Troy Archie – Everybody Knows This is Nowhere

Been Listening to Tiger Army lot’s lately, specifically the song “The Long Road”, great stuff. I just landed my self in Vientiane, the capital of Laos after spending a day in Vang Vieng. Vang Vieng was an interesting little town that seemed to be based around tourism and tubing down the local river. It kind of reminded me of Nam Th but with tonnes of foreigners, lots of restaurants with pretty much the exact same menu, a whole slew of bars serving “happy shakes” and absolutey no charm. There was some nice caves in the area and I biked out to one of them and got a tour of it. It was a pretty cool cave going about 1km into the mountain side with tonnes of really cool stalagmites, some of which you could knock on in different areas and make different sounds. I got a tour of it, or more like was taken on a tour of it by a couple locals with flash lights. I was grateful that they were taking me on it and thought it was going to be like $1-2 for it but was a bit shocked afterwards when they came asking for $6 for each me and this Aussie I was with. The Oz talked him down to $5 but I walked away a bit pissed off as they didn’t say or post the price before hand. I’m sure I would have paid for it as going by myself would have been a bad idea but it was just a little annouying. But in the end it’s only $$$.

Luang Prabang
Before Vang Vieng though, I had to force myself away from the great town of Luang Prabang. I guess we all have our chill out towns, places that we get stuck in while travelling and stay there longer than expected, well LP was my town. I spent 10 days there and 12 nights before I forced myself to leave and already I’m regretting leaving thinking that I should have stayed there for x-mas. I kept putting off going, always finding more things to do. The last couple days there I rented another bike and headed out to Tad Sae waterfall, which this time I’ll took pictures of. I also took another cooking class, this time in Laos cuisine, went to the museum, which was actually really good and just chlled out at my favorite cafe Morning Glory. The place was owned and run by a guy from the states who knew his coffee. The shakes they had there also rocked and although I never ate there, from what I was told by others was dam good.

Morning Glory Cafe

My View from MG

Christmas
Thought I’d just touch base on this again. After some thought I’ve realized why Christmas doesn’t matter to me out here. Family. Christmas to me is about family and without my family here it’s nothing but just another day. Without Mom, Dad, Tiff, Booboosh & Mike, Brad, The Smiths and every last Hynek, it’s nothing. Same goes for New Years. Without my friends New Years is just another day, I highly doubt I’ll drink or do anything exciting. I’ll probably stay up to 12:05 and then go to bed. Without Mike & Erin, Colby & Steph, Sean and Jesse it’s again, just another day.

About as Christmas as it’s going to get

Random Thoughts and observations
I see a lot of local people here watching WWE, it’s pretty popullar. Everywhere from Nam Th to Vientiane I’ve seen people wearing and buying WWE shirts and watching it on TV.
There’s lots of travellers travelling with their kids. Children from toddlers to teens. Anyone can travel.
Seemingly everyone no matter how poor looking they appear to be has a mobile phone. Welcome to the digital age.
Roads in the north of Laos reminded me of the trains that go through the Rocky mountians and have to circle and loop around the mountains to make it through. You can be driving and see a road way across this gorge and like 10 minutes later be on it and looking up or down on where you just were.
Asians love Red Bull and their version of it M-150, at least I think it’s their version of it. Don’t remember seeing it Canada or Australia. They drink that shit by the truck load.
Berr Laos is a very very popullar beer here and from what I’m told is really good. If you can try it ever back home give it a swig.
One thing that I’m really missing and finding a bit hard is variety in food. I’ve gone form one extreme to the next; I’ve either had to pretty much always cook for myself to the opposite where I’m always having to eat out. A lot of the restaurants here serve a lot of the same thing and I’ve seen many that have the exact same menu as as place down the street. Things can get very borring especially if you’re in a town with limited market stalls and street food and finding restaurants that serve some of the local foods and cuisine can be a bit of a challenge.

So like I say, I’m in Vientiane now but I think I’m only going to spend like a day here if possible, depending it I can get my Cambodian visa sorted and then just on a bus all in the same day. There’s not too much of an appeal here for me but I’m sure that’s mainly because I really liked Luang Prabang so much and find it doesn’t compare. From here I’m off to the south to a place called Paske which is suppose to be coffee country and from there either up to some waterfalls or down to near the Cambodian border to a place called 4000 Island which is suppose to have quite the draw.

Peace
Troy

Tags: Laos

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 20th, 2006 at 7:22 am and is filed under Laos. 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.