Idyllic

That evening in Luang Prabang, we went to the night market. I thought there would be a million more markets just like this, but looking back, I wish I bought everything there, because we didn’t see any markets like it again! Everything was so beautiful. I did buy paper lanterns with flowers pressed into them, a bejeweled puppet of a prince for friends, and other gifts. During the day, the streets had been filled only with passersby, but at night, blue and red tents sprung up everywhere with goods laid out beneath them.

The next morning, we found four other travelers to join us in a tuk-tuk to the Kwang Si waterfalls. This was another magical place; my pictures from that day don’t even look real—they look photo-shopped or constructed somehow. Even being present there didn’t seem quite real. It was too beautiful.

At the entrance to the waterfalls, we watched the Asiatic Black Bears, or “Moon Bears” that had been rescued. We then walked past gently cascading waterfalls that formed glacial-blue pools. Each level of waterfalls seemed more beautiful than the last, somehow. The vegetation was rich and colorful—it was the first time I felt like we were actually in a rainforest. The small waterfalls led to one extremely tall and powerful one, and we climbed a steep path to the top, where we walked through cool pools to see the view and cross to the other side. The climb down was easy, and we followed wooden steps back to the bottom.

The butterflies were more beautiful than ever. I saw a pair with orange on the wings nearest the body and the deepest, iridescent purple on the outside. There were butterflies of many shades of blue, small orange ones, black ones, white ones. I wished I had a butterfly guide! The place was so idyllic—a monk taking a photograph of a spinning waterwheel, another meditating at the top of a short but wide waterfall, water falling into shaded pools of crystal. When we got back to the bottom, we went swimming in the numbingly cold water and sat in the sunshine.

 
That evening, back in town, we had dinner on a porch overlooking the Mekong, where the sun set and lit the whole world orange.

Luang Prabang

On our last morning in Vang Vieng, the power was out, as usual.  We walked to the bus stop and got on a “VIP” bus to Luang Prabang.  I had to take a Dramamine because the bus was plowing down the windy roads and swaying from side to side like the Knight Bus in one of the Harry Potter movies.  The bus ride was about five hours, and we stopped at a roadside establishment to use the squat toilets and have lunch.  The spicy noodle soup was served with side dishes of lettuce, mint leaves, and cucumbers—cool foods to contrast the spiciness of the soup.  Once in Luang Prabang, we found ourselves a guest house, took out some money (I hadn’t been able to use the ATMs in Vang Vieng and had been borrowing money from Malone the whole time!), had dinner, and went to bed.

After our morning fruit shakes, we set off to explore the city.  The thing that attracted me most about Luang Prabang was the vegetation.  Nestled amongst the wats and French villas were palm trees, banana trees, and trees blooming with all kinds of flowers—magenta, pink, red, purple, white, orange, yellow—and orchids and epiphytic ferns sprouting from tree trunks.  We hadn’t seen flowers like these thus far into the trip, with the exception of the Flower Festival in Chiang Mai, perhaps because it was the dry season.  Nevertheless, I truly felt like I was in a tropical city, and the flowers made the city that much more charming.

Our first stop was at the Royal Palace Museum, where we took off our shoes, locked our things in a locker, and Malone paid 2,000 kip to rent a shirt to cover her shoulders.  Also known as Hawkham or Golden Hall, the Royal Palace was built in 1904 for King Sisavangvong and his family.  The palace was converted to a museum after 1975, when the king’s son, Savang Vathana, who inherited the throne when his father died in 1959, was exiled to the caves of Vieng Xai in Northern Laos following a revolution.  Inside the museum, we saw clothing and ornaments of the king and queen, Buddha statues, gifts from other countries (the US gave a model of a space shuttle?), bronze drums with fish and birds engraved on the surfaces and frogs perched on the edges, portraits of kings, and rooms set up as they were when the palace was a home.  Paintings hung the length of a hallway told the story of a prince who was said to be a reincarnation of Buddha.  The prince left the kingdom, gave away all his possessions and went to live in a cave, then gave away his children as well, and somehow was rewarded in the end by returning to the palace, reuniting with his family, and becoming king.  I’m not sure what the moral of the story is, but it’s a favorite in Luang Prabang and told during religious celebrations.

Also in the palace grounds, we attended a photo exhibit called “The Floating Buddha.”  The photographer went to a retreat with novice monks who were just learning about meditation and photographed them in both black and white and in color.  Some of the pictures were really beautiful—monks meditating on the forest floor with leaves all about, monks crossing an open field, an orange robe hung up and flapping in the breeze.

In the afternoon, we walked to the place where the Nam Khan meets the Mekong River.  We paid 5,000 kip to cross a bamboo foot bridge, from which we had a beautiful view of the Mekong and could see young monks bathing in the river with bright orange cloth wrapped around their waists.  Large boulders were strewn about the confluence of the two rivers and monks tended small gardens along the banks.  We followed a dirt path to the shore of the Mekong, where we walked barefoot on the sandy beach, strewn with lumps of clay, before climbing stairs to a small craft village where colorful fabric hung from porches and banana trees lined the dirt road.  The craft village was filled with stalls selling beautiful fabrics and handmade paper.

 

We visited several wats in Luang Prabang.  Within the palace grounds was an emerald and gold wat with intricate patterns in ruby and gold on the inside.  Wat Xieng Thong, built in 1560 by King Setthathirat, was different from other wats we’d seen because it was built with wooden beams and was very old, but this did not prevent it from being as intricate and ornate as the others.  There were mosaics and murals on the outer walls and flowering trees everywhere.  Wat Pahouak was built in 1860 and covered with murals on the inside.  In that wat, I bought two small pieces of art: one of a gold Buddha painted on a leaf and one of orange-robed monks painted on handmade paper. 

 

We walked a steep staircase to the top of a hill that overlooked the city, where Phu Si stood.  We could see from all directions, both rivers, the mountains, the city.  We walked to the top for the sunset, but it was too cloudy to see it.  Walking down a separate path, we passed more wats and large, gold Buddha statues.  We emerged from the trail near the back of a temple where monks sat, singing.

Magic

I believe it was then in my journey that everything became magical.  The temples in Bangkok and the tiny mountain town of Pai and the ruins of Sukothai had been magical enough, but nothing compared to the Blue Lagoon in Vang Vieng, where we spent the following day.  We walked seven kilometers to get there, first crossing the Nam Song by paying 4,000 kip to walk over the bridge.  We followed a dirt road, through small villages and farms, with chickens and chicks, kids on bikes, puppies, goats, cows and calves, and men on tractors all around.  I don’t know if I’ve ever seen as many babies at once as I did in Laos, both human and animal.  It felt like a springtime storybook where everybody was giving birth.

The walk was long, but the limestone mountains behind the gardens and fields were beautiful in the distance, dark blue against the sky.  Before we reached the lagoon, we stopped at an organic farm for lunch.  I had a refreshing mint lemonade, which was much tastier than the vegetable fried noodles I had ordered, which, for some reason, had been covered with ketchup.  A Siamese cat begged under the table, and Malone fed it some of her fried rice.

 

Another couple hundred meters down the road was the Blue Lagoon, which was, as its name would suggest, blue.  I mean, it was BLUE.  I’d never seen anything quite like it, at least not in the natural world.  Fish swarmed by a wooden ladder that led into the water, there were people sitting on a giant swing that hung in the water from a large, epiphyte-covered tree, and Lao men stood on a bridge and observed people swimming, swinging into the water from a rope, and jumping in from the branches of the tree.

Before we went swimming, we decided to walk up to Tham Phu Kham, a cave within the limestone that stood behind the Blue Lagoon.  The climb to the cave entrance was steep and exhilarating, so entering the cool, damp chambers of the cave felt soft and silky against my hot skin.  Having forgotten my headlamp, we remained in the two outermost chambers, where enough sunlight entered the cave to see its beauty.  The sun beams displayed a small temple with a gold reclining Buddha.  In an opening in the cave’s wall, two trees grew, and the daylight fed the bright green moss and ferns that grew on the boulders there.  The ceiling of the cave was impressively high.  Stalagmites hung near the opening to the cave, but deeper inside, there were just huge slabs of rock holding the ceiling up.  It was amazing to think about the weight of the mountain that rested on this stone ceiling; the top of the limestone was still 200 or 300 meters above us.

Back down at the lagoon, we entered the water, which was very cold, clear, and refreshing.  I swam a few laps under the bridge and back, then sat and relaxed in the giant swing.  When the water became too chilly, we got out and shared French fries and a Beer Lao on a picnic table before finding a mat to lie in the sun and read (Magister Ludi, or The Glass Bead Game for me).  We were living the life, right?

We walked back along the dusty path before darkness and enjoyed sandwiches back in town, only to walk back down the same road the very next day, once the morning rain stopped.  On the way, we stopped at several small caves along the road, each of which charged its own admission.  The caves were not nearly as impressive as Tham Phu Kham, and walking through the fields of butterflies and banana trees in the hot sun was enough to make us crave the Blue Lagoon’s cool waters again.  We continued walking the path, but, hot and exhausted, were thankful when a Lao family picked us up in their mini van and drove us the remaining 2 kilometers.  We tried to offer them some money, but they laughed at us and waved the money away.  The refreshing water got my courage up, and I climbed the tall, epiphyte-covered tree to jump into the water—something I had been afraid to do the day before.  Climbing the slippery trunk of the tree was scary enough—it left me trembling—that jumping off the branch was easy.  Jumping was much easier than climbing back down the tiny notches carved into the wood.

Tired from all the walking we had been doing, we paid for a tuk-tuk back into town.  We ate more street pancakes that evening, and decided to spend one more full day in Vang Vieng.  On our last day, we took a tuk-tuk to the river, this time without tubes.  We chose a bar to hang out at for the day.  It was such a relaxing day, just sitting by the river beneath the shade of a large tree.  The bar we chose had a deck, which we had to ourselves, with a swing, hammocks, a trampoline, and a small table where we ate sandwiches and shared a mojito in a plastic bucket.  I spent the day reading and writing and swimming and relaxing.  I laid on my back on the deck, looking up at the tree and its green leaves moving graciously above me.  The sun began its descent behind the limestone karsts on the western bank of the river, but still sent golden light through the branches and onto my skin.  I watched the occasional dry bamboo leaf, from the cluster of bamboo behind my head, flutter to the ground against a blue backdrop of sky.  So peaceful, so simple.  It reminded me simultaneously of maple tree helicopters at home and the butterflies that clotted the path the day before, all of them aflutter.

At the end of the day, we walked back into town.  Because the mountains get shorter as you walk south along the river, we were able to continuously watch the sun set.  A hot air balloon rose above the mountains, and both were silhouetted against the sky.  Do these pictures at all convey the magic that I witnessed in Laos?

In the Tubing Vang Vieng

When I look back on it, my next two stops in Vang Vieng and Luang Prubang are some of the places I remember most fondly (discounting the bus rides between these places!).  As touristy/backpacker-y as it was, Vang Vieng was truly beautiful.  On the main street, all of the establishments looked very similar.  The places to eat, like most places in Southeast Asia, were open to the streets.  Cushions and low tables were set up on platforms.  This was more like a place to sit and hang out, or even curl up on a comfy pillow, than a place to sit and eat a meal.  And at each restaurant, numerous TV screens repeatedly played reruns of Friends and Family Guy.  That was the part we could have easily done without, but somewhat in our favor, the power went out in Vang Vieng for at least a portion of every day.  (This was fine when we were eating, of course, to avoid the TV shows, but bothersome when we were trying to sleep in our hot room at night and the fan stopped working or in the morning when we wanted to get fruit shakes but none of the blenders worked.)  Various shops sold sunglasses, “In The Tubing Vang Vieng” tank-tops and T-shirts, and beautiful silver jewelry.

Away from the main street was where Vang Vieng stole my heart, however.  After relaxing in town for the first part of our first day, we rented tubes and took a tuk-tuk down to the Nam Song River, which flowed between the tall limestone karsts and just west of the town.  I had heard from a friend about tubing down the river in Vang Vieng: how it was lined with bars, and every year tourists ended up getting wasted and lost out on the river past dark, then drowning.  Because it was the dry season, the river did not pose as great of a threat, and we didn’t have plans to get so drunk that we wouldn’t get back in time to receive back the deposit we had made on our tubes.  When the tuk-tuk dropped us off, we walked about 500 meters down a dirt path beside the river before finding a place to enter the river.  The water was cool but comfortable.  I clipped my shoes and clothes to my tube and we set off down the lazy river.

Bungalow-style bars made of bamboo lined the river.  Each had something to draw tubers in: large porches, rope wings, water slides, zip lines, loud music, trampolines, and of course, alcohol.  Staff members waded into the water, trying to drag people in by their tubes or throwing ropes out to pull people in.  Malone and I avoided these attempts and continued floating along down the river.  The tree-covered limestone mountains were beautiful where they rose high above us against the sky.  The water itself was clear and strangely devoid of fish or much else, other than the floating leaves, occasional stick, and thankfully even more seldom plastic water bottles.  Though the water was shallow, we floated easily along, only occasionally needing to navigate between groups of rocks.

At one point, we rounded a bend in the river, and it was perhaps at this point that the place’s beauty struck me the most.  The mountains were greener, the water looked almost green, perhaps because of this tropical reflection, and the bars had thinned out so the place was more secluded and wild.  It was quiet here and peaceful to float down the river, looking up at the endlessly impressive mountains.  As the sun began to lower behind the mountains and the water began to feel a bit cooler, we exited the river and got a tuk-tuk back into town.  Still in our wet clothes, we stopped on our walk back to our hotel for some warm noodle soup.  From our porch, we watched the sky come alive as the sun set behind the mountains, then went back into town to shop and enjoy an evening snack: fruit shakes and street pancakes.  If I could only live many more days like that first day in Vang Vieng!

Ugh

Our next stop was Phitsanulok, which sounded much better in the guide book than it actually was.  When we arrived after the hour-long bus ride, we checked into the “Guest House Hotell” and set out in the blistering heat to look for a bookstore that we never found; have lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant, where I accidentally ate some kind of dried, shaved pork (weird); walk around some more in search of the Buddha casting factory, which we never found, and the bird park, which we also never found.  Phitsanulok didn’t do a very good job with their tourism industry; we couldn’t find a map anywhere!  We did go to Wat Phra Si Ratana, a famous temple, but I think we’d had our fill of wats by that point.  After dinner, we walked by all the street vendors selling food beneath a full moon, which was very bright for a city sky.

The following day was actually even worse.  We took a tuk tuk to the bus station; the tuk tuk was a carriage hooked on to a bike.  Not a motorbike—just a bike.  There was barely enough room for the two of us in the carriage, and our backpacks hung precariously from an S-hook on the back of the carriage.  We had breakfast at the bus station and got on a late morning bus to Udan Thani.  This is my number one recommendation to anyone traveling to Udan Thani: get there early so you can catch the next bus.  We failed to do this.  We therefore had to spend the night in Udan Thani.

Why wouldn’t you want to spend the night in Udan Thani, you ask?  Though the town is a transportation hub, with three major bus stations, it is also the capital of sex tourism.  Therefore, everywhere you look, there are fat, old, white men—the ones who wear white socks with sandals and have giant beer bellies—walking around with beautiful young Thai women.  It was utterly depressing.  Every place in that town was shady.  We even had trouble finding places to eat.  We also had trouble finding a place to stay.  A young man took us around the city in his tuk tuk, which was motorbike driven, to hotel after hotel, looking for a place we could stay, his brakes squealing like a dying animal the whole time.  Finally, we found a place that had room.  It was expensive for what it was.  It was the first place we stayed that had a squat toilet; the sink didn’t have a drain, so when you ran water, it just ran straight to the floor and drained from there; there was a cockroach in the bathroom; and the sheets on the beds had clearly never been changed.  Not wanting to spend any time in that room, we left for dinner and then walked around a night market, which was more like a mall.  It was an equally depressing place because tons of puppies were locked away in small cages, waiting to be sold.  When it was time to sleep, we walked back to our room.  Malone and I shared what looked like the cleaner bed and we spent what was probably the worst night of the trip.

Our third miserable day started early in the morning when we got on a bus to Vientiane, Laos.  On our way to the border, the bus stopped along the side of the road; somebody took our backpacks out of the storage area of the bus, and a man pointed at us through the window and told us to get off.  Confused, we got off, and a tuk tuk driver took us to a building where we could get our Laos visas.  The problem with this was that we were pretty sure we could get our visas at the border, just as we had when we arrived in Thailand.  However, we had been kicked off the bus, didn’t know where we were in relation to the border, and didn’t really know how to ask.  We sat there, aware that we were being ripped off, and handed over our passports to the woman behind the desk, who filled our a few forms for us and charged us between seventy and eighty dollars for the process.  Two women then got into the tuk tuk with us, which took us to the border, and we felt our stomachs sink when they marched us up to the “Visa Upon Arrival” sign and handed us $36 each—the cost of the Laos visa.  That’s right—we paid almost $80 for a $36 visa and a $1 bus ride across the Friendship Bridge between Thailand and Laos.  We were angry, so angry—but there was nothing we could do at that point.  The Lao official at the counter lightened the mood a little by making fun of us for what had happened.  I bet he sees it all the time.  We learned our lesson, though, and wouldn’t be fooled again, though the Thai people would try to do the same at the Cambodian border and at the Malaysian border—and get this—the Malaysian visa is free!

From the bus station in Vientiane, the capital of Laos, we found ourselves in another sketchy situation.  We tried to arrange a mini-bus ride to Vang Vieng, and we followed around a couple of men who kept arguing with each other and handing each other money, until finally one of them took us to his mini-van.  Somewhat terrified, wondering where we would be taken, we finally relaxed (though Malone got super car sick) and eventually arrived in Vang Vieng, where we were taken to a somewhat pricey bungalow that afforded a beautiful sunset view.  The peacefulness of the Nam Song River and the beauty of the sunset between the limestone karst mountains relaxed us and prepared us to enjoy a beautiful place in the coming days.

Ancient Ruins and Noodle Soup

The following day in Sukhothai was one of the best days of the trip. It was also one of the hottest. After a breakfast of pineapple pancakes and fruit salad, I walked to the post office to mail Sam’s birthday present to Vermont and a post-surgery feel-good letter to Scott. Even though it was still early—before eleven—the sun was beating down on me and I could not stop sweating. On the way to the post office, I passed a parade of sorts, with Chinese dragons, people in costume, a marching band, and a small float that looked very tacky compared to the floats at the Flower Festival in Chiang Mai.

After I walked the hot sidewalk back to the hostel, Malone and I gathered our things and walked down the block to catch a bus to the Sukhothai Historical Park. The bus was more like a giant pick-up truck, with two bleacher-like wooden benches lining the two sides and one running down the middle. The vehicle was open, to let the hot air blow through.

At the park, we rented bicycles for 30 baht each (about one US dollar). Somehow, but unintentionally, we entered the park without paying and began to bike around. We first reached the largest ruin: Wat Mahathat. We took our first pictures of the ancient stupas of crumbling brick and the giant Buddha statues that sat so nobly and serenely in front of them. We could see Wat Sa Si and Wat Tra Phang Ngoen across the water, in the distance. The latter looked particularly beautiful, with a pure white Buddha sitting regally in front of a muted mountainscape.

We left the main part of the park on our bikes to go to Wat Si Chum. We rode past trees with bright orange blossoms that fell to the ground and spread there like a monk’s robes; brilliant green rice paddies; a mote-like creek that encircled part of the park; barking dogs; dried grasses in the heat; views of mountains. We paid 110 baht to go into this part of the park and stopped at an elaborately carved ebony stupa near ruins that must have been consumed by fire at one point: Wat Phra Phai Luang. At the entrance to Wat Si Chum, Thai school children were excited to practice their English on us, each one of them yelling “Hello!” with big smiles on their faces, then running away to giggle with each other. I bought a bottle of ice cold water before heading inside Wat Si Chum, where the biggest Buddha we’d seen sat with one gold hand cupping its right knee, staring fixedly out into space. It was nearly impossible to capture the whole statue in my camera lens.

After paying a second entrance fee of 110 baht at the third part of the park, we rode our bikes to Wat Saphan Hin, which sat high on a hill overlooking fields and the other ruins of the park. We climbed a path made of stone to the top, where one Buddha stood with its hand raised to the light and a smaller Buddha sat before it, both gazing out at the view. We lit incense and gazed outward with the Buddhas.

After climbing back down, we continued riding our bikes around the park, finding ourselves in an odd situation where we bought a Coke out of an old woman’s bedroom, and then riding past more ruins, the wats all reduced to crumbled brick walls and stupas. When we reached the road that surrounds the main part of the park, we stopped for the best lunch that we had the entire trip, and it wasn’t just because we were so hot, hungry, and tired from biking. Malone ordered pad Thai; I had an ice cold mango shake and a vegetable and noodle soup.  I still crave the combination of crushed peanuts, cilantro, and scallions when I think about that bowl of soup. We ate in the shade while a puppy nibbled at our toes.

We rode our bikes back to the main part of the park, this time paying the 110 baht entrance fee, and headed along a path shaded by trees in the late afternoon light. We visited Wat Si Sawai, where small Buddhas were tucked into the roots of a tree and a flock of pigeons swooped over the tallest stupa and perched there. We relaxed in the shade along an old brick wall, next to the creek where a small turtle came up to breathe and a heron perched in a tree that shone with golden green afternoon light.

 

 

All in all, it was a perfect day. We returned our bikes and took the bus back to our hostel, where we showered and relaxed for the night and enjoyed a small dinner at a coffee shop a few buildings down. The beauty of the day in Sukhothai would carry us through the next three somewhat-miserable days.