Indelible Roots

I awoke to the sound of thunderous rain and rain water splashing onto my head underneath the window early this morning. This is supposed to be the height of the dry season, yet it has rained the past two days with this being the fiercest yet. As my window had screening on the inside, I couldn’t close the outer shutters, so I merely closed the curtains and drifted back to sleep, wondering how we would climb on wet rock.

I met up with Kylie and our guide at the office at 9am today and confirmed with the staff that climbing was a go. Off we went for the short boat ride to our slice of rock face on the Mekong. We were the only ones going so it was a rather comfortable ride out on a clean boat chartered by the company, Green Discovery. Our guide was a young Laos man by the name of Yai who spoke fairly good English and was very good with giving directions.

On the rock face he went over the basics as I requested and climbed up lead climbed to place our top rope. Then it was our turn up the fairly easy first climb. Twice on that and we moved up to a higher point from the same base. This was a bit more technical and I would not have made it up easily if Yai didn’t know every nook and cranny of the rock face and told me where to place each and every extremity. The top here put us within a foot of a be hive with dozens of bees coming out of a narrow spout that looked artificial to me. But they were “friendly bees” and I didn’t get stung.

Next we moved the route just to the right a little for a little which made it easier to get 3/4 of the way up, but then you had to deal with the rock bulge at the top. I made this route twice and almost didn’t the second time as my arms started shaking and giving out on me. It was fun, but the view from there wasn’t that spectacular, with Luang Prabang in the distance and motorized wooden boats puttering by on the Mekong below.

As I’m wondering around looking for food I run into Kylie again. She’s looking for a particular trekking company and we go there together. Shew wants to book a rock climbing trip and it turns out to be $47 for one person, or $28 each for two persons. I told her I would think about it and we go have dinner overlooking a darkened Mekong River.

We then walk the night market with mat after mat of fabrics and silver bracelets. The scarves look to be very good quality and I teach Kylie how to bargain and buy in South East Asia. As I predicted, she got several things at about fifty percent of the asking price. We then head back to the trekking shop where we book the trip. The price is quoted in dollars of which I was short, so I ask for it in Thai baht. He quotes me one thousand baht, about thirty three dollars. I say this is too much and doesn’t equate to the amount of twenty-eight dollars. He says I can pay him in dollars tomorrow.

Unfortunately my very short experience here has been rather poor. I find the people to be greedy and unkind. Hopefully this is not true of the rest of the nation.

We arrive in Luang Prabang at around 5pm and I head off to find a cheap room. Multiple people approach me with ten dollar rooms with private baths and hot water. I just want a place to store my things and sleep. I see a sign advertising “room available” and ask the young man at the desk how much it was. He says “go look first.” I say “how much is it.” He says “you want to go look.” I say “well how much is it?” He says “I’m sorry, but we are all full.” I say “that’s fine” and leave.

As I’m walking down the same road with my pack on another guy comes up on a moto saying he had a nice room for 70,000 kip, about eight dollars. I say I want to walk and he walks with me the three or four blocks to the place. He have a pleasant conversation along the way. Looking at the room it didn’t have a window, so I declined it. The nice smile then disappeared off his face and he was a bit rude so I left.

A woman then approaches me with another ten dollar room. I say I can get one for 8000 kip, about nine dollars and she agrees to it. The room is nice  and big with a working fan, clean sheets, a clean bathroom, a towel, two bars of soap, and a new roll of tp. I take it.

So we arrive in Pak Beng, half way to Luang Prabang around five or six in the evening. As soon as the boat docked kids jumped on board and wrestled each other for our backpacks. I had read about this scam where they take the pack to the guest house for you and charge you four dollars and took my pack off the youngster as he started to leave the boat.

Kylie and I then headed up the hill to a guest house mentioned in my soon to be apparently out of date Lonely Planet book. We found Bounmy guest house where it should be on the map and got into separate rooms. I felt it was overpriced at three hundred baht and almost went off looking for another place. My fan didn’t work and I had to ask the staff a dozen times to get it looked at, then to get it replaced. They told me they would give me another one when I went to bed.

I then had dinner there with a couple of guys from the boat. Roger is an Aussie on holiday and John is a Brit taking a year off of school. Rog shows me the bottle of scotch that he’s been polishing off during the boat ride and it’s nearly empty. I order some food and have to ask the staff twice for my drink.

The staff member and likely a family member is named Money or something like that. He drinks a bit with us and Rog asks for a bong to smoke the pot he got when he arrived here. Money then says he has  “a friend” who will make him one for three hundred baht.  Rog agrees and starts goofing off with his Thai cell phone. Money then takes the cell phone and disappears for an hour. When he shows back up there are messages on it and we scroll through them to find that money has been taken off the phone and transfered to another phone. But Rog is too drunk to remember how much money he had left on the phone.

We then agree that this place is a scam and ask for our check several times. Rog also says he doesn’t want the bong anymore and Money immediately goes out and brings back this stick of bamboo and starts whittling away at it. We finally get our bill and it has food that we didn’t order on it. Finally we get it squared away and Rog treats us to dinner. I leave and as I was leaving another staff member gruffly asks if I had paid.

I then remind him that I want my damn fan. It was a cool night, but if I’m paying three hundred baht for a room with a fan, I’m getting a fan. Turns out that the fan didn’t work in the room because the eighteen gauge wiring doesn’t deliver enough electricity to run it. I then find that the hot water is disconnnected even though it’s supposed to have hot water. There is also no towel, soap, or paper towels and I have to dry myself off with my pack towel after the shower. The bed is caved in in the middle and looks so dirty I take out my sleeping bag liner Ali gave me and sleep on that.  I found out in the morning that Kylie’s room wasn’t much better though it had a working fan and she slept in her clothes.

At 6:30 I get up to the sound of roosters and find that there is no electricity as no one has started the generator. I take my cold shower using the fan to prop open the bathroom door and go downstairs with my things. One of the staff members asks if I want breakfast to which I said I was going down to the boat and threw the keys onto the desk and left.

At the dock I find that we have been moved to another boat, a smaller boat. I say this and one of the Laos passengers relay my message to the boat man. He says it’s not smaller the lying bastard. It was a good three feet narrower and I’m only slightly happy to get there early to tie my bag to one of the seats. I then go off to walk the town, find breakfast, and get some snacks for the ride.

At 7am on the 15th I left Bamboo to find an ATM machine. Apparently there are no banks or ATMs in Huay Xai, Laos. Being only half awake as usual in the mornings, I only got five thousand baht out, about one hundred sixty dollars as I don’t like carrying around a lot of cash. The immigration office opened at 8am and stamped us out of Thailand. Then it was a thirty baht boat ride packing about ten people in tandem to get over to Huay Xai. In Huay Xai it was another twenty baht “off duty hours fee” to get stamped into Laos.

Then I was off to find the Gibbon Experience of which I had heard so much and received zero information from the company after two emails separated by weeks. It then occurred to me that perhaps I didn’t bring enough money to cover the expenses. I did find the company shortly there after and was told that there was an opening that day. However it costs one hundred ninety-nine US dollars to which I said I didn’t bring enough, scolded the gal for not returning my emails asking for price and other information (she merely said that they were full, that is they don’t reply if they don’t have openings,) and I left. I remember on their sparse website that there are no banks/ATMs there.

So it was off to BAP guest house to book a slow boat to Luang Prabang. I met Kylie from Oregon here who pointed me to the lady booking the boats. It was only after I had booked the boat trip that she had gone on the Gibbon Experience the past three days, how great it was, and that she booked it with her credit card. Huh! Well, I had just paid nearly thirty dollars for this boat trip, so the Gibbon Experience will have to wait another decade.

OK. So Laos is the poorest nation in South East Asia. So thirty dollars should be a huge amount of money, thus we should be getting a nice, luxurious ride to Luang Prabang. NOT! We were told to be ready at 9am and the tuk tuk arrived at 10am. Then we waited around on the boat that was supposed to have “nice seats” according to BAP guest house staff, it had wooden seats that hurt your hiney just looking at them. We waited and waited and another eighty tourist shows up at about 10:45. Packed in like sardines with people on the floor between the seats, standing by the engine room, and draped over some cargo we finally left Huay Xai at 11:15.

I found out later that you can charter this same boat for a little over one hundred US dollars. I’m sure the boat owners are making a thousand dollars on this trip, so who is making the two thousand nine hundred dollars in profit? This is definitely a scam and left me with a bad taste in my mouth for Laos.

I got to the bus station at about 10am and found the one window servicing Chaing Kong. It turned out that the early buses were full so I took the 1pm bus. Little did I know how long this ride would be. But I wasn’t feeling great, so sitting around Chiang Mai for a few days doing nothing new wasn’t appealing to me. Being sick on a bus wouldn’t be great, but I would get that travel time out of the way.

With three hours to kill I decided to walk around looking for an internet cafe. The first one I came to had a bunch of computers, but all were running Windows ME, so it wouldn’t read my external hard drive from which I surf the internet being the paranoid person that I am. So I left and found the next one several blocks away with newer computers. But as I plugged in my hard drive, the lady motioned that usb wouldn’t work or something to that extent. So I left, had a cheap lunch for twenty-five baht, and sat around waiting.

Finally on the bus we headed off just after 1pm. However, we stopped at every city along the way picking people up and dropping people off. At one point there were about ten extra people standing in the aisle of the bus.

Around 7pm we finally arrived in Chaing Kong, on the Mekong bordering Laos. Of course the “ferry” was closed for the night, so I had to spend the night there. I took a tuk tuk with a Frenchman, Rene and an Australian gal who said she didn’t particularly want to go to this guest house, but was somehow pushed onto the tuk tuk. We arrived to find that there was only one room left and Rene and I agreed to share it for a whopping three hundred baht (ten dollars.) I had reserved this last room at the last bus stop.

The place was called Bamboo Riverside or something to that extent. The staff was rude and the room was bare; two beds side by side, a brick wall on one side, a wall that didn’t go all the way up separating the bathroom, and no electrical outlets.  Rene and I then went out to get something to eat and then we walked to the hillside what was on fire. The haze around Chiang Mai turns out to be slash and burn from the fields as farmers clear things out before it gets too dry. The whole of northern Thailand and Laos is apparently smoking for months, until the rainy season.

I spent all of yesterday walking and walking with my little “walking map of Chiang Mai” in my hand. The old city is surrounded by a moat and is square in configuration. It takes about thirty minutes to walk from one end to the other and I walked pretty much the entire old city.

I saw many Wats, some cool statues, and sat in the park to read “The Iliad.”  Then it was back to the guest house for some food and to get some suggestions for things to do the next day. The food there was actually quite good and in large portions. And the owner seemed to know everything about everything to do around the area. Her husband is a westerner who puts together motorcycling tours of the area and we had a good chat.

Later that night I went to a local bar for a few drinks and ended up talking with the elderly Canadian owner. He has two bar/restaurants here in Chiang Mai and two in Phuket. He said he wanted to look at getting a place in Kampong Som in Cambodia, but it was more expensive than Thailand and there was way more red tape. No kidding.

Today I decided to go to the local mountain top and then onto the national park several kilometers away. I walked to the northern taxi station where all the red pickup truck taxis going in this direction are located. I was met by one of the drivers who asked if I was going to Doi Suthep and I said yes. He said it was forty baht which was lower than I had been told (should be sixty) and then told me that because I was the only one waiting to go, it would cost four hundred.

I laughed at him and then a Thai man came over and said he wanted to go also. They talked back and forth and this new guy said we would just pay two hundred each as he wanted to go and hadn’t been for a long time. I told him that for that price he should rent a motorcycle and he said he didn’t know how to drive one. Yeah right. I wished him luck, told him to honk at me if he finds eight other people to go, and walked in the direction of the mountain.

On the way I found that my pricey earphones no longer worked on one side, likely due to ear wax intrusion since I wore them all night on the train to block out the noise.  And of course I didn’t have any more filters and there was almost no chance of finding this brand here. So luckily I walked right by a computer/IT mall and wandered around looking at all the knock offs they had. I picked one up that I thought said Sony, only to find that it said Sonia upon closer inspection. A helpful girl found me a pair for under four dollars and I was on my way.

At the next taxi station (a long walk away) I got on one with five other locals for fifty baht. The ride up was intense and nauseating. The driver wanted to get up and down as fast as possible and the entire way the road switched back and forth. It would have been great fun on a motorcycle, but I was nauseus by the time we got to the top.

There I found some less than appetizing lunch  and sat down for almost an hour, wondering if I should try to hike up the three hundred steps to the top or call it quits. Of course I went to the top, but Chaing Mai was obstructed by haze or pollution. The ride back was just as bad. My symptoms are that of the flu or cold, so hopefully a good night of rest will do it. But that means I can’t book the mountain biking day trip for tomorrow as I had hoped, but hey, that just saved me fifteen hundred baht. If I feel good tomorrow I think I’ll just hop a bus to the Laos border.

OK. Not a lot to write about here, but just to let everyone know where I am. The landlady got a tuk tuk for me at 6:50pm. She told me to pay him “fifty baht” when he was there even though she had already told me that before. It figure it was so he wouldn’t try to overcharge me when i got there. She also said maybe a nice Chiang Mai girl will think I was Thai etc… Ha! As long as I don’t speak I suppose as everyone here thinks I’m Thai off the bat. Interesting as a Khmer person wouldn’t confuse me for Thai, perhaps Chinese.

So I got to the train station along with a hundred other people. There are three tracks and people are all over them. Trains are coming and going and I’m not sure which one and where since there’s no train number on my ticket. So I go ask one of the three guys in charge and he tells me where to stand and when to get on.

On the train I find a car full of kids around 10-13, and I thought they might be Korean. Anyways I have the top bunk in the front and have to fit my large backpack in with me. I tried to shove it under the table across from me, but got yelled at. It turned out to be another two bunks for a couple of people at the next stop. So I spent about twenty minutes tying my back to the seatbelt so it doesn’t go crashing onto some kid’s head.

I actually got a fair amount of sleep out of it, though I was feeling pretty dirty on the way out. Also one of the kids had wet his/her bed in the night just down the car. The poor lady who had to clean everything up.

So now I’m in Chiang Mai in a little guest house in a little room with a bad mattress, but my own bathroom for the same price as in Ayutthaya. How much exploring before I hit the road again?

9am today saw me leaving on the Skytrain to parts unknown. I took the train as far north as it goes and tried asking the only western looking person where the northern bus station was to no avail. Finally I just got in one of the many taxis there and told him where I was going. I had thought I would be able to walk there, but twenty to thirty minutes later I was glad I took the taxi.

This is the biggest bus terminal I’ve been to yet. There must be almost 100 different ticket windows on the outside and the inside has even more. I walked the entire outside windows looking for one to say “Ayutthaya.” But to no avail, so I headed inside. There I found the correct window and was told the bus is leaving now, “you buy ticket on the bus” and was led outside by the lady in uniform. Less than two hours later I was awoken by the attendant and followed everyone off the bus.

I wasn’t sure where I was until the tuk tuk driver started to flash his picture cards of sights around Ayutthaya. I asked him about the Baan Lotus Guest House and he said he can take me there for thirty baht. He then showed me the Baan Lotus Guest House logo on the side of his tuk tuk. But I insisted on walking and he pointed the way for me.

About four blocks later I wasn’t sure if I was going the right way or not and almost pulled out my compass. Another tuk tuk driver stopped and asked me where I was going. “Ok, twenty baht” he says. I asked if I can walk there. He said yes, pointed in the direction I was going, and said “one hundred meters.” Ha!

Well, if you ever come to Ayutthaya, this is the place to stay. I’d like to own a place just like this some day. It’s a little teak house, actually two, with a large front yard and a small pond in the back. It just projected tranquility. I was greeted by an elderly woman who spoke English slowly and haltingly, the epitome of a gentle grandmother. She showed me the rooms, the first one being the size of a walk in closet with just enough room to walk around the bed, shared bathroom in the hallway. She also showed me the double room that was four times as big, and the one with the private bath. She said I would be fine with the small room being a guy and all and I had to agree, even though she offered discounts on the other rooms. Total price, $6.67.

I then decided against renting a bicycle from her and walked to the old capital ruins. And I walked, and walked, and walked. Then I got on the wrong road and had to double back to find my way home. Tuk tuk drivers kept trying to get me in, probably after passing me for the fifth time on the same stretch of road.

Ayutthaya seems like a nice little city, at least the old city. There are internet shops offering kids on line games everywhere. Internet here is cheaper than in Bangkok if you can believe it. The people seem really friendly and the ruins are interesting. They are mostly brickwork, so nothing compared to the large stone blocks of Angkor and the more ancient ones are Khmer. Actually some of the older Khmer prasats I saw near Battambang were also made of bricks.

I also saw bus loads of Japanese tourists going for elephant rides around the park. They had three baby elephants performing by a tent. I do want to go see the restored ancient elephant corral though and may try to do that now.

Second Day:

Spent last night in my closet listening to the birds and insects, then the dogs howling, then the rain pouring. I tell you I can’t stand dogs that make noise. One dog would start in the distance, then another, then another, and finally one who sounded like it was sleeping underneath my window. Luckily it rained pretty heavily later on, so that silenced the dogs.

I decided to go find the train station and buck up for the thirty dollar, twelve hour sleeping train to Chiang Mai. What the hey. I looked up flights, but they were only from Bangkok and after all the taxes and fuel surcharge came out to twice that much. I also met a couple from the UK/Australia staying at the guest house and on their way to Chiang Mai, but with a stop over in another city. We actually have the same route planned except that they are going into Viet Nam afterwards. Perhaps we’ll meet up again on the road.

Finally I rented a bicycle for the ride out to the elephant corral. In the heat of the noon day, I biked the few kilometers to find a lot of elephants hanging out, getting washed, being chained, etc… This places is supposed to be restored to look like the corrals they used in ancient times to contain captured wild elephants. It looked like a bad mock up to me as it didn’t fit the tour guide description. But seeing the baby elephants was cool.

One more trip to the only wat that was spared by the Burmese army in the 1770s and I was templed out. I relaxed by a shaded pool there until a bunch of monks and school children got off the bus and joined me. And since I’ve already checked out of my room, I’m relaxing in the air conditioned internet cafe packed with teen boys playing games on line. I hope I can at least sleep on the sleeping train tonight.

I took a visit to the river to see the area around the palace and the big wat today. Not caring to go inside, I went in my shorts, thus was barred from entering. Unfortunately there is a high wall surrounding both complexes so I could not get any good shots of the wat.

I did wander around the little market around the area. There are charms as far as the eye can see, little figures of the Buddha that you carry around for luck? I mean there were block after block of people selling them on the sidewalk.

Other things I have not seen in the markets in Khmer country are the previously used dentures (can you try them on before buying,) hand carved dildos (material unknown as I didn’t pick one up to inspect), old magazines, and cassette tapes! Are there even cassette decks still functioning to this day?

I stopped by a little hole in the wall place for some “authentic” Thai food. It was very spicy, a good thing the portion was small. Then it was a half hour taxi ride back in 1pm gridlock. I paid the forty Baht fee to use the elevated expressway which probably saved us twenty minutes. Tomorrow, I’m off to Ayutthaya for a simpler, more wallet friendly experience.