Llew Wanders the World

As discussed previously, I arrived in Pai (the P’s pronounced sort of halfway between a P and a B) and was pretty happy with what I saw. I got my bearings then took a wander down to the river to look for guesthouses. The riverine ones weren’t as centrally located as others, but town centre was still only a five minute walk away and they looked far superior for chillin’ out.

Which was pretty much what I did. I picked out the Darling Riverpark Guesthouse from the bunch and settled in. Annie, the owner of the Darling was a super-sweet Thai lady and it was this that tipped the balance in her favour. She called pretty much everyone she met “darling” and as I’d later learn, is probably the hardest-working woman in Thailand’s tourism industry. Added to the fact that she has a special place in her heart for Canadians (she has a good friend from Canada, and one of her Bungalows is even named “Toronto”) how could I have stayed anywhere else?
Read the rest of this entry »

After crossing the Mekong (almost certainly for the final time on this trip) I climbed up the road and back into Thailand. This time my port of entry was the border town of Chiang Khong. Re-entering the country presented no problem. This border post didn’t even have a posted copy of the amusing rules discouraging entry to hippies that I’d seen at the Thai-Malaysian border.

I’d read a bit and wasn’t enthralled by the prospect of hanging around in Chiang Khong, though I did make a quick (and ultimately unsuccessful) search around town for a nationalist Chinese soldiers’ cemetary I’d read about. Though I didn’t manage to locate the cemetary, the search and the walk to the bus station allowed me to see a fair bit of the smallish town.

Chiang Khong has a prominent place on the backpacker trail. The majority of those entering Laos from Thailand do so through CK, and it shows. Guesthouses and tourist restaurants lined the main street, and they weren’t nearly as subtle as those in, say, Luang Prabang. There were a couple of very pretty temples in town, but their appearance from the outside was marred by something I hadn’t seen much of in a while: Electrical and telephone lines. All of this served to send me the message very quickly that I wasn’t in Laos anymore.

I arrived at the bus station with a few minutes to spare and stocked up on food for the trip at the nearby market before climbing aboard bound for Chiang Rai.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’d thoroughly enjoyed my time in Luang Prabang, and for the first time in quite a while I felt as though I was clearly leaving a place before I really wanted to. But I had less than two weeks left on my Lao visa and other destinations in that wonderful country called.

The morning of my departure I woke early, finished packing and headed towards the house of a boat driver I’d met who was headed to north to Nong Khiaw that foggy morning.

But never made it. Said boat driver had planned to charge me 100 000 kip ($US10) but as I passed the town boat dock I found a Lao man offering a ticket on the same trip for 85 000. I headed down towards the boats with him and handed over my money. He’d just begun to walk away when I saw Sunny a Chinese woman who’d stayed in the dorm with me headed towards the boats. In no time I’d determined that she was also headed to Nong Khiaw and had paid only 65 000 for her ticket at the official ticket office which I’d somehow missed. The embarrassed Lao handed back my money and I walked up and purchased the ticket myself.

I headed back down to the mist covered boat landing where I sat and waited for my boat to depart (and since no transport in Laos goes anywhere until it’s full I figured it could be a while.)

Finally after I headed back up to the road for breakfast, after some re-arranging of passengers and after two more people showed up we departed up the Mekong for our eight hour journey with the surprisingly sparse cargo of five paying fares plus the driver’s wife.

The amount of waiting before departure was in almost no way a bad thing. It meant that most of the mist had lifted by the time we were away and I could enjoy the sights along the way right from the start (and since the bus to Nong Khiaw was faster and cheaper there was no other reason for taking the boat.)

The Mekong was generally pretty, though the first of the real highlights came as we turned off the Mekong itself and up onto a tributary, the Nam Ou. At their confluence are two wonderful sights. First the Pak Ou caves, filled with hundreds of antique Buddha images. While only the entrance is really visible from the river, they were still quite nice. More impressive still were the cliffs that towered above the Nam Ou just as we entered it. They were made even more spectacular by the fact that in the morning calm everything above was reflected onto the river below.

The boat carried on up the Nam Ou, pleasantly similar to my Cambodian river trips with the wind in my hair and the sun above the (covered in this case) boat. Different from most of the Cambodian Mekong, however, was the relative paucity of settlements here. Villages did appear now and again, but they were clearly the exception rather than the rule. The rule was gorgeous steep green mountain slopes, the vegetation occasionally broken when the slopes became to steep and rocky to sustain it.
Read the rest of this entry »

Laos isn’t a heavily touristed country compared to some of its neighbours (most notably Thailand) but it still does have some areas that receive a good number of visitors. The most notable of these are the capital, Vientiane, Luang Prabang, 330km to the north and areas in between. It was to this part of the country that my travels would take me next.

Though the bus ride to Vientiane had taken a painful nine hours (to cover just over 400km on the best road in Laos) I was finally there. It took a bit of negotiation with tuktuk drivers to find an even vaguely reasonable price for my trip into town, but eventually it was done.

I climbed aboard and off we zipped (I’m fairly certain now that the only proper descriptor to use for travel by tuktuk is “zip.” Unless they’re stuck in traffic, of course.) into the streets of Vientiane, headed for a dense concentration of inexpensive guesthouses as noted in my guidebook.
Read the rest of this entry »

Part two of my Lao adventures began in the city of Pakse, capital of Champasak, the country’s southernmost province. I arrived in Pakse at about 14:00 along with many of my newly acquired friends from Don Det. Most of them were headed across the Mekong to Thailand, but myself and Kate, a girl from New Zealand were planning on staying in the area for a bit and had made plans to travel together for a few days.

This was more or less the extent of our plans, however. Our first stop in Pakse was at the Jasmin Indian restaurant, recommended by Lonely Planet as a good place to find information about the region. Before further planning we had a quick lunch (the Indian food was a nice change from the steady stream of [tasty] Lao fare in Don Det.)

After inquiring about transport to a few nearby towns we eventually decided to head for Paksong, 80km away on the Bolaven Plateau. This appealed for a couple of reasons. First, Kate formerly worked for a coffee distributor in New Zealand and was interested to see the heart of the Lao coffee industry on the plateau. Second, there was nothing more than a half sentence about the place in our guidebooks. Finally, we knew from the restaurant proprietor that there was a guesthouse there, and that if we hurried we’d be able to make it there that evening.

With that, we climbed aboard a jumbo (the Lao name for a tuktuk) and headed 8km out to one of Pakse’s two bus/songthaew stations. Upon arriving a kindly Lao man who had shared the jumbo with us located a songthaew headed for Paksong and we climbed aboard. And waited. Though the Paksong songthaew (apparently) normally departed at 15:00, we didn’t get moving until about 16:00. This gave us a bit of time to explore the small market near the bus station, and to try some of the snacks for sale by the usual crowd of female merchants.

After our hour of waiting and driving around the market to pick up cargo (and one additional passenger) was complete, the songthaew pulled out on to the road towards the highlands.
Read the rest of this entry »

Both for myself and for anyone else who might be interested, I’ve decided to keep track of what all I’ve read since leaving home on this trip. I may have missed a few from earlier in the trip, but maybe I’ll remember them later.
Read the rest of this entry »

The title of this entry probably makes it seem like my first days in Laos were sunshine and roses (or at least hibiscus flowers) and for the most part they were. But first I had to deal with getting away from the border.

The only songthaew (truck with rows of seats in the back) driver at the border said he’d charge us five dollars per person for the 25km trip to Ban Nakasang, the first sizeable village north and the departure point for ferries to many of the Si Phan Don (4000 islands.) This was gouging in the extreme, but he must have figured he could do it, since it was late afternoon and there was nowhere else to go.

Not willing to let ourselves be cheated, my three Belgian companions and I started walking up the road, sure that we’d find a small village, or be passed by someone else who would be asking a more reasonable price.
Read the rest of this entry »

After my evening in the town of Kratie, I was well rested and ready to hit the road again. Or rather, the water, as I my route headed still further up the Mekong river to the town of Stung Treng in the far north of Cambodia.

I’d been a bit nervous with my first boat trip up this river, and had decided to sit inside the boat, but this time I made straight for the roof, where I was joined by all of the other foreigners making the trip.

The boat ride was wonderfully smooth. As the Mekong slid by, I read, stared at the banks, laid in the sun and wind and spent a lot of time grinning at the wonderfulness of just BEING THERE.

As the boat sped on up the river, (40 or 50km/h perhaps) the settlements on either side changed from continuous houses to occaisional villages to single shacks dotted along the banks. In the river itself, concrete markers appeared, rising out of the water to mark the edges of the safe shipping channel. There were times that the markers led us upstream, then downstream for a kilometre or so then back north up the river, making a sort of N shape. This made for a longer (though more fun) ride in the afternoon sun.

Finally a town of some size appeared, heralded by a water tower and a telecommunications tower (and some people say they’re eyesores…)

The boat pulled up alongside the pier, and I hopped off with my pack. I was in Stung Treng, last stop north for public transit in Cambodia.
Read the rest of this entry »

After arriving back in Phnom Penh, I took a quick look at the television before heading out for dinner and was astonished by what I saw. I’d been up in the hills near Kampot for the past few days and had entirely missed the news of the tsunamis that had devastated much of southeast and south Asia. Thankfully Cambodia didn’t receive any of them, but I still had to phone my mother and father and let them know I was okay, both because I wasn’t certain that people were aware of Cambodia’s safety and because they might have worried about my having changed travel plans.

It was my first experience with an internet phone, and while it functioned well enough, they still aren’t really that well suited to normal human (or at least Llew) patterns of conversation.

After dinner at a food stall near my street (I think this was probably my first real southeast Asian street meal [as opposed to snack]) I headed back to my guesthouse to bed.
Read the rest of this entry »

The trip to Kampot was interesting from the start. Leaving my guesthouse at 10:00 meant that I would need to take a mini-bus instead of an actual bus-bus. The moto (motorcycle taxi) to the minibus station was an adventure in its own right. With a 25kg pack on my back, a daypack in front of me and a walking stick in my hand, the trip over alternately bumpy and gridlocked roads wasn’t an easy one.

Upon arriving at the station (in one of Phnom Penh’s many markets) my moto driver found a minibus headed where I wanted to go. At this point I should explain that “minibus” doesn’t mean a small bus, which sells tickets to passengers and runs on a regular schedule. The minibuses in Cambodia wait until they’re full of passengers headed for the same destination (or at least in the same direction) and head off immediately afterwards.

My pack was stowed (which is to say tied onto the back of the minibus, since the small luggage compartment was already overflowing) I managed to buy some bread and bottled water (actually with the number of vendors coming up and sticking their wares in the minibus windows, you’d be hard pressed to avoid it) and within a few minutes we were off.

There were several stops throughout town, picking up additional passengers, and by the time we were on the highway out of town there were four more than when we’d departed the station. Bringing the total to a barely credible twenty-two. Yes, you did read that right. In a vehicle pretty much the size of a Volkswagen van, there were crammed almost two dozen people. Four in the front seats, eight in the second row of seats (four on the seats, four facing them on an improvised bench,) five in my row (including a baby in his mother’s arms,) four in the back row and one standing up leaning out the side window.

Once again, I didn’t see much of the countryside during this trip.

Eventually the crowd started to thin out a bit, and I did manage a brief conversation with the one English speaker on the bus before he disembarked. Finally after an eternity on the bus (as it seemed to my alternately painful and numb bottom. It was really just over three hours) someone indicated to me that we’d arrived in Kampot.
Read the rest of this entry »