I'm going to surpass the latter three days of my trip to Burma as well as a bunch of other stuff in order to get to the more recent stuff--that is the last two weeks that I've been traveling.
We took a sleeper train to one of the northern most provinces in Thailand and took a short ride by tuk tuk over the border. Vientiane seemed so small in comparison to Bangkok so I jumped at the chance to hop directly on a bus with my two friends heading to Vang Viene for tubing. This bus ride introduced me to what I should be getting used to when traveling throughout Laos--mountains, lots and lots of mountains and the need for lots and lots of motion sickness pills. It started raining after we'd checked into our bungalow and were eating dinner, the power went out in the restaurant for a bit. Beer Laos is famous for a reason. The three of us walked around the town for a bit then went to bed--the first time in my life that I've slept under a mosquito net and I slept beautifully.
The next morning we awoke to what I began to get used to, the sound of roosters. We went to breakfast which consisted of the delicious baguettes, butter, jelly and Laotian coffee, served typically with sweetened condensed milk, why this concept has not caught on in the states, I do not know, it's amazing. While waiting for Shay to show up I had a conversation with a nice British couple who were traveling around Southeast Asia before going up to China to teach English for a year. It became a sad trend throughout our trip that all the people we met traveling were either backpackers, teaching English or unemployed, mostly unemployed, retreating from their countries of origin and finding solace in spending their life's savings seeing the world, uncertain of what to do when their money runs out.
Shay showed up as I was about to cross the river back into town to try and find her--yes, I had to cross a river on foot to get to my bungalow in order to avoid paying the fee to cross the bridge every time, the toll collectors didn't like it, the Laotian children constantly bathing under the bridge didn't seem to mind. It was getting on into the afternoon but we decided to go tubing anyway. At the place to rent tubes we met up with three girls from New Zealand who were all a blast, we shared a tuk tuk down to the start of the river and came upon a scene that none of us expected. Tubing in Laos is essentially the equivalent of spring break in Cancun. Immediately after getting out tubes off the top of the tuk tuk we were greeted with the sight of a guy going bare-ass down a zip-line into the water, which was connected to two large docks with bars covered in young white people drinking and carrying on. There were all kinds of rope swings and slides at the different bars, and there were a few with mud wrestling as well. I tried all of them except for the slide, which looked questionable. I won all of my mud wrestling matches--those guys didn't see my wrath coming. Getting a tuk tuk back at the end of the night took some strategic planning. Shay, the Kiwis and I met up with a couple walking away from the crazy scene just outside the last bars on the river where people were literally climbing on the tops of tuk tuks to get a ride back into town. After a short while of walking and trying to flag down an empty one we finally stretched across the entirety of the dirt road, seven strong, blocking the next tuk tuk from leaving us behind. It worked. The bar that we went to on the main land later that night had hammocks, another thing I could get used to.
The next day we chilled out and went to a lagoon and a cave with two of the three Kiwis. The lagoon was freezing and very blue, the cave was huge and very dark--the only real cave I saw on my entire trip. We went tubing again that afternoon but it wasn't as good as the first time, and we left early. We did meet a guy who'd been tubing for 27 days straight and had been traveling around the world for a while, stopping to work for a while in Australia and Spain. Hearing people's stories about leading lives like that makes following in their footsteps sound so feasible and so tempting.
We caught a bus to Luang Prabang the next day, a town which could be seated in the US or Europe. It's so quaint and pleasant, which was good because as it turned out we couldn't catch a bus directly into Vietnam for four days, much longer than we'd initially anticipated. The first day Shay and I rented bikes, one speed pedal bikes with baskets on the front and everything, and decided that we were going to bike, yes bike, through the mountains--that's right, mountains, not hills--of Laos for 36 KILOMETERS in the rain to see this waterfall. Four hours and a couple of mental break downs later, we made it just in time to see the falls before the park closed and managed to catch a tuk tuk back down. They were actually pretty amazing and I wish I could have stayed longer. I jumped off the top of the waterfall into a lagoon and there was a rope swing and all. Exhaustion set in and made for an early night.
The next day Shay and I met back up with Jill, Julianne and Julia to go on this two day elephant trekking tour with an overnight stay in an ecolodge. We rode on the backs of elephants, starting with sitting in carriages with guides on the front, then being allowed to sit on the necks ourselves (which is much, much more uncomfortable than you might think, or at least than I'd imagined), then we were taught some simple commands like 'go', 'stop', 'left' and 'right' which were all pretty much the Thai words for them (Laotian is really close to Thai) and we rode them into this river to 'bathe' them. Bathing the elephants consists of riding them into a river and trying not to fall off of them as the guides command them over and over to dunk their heads and spray you with water. It was a blast. The food they gave us was amazing and our ecolodges were pleasant bungalows with awesome beds and bathrooms that didn't have a roof, which was actually really cool too because the night was clear and warm, and you could see the stars when you showered. We got up early to bathe the elephants again and spent the remainder of the day bamboo rafting, which provided us with some amazing views but it rained the whole time. We left that evening on our bus to Vinh, Vietnam. Twenty hours sat at the back of a bus loaded with Vietnamese people who obviously hated us. We stopped twice for food, once at 3am at a random kitchen where all the white people weren't given meat with our noodles, and once at around noon the next day where all the white people had to pay and the locals didn't--there was a bit of a fiasco over this because some of us hadn't had a chance to exchange money yet. By the time we reached Vinh we all wanted to go home, and what made things worse was that everyone else was heading south, and I was going to have to head to Hanoi by myself. All the ticket salesmen at the bus station didn't pay attention to me because I had four friends also buying tickets together, more money involved with them. I saw buses leaving for Hanoi almost every half hour but I was unsure how to get a hold of one because only a select few people spoke English. I finally got a guy to sell me a ticket at what I knew was a fair price, but the bus driver yelled at me when I paid him the money and the guy didn't give me an actual ticket, he just told me to remember the license plate number of the bus, so I remembered the first three numbers which turned out to be very common, which sucked. My bus was to leave at 10:30, so I had to wait for several hours by myself, with nothing to think about other than the fact that I didn't speak any Vietnamese and that I had a limited amount of money and no bus ticket. When searching for a bathroom at around 9 I ran back into the guys who sold me my bus ticket, and the intentionally put me on the wrong bus, and I knew it. After I saw them leave I got off the bus and ran across the street to the bus I knew was mine, pointed furiously at the square of paper where the man had written down that I'd paid, and huddled in my seat praying that they wouldn't kick me off. I hated Vietnam.
The bus got going and no one said anything to me for the entirety of the ride. We arrived in Hanoi at around 5 am, perfect. I knew the fair price for a ride into town and I caught a motorbike taxi into the old quarter to the lake that I could use as a reference point to find pretty much anything I needed after a few hours of studying a friend's map on the bus. It was still really early when I got there and there were tons of people running and walking around the lake, and even two large-scale aerobics classes going on. It was very amusing and had a calming effect on me after the ordeal I'd just been through. I found the hostel I'd wanted to stay at without any problem, checked in, showered for the first time in days, and slept. I didn't sleep long because people started moving around and stuff, so I got up and decided to explore the town. I visited the Women's Museum and the Hoa Lo Prison Museum, as well as a couple of temples. I also bought a ticket to a traditional water puppet show which I'd learned about in my Southeast Asian Studies class, it was actually really amusing. The more the puppets splashed, the more people clapped, it was great. One of my friends from school was at the same show with her family and she invited me to have breakfast with them at their hotel the next morning before my trip to Halong Bay.
Natasha met me at my hostel early the next morning to walk with me to her hotel. The complimentary breakfast was glorious--pancakes, baguettes, fruit, yogurt, the works. Another guy from my hostel was on the same tour, and we met two other guys on the tour who were from Quebec. We were all amused by the Disney Land style of the caves we were allowed to 'discover' on the tour. It was one of the most touristy things I've ever been on. We all just laughed it off. That night the four of us hung out at the super swanky hotel the Quebec kids were staying at, and the next morning I met back up with my friend from school, Greg Bonney. Neither of us felt much like doing anything, so I wandered around the markets of the town while he napped and that evening we mailed a couple of postcards, hung out by the lake and drank really cheap Beer Hue on a street corner and talked for a while. Our flight back was early the next morning so we turned in fairly early. Then it was back to Bangkok for a hot minute before going down to the islands for the full moon party, another story in and of itself.
