Laos to Cambodia - Long Transit Double-Day With Little Sleep and Lots of Scams

11:30 AM finish breakfast, check out of hotel, hunt for old bus station.
12:00 AM told this is where the old bus station used to be, not bus station anymore, but the bus to Vietane will stop here for us. Wonder at the central planners who shut down a bus station in the middle of town, right next door to the decommissioned airstrip from the war (thus plenty of space), and replaced it with a new bus station 2-3 km ($1 pp by tuk-tuk) out of town. Tuk-tuk drivers lobby is really strong perhaps?
12:30 PM get on fan bus.
4:30 PM arrive north bus station of Vietane.
6:00 PM get on bus to town in Thailand across the border, 22 km away.
7:30 PM arrive in Thailand.
8:00 PM get hassled by a bunch of private bus company employees to take their buses, then depart on public overnight air-con bus toward Bangkok, which we are only on until Khorat. Exclaim over how nice the Thailand public buses are. Air-con, included cold(!!) water and snack when you board.
12:15-12:45 AM bus lets us off for free (included) dinner. The soup looks a little disgusting (as do the other choices), but it is the most popular choice with the other riders and smells good, so we get it. Turns out to be excellent!
2:00 AM dropped off at Khorat, which is like Thailand's second biggest city, but gets approximately no tourism. There are no signs in our alphabet, but there are 3 women working what looks like an information counter. We tell them where we want to go and they write down some times for us and point to where the bus will be. Next bus is at 5:30 AM. Fortunately nice well-lit, but not air-con, bus station is open all night. We play Canasta at one of the tables in the food court. Disappointingly, the food vendors are shutting down and not selling food by the time we get hungry again.
6:00 AM depart on bus to Cambodia border.
7:30 AM driver turns on the loud rock music, making further sleep impossible.
11ish arrive at border, find street vendor for Pad Thai and Cow Kai Gatium (fried garlic and pepper over rice).
12ish cross the border.

We were caught off guard by the immigration cops insistence on an extra 100 Bhat more per visa than the posted sign said. We paid the extra $3 each because we were confused, then regretted it. Not that it's an amount of money to really worry about, but we don't feel so good about feeding the corruption. The systemic problem of cops skimming off the top like that is something to worry about.

When we got through with all the paperwork, we were pushed to get on the "free government bus to the bus station". How nice. So we did. Not surprisingly, the chatty Cambodian guys riding the bus with us turned out to be taxi drivers. And the bus station? A fake. Well, I think it was really run by the government, and there really were a few buses parked there, but the posted prices were only in English, and there were no posted departure times. The ticket sellers said "2 to 3pm", which seemed pretty odd. I understand some buses tend to run late, but there is normally a single stated time when you are to show up. Also, the price was crazy-high. It should not cost $9 to take the public bus 155 km in southeast Asia. We paid about that much to go 3x as far from the Laos border to Khorat, and that was a really nice air-con bus with meals. The taxi drivers continued to pester us something horrible. Even though we had 2-3 hours to the next bus, they just didn't think it was right of us to neither buy a bus ticket right this instant, or get in one of their taxis right this instant. And needed to stand about two inches away from us explaining it over and over again like we were little children who couldn't figure it out on our own. The taxi was only $12 pp if we waited for two other tourists to share with, but when possible we do not spend our money with people who are so obnoxious, or people who are clearly running a fake bus station racket.

We decided to go walk to an ATM, and from there back to the border crossing. At the ATM (which was in a glorious air-con little glass room), Mary discovered her ATM card was missing. Crap. When Josh tried his, the mechanism for pulling the card in seemed off--it was pulling too slowly. We pulled it back out and tried again a few times in a few orientations before deciding we didn't really need to use it all that badly. As we were leaving, we spotted a guy standing nearby watching us, trying to look casual and basically failing. Sure enough, after we were a little ways away with our backs to him, he went briefly into the ATM, then went and stood around at the business next door watching the ATM. I've read about the scam where they put a hook in the ATM slot to capture cards before, and it's supposed to be big in Southeast Asia, but this was our first time seeing it in action! (We cancelled our missing card upon arrival at our hotel--don't seem to have been any bad charges on it.)

When we got back to the border crossing, we started asking for directions or a taxi to the "old bus station", the "real bus station", and the "public bus station", but no one would give us directions or a taxi ride. There were also none of the shared private mini-buses that our guidebook told us to expect at the border crossing. Our guidebook suggested a small town a little up the road where you can take real public transit to Angkor Wat (or at least could as of publication), but evidently the powers that be have wised up to that suggestion, and it cost almost as much to get there as to get to Angkor. Apparently somewhere this corrupt, you really do want the up to date travel guide.

Anyhow, one taxi driver offered us $30 for the whole taxi, which seemed pretty good to us by then if we could fine two more people. Soon we spotted a pair of English blokes getting mobbed and suggested splitting the taxi with them, which they happily agreed to. On the way, when the driver was out getting cash, they told us about the upcoming scam of being dropped at a hotel outside town where you have to pay another few bucks to the taxi driver's tuk-tuk friends. They were ready with their fake reservation in the part of town they wanted to go to (with the cheap beds), and sure enough our taxi driver tried to drop us somewhere random to take an overpriced commission hotel or overpriced commission tuk-tuk, as he "didn't know" where our hotel was. We refused to get out of the car. The English guys insisted that they'd already paid for the hotel rooms at the other place for all 4 of us, so staying at this hotel was out of the question, and said we'd deduct the cost of the tuk-tuk from the taxi fare if we weren't taken the right place. After about 5 or 10 minutes, we were finally at the hotel.

The hotel seemed like fine value, so we checked right in. In Thailand and Laos, unlike India, shopping around for hotels doesn't help much--prices are pretty flat for similar rooms. And our room isn't too bad, but they say they have free wifi, and 24 hours later it's still not working. Josh made them knock 20% off the price of the room for failing to have it as advertised, and I think if they still don't have it tomorrow (they said they'd get it fixed today), we will move to the similar place next door that does.

As you can no doubt imagine, Mary, who does not sleep so well on buses, even nice Thai public buses, was kind of grumpy by the time we got to the hotel, installed Skype on the ancient computers that were available instead of wifi, and cancelled her ATM card. Actually, she was still pretty grumpy the next morning when Josh woke her up at 7:00 AM all anxious to get out right away and upset that we'd overslept the 5:00 AM opening time for Angkor Wat. Instead, we took a rest day with Josh doing some research on options to get to Singapore, and Mary catching up on sleep. Much better.

Vang Vieng - Caves, Tubing, and Expensive Mistakes

Today should have been an awesome day. Should have been. Really, aside from being ungodly expensive and leaving us feeling dumb and clumsy, and creating totally unnecessary stress for ourselves, it was an awesome day. We booked a tour last night that involved some caves in the morning, lunch, and then tubing down the river in the afternoon. The tour itself was fine. Great really. I'll get into that in a minute after I get the bad news out of the way.

1. Slipped and fell on the camera and broke it.
2. Lost the key to the hotel room in the river, had to pay $35 for replacement.
3. Knocked a lens out of Josh's glasses and into the river (but incredibly retrieved it).

Ugh.

Our first stop was the Elephant Cave, which was a very small cave-shrine with some Buddhas and a giant stylized Buddha foot. It is named for a natural rock inside that just so happens to look like, you guessed it, an elephant.

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Next was a brief walk through a village, during which our guide pointed out a cashew tree to us. The interesting thing about the cashew tree is that each cashew nut grows under another fruit, which appears to be a fruit we've seen at the market a lot in Thailand: it is shaped roughly like a strawberry, but has the size and texture of an apple. The flavor is quite boring. Nothing to write home about, at least not until now.

The second cave, Loup Cave, had several large caverns full of incredible stalactites. We spent a leisurely time exploring it and taking pictures. Should have brought our own headlights as the ones they provided were weak, but it was still incredible. In one area, our guide had us bang on the hollow stalactites to make music. The floor of the cave was strangely textured. Most of it was like clay, but there were these ridges winding around on the floor and sticking up around a foot. They seemed a lot like the ridges forming the wonderful pools at the waterfall in Laung Prabang. I wonder what causes those harder bits of limestone to form in those patterns? [Note: We eventually found the answer to this question in Croatia.]

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Our third cave, Hoi Cave, was right next door. It was a fairly boring tube of a cave that must have once been an underground river or something. Our guide said that it was possible to follow it for two hours to an underground lake, but that we didn't have time and it didn't get much more interesting. I don't even know why I had the camera out in my hand, since the cave wasn't that interesting. But I did, and so I smashed it on the rocks when I fell. It is no more.

We walked another 10 minutes or so to Water Cave, which is an underground river. We piled into inner tubes and paddled our way upstream into the mountainside. It was really cool. Actually, quite a lot cooler than I would have expected. It was really tranquil and pretty, plus pretty unlike anything else I've ever done, seeing as I've never been swallowed by a whale.

After water cave we had chicken-vegetable skewers and fried rice for lunch, then piled back into the minibus. We drove most of the way back to town, then were dropped in the river with our inner tubes. In was a nice relaxing float down the river with some good conversation, great scenery, and a couple stops at the riverside bars for the giant water slide and giant swings. The water slide and swings are two (or too) exciting ways to get into the river from a great height, but would have required more alcohol than Mary has had in her entire life to get her to try them out. Josh, in contrast, didn't need any alcohol at all to enjoy them, while the rest of our tour group just went for the alcohol without additional thrills.

Oh, and on our way down the river, while Mary was supposed to be keeping Josh's glasses safe, she accidentally knocked one of the lenses out. For a miracle, she was able to recover in from the bottom of the river a minute later.

So, had it not been for the mishaps, it would have been a really awesome day. However, the point of going on the tour instead of doing stuff on our own was to have a totally relaxing day and not need to worry about anything. Clearly, it completely failed to be that.

Luang Probang to Vang Vieng (What We Really Did On April Fools Day)

We got up early to see the monks collecting alms from the local people. Basically, they go out at dawn and are given rice.

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Then we took a minibus to Vang Vieng. That was a little frustrating. It is supposed to be about a 5 hour trip, but took 7 because we left an hour late and then made not one but two 30 minute food/bathroom stops. We thought that was more than a little excessive. Gotta assume it was a commission thing.

Along the way we saw a depressingly huge amount of burning jungle. Makes you realize what people are talking about when they quote rates of rain forest destruction like it's a continuous, powerful, scary, and apparently all-but-unstoppable force, practically outside of human control. That's definitely exactly what it looks like when you are here.

For dinner, we found a restaurant with a view of the river and sunset.

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Luang Prabang - Kuang Si Waterfall

Today we took a shared ride out of town to one of the most beautiful waterfalls I've ever seen, fully meeting and even exceeding tropical waterfall expectations. There was swimming in the most incredible pools a ways beneath the waterfall, and a steep hike up to the top of the 50-meter falls where we waded across the top of the falls, practically right on the lip! It was incredible.

The pictures are pretty self-explanatory. See the side topic on travertine for the geological explanation of this amazing place.

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There was also a little rescue bear park.

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After, we went to the Lao Ballet, which probably would have been more interesting if we knew the stories of the Ramayana, but was still pretty.

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Luang Prabang - Wats

Slow start to the day with Mary feeling queasy in the morning after breakfast. Josh wandered around and found us a different hotel with wifi included, which we moved to.

After moving, Josh brought Mary back to the Wat he'd found with a bunch of graphic Buddhist Hell murals on the outside. We didn't know that Buddhism had a concept of Hell, but it seems to involve all kinds of nasty torture. I'm thinking these levels of Hell are somewhat deeper than the ones Dante described.

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After a frustrating lunch (Mary threw away her first sandwich without tasting it after thinking better of the mayo that clearly sits out in the sun everyday without any ice or anything), we climbed the 300-ish steps to the top of the sacred hill in the middle of Luang Prabang, where we enjoyed nice views and nice cool shade inside the wat.

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On our way back down we saw a couple of large "Buddha footprints." Way too big to be human footprints...

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There was also a shrine area that had a bunch of "Days of the Week" Buddhas. Seriously.

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Next we wandered down to Wat Xieng Thong, which is supposed to be the primary wat attraction in Luang Prabang. A lot of the style and condition made me think of the Grand Palace in Bangkok, and what it must have looked like before the massive restoration. (This is one of the smaller, but more interesting buildings.)

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There was a giant funerary procession vehicle.

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And we especially liked some of the mosaics that only filled in the subjects with murals, while leaving the background undecorated.

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Then we walked down to the confluence of the end of the peninsula and Josh put his feet in the river.

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We wandered all over town looking for a not-to-touristy Lao dinner. Didn't find one. We decided to go back to the Bakery associated with the Ancient Hotel and right as we got there found the food in the Night Market. The food in the Night Market is a little hard to find, it is mostly down the side street on the left hand side of the Bakery. We decided against the 10,000 Kip buffets since who knows about prepared food that's been sitting out for a while, and instead got fresh skewers and sticky rice. Josh got a fish that he really really liked, and Mary got some amazing pork. Can't believe we almost walked right by without noticing the side street!

Sometimes in Laos, You Are Expected to Get Out and Push - Nam Ou River - Slow Boat from Nong Khiaw to Laung Prabang

Today's adventure, which turned out to be more of an adventure than we expected, was a scenic boat ride down the Nam Ou River from Nong Khiaw to Laung Prabang. The good thing about Nong Khiaw having become a big tourist destination is that there are now normally enough people for the daily "public" boat to go to Laung Prabang, at $12 pp instead of chartering your own boat for more like $100, as (some) people were doing a couple years ago. These days Lao people generally take the bus as it is cheaper and faster.

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The scenery was, as promised, spectacular. We motored more powerfully and more constantly than I expected though, so we didn't really see much wildlife. Just cows, a few birds, and fish being pulled from the river in nets.

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There were rapids in the river, and the water level was quite low, making us very glad that our boatman seemed to know the river well, and that our boat was of the flat bottomed variety that doesn't need much water. It was also reassuring to remind myself that the boat was surely worth more to him than the electronics in our bags are worth to us.

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The Laos people, villages, and uses of the river were very interesting. There were, of course, tons of children playing in the water and along the shore when we passed villages. And there were many people fishing, with small throw nets, larger nets left in the river with bamboo or plastic drink bottle floats, and we even saw a couple guys with goggles and harpoon guns.

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More curious were the strange bamboo tripod structures sticking out of the river and held down with large river stones. Sometimes there would be just one, other times there would be a dam of bamboo between multiple, forming a bit of a pool. One of the other passengers said they were associated with panning for gold and pointed out some gold-panners to us.

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Finally, in a couple places, we saw similar bamboo structures holding what appeared to be steal poles dangling in the river, pulled sideways by the current, and for some reason spinning at great speed. This seemed very strange until I spotted the wire connecting them with the mainland. Small-scale hydroelectric turbines. Sweet.

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After about 3 hours on the river, we stopped at a sandy beach near a village for what we thought was a pee break, until our boatman informed us that the river up ahead was too shallow and we would have to walk a section to lighten the boat. We walked up to the road, loaded onto a minibus, and went a surprisingly long way before unloading and walking down to another beach and waiting for our boat.

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Along the way, we noticed many bulldozers along the river. We thought at first that they must be dredging the river to make it more navigable, but once we got back aboard and boated past some of them, their true purpose became clear--more gold mining.

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A while later, just as we were joining the Mekong River, we got to another very shallow area with rapids and all of a sudden, the boat ran a-ground! We started going sideways, then leaned over to one side. The boatman quickly got out (into shin-deep water) and told us all to do the same. So there we all were, walking shin-to-knee deep in the water along side our boat until we got to deeper water. We were all a little miffed at first, but, you know, it's all part of the adventure and it was actually kind of cool.

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Hardly had we all gotten back into the boat, however, when the boatman seemed to be having difficulty steering the boat into the channel that he wanted. For some reason, he didn't seem to want to engage the engine, which makes steering very difficult. He quickly climbed out of the "cockpit" area and around onto the front lip of the boat where he paddled frantically, then tried to push off a big rock in our path so hard that he fell backward off the boat and into the water. The passengers on that side also tried to push us away from the rocks, but they slid painfully along the side of the boat. Fortunately, they don't seem to have done too much damage, as we proceeded to finish the journey uneventfully.

Oh, yeah, and right after that, we passed a cave. Tham Ting cave, we think. We might go back and explore it another day.

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Nong Khiaw - Travel and Cave

Traveled to Nong Khiaw in a minibus. It was slightly pricey compared with the regular bus, but we were excited to find one going direct and when we wanted to go, as we've read that the bus transfer could be quite time consuming (like, overnight).

We were told the minibus would take around 8 hours, but incredibly, in spite of construction for much of the first 3 hours, it only took 6 and a half. We were impressed by how much of the road they had under construction at once, but unlike in the US, there did appear to be a reason behind it. Every couple kilometers there was another team with a pile of rock, sand, and preformed concrete gutter sections working on their own length of road with shovels and hammers. Some teams seemed to be working out of a local village; in other places there were a couple bamboo-and-tarp tents nearby, presumably housing the workers. Traditional parallel processing.

We also saw lots of fires raging in the jungle. Surprisingly, these were mostly on the hills rather than in the flat low areas, suggesting that perhaps, contrary to what we would have expected, they were probably not being cleared for agriculture or ranching. They don't seem to use the hills at all for that stuff: a sign, I guess, that there is plenty of land to support the local population. At least this seemed to be the case in the rural far north.

Upon reaching Nong Khiaw, we discovered that it has been fully integrated onto the tourist trail. Disappointing. But it was still beautiful.

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We did the hike up to the nearby cave where the local population took refuge from the bombing during the war. It was kind of cool, but the real point of the walk was to see a bit more of the incredible scenery.

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We also saw more burning, clearly controlled, and this part in an area that did look like it had potential for agriculture. Probably this was the burn responsible for the huge amount of ash we'd noticed in the air in town.

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Back in town, we wandered around trying to figure out what we wanted to do next. There was a similar situation as Laung Nam Tha with a couple outfitters offering overpriced tours (trekking, cycling, kayaking, etc). Although there were tons of tourists in town, no one else had signed up for anything. We decided that these places must advertise to make you feel like you've come all this way, and you need to spend the last $30 pp to see the "100 waterfalls" or whatever. Except at that price you are really paying for 2 dudes to sit around all day surfing the internet 6 days per week waiting for that one sucker to sign up for a tour on the 7th. We decided not to be the sucker. Seriously, it's more expensive than the Tower of London or Stonehenge. But I doubt it's as unique an experience.

We were also considering taking some time to travel an hour north on the river to a village that doesn't have any roads and was, as of the publication date on our out-of-date guidebook, a totally unspoiled destination with few tourists. But considering the way Nong Khiaw has been transformed into a tourist trap in the last few years, and every second tourist we talked to was headed up the river there next, we're guessing the unspoilt days are over for that village.

So what did we come to Nong Khiaw for anyway? Just for a transit transfer actually. The 7-hour slow boat ride down the Nam Ou River to Laung Prabang is supposed to have incredible scenery; one of the best sections of river is Laos. We're here as a compromise doing this instead of the 2-day slow boat ride along the Mekong River to Laung Prabang that Josh wanted to do and Mary thought would be too much. That's tomorrow.

We spent the night in a cute little bamboo bungalow.

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Laung Nam Tha - Biking to Villages, Waterfall, Industry, and Walmart

After a leisurely morning, we went forth to try a motorbike. Given what we had heard, splurging on the Honda ($6) instead of the Chinese cycle ($4) was a good idea. Unfortunately, the Honda was a manual, and Josh quickly showed his lack of proficiency, such that they wouldn't rent us the cycle. They suggested an automatic, but Mary was freaked out, so we opted for pushbikes.

Our first destination was Nam Dee waterfall, some 5km out of town. After the first kilometer, the road became a hellish combination of cobble/dirt that was exceedingly jarring. The views along were pretty sweet: verdant hills, bamboo huts, rice paddies, and of course the ubiquitous chickens. The villages along the way are composed of ethnic minority peoples, frequently refugees from some war or another. Somewhere along here (around 1pm), Josh's watch stopped working. :(

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The waterfall itself was ok (it's the dry season here too). There was a reservoir dam upstream of it, with a pipe leading down to the closest village.

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Next we biked up to a stupa on a hill over the town. The statues were interesting for representing the diversity of the local peoples. Also liked the fountains of women washing their hair. There was a small shrine set into the hill behind the stupa.

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After a lunch and rest, we started out toward Muang Sing on our pushbikes. The terrain was pretty hilly for a single speed bike, but we caught some nice views along the river. We stopped and took some pictures by the dam (appeared to be hydro-electric), but we were shooed away. Also passed a lumber mill and what appeared to be a query and brick oven.

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We returned and perused the market. The market was completely free of tourist trinkets and was actually quite a lot like a Super-Walmart, with its huge selection of imported cheap stuff China to fill virtually any need (though we couldn't find a sink plug). There was also the grocery section with lots of fresh vegetables, dry goods, and dead meats (including something that looked like a rat), along with the requisite live chickens, and fish jumping out of their cement holding tanks. You know, the usual. We picked up some razor blades for Josh and a pocketknife for Mary.

(You may notice a conspicuous absence of photos of villages and the market, this is because the local people here are not generally okay with being photographed.)