"Go for it, mate, she wouldn't have come on holiday if she didn't want it;" or, in Chiang Mai there be dragons

After Lao our next stop was Chiang Mai, a cute little university city in the northwest of Thailand near to the Burmese border from which a lot of nature treks depart. After a brief search for hostels, we eventually settle on the 3 Sis, a fantastically located flashpacker set up with AMAZING service. Seriously, the folks at the front spoke better English than any others we’ve encountered in this part of the world (I know, I know, I sound like an American) and they always seemed genuinely enthusiastic and pleasant. For dinner we settled on a big northern Thai/Burmese sampler dinner with all sorts of random dishes, including what seemed to be pork rinds.

Frank is still a little under the weather at this point, and at the behest of Dr. Mama Stern he strayed away from the super spicy menu items, which pleasingly meant more for me. While walking around town Frank and I bemuse how CM, with its layout and cute little boutiques, reminds us so much of La Plata, a cute little Argentine university city where we randomly both have family. After a drink at an underwhelming backpacker bar, we walk back to the 3 Sis.

Saturday morning we set off on the Lonely Planet recommended walking tour of the Chiang Mai old city, which visits a lot of the historic wats (Buddhist temples) in the town. Many of them are “protected” by these crested dragon/sea serpent statues that are really incredible.

One of the wats offers group chats with one of their young monks which was neat although could have been more interesting and informative if it were more one on one rather than in a group, since Frank and I have more unanswered questions about Buddhism than you could imagine.

Also, Emma, I spotted this little guy:

Enter the deluge. As the heavens opened we retreat back to the 3 Sis and Frank departs for his much anticipated personal training session at the only CrossFit gym in SE Asia. Like a kid on Christmas, but wearing Vibram 5 Fingers. To keep myself busy I grab some overpriced falafel and get a mani/pedi at the hotel. Yes, that’s right, *I* got a mani/pedi. It’s hard to pass up when it’s raining like crazy outside and only costs $8 and is done right in your hotel lobby. When Frank returns we discover that the entire country of Thailand is dry for the next two days due to the national election on the 3^rd. FUUUCK. Seriously, nightmare.

We grab dinner outside of the old city at this restaurant run by this super eccentric awesomely kooky ex-pat who used to be a chef in New Orleans. After dinner we hop back to the old city and wander around the “Saturday walking street” night bazaar. It’s at this point I realize that I should have gotten more souvenirs at the incredibly legit Luang Prabang market, but still got my dad a cast bronze tiny version of those awesome wat guardian dragon things. The guy totally ripped me off, and I walked away twice, but I really, really, really wanted it because I know how excited my dad will be to get it. So I forked over the $25 (at least I got him down from $40!) much to Frank’s dismay. Sometimes you just gotta sack up and not “know the price of everything but the value of nothing.” Or maybe I’m just trying to make myself feel better haha.

On the wander back home from the night market we spy a pack of wild 19-year old Irish guys drinking just inside the gates of a hostel. Intriguing. Turns out they had stocked up earlier (“It never ceases to amaze me how you will just walk up and talk to anyone” – FBG) so we joined them for a quick brief drinks. Quite a bunch of characters: they tried telling us that they had an American accent (despite the fact that they sounded Irish as FUCK), about how Justin Bieber was one of their role models, and blah blah drunk Irish accent blah. As we bid adieu after about an hour, one of them pulled dear Frankie aside and laid it out for him: “Just go for it, mate, she wouldn’t have come on holiday if she didn’t want it.” Spoiler alert: Frank and I didn't hook up.

What better way to celebrate a Thai election day than getting the eff out of the city and hanging out with some rescued Asian elephants all day! Sunday was our requisite elephant day in Chiang Mai. We went with the Elephant Nature Park, which rescues abused working elephants around Thailand and gives them a happy home where they get to eat bananas and watermelons all day and chill and bathe in the river whenever they want and have people aid them in these two endeavors. Many of the elephant activities in Chiang Mai involve demeaning elephant shows or long arduous treks through the jungle and treat their elephants really poorly. ENP works to combat this and educate people about the hardships many elephants in Thailand face. Some really heartwrenching stories include:

• An elephant that was blinded after refusing to work after her baby was stillborn
• An elephant who lost most of a foot in a landmine
• Female elephants whose pelvises were broken after they were tied down and forced to mate with a violent bull elephant (as you may imagine, there aren’t exactly elephant casts or splits so this injury leaves them horribly deformed – it’s a miracle they can walk at all)
• Baby elephants whose mothers had been killed by poachers or died from overwork
• Rescued bull elephants that are now apparently quite a handful to deal with

And the list goes on and on. Bottom line, it’s really great this organization exists to give these elephants a happy life and if you go to Chiang Mai you should do it (Patara we’ve also heard is very good to their elephants)

And now, I bring you fauna:

(note the deformed hip, poor girl)

They also had a cat with a little Hitler mustache

At the end of the day we went to the Sunday Walking Street (which turned out to be much better than the Saturday version) for some street food and shopping. Street food was absolutely amazing, and we thankfully only ended up with one weird meat spongy thing by accident. I also got myself a little pair of cast metal Thai Buddhas. As some of you may have noticed in my room in Boston I have little pairs of things I’ve picked up during my travels, notably a pair of Delft pottery shoes from Amsterdam and a pair of carved stone elephants from Mahaballipuram, India. And now I have a little something to add to my collection. Frank also was in heaven because we found a golden retriever puppy.

We met a fantastic European couple, Kevin from Germany and Eduardo from Portugal, who found us a little bar that would sell us fairly decent mojitos under the table before the alcohol ban was lifted. Nice find. We discovered we would be down in the Ko Samui/Phangan area around the same time and arranged to meet up in Ko Phangan for the Half Moon Party (get excited!). After the ban was lifted at midnight we walked around the backpacker area looking for a scene, but it turned out the only scene was a gogo bar, where numbered unenthusiastic prostitutes dance without any rhythm (no seriously the worst show I’ve seen in my life) in front of gross sex tourists while they wait for their number to be called. After this depressing showing we went home.

Monday we took the trip up the mountain to Doi Suthep, arguably the most famous temple of the Chiang Mai area. It was pretty baller. We had arranged for a driver with our hotel who turned out to be this fun 25-year old Thai dude who took us around and showed us how to use prayer sticks and get prayer wristbands from a monk (mine had to come from a layperson though cause monks can’t touch women). It’s still hanging out on my wrist today (11 days later fyi). It’s really a shame how ignorant about Buddhism and its practices I’ve been this trip.

After the wat we headed down to the posh shopping neighborhood by the university for a brief shop perusal and more importantly Frankie’s favorite, Khao Soi, for lunch. It’s basically a soup of red curry and yellow curry and coconut milk and noodles and maybe some veggies and I really, really delicious. Place was mad legit, we were totally the only farangs in there. Insert sophomoric humor here:

In the afternoon we visited Tiger Kingdom, where in sum you can pet tigers. They have a whole range of tiger sizes to choose from. We chose the baby 3-4 month tigers. They were mostly really sleepy but I got to pet it on its little Tiger paw which was amazing. Sadly the big tigers look really drugged which was particularly depressing. I’m very torn about the place, mostly between my selfish desire to pet a baby tiger and my desire for animals to be happy and treated well. Ah well.

We spent our early evening at a Thai cooking class led by an incredibly enthusiastic Thai woman. Cooking class was really cool because we got to prepare a lot of things from scratch and cook in a wok which I had never done before (cue Joey and the peanut gallery noting the fact that I never cook in anything). I made: spring rolls, chicken with cashew nuts, Khao Soi, and pad Thai. Yeah so orders and codes by 6:25 please.

As the sound of fireworks echoed through Chiang Mai, Frankie and I realized it was the 4^th of July. Oops! Honestly I’ve spent 3 or 4 July 4^ths out of the country now and eh whatever. After our cooking class we went out in search of an rumored American party, but where we failed to find that holy grail, I managed to find some random South African and American expats who I chilled with long into the night despite the fact that I had to wake up at 7 am for a…

Batik Painting class! Tuesday we only had a half day so for my last day I signed up for a little arts and crafts. Batik painting is done on fabric using hot wax to create borders around separate areas that are painted using fabric dye. Basically you create a paint by numbers with wax and then fill it in. This (as far as I can tell) rich Thai housewife does it out of her suburban home while her daughter is in school. Very cool.

Tuesday evening we took the night train to Bangkok. This old Thai lady sleeping in our berth area gave us like a kilo of freshly picked lychees out of this box she was carrying with her. She just kept handing us more and more branches. They were DELICIOUS.

We hung out for a while in the bar car in the back (yes, Frank, for the 6^th time there is only one bar car on this train) which was a happening scene, with a gaggle of Dutch people singing loudly along to concert videos of Cher and Celine Dion. We met some Aussie art student field trip group. Let me tell you, not a good look those ones…

After dosing Franking on some Ambien we settled into our top bunks, giggling and lightly teasing all those who moved through our car. Next stop: Bangkok.

Oh What a Mighty Storm: How I Came to Know the Monsoon's Unseasonable Fury in Lao

After coming to terms with the fact that pushing that truck through the floods was the closest we were going to come to tubing, we had some delish Korean style BBQ for dinner and headed to Q Bar which was grotesquely packed with a bunch of 19 year old British kids bemoaning the lack of tubing and making up for it by pounding bottles of what I believe is Lao moonshine and unabashedly hitting on our young English friends. After a particularly grabby clueless aggressor didn't pick up on us boxing him out of our circle, I pulled my usual "get away from Kelly" and started dancing quite unattractively in between him and our friend until he wandered off to latch onto his next victim.

In the very rainy next morning we headed down to the river to see what all the hullabaloo was about and how about that the normally lazy river had turned itself into an absolute beast. The mid-river island that housed bars and hotels was about 5 feet underwater, the river itself was tearing ass at a pace I cannot even describe, and the water was up to the treetops along the flooded banks. The last remaining bamboo bridge to the island looked like it was on it's last legs and wouldn't be there much longer. Yeah, probably a good idea to cancel tubing.

Around noon I came down with ye olde "I was sitting in the back of a flatbed truck in the rain for 3 hours and now have a fever, chills, headache, stomachache, and general malaise." With total disregard for creating an antibiotic resistant super bug I popped a couple azithromycen and 800mg of ibuprofen and settled in for a 4 hour nap while the heavens continued to unload themselves outside.

When I awoke I was feeling quite improved, and went to the front of the hotel to meet up with our new friends, who had met a couple more American new friends spending a year traveling for a year. Sadly they had come bearing so sad news - an 18 year old British kid traveling by himself had jumped into the ridiculously fast moving flooded river off the only bridge still standing while off his head from some combination of mushrooms and pot that had maybe been laced with meth. At the time of our departure the next day he hadn't been seen and was presumed dead by local authorities. No, they don't have the infrastructure to do search and rescue missions in Laos. Apparently this sort of thing is not uncommon in Vang Vieng, so kids, if you go, heed the Lonely Planet's cautionary tales.

We then had a lovely group dinner at a falafel joint where I discovered Dark Beerlao, in a circumstance not unlike the one in which I discovered Speight's Old Dark (hi Kelly and Sheila!).

Following dinner the boys and I barhopped, discovering "the original Red Bull" (um, Red Bull isn't actually supposed to be red, Jai Dee) and totally crashed Frank in some sort of backwards pushup, before our friend Paul bested him in legs up pushups. Guess that's where CrossFit gets you...? (sorry, Frank)

The next morning we set off on a beautiful yet harrowing minibus journey to Luang Prabang in spite of Frank's hangover.

 

The trip proved to be yet another sobering reminder to Frank that he should have sprung for the travel insurance. As one British girl in our minibus put it, "this driver doesn't give a shit." Rain, cows, fog, landslides (I've never seen anything like them), dogs, women and children, other cars, buses coming at us... None of these factors had any impact whatsoever on the speed with which he careened through the treacherous, 1.5 lane, guardrail-less mountain roads. On yeah, and he took a lot of important phone calls throughout our 9.5 hour drive.

Only thing that stopped us was the performance of other vehicles in the mudslides: At one point a large dilapidated coach directly ahead of us lost traction in the mud and began to slide uncontrollably toward the road edge (read: treacherous cliff) whenever the driver accelerated. Naturally, they kept everyone on the coach until it was about 5 feet from falling off the cliff. For the record, it's a really terrible feeling thinking you're going to watch a bus of 50 people die right in front of you.

 

Thankfully they eventually unloaded the coach and we jumped out of our minibus in case it slid downhill and knocked us off the road with it.

 

Our driver, totes pissed at us, maneuvered around the stranded coach and took us to some of the most awesome street food at the top of this ridic mountain.

 

Eventually we made it to Luang Prabang after several more mudslide incidents (these more annoying than harrowing) and sought out a hotel. Emma – on our search I spotted this beauty…note the phrasing:

The next day, Frank and I attempted a walking tour of LP, but were swiftly brought down by the onset of stomach pains, so we retired to our hotel essentially for the rest of the evening. For the most part, Luang Prabang was characterized by Frank and I feeling like hell and torrential downpours, although we managed a tuktuk trip with some folks we met on the street to national park with a bear exhibit and a waterfall which was supposed to have sparkling blue pools great for swimming. Due to the heavy rains, the waterfall had turned into an absolute deluge, and all the paths and pools had become a part of the raging river.

(Which one is best, Kelly?)

 

After a stop back at LP, our tuktuk driver kindly scammed us out of the second half of our day trip ("no no you just pay waterfall not waterfall and caves") and in spite of a quick group trip to the travel police ("no no you must not have been clear you wanted to go to both, it doesn't matter he started by asking which one you wanted to see first") we resigned to a lovely riverfront expat bar aptly named Utopia. There I met a lovely couple from NYC and got to chill a little more with Dutch Annemarie (Emma she lives in Frisia!) who had shared our minibus with us.

The next day Frank and I headed off to Chiang Mai via plane, running into a very nice older Belgian couple we had bumped into no fewer than 3 times. This trip has been funny like that, with us spotting the same people in the most random places. At the airport we watched the immigration officials hammer out games of spider solitaire while stamping exit visas, although the ones in charge of entrance visas in Pakse didn't even have computers if that gives you a sense of the intensity of Lao border control. Also, Lao Airline's entire fleet is twin props.

Caulk the Wagon and Ford the River: Our Adventure to Vang Vieng

Let me tell you about how we got from SR to Vang Vieng, Laos, the site of the infamous “In the Tubing” river parties. In VV, is a huge backpacker scene where you rent intertubes and party down the Nam Song River. Riverside bars and “activities” – such as rope swings and a “slide of death” – create a raucous, Bacchanalian spectacle.

Our day started off innocuous enough, with a quick flight from SR to Pakse to Vientiene, the former French colonial capital of Laos. From Vientiene, there is a minibus service that will drive you to VV through the mountains for around $90. We met 4 other travelers (two English girls – Milly and Charlotte – and a pair of guys, Paul from England and Pat from Sydney) at the airport who were going the same way and decided to split one of the minibuses.

The first two hours were smooth sailing, with everyone in the bus getting along and carrying on like old friends. We joked about Frank’s lack of travel insurance, and the fact that we were all going to get pink eye from the river water according to Lonely Planet and various internet forums. The drive up through the mountains was quite picturesque, with random waterfalls peaking out here and there near the road, and with lazy villages and farms breaking up the otherwise undeveloped highway. It was at this point that our minibus started to slow down. Something was happening just around the corner that was causing the cars in front of us to slow. As we pulled into the village we saw it: there was a 100 meter, waist-deep muddy river crossing the road.

Local children had stationed canoes at the roadside to ferry people across. A few brave souls were tying garbage bags over their exhaust and recruiting help from other locals to push the vehicles across. Our minibus driver was having none of it, and refused to attempt to cross the river. We all piled out with our bag, and found a local who spoke enough English to tell us that there was a local bus that ran to VV from there, and that it may be there anytime between 30 minutes and an hour and 30 minutes. Given that there was another local bus stopped on our side, that was making no movement towards crossing the river, we had our doubts that said bus would even get us to our final destination.

Frank, my favorite little problem solver, went out in search of an alternative means of transportation. Somehow, he flagged down a local with a small pickup truck (TIL the British call such vehicles “utes”) that would take us the final 40 km in the bed of his truck for $20, plus a little extra to pay 5 Lao dudes to push us across. We all piled in, stacked our packs up on top of things in case the bed flooded, and miraculously made it across. I now fully grasp the Oregon Trail context of the option to “caulk the wagon and attempt to ford the river.”

We continued on our way, bumping and speeding down the windy mountain road and high fiving at our ingenuity and good fortune and how great of a story we would have for our fellow travelers and friends back home.

We carried along like that for about 15 minutes, when we spotted the second flood crossing the road, this time with a noticeable lack of helpful locals that could be recruited to push us across. So, desperate times, desperate measures, the boys volunteered to unload and push us across, while the girls minded the bags precariously perched on the roof of the cab, losing and recovering several flip flops along the way.

On the other side we met some other “falang” (foreigners) who informed us there were 3 more such rivers between that point and Vang Vieng, included one so deep no vehicle could get through, necessitating a detour around “The Old Cement Factory,” which sounded like something straight out of Scoobi Doo, and that the road to Luang Prabang had suffered dozens of mudslides and was likewise impassable for the time being (it's cool, Frank and I had two days before we had to make that journey).

Long story short, the boys push us through us through two more of the rivers, much to the entertainment of every local that sees us along the way. By this time our driver is realizing he’s gotten himself into much more than he’d bargained for, and is speeding quite recklessly through the mountains of Lao, paying no mind to large potholes or any of the fauna lying precariously across the road. This fauna included just about every farm animal imaginable except for sheep and donkeys, including: cows, water buffalo, chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, piggies, goats, and I’m sure a couple others I’ve forgotten to mention. What a safari.

It’s at this point that Frankie hears it: puddup puddup puddup… Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the truck has a flat tire. Nightmare. Against my poorly rationalized protests (“dude, don’t tell him to stop, we’ll be fine, let’s just get there already”), Frank alerted the driver and we pulled over, only to find the single spare to be likewise flat. Needless to say, morale was at an all-time low by this point. The driver of the truck was attempting to switch one of the two “good” left side rear tires with one of the two completely flat right side tires (2 tires were on each side in the rear) when Frank decided it was probably easiest to flag down another truck to take us the remaining 10 km to our destination. This thankfully was quickly accomplished and we continued on our way.

Look, the Old Cement Factory! Ironically signposted with “Safety First.”

Finally, we made it to Vang Vieng, only to find out immediately from fellow backpackers that tubing had been canceled for the past 3 days due to the incredible 10-foot flooding (some described it as a 20-year flood) that had turned the normally lazy river an absolute death current and washed every single riverside bar off its foundation. Ah well, you win some, you lose some. We eventually found a nice hotel that was offering an incredible discount on agoda.com and celebrated surviving the journey with delicious cocktails.

Whatever you do, please don't tell my Mom I did that.