Barry Backpacks Around the World

After I finished typing the blog entry, I decided on a whim to shave my head bald as I realized I have never seen myself bald and here was a good opportunity to do it. (I am on the trip to gain new experiences.) I went to a barber near the Ta Phrae gate and she worked for over a half an hour with an old fashioned razor to give my skull that smoothness that I desired. When you shave yourself bald you learn a few things about your skull that you didn’t know before. For example I have numerous scars and my head is not perfectly round on top. (If you are good, later I might even show you a picture.). Despite my head having an albino, never in the sun color, it didn’t look horrible. That task accomplished, I walked back to the hotel noticing that I was walking a bit easier and I was now so much more areodynamic. I went to bed early that night as I had to catch an early train. Read the rest of this entry »

I returned to my guesthouse after writing the last blog entry and proceeded to become slightly ill. I spent the night suffering from nauseau and a very upset stomach. In the morning the upset stomach was mostly gone, but I was still dizzy. I had thought about postponing going to Pai ,but decided to give it a try anyway. I left most of my bags at my guesthouse since I was coming back anyway and set off walking to the bus station with my small backpack. I had plans to get a lift, but as with everywhere in Asia white face means overcharge and I was halfway to the bus station before I finally found someone to take me for a reasonable price. I could have finished the walk myself, but as I said, I was feeling a bit ill. At the bus station I bought a ticket for the 10:30 bus. The bus wasn’t crowded and I had a seat to myself. We left on time and much to my head’s delight we went to Pai along what must be one of the windiest roads in Thailand. The trip was pretty, going through lots of mountains and forest but I saw only bits of it as I tried to sleep as much as I could. The 130 km trip took about 4.5 hours due in no large part to all the stopping. Sitting in the seat in front of me was an Australian lady named Dominique. We spoke a bit but I probably wasn’t the best company. By the time we got to Pai, I was feeling better, somewhat due to the sleep I had gotten on the bus. Dominique had some recommendations on where to stay and since I had left my guidebook behind I went with her. We walked down the main tourist street of Pai which ended at a small bamboo bridge over the river. Across the bridge were many bamboo and leaf bungalows. Most of the ones directly on the river lacked porch hammocks, so I immediately ruled them out. We found some a bit further back set around a large circle. They had their own bathrooms. We checked in and laid about on the hammocks for a while before going back into town to eat. Read the rest of this entry »

After typing the last blog entry, I found a restaurant to eat at on the main strip. While eating, I got involved in a conversation with two other Americans. We ended up deciding to see what the Tuesday night nightlife of Luang Nam Tha was like. To sum it up: Not much. We tried two different bars and they both only had about five people in each. This was in contrast to the previous weekend when one of the guys had went to a disco in an old church. The place was packed full of Laotian breakdancing. We stayed at the second bar where they had at least a video of people breakdancing playing. A few of the local patrons also took a stab at singing along to the music. The bar finally gave up at midnight and closed. I returned to my guesthouse to sleep. Read the rest of this entry »

I went to the boat ticket office early in the morning to buy a boat ticket to Nong Khiaw. While standing in line to get a ticket, I noticed a helpful signboard that listed the prices for all the destinations. I also quickly noticed that I had to pay about 30% more (110,000 kip) than Lao people according to the sign. While this, as always, is annoying as I don’t get anything more for my money at least it’s not like India where I pay 20-40 times more for things just based on race. After buying the ticket, I waited around for about 2 hours before we set off 30 minutes late. They needed to use an extra boat as there were 16 tourists making the trip (so much for my “original” idea of going by boat). Audrey, the Malaysia lady, who you met in my earlier posting was also making the trip. The boat I was in was equipped with small hard butt numbing wooden chairs.The ceiling over the chairs was too low and I had to hang out to really see well. We first headed north up the Mekong River before turning onto the Nam Ou passing by the Pak Ou caves. Once on the Nam Ou we spent about eight hours making it to Nong Khiaw. The scenery in the beginning consisted of small mountains lost in a haze.  The mountains were greatly deforested. (This would be the most depressing part of the whole journey. For such a small population, Laos is tremendously deforested. There is almost no replanting going on and the hillsides are almost bare or covered in grass. In some areas a few clumps of teak trees have been replanted.) The river paralled route 13 for most of the trip. As we got closer to Nong Khiaw the scenery became more dramatic. The mountains turned to karst and great limestone cliffs riddled with caves leapt out of the water. Here the slopes were too steep for logging and old growth forest with full jungle canopy remained. The villages consisted of traditional thatch hut architecture. The river itself was full of rapids, clear, and quite shallow. The boat struggled to get up a few steep parts. We had to stop at one point to change propeller blades as the old one had gotten bent in an extra shallow portion. One of the other boats struck bottom and had to be pushed to deeper water. In a clever blend of old and new technology, the villages produced electricity from the river. Where needed, they constructed bamboo rafts and tied electric turbines to them. The river current turned the turbines. Where extra ooomph was needed, bamboo shoots were used to channel the water over the turbine propellers. Wires supported on bamboo poles ran from the turbines up into the villages. Read the rest of this entry »

I left the guesthouse around 6:00 am and took a tuk tuk to Vientiane’s Northern bus station. I got on the 6:30 am bus going to Phonsovan. The bus trip took 11 hours. The landscape was at first flat, but then quickly climbed into the mountains north of Van Vieng. I am sure the scenery would have been stunning, but it was so foggy that I couldn’t see anything. The weather turned very cold by the time the bus reached the high plateau (1200 meters,  4000 ft) on which Phonsovan sits. I exited the bus and sat shivering in a tuk tuk with other Lao people. I was charged 10000 kip for the 3km trip which is really expensive considering the number of people in the tuk tuk. The Lao people paid this as well so I couldn’t complain (the driver originally asked me to pay 20000 kip which I refused). Once in town, I quickly found a guesthouse and proceeded to throw everything out of my bag to reach my jacket, thermal top, and hat which had been languishing at the bottom of my bag since Nepal. As it was already late, I set about trying to find the best way to see the Plain of Jars. I finally settled on booking a 120,000 kip minivan tour that went to all the sights and included lunch. This accomplished, I found a Chinese restaurant to have supper. I sat with two Australian ladies, one of whom caused quite a bit of excitement by severely choking on a chicken bone. I thought I might have to try the Hiemlich manuever and was trying to remember how to do it when she managed to remove the bone. I then spent a little while at the MAG UXO office looking at all the pieces of bombs that they have found and dismantled. This area of Laos was the most heavily bombed during the 8 year American bombing campaign. On average a plane dropped bombs on Lao every 8 minutes for 8 years. I returned to my hotel room and finally went to sleep around midnight after the drunken singing from the wedding next door finally ended. Read the rest of this entry »

Andreas and I headed to the bus station early to try to get on a bus to Savannakhet. At the ticket window, we bought tickets for the next bus at 8:00 am. While we waited, we observed that there weren’t many people waiting to get on the bus. The bus employees must have noticed this as well and decided that the 8:00 am bus should become the 9:00 am bus and finally the 9:45 am bus before it left. We managed to get seats in the very front and were reveling in the leg room until a motorcyle was pushed right in front of us for transport. The long trip was pretty much like the rest I have taken. Small villages, big towns, and basically the bus stopping at everyone’s home along the way. At least we had karaoke videos to keep us entertained. The story lines in the videos all seemed to follow a similar pattern. Read the rest of this entry »

After having so much fun (despite the dust and knee injury) renting a motorbike in Ban Lung, Andreas and I decided to rent motorbikes again and do a tour of Southern Laos. We rented bikes from our hotel in Pakse for 70,000 kip/day. Our bikes were two nearly brand new 110 CC Honda’s. My bike had only 500 km on it. Waking up early on Wednesday morning, we set out for our first stop of Tad Lo. Leaving early meant that the traffic was light. We stopped at a hardware store before leaving Pakse and bought some chains to lock the bikes with at night. It was about 85 km to Tad Lo which we covered in a few hours. At first, I was a bit uneasy on the bike, but was soon comfortable enough to cruise along at 60-80 km/hr. We stopped for a rest in a small village where Andreas had coffee (Laos produces its own coffee beans at plantations on the plateau). I bought some bread made by a local lady that tasted as if it contained some sort of blueberry. We could see the high cliffs of the plateau rising in front of us. After the break, we began the climb up the plateau reaching an elevation of 900 feet by the time we were in Tad Lo. I immediately liked Tad Lo as soon as I saw it. Accomodations consisted of thatch bungalows set along a dirt road. The more expensive ones faced the waterfall for which Tad Lo is known. There were very few tourists around. After checking in, we set out to look around the waterfalls and the area. There were a series of waterfalls so we had to walk upstream to view them all. There were children swimming and fishing all along the falls. After viewing the falls we began to look for a place to cross the stream to take a shortcut back to our bungalows. While doing this, the branch that I was holding onto keep my balance on a rock broke, and I went falling into the water. Everything on me got wet (money, camera, hiking boots, etc.). Fortunately the camera case had enough padding to absorb most of the water keeping my camera mostly dry. Since I was now wet anyway, I just walked across the stream to the other side. During the walk back to the bungalow, we ran into an elephant (two actually). They were just standing around contentedly munching on bananas. They had saddles on the their backs, so I assumed that people rode them, but there were no handlers in sight. After bidding farewell to the elephants, I went back to the bungalow, changed, and spread all my things in the sun to dry. In the evening we took the motorbikes to a waterfall about 10 km distant. We passed through a village with a group of men playing a Laotian game much like volleyball. The main difference is that one can only use their head and feet to get the ball over the net. Because it is the dry season, there wasn’t much water. The view more than made up for it though. The waterfull plunged over a 100 meters down a cliff. From the cliff, we had an excellent view over the whole valley below. In the evening, I was shown a bomblet casing from a cluster bomb. Laos was heavily bombed during the Vietnam War with American cluster bombs. From inside the main bomb casing, individual bomblets are sprayed over a wide area. The bomblets are metal spheres with fins. They detonate after so many revolutions. If they aren’t dropped from a high enough altitude they fall to the ground without exploding. Children find undetonated bomblets and think they are balls to play with. As they throw them around, many of them explode after the required number of revolutions are complete. Two years ago a group of children were killed in Tad Lo. Read the rest of this entry »

Due to an afternoon bus departure, I had a morning to kill in Kratie. To that end I went back to the bookshop where I had eaten previously as the breakfast menu looked good. Upon my entrance, I found that the American owner had indeed been busy over night. Sitting on the bar were two brand spanking new cardboard bosoms. They were modest in size, but very 1980’s Madonnaesque (a.k.a. pointy). Having completed his necessary cardboard body alterations, he was working on a cardboard skirt when I entered. I learned on further questioning that he was to be Anchora the beer princess. Anchor is a beer brand in Cambodia. Anchora supposedly has made appearances before in Cambodia on different occasions and is quite the hit in this small river town. Read the rest of this entry »

My posting schedule may be a bit erratic while I am in Laos as Internet access is very poor. This small post alone is taking FOREVER. I hope this situation will improve as I head north.

I caught a morning bus to Kep and got dropped off at the boat docks for the trip to Koh Tonsay. I found a man selling boat tickets for $15 roundtrip to the island. As this was for the whole boat, I decided to wait around and see if anyone else would show up to go. About 40 minutes later a group of four foreigners showed up. I walked over to them as they were speaking to another man about a boat. He was going to charge everyone five dollars a person for the roundtrip. Despite this being a slightly higher price, I decided to go with them as I was tired of waiting. When I said that I was going to stay overnight, the man tried to charge me $10 saying that it cost more for me to stay overnight. Despite explaining why this made no sense (I was just going to share a boat coming back, I didn’t need a special boat just for me), he wouldn’t take five. In the end I told him that I wasn’t going to spend the night and paid my five dollars. It technically wasn’t a lie because I still had plans to look around the island before ultimately making up my mind about how long I wanted to stay there. The trip out to the island in the wooden skiff took about 25 minutes. Read the rest of this entry »