The disadvantage of living on a secluded island in the Andaman Sea is that travel to and from is a game of hurry up and wait for a multitude of different modes of transport and it takes at least a day of travel to get anywhere beyond Phuket. But a last we were getting off this rock just as I was falling into the madness that is Island Fever.
We boarded the Chao Koh ferry minutes before 9:00 this morning after stopping off at the French Bakery to pick up a “pain au chocolat” and cappuccino. Ryan had grabbed a bacon egg and cheese from Phi Phi Bakery and Chris had an assortment of different breakfasts from a couple different places. At 8:30 in the morning the pain au chocolat from French Bakery is still really really good as it has yet to transgress into a humidity-imbibed stale copy of its earlier self.
The ferry is about an hour and a half crossing to Rasada Pier, Phuket Town from where we took a half hour mini bus ride to Phuket Airport where we waited for our 2:40 flight. We opted on Burger King for lunch (and I also got a piece of quiche from a bakery vendor which I didn’t so much enjoy but ate out of hunger with some BK fries which I over-enjoyed). Chris hasn’t recovered from his BK lunch yet, while Ryan savored every last fat globule.
Pete from Seafrog who was also joining us on this trip to Vientiane met us in the lounge while we waited to board. A quick 1:40 minute flight landed us in Udon Thani at about half past four where we found ourselves another mini bus for the hour drive to Nong Khai, the Thai side of the Thai-Laos border. The Thai customs agent did not say a word to me as seems to be the custom and we were in No Man’s Land waiting for a bus to take us over the Mekong River via the Friendship Bridge. The sun was just setting, painting an eerie still picture over the water of the Mekong. Lao visa on arrival cost us $30 apiece – more than our flights to Udon Thani! And then we were on another mini bus into Vientiane where we arrived about 6:30.
From all the sitting and jostling around in poorly suspended vehicles, I can’t feel my tailbone and Ryan’s complaining that his butt hurts.
I’ve idled the day away reading an extremely depressing and poorly written book titled “And Then One Morning” about the Tsunami. It’s a fantastic story and it really is a shame that the guy can’t write and that it wasn’t professionally edited. Otherwise it’s riveting and I would recommend it – it’s a quick read – only a couple hundred pages. It’s all the more interesting from the perspective of one living on Phi Phi when you can follow his every move and know some of the people he writes about.
Vientiane so far is promising to be a much better choice in cities for us. It’s bustling, there are streetside cafes with people sitting outside, the streets are lined with welcoming guesthouses in a variety of interesting architectures. There’s a little night market and street vendors. I think this will be a much more pleasant city for us to explore on foot than KL was. And from where I stand the fact that I can actually STAND and WALK this time should alone make it a huge improvement!
We had a fantastic Indian meal for dinner of pappadam, naan, rogan josh, tikka massala and vindaloo. I topped mine off with sweet sweet lassi.
December 23, 2009
I slept troubled our first night in Vientiane. My first mistake was finishing the world’s most depressing book before falling asleep so that I was full on fountain of tears, with snot running down my nose by the time I read the last word and turned out the lights. There is just no uplifting ending to that story. It keeps getting worse and ends just as awful as it could. I suppose that’s the difference between truth and fiction. In fiction the guy gets the girl in the end or there’s a beautifully uplifting moral. In truth everybody dies and it’s miserable.
Until now I’ve not understood why the Thais head for the hills or Krabi every time there’s the most minute, little earthquake. Certainly logic can dictate the difference between a 4.5 quake and the wave that might create in comparison to the second most violent earthquake in recorded history. But I think now I understand the trauma that must linger so overwhelmingly and PTSD is not logical.
I’ve also concluded that Andrew, Ryan’s boss was very very lucky indeed. His entire family was at Adventure Club when he saw terrorized people running down the street away from the beach. He didn’t question, but just grabbed his wife and kids and headed for Reggae Bar. He could have lost his entire family.
But now we’re in Laos. If you blink in Laos you’ll miss a temple. There are more temples in Vientiane than there are Starbucks in Santa Clara – not making a comparison, just saying.
Vientiane is lovely – like I said – bustling. It reminds me a bit of New Orleans in the French influenced architecture – lots of wooden balconies and terraces. It is also a bit of collision of old versus new. Lots of shiny new building interspersed with old world charm. A scooter goes by side saddled by a girl wearing shorter than short shorts and a clingy t-shirt at the same time you cross an old Lao woman in the traditional Lao garb, covered from head to toe in grey drab clothing complete with the straw pointy hat and carrying their wares in two baskets carefully suspended from a big stick.
The names of the streets are mostly in French – all “rue” something or other. Our guesthouse is on Rue Francois Ngin.
We started our first day by going to drop off our passports at the Thai Consulate. I had a minor freak out at the border when I realized that I only have one empty page left in my passport. I was hoping that asking for a double-entry visa was not going to require two pages.
(Riding the Tuk Tuk)
(Bahts and Kips and Dollars, oh my! How to pay for a Tuk Tuk)
Once passports were dropped off we wanted to go to Buddha Park but did not realize that Buddha Park is about 30 km outside Vientiane. The Tuk Tuk driver dropped us randomly at the Victory Arch which they compare to the Arc de Triomphe. The only resemblance is that it is indeed an arch and it represents victory. That’s where the similarities end. To say that the Arc de Triomphe is beautiful might be a little excessive, but it is not displeasing to the eye. This thing, however, was an eye sore! But like the Arc de Triomphe, you can climb to the top of it (albeit via stairs, not an elevator) and the view is quite nice from the top. Unlike the Arc de Triomphe, there are two levels of mall like stalls selling all manner of Lao souvenirs from t-shirts for BeerLao to old French colonial coins to knick-knackery made from ivory (score!).
We’ll come back later to how much my ass hurts from climbing up all the Lao stairs.
From the Victory Arch we walked back to our hotel. Vientiane is actually really really small and you can certainly walk everywhere if you have the time, and well, we have nothing but time. We had lunch at a lovely little outdoor restaurant and I enjoyed one of my favorite dishes – laap gai with khao niao (shredded chicken salad with sticky rice).
While Ryan napped the afternoon away, Chris and I decided to go see one of these million temples that you can’t blink in case you’ll miss it. Not so randomly, we opted for Vat Sisaket. It was a lovely and charming low-key little temple with lots of shrines, a central Sim that was in desperate need of restoration and boasted a ceiling replica of a Chateau from the Loire Valley and a massive Buddha.
Now let’s talk about dinner. I had spotted a Vietnamese restaurant that sounded wonderful to me (dragging Ryan there for lunch tomorrow before we leave). But, the three boys outvoted me. So off we went to try Lao food at supposedly the best Lao restaurant in Vientiane. I had a really bad feeling about this, but I figure that I can always find something to munch on. Oh how wrong I was!
You all know how I do not eat mystery meat to begin with. What you don’t know is how incredibly picky I’ve become since living in Asia. I eat chicken, shrimp, bacon on top of my Sports Bar salad only and ham in my Unni’s Ham, Cheese, Pasta salad only. That is it – no other pork and absolutely no beef and no fish except every once in a while I’ll have the chili/lime fish at Esom. Otherwise, it’s generally not difficult to find vegetarian options so not too big an issue.
The menu had everything from entrails to fried frog skin – not a single dish with chicken or shrimp. But there all the way at the end of the menu was my dish – fried noodles with no mention of meat. Okay, I’ll order that! All the boys ordered the same thing – beef stew. And we opted to share a papaya salad; it came first and was tart and not at all spicy despite a request for 3 chilies.
Then came my fried noodles slathered in mystery meat. The boys decided that they would share my plate and I would order it again and specify no meat. I explained best I could what I wanted having also specified that the menu said nothing about meat. Translation – hint, hint, I’ll be polite, but really, if you’re gonna have meat on something, the menu needs to say so
Chris enjoyed more of my noodles than his own stew – he slurped the broth from his stew, but left all the chunky bits. Pete and Ryan ate everything except the big hunks of fat.
Here is what must have gone through the guy’s head as he headed for the kitchen to order my noodle dish take 2: “why is she ordering the exact same thing again when she hasn’t even eaten the one she has.” Here is what went through my head when he brought me back the exact same dish slathered in the exact same mystery meat: “Why would I order the same thing twice.”
So that night for dinner I had apple pie with vanilla ice cream – nice white people food ordered at the very white people pub next to our hotel.
I told Chris as we were leaving the restaurant that if Laos was known for the quality of its cuisine, we’d have a Lao restaurant in the San Jose area.
Day two began at 8:00 a.m. We’d decided to try for Buddha Park and left early since we needed to be at the consulate at 1:00 to pick up our passports. We’d been told that we could get the government bus to Buddha Park, a much more financially reasonable option than a taxi. The bus is an oversized mini van with about six rows of seats – a bit like the shuttle that takes you from the airport to your hotel or rental car place or long-term parking, but much much much much much older and noisy.
Miraculously we got on the right bus. We were the only three white people on board and compared to all the Lao might as well have been giants. I think that Ryan’s head touched the ceiling when he was standing. The back row of the bus was already rather full, I thought, when we got on. But these three people parted to make room for me to sit down. And now we were nice and sandwiched in there. Then the bus driver walked around the outside to the back window and started yelling at us about the back row. 5 people. 5 people. He barked this a few times and more buns were squeezed too close together to make room for Ryan who was able to squeeze about 1/3 of his butt between mine and the Lao butt on his other side.
We started our journey through Vientiane and then along the Mekong River heading towards Buddha Park. A few stops were made to pile more people onto an already crammed bus. Only major stop – Friendship Bridge/Thai border where virtually everybody got off except the 3 white giants who then spread out for the remainder of the trip to Buddha Park. Since this was the only major stop, we’re considering taking the same bus to the border tomorrow.
Buddha Park rocked! On the banks of the Mekong is a plot of land covered in various Buddhist statues, amongst them, a reclining Buddha and this very odd structure that’s like a jungle gym for adults. Made of concrete and shaped like one of those Mexican outdoor stoves (or like a big onion), you enter through the mouth and inside there are three levels connected by a series of incredibly narrow, high and dangerous stairways. Each level has a ring of statues with a theme, each level stranger than the next. From the top, there’s a nice view of the rest of the park. Apparently this thing was all sculpted and put together by some ferang who’d spent a little too much time sniffing glue?
We took lots of funny pictures.
Growling bellies dictated that we ought to enjoy some Lao lunch on the banks of the Mekong, this time emphasizing the need for it to be vegetarian. We hopped the bus back to the bus depot in Vientiane. Since we had an hour to kill before we needed to be at the consulate, we decided to walk there and avoided the instant onslaught of Tuk Tuk drivers that swarmed the second we descended from the bus.
We picked up our passports and all checked our visas and sure enough, next to the spot where it says “Number of Entries” was printed the number 2. And mine was taking up the last possible page of my passport, so off we went to the American Embassy to enquire about having new pages sewn into my passport. The boys figured that they’d do that as well since we were going anyway. I never expect anything to be easy when it comes to governmental bodies and was pleasantly surprised. We filled out a form each, handed in our passports and 20 minutes later got them back with a booklet of pages sewn into the middle, giving us many more travel possibilities before our passports expire.
December 24, 2009
Day three in Vientiane brought about much laziness before our noonish departure. Deciding how to get back down to Udon Thani was an exercise in herding cats amidst so many simple solutions. I left the boys to figure it out while I went to spend 10 minutes by myself to get my eyebrows waxed. Still cannot find a place to do it completely correctly like my place in Santa Clara. When I returned the boys still hadn’t figured it out and I still butted out because I said I was okay with whatever they chose. As I said to Ryan, “I got us up here, you guys figure out how to get us back down.”
Ryan and I had lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant – remember that restaurant I wanted to have dinner at the night I ended up in mystery meat hell? It was almost everything I’d hoped for though the quality of the duck in the 5 spice duck dish I ordered was, well, tough.
I’m writing the last of this as we’re sitting at Udon Thani airport awaiting our flight back to Phuket. For the first time in four days, I’ve managed to log on to the internet and Facebook is abuzz with Christmas-y type status updates and it is making me incredibly homesick. I said to Ryan that I would love nothing more than for Scotty to beam me back to pellet stove and flannel sheets and Homer PJs and figuring out how we’re going to fit in all the Christmas visits that we want to get done.
We did not successfully find and connect to any wifi while in Laos which was a bit of a shame as I was curious whether we’d have full access to sites like Facebook and wiki from within a communist country – I know that in China, for example, you can’t. Watching a smidge of Lao television this morning, I was able to surmise that the movie “Finding Neverland” is just now coming out in Lao theatres. Hmmmmm.
The Lao immigrations agent asked me how I enjoyed my visit to Laos and I told him that I loved Vientiane and I would like to come back to Laos for longer and visit the countryside. I’m tempted to say that even though we don’t have to do another visa run, we do have to cross the border again in 3 months and I wouldn’t be against using that time to take a few days to go up to Vang Vieng.
Laos has no elevators. Remember how I said I’d talk about all the stairs I’d climbed? In addition to the stairs at the Victory Arch and the concrete onion Ryan and my room was on the fourth floor of a building with oversized floors – better make sure that you haven’t forgotten anything before you start off on your adventures!
Much love to you all. Peace.
