Laos and Northern Thailand - journey into fascination

8/14/2019 Laos and Northern Thailand - journey into fascination

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Laos and Northern Thailand the beginning of an adventure

One August morning I logged into my computer and began to type ...

Saturday was interesting but expensive.

J and I finally decided we were going to go to Thailand and Laos over Xmas and New year.

Of course when we got to the flight centre, all the cheap deals other than those you didn't

want (Sydney to Bangkok via HK?) had gone. So $1100 each turned into more like $1500, but

at least we've got direct flights on Qantas which is reasonably civilised.

All we need to do now is come up with an itinerary that works - probably something like

Sukkothai/Chaing Mai/Chain Rai/Luang Prabang/Vientiane/Bangkok - the travel itself looks to

be a bit of an adventure.

Then began the planning of it. We dumped the first itinerary, and decided to go to Laos first.

That involved a train journey from Bangkok to Nong Khai on the Laotian border. Booking the

train looked to be easy - I found a travel agency in Thailand that can book sleeper tickets on

the train to the border for us and FedEx them to us for a not terribly extortionate cost.

Internal travel in Laos is another matter. We've had mixed reports about the safety of Rte 13,

the route between Vientiane and Luang Prabang - some people say it's safe, some that

there's still a risk of bandits.

The alternative would be to fly - but Lao air doesn't have a computerised flight booking service

and I haven't yet found a company or travel agency in Laos that has a website to book flights

through, although there are a couple of agencies with websites that claim to be able to book

flights.

Flying isn't without its risks either - Lao airlines have some Yuen-7 and Yuen-12 aircraft that

you are strongly discouraged from flying on because of their safety record.

Further experimentation was required as regards booking flights. Even a website with a

Western Bid - type solution - the company that collects paypal and other payments for ebay

sellers in the ex USSR countries to allow them to accumulate USD without the tax man

knowing - would be a start.

Well, I didn't come up with a solution like that but halfway through the search Lao Airlines


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updated their site with a list of companies that could book flights simplifying matters, like all

we had to do was find one that responded to emails.

As well as that I'd have to sort out immunisations against nasty diseases that lurk in places

without decent sanitation etc.

I've also done a fair amount to overseas travel to Morocco, Turkey and Borneo so I've had a

number of immunisations already, some of which are out of date.

But which have I had? Normally you'd ask your friendly doctor, but there's a problem here. I

now live in Australia, but had them all when I lived in England and had them all at my local

health centre there. So I thought, maybe they would still have my records. Googling for them

revealed that they now have a website - more than they had when I left. I was initially planning

to fax them using the free fax service to UK numbers provided by Thus via tpc, but their

website now has an enquiry form.

So I filled it in, asking if they still had my records and would they tell me what immunisations I

had had.

'Sure', they said, 'email us back with a fax number, your date of birth, your NHS registration

number and your last address in the UK and we can get your records back out of the archive.

We can't guarantee it's a full record as we don't have your NHS file any more' - which is fair

enough, but I know that what they have in their archive will be close enough.

Now I don't have a fax machine, but I do have an efax number in the States, so I gave them

that, forgetting that it forwarded the faxes to an account I have on a time sharing system in

Belgium (don't ask - I use it to test access to systems from outside of our firewall) which

forwarded it on to my work email account.

Of course I didn't have the software to read the fax, and when I got it, it wouldn't install. Once I

got it to install, I made a pdf of the file and emailed it to myself reckoning that what ever else it

might be useful to have a copy to download and print off on demand.

Now this is all very high tech and impressive but it wasn't getting us any air tickets booked.

After a lot of leg work I eventually found a company in Bangkok who could book both trains

and internal flights in Laos, but we needed to send them copies of passports and Laotian

visas. J's passport had run out and we had no Laotian visas.


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Much to my amazement it took us only a week to renew J's passport and another week to get

the Laotian visas. The travel agency in Bangkok then decided not only did it want a copy of

our visas etc. it wanted them faxed.

Some scanning, and putting together a document with Star Office and then faxing it from anold Windows 98 PC with bitware fax software and your sorted.

Doing this taught us a lesson - And organizing this has taught us a lesson about dealing with

the less developed world. Some places the internet comes and goes and things like secure

websites really don't work reliably, and because of this people don't read email, etc. etc.

The answer is fax. A free fax account from efax to receive faxes sent to you -even if their fax

reading software can be finicky, and an old Windows 98 PC with fax software and you're

away. The world is literally your oyster.

Either that or a government surplus fax machine, but the old computer and efax solution

works for us.

Strange though that the software and the solution seems a lot clunkier than the global village

software I had on a Mac Classic in 1992. In fact I still have the disks and the old and fax

modem somewhere.

When I lived in England, I actually tracked down and old Mac Classic for 10 and always

meant to install the global village stuff on it to have a basic fax capability, not that I ever did

pity, it would have been kind of cool still having a Mac Classic doing a useful job ...

And suddenly, geekery aside, we were on our way. I even wrote a poem about it:


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Furious, Furious, Furious

posted Thu, 15 Dec 2005 12:01:32 -0800

Write this,

fix this,

upload this,

going to Laos on Tuesday,

do this,

install this,

mail this,

going to Laos on Tuesday !


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Laos & Northern Thailand - Part 1

Travel writing comes in two sorts, the lyrical, and the sort that details the difficulties and

unpleasantness of the journey, and the stoicism of the traveler. Even such enjoyable books asEric Newby's 'A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush' actually detail travel as a risky hit or miss

affair.

On the other hand, guidebooks tend to the lyrical - 'well you go there, and there's this to see,

nice places to stay and nice places eat'. Life isn't lyrical, it's the triumph of optimism over

experience.

We know the guidebook view of travel is false - there was the weekend we went to Paris and

all the museums and galleries were shut because of strike action and the only place we had a

really good meal was an Algerian back street restaurant run by illegal immigrants. Yes we had

a good time, no we didn't do what we expected, and yes we made it up as we went along.

So it was with our trip to Laos. We'd booked and organized things as far as Luang Prabang,

but, because we didn't know what we were doing next hadn't booked anything ahead.

Everything had gone well until we had tried to book a hotel in Luang Prabang and discovered

it was full.

Bugger! In fact double bugger with cheese on as we were flying to Bangkok the next day,

before heading off to Laos. Now by chance, the Thai travel agent we had used to get us

sleeper tickets to the border and book an internal air flight in Laos claimed to be able to book

hotels in Luang Prabang and listed a vast number of hotels.

So we thought, they should be able to find us something. So we asked them, and blithely set

off for Bangkok.

Bangkok

When you land at Bangkok late at night you don't realize it had been designed by people who

thought that Bladerunner was a textbook urban planning. A noisy smelly polluted place of mad

traffic, grimy air, pushing crowds, contradictory street names, and the rest of it.

Never mind, phone the travel agent and see how they're doing. The problem was that they

weren't, they hadn't done anything, and unable to cope with the fact we had been in Australia


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and were now in Bangkok had sent us an email asking for more information. Explained the

problem again to them, and this time they promised to do something and phone us back at

3.30.

So we went out, got taken by a tuk-tuk driver to the wrong ferry terminal - our mistake - walkedaround and got a cab back to the hotel. The phone rang at 3.30, everything was sorted and

we had a hotel, a flight to Chiang Mai and a hotel in Chiang Mai, all they needed was an email

confirming our agreement and they would issue tickets. Easy, downstairs to the hotel business

centre, send the email, and sorted, or so we thought.

We were happy. We booked a dinner at Le Lys, a highly recommended Thai/French fusion

restaurant and prepared to enjoy ourselves.

Then the phone rang again. It was the travel agent. 'So sorry, hotel full, flight overbooked,

Chiang Mai full'. Now at this point hari kiri might have been in order. Instead, I said something

like 'Oh Dear, can you find us an alternative and call us back to tomorrow morning. We can

come to your office if it helps'.

Naive optimism on my part, but then they claimed to be the experts and they'd almost

managed to pull it off once, so they might again, given a second chance. And to be fair we

didn't really have a lot of choice, not having an intimate knowledge of Bangkok travel agents

and their capabilities.

Le Lys

We'd booked for 7pm. We left at 6.30pm, we arrived at 7.45pm. It was only 4km, but we hadn't

counted on Bangkok's insane rush hour traffic. Oh and rush hour lasts for three or four hours.

Earlier that day we'd got a taxi back from the river, after getting rid of the demented tuk-tuk

driver, for a similar distance and it had only taken twenty minutes.

Crazy traffic. The restaurant was up a side lane and the driver dropped us at the end of the

lane. After a moment of doubt we ventured up the lane and into a beautiful oasis of calm and

excellent food, in an old Thai wooden house. We felt restored. Well we did until the taxi driver

on the way home claimed his meter was broken and tried to charge us 200 Baht due to the

traffic jams. By this time the evening traffic jam had evaporated and it was going to take 20

minutes to the hotel.

So we said no, 100 Baht or we get out and call the police. Strangely enough we got to the


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hotel without problems.

The Travel Agent

Morning came. The travel agent hadn't done anything more. So we checked out, left the bagsat the hotel and took a cab to the travel agent, which turned out to be a block or so from Le

Lys - thank you Bangkok for rational street names - even the taxi driver had to stop and ask a

cop on the way there.

Inside the travel agent we realized what the problem was. The agency had specialized in

booking things for westerners overseas, train tickets, flights, etc. They weren't, despite claims

to the contrary a travel agent, they were a booking agent who got you train tickets, called

hotels and all the rest.

The staff consisted of four Thai girls in their twenties and a western woman who was clearly

the owner and who sat in her office and ignored us while her staff flailed about trying to help

us. They did come up with an alternative plan on flights but no hotels, but they would try and

find us some.

Given that they were using google to look for hotel websites I had my doubts about their ability

to deliver. After 45 minutes of this, we left after agreeing that they would email us an itinerary,

and we could arrange payment via their agent in Vientiane.

Basically we were stuffed. But a walk round Lumphini park with it's rentboys and middle aged

westerners convinced us getting out of Bangkok was the sensible thing to do - we might be

able to arrange things in Vientiane.

Well at this point I had doubts about this as I'd been reading Edward Gargan's 'A year on the

Mekong' in which he paints quite a negative picture of contemporary Laos, but anything

seemed better than this city of bumboys, demented taxi drivers and incompetent travel

agents.

Skytrain to the hotel to pick up the bags and another 90 minute taxi ride to Huamphalong

station through the rush hour - the traffic was so bad that the taxi driver initially refused to go

until the hotel porter said something curt and not particularly friendly sounding.

We were on our way to Vientiane.


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Laos and Northern Thailand - part 2

The night train to Vientiane

The first thing to realize about the train to Vientiane is that it doesn't go to Vientiane. It onlygoes to the border. There are plans to extend the line to Vientiane, but for the moment the

train to Vientiane is the train Nong Khai.

The rest of the journey is up to you.

Huamphalong station is like any train station anywhere, the odd drunk, people with luggage

waiting for trains, and not enough seats. It could the Gare du Nord, King's Cross or any of a

hundred other stations.

Our train wasn't ready for boarding so we waited, for the lack of anything else to do, and then

our train was called. Car 17, berth 3 & 4 and there it was - the last car on the train, a first

class sleeper.

It looked tatty and well used, the paint was chipped and the aircon erratic, but, if you

overlooked the dead banana in one of the luggage racks, basically clean.

A cheerful man came around and sold us beer, took an order for dinner and breakfast

someone else checked our tickets and then with a jerk we were off, trundling through Bangkok

at around 25 km/h.

Dinner when it came was rice with stir fried pork and vegetables, neatly wrapped in clingfilm

on pink plastic plates. It actually tasted good - some of the best tasting railway food I've had

on the planet, and then someone came along and made up the beds with clean linen.

Well used though the coach seemed, it looked like this was going to be fun.

Sleeper trains are romantic - probably because of their associations with Agatha Christie and

the Orient Express - and fun. I remember using sleepers int he early eighties in the UK, and

the was something about falling asleep and being wafted from Glasgow to London overnight

with hardly a bump or rattle.

This one was different - it bounced and rattled, perhaps because it was narrow gauge,

perhaps because of track maintenance, but it was restful - well it was until I woke up in the


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middle of the night with stomach cramps, only to find that Judi was suffering them too -

probably due to Thai railways food rather than anything we'd eaten earlier - Starbucks and an

upmarket lunch place in the Central shopping mall in Chidlom.

However, whatever it was passed quickly and by the time the sun came up we were rattlingacross north east Thailand past people's back yards, chicken pens and rice paddies. Train

travel always lets you see secrets as it goes past people's back yards, and letting you see the

broken down car in number 30's yard or the man feeding his chickens at number 84 - brings

out the voyeur in all of us a little.

Then we came to Nong Khai where the train stops, and in the station yard was a bus with Lao

plates. Well we'd heard that there was now a bus service to Vientiane so that looked easy -

we started towards the bus, fending off the tuk-tuk drivers clamoring to take us to the border,

and shouting 'bus - Lao' and gesturing to the nice green bus with Lao plates.

Eventually one driver realized our confusion and shouted 'no bus Lao - border' - we later

found that while there is a bus the train doesn't connect with it and we'd have had a three hour

wait at Nong Khai bus station.

So we gave in and allowed the tuk-tuk driver to take us to the Thai side of the border, where

after border formalities, we and about a hundred other people crammed on to this old battered

Russian bus that rumbled across the bridge to drop us at Lao immigration, after being

sprayed for bird-flu prevention along the way.

Then the waiting began.

We thought we'd be relatively quick going through Lao immigration, after all we had got our

visas in advance rather than relying on getting them at the border, and had filled in our

immigration cards in our best handwriting.

This was a mistake. It takes them for ever to process each person, longer than Washington

Dulles, longer than Sydney Kingsford-Smith, longer than anywhere we've crossed a border,

even Labuan in Malaysia.

However the queues were organized and the system worked - certainly better than at Bab-al-

Sebta where your papers and documents disappear into a little room and they come back

ages later with someone shouting 'is this you'? I know my passport photo's bad, but ...


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So we stood there, shuffled forward now and again, admired people's packs, nose studs,

interesting t-shirts or anything else for want of visual stimulation and something to talk about,

and then after 50 minutes we were through - well we were after we paid an immigration

processing fee for using the border.

Still naively believing that there must be a bus or some sort of way to Vientiane we stood

about asking 'bus - Vientiane?' until someone moved us over to a taxi booking stand where

they said 350 Baht (A bit over $10 if you're Australian, a bit under if you're from the States) -

not too bad for a 25km ride to the hotel.

There was a poor backpacker who'd been stuffed - had been sold a bus ticket to Vientiane in

Bangkok but the bus had dropped him at the border - either he'd misunderstood or the bus

was supposed to connect with another or whatever. I'd have said he could ride with us, but he

started arguing with the taxi stand people - so I thought no.

And then the cab arrived - a 7 seater Kia people carrier nicely fitted out with frilly and fringed

curtains and images of the Lord Bhudda hanging from the driver's mirror.

So off we went, in splendid isolation, into Laos.

Laos and northern Thailand - part 3

Vientiane!

The drive to Vientiane - our first 20 minutes in the Lao PDR was fascinating - mainly because

we didn't know what to expect of one of the last communist states left on the planet.

Would it be grim and authoritarian and regimented looking like the former DDR? Ostalgie, or

perhaps the legacy of having studied Russian in Soviet times had me peering through the

tassels looking for exhortatory slogans and posters of stern grim faced cadres.

To be sure we saw plenty of hammer and sickle flags, but these were left over from the

celebrations for the 30th anniversary of the revolution earlier in the month, and one, exactly

one, poster of heroic spanner wielding workers.

What we mostly saw were new motor bikes, locally assembled mini-vans and utes, the odd

battered Chinese truck, and a few cars - mostly from Korea plus the occasional Fiat Panda.

No Ladas, no hordes of belching Trabants. In fact it looked a lot like a poorer version of

Thailand, but one clearly going somewhere as people had money to spend on new motor


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bikes.

The road was sealed, there was a white line down it, there were traffic lights and pedestrian

crossings, although the roadmarkings for these were really only for decoration.

Vientiane city centre was amazingly, absurdly, French in style even though hardly a trace of

French Indochina remained in the streets. Their proprietors had long ago retired to the Midi,

but the shop buildings looked as if they could have been lifted from any one of half a dozen

French provincial towns, even the power poles looked like the one that they used to have in

rural France.

And everything was on a small scale, the way it used to be once in France.

We were staying at the InterHotel, with a room overlooking the Mekong and a row of food

stalls which operated most of the day selling typical SE Asian food plus intriguing looking fish

stuffed (literally) with lemongrass and grilled over charcoal.

The InterHotel had started life as a building catering to Russians on secondment to Laos

during Soviet times when the country was closed to everyone but official visitors, engineers

and development from the socialist countries, and the exterior certainly showed this with a

rather stark concrete exterior.

However it had had a mega makeover inside, and was simply very tasteful, nice wall

hangings, polished wood floors, and seeming antiques in the rooms - well other than the

bathrooms which probably were not much changed since Soviet times - functional and

utilitarian.

But where we were going after Vientiane?

We still had this problem that we really didn't know what we were doing after Vientiane. Well

we checked Lonely Planet for recommendations on travel agents in Vientiane and started

without he first on the list, who were utterly and completely unhelpful, so we tried the second

who were helpful but who spoke sketchy English.

However, they found someone in the back office who spoke English, who said yes they could

get us a hotel in Luang Prabang, and yes, they could organize us a trip up the Mekong from

Luang Prabang to the Thai border. Ten minutes, two phone calls and a swipe of the credit

card we were back on track and worry free.


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So off we went to celebrate at Jomo's - an expensive US style coffee shop with a couple of

coffees and a bit of lunch.

Paying for it was a problem - we'd neglected to change any money into Kip at the border andonly had Baht and US dollars, but Jomo's were happy with either although the change came

in Kip.

Again, what we'd read was at variance with reality - most guidebooks suggested that the kip

was in freefall and that most shops and restaurants would prefer Baht or US dollars in small

notes. Well the kip seemed to be stable at around LAK10,000 to the USD and everything was

back in Kip again. Changing a 100 dollar note at the foreign exchange bank - which even had

an ATM for foreign cards to allow people to get kip after hours made us instant millionaires.

The currency situation was more like Turkey in the late 1990's - stable enough for day to day

purposes but big and expensive things had to be paid for in hard currency, and given the

largest bank note was valued at 20,000 kip or US$2 you could see why - any large transaction

involved handing over wads of cash.

So we strolled and enjoyed Vientiane soaking up its atmosphere. We'd forgotten it, but the

next day was 24th December, Christmas Eve, and some expatriate French style restaurants

were either closing for the weekend, or else scrapping their menus for European style

Christmas dinners over the weekend.

As it was we ate at a truly wonderful Vietnamese cafe that night - for not much more than the

equivalent of US$10 and then go back to the hotel to slump on the bed and watch TV and let

the journey catch up with us - pour destresser as they say in French.

We ended up watching the Phoenix Chinese language channel from Hong Kong, not because

we can understand Chinese, but because we caught a news broadcast and wanted to see the

regional weather map.

Between the end of the news and the weather was the oddest Xmas filler I've seen - a cartoon

sequence of south park style Chinese kids solemnly processing across the screen, turning

round, dropping their pants to show their bums, bending over and farting 'Jingle Bells' in

unison. Odd. And the weather girl who was on next clearly hadn't been tipped off what was

coming as she was giggling and desperately trying not to crack up on screen.


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And so to bed, to be woken the next morning before dawn by a PA system playing music to do

Tai-Chi to, coming through the mist on the banks of the Mekong.


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Christmas Eve in Vientiane

Laos is a fundamentally a Bhuddist country with a very thin Marxist veneer. To be sure, expatbars and cafes had signs up for Xmas, but basically it was nothing special, something you

could ignore, and unlike Thailand, Laos hadn't imported the western end of year festivals and

turned them into a festival of buying and gift giving. So Xmas in Laos was like Tet in Canberra

or Diwali in London - important for those who take part, and a complete non-event for those

that don't.

So, after breakfast we simply wandered round Vientiane, Judi indulging her interest and

fascination in textiles, design and weaving, absorbing the sights and sounds of Vientiane.

Being a sad geek, I couldn't help notice that the internet cafes all had reasonable computers,

high speed adsl connections and quite a few were offering VOIP phone calls - being poor

means you can skip technologies, and just like other poor countries cell phones were

omnipresent - cheaper than wires.

And after lunch, a trip to the National Museum - in an old run down French colonial building in

the heart of Vientiane.

The first thing to notice was how small the collection was, some stone tools, some artifacts, a

burial jar or two from the plain of Jars, some early bronze and iron tools. Almost nothing from

the early Lao kingdoms, from Laan Xang or any of the successor states, nothing really until

the start of the colonial period when there started to be photographs, including one of the

French and the British dividing Laos from Thailand, something that still rankles with the Laos

who one ruled much of what is now north eastern Thailand until a series of disastrous wars

with the Burmese and growing Thai state caused them to lose control of much of their

territory. When first visited by French explorers in the 1850's Vientiane was still in ruins after

these wars.

At this point the museum started to come into its own and show its origins as the

Revolutionary museum.

We had collections of weapons used for colonial oppression, photographs from the colonial

period highlighting the oppression of the Lao people and photographs showing the formation

of the Pathet Lao, and the start of the revolutionary struggle, first against the French, then the

Royalist government and Americans during the 'secret war' - this was Apocalypse Now


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country after all - and collections of well used AK47's and other Russian weaponry. And then

the tenor of the displays changed - after the photographs of the proclamation of the People's

Democratic Republic, the photographs and images were all of getting people back to work,

reconstruction, foreign aid, and development. Even the history of the revolution acknowledged

the role of the Vietnamese, Chinese and Russians in supporting the Revolution, and while thereferences to the secret war were present, it was hardly a rabidly anti-American display -

actually in a slightly odd Marxist way, a pragmatic recounting of history with the definite sense

of 'this happened and now we move on'.

On the way back, we walked through a wat. The young monks were mucking about and one

of the dogs that they have around - not quite pets, but definitely animals that are cared for,

had been painted with 'I am a dog' down its side - why? no idea, but definitely odd. Laos was

turning out to be an experience peppered with oddities.


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Christmas in Laos

Christmas day dawned cool and misty. Of courser it wasn't Christmas it was the 25th ofDecember - however it was a Sunday, a day many people have off.

We went to Patuxai, a huge unfinished Arc de Triomphe like structure in the middle of

Vientiane at the end of a parade avenue with the presidential palace at the the other end of it.

(The president doesn't live in the presidential palace, the old French governor's residence -

the president lives more modestly elsewhere, a tradition started by the first Marxist president

and followed ever since. The palace is only used for state functions.)

Patuxai is not quite finished - construction began during the Royalist government and was

abandoned during the secret war - the structure's there but not all the decoration, and it sits in

a pleasant park. When we got there there were crowds of people strolling about, enjoying the

sun. The PA system in the park was blasting out Lao classical music at enormous volume -

something which added to the exoticism of the scene rather then detracted.

The arch itself is pretty ugly - there's a couple of holes in the walls that may be shoddy

construction, or may be badly patched up shell holes, but you can climb up to the top, through

a shop on the first floor selling Hammer and Sickle, Lao PDR and Che Guevara T-shirts to

tourist for a magnificent view of city. Photography though is forbidden, which is a bit of a pity.

After that we walked down the parade avenue to Talat Sao, the morning market, and the State

Department store - Vientiane's answer to GUM in Moscow. More accurately we walked down

to where Talat Sao had been - there was now a massive construction project financed out of

Singapore to build the new Talat Sao shopping mall. Clustered and crushed round the

construction site there were still stalls, and the stalls overran onto the sidewalk outside of the

construction site, with hill-tribe people setting up shop on a bit of canvas selling dried herbs,

pickled snakes in bottles, some very dead furry things, and in one case, something that

looked very much like bear claws with the fur still attached.

Inside the now truncated Talat Sao the market was much less exotic, vegetables, spares for

home appliances, plastic bowls from Vietnam, cheap and cheerful enamel mugs and thermos

flasks from China, clothes in non western sizes from half a dozen countries.

The State department store blended with the market the watch and jewelry sections segueing


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into the antique and curio sellers in the market.

The Curio stands were perhaps the most interesting - collections of old Bhudda carvings,

collections of French colonial period silver coins, American silver dollars, old looking coins

from China, and British coins from colonial India, including a couple of East India companycoins, were a pile of American zippo lighters. Some plain, some engraved with messages

such as 'don't ask me why I'm sad'. One would guess they were left over from the Vietnam

war period, either given by American service men to their girlfriends as keepsakes, or else

picked up from the dead and wounded. There's no way of telling, and in the same way as

some of the silver coins on display were cast copies, rather than the genuine things, there's no

way of knowing if some of the zippos were engraved later, copying genuine messages, to

enhance their value.

In Laos, truth, romance and history tend to merge into one another.

Certainly, in the days I used to smoke, I had a Chinese copy of a zippo lighter that looked

identical other than the lack of a manufacturer's name on the base -it worked the same and

there was ample space to add 'ZIPPO' if you wanted.

We were reaching the point where we felt we'd 'done' Vientiane - pleasant, relaxing, but done.

Judi wanted to visit one more weaving company and the next day we tried to do that based on

a map in the Lonely Planet.

We hired bikes - the wonderfully misnamed 'Turbo' bicycle from Thailand, and set off in

search of the Lao cotton company.

Well, we never found it. We ended up pedaling down Route 13, dodging tuk-tuks, minivans,

and massive Chinese made trucks, towards Luang Prabang and China and got as far as the

airport when we called it quits. We couldn't face battling our way back in the other direction,

so shot down a side street to ride back along a dirt lane beside the Mekong, past peoples

houses, chickens and what have you stopping for a Pepsi at a neighborhood cafe.

And that was it, well apart from going shopping for textiles that afternoon and being offered

menus in Russian in a riverside bar that evening.

The next day we were off to Luang Prabang.


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Flying to Luang Prabang Luang Prabang used to be remote. In the days when the Frenchruled Indochina it took as long to get from Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) to Luang Prabang

as it did from Paris to Saigon. It's now a bit better, but not by much. You have two choices -

bus or plane.

Buses have an unenviable safety record, take eight or nine hours and have been stopped

occasionally by Hmong bandits, on one occasion killing some of the passengers.

Lao Aviation has a decidedly flaky safety record, with questionable maintenance standards,

but they haven't crashed recently and are supposed to be getting better, and the flight only

takes 50 minutes.

We flew.

The taxi - an elderly Toyota (like 30 years old) with seats patched with duct tape - one of the

few really old vehicles we saw in Vientiane - turned up and took us to the airport for USD5-

simple straightforward and easy. The airport has two terminals, international and domestic.

The International terminal is new and shiny and styled to look vaguely reminiscent of a

traditional prayer hall.

The domestic terminal looks like a large shed, and inside looks uncannily like a 1950's French

provincial railway station - after which it was probably modeled.

Check in was a similarly odd experience. Most airports are the same, or at least the process

is, you put your bags on the check in scales, they check your tickets, tag your bags, which

then disappear off on a conveyor system and give you your boarding cards, you go and have

a coffee, forget security takes so long these days, get held up and almost miss the plane.

Not at Vientiane. You heave your bags onto an elderly mechanical baggage weighing

machine of the sort last seen in the 50's, they put some tags that look like old fashioned

luggage tags on your bags, hand you some boarding cards and gesture vaguely towards

security. There's nowhere really to have a coffee, so off you go, where they check your

passports and go through the metal detector - which had a helpful sign in English - 'please

show all weapons', more document checking and then you go to the departure lounge - a


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room with broken down plastic seats a bit like an old fashioned railway station waiting room.

with a cafe attached. No gates, nothing like that.

When we got there the departure lounge was half full with people still waiting for previous

flight including a crew of people from the US embassy who were practicing being obnoxiousand pompous at the same time. Well, whatever. We were early and their plane was late, and

that's what airports are about. Their plane was still late half an hour later and the Americans

were becoming restive and moaning about 'this goddamn country' when a Lao Airways person

appeared with a magic marker and wrote Luang Prabang: weather inconvenient - perhaps

1400in magic marker on a whiteboard.

This didn't help matters - it set them off all a-trumpeting, something that we, and everyone

else tried to ignore. Whatever George Bush's undoubted powers, controlling the weather at

Luang Prabang airport was not one of them. Suddenly there was a flurry of activity at the exit

and a shouting in Lao, and then a disorderly queue as they checked the boarding cards,

marshaled us in two lots - one for plane A and one for plane B, and marched us out onto the

tarmac to our planes - we were off to Luang Prabang. Whatever else, Lao Airways had

mastered the art of efficient speed boarding.

The plane was a battered and well used turbo prop plane, the safety drill just this side of non-

existent, but the plane started and taxied off, taking off at speed and climbed through thick

cloud over the mountains. Everything was minimal - no in-flight catering, just a bottle of water

and a bag of Lao Farmers Product tamarind sweeties. The in flight magazine advertised trips

to Siem Reap in Cambodia and shopping trips to Chiang Mai in Thailand, and an article on an

exhibition of old photographs of Laos that began 'according to Marx and Engels...'

And then we were there, dropping out of the cloud into rain, flying over rich red earth fields

being tended by hand, between low jungle covered hills, past a golden wat on a hill and

thump, we were down.

Luang Prabang airport had a carousel, just one, but you grabbed your bags just like anywhere

else,a and then they wouldn't let you out until you gave back your Lao airways tags - I guess

they counted them to do a reconciliation by hand instead of relying on computers, and out into

the rain to find a tuk-tuk to the hotel.

Getting a tuk-tuk was organized - in fact we were coming to realize that most things in Laos

was organized, it's just that sometimes it looked like chaos. The system was simple - by a tuk-

tuk docket for 50,000 kip, grab a driver - basically anyone you liked the look of and hand him


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your docket. You wedge the bags into the tuk-tuk and off you go. Later on he gets his cut from

the tuk-tuk organizers for the ride, no-one's over charged, and everyone gets a fair price. Tuk-

tuks are nerve racking things at the best of time but in rain they're worse, especially as in

Luang Prabang they're also digging up the streets to resurface and repair them.

So off we went, past a line of contented water buffalo munching on the verge, splashing

through massive puddles and slipping on mud as the tuk tuk weaved and slid its way to the

hotel. We had arrived


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24/47

So we paid, tied our jumpers round our waists and set off to the top of the street. This opened

out into the main street of Luang Prabang, and suddenly we were in a sea of western tourists.

The city's reputation for being relaxed of course attracts tourists and then threatens its relaxed

ways. Already the main street is lined with restaurants, travel agencies, trekking companiesand the like, all designed to cater to foreign tourists and their wants. However it's not yet over

touristed, and its only one street - the others still have chicken pens beside the river and real

people doing real things, including a flat bed truck full of actors from the Luang Prabang

theatre dressed up as demons, gods and characters from Lao mythology and trying to drum

up business for an evening performance.

Bhuddism came late to Laos and the hill tribes around Luang Prabang are probably more

animist than anything, though of course officially Bhuddist. The other thing about Luang

Prabang is it's definitely upscale - further down the main street away from the shops catering

to the backpackers there are some very fine, and expensive, French restaurants. But its still

very Lao - even though the buildings look like they've escaped from the French provinces

there are still groups of grave shaven headed monks walking past in single file, dressed all in

orange, even their flip flops.

So, Luang Prabang is a relaxed, touristy place, full of exotic visual treats such as golden

stupas and red and gold roofed wats, a place to relax, be it lunch in a French style cafe or a

splendid nouvelle cuisine meal at les trois nagas - a wonderful French style restaurant, even if

I did feel guilty about spending US$30 on a superlative white burgundy.

The night market

Every night the far half of the main street is taken over by the night market - a range of stalls

and pitches selling in the main hill tribe style clothes, wall hangings carved wooden objects

and the rest.

Visually a treat.

Everything is for sale and you can bargain but not very hard - you might get a dollar off for a

multi item purchase but that's about all. Look and walk round the market first through the

crush to see what you want and if necessary come back again. A walk round is worth it just to

take in the colours and styles of some of the hill tribe style clothes worn by the vendors. At the

further end towards Jomo's - there's one in LP as well and the Phousi hotel the night market

(tourist version) melds into the night market (real version) with stalls selling Lao pop CD's and


25/47

dvd's, useful plastic articles and fried bananas on skewers which at first sight look like deep

fried mice. Take a right down towards the Mekong and there's a run of food stalls - including

one advertising 'deep fried intestine' as well as stalls selling fruit, vegetables, soap, tools and

the like. When we were there it was orange harvest time and the fruit vendors all had mounds

of oranges flowing over onto the street.

Outside Luang Prabang

Tuk-tuk drivers always want to take you to see the waterfall or the caves. We eventually gave

in and hired a guy to take us out up route 13 to one of the waterfalls - there are actually two

sets, we went to the least visited one.

Off we went up rte13 past a massive sign telling us that China was only 300km away and

visas were now available at the border. The tuk tuk climbed up though the morning mist

climbing higher through the forest eventually turning off up a dirt road to a village of wooden

houses. From there we took a boat along the river for a couple of km, past subsistence

farmers bean and groundnut plantations through a deep valley - definitely a stand in for a

scene out of Apocalypse Now, to the reserve and the water falls, which were nice but not that

nice, it being the middle of the dry season, Still it was good to get out and see some of the

surrounding country, even if I did get stung by a wasp on the way back.

What we didn't do

Bike riding and day-trekking. We'd meant to hire bikes and ride out to Mahout's grave -

Mahout being one of the early French explorers who found his way to Luang Prabang in the

early 1860's, and to the golden temple on the hill you see from the plane on the way in. We'd

also had half a plan to sign up for a day trek to a hill tribe village for an ethical eco-trek. We

did neither. We were out of time and we had to travel up the Mekong, and then back into

Thailand


26/47

Laos and northern Thailand part 8

The Mekong

We left before dawn, the tuk tuk coming to pick us up as sky began to lighten. We drove downthrough the closed vegetable market, where orange sellers were already starting to stack up

their crop, passed a line of stately Bhuddist monks, walking in single file, off to collect their

morning's offerings in their offering bowls, down to the boat pier.

Here we've got to make a confession. We could have taken standard riverboat, but in fact we

took a riverboat cruise - more comfortable, hotel half way, food included. Riverboats are dying

out, the fact that Laos is fixing the roads means that bus is a more practical and faster option,

so probably in a year or two there'll only be tourist boats.

The morning was cold and we were glad of our fleece jackets in western sizes that we'd

bought in Luang Prabang the day before - clearly over runs and factory bin ends - mine had a

price in Euros and care guide in German still attached to the zip when I bought it. The sun

came up, but did little to warm us as we chugged off into the morning mist and up the

Mekong.

We stopped off at Tam Thing, or the Thousand Bhudda cave to view the collection of

Bhuddas, some very old that had been left by the rulers of Luang Prabang over the years and

which traditionally were ceremonially washed each year.

Otherwise we chugged up the Mekong see sawing through rapids, and every so often passing

a village set in the jungle and surrounded by vegetable fields and ground nuts growing on the

sandbanks.

Most of these villages are inhabited by members of the various hill tribe groups and are still

very traditional in life style - give or take the odd solar panel and TV aerial - practicing slash

and burn subsistence agriculture - and I suddenly had the revelation that once, say 2500

years ago, almost all the world was like this, villages of subsistence farmers, who rarely met

anyone they didn't know, and to whom people from 10km on the other side of the mountain

were exotic strangers.

About the time the sun came out and it started to heat up we stopped to pick up a nice

Spanish guy who'd been trekking on his own. One of the things he said was really odd to him

was the way that most of the tribespeople he met had no real concept of money or its value -


27/47

everything was US$1 or 10,000kip. I guess if you're a subsistence farmer you don't have

much access to the cash economy, and as long as you can replace your tools when they wear

out, and buy the things you want that your family can't make or grow themselves, you don't

have much need for cash and don't much care about theories of relative value or whatever.

We'd been provided with an official accredited Lao guide on this leg, and he was keen to chat,

even if he tended to give the party line now and then - for example when we asked him about

the tribespeople living along the river, he launched into a long and convoluted explanation of

how the groups had been classified as lowland Lao, hillside Lao or mountain Lao - shades of

Attaturk's renaming the Kurds 'mountain Turks' - and that the old groupings were no longer

used as they were all Lao. What the river dwellers considered themselves to be wasn't

discussed, especially as quite a few of the Hmong had been recruited by the Americans

during the Secret War, and afterwards had fled first to Thailand and then later to the States - a

lot to Minnesota - googling for Hmong brings up a whole lot of links about this and about the

Hmong community in America.

Anyway, we chugged on, past peanut groves and water buffalo, and a riverside town with a

spectacular wat, to arrive at Pak Beng, the halfway point of our journey, and dinner, a night in

the lodge, some conversation and early to bed as they had gravely assured us that the boat

would leave at dawn and we would need to be up at 5.30.

We even set the alarm, or we thought we did - we didn't in fact, I forgot to turn it on- and

crawled in under our mosquito nets. We had completely forgotten it was New Year's Eve.

The lodge staff hadn't however, and they and the boat crew had a wild party with loud Lao

pop music, shouting and much roaring of motor bikes. Being knackered, we somehow fell

asleep and slept through most of it to wake at 6am.

Panic! had we missed the wake up call, would we miss the boat? Hi-speed showers, cram the

overnight gear back in the bag and a dash down to the lodge lobby where we were to meet, to

find only half our fellow travelers waiting there.

Apparently, no one had a wake up call, and the lodge staff blearily handed round cups of

coffee and organized baguettes and jam for breakfast - the French influence. Our Spanish

friend asked one of the waiters why he hadn't had a wake up call - to be told 'oh, everyone

was drunk last night'.

The boat crew eventually appeared, and we chugged off into another misty Mekong morning,


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about an hour and a half later than was planned.

This actually was a problem, they reckoned it was going to take eight or nine hours to get

Hoay Xiay, the Lao side of the border crossing to Thailand, and the border apparently closed

at 5.30pm in the evening, ie just before the sun went down.

However all we could do is chug on. The captain said he thought we'd be there by 4.30pm.

Gradually the river began to become flat and wide and open out into a wide valley, rapids

were things of the past, and we eventually reached the point about 25kn from Hoay Xiay,

where, instead of both banks being in Laos, the west bank becomes Thai territory. The

change is immediate and obvious - we rounded a bend in the Mekong to see a massive tourist

resort complex on the Thai side built right up against the border - welcome to capitalism!

We chugged on and eventually reached the port on the Lao side at around 4.45pm. It was

New Year's day, a holiday in both Thailand and Laos, and the big truck ferry was not running.

However, the Lao art of chaotic organization took over again. They found a ute for the

luggage and half a dozen tuk tuks to take us to border control.

Compared to entering Laos, leaving was quick and easy. The immigration guy stamped our

exit cards, stamped our visas so we couldn't come back without a new visa, and put exit

stamps in our passports, all the while while two dogs copulated enthusiastically beside the

immigration control counter. Took about 5 minutes, exit clearance that is.

Then down to the quay. Porters had started bringing the bags down and the original plan was

to put us and our luggage in long tail boats and ferry us across the Mekong. Unfortunately the

sun was beginning to set, so they crammed everybody into a pair of longtails, leaving the

luggage behind. Typically our longtail's engine stalled halfway across and I had visions of us

drifting down the river, unable to enter Thailand, or re-enter Laos. Fortunately they got the

engine going again and alternately sped and stuttered across to Thailand.

There was no quay as such on the Thai side, instead a sandbank and a boat ramp down to

the Mekong. Up the bank to the immigration office, it was now 5.25 and it was getting dark, fill

in immigration cards as quickly as possible and hand them to the immigration officers. Back

they came with Thai entry stamps. We were in. Hopefully our luggage was as well.


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Chiang Khong

The Thai side was chaos. People touting mini vans to Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai, mini vansfrom hotels waiting to pick people up, plus the people who'd been across to Laos carrying

their shopping.

Back down, ducking under the now closed entry barrier, to the sand bank to find our bags

piled on the bank, and guarded by one of the boatmen. Pick them up, tip the man a handful of

now worthless Lao notes and back up the bank.

We'd phoned ahead to book a room at a hotel suggested by the boat company, the Riverview.

We hadn't organized any onward transport, but we had booked a hotel in Chiang Mai for the

day after.

No tuk tuks to be seen, just minivans and open pickups, most of whom were collecting people

to drop them off at long range mini-van companies - basically the company runs a couple of

mini-vans, Toyota Town Aces or similar, when they get enough customers they'll leave to go

to a nearby city, otherwise they might not go that day.

The trucks picked up people and their luggage and took them to the departure point.

Eventually I found a driver who agreed to drop us off at the hotel after dropping off his mini-

van customers, and we were off through the dark.

In the dark Chiang Khong looked unprepossessing and slightly unsafe.

The Riverview hotel looked the same, but the owner was friendly, gave us a room on the top

floor with a view of the river. It was your standard Chinese hotel - hard bed, aircon, loo and

TV, all topped off with fluorescent lights. Basic but clean, and everything worked.

The loo was a fusion of two cultures - described as a 'western style bucket flush'. Over a lot of

SE Asia you get squat toilets. Asian squatters differ from the ones in southern Europe and N

Africa where you squat on foot rests in a ceramic tray like a large shallow sink - in your Asian

squatter you squat over what is essentially a toilet bowl sunk in the ground. Some you flush

normally by pulling a chain, and other are bucket flush - you fill a container of water from a tap

and use it to wash away your excreta, much as you would flush a loo if the water was off and

the cistern dry.


30/47

This system isn't unique to SE Asia, I've seen in in Morocco and Turkey and is, I guess, a way

of coping with erratic water supplies. In fact, one time years ago we went mountain biking to

the backwoods of Morocco, or more accurately the desert side of southern Atlas, inland from

Agadir. One evening we ended up in a reasonable sized town, I forget where, and went to thebest hotel in town for a beer as it had a western style bar and served alcohol. Well beer had

its usual effect and I needed to go for a pee, which I duly did. In the loo was a porter whose

job it was to flush the loo for you - obviously a hangover from the days when his job would

have been to refill the bucket for clients.

Anyway back to the River View - instead of a squatter they'd installed western style loos,

possibly because there wasn't enough space in the floor void to install the loo and plumbing,

but the loo was bucket flush - first time I'd come across a western style loo that flushed like

that - and had been designed to be so. However, it worked and didn't smell.

Anyway we felt tired and unadventurous and ate in the hotel that night, noodles, vegetables,

fried rice, river fish with an unfeasible amount of chili and three bottles of Leo Beer - no more

of the superlative Beer Lao of course - and we felt relaxed, sleepy and tired.

The next day revealed that we had a problem - it was still the New Year holiday in Thailand

and the banks were closed, and we had no Thai money. Fortunately there was a bank that

had an ATM that accepted overseas debit cards - not all do, even in Bangkok. That done, we

set off through the near deserted streets in search of someone who could organize us a bus

ticket or minibus or shared taxi to Chiang Mai the next day. Almost everywhere was shut, and

those places who were open were not helpful, muttering 'new year, new year'. Eventually one

person suggested we try the public bus station, back the way we came, and not far from the

Riverview.

They had two buses to ChiangMai the next day. One a first class express, was fully booked.

The booking clerk actually looked surprised and double checked his computer, but that's what

it said, and computers never lie do they, but there were seats available on a second class bus

at 11.40 the next day - 197 Baht each, a little over A$7, for a ride to ChiangMai. Mind you he

did warn us it would take seven hours.

So, sorted. But we had a day to kill in Chiang Khong, so we went for a walk.

The Lonely Planet suggested the Chinese Nationalist cemetery with graves of KMT soldiers

who escaped from China in 1949 was worth a visit, if only to see the graves rather sadly and


31/47

forlornly oriented to face China.

In fact it was just about the only suggestion. So off we went. Well we found it, and it was

locked, chained shut. We went down a side lane towards what at first sight seemed to be a

caretaker's house to see if there was a side entrance. Before we got near, an Indian guy,dressed in blue hilltribe clothing and with a very neatly trimmed beard, and with a very

educated English accent, came out and wanted to know if he could help us in a superficially

polite manner but with a definite undertone of aggression.

We took the hint, made our excuses and left. But there was definitely something very odd,

guns, drugs or whatever.

We walked down into the town, failed to find various closed restaurants, encountered various

surly aggressive dogs and eventually made our way back to the Riverview to find a Thai gun

boat moored in the reeds outside of the hotel.

Chiang Khong had done nothing to counter the impression of being an unfriendly,

unprepossessing place.

Later we ate in a Thai/Mexican restaurant firmly aimed at backpackers with cool jazz on the

music system, over priced beers and enchiladas, and a balcony over looking the Mekong.

At least we were out of here in the morning.


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Second class bus to Chiang Mai

The next morning, the gunboat was still moored outside of the hotel, but it fired up its enginesand took off upriver while we were having breakfast. Later on we learned that the Chiang

Khong area was notorious for smuggling, including drug smuggling - after all it was on the

edge of the Golden Triangle, and that many of the Hmong guerillas who escaped to Thailand

after the end of the secret war were rumored to have holed up in the hills on the Thai side

round Chiang Khong. In fact it was rumored that some were still holed up deeper into the

jungle. Well breakfast came and went and we crammed our gear into backpacks and lugged it

up to the bus station - really a bit of kerb outside the booking office. The bus duly appeared -

slightly old and battered looking, with the gearstick covered by a knitted sheath, and a brake

fluid reservoir you could see from the seats - whether to build confidence by letting you know

the bus had brake fluid in the system, or to cause blind panic if it ever drained while the bus

was in motion I don't know. The bus had 5 seats in rows of two and three - Thai people are

smaller than westerners so they could cram an extra seat in each row - and it had aircon. The

bus was about half full, and most of our traveling companions were farangor westerners.

Farang - sometimes pronounced like it was falang - is the word used for westerners. Some

cabs and buses in Thailand have stickers saying I (heart) farang - I love westerners, part of a

government campaign to make people more accommodating to westerners, and boosts the

tourist trade. The word farang derives, via the Hindi ferenghi, ultimately from frangasthe

Byzantine Greek word for Franks, ie people from the former western Latin empire. Greeks

sometimes still today call west Europeans 'Franks', in much the same way as they use

romiosini, the Byzantine Greek form of the Latin romanitasto describe people we subscribe to

a civilized cultured way of (Greek) life. Frangasalso gave rise to the English words foreign

and foreigner. Anyway, etymology wouldn't get us anywhere, but hopefully this bus would.

Most of our traveling companions were farang, and included this slightly smelly English guy

who lived in Seattle and who had a good story about how he'd been rockclimbing at Udomxai

in Laos - his only luggage was a shoulder bag containing climbing gear, a laptop(!) and a

change of clothes - about how he'd run short of money to change into kip, and had had to

hitch down to Hoay Xiay on a Chinese truck, had missed the last ferry the night before and

had had to sleep on the ferry quay as he'd gone through Lao immigration and had his visa

canceled, before getting the first boat over this morning and finding a cash machine. So, we

were a happy crew - we all had plenty of space. Come departure time, the bus lurched off only

to stop about a kilometre down the load to pick up some people who paid for their tickets in

cash - strange as we thought you were supposed to book, but maybe they knew how many

free seats they had. Off it went again occasionally stopping to pick up people, some of whom


33/47

paid cash, some of whom had pre booked computer printed tickets like ours. After a

kilometres we were flagged down at an army checkpoint and soldiers demanded to see every

non-farang's papers - for whatever reason they didn't want to see our passports, perhaps

because we were obviously not Thai. Checkpoints were a subtheme of this trip - we must

have gone through 20 checkpoints on this journey. Most times they waved the bus through,sometimes they stopped the bus and had a look, and on one occasion they took the driver

away for questioning - we could see him sat down at a table in front of three officers.

Fortunately whatever it was was fairly routine, he was back in a couple of minutes. Anyway, at

the first checkpoint we noticed that the soldiers had to squeeze past people and turning round

we noticed that all the seats were full and there were about twenty people standing at the

back of the bus. Naively, we thought they were just picking up extra passengers on short hops

and that the people standing would probably get off soon. No such luck, at the next stop more

people got on. Obviously the bus driver and his conductor thought this was a bit much as at

the next bas station they tried to put more people on they got out and had a 5 minute

argument with the bus station staff about it. They lost and on more people came. The next bus

station there were even more people waiting and the argument went on for at least 10

minutes, with, unusually for Thais, much gesticulation and raised voices, clearly the

discussion was along the lines of "we can't f**king take that many - get a f**king relief bus"

and being answered by "there's no damned spare buses, and there's no f**cking alternative

service". When we left, the bus, which had been designed to take 60 probably had a 100

people standing crushed up together, plus people in the stairwell and sitting transmission box

beside the driver. Fortunately, with the aircon and fans going full blast it was tolerable, even if

it broke every safety regulation in the book. Somehow the bus made it to Patahyo, about half

way, where for the first time more people got off than got on, the next couple of stops this was

repeated and we amazingly reached the point where there were only about 20 people

standing, more accurately sitting in the walkway between the seats. At this point the bus

seemed almost spacious, and when we stopped at a big bus station for everyone to go the the

loo, and get something to eat, everybody who had survived so far was by unspoken decision

really helpful and nice to each other, passing bags back and forth, letting people in and out

and standing in a knot outside the bus to smoke if they did and to stretch and get the stiffness

out of their bodies after being crammed into the bus. So off we set in this spirit of new found

solidarity, the bus grinding up over long hills on its way to Chiang Mai. The bus managed to

stagger over most of them until, as the light was beginning to go it stalled about 10m from the

top of the last hill. Something had gone wrong and the driver first got the conductor to try and

find some rocks to check the back wheels, to no success, when the driver let the brakes off

the overloaded bus simply rolled right over the rocks. So we rolled gently back down the hill,

the driver alternately letting the brakes off and revving furiously, all the time we were leaving a

smear of what looked transmission fluid down the concrete. It wasn't brake fluid, the reservoir


34/47

was still fairly full. It looked like the gear box was dying and the driver couldn't get bottom gear

to engage, or perhaps the previous gear to disengage and the furious revving was an attempt

to shake it free. Amazingly, about halfway down the driver managed to get first to engage and

we crawled up the hill at an agonizingly slow pace, cresting the hill at less than walking pace.

The conductor, and someone else from the bus company who had bummed a ride had beenleft standing when the bus went past now started running furiously after the bus as it started to

speed up on the down slope. The driver opened the door - no safety interlock here - and a

couple of beefy looking Thai guys grabbed them as they ran alongside and pulled them in.

After this everyone was subdued, holding their breath every time the bus changed gear, or

stopped at an intersection, but we got to Chiang Mai, and the complete chaos of the bus

station with buses coming and going, taxis and tuk tuks squeezing in among them but

eventually the bus got to where it was supposed to stop. Inside the bus station was chaos,

families standing by ginormous piles of luggage, lost kids wailing, police and soldiers

wandering about as bemused as the rest of us by the chaos. We'd called ahead the day

before and booked a hotel, basically the first reasonable sounding one which answered the

phone and could speak English. I left J with the luggage while I went to find a tuk-tuk man.

Some of them had signs saying Tuk-tuk, one guy walked around going tuk-tuk-tuk like a

chicken, and some of them just stood about. I basically grabbed the first one who looked

reasonably trustworthy and back we went to collect J and the luggage. In the interim she'd

struck up a conversation with our smelly friend, the one who'd hitched on a Chinese truck

when he ran out of money, and we offered him a ride to the Tae Pae gate which was on our

way. So off we set, three people and bags crammed into a tuk tuk that could only have

accommodated two farang normally, lurching and swaying in and out of traffic. Our friend

wanted a guesthouse, and the driver, without explanation took us up and down a maze of side

alleys to drop him at a guest house, god knows where, where he said 'good room - clean'.

Whether it was or not we'll never know, as then we were off in a haze of twostroke smoke.

After gyrating back and forth we eventually arrived at our hotel. Of course the driver didn't

have any change (they almost never do - funny that), and neither did I so he ended up with a

generous tip by default, but I didn't grudge him that. We were in Chiang Mai, and in a hotel

where the toilets flushed, and we didn't have to get on a bus again.


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Chiang Mai

Chiang Mai is a big city, and one in which I could indulge my love of print journalism by buyingthe Bangkok Post, Thailand's major English language newspaper.

There it was on the front page, and illustrated by a picture of a group of guys riding illegally in

the back of a pickup on a freeway - "New year ends peacefully - road casualties down to 363

this year".

We'd managed to pick the last day of the new year holiday to travel, the day that everyone

who's been back to visit family in the country tries to get back to the city, and the day that

buses and trains traditionally go to hell, and even though they sometimes run extra buses

there's never enough etc. etc. We felt relatively lucky to have successfully got to Chiang Mai.

But what to do next?

We'd got to Chiang Mai, we wanted to visit Sukothai historical park on the way back to

Bangkok, and we knew when we had to fly out of Bangkok.

So we went walking looking for a decent travel agent, and we literally just happened across

one in the next street, that said they did culturally and environmentally sensitive trekking and

could sort out itineraries. And they could. In thirty minutes we had a flight to Bangkok stopping

over in Sukothai, hotels in Bangkok and Sukothai, and two tours, one more cultural was a trip

to some archaeological sites outside of ChiangMai and a slightly more cheesy trip to an

elephant camp to see former forestry elephants. And the other thing was the travel agent

refused a credit card, and suggested we cash travelers cheques at the bank down the road,

as the transaction fees for credit cards were too high.

So down we went to the bank. First problem - all the signs were in Thai, including the crucial

'please take your number and wait'. Fortunately the bank staff saw us standing about

gormlessly and shouted out to us to take our number, at which point middle aged ladies

started gesticulating and pointing to the display screens to make sure we could read them -

fortunately they used western numbers on the 'now serving' monitor, not Thai.

So we waited, along with Bhuddist monks paying in the temple donations, casually pulling out

wad after wad of notes from their offerings bag, people changing remittances from abroad


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and all the usual transactions of a bank, and the staff even shouted out to us now and again

to make sure we hadn't missed our number.

Eventually our turn came, they cashed the cheques at a pretty good rate and without silly

extra transaction fees, and even offered us chocolates and tried to make conversation inEnglish while they scanned our passports as a security check and got the cash, neatly and

sensibly packed with big bills to pay the travel agent and the rest in easier to use values plus

a few big bills for backup.

Back we went to the travel agent, paid, got the hotel reservation and tour reservation dockets,

and a receipt for the air ticket. tinur, the agent said she couldn't get the airline ticket issued till

later that day, but that we were booked on the flight and it was confirmed.

Sorted, so we did what we usually did when we were sorted and went to lunch, followed by a

stroll round the centre of the city.

A block or so from the cafe we had lunch, in the heart of the old city, was a square with a

statue of three people in traditional dress. The statue was obviously of some significance as

there were wreaths and flowers left at the statue base, but the inscriptions were all in Thai.

As we were stood there saying 'I don't know, it's in Thai' a guy passing by just turned round

and said 'Do you want to know about the statue', and we said yes and began to explain that it

was a representation of the first three kings of Lanna (million rice-fields) who established the

Chiang Mai state in the eleventh century. The next day, when we went for our archaeological

tour in the suburbs of Chiang Mai this became more apparent, as our guide expounded on the

early foundations of the city and the development of Lanna and its eventual conquest by the

Burmese in the late 1500's, and its reconquest by the growing Thai state based around

Bangkok in the late 1700's.

Our guide was quite open that there was still resentment about how the Burmese conquest

had put an end to Lanna's independence, and took great delight in pointing out to us signs

written in Lanna script - different from Thai and Lao script and how most people could speak

Lanna, but only a few could read Lanna, but because he had spent time as a monk, he had

learned how to read the Bhuddist scriptures in Lanna.

Gradually we were beginning to realize that the history of Lanna, and Thailand was complex.

The Chiang Mai state had come about as Meung Rai had started conquering the individual

city states in the north of Thailand to make a state which gave him control of trade routes,


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much as Fa Ngum had done so in Laos to create Lan Xan centered on Luang Prabang.

It was the old story, but with a few twists, the same as the rise of the Greek city states and

their consolidation with the Athenian empire, or perhaps more like the rise of the Roman

Republic in antique Italy where a gang of sheep herders had built a city at river crossing on asalt trading route and gradually started, threw increasing wealth and military power started

taking over their neighbours to eventually control the Italian peninsula and beyond.

Of course it wasn't exactly like that here - it had stopped at the gradual expansion and

consolidation phase as a result of the Burmese invasions and growing power of the Burmese

states. Of course, this led to the question, what was the history of the growth of Burmese

power?

The net effect was to make Chiang Mai and major trading centre and to control the trade

routes from Yunnan and beyond in China to the trading ports in Burma. When ChiangMai was

visited by Ralph Fitch an English trader working for the English East India Company in 1586,

it was a substantial and well found city. Later on, in the 17th century Thomas Samuel and

Thomas Drover, also working for the East India Company, retraced Fitch's steps and set up a

trading post in the town.

Fitch wrote an account of his journey to the east for his paymasters at the East India

company. The section of his account dealing with Burma and Chiang Mai is online at

http://web.soas.ac.uk/burma/pdf/Fitch.pdf .

And the same thing went on well into the late 19th century with Lanna as a semi independent

feudal state between (British) Burma and (French) Laos and despite being nominally part of

Thailand, forced to give logging and trade concessions to the two European colonial powers.

So there we have it, Lanna was semi-independent and semi-detached - so remote that in the

19th century it could take three months to get to Chiang Mai from Bangkok, and not yet fully

integrated into Thailand until 1921 when the railway arrived.

This remoteness also contributed to the survival of the hill tribe cultures, and in turn gives

Lanna its different character.

And the sights are there today - a walk around the block from the hotel brought us to a wat

with an old 18th century wooden prayer hall built in a style different from those we'd seen in

Laos.


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Another time we were sitting in our favourite cafe when we noticed westerners walking on the

balcony of an old rather attractive house opposite and people coming and going from the

entrance - investigation revealed that it was a conservation project run by the local university's

architecture department, and it was a traditional Lanna city house.

Curiosity piqued, we went in to look further. The same sparse, open rooms as in Lao

buildings, but subtly different and all build of wood. Interestingly it also hosted an exhibition of

old photographs of Chiang Mai, including one of bullock carts going down the main street of a

city of small wooden buildings - in 1961!

Now of course, Chiang Mai is a busy modern city, and one that's growing rapidly - seeing the

old pictures made you realize how fast, and how recent the development has been.

However, Chiang Mai was not all history and architecture. We did some fun things as well

including the Night Market.

Chiang Mai's night market is world famous, bigger, brasher and noisier than the one Luang

Prabang, but not quite so exotic. However, in among the the tat and knock offs of western

brands there were some fine silks to be had - not cheap, but cheaper than elsewhere and they

would bargain a little, certainly more than in Laos where bargaining was a fairly perfunctory

and nominal activity.

We ate in the food court in the middle of the night market one night - different from Lau Pa Sat

in Singapore where you grab a table and then get the food from the various vendors, here it

was more like a food court we went to in Sandakan in Borneo, where it was really a collection

of open air restaurants distinguished by different coloured bowls and plastic chairs. You order

your food from a waiter and it appears from somewhere out in the darkness at the edge of the

square, you eat, and the bowls disappear to be washed by someone who does bowl washing

for the restaurants - hence the different colours - and returned to the cooking place. Good, but

not that much cheaper than a normal restaurant.

The only downside of the night market was that we had to walk through an area of dodgy

looking bars with obvious prostitutes, of both sexes hanging about, to get to the night market

from our hotel. A tuk-tuk solved the problem on the way back.

The next day we walked round the area in question in daylight and it looked quite different,

with book exchange shops and backpacker hostels, normal and safe looking. At night it has a


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different character.

There's obviously a bit of the sex trade in Chiang Mai, you do see elderly florid Englishmen

with boys who look barely old enough to be legal, and fat, deeply unattractive 40-something

western men with much younger Thai women, be they mail order brides or renta-wives, but it'snot quite as in your face as Bangkok.

Other nights we ate at the Huen Phen - supposed to be very traditional and very Lanna in

style and a little bit upmarket - certainly the food was different to normal Thai food - slightly

sourer, more spice than chili - and consisted of little dishes of different curries and spice

vegetables.

Another nigh we ate at the Writer's Club - really a restaurant cum bar and definitely a good

show - the haunt of expatriate eccentrics, all chattering in a pretentious arty manner, while

providing a relaxed atmosphere - entertaining for sure.

Other nights we had pizza - including the odd experience of going for what was clearly a

'western' - in the same way as we would go out at home for a Thai or Vietnamese meal - in a

restaurant where clearly the go was for guys to take their girlfriends for a taste of authentic

and exotic western food. I think our presence was taken as some sort of endorsement of the

restaurant's authenticates ...


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Laos and northern Thailand part 12

Elephants and snakes

And suddenly, it was our last full day in Chiang Mai. We'd booked a slightly cheesy elephantcamp trip because J had ridden on an elephant when she was 7 years old and had always

wanted to see them close up ever since.

On the way out, the mini-van stopped off at a place where they make paper ( and things that

are made or moulded out of paper and cardboard) out of elephant dung, elephant dung being

high in fibre and the fibres are long and produce a rough paper not unlike cheaper hand made

rag and mulberry bark paper. Needless to say the first stages involve washing the fibers out

and bleaching (+ sterilizing) them. As always they gave us a few minutes to linger in the

factory shop, but we resisted, we wanted to see the real pachyderms.

Thailand faces a problem. Elephants are long lived, and a large number used to work in

forestry pulling logs out of places where tractors and trucks could not go.

As the forest is cleared and Thailand modernizes, both they and their mahouts are out of a

job. One solution is elephant camps where they show the elephants to tourists, giving the

elephants and the mahouts an income.

It was fun, we did the tourist things, photographed them, bought sugar cane and bananas to

feed them, watched them show how they used to haul logs and do various things, including

one elephant that could daub a sort of a picture with a brush - it had learned to do this as a

trick - they pretended it was drawing a vase of flowers but actually all it was was a learned

response.

After that we had an elephant ride, where they took you for a couple of kms up a jungle track

on back, all the time the mahout chewing on hunk of sugar cane. Cheesy it might have been

but it did give you a little bit of insight into what it might have been like if you were some

Victorian colonial district officer doing the rounds by elephant. After that, again more

cheesiness with a raft trip down the river - they had floated bamboo - used for construction

and myriad other purposes - down the river in the old days.

The highlight of the raft trip was coming round a bend to find this guy with an esky full of beer

and soft drinks gently treading water before paddling over to each raft to see if you wanted to

buy anything - you couldn't but ignore his entrprenurial spirit.


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And finally we had a bullock cart ride - on a traditional cart like those used for long distance

trade and transport right up the 1960's - slow, monotonous, and hard on the butt in an

unsprung cart on a dirt track but again an insight and feel (however brief) of how things must

once have been like.

After this our guide suggested a monkey show. Nobody wanted that, so she came up with an

alternative suggestion, a snake show.

This was an inspired suggestion. This was pure burlesque, a Thai show for Thais, but with an

English commentary. We drove up this side road to this dilapidated looking enclosure. Inside

was a hollow square made up of rows of plank benches raise in tiers and a tin roof, not to

mention a pumping sound system which for some reason was playing "I'm a Barbie Girl".

Then the show started, pure burlesque, pure theatre with the snake handler doing tricks with a

live cobra, including milking it at the end to show it still had poison, all the time while the

compere kept up this continuous patter in Thai and English. I don't know about the Thai, but

his timing and ad libbing in English was superb, it made the show. Following that pythons, and

rat snakes which they let out of the bag, and which shot out towards the audience. Of course

they grabbed them just in time and of course they'd probably doctored them to ensure they

were safe. They even played the 'dangerous jumping snake trick' where they allegedly let a

jumping snake (he jump tehn meetah!) out of box, and actually what they did was sling a bit of

rope into the audience. Real fun. I'll remember the compere's refrain for ever after - King

cobla, number one poisonous snaake in aaall Thaiiilaaan!.

On the way back we passed signs for what is variously called the Tribal museum or Tribal

Centre, in a park on the northern edge of the city. This is the official centre for the study of the

history and society of the hilltribes, and we had meant to visit it the previous day and had run

out of time.

It's not well known, and it doesn't seem to have a website, and there's not much information

available on it. It's a regret we didn't go and see it. If I ever get back to Chiang Mai I will.

Just by happenstance I came across Virtual Hilltribe Museum, a site devoted to the culture

and history of the hilltribes of Laos, Thailand, Myanmar, China and Vietnam. Outside of the

virtual museum there's more at the Hilltribe.org parent site.

And for Hmong resources try Hmongnet as a starting point.


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We were woken the next day by the sound of protest marches against the US/Thailand Free

Trade Agreement talks due to start the next day. There's a radical edge to Chiang Mai, people

tie orange sashes round tree to stop developers cutting them down - orange being the colour

of monk's robe, and no one, and I mean no one in Thailand would ever harm a monk. As we'dseen a few days before monks wo

Documents

Laos and Northern Thailand - journey into fascination