A Journey to Well Known Places

We are in a small town called Chaing Khong now on the Thai/Laos border. Tomorrow we are taking the slow boat to Laung Prabang. The slow boat entails sitting a plastic seat with no cushion in an open aired boat (with a roof though) for seven hours….two days in a row as it putters down the Mekong. I have seen alot more of the Mekong than I thought I was going to get to. In fact, our hotel room over looks the might brown river. After I finish typing this I am going to have a few beers and gave at it for a while.

Since it has been so long since I blogged I am just going to have to sum up.

After Bangkok we went to a smallish town called Kanchanaburi. That is were the bridge over the river Kwai is. One person died for every meter of track laid from this town to Burma. Over 100,000 total. The Japanese engineers estimated 5 years of work to completion, but worked the POWs and other asian unfortunates so hard they got it done in 16 months..at a terrible price. We also went to a national park and saw some beautiful waterfalls with lots of fish and monkeys. We swam and hiked. It was great.

From there we went to Ayutthaya, which was the second capital of Thailand before it was sacked by the Burmese. It had lots of old temples (wats) that were all lit up at night. I am sure they are cool during the day, but we didn’t stick around to find out. After Angkor Wat we are pretty templed out. We stayed in a guest house with a very nice owner and hung out with a British couple until late. I left my passport in the room and the lady came to the train station just as it was pulling away. I saw her and waved. She looked panicked and held up my money belt with my passport in it. Then I panicked. They stopped the train and she handed my stuff off to Erica…as I had run down the train the other way to try to catch up with her for an in-motion hand off. Whew. That was lucky.

Next stop was Phitsanaluk. I wanted to ride the train in Thailand and this was the closest stop to where we really wanted to go. This place was pretty neat. We saw some temples, but the most fun was drinking with expats at the local pub until all hours of the morning.

Then it was on to Sukothai; the first capital of Thailand before it was absorbed by Ayutthaya. More temples. These were quite nice though and we spent two lesuirely days biking around them.

We spent three days in Chaing Mai, although we don’t really have much to tell about it. The night market is cool. I like the town itself quite a bit. We just didn’t do much there. I got some xbox360 games for my brother for cheap and a couple hacked PC games for myself. If you have any software requests for me pass them on. I will be back in Thailand after Laos.

It was a 3 hour bus ride from Chaing Mai to Pai up a winding mountain rode and through a police check point. Fantastic. Could have stayed there for months. It was very small and quiet with a large number of businesses catering to backpackers. We rented motor bikes and rode around the mountains for hours. Simply beautiful. We did not want to leave, but our visas were close to expiring.

Back to Chaing Mai for a night then on to Chaing Khong, I mean Chaing Rai because the bus to Chaing Khong was all sold out. We spent one night in Chaing Rai, ate in the market and went to bed early. We will spend one night here and off to Laos we will go. I hope you are all well. Cheers.

We stayed at a nice and expensive (for us) hotel our first two nights in Bangkok. It was a great location, but it was very difficult to find. It was in the Sukimvit area known for its nice hotels and, appearantly, its abundance of go go bars. It was nice to stay in a fancier part of town before we slummed it again. And slum it we did. Our next stop was the infamous Khao San road…..backpacker hell. Actually, I thought it was not bad. We had to find someplace to park it for a few days while my parents Fedex’d the replacement to the credit card I lost in Saigon. We picked an aging boarding house with a bar attached. Not the best choice we have ever made. Every night the bar crowd and music were very loud, but we had to stay bc that is where my card was being sent. We spent several nights drinking with the locals in the bar. All the staff were lady boys; which was interesting to see. One was clearly a lady boy, but I had no idea about the other until she spoke.

The street food in Thailand is good and cheap. I think the food here is the best we have had so far. I eat curry often. Green curry soup is fast becoming my favorite. We spent some time seeing the royal palace and some famous temples. We spent several days looking through their vast weekend market. It is huge. They have 20000 vendors and get over 200000 shoppers a day. It was crazy. We got our teeth cleaned and Erica got her hair done. It was not a rushed 8 days. The day my card arrived we shipped off to Kanchaburi….and that is a story for another day.

We spent four days in Siem Reap; three of which were occupied by the glorious Angkor area temples (Angkor Wat). Really, Angkor Wat is just one of the hundreds of temples in that area, but it is the one everyone ... [Continue reading this entry]