12/19 - The Cycle of Life

I arrived in Vientienne after a 3 hour sawngthaew (remember, those 2 bench pickups) ride from Van Vieng. The trip, like all the other bus trips so far, had plenty of cows on the road, little village kids chasing after the truck waving and yelling "sabia diiii sabia diiii" (hello) and rest stops along the way in places that would have been really intersting to spend just one night in. I shared a room with an Israeli the first night in Laos's capital and walked around the city a bit before basically calling it a night.
The city was spooky. Abandonned French-colonial style buildings, streets empty at 10 P.M., the main source of light the lamps pointed at the wats. It was really neat.


12/20/01 - The Sites of Vientienne
The next day, I toured around and met a wonderful monk in one of the wats. He spoke English very well and my Lao is actually imporving. We were actually able to talk about what it meant for him to be a monk - with most Thai and Lao I hadn't been able to get past the "where are you from?" "where are you headed?" stage. The wats in Lao are themselves quite distinct from the one's in Thailand. The statues are a little more cartoonish and the buildings are bult with more woodf and les brick and concrete. They also don't seem to be into those shiny colored mirrors that make the Thai wats sparkle.
In the afternoon I walked out to a few of the further away sites. The first was this huge concrete arch that supposed to looked like a Soviet Champs Elysee. The, on the way to the national Stupa , I came across a cremation cermony at the national temple. The cremation stage was a beautiful wooden structure covered in firecrackers and these things that let off colored smoke.
Then, when I reached the National Stupa (which is featured on all the money) I came to another wat. Inside a monk was being ordained. And so, in Lao, I've had the good fortune to see the cycle of life plated out - the celebration of a birth in Luang Brabang, this coming of age cermony, and the cremantion moments ago.
On the way back, I drank soda from a plastic bag for the first time despite seeing lots of Lao people ding it.
At night I had another great French meal at a restaurant called Cote' D'Azure and met Boris for drinks at the a local bar.


12/21/01 - Buddha Park

The next day I wenty to a Buddha sculpture garden. I didn't think it was going to be that interesting given that I've seen plenty of Buddhas already, but it turned out to be one of the wackiest things I've ever seen. It was made in 1968 by some Buddhist who sort of started his own cult that integrates the Buddhist pantheon with the myths and legends of Hinduism. The park was filled with surreal sculptures of bizzare creatures and gods. There was a 15 foot high statue of some monster carrying the sister of Buddha like the girl in King-Kong, the were 3 headed cows and midget sword-fighting. The centerpiece was a huge thing that looked like an apple with a big mouth on it. You walked into the mouth and inside was earth, represented by sculptures of every day life. You could descend into hell which had sculptures of people being speared and burnt and stretched on the rack and you could ascend to heaven which has plenty of happy concrete people smiling. All of this was in a maze inside this huge concrete mouthed apple.
At night I had the best seat in Vientienne as I had the corner seat at the restaurant on the end of sunset strip. I watched the sun descend over the Mekong and heard the monks chanting from the Thai side which was perfectly accompanied by a back-beat in the bar next door. I was joined by two wierd women - one of whom owned a bar in town and actually took me to a pretty fun nightclub where everyone knew her.


12/22/01 - Back to Thailand
I'm headed back to Bangkok to met a friend, David, so I crossed the border into Chong Khai, saw the town then took the 10 hour overnite bus back to Bangkok.

12/24/01 - ....
And back in Bangkok I am, hopefully on to some more adventures.

The latest from the past week and a half in Laos...


12/09/01 - Golden

Today, I ventured into Burma, the longest side, if you will, of the Golden Triangle. Across the colored bridge in Mae Sai I found a land of Sony PolyStations, Nintendo GameKids and knock-offs of just about everything else you could imagine.
I also violated the first rules of serendipity and didn't follow a whim. In Burma, a teacher wanted to have tea with me and tell me his story. Burma is ruled by an oppresive military dictatorship and the house-arrested opposition leader had called for a boycott on tourism. I had a strong inclination to go, and sit, and listen, but I was eager to make it to Laos, so I left and climbed the local wat for a rooftop view of the fabled Golden Triangle. Home, for the past 40 years, to a significant amount of the world's opium, morphine and herion production. The history is complex, as the opium museum would show, but basically the 3 sides of the triangle are Laos, Myanmar and Thailand. The hilltribes in these countries have alternatively been encouraged to grow, then stop, then grow poppies for opium. It's low cost and high profit yield and the net result now is that Burma, to an extent Laos and to a lesser extent Thailand, is still filled with opium as the Thai border police are well aware.
I tried to get to the Chiang Khong border crossing into Laos, but made a grave mistake and lost a precious few hours. Laos would have to wait, perhaps as retaliation for not talking to tthe Burmese man. Not only did I miss the border closing, but had to suffer a dinner with a trio of the most self-righteous hippy-dippy Canadians I've met.


12/10 - The Rules of Serendip.

I've sort of formulated some sort of set rules that seem to work pretty well for me for maximizing... well I don't know what. But it seems that the more you increase your seredipity , the better things turns out. This fact was confirmed by a German tourist I shared a bottle of wine with in Laos. (Though he also liked my quote "I traveled the world searching for myself only to realize that I need just look at me." so I can't vouch for his taste. He's also German.)
1) Follow your whims.
2) Change your plans.
3) Go a different way or do it differently the 2nd time.
4) Give anything a shot once.
5) Have a bad sense of direction.
Looking back over this vacation and vacations past, these principles have never failed me, and so I think I'll try to follow them.
Today I spent the day on a boat down the Mekong after crossing into Laos. It was really neat, as we were basically human cargo sandwiched between bags of oranges, spare motors and whatever else. "We" was a group of about 70 backpackers aged 21-35, and 20 Lao passengers that sat in a different section. The sunset was radiant, and the ride bearable.
That night was my first in Laos, in Pakbeng, a town where the electricity was only on from 6-9 p.m. The moon decided to disappear that night and the stars were milky in their near-infiniteness. The moon actually wouldn't return for a week...


12/11 - Slow Boat Down the Mekong

The next day was another 6 hours of boat riding. I've met some nice people, (Levi and Colin - two young Canadians, Sophie and Delphine - two French girls, Dave - a Brit my age, and Oliver - the previously mentioned German) and have had the opportunity to speak extensively in both French and Hebrew. Knowing languages is neat.
Today's trip was a little more claustrophobic even though half the boat had veered off in another direction in Pakbeng. The novelty had worn a bit and I was glad to disembark in Louang Phabang. I hunted for a hotel with Yannis, best described as a Greek Woody Allen.
At night I tried to track down 2 people from my trek, and instead came across Oliver, Sophie and Delphine. Oliver and I stayed up a bit and drank and talked all about peace and understanding. We had it all figured out.


12/12/01 - Laos

It seems that most descriptions of far-off cultures are beyond words. It's not like Montreal where you can say "Yeah, it's like Boston but they sell cigarattes in packs of 25, the drinking age is 18 and they sometimes speak French.". Laos is supposedly least densely populated country in Asia (hmm... Mongolia seems sparse - maybe just SE Asia). The entire country has 5.2 million people, most of it rural. I'd venture that it's one of the most laid back places on earth as it hasn't experienced a toursit boom yet, the geography is beautiful and the people themselves are laid back (the Pathet Lao as compared to the Viet Cong in Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot in Cambodia AND their historical lack of world power aspirations show that even their ideological insanity is low-key).
Luang Pabang is a former capital and a neat city. It is still tinged with French from when it was part of Indochine and is the 2nd largest city now with a population of about 200,000 (not even 3 Newtons).
In the morning, I saw some temple and ruins (see: pictures) and stumbled across the loud party your could hear throughout the city. I was invited to sit down by some teenagers as Lao people love practicing their English and are very friendly by nature. They offered me beer and the rules of serendip compelled me to partake and put off the rest of the wats - even sunset at the moutaintop one - till tomorrow.
We went to the party tent and had a sip or two Lao whiskey and listened to the keyboard-and-singer band play Lao-pop which always seems to have thatone cheesy horn keyboard sound carrying the melody.
Laos has its own beer, own whiskey and own cigarettes as it's a Communist country. They all taste as generic as a 6 storey square cement apartment building or Orwell's chocolate in _1984_. I hate to say that their modern music and dancing is equally uninspired.
The party progressed and next thing I knew I was dancing with an old Lao woman at the party celebrating the birth of a baby. I assumed the aunt was the mother, and with that faux pas, I biked with the now-drunk teenagers to a temple.
Dinner was at a French place and was one of the best meals I've had in months - states included. Camembert and blue heese first, perfectly cooked steak, then sorbet. The meal for the two of us, wine and a few glasses of kir (kir - can you believe it) inclued, came to $50, or half a million kip. We stacked 100 of the 5000 kip bills high and called it a night.

I spent a few more days in Luang Pabang.
One day I crossed the city's river to a tiny little town across the way with Levi. We stumbled across a school and actually sat in a class room while the teacher taught numbers. I can't say enough how friendly and open the Lao people are.
Another night I went to a Lao nightclub with 2 people from that original Chiang Mai trek. The music was again, bad, but I got to do the Lao equivalent of the lectric slide.
My last day, I traveled to some waterfalls and met a other group of people who would reappear throughout my travels in Lao, as Colin, Levi, and Oliver would from the boat trip. The eaterfalls were really neat and the hiking was fun, but I got pretty wet and tired, so when it came to finding the really neat natural pool at the top I violated the first rule of serendip and hung out by the tiger cage as the tiger was fed it's snack.


12/15 - The chillest place on earth

The next destination was Vang Vieng. The bus ride was pretty neat - the best one so far, and that's saying a lot as the bus rides have been some of the best parts of the trip. See the hyper link to the left for a recent NYT article about Van Vieng. It's pretty on the money and I can go into detail about how intensely I chilled over there, but instead I'll give a quick run down of what I did over the course of 3 days:
- inner tubed down the river
- explored a cave (with a guide this time) and swam in it's nearby grotto.
Yup, that's about it. VV was like a landlocked paradise. I had lots of Lao mixed fruit shakes (which is quickly becoming my favorite drink) watched sunsets and enjoyed my decent hotel. I unfortunately became a little sick again with a cold and decided to move on on the 18th.

12/08/01 - Top of the World?

The past two days have been pretty exciting.
I arrived in Mae Sai on a bus from Chiang Rae. Mae Sai is a busting border town between Burma and Thailand. Again, I'm at a loss for words in trying to explain the character of this city, partly because I have no idea what anyone is doing. There's a lot of selling and yelling and milling about. There's neon framing Buddha's head in the town temple - a first amongst the 250,000 wats I've seen so far. Hundreds of people flow back and forth across the border for the day, and I can almost tell the difference between the Burmese and the Thai (though much of the northern Thai population is made of Burmese blood.)
Mae Sai is the northernmost spot in Thailand. The tippy tippy top, and I guess it felt a little bit like I'd expect a busy Indian city to be like. Like Indianapolis or something.
Yesterday, I rented a motorbike and went up Doi Thung, the highest peak in the area. It was a breathtaking ride, and was breathtakingly difficult as I've never riden a motorbike before. I took dozens of pictures on the: to my left were the sweeping valleys and mountains of Thailand, to my right the sweeping valleys and mountains of Burma. I was riding on a mountain ridge on a small dirt road and at the top was a beautiful garden commissioned by the Queen Mother (they love the king here), though it was the journey itself the made the trip. I was on one of the highest peaks in the northernmost part of Thailand. Though it is just the foothills of the Himalayas, it still sort of felt liker the top of earth.
There was also a wat at the top and I arrived just in time for the |Buddhist monk's evening chant right before sunset. The prayers finished and I started back down (didn't want to ride in the dark), but caught a beautiful sunset on the way down.
I took a different route on the way back, through from Lahu tribe villages. I read that after 5 P.M. you should be careful in that area because of the still booming tribal village opium production. I was stopped at a police stop on the way down.

At night, I met a few expats (Swiss, French, British) at a bar (there a little to no non-Thai tourists here, it seems) and drank while playing Mexicano. There are swarms of expat men (though I met 1 woman as well) throughout Thailand who've taken a Thai wife and retired. In some ways it seems great to retire so early to a forgeign country, but they all seemed to have a deep lonliness about them.

Today, I took the bike to a few caves (I can't say enough how beautiful it is just riding around here, outside the cities).
At one, there are dogs and monkees and fish and these intensely rotten smells coming from food stands. Vivid. In the cave was a little monument to Buddha.
In the other, I had to take a lantern as my flashlight broke. I started in and the cave seemed to go on forever. I'm not sure if I reached the end, and I was climbing and slipping and falling all over the place. At one point, I stopped seeing the signs for the way back and thought I was lost. I was sweating, alone, covered in mud and scared. Finally I came across a familiar broken women's shoe. I've never been so happy to see a pump. I don't know how I looked when I came out, but the patriarch of a Thai family loitering around the entrance patted me on the back as I made my way to a hose.
The motorbike ride back was wonderful and drying.
I'll probably meet those guys for a quick drink again tonight, then tomorrow, I'm off to Laos.

11/27/01 - The Farthest Spot From Home

Chiang Mai is like the San Fransisco of Thailand. Not that large, very chill, lots to do, cooler temperatures, and surrounded by nature. After a few days there, chilling out, I decided to go on a 3 day trek.
The trek wound through the rainforest of north-western Thailand.
The first day was a killer 6 hours of treking. It was with a good group and a good guide, and at the end, just after sunset, we reached the first camp - a waterfall. The water was frigid, but it was a welcome frigid after the xhausting hike. They'd never have a trek like that in the States. Up loose gravel, over fallen trees that did pale imitations of bridges, through rice fields, past water buffalo. My main motivation to it up was not wanting to be the first to die slipping off one of those logs in to the Mae Kok river below. How lame would that be?
The rain forest (monsoon forest, I think, actually) was amazing. Again, nothing like home. Plants, spiders, trees like I've never seen. Enormous red ants!
The next day we hiked through a few hilltribe villages. It's tough to explain what it's like. It doesn't have the impact of a movie; no walking through the brush, then, there, in the clearing, a tribal village with masks and a fire. If you've seen the shantytowns of cities like Cairo and Bangkok, the population isn't that different. Perhaps that's because those shantytowns are mostly made up of tribal communitees that have fled the deforestation of rural areas. (In many cases, the deforestation is their own doing.)
So here they were with the Karen and Hmong hilltribes. They staunchly believed in spirits, had livestock, spoke a different dialiect, and depending on the tribe, still lived nomadically, leaving their homes every few seasons. But, in some cases they had running water, and they had been exposed to the markets of the cities, so they sold their crafts and owned western clothes. It's expected that they'll pretty much be gone in a generation as the young are going to Thai schools to get better educations.
That night we stayed in the hut of a village chief. It was at that point that I felt I could be no further from home. 12 time zones away, 8 hours trek and 3 hours drive from a small city (100,000) that was 10 hours train ride from the city of Bangkok. I was wrong - I would get even further away from New York.
The next day was pretty laid back. We rode elephants and bamboo rafts. It sounds cheesy but was actually a lot of fun. Especially when we had raft wars and splashed the German toursists. Germans have become the butt of jokes for our group, the trek group being made up of:
2 Aussie sisters looking nearly like twins.
1 transient girl from Englang and Prague.
2 Canadian guys from outside Calgary. One had never left Manitoba.
A couple, the girl from Australia who wore flipflops the whole time, the guy a Southern Frenchman.
If you ever go to Thailand, a trek is a must.



I've been feeling sick for 3 straight days and have fallen behind on my stories, but I wanted to share one good one:

11/30 - Dive Bar at the End of the Earth

There I was, in a bar in Chiang Mai, with a bunch of pals: 2 Canadians, 2 Aussie sisters that looked like twins, a Brit transient and myself. I had spent the past 10 minutes speaking in French to this bleach blonde Frenchie from the Pyrenees who was now taking his shirt off. I speak French well after a few drinks. I was drinking a beer I had won off of a marine with arms the size of my legs by betting on the Canadian in pool. Next thing I know a prostitute starts throwing ice at a waitress. Fight breaks out, flower petals are flying and I'm in the middle. I break up the fight holding both clawing females at arms length as they expound in Thai on the merits of their respective argument - or so I'd imagine. Fights over, ice's in my beer, flower petals in my hair; it was so film noir. I felt like Humphret Bogart, for some reason. These sorts of encounters always seem to find me. Some dive bar in the middle of nowhere breaking up fights.
I smiled.

I've reached the city of Chang Mai after an arduous (arduous as in long cramped bus rides, hotels with no hot water but plenty of hot bugs) switchback journey through the center of Thailand. Some annectodes as copied from my journal:


11-25-01 - Foreign Air is Fertilizer for the Brain

I took a train from Ayuthaya to Lopburi. Unfortunately Buddha saw to it that I could only secure myself a 3rd class ticket. I sat for part of it sandwiched between two monks. but had to stand for another part. I bought some train food - a near-full meal - for $0.25, 10 baht.
At one point, I was standing between two of the cars and was able to hang out the side of the train. Rice paddies, rainforests, shanty town after shanty town blurred past my eyes as the sun set on the Thai landscape and all that remained were lights flashing by in the darkness. The dancing light of distant fires and the constant shine if what must have been bare bulbs.
I arrived at Lopburi, famous for one thing, really.
After walking around town, I finally came upon the monkey temples. A wat at the edge of town swarming with monkeys. They were pretty tame and were harmlessly crawling in the hair of the girl from Tallahasee when not roughhousing with each other. I witnessed animal copulation, which, as you'll read later, seems to be one of the several themes of my trip.
I snapped photos and left town.

Got to Pitsanulok at night, via bus (I never thought I'd say I was happy to take a bus, but I had a seat).
I took a bug infested hotel that was Lonely Planet recommended and ran into the dreaded that-guy. The older man who travels the world from hostel to hostel casting a derisive condescending eye at males, as they must be less enlightened than him (the mighty world traveler) while casting a perverse lustful eye at the females in the joint. I got stuck listening to a lecture by him. ]
Apparently, America's problems would be solved if drug crimes carried a death sentence. It's going down hill, he said. Just like the Roman empire. Moral decay, he said. That's why he left. Right. (He did have a point about the proliferation of Lonely Planet guides, though.There isn't anything lonely about seeing the same people from city to city, packing in the hostels mentioned therein.)
Anyway, the city itself was quiet and had wonderful wandering potential. I wandered to a Buddha factory and cultural museum down at the end of this dirt road. The Buddha factory was really neat, and I got to wondering what Buddha really looked like. His image is all over the place here, but it's this sort of amorphous generic peaceful face.
He has kinky curly hair, that supposedly he did himself as a symbol of... what was it... well I can't remember, but I wonder if it's maybe because he's from Africa. Cultures are always bastardizing the image of prophets (see: Jesus) and I bet an African wandering across the Indian sub-continent would certainly garner a cult following 2544 years ago. I'm probably completely wrong, but it was a thought.

One of the most beautiful temples I saw was in Pitsanulok, but it was ironically not in use. It was a 10 minute rickshaw ride outside of town. Maybe it was the un-usedness of it that made Wat Chalumni so captivating.
I luckily caught a sawngthaew (2 benched pickup truck) back as rickshaws and tuk-tuks (motorized rickshaws) don't come out there.
I ran myself into the ground walking around town. I walked some more, drenched in sweat, legs aching. It made everything all the more vivid, senses all the more sharp. I stopped in an Muslim restaurant, actually, and had a yumyum meal.

They sell turtles near the temples here, to free into the water. I took one down to the bank, a cute little Thai kid grabbed it from my hands and dove in with it. Turtle freed, (for now).
Traveler's freedom is sinking in (for now). I practically feel the foreign air streaming in on the hemoglobin expressway to my brain. Everyday, I wake up with new thoughts, new ideas, new theories.
Interestingly, none of these ideas have to do with future plans when I get back.
xoxo,
Marc