It feels like it’s been a while since I last blogged and a lot has happened in the meantime, spanning two countries. We arrived in Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand on 3rd March and checked into our lovely hostel, Finlay’s Cottage, run by a knowledgeable English chap called Keith. Chiang Mai is a nice, relaxed place with a walled centre, a moat around the city and lots of beautiful temples and is pretty popular with tourists. On our first full day we booked onto a Thai cooking course. With our group of Swedish, South African, German and Chilean fellow chefs, we were guided around the morning market in Chiang Mai to see the fish, vegetables and ‘1000 year old’ preserved eggs! We got down to cooking and I made green papaya salad, a Thai soup, Penang curry, noodles and sticky mango rice...the best bit, we got to eat everything we made...mmm. It was very good, if I may say so myself, and great to learn about all the ingredients and flavours, although Jonny struggled to consume his soup due to the copious amounts of chilli he threw in!
After a tough day cooking, Jonny and I did what we now do best- had a massage! On Keith’s recommendation we ventured down to our local temple where you have a clothed massage outside. Again, this was not for the feint hearted as a man half the size of me dug his knees into my back and pulled my shoulders back to achieve very satisfying clicks. Feeling very loose, we glided down to the Sunday market which stretches farther than the eye can see, near the city walls. I predictably got lured in to freeing two tiny birds from a bamboo cage. It is meant to be good luck but I just felt bad for the birds...Jonny had to stop me paying to free them all. We had a great evening strolling around the market and eating various different street foods from the stalls huddled around the temples.
Somehow Yonna convinced me to do a trek (even after Mount Kinabalu) the next day. It was actually great fun and not that much trekking. We started in an orchid farm with beautiful flowers before being taken up into the hills. We alighted our rickety tuk tuk and were swiftly moved up a wooden tower to mount our elephant! The hill tribes have used elephants for centuries in the logging industry. They have been replaced by machines now and so the retired elephants take tourists for rides instead. We were informed that the wild elephants in Thailand cause a lot of damage to farm land and so the government fund local people to take them in and use them in this way instead. I have to say I was dubious beforehand and worried about how the animals would be treated but the men we were around were gentle and respectful. Our elephant thought it was amusing to snort water and elephant snot all over us on his back and ate a banana tree trunk on the short trek too. It was lovely to be so close to the elephants and we appreciatively fed our guy a bag of bananas and sugar cane when we got down. After that, on our fun packed day, we took a short trek up to a waterfall. The water was absolutely freezing but quite nice once you’d been in for a while. We trekked back down and got on with some white water rafting. It is dry season at the moment so it was more water rafting than white! It was a lot of fun and we got soaked- much to the dismay of the Chinese girl who was at the back of our raft. We were instructed to get out and swap to a traditional bamboo raft. Despite our many protests that the bamboo was sinking and almost hitting the rocky river bed, the Thai guide told us it was fine and to carry on. So we had a five minute ride pretty much in waist deep water on a piece of sinking wood...very funny. Whilst we attempted to dry off a little, we watched the elephants being ridden by the locals down to the river to have a bath. We were then taken to a ‘traditional hill tribe’. It was all very surreal as we were guided around a village of what looked to be totally normal Thai people who happened to live on a hill. The guide tried to convince us of their traditional ways of living as we past satellite dishes, 4x4 trucks and flat screen TV’s. There were a few older ladies dressed traditionally, trying to sell souvenirs so it’s understandable why they bring tourists here but it was a little embarrassing really. That night, we settled down to an evening of Muay Thai boxing which included some very young contestants, lady boxers and a Spanish guy. It was interesting to watch even if I did think some of the kids were a little young to be fighting, however I am told that boys start training very young in Thailand.
The next day we devised our own walking temple tour of the city. Yonna gets a little bored after the 8th temple or so but I love them and so drag him into every single one! I loved seeing the saffron robed monks walking around Chiang Mai and the temples. Most of the temples are gleaming with gold leaf and beautiful paintings inside of Buddha and Buddhist stories. The most opulent temple we visited was in Doi Suthep, a short taxi ride away on top of a hill. It was a little crowded with tourists but the stone and Jade carved Buddhas were beautiful. Having read a bit about Buddhism before coming to Asia, I have been surprised to see the Buddha worshipped as a God like figure. As I thought I understood, Buddhism has no God as such but is more about a way of life but I do know there are many variations. There seems to be a lot of offerings at the temples, usually money, and giving alms to the monks, who have no personal possessions or income, is seen as a way to achieve redemption. We even saw one monk offering a blessing whilst hanging out the window of his brand new BMW-quite the gift! We were told that often corrupt politicians will commit fraud, do a couple of months’ prison time and then become a monk for a few months and all is forgiven. However, none of this took away from the aesthetic splendour of the temples and my fascination with the Buddhist way of life. We found some smaller, less visited temples that were a bit more serene and spiritual in feeling. We visited another temple which had differentiated itself by being silver and I inscribed the names of mine and Jonny’s family onto a silver Boddhi tree leaf and hung it up, as is traditional. I finished the day with a body scrub at a pretty dodgy (I didn’t figure it out until I was in!) looking massage place with older men queuing up for their ‘treatments’...I’ll say no more.
The next day we said a sad goodbye to Chiang Mai but were excited about the prospect of a whole new country..Laos. We had to take a minibus to the border, stopping at an incredible but strangely situated white temple, on the way. We got our passports stamped on exit and after 5 minutes on a boat, we were in the land of Laos. We stayed the night at the border town in Laos and were very lucky to be there during only one of the 3 days every year when there’s a festival at the temple. We joined the monks and locals in throwing balls at towers of cans and throwing darts at balloons to win biscuits and sweets. We also had dinner at a women’s empowerment cafe that had been set up by a Dutch lady. She moved to Laos ten years ago, lived with the mountain tribes, married a Laos mountain tribe man and set up a charity for battered and impoverished women. She also spoke fluent Laotian! It was really interesting to hear about her project and we had great food. A nice welcome to the country.
The next day we set off on a two day long boat ride to reach Luang Prabang. Day one was slow as we broke down a couple of times but after a night in Pak Beng and a total of 17-ish hours on a boat, we arrived in Luang Prabang. What I didn’t know was that Laos was a French colony so the locals speak French and a lot of the signs are in the language. Luang Prabang has some colonial French architecture and is a beautiful place. For this reason it is a UNESCO heritage site and has a curfew of 11.30pm! On the first day we hired push bikes and cycled round the quaint streets. I don’t think I have ridden a bike for about 15 years so it was good fun. We visited a few temples and the royal palace and of course, ended the day with a massage! The next day Jonny went off to the nearby waterfalls whilst I stayed in town and did some sketching in the temples and generally pottered around. I had a night in the market looking for souvenirs before we had to leave pretty Luang Prabang for Vang Vieng....not at all pretty!
The main reason people go to Vang Vieng is for the tubing down the river. The town itself is not at all nice, although it is set in some very striking mountains. The day after we arrived, the time had come for the main event...the tubing. Everyone I have ever spoken to who has been to Laos has been tubing and says that you have to go and do it. Basically, you hire a rubber ring and float down the river whilst bars throw a rope out to you and pull you in for cheap drinks. Every bar we were pulled into was full of young English guys and girls working there and it was kind of like you could be anywhere, not really Laos. The loud dance beats and guys off their heads on drink and drugs was not really my scene but we had fun on the big water slides and in the tubes themselves.
Today we got a bus to the capital, Vientiane, where we stay just for one night before getting the 24 hour bus to Hanoi, Vietnam tomorrow!
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