Missing… Presumed Having A Good Time

From Luang Prabang, I decided that it would be a good idea to take a boat trip up the river to Nong Kiaw after reading the Lonely Bastard’s description of the river scenery. Don’t get me wrong, the scenery is quite beautiful, but after a few hours the beauty starts to fade and boredom sets in. We were put on this little boat fitted with Playschool Chairs with just enough room for your head while seated. Standing was not an option as we found out quickly when the large guy with the camera decided to shift to the opposite side of the boat to get a picture. He almost sank us. I told him to “think canoe, sit down”. After about 5 hours, I figured out there was one place you could stand on the boat and got a much needed stretch and some nice vistas. We stopped along the way and I got to see the erosion of the river happening right before my eyes. There were hundredes of worms struggling to not get sucked into the river. But overall, I’d say don’t bother with the ride up river to Nong Kiaw, take the 3 hour bus ride instead. The worst part is that just before we get to Nong Kiaw, it starts to piss down rain. It’s funny because I really hate it when you arrive somewhere and there are 100s of touts trying to take you to their guesthouses. Here, no one greeted the boat and we had no clue where to go or what was available in this sleepy little village. In between rain drops I decided that I needed a beer and stopped at a restaurant when the rain got heavier. All of us from the boat ended up sleeping at their guesthouse after a few beers and the inability to bother crossing the river. We sat there and drank for hours and I realized that I didn’t have a room yet. After a few more beers and dinner, I decided to just crash with Peter, a Belgian guy from the boat. We ended up traveling all across Lao in 4 days to get to Huay Xai for the Gibbon Experience (see this post on my new blog site). If you look at the map on this site, you know that’s it’s a long way to get to the Thai border.
There was no internet or much of anything in NK except some beautiful mountains surrounding the river. We had to travel for about 6 hours in order to get to an internet cafe to confirm my reservation for a treehouse on the 16th because for some reason the ‘Gibbons’ weren’t answering their phones. We hopped on a Song Thaew (a pickup truck with 2 rows of bench seats in the back) with about 20 other people in the back. We changed trucks in Pak Mong and got a driver that was hell bent on breaking the land speed record from Pak Mong to Udom Xai. A trip that should have taken 4 hours was easily made in just over 2 hours. I said to Peter, “well on the bright side, if we live, we’ll get there quickly” One of the locals on the truck was hanging on for dear life When we go to the bus station in Udom Xai we saw a great sign at the ticket counter. Good luck Everybody ala Dr. Nick from the Simpsons! Well to make a long post not short, we took another truck and a full day boat trip to get to Huay Xai, but made it in time to register and pay our 1.3 million Kip for the Gibbon Experience.

Sorry for the dramatics. It’s only worse case for my Blog. Thailand is still intact and holding. Well if you have been following closely to the updates that I had put up on the Military Coup here in Thailand, you know it was pretty exciting around here for a couple days. Things have pretty much calmed down for the moment. If you were really watching closely, before the servers went down, you saw that I even spent a day out at Governement House, where all the tanks and soldiers are, taking pictures of the latest tourist attraction in Bangkok, Tank Row. Unfortunately, as with Murphy’s Law, the last few blogs have been lost forever. The servers at Bootsnall crashed a couple days ago and they lost all the entries that I’ve done all the way back to August 17th. The worst part for me is that since August 17th, I’ve filled in entries that have been missing from about June 15th to August 16th. Hundreds of hours of entries were lost. Fortunately, with the help of Google cache, Yahoo cache and Chris at Bootsnall, I have been able to reassemble most of what was there before their server blowup except for the real time war correspondent entries from the last few days here in Bangkok. That I’m really upset about that because the emotion, sense of urgency, the unknown… was all captured in the entries that came after the coup in near real time. I’m heading out of the country in a few hours and most likely won’t have much time to blog in Lao. Don’t know what the internet connections are like up there. I just know that ATMs are scarce.

I was woken up by a text message from the wife of an AP reporter that tanks were rolling down the street and a state of ... [Continue reading this entry]