I have spent so little time in Laos and barely seen anything, so I don’t have much to say about the place.
One thing is for sure: It’s a very beautiful country, green hills everywhere you look. Such an attractive place.
I mean, WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT?
Kids are everyhere. They are running alone in the streets, or with their parents at work. Honestly, I saw more kids than I saw adults. And they were all adorable.
Service was non-existent, but even worse than ever before. We once sat in a restaurant for over an hour without even ordering. If you try and call for a waiter, they are out pretending to be Waldo, or they completely ignore you. Shame, because this country had potential to be an awesome place to visit, but it’s hard booking tickets, getting a room or ordering food.
All in all, I know that I could have seen or done more, but Laos wasn’t really for me.
So, on our first day in Vang Vieng, we pretty much think there is only really one street here and tha’s it. We stay at Easy Go, which seemed nice at first, until we have to endure another night in a fan room, which makes us soak the beds in sweat. I wake up, feeling severely dehydrated and unable to do a simple task like showering or brushing my teeth, so we decide it’s time to check out and go to Central Backpackers. Most restaurants play Friends all day and night, so we honestly spend two days just chilling on a bed of pillows, watching TV. I’ve been in this weird state of laziness since Bangkok, and I haven’t wanted to drink or really meet people since then. It’s quite awful.
This is what paradise looks like to the lazy backpacker
On our third day, we decide to go tubing, which is what this place is known for. We meet two Danish girls, Siw and Christine (random that I found another one, since it’s such a rare name back home), and an American guy, Tyler. We all go to the first bar, shotgun a can of beer, have shots, play beerpong and then we go out on the water.
At the next bar, I play flipcup, have cocktails, more shots and probably another beer. You get a nice little bracelet for every shot you do. By the third bar I am wasted. I lose Sara in the grass somewhere between the third and fourth bar, and after drinking at the fourth for a while, I get worried. I have just assumed she was going to catch up anytime, or maybe she’s met some of our friends on the way on gone back to the other bar. A guy I’ve been drinking with goes out to find Sara, but after 10 minutes it starts raining. A lot. He doesn’t come back, and the girls at the bar start to get pissed with me that their friend in’t back, so I decide to swim against the current in the rain to find her.
I am calling out her name, but nothing but the hard rain responds. The river is cold and dark, sometimes really deep, sometimes I can feel my feet stick in the gooey mud. I am scared, because I don’t like deep and dark waters, and because all that I can think of, is how I have to call Sara’s parents and tell them that their daughter has drowned. I swim for at least half an hour (since I wma searching very hard, and the weather makes swimming more difficult) before I reach the last bar we’d been to. It’s packed with people, and I look everywhere, crying hysterically. Suddenly, a few of the people I have been drinking with see me, and run over to see what’s wrong. They try to comfort me and tell me that she’ss alright, but I don’t believe them. I’m drunk and scared. A couple of french guys come around and jokingly say (in a french funny way – so without a smile on their faces) that she is probably dead and it’s my fault for not taking better care of her. Of course this upset me even more, and one of the girls takes me away from the crowd and tells me to go home.
I cross the river to get to a bar with no people in it. A big local family is sitting there, and as I approach them for help to get a taxi, I break down. Still, they take me to a taxi and demand 20.000 kip. I am tired, sad and desperate, so I just hand the driver money. As he’ss about to drive, three very demanding spanish girls jump on board and only pay 10.000 each. They keep asking him to drive faster so they can get their deposit for the tubes back – I realise I have lost mine at the fourth bar, when I went out swimming to look for Sara. After they’ve been dropped off, the driver doesn’t bother stopping at my hostel: he tells me to get off at the same place as the girls and walk in the rain. I try to argue, after all I have paid double, but he lets me out, and I walk barefoot in a bikini in the rain, crying.
I walk up to the room to find Sara asleep. I don’t even feel relieved, I just feel anger. I startethrowing things at her to wake her up and show how upset I am, but her side of the story is different than mine. She feels that I have abandoned her, and I am the bad guy. More upset than ever, I walk out, go to a restaurant and have dinner and watch Friends for hours. I calm down quite a lot, but not enough. I stay up till about 3 at night, still very drunk, and buy an amazing burger on the street just before falling asleep.
Best burger ever
Bracelets from tubing
The next day, I get Sara’s version of the story. She called for me while we were approaching the fourth bar, passed out in the tall grass by the river, then was taken to some local’s home, where she vomited, before being driven back to the hostel and helped to bed.
The yearly rocket festival Bun Bang Fai is happening that day to celebrate the beginning of rain season, but we don’t bother leaving the restaurants.
At night, people get what they wished for: rain. And lots of it. It’s storming, massive lightning bolts appear all over the sky, and the rain is brutal. The power goes out for quite some time. The ground floor is flooded. The door to our room on the third floor can barely stay closed from the strong wind. I guess no street food for me tonight.
This is such a boring thing to write about, much like the trip itself. It takes two days of sailing on the Mekong River to get to Luang Prabang, only broken up by a night in Pakbeng.
The slowboat trip is fairly uneventful. Beautiful view, but 8 hours on a boat isn’t purely entertaining. On the first day, Sara, Kaleigh, Max, Andrew and I bring a bottle of vodka and end up having quite the party in the back of the boat. On the second, I sleep as much as I can. Oh, and we pass a dead, skinned animal in the river and I’ve finally learned that death smells foul.
I’m not really impressed by Luang Prabang. We check into SpicyLaos, in a decent dorm with no AC, which is awful. We decide to upgrade and get AC, even though it costs extra.
The hostel offers a free cup of snakewhiskey to the ones who dare. I dared, and my mouth tasted like rotten meat for the entire evening. That’s what happens when a snake has been in there for 5 years, I guess.
The next day, we go with a group from the hostel to Kuang Si waterfalls and it is so amazing. I’ve never seen anything like it. First, we go to the bear sanctuary.
That’s a bear cage
We then go swim in one of the pools with a smaller waterfall, which makes it OK to cross off another thing on my 22 things list:
#17: Shower under a waterfall
At night, we have some beer and a hookah at Utopia, which is a really cool bar, and also the only one of two bars in town. And it closes at 23.30! Fuck that. But at least the view is nice.
Sunset at Utopia
Besides the waterfalls, there is a nightmarket and some temples, all things that we are bored of. We’ve spent three days here and now we are heading to Vang Vieng, which I am just so ready for. I am so bored!!
In India, I was addicted to my Lonely Planet book. Here, we just went with the flow. I haven’t looked through my 40 pages of notes about what to do and see in the places we planned to go to. Instead, we did some island hopping, then went to the mainland to be productive. And boy was it a great way to do it.
A few things were different. This time, we barely learned the language or the history of this country. We didn’t do many cultural things or much sightseeing. We partied a lot, and actually met people. We got addicted to 7-11 toasties and Chang beers, chicken with cashewnut and pad thai. I slept in dorms that others would describe as nasty, but I had some of the best times in those. The nature here is beautiful, although we didn’t see a lot of it, and it rained a lot in the month and a half we stayed there.
When I first arrived in Thailand, I was surprised to see so many women – I barely saw any men the first few days. They all spoke almost perfect english, until we started island hopping. I really felt safe at all times, even walking home by myself at three in the morning in Bangkok, partying alone at full moon party, and doing a lone toasty-run during a pubcrawl in Koh Tao. I rarely locked up my belongings, and didn’t sleep with my fanny pack stuffed with passport and money. I felt safe and comfortable.
Service is horrible, as in India, and the waiter usually forgets at least one thing – but in most places they serve everything at once instead of as soon as its been made, which was the case in India. We didn’t tip once, which we always did in India. We learned that you must always take a cab with taximeter if you have the option – a tuk tuk is more than double the price!
Generally, Thailand is expensive – especially on the islands. It must be the fee to ship it from the mainland that does it, and the more north we traveled, the cheaper it got.
The islands are paradise. Not neccessarily visually, but the atmosphere and the people really make the place what it is.
On the mainland, the partying seems more aggressive (I’m thinking of Bangla Road and Khao San Road), but I generally really liked that atmosphere and the options to do things during the day, like going to the movies and nice stores for purchasing electronics, for example.
Oh, and everything is whitening. Creams, sunscreens, deodorants… Wtf!?
I fell in love with Thailand (and elephants) and I would go back in a heartbeat. I am, because my flight home is from Bangkok.
With 9 things left on my bucket list, it seems that I am going to finish it soon… Or am I? I am starting to worry a bit.
Since we threw all of our plans out of the window, the volunteer work we were supposed to do in Cambodia is not going to happen. Laziness and other factors make it hard for me to cross some of these goals off as well. Things like having a supernatural experience and swimming with dolphins seem impossible. What was I thinking?
