Floating Out Of Laos And Into Thailand
Monday, 9th January, Roong Ruong Hotel, Chiang Mai, Thailand
So our last day in Luang Prabang involved numerous encounters with crazy people. We spent most of the day just walking back and forth along the main street, helping Jen find some gifts for friends at home. James and I were too tired to be bothered doing anything too intense, so wandering the streets was an enjoyable way to pass the day.
The first crazy person was our old favourite, Crazy Beggar Guy . He’s a really, really tall Laos guy who always wears a conical hat, has about three teeth and appears out of nowhere, thrusting his shaking hand out at you for money. And he wears a skirt. Well, sarong, but it’s a skirt when he wears it. He walks up and down the street, sometimes with money clasped in his hand, but more often than not with nothing. Now the running joke with this fella (aside from his appearing from nowhere like the Cheshire Cat) is that Jen kept trying to give him things, and he kept giving them back to her. First, she gave him 1000 Kip, which is small but nothing to scoff, and he looked at it and gave it back to her. Second, she tried to give him a packet of peanuts, and again he gave them back to her. James, in all his old and wise maturity, took to saying “Jen! It’s your friend!” whenever the Crazy Beggar Guy was around, making her turn around and then she’d jump. So Crazy Beggar Guy sightings became funny and exciting, rather than scary. Because he is quite scary.
The second crazy person was Funky Ice-Cream Vendor Guy, who is this old guy on a bicycle who travels the streets of Luang Prabang with home-made ice-creams on the back of his bike. When he sees tourists, he slams on his brakes and declares, “Madam, Monsieur! I have ice-cream for you!!”. He’s fabulously colourful, and has a huge smile that lightens up any weary travellers day. But his ice-cream tastes awful. James’ was okay, but Jen’s and mine was terrible, and we ended up throwing it away. We figured our money (they were only 1000 Kip each) was like a donation to him for entertaining us so.
The third crazy person was Voices In Her Head Girl. This girl was about seven, and she ran up to us on the street and just…started talking. It was very strange. She said “Where are you going?” in a strange English-like accent, even though she was Australian. She had curly blonde hair, and a sparkling face. She walked with us whenever we tried to get away, so we stayed to chat for awhile. She had a friend, a Vietnamese girl, who showed Jen a photo album, then ran off without getting the pictures back. The Australian girl was being looked after by the couple who owned the guest house she was at, and they looked as bemused by her as we were. Have I mentioned she was crazy yet? Well she was. Completely and utterly insane. She needed medication. And fast! It started with her yelling “Daughter! Where’s daughter??” and then she ran off and came out with a creepy rag-doll with no nose. The girl spoke to us, occasionally stopping to tell her doll to “stop screaming.” Then she kept getting phone calls (from her Game-Boy), and she spoke in a fictional language for an extraordinarily long time. I whispered to Jen “This girl has seriously got voices in her head!”. There’s a line between playing, and being nuts, and this girl was nuts. The Laos couple just kind of laughed awkwardly and gave us knowing looks, and I felt very sorry for them having been saddled with this…um…“creative” and “imaginative” child. Then suddenly this woman walked up, and she was really young and casual (about mid to late 20s), and she was like “hey.” The girl barely acknowledged her, and the woman was standing there for some time before we realised she was the mother. She didn’t ask why we there, she didn’t talk about how socially extroverted her daughter was, she just stood with her hands in her pockets and a glazed expression on her face, like she’d just come from an opium den somewhere. We ended up telling her that her daughter had come up to us and just started talking, and the woman was so indifferent, suddenly I just felt really sorry for the girl, being dragged around Laos when she was clearly bored and starved of attention. The mother said they’d just spent two weeks in a minority village, and I thought “No wonder she’s got voices in her head! It’s the only company she probably has!!”. I don’t want to sound like I’m judging the woman’s parenting skills, but boy was she lifeless and drug-fucked. It was quite sad. And so, while the girl chattered away in her secret language, we made our escape, feeling a little depressed but still amused by the kid’s antics.
The other great thing we saw (aside from a guy who looked like he’d come to Laos to pass some time before the WWE show in Bangkok at the end of Jan) was The Cutest Kid in Asia, a boy about 1 year old, wearing a baby Beer Laos shirt and a hill-tribe hat. He was adorable, and we took so many photos as his family crooned and fussed over him to make him look good for our photos. Then James showed him the screen of the camera, and as soon as the kid saw himself on the screen he started trying playing with the camera, which Jen has a great photo of.
But then evening came, Jen left for her bus trip back, and James and I were alone again. Kareem had left early that morning, so James and I retired early-ish, knowing that we had to get up early the next morning for the 2 day slow boat trip to Thailand.
Except the next morning James was feeling really sick, and then he was throwing up, but thankfully only the once. We got on the boat, and he dozed all day. I read. The boat was great. We’d heard such horror stories about it, but the seats were old car seats (at least the first few were, so you had to be in early, or you got a plastic chair at the back), and it wasn’t crowded at all. So I think the Thailand-Laos boat is way worse than the Laos-Thailand boat, as all the horror stories I’d heard had been from people going from Thailand into Laos.
The boat trip itself was uneventful. Pleasant scenery, painfully slow travel, occasional roaring past of stupidly fast speedboats, etc. I really just read. The morning was freezing, though, and everyone had to get really rugged up, and it didn’t really warm up until the evening. We arrived in Pakbeng, the halfway point, around 5:30/6. It was a dirt road, a few filthy guesthouses and one nice clean one. We stayed in the nice clean one. No hot water in Pakbeng, and electricity only between 6pm and 10pm. Suffice to say we weren’t tempted to stay more than one night.
The next morning James was heaps better and the boat was heaps worse. The nice boat only goes from Luang Prabang to Pakbeng and back again. This boat was hard wooden seats that were so narrow only one butt-cheek could fit on them, but we did get a bench each, so we could spread out a little. Again, nice scenery, we just read most of the time. Oh, our mp3 player broke the day earlier, so we had no music either. So it was quite boring. But eventually we arrived in the border town for Laos, where we had to spend a night before catching a taxi in the morning across to Thailand. So again we slept, then got up to make the final overland leg of our journey into Thailand.
We ferried across with another couple who had been on our boat with us (a Dutch couple and a German couple). When I stepped off the boat I did a jig and said “Yay! Thailand!”. It was very cool being able to turn back and wave to Laos, wave to Thailand, etc. The border crossing itself was anticlimactic, although the guy working there yelled at me for saying “hello” wrong and I got scared. The German couple, Iris and Toby, came on the minivan with us, which was a great trip. There were only six of us in the bus, and it was air-conditioned, and we travelled at a great pace. The other two were an Israeli guy who was really talkative and nice, and a Danish guy who was equally nice but less talkative. We made two stops. First was at a conveniently placed cashew factory, where we watched the painstaking labour involved with getting cashews (I understand the high price now!) and we also sampled a range of flavoured cashews. They had everything from chocolate, to spicy, to butter, but we ended up buying coconut cashews. Yum! Everybody bought a packet, but our problem was that we didn’t have any Baht, so we had to get it on credit. The limit mysteriously went from 250 Baht to 350 Baht, but we said “wasn’t it 250 Baht before?” and the girl was like “yeah, yeah, okay 250.” We were both like “yes! Caught you sneaky little price-jumper woman!”. She was just trying to get us buy more cashews, but we caught her!
The second stop was bit more…unexpected. About two minutes from the cashew stop, I felt my…uh…bowels rumble. A sweat broke out on my forehead and I said to James, “Oh no, I’m not good.” I waited for a long time, about an hour, trying to make it to Chiang Mai, but then suddenly I knew I just couldn’t. I got the Israeli guy to tell the driver “next toilet, urgent!”. The next toilet turned out to be at a police station, and everyone scrambled out of my way and the officers helped me find the loo. They were really nice! The toilets and the policemen. Everyone was very understanding, but it was very weird knowing that everyone was outside waiting for me to finish my “business.”
We got into Chiang Mai around 4, wandered around, found a nice hotel just off the main street, and then met Iris and Tobias at 7 for dinner. We were going to go see King Kong as well, but time was against us, so we just ate and chatted until about midnight. We drank at a bar that was set up at a random spot on the street, and were halfway through our drinks when a student protest began against the signing of an FTA between Thailand and China. There were about fifteen students, some of whom were Muslim, and they were planning an six-hour protest. A little action is better than no action, and at least they could even think about protesting, unlike in Laos or Vietnam, where the slightest thought against any government principles would involve police intervention.
Oh, I should say something about Thailand as well. It’s great. I like it a lot. I like it a lot, a lot, a lot. In fact, I love it. There’s so much life and spirit here, and the people are wonderful. There are markets everywhere, and people busking with traditional music and instruments. And there’s franchises again! Yay! I never thought I’d be happy to see a franchise, but it’s nice seeing an old bit of home in a foreign country. Or something. Okay, maybe we just spent too long in communist countries. But Thailand is incredible. We’re going to wander around Chiang Mai today and then do an elephant trek tomorrow. And we’re going to buy James a new camera lens. And eat. Lots and lots and lots of Thai food.