Glory Days in Vang Vieng

I took the "SUPER VIP" bus (which broke down) out of Luang Prabang at 8am this morning and arrived back in Vang Vieng in time for a late lunch. I'm overjoyed to be here; this is such a fantastic place. My arrival here was vastly different from last time; this time it seemed like everything was there to welcome me back. When I return to the same riverside bungalows, the owners wife hugs me and is ecstatic to see me. Okay! The two frenchmen are still on the porch of their bungalow smoking joints; virtually nothing has changed in the week that I've been gone. I have yet to visit the bar/restaurant which I went to the entire week that I was here last time - the pleasure of their surprise to see me will be mine this evening.

Shortly after my arrival I walked into town to say what's up to Wayne, the proprietor of the internet shop which I frequented when I was last in Vang Vieng. I've hung out with him for most of today and I'll spill most of what I know which is interesting.

Wayne is a 38 year old Chinese Malay entrepreneur from Singapore engaged to an 18 year old Lao girl he met a month ago. He made a boatload of cash in Taiwan selling counterfeit cell phone batteries and moved to Vang Vieng and started an internet shop, but he has wild ambitions and a good sense of business which I feel is sorely lacking in this particular corner of tropical paradise. He rents a space for $80/month and recently renovated the place for $1,200 which included new walls, furniture, ceiling, all kinds of shit. It took a month and he employed four local guys to do the work; they worked all day, hammering this or sawing that, getting paid $100 a month. Here's where I come in, though.

A week before I arrived, he made the decision to expand his business. He offers MP3's to travellers at the cost of $1 an album. People passing through sort through a list of albums available, pass him their iPod, and he copies whatever they want. This is a genius idea which would land you in jail in about 20 minutes in America, but is no problem over here. I saw a poster advertising this new feature in the window and walked inside to inquire and find out what the deal was. Well, this guy has a thing or two to learn about efficiently pirating intellectual property, and I was in a unique position to advise him while he offers me free internet and local insider information. I set him up with the software he needs to copy music from iPods (iTunes disallows this), so now he copies music from other peoples iPods as they pay him to add music to theirs, instead of his mainstay which has been Soulseek. (vastly inefficient by comparison). So we hang out and talk about this or that, Singapore or China, computers or music, or whatever. Today he closed the shop and took me to a local guys house for lunch; the guy is a Norwegian who sold his house in Spain and moved here, acquiring a guest house which he manages. He was joined by his son who's a Norwegian hip hop MC and another guest house proprietor, this one Irish with an attitude. The plot of land that the Norwegian has staked for himself is unbelievable, with a flawless postcard view of vast mountains over snake-like river. We sat and talked for a few hours while he served home made ice cream made into floats; he also has a coffeeshop which serves drinks. As the sun was starting to set, his Vietnamese wife arrives, says hello, and goes straight to the kitchen. Twenty minutes later she sets a giant bowl of boiled snails onto the table, with some kind of sauce, and toothpicks to pry the snails out of the shells with. That was a first; the snails themselves have very little taste, hence the sauce that you dip them in. They were straight out of the Mekong, that afternoon.

I returned to the bungalows and spent a few hours catching up with Ellele and Jeremy on the porch of their bungalow, smoking joints with them as they also do. I'm surprised that they're still there in the same place, but I can't blame them for not being in a rush to leave. This place is wonderful. Thoughts of starting business here have come into my mind across the span of the last two weeks, and I'll be keeping it in mind for a while.

The sunset was beyond words, and even the two frenchmen said they hadn't seen one like that since they've been here. I went to the deck on the riverside restaurant to take some photographs and video of the sunset where I met a German couple. I spoke with them for about thirty minutes, as the girl seemed to laugh at everything I said. Either she was flirting with me, or she's had some happy shakes. Either way, it resulted in entertaining conversation as we touched over the German election, travel in Laos, and DJ'ing in China.

Wayne is copying everything new he's gotten onto my iPod which will soon be filled with who knows what. Apparently a lot of french and Isreal music in Hebrew. Anything new and different is good.

An hour ago a customer was here in the shop who introduced himself as Mark, from England. A few minutes of conversation reveal that he's just been in China, Dali in Yunnan province, to be exact. I asked if he'd been to Bad Monkey, the bar owned and managed by my friend Scotty who lives half of the year in Chengdu. Turns out he was there for a week and they'd become good friends, being from the same district in London. I don't have Scotty's email address, so on my way back to Chengdu I'll pay him a surprise visit.

My flight to Kunming, Yunnan province China, leaves on the 28th at 6:30am. I'll fly there and then take a bus to Dali, and after that, find my way north to Chengdu. I can't wait to return to China because I love that place, but I'm simultaneously grieving my departure from Laos, and most specifically, Vang Vieng.

I will be back.

Luang Prabang, Opium & Whiskey Village, Leaving Laos

I spent the day yesterday on a slow boat headed down the Mekong to Pak Ou caves, which is a small network of caves surrounding Buddhist shrines which are hidden inside dark corners of the caves. The ride on the boat was about two hours, and provided fantastic visuals. The river seems incredibly dirty - it looks like chocolate milk. It moves at a very fast rate however, and the color could be due to the rapid movement of silt and dirt. The river winds and stretches through towering limestone mountains, many covered by bright green trees. Beyong the nearby mountains are more mountains, and beyond those are more mountains - they fade into the distance as far as one can see and from a distance don't look totally unlike some of the mountains of southern Virginia.

On the way to the cave, we stopped at a small collection of villages. I can't recall the names, but one was renowned for being a large producer of Laos whiskey, and the other for handwoven textiles. Both were tiny, with a population in the hundreds. The textile village had a dozen shops filled with the apparatus to make the textiles - large wooden structures build by hand, manned by women sitting in front of hundreds of threads extending five feet in front of them. They wove the threads into the textiles in a process which took weeks, depending on the size of the piece. A tremendously intricate and ornate 2x4' piece which took two months to produce would sell for $100.

The whiskey village was filled with flaming barrels producing the high power drink which is everywhere in Laos. There are two kinds, one having a 15% alcohol content and the other with 55%, which is more akin to western whiskey. The weaker of the two is slightly thicker, sweet, and red, very much like wine. The more powerful is clear and tasted to me like grain alcohol. It was this that I drank with the old man on the porch of my guesthouse the day that I arrived in Vang Vieng. A wide assortment of both were available in bottles that filled large tables - many of them included various vegetation and snakes inside the bottles. I never really found what significance they had upon the drink; perhaps it's just a cosmetic effect, or maybe the snake offers some kind of other purpose, as does the worm in tequila. I had a few shots of the clear whiskey with a vendor, bought a small bottle, and devoted half an hour to my own valiant attempt to communicate with the village locals. I passed a group of four women having lunch on wooden seats outside of the shop area and they offered some of their lunch to me and Cat. We both ate what they gave us, which wasn't bad at all. I'm still not really sure what it was, but we both agreed that it tasted most like yams in coconut milk. We also found an area of the village entirely devoted to opium accessories, including weights and a truly wide selection of pipes. I saw one pipe in particular which caught my interest - it was nearly two feet in length and weight about four pounds. It was an intricately carved dragon, and the dragon had a small jade rock set into its mouth. This was really the champion of all non-glass pipes I've ever seen, and it was only $10. Although still too heavy and too large to travel with, so for now it will remain fondly in my memory.

I have to wait five more days until I can be issued my Chinese visa. My plan was to travel north, through Udom Xai to Boten at the Chinese border, cross there, and then head north through Kunming to Chengdu. Because I now have to remain in the country for an additional five days, and the travel from Laos to China would likely take another four or five days, I made the decision to depart from Vientiane by plane.

I truly love Laos, maybe moreso than Thailand, but at the same time I'm anxious and excited to return to China. In many ways, I miss it.

Stuck in Laos

That's what I'm calling it for now. Really I'm waiting for my Chinese visa to arrive and I'm doomed to spend 5 additional days in this awesome country. I'll probably pass on Thailand in favor of Laos in the future, although I still miss the cultural tranquility of China. Thailand especially is a crazy mish-mash of international culture (backpackers), and I don't think that generally adds up to a super travel experience for me. I've spent the last few days with a group of German guys and an American girl from NYC. One of the Germans is an ENT surgeon and the girl is a lawyer, so I'm the punk of the crew being the DJ. Today we went to famous waterfalls an hour outside of Luang Prabang, where I am now. It was really a collection of waterfalls - at least a dozen of them. And then one enormous one, which had a natural bridge leading up to it. You could stand probably 20 feet in front of the waterfall, where it pretty much feels like you're facing a raging hurricane - you get completely blasted by high intensity wind and water flying at you at high speed. It's pretty much fantastic. I don't know if they actually enforce it, but the guest house that I'm staying at has a midnight curfew. That means I have two minutes. I expect to return, knocking the door, to wake up some dude sleeping on a cot just inside the door to enter. Will write more later.

Adventures in Central Laos

Whatever ambitious travel goals I had for the next week are pretty much shot by this town being so much fun. Yesterday it rained almost all day long, but a friend and I rented mountain bikes and rode around in the rain all day, looking for a lagoon to go swimming at. We went down the main road until it hit the river, at which point we had to cross by being taken by a long, narrow boat. The boat is about 15 feet long and maybe 2.5 feet wide and is powered by a man standing at the rear with a hand on a bamboo stick attached to the motors directional fin. With three of us and a pair of bikes on the boat it sank down in the water until the side of the boat was only two inches above the water surface, not really keeping water from splashing in. We made it across and rode for about an hour through a small village and a long stretch of dirt road surrounded on both sides by vast rice paddies, as far as you could see. The colors were incredible - I was looking to the sides almost the entire time. We arrived an hour later, my hands hurting from clenching the wet handlebars while going through mud and water and over stones and branches. The lagoon was almost like a pond, except the most memorable part was the color of the water. Had I ever seen a lagoon before? I don't know. The water is a bright indigo color though, not like anything that I can remember having seen before. The water was cold and clean, carried a strong current, and led into a cave in the side of a mountain. We were able to swim inside about 20m before it got too dark to see and swimming into sharp rocks became a hazard. Last night I was in the outdoor restaurant outside of my bungalow where I met Sean sitting across from a guy of about fifty with a young Lao girl. I didn't know who he was, and the scene was a little strange. Come to find that he's from Australia and the young local girl is his friend that he sent up to meet him in this city. No further questioning necessary on that. After we finish the meal the guy gets up and is like OKAY LETS PARTY. Right, so, he's insistant on going the disco in town. The disco here is kind of like Meet the Feebles - like it somehow acquires some kind of good quality from being so mind-blowingly bad. I leave quickly and go to the bar a few doors down where they manage to attract all the solo travelers. Here's how this place works: they don't have seats or tables, but it's like Japanese-style, take your shoes off and sit on an elevated seating place. They have one of these outside and they employ about 15 people who hang out there all day, rotating as if in shifts. If you walk by alone, like I did, and (like the German guy who was in there last night) they start with some "hey! come here real quick!" shit. They urge you to sit down, hang out, and have a beer and because you have nowhere else to be, why not? Everyone else at the table speaks broken English so I spend most of the time talking with Jong about Germany and traveling around Asia. As I'm sitting there, this local girl starts getting all on me. What I mean is sitting right next to me (INVADING MY BUBBLE), touching me, being talkative without saying much of anything, etc. I don't know what the game is, and being traumatized by my foreigner-scam in Shanghai a few months ago, I'm friendly but not interested in someone who gets paid to entertain me. We hung out all night though, and she never did any of the things I was waiting for her to do before I could say 'I knew it'. Maybe this means I'll grow to be more trusting of strangers again. It's drizzly and overcast outside; a good day to be lazy. Places all around here show movies during the day in their outdoor restaurants and lounges, and dozens of people sit around and watch movies or TV all day. Especially popular here is Friends, which to me is incomprehensible. Come to Laos and watch Friends. I came to this place to download Vajra's new mix, called Saul Good. Vajra, from Boulder Colorado, is maybe my favorite American battle DJ's of the last five years. He sells it online for $10, but I was hoping to find out if he could upload it online someplace for me since I'm really anxious to hear it. Not only did he put it online for me, but he put it on YouSendIt and made it public for a week. I haven't even listened to it yet, but I still urge you to download this without hesitation if you like real hip hop. Here's the link: Saul Good I'm now listening to the Sub Focus breezeblock mix on the Shuffle. It took me a few listenings to even get past the first half of it, since to me, most of it is slightly bland techstep. The second half is better than the first.

Sunburned Musings

My sunburn isn't so bad, but just enough to be a reminder of how much time I spent exposed to the deadly rays of the sun. I've spent the last two days hiking, kayaking, caving, and tubing. Yes, it's a difficult life here. Pretty much all of my muscles are spent, though. I sit here comfortable and overwhelmingly happy, even still. I can't really describe the view of the Laos scenery from the river - it's unreal; among the most beautiful sights I've ever seen. I have new calouses on my hands from paddling all day, and the bruises from falling into the river at weird angles yesterday have healed. We took breaks on our kayaking trip down the river at stops with tree house swings. Locals erect enormous tree houses which passerbys stop at, climb up, and either fly down a zip line or swing on a tree swing into the river. At one yesterday we had a daytime competition. First a local guy went down the zip line upside down (with his knees around the handlebar). I followed, and then two of them went down, each with one arm on the handle. Then Tony (an American from San Jose) and I went down with upside down with one knee on each side of the handle. That one was for mother America, God Bless. Twice I hit the water so hard that I jostled my contacts almost out of my eyes. There was one swing built onto the branch of a tree 60+ feet into the air with a rope attached, so people on land would pull the rope while you're standing on the swing, which would allow you to swing into the river. I went backwards twice and tried to do a backflip, but found that I have some kind of mental block which prevents me from fully completing the backflip. Front flips are no problem, but I'll keep at this until I get it right. Also, before going caving the other day we stopped at a village which had a monkey tied to a tree. It's really not so much a happy sight, but no one can resist the monkey, so he gets a lot of food and attention. A friend asked me to take a picture of him with the monkey and it was outstanding. He's slowly approaching the monkey to show that he's friendly (meanwhile, I'm shooting them off) and the monkey acts completely nice and cute, etc. He gets closer, and out of nowhere, the monkey lunges at the dude and swipes at his necklace. Beads fly all over the place and we're all on the ground laughing. The monkey is a jewelry thief and plays the part perfectly. I spent the evening tonight hanging out with a pair of frenchmen staying a few bungalows down from mine. I don't think they do much but sit on the porch smoking bud all day long. And since the place where I'm at sells Rizlas along with water and beer, I asked them where I can locate some bud. They refer me to a 15 year old kid who happens to walk by a few moments after I ask them, and he sells me and a friend the cheapest bud that either of us have ever seen, by far. Three dollars for a filled bag about half the size of a coke can; decent shit by all measure, too. It's been about four months since I've really smoked any bud at all. I suspect that I'll make up for that time in Laos. I checked into a new spot this afternoon, it's right in front of the river. There's a restaurant just outside on a porch nestled over part of the river which offers a fantastic view. The village is about a 10 minute walk up a dirt road. Time to head out of here, smoke a joint, and listen to Pink Floyd until I fall asleep.

Vientiane, Part One

This place is really dusty and there are Buddhist temples all over the place.

I arrived a few hours ago and have spent most of the time since then walking around, mostly along the river. I've passed probably almost half a dozen temples and monestaries and gone in about half of them. Spent 30 minutes in one hanging out with some young monks who were doing their language practice outside of the temple. They all spoke a little bit of english, one of them spoke some chinese, and another was studying japanese kanji with a workbook. They were really unusually outgoing and friendly for monks, in my experience. In front of that temple was a large garden with very well-maintained plants and a dozen monks sweeping up loose brush and leaves on the ground.

Futher in front of the temple, still inside the courtyard walls, was what looked like a concrete volleyball court. I walked through the trees to get a better look, and there were about 40 children playing some combination of soccer and volleyball. There's a net dividing the two sides, but they can only use their feet and heads to propel a ball back and forth between both sides. As soon as I saw it I thought "oh, basket ball", not thinking about the NBA of course, but the ball looks like someone basket-weaved a hollow cylinder about the size of a canteloupe. They were all really good at the game; I took some video of it.

I'll leave in just a moment for Wat Sok Pa Luang which is one of the biggest wats in the city and a place where I can also get a legit 60-minute traditional Lao massage for just under $2.

Incorrigible Sleaze, Bangkok

I've said it before, but I'll say it again: the sleaze in this place continues to amaze me.

I went with my new friend Som to the night market which was insane. It's the largest in the world. Suffice to say, it's much bigger than you imagine. I wanted to buy a rack of shit, but I restrained my impulses because I'm traveling light and I'll be back here in a few weeks. They stock a small mountain of great things that I've never seen anywhere else, though.

After the night market we went to the bar/restaurant. Now, this was cool, but there was an air of suspicion. And this is probably uncalled for, and the direct result of the trauma that I got on my last trip to Shanghai in which I was almost had for a few hundred dollars by a pair of Chinese girls. I played the part of the stupid foreigner that time, as they brought me to some restaurant and tried to drop me with a huge bill. I'm sure it was way out of line, but I had that on my mind the whole time I was with Som, if only because he was so cool and so generous and kind. Thankfully my trauma will most likely die tonight, as everything was cool and great.

So we were at this restaurant/bar where we got a few drinks and some food while checking out some local Thai bands on stage. Met a few people and had a few bottles of Singha while he ordered a bottle of V.S.O.P. (weird). I'm fairly faded and he's proposes what we should do for the rest of the night. This part is really sweet.

Som: SO WHATS NEXT
Me:  YOU TELL ME, YOU'RE THAI
Som: WE GO TO THE STUDENT DORM
Me: OKAY
Som: HOW MUCH MONEY DO YOU HAVE?
Me: WHAT
Som: HAND ME YOUR PEN

Here's where it gets interesting. On a scrap piece of paper, which I have in my pocket, and I will tape into my journal, he writes the following. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And then below these; 4000, 3000, 2000, 1500, 1000.

Som: OKAY, NUMBER 5 IS AGED 30-40, NUMBER 4 IS 25, NUMBER 3 IS 23, NUMBER 2 IS 20, AND NUMBER 1 IS 18. WHICH DO YOU WANT
Me: (I don't want prostitutes) OH I ONLY HAVE 800, DANG IT
Som: OKAY COOL, GIVE ME THE PEN AGAIN

He starts writing again. This time, "500-2000". And then below that, "H.I.V.".

Som: SO YEAH, THESE HAVE HIV, BUT ARE CHEAPER
Me: OH EXCELLENT, NO THANKS THOUGH, JUST ANOTHER BEER

Today was a pretty eventful day, but that I think was definitely the most interesting and memorable part. Tomorrow is my last day in Bangkok before I go to Laos. I will do my best to make it just as eventful, but I will have to try hard. Hookers are out of the question (I haven't even been to Pat Pong yet).

Salakeawkoo, Nong Khai

It's the name of the sculpture park that I went to today. It reminded me of a much sweeter version of the gardens and sculptures at Kings Dominion in Richmond, VA. Here's a photo; check out the mighty 70ft tall snakes:

Welcome to Northern Thailand

I left Bangkok last night at 8:45 from Hualamphu train station for a 12-hour trip north to Nong Khai on the Laos border. The trip was actually fantastic, and now I feel free of the trauma of my 30-hour train trip across China. While trains in China are stark, white, and very prison-like, everything was very comfortable this time. I made the small mistake of saving $2 by reserving an upper sleeper compartment as opposed to a lower, which has a window, but I slept soundly the entire time. The compartment that I was in was rather small and I couldn't sit up without hitting my head, so I didn't. I wrote some postcards; maybe you'll get one. They had curtains to keep the light out and offer some privacy which made sleeping a lot easier. I woke up this morning at 8am and had breakfast with coffee on the train and arrived just before 9am.

They don't have tuk-tuk's here (three wheeled motorcycle-cart things that are everywhere in Bangkok), but something very similar. It was a pretty strange motorcycle pickup truck hybrid-thing. I was taken straight to the best guesthouse that I had listed in Lonely Planet and everything there has been fantastic.

The place is right on the Mekong River; there's a restaurant and garden overlooking it which is a superb place to read, eat, or chill. I haven't spent much time there yet, but I plan to do a lot of reading and hopefully finish my book so that I can get another at a great bookstore down the street. I already found a handful of books that I'd really like to read.

As much as I like this place, I'll leave Nong Khai tomorrow and cross the border to Laos (the border bridge is called the Friendship Bridge) and check into a new place there. There's a short list of things to check out in the capitol, and then I'd like to take a five hour speedboat trip up the Mekong to Luang Praba which is apparently the most beautiful place in Laos. I got an e-mail from friends in China and I'll meet up with them in two weeks, either in Northern Thailand or in Laos if I find a great place to recommend that we meet.

I saw today that Apple released a new iPod, called the Nano. I guess I got the shuffle just a few weeks to early - it looks great though, check it out: www.apple.com/store/