Laos and Ko Samui

Laos was lovely. I recommend that you take a trip there sometime. The weather was nice. The food was amazing. Laos is a former French colony, and Luang Prabang is a quaint mix of French and Lao food and architecture. Luang Prabang was a very easy city to visit. It is a little like Banff: nice restaurants, quaint shops, small town. The whole town is easily walkable. The traffic is very quiet, and most people get around on bicycles. There is a very nice night market in Luang Prabang.

From Luang Prabang we went to Vang Vieng. In your someday trip to Laos I recommend that you skip Vang Vieng. This is the city that people head to if they want to do drugs in Laos. A lot of the tourists here looked to be in pretty bad shape. We did not stay long.

The next place we stopped was Vientiane - the capital city. I really like Vientiane. It was easy to get around as a tourist, but it was still a very Asian city. There was a lot of traditional clothing and activities. This city is not just set up as a tourist town, but it happily welcomes tourists to come to visit. Vientiane has a replica Arc de Triumph rising up unexpectedly in the middle of a major street not far from the traditional morning market and noodle stalls.

We took a sleeper bus from Vientaine to Pakse in the south. This bus was amazing! We got a fairly comfortable bed to share. They provided dinner, bottled water, candies, and face wipes to freshen up in the morning. Even with a very nice bus it is hard to get a decent night's sleep in a moving bus. When we arrived in Pakse we had a look around and decided that there was not much of interest here and we carried on to our final destination: Don Khon. The trip included a short trip on the side car of a motorbike. David took some pictures of us going down the street on this contraption. I made him stop taking pictures when I noticed how distracted the driver was becoming. We have a nice picture that we will have to post sometime where the only person with a nice posed smile is the driver. He is totally not looking at the road. We arrived at the bus stop to find that it is not, in fact, a bus that goes to the four thousand islands bus a songtao. Three hours in a songtao is not overly comfortable, especially not after spending the whole night on a bus. After this there was a short ride in a longboat before we would arrive on Don Khon and at a guesthouse with what seemed like the most comfortable bed in the world. We really enjoyed Don Khon. There is nothing to do there. There are no tourist sights that you feel obliged to rush around and see. The only thing to do is relax. We went for walks and bike rides and sat around reading our books. I finally finished reading Homer's Iliad. It is a very boring book. I don't even like war stories, so I really don't know why I decided to read it.

We did a bus riding marathon to get from Don Khon to Ko Samui in southern Thailand where we met with Debbi and Dave (and Otis) for their Chinese New Year holiday. The overnight bus on this trip was not at all like the other. The seats were so close together that our knees pressed into the back of the seats in front of us. Everyone had to recline at the same time. It was a very uncomfortable ride. Ko Samui has been very nice. The weather is hot and the ocean is a shade of turquoise that I thought only existed on postcards. I have never before been to the ocean in a place where it is actually warm enough to get into. The push and pull is very strange.

We are wrapping up our time here in Ko Sumui relaxed and sunburned. Apparently some people can burn through the shade of a beach umbrella and three applications of SPF 60 sunblock. Ow. It has been really nice to spend time with friends. We have not had the chance to spend time with friends (except on Skype) for quite a while. Tomorrow we plan to head for Bangkok where we will spend a few days before we head for Cambodia.

Should have paid more attention in French class

So far our time in Laos has been very enjoyable.We are currently in the capital city Vientiane and are planing to head down to the Four Thousand Islands in the next few days. The money here comes in very large bills, we have taken out about four million kip which is a little more than four hundred dollars Canadian. It can be a little confusing at times to figure out how to pay for things and I have a couple of times given a bill with one less or more zero than is required. To add to the confusion there is some times a decimal used to separate the zeros so I have taken to counting the money before paying.



This is becoming easier day by day as I start to learn the approximate cost of things here. We see lots of tourists in most area that we have been traveling many of them French. Laos being a former French colony maintains a large section of French culture. There is French architecture in certain areas of the city's.



Cafes, pastry, and French restaurants are mixed throughout the main city streets. There are lots of cafes in Chiang Mai but Laos gives you the feeling that it's part of their culture here. Street carts are selling baguettes and once when we were lost a local asked if we spoke french to try and help us out. There is also a good number of really good Indian food restaurants in Laos and we have a few times gravitated towards these restaurants to have some very tasty curried vegetarian meals. So far on our trip this type of meal has been hard to find so we have especially enjoyed it. We have also realized how much we eat like this at home because it feels more like a home cooked meal.

Slow Boat

From Chiang Kong we crossed the Thailand border into the Laos town of Huay Xai. From here we decided to take the slow boat down the Mekong river to Luang Prabang. This is a two day trip with a one night stop over in the small town of Pak Bang. This trip used to be the main mode of transportation for locals but with the recent upgrading of the roads the trip is mainly used for tourists. We booked the trip through our guesthouse as recommended by our travel guide book. He arranged a Tuk-Tuk to pick Marina and I and another couple up at the guesthouse and take us down to a ferry which then takes us over to Laos. Here we wait, along with thirty other confused tourists, to get a visa and then have our passports stamped. Then we meet up with someone who is going to buy our tickets and take us to the boat. We make two stops along the way just to make sure we all have enough food and drink to survive one day on a boat and end up near the harbor. We hand over our passports at our second food and drink destination and the man heads off to buy our slow boat tickets. He arrives a few minutes later with our tickets and we head off for the boat. The four of us all traveling from the same guesthouse are the first four on the boat so we pick our favorite seats at the front of the boat with lots of leg room. Here we wait for a few minutes discussing if we are going to be the only ones on the trip. The rest of our fellow tourists arrived a few minutes later and eighty of the one hundred seat are filled and we are ready to go. We head out the harbor and onto the silty brown colored Mekong River. I am surprised at the relatively fast speed of the slow boat but when we are passed by a fast boat, with everyone wearing helmets, the name then makes good sense. The boat takes us down the river through its rocky and sandy shores, the hills in the distance look like jungle.



On the sides of the river we see locals fishing, panning for gold, and kids playing in the river(some without clothes).




There also appears to be gardens at various locations with locals growing different varieties of plants. The only one I can recognize is corn. It's a very nice trip which lasts about seven hours before we arrive in the town of our overnight stay. When we get off the boat we are inundated with people trying to get us to stay at their guesthouse. We have a couple of names of places that we found online so we head towards them. I can't help but think of how tourism has had major impact on the way this town operates. There are guesthouses and vendors lining the main street into town. All the vendors are selling the same western treats and box lunches for the next day's boat ride. The next day we are told the boat would leave around nine thirty so we head down at twenty to nine and there are two boats that are mostly full. We end up on a less comfortable wooden seat with a cushion which requires getting up every once and a while to ensure you don't get too sore. The second day is similar to the first filled with beautiful scenery and chance to take it in slowly as you head down the river. This is a great way to travel although I do have some concerns about the impact this type of travel has on the local communities.

Cabbages, Condoms, and Meditation Lessons

We recently spent a couple days in Chiang Rai. It is a pretty quiet city that sees a lot less tourism than Chiang Mai. During our stay we went out for dinner at a restaurant called Cabbages and Condoms. Their logo is "Our food is guaranteed not to cause pregnancy". They are part of an organisation that promotes family planning and combats AIDS in Thailand. They want to make condoms are freely available as cabbages. It was a great meal with some entertaining decor.

The next day we walked to a Wat where a monk wanting to practice his English gave us an impromptu meditation lesson. It was a lot of fun. He gave each of us a bracelet and prayed for us to have safe travels. The monk explained that Buddhism and Christianity are same same.

We are now in Chiang Khong. We can see Laos from our guesthouse. The restaurant is right on the Mekong River. Tomorrow morning we will cross the boarder into Laos and board the slow boat to Luang Prabang. The trip takes two days. It should be a nice time to relax, read, and take in the scenery. We started taking our antimalarial medication a couple days ago, and so far we have not noticed any side effects.

Grandpa's Organic Farm

Working as a Wwoofer on an organic farm can sometimes feel like you have been placed in some kind of strange reality TV show with the exception that everybody is fully dressed and there is not goal of trying to create drama. It would definitely be an interesting case study in community living. We are thrown together with a bunch of random people and expected to live, eat , and work together. There is also somewhat of an employee to worker relationship between the owner of the farm and the Wwoofers. We have found this to be both challenging and rewarding at times. In general we have gotten along well with the Woofers and have found common ground around the ideology that surrounds the growing of organic food.

I guess that leads me to our experience at the last farm we stayed at. We were the first Wwoofers to ever volunteer on this farm and so some disorganization and growing period was to be expected from the beginning. The land is owned by a seventy year old Thai man referred to as Grandpa. Grandpa is best known for his organic fertiliser, and is very proud of the fact that the King once stopped by to check out his farm and donated a tree to his farm. Grandpa speaks exclusively in Thai and it didn't matter that we don't understand he continued to speak to us in Thai. At first we used body language to convey that we didn't understand and this resulted in him repeating himself which was not very helpful. Eventually after receiving advice from others we learned to agree to what he was saying and this avoided the repeating of communication that we couldn't understand. During our stay, we grew quite fond Grandpa and his instructions (particularly when they included charades). Grandpa is renting the land out to an American named Steven who is growing organic food for a health therapy that involves eating all organic, mostly raw foods. We were under the impression from the Wwoofer website that Steven and Grandpa were working together, which in all fairness may have been true when the web posting was created, but was certainly not true when we arrived. We heard from Steven that there had been a fallout just a few days before our arrival. Most communication between Grandpa and Steven is handled by a very nice Thai man named Taw who speaks very good English. During the first week and a half of our stay, Steven would talk about tasks that needed to be done but because of health reasons and the therapy he is doing, he was unable to visit the farm very often. We would receive general instructions in the evening of what to work on the next day, but when we arrived at the farm Taw or Grandpa would have other tasks lined up for us to do. Steven is having only vegetables that come from North America seeded on the farm. This seemed a little strange to us because we have eaten lots of good local vegetables, but we thought it would be good experience for when we get back home. I think Steven is doing this in part to fill the requirements of the diet and partly because he prefers things that come from North America. Nobody at the farm really has any experience with growing these varieties of vegetables including Steven. I think this is fine as long as you are prepared to have lots of patience and a willingness to learn. We were told in our garden workshops in Calgary that plants want to grow. There were lots of mistakes made with planting vegetables too close together and we are assuming there is probably some problems with the soil, but overall the plants are surviving and in time look like they will produce a crop. For a first try I would consider this an overall success given the experience they were working with and that they only started working on this project four months ago. One day Steven arrived at the farm and proceeded to flip out, cursing, swearing, and making racist comments towards the Thai workers repeatedly calling them "fucking midgets". According to us, they are doing the best that they know how to grow unfamiliar produce for him. He proceeded to rip out rows of tomato plants that were seeded too close together - some with tomatoes growing on the plants - after we had spent the past week pruning all these plants. We would have been able to deal with the plant destruction; after all they are his own plants and he is free to do what wants with them, but the racist comments towards the Thai people really violates our values. Our desire on this trip is to work alongside the Thai people learning a culture that is different from our own. Steven had given hints of a bias throughout our stay. Saying how much he really dislikes some of the things here in Thailand and having lots of things shipped from North America. The only things he seemed to like about Thailand was the low cost of things and the chance of finding a Thai wife. Given this situation, we made plans on our next day off to move on early. To me this was a shame because there is so much potential for this farm. Steven was a very good host towards us, going out of his way to provide us with bikes so that we could get around better and he had a bottle of wine around for us to drink in the evenings even though he doesn't drink. We also really enjoyed our time with Taw. He took us to a hill tribe village one day during our lunch break when he was looking at some other land for possibly expanding the farm. We had a good time at this farm and it's situated in a very beautiful spot. I hope that this was perhaps just things getting ugly for a few days and Steven is able to make amends with the owner of the land and at the very least if things cannot work out he would treat Thai people with the humanity they deserve. As for us, I think we need to deal better with some of the general issues we picked up on earlier in our stay and hopefully develop a group consensus. This can be difficult in a relationship that is only expected to last a couple of weeks and where the owner has control over your living accommodations it will probably always be easier to let things slide. In order to live successfully in this type of community, or perhaps any, it appears important to not let what is important to you be overshadowed by the comfort of letting things you feel are wrong pass by. In the book I am reading called "A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada" it refers to the strength of First Nations communities being able to promote both the interests of the group and the individual. I can see when I am living in a community setting just how important it is to find ways to respect the needs and wants of each individual with what is best for the community as a whole. I feel like there is lots to learn in this area and hope that situations like I have described can help us discover better ways to live in this delicate balance.

Hello from Chiang Rai

Yesterday we took a three hour bus ride through some very beautiful countryside from Chiang Mai to Chiang Rai. So far Chiang Rai has lots of similarities to Chiang Mai only it's smaller. The plan is to stay here for two more nights and then head up to Chiang Khong which borders Laos. After that we plan to spend a couple of weeks in Laos before heading south to meet Dave and Debbi in southern Thailand for Chinese New Years.

Our Addiction

Before we headed to Chiang Mai, a friend told us that we should try rotee while we were there. She recommended banana and egg. A few days later, we noticed a rotee stand one evening near our hotel, so we stopped to give it a try. There was a big sign advertising (in English) Chocolate and Banana Rotee. We thought heck with banana and egg, we're having banana and chocolate. It turned out to be a great decision; chocolate and banana rotee might just be the most delicious food in the world. First the vendor takes a egg sized piece of dough, and with a practiced flick of the wrist stretches it out until it is paper thin.


The dough is then placed on a sizzling pan with a little butter then folded around a chopped banana.


The square of dough and banana is fried for a few seconds until it is golden. The vendor removes the rotee from the heat, cuts it in bite-sized squares, then drizzles chocolate sauce and sweetened condensed milk over the whole thing. Mmm. . .