Friday, July 13, 2007
Sure enough, the 22 hour bus journey from Hanoi in Vietnam to Vientiane in Laos was hell. I prepared myself for the worst thinking that way I couldn’t be fazed by it but it was worse than the worst! The bus was tiny and they packed in far too many people for it and when the seats filled up, about 7 or 8 people just sat in the aisle. We were only allowed sit at the back row which had the worst leg space and no space behind to recline the seats. On top of all the people they packed in, they loaded the bus with tones and tones of luggage. Any spare millimeter of space that wasn’t taken up with people was used for boxes, baskets, bags and kids toys. Of course there wasn’t air conditioning and the feckin’ Vietnamese just love to listen to all the ring tones on their phones one after the other all night long – just for fun. We started off anyway at about 7pm and we were beside an English guy and a Japanese girl, the only two other non-locals on the bus. I had resigned myself to not being able to get any sleep and I was actually dealing with the situation pretty well. About 4am we turned up at a random guesthouse in the middle of nowhere. We were told that the Laos border was only an hour away and it didn’t open until 7am so we we’re going to wait at this guesthouse for 2 hours. “What are we supposed to do for 2 hours?”, we cried. Our options, it seems, were limited. We could sit on the roasting hot stuffy cramped bus, hang out on the streets or get a room for $5 for 2 hours. We refused to get the room as a room anywhere else in Vietnam costs only $3 – for a whole day! The cramped bus didn’t seem to inviting either so I just hung out on the side of the road in the middle of Vietnam.
Finally 6am came and we started off again to the border. If I thought the bus was my biggest worry, the border crossing was a bureaucratic nightmare. We had to get our passports stamped coming out of Vietnam, pay an exit tax go back to the original guy with the receipt of our exit tax, walk to Laos, apply for a visa, go off and pay for the visa, come back to the visa application place with receipt showing payment for the visa, go back to the paying place to pay the entrance tax and then bring the passport back again for a further stamp. The whole thing was irritating enough without the fact that I had had no sleep. At least that was over and we were on our way to Vientiane. Only 8 more hours to go! I could deal with that BUT… the bus broke down. I should have seen it coming. The bus had been packed to the gills and running smoothly for 14 hours. It was well overdue for a breakdown. I could only laugh and luckily the bus broke down by a little roadside shop. We figured this was a good time to sample the famous Beerlao that we had been hearing about for the last 7 months. Maybe it was the state I was in but it was the best God dam beer I had ever had. I was so overtired at this stage that I was in hyper mood. Eventually we made it to Vientiane and the big saving grace was that Vientiane is small, quiet, chilled out and entirely non-stressful. I don’t think I could have hacked arriving into somewhere like Hanoi after all that malarkey. We checked in to a guesthouse, grabbed some food and SLEPT!
We hadn’t actually planned to spend any time in Vientiane as it’s infamous for not having much to do. We revised this plan after our bus journey from hell and decided a day of chilling out was in order. We ambled about the lazy streets, went for a nice lunch, bought some stuff in the market and took advantage of the DVD player in our guesthouse. A nothing day of pure bliss. The next morning we were straight off to Vang Vieng. Vang Vieng is widely known among backpackers as the ultimate chill out place in Southeast Asia. Nothing stressful ever occurs here. The place is full of bars selling cheap Beerlao and happy pizzas while showing episodes of Friends on repeat. You can also watch any movie from the extensive DVD collection each bar has or even bring your own. This suited us down to the ground as we had an entire season of Jack Bauer in our rucksacks. From an activity point of view, we spent one of our two days there caving. There are several cool caves in the area and we visited four of them on this day. The first two were nice and we ventured far into the depths of them with our little 15,000 kip torches. The third one was the largest which reportedly goes back 3km into the mountain. We only ventured about 1km of the way in but we could have gone on for ages. The last cave is one in a river. The water is high inside it and to get through, we sat in rubber tubes and pulled ourselves along using a rope attached to the inside walls of the cave. The beginning was quite scary as the roof was very low and I felt like if the water began to rise for any reason I’d drown instantly. But the cave then opened up and I felt less claustrophobic. Finally we reached a big open cavern where there was no current so we were able to go swimming in the pitch black of the cave. Another freaky activity of the trip! Coming out of the cave was easy as the current was flowing that way and all we had to do was sit in the tube and be floated out.
On our second day in Vang Vieng we indulged in its premier activity – tubing. You rent a tube for about 40,000 kip and get a tuk-tuk a few km up the river. Then you sit in the tube and float all the way back downstream to Vang Vieng. Sound fun and relaxing? It is! But there’s more to it than that. Along the way down the river there are numerous makeshift bamboo bars along the way selling cheap Beerlao and pumping rockin’ tunes. Well, the Red Hot Chili Peppers were good but one bar, dubbed the gay bar, had cheesy gay tunes pumping out all day. Whenever you want to stop at one of these bars, just wave to the guy at the bar and he’ll pull you in using an exceptionally long bamboo stick. If drinking in bamboo bars on the way down the river wasn’t enough fun, each bar had its own tall wooden contraption that you climb to the top of and swing off on a wire flying fox style. I personally didn’t indulge in any of these swings (my responsible side was showing just a little too strongly) but we made our way down the river over the course of 6 hours drinking Beerlao and meeting many people. We even bumped into David Quinn, a guy Fi and I went to school with, at the first bar on the river.
After Vang Vieng we grabbed a bus to Luang Prabang. We reckoned that an 8 hour bus could be nothing near the hell that our 22 hour one was and in fairness it wasn’t. Except that the road from Vang Vieng to Luang Prabang winded constantly up and down the mountainside the entire time making it a very lurchful journey. Luang Prabang turned out to be very nice, however. It is the same kind of set up as Vientiane but a lot more popular and a lot more to do there and in its surrounding area. On the first day we visited a waterfall. Doesn’t sound terribly interesting but we heard from a few people in Vang Vieng that it was an exceptionally beautiful waterfall. This turned out to be correct and the waterfall was actually made up of five smaller waterfalls. Water cascaded down five whole layers of rock before hitting the river at the bottom. At the second layer it was possible to get into the water and swim around. We got in and made our way against the strong current to where the water hit the ground. It was very strong but making our way past the sheets of water we came across a little cave that you could sit in. We were now behind the waterfall and could see the water gushing down from above. It really looked like something out of a Disney movie – too perfect to actually be real.
The Gibbon Experience is a tour that one can take in northern Laos which involves spending three days in the jungle living in the tree tops and spying gibbons. A lot of it is chilling out and stuff but the rest involves ziplining between different tree top huts to catch various different views of the gibbons. It is something we heard about from a couple in Mancora, Peru and something we’ve been looking forward to since. Unfortunately, even though we attempted to book ourselves in a few weeks ago, the tour turned out to be booked out until 22nd July which is too late for us as we fly from Bangkok to Ko Samui on 23rd July. So to ease our disappointment we decided to book ourselves in for a two day Mahout course. A mahout is someone who can drive an elephant and we were very excited about spending two days with these fascinating creatures. On our first day we arrived at the elephant centre and first thing we were taken on a 90 minute elephant ride to get to grips with the massive beasts. This tour was taken sitting on a bench on top of the elephant. Afterwards we got to feed the elephants bamboo shoots and bananas. My elephant turned out to be the greediest bugger this side of the Mekong and snatched the entire bunch of bananas out of my hand, eating about ten of them in one go.
After the feeding, we were taken to the nearby river for some tubing. This is typical of Laos. After a “stressful” morning of sitting on an elephant, we were required to de-stress by sitting in a rubber ring and floating down a river amid spectacular scenery. Phew! I was beginning to feel a little too stressed with all the chilling out. In the afternoon, after donning our rather fetching mahout suits, we took our first ride on the elephants without the security of the bench. We had to drive them through the jungle to the place where they sleep at night. We had to sit on the elephants necks with our knees tucked in behind their massive ears. By nudging their ears with your knees you can persuade them to go, stop, turn left or turn right. We also learned all the verbal commands including ones to make them sit or stand up. Balance was a very difficult thing to master. By the end I was ok with flat or upwards sloping terrain but the downwards sloping terrain freaked the bejesus out of me. I constantly felt like I would be thrown forward off the elephant and trampled underfoot. Thankfully I survived that but I think my elephant had a cheeky streak in him as he was constantly spraying mud all over me via his trunk. He also liked to break branches off the nearby trees and whip me with them. By the time we arrived back at camp we were given some free time to relax. Again this was well overdue as I was beginning to feel a bit too stressed out again with the 90 minutes of preceding activity.
That night turned out to be one of the best of the entire trip. There was a fridge in the camp that was generously stocked with Beerlao. We invited the mahouts and guides to join us after dinner and since beer is a luxury for them but peanuts to us we decided to treat them. A few hours later we were all rolling around laughing and joking even though only one of the guides spoke English. After a while the Lao insisted that we teach them some western games. All we could think of at the time was snap. It proved to be just the ticket. Things got rowdier and rowdier and the Lao were totally out of control. Had we not been deep in the jungle I would have been worried about the authorities hearing us. Around 11.30 it seemed time to go to bed since we had to be up at 6am. When we arose we once again put on our mahout suits and ventured into the jungle to collect the elephants. The mahouts weren’t in tip top form and at some times it felt like we were teaching them to drive the elephants. Once we collected the elephants we drove them down to the river where they waded in so the water was just below their eyes and only the tops of their head were showing. This was the elephant bathing time and we spent a while scrubbing them down and making them clean for the day ahead. The elephants loved this and soaking us with trunkfulls of water delighted them even further. Once we had them back at camp we indulged in breakfast.
This was the last of our contact with the elephants for the course but the Lao had more activities planned for us for the afternoon. We were to go bamboo rafting, something which sounded a little too stressful for a Lao activity. Once we arrived at the bamboo rafts it all became clear. We were to sit IN a tube ON the raft while the guides did all the paddling! The whole afternoon turned out to be basically an afternoon of tubing, rafting and swimming and our guide, Lu, had even brought a packed lunch for us. And I’m not talking about soggy sandwiches, I’m talking about spicy Lao curry and fried rice in Styrofoam containers. We spent hours floating down the river in various ways while chatting to the increasingly cool Lu. Afterwards we were driven back to Luang Prabang where we headed for a cinebar (bar with a cinema in it) armed with our Jack Bauer boxset. We were sad to leave Lu who we really got to know over the two days but we’ve commissioned him to take us on a two day trek to some Hmong (ancient Lao tribes) villages starting tomorrow. Will keep you posted…
Finally 6am came and we started off again to the border. If I thought the bus was my biggest worry, the border crossing was a bureaucratic nightmare. We had to get our passports stamped coming out of Vietnam, pay an exit tax go back to the original guy with the receipt of our exit tax, walk to Laos, apply for a visa, go off and pay for the visa, come back to the visa application place with receipt showing payment for the visa, go back to the paying place to pay the entrance tax and then bring the passport back again for a further stamp. The whole thing was irritating enough without the fact that I had had no sleep. At least that was over and we were on our way to Vientiane. Only 8 more hours to go! I could deal with that BUT… the bus broke down. I should have seen it coming. The bus had been packed to the gills and running smoothly for 14 hours. It was well overdue for a breakdown. I could only laugh and luckily the bus broke down by a little roadside shop. We figured this was a good time to sample the famous Beerlao that we had been hearing about for the last 7 months. Maybe it was the state I was in but it was the best God dam beer I had ever had. I was so overtired at this stage that I was in hyper mood. Eventually we made it to Vientiane and the big saving grace was that Vientiane is small, quiet, chilled out and entirely non-stressful. I don’t think I could have hacked arriving into somewhere like Hanoi after all that malarkey. We checked in to a guesthouse, grabbed some food and SLEPT!
We hadn’t actually planned to spend any time in Vientiane as it’s infamous for not having much to do. We revised this plan after our bus journey from hell and decided a day of chilling out was in order. We ambled about the lazy streets, went for a nice lunch, bought some stuff in the market and took advantage of the DVD player in our guesthouse. A nothing day of pure bliss. The next morning we were straight off to Vang Vieng. Vang Vieng is widely known among backpackers as the ultimate chill out place in Southeast Asia. Nothing stressful ever occurs here. The place is full of bars selling cheap Beerlao and happy pizzas while showing episodes of Friends on repeat. You can also watch any movie from the extensive DVD collection each bar has or even bring your own. This suited us down to the ground as we had an entire season of Jack Bauer in our rucksacks. From an activity point of view, we spent one of our two days there caving. There are several cool caves in the area and we visited four of them on this day. The first two were nice and we ventured far into the depths of them with our little 15,000 kip torches. The third one was the largest which reportedly goes back 3km into the mountain. We only ventured about 1km of the way in but we could have gone on for ages. The last cave is one in a river. The water is high inside it and to get through, we sat in rubber tubes and pulled ourselves along using a rope attached to the inside walls of the cave. The beginning was quite scary as the roof was very low and I felt like if the water began to rise for any reason I’d drown instantly. But the cave then opened up and I felt less claustrophobic. Finally we reached a big open cavern where there was no current so we were able to go swimming in the pitch black of the cave. Another freaky activity of the trip! Coming out of the cave was easy as the current was flowing that way and all we had to do was sit in the tube and be floated out.
On our second day in Vang Vieng we indulged in its premier activity – tubing. You rent a tube for about 40,000 kip and get a tuk-tuk a few km up the river. Then you sit in the tube and float all the way back downstream to Vang Vieng. Sound fun and relaxing? It is! But there’s more to it than that. Along the way down the river there are numerous makeshift bamboo bars along the way selling cheap Beerlao and pumping rockin’ tunes. Well, the Red Hot Chili Peppers were good but one bar, dubbed the gay bar, had cheesy gay tunes pumping out all day. Whenever you want to stop at one of these bars, just wave to the guy at the bar and he’ll pull you in using an exceptionally long bamboo stick. If drinking in bamboo bars on the way down the river wasn’t enough fun, each bar had its own tall wooden contraption that you climb to the top of and swing off on a wire flying fox style. I personally didn’t indulge in any of these swings (my responsible side was showing just a little too strongly) but we made our way down the river over the course of 6 hours drinking Beerlao and meeting many people. We even bumped into David Quinn, a guy Fi and I went to school with, at the first bar on the river.
After Vang Vieng we grabbed a bus to Luang Prabang. We reckoned that an 8 hour bus could be nothing near the hell that our 22 hour one was and in fairness it wasn’t. Except that the road from Vang Vieng to Luang Prabang winded constantly up and down the mountainside the entire time making it a very lurchful journey. Luang Prabang turned out to be very nice, however. It is the same kind of set up as Vientiane but a lot more popular and a lot more to do there and in its surrounding area. On the first day we visited a waterfall. Doesn’t sound terribly interesting but we heard from a few people in Vang Vieng that it was an exceptionally beautiful waterfall. This turned out to be correct and the waterfall was actually made up of five smaller waterfalls. Water cascaded down five whole layers of rock before hitting the river at the bottom. At the second layer it was possible to get into the water and swim around. We got in and made our way against the strong current to where the water hit the ground. It was very strong but making our way past the sheets of water we came across a little cave that you could sit in. We were now behind the waterfall and could see the water gushing down from above. It really looked like something out of a Disney movie – too perfect to actually be real.
The Gibbon Experience is a tour that one can take in northern Laos which involves spending three days in the jungle living in the tree tops and spying gibbons. A lot of it is chilling out and stuff but the rest involves ziplining between different tree top huts to catch various different views of the gibbons. It is something we heard about from a couple in Mancora, Peru and something we’ve been looking forward to since. Unfortunately, even though we attempted to book ourselves in a few weeks ago, the tour turned out to be booked out until 22nd July which is too late for us as we fly from Bangkok to Ko Samui on 23rd July. So to ease our disappointment we decided to book ourselves in for a two day Mahout course. A mahout is someone who can drive an elephant and we were very excited about spending two days with these fascinating creatures. On our first day we arrived at the elephant centre and first thing we were taken on a 90 minute elephant ride to get to grips with the massive beasts. This tour was taken sitting on a bench on top of the elephant. Afterwards we got to feed the elephants bamboo shoots and bananas. My elephant turned out to be the greediest bugger this side of the Mekong and snatched the entire bunch of bananas out of my hand, eating about ten of them in one go.
After the feeding, we were taken to the nearby river for some tubing. This is typical of Laos. After a “stressful” morning of sitting on an elephant, we were required to de-stress by sitting in a rubber ring and floating down a river amid spectacular scenery. Phew! I was beginning to feel a little too stressed with all the chilling out. In the afternoon, after donning our rather fetching mahout suits, we took our first ride on the elephants without the security of the bench. We had to drive them through the jungle to the place where they sleep at night. We had to sit on the elephants necks with our knees tucked in behind their massive ears. By nudging their ears with your knees you can persuade them to go, stop, turn left or turn right. We also learned all the verbal commands including ones to make them sit or stand up. Balance was a very difficult thing to master. By the end I was ok with flat or upwards sloping terrain but the downwards sloping terrain freaked the bejesus out of me. I constantly felt like I would be thrown forward off the elephant and trampled underfoot. Thankfully I survived that but I think my elephant had a cheeky streak in him as he was constantly spraying mud all over me via his trunk. He also liked to break branches off the nearby trees and whip me with them. By the time we arrived back at camp we were given some free time to relax. Again this was well overdue as I was beginning to feel a bit too stressed out again with the 90 minutes of preceding activity.
That night turned out to be one of the best of the entire trip. There was a fridge in the camp that was generously stocked with Beerlao. We invited the mahouts and guides to join us after dinner and since beer is a luxury for them but peanuts to us we decided to treat them. A few hours later we were all rolling around laughing and joking even though only one of the guides spoke English. After a while the Lao insisted that we teach them some western games. All we could think of at the time was snap. It proved to be just the ticket. Things got rowdier and rowdier and the Lao were totally out of control. Had we not been deep in the jungle I would have been worried about the authorities hearing us. Around 11.30 it seemed time to go to bed since we had to be up at 6am. When we arose we once again put on our mahout suits and ventured into the jungle to collect the elephants. The mahouts weren’t in tip top form and at some times it felt like we were teaching them to drive the elephants. Once we collected the elephants we drove them down to the river where they waded in so the water was just below their eyes and only the tops of their head were showing. This was the elephant bathing time and we spent a while scrubbing them down and making them clean for the day ahead. The elephants loved this and soaking us with trunkfulls of water delighted them even further. Once we had them back at camp we indulged in breakfast.
This was the last of our contact with the elephants for the course but the Lao had more activities planned for us for the afternoon. We were to go bamboo rafting, something which sounded a little too stressful for a Lao activity. Once we arrived at the bamboo rafts it all became clear. We were to sit IN a tube ON the raft while the guides did all the paddling! The whole afternoon turned out to be basically an afternoon of tubing, rafting and swimming and our guide, Lu, had even brought a packed lunch for us. And I’m not talking about soggy sandwiches, I’m talking about spicy Lao curry and fried rice in Styrofoam containers. We spent hours floating down the river in various ways while chatting to the increasingly cool Lu. Afterwards we were driven back to Luang Prabang where we headed for a cinebar (bar with a cinema in it) armed with our Jack Bauer boxset. We were sad to leave Lu who we really got to know over the two days but we’ve commissioned him to take us on a two day trek to some Hmong (ancient Lao tribes) villages starting tomorrow. Will keep you posted…
# posted by Grum @ 8:08 AM 
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