Next stop, Vietnam

We are currently hanging out in the central Laos town of Savannakhet. We took a local bus from Vientiane, and it was a fairly uneventful and comfortable ride, although I did rip my shorts on a motorcycle that was in the aisle of the bus. Unfortunately, the shorts are pretty much beyond repair, as they'd already been stitched up twice before by Jaimee, but this time the rips are quite large:

If ripped clothes are the worst of our worries, we're in good shape. After feeling a little under the weather in Vientiane, we both recovered nicely and are having a nice time in Savannakhet. We've used this stop to determine our next few weeks of travel. Back in Luang Prabang, we thought we'd keep heading south in Laos, crossing through Cambodia and then into Vietnam. However, and this will come as no surprise to frequent readers, but we've changed our mind yet again. Being that Savannakhet is on a main highway between Thailand and Vietnam, it has a Vietnamese consulate. We stopped in there yesterday and got 15-day visas for Vietnam. We thought we couldn't get them until Phnom Penh in Cambodia, but they were able to issue them to us on the spot. So, now that we have our visas, and there's a major road from here to Vietnam, we've decided to go to Vietnam sooner.

Our plan now is to head East toward the Vietnam border, stopping for a night or two to see some remnants of Operation Lam Son 719, part of a US ordered, but South Vietnamese Army led attack on the North Vietnamese Army along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. I'm not sure what there is to see exactly, but we plan on staying a night or two in Xepon (also spelled Sepon sometimes) and see if we can find someone who can show us around the old Ho Chi Minh Trail. Here is a map of the area:

View World Trip in a larger map

The only problem with this plan is we'll enter Vietnam in the middle of the country. We're not sure exactly what our itinerary will be, but we only have 15 days on our visa (getting a longer visa would have taken more time to process) and we would like to visit both the North and South of the country. Also, another big update is that we bought our tickets to India today. We are flying out of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam to Chennai, India (via Singapore) on March 23. We found relatively cheap flights on Tiger Airways and decided to go ahead and book the tickets.

Anyway, Savannakhet is a charming, albeit very poor town. There are some remnants of French colonialism here, including a beautiful Catholic Church built in 1930 in the main square.

The town is also along the river dividing Laos from Thailand and one night we had a sunset dinner along the river. We ate at this place where they server you claypot pull of broth and you heat it up over your own coal fire. Then you add whatever vegetables, meat or seafood you want into the broth. It reminded us of our meal in Melaka at Capitol Satay.

We also got a massage, and in all honesty have enjoyed watching movies on HBO at night (yes, our hotel, at only $8 US) includes air-conditioning and HBO. Unfortunately, the only other English channel is CNBC ("First in Business Worldwide!") and despite being an Econ major, I can only take for so long (Jaimee's tolerance is even less). But, HBO has been nice.

Here's the photo album link. We'll add more pictures as we work our way into Vietnam:

Laos to Vietnam

Vientiane, briefly

Sometimes when we visit a place we understand right away why it's popular. When we were in Luang Prabang or Chiang Mai, for example, we could tell why people visit there. Vientiane, the capital of Laos, on the other hand, is somewhat of a mystery. Maybe we're missing something, but we don't really see the appeal of this city. It's sort of like a tourist destination trying to become a tourist destination.

We survived our overnight bus from Luang Prabang, even coming in an hour early, but after taking a tuk tuk downtown we immediately found out that all the guest houses and hostels were full. This is the first place we've been where everything has been booked. And we're not the only ones who searched for a room. It's the opposite problem of Luang Prabang; there you couldn't walk 10 feet without encountering a guest house offering a room whereas here you can't walk 10 feet without encountering a tourist couple carrying their bags around looking for a place to stay.

We got lucky, sort of. The morning we arrived, we walked up and down the main street where most of the guest houses are, and although they were all full, we decided to wait at one of them for someone to check out and then grab their room. We only had to wait about two hours before we were able to check in. The price sheet said 45,000 kip (about $5 US) and I thought that was per person, but it turned out to be the total price! However, the room was about what you'd expect for $5...two very narrow metal beds with cigarette burned sheets, a plank floor covered with shoddy linoleum and a view out the window of a brick wall. Oh, and there were bugs. But being that we'd hardly slept on the bus and were both suffering from slight sickness (nothing a bit of Imodium couldn't fix) and every other place was full, we took the room.

Today we changed to a nicer place down the street (getting the last room in the place), which at 85,000 kip (about $9) is worth every penny. It's no Fairmont, but it's clean, there are no bugs and the wall does not have a drawing of a penis on it. And, there's running water! The first place didn't have any running water in the morning, which the people working there didn't seem too concerned about. By the way, here's a business idea for an aspiring entrepreneur: come to Laos and open a plumbing school. They need plumbers here. Everywhere we go the plumbing is shoddy: entire faucets turn when you turn them on, there are constant backwashes of toilets, drains don't drain, pipes drip, showers have no pressure and shoot in all directions but on your body, etc.

As for things to do here, we did take a walk down Lane Xang Avenue, which supposedly is modeled after Champs Elysees in Paris. There's even a Laotian version of the Arc de Triomphe, called Patouxai:

We climbed the stairs to the top of it and although there wasn't much of a view on account of the smog/haze, it was fun enough.

Tomorrow we're going to continue south to the town of Savannakhet in Southern Laos, which supposedly has lots of French colonial architecture with a Vietnamese influence as well. Although there is an overnight bus, we figured we'd take the day time local bus. Not only is it cheaper, but the overnight bus lands you in Savannakhet at 3AM which we thought would be an inconvenient time to arrive.

We didn't take too many photos here, on account of there not being too much to take photos of, but here are the few that we did take.

Relaxing in Luang Prabang

We've enjoyed our time immensely in Luang Prabang. The city (it's more of a town really) here has a very "up and coming" feel to it. There is a lot of construction going on, and the steady influx of tourists makes it a vibrant place to kick back for a few days, although it's definitely not typical Laos. On the bus ride through the country-side to get here we saw how poor Laos really is, but you wouldn't know in Luang Prabang. It acts like a sleepy village, but it has all the modern conveniences you'd need to have a comfortable stay.

If not for our desire to see more places, we could easily stay here longer. From what we've heard and read, Luang Prabang now is what Chiang Mai was maybe 10 or 15 years ago. It would be interesting to come back here in a few years and see how it changes. With so many new guest houses and touristy restaurants opening up, I wonder if it will be able to continue to retain it's charm and appeal. But, of course, I think that's why we travel - to see places and enjoy them in the moment, as they are.

In any event, as I mentioned, our stay here has been very relaxing. We took a day trip out to a huge cave, called Pak Ou Caves where there are hundreds of Buddha statues, which although interesting, was not really that impressive (maybe I should have been impressed?).

Pak Ou is sort of a resting ground for Buddha statues

Combined with that trip, we also went out to a beautiful waterfall called Kouang Si. This was totally worth it, and we weren't going to go out there since it's the dry season, until we ran into some people from our bus who said it was gushing.

There were multiple swimming areas, including a cool rope swing that we got to use to jump into the water. Doing either side trip was kind of fortuitous, because although tuk-tuk drivers ask you on every corner, "Hello sir, Cave/Waterfall?" we weren't exactly sure how to organize a group to get the best rate. The drivers charge a flat fee to go (they charge about $50 US for the entire trip of about 100km), so the more people you have the cheaper it is per person. On the street one morning we ran into a Canadian from Montreal who was on our bus and he said he had booked the tour with six people but two of his group were sick so he asked us if we wanted to go. He was leaving in about 10 minutes, but we thought, why not? We grabbed some coffee and banana cake, ran back to our guest house and put on our bathing suits. We had no idea that it would be an all-day tour (we left at 9AM and got back at 4PM) but we had fun. Plus, this guy Pierre is a hoot, as were his friends from France (who we continue to see all around town).

Apart from the cave/waterfall tour, we've spent a fair amount of time lounging at a very nice bookstore/cafe called L'Etranger Books and Tea, which although overpriced by Southeast Asia standards, has free wifi, draft beer and at 7PM they show free movies on their TV in the loft area on the second floor. We were lucky enough to catch Fantastic Mr. Fox (bootlegged DVD from China) one night.

Additionally, we caught up with the Canadian couple that we met in Chiang Mai and had dinner with them. We attempted to go to the highly recommended Tamarind restaurant, but apparently it's closed on Sunday. As a backup plan we had great food and beer at the market, and it was fun to talk smack (as much as we could having not really followed the Olympics) about the upcoming USA versus Canada gold medal hockey game that they were getting up at 3AM to watch. (Having not that much a vested interest either way, I'm glad Canada got their gold medal.)

We went to Tamarind for lunch today, and it's definitely worth checking out. We had their vegetarian sampler platter and some pumpkin-coconut soup. The restaurant also has cooking classes which would be worth doing if we were staying longer here.

Speaking of leaving, we decided to take another overnight bus tonight, down to the Laos capital of Vientiane. It's supposed to take 12 hours. We'll see. (Update: the bus actually came in an hour early, with no breakdowns or other issues. It was uncomfortable though, and the Laos music videos on the TV were interesting for the first 10 minutes, but annoying after that, especially while trying to catch some sleep.) We've also been trying to figure out when to leave Southeast Asia and head to India. We're having a great time here, it's pretty cheap (we're averaging about $35 US per day including transport costs from town to town) and there's still a lot to see (Southern Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam). Our tentative plan is to do an S-shaped itinerary down through Laos and Cambodia and then traverse south to north in Vietnam ending up in Hanoi in northern Vietnam. From there we'd fly to Bangkok and on to India. Nothing is booked yet, but we'll be sure to update the blog when know for sure.

We added more pictures to the photo album, and there were some tourists who took pictures of Jaimee jumping into the water at the waterfall. The one guy promised to e-mail us the pictures which we'll post to the album as soon as we get them.

The Road to Luang Prabang

When we were planning our trip we knew that we couldn't plan out each step very far in advance. It was too difficult to know what the conditions would be at a given time and place. Plus, we wouldn't have wanted to be held to a specific itinerary; we knew that we'd discover new places we'd like to visit along the way. This is how we arrived in Luang Prabang, Laos. (Our guide book spells it Louang Phabang so you'll see us spell it both ways or just abbreviate it LP). Located in North-central Laos, LP is a charming, very much French-inspired town with lots of little temples, street vendors selling fresh sandwiches on excellent baguettes, and myriads of coffee shops and guest houses.

We've had two sandwiches in two days from this lady

However, getting here can be quite the adventure, as we can attest. First there was the border crossing. We took a pick-up truck to the border and went through Thai customs, which was easy, then boarded a boat across the river where we went through Laos customs, which involved securing a Visa from one guy, paying $35 US dollars each to another guy who stamped our passport, then getting it all checked by a third guy. I'm pretty sure the TSA from the US were involved in training the Laos border agents.

After getting checked in along with a large group of French and French-Canadian tourists, and one Japanese guy (who bragged that his Laos Visa was free!) we all boarded a van (14 of us in an 10-seater van) to the private bus station where we had two hours to wait before our bus left. Little did we know this would be the "calm before the storm."

First of all, although we had assigned seats, nobody sat in them because the seat numbers were underneath the luggage space so no one saw them so people just sat where they wanted and even after showing the people in our assigned seats, they wouldn't move because it would have meant the people in their seats would have to move, etc. Therefore, since we were the last on the bus (seeing no point in boarding early since the seats were assigned), we got seats in the last row, squished in between a monk, a Chinese and a Laotian, who I'll just mention were constantly on their respective cell phones most of the trip. Each phone had its own ring tone so after a while we would know who was getting a call just by the ring. "Oh, the monk is getting a text message now," we'd think as the bus creeped along the windy, bumpy roads.

Without going into too much detail I'll summarize and say the bus was delayed by over 10 hours, we broke down twice, got rescued by another bus (but only the locals had to get on that bus), and eventually made it to LP 25 hours after we left our Thai guest house.

The guy in the green sweatshirt was actually a passenger

We were so sleep and food deprived that I felt like I was hallucinating. (Why is everyone speaking a weird language? Where are we?) We tried going to a Guest House recommended by the Korean we met in Chiang Mai (he gave us the guest house business card and everything) but when we found the place we couldn't make out if 120,000 kip (the Laotian currency) was a good deal or not. Let's see, it's about 8,500 kip to the dollar or 260 baht to the kip, so that means 120,000 is? It's not easy even with all your faculties, which we definitely did not have at that point. Eventually, with the help of a calculator, we found out this was about $14 US, and being significantly more than we were used to paying, we decided to move on. We found a place down the road (you can't walk more than five feet without going by a guest house) where a room was 80,000 kip (about $9.50 US) so we took that.

After a street sandwich each and a couple cold glasses of Beerlao we crashed under the fan of our room. Today we switched to another guest house where we could have our own bathroom for the same price.

LP has definitely made it on the "tourist track" and we can see why. In fact, today we ran into a couple that was in our cooking class in Chiang Mai (they arrived today after only a 15 hour bus ride and just one breakdown). The town itself is very cozy, the food is good, and compared to the hustle and bustle of streets in Thailand, it's pretty quiet here. We're not sure how many days we'll stay. We might rent bicycles for a day and tour around or possibly take a boat trip down the river. Since we were supposed to arrive by boat initially, it would be nice to at least experience it for a bit. We do know we don't want to leave right away as the thought of getting on the bus anytime soon is not very appealing.

Here are pictures all the way from Chiang Khong to LP (we'll be adding to it as we do more stuff here).