The Young Man Odyssey

First of all, Laos is a foreign term invented by foreign powers. All travellers that have been there, and all the Thai locals call “Laos” Lao, and that is how I shall refer to it from now on. I recommend the same to everyone back home. Thai’s don’t use an s on the Phillipines as well.

Last night I met up with a German PhD hopeful whom I shared a room with. We went to a horrible kareoke bar in remote Chiang Saen, and the whole experience reminded me oddly of a ho-down in Texas.

Anyhow, in the morning I went to the Golden Triangle to get a picture of Lao, Burma, and Thailand. It was a horrible tourist trap but I got some nice pictures, though I am too lazy to share them with you now.

I took two sawganethew (song-thow) the pickup truck taxi’s to Chiang Kong. Toward the end I built up confidence and rode holding onto the back which made for a much more memorable experience.

Nearly the entire road parallels the windy river of the Mekong, which acts as the border between Thailand and Lao. So my entire day I have been staring Lao in the face, and tomorrow I am taking a boat across to begin my travels there.

It takes 10 hours to get 200 km, the roads are so bad. There are many boat options as well but the Mekong does not traverse the entire country.

The extremely remote countryside of Northern Thailand is like none I’ve seen thus far, and riding on the back of the taxi to see it was completley wonderful.

The roads are bad in Lao, the people are wonderful. There are many temples but only one ATM in the whole country. I look forward to it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 18th, 2006 at 6:11 am and is filed under Thailand, Laos, Vietnam 2006. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.