It’s time again.Time for me to finally sit down again with the purpose of writing down a story I hope to never forget. This time I’ll take you somewhere new. We will venture back to the border of Laos and Thailand. We were in the north of Thailand in the hippie village of Pai, our 30 day visas just on the verge of expiration. We have a few options. I was traveling with Natalie, whom will appear in a lot of my stories because we traveled together for the majority of my time in Asia. We had arranged via facebook to meet, for the first time, in Bangkok. Ah, the power of the internet. I loved to tell everyone we met that we had, “Met online, through a dating website...Yes we are in love.”I don’t think she liked that line. Anyways, we had booked our exit ticket together before meeting. (As you are supposed to have proof of exit when entering the country on a tourist visa, I was never asked to prove it though.) So sitting in rooms on opposite sides of the room, facetiming for the first time, we booked tickets for 30 days after arriving in Bangkok on a plane to Myanmar.
With those tickets being pre-booked our options were then, to leave Pai back to Bangkok and onto our flight according to the plan we made before knowing what we would even be getting ourselves into. Sounds exciting, a new mysterious place with new mysterious people.Or we could join our new friends on the boat ride from the edge of Thailand up the Mekong River to the Laotian town of Luang Prabang, a sure fire good time. Or of course we could draw a wild card, spin a globe, place our finger and say, “Here! We will go here.” All of the options had the amazing potential of throwing caution to the wind and seeing how all the new pieces lay out at our feet, all would be new and adventurous with so much of the glorious unknown I love so much. How to decide, how to decide? A few nights out in Pai dancing with strangers who became friends and a few mornings in lazy hammocks and bamboo bunk bed huts,convinced us we had a really good thing going with our new friends who were headed to the east, so what the hell let’s go! Laos, here we come.
There are two boat options from Thailand to Laos. First, the slow boat, a casual two day boat ride, down the mekong with a night stop in a river village. A long journey which cuts into your travel time once you arrive, but a lot lower risk than our second option. Second option, the speed boat, which is; you strapped into a life jacket and helmet (yes, a helmet) sitting on the bottom of a small thin boat, clutching your bag flying up the river as fast the boat can manage. This option results in you getting there significantly faster, or in death. Weigh out those odds if you like. Decision? We will take the slow boat. Like they always say “ Life moves fast, slow down and smell the water buffalo.” Don’t they?
Picture of one of the slow boats. Natalie took this photo not me.
To get to the boats you have to go through the interesting procedure of crossing the border. Ours began with a mini bus ride down the curvy mountain roads from Pai, one that had a strange amount of stops along the way, picking people up, bathroom breaks, drug deals(?), obviously strategic stops at a little restaurant or roadside snack shack where you can conveniently pay for something like a whole watermelon to chop up and share with your friends as you try to make a quick recovery from car sickness before you have to get back in.
We are all just trying to get some sleep, and if you have ever been in any sort of vehicle in South East Asia you know that it is a remarkable thing to accomplish, if you ever do. Never been through that, let me attempt to explain. Imagine this, you are crammed into a 15 passenger van, is there only 15 people in there? Only god knows. Is there air conditioning? Only god and maybe one lucky passenger with a working vent knows. (expect for the rare occasion when the aircon does work and it’s turned on full blast 100% of the time, in which case, be sure to pack your winter coat. The options are only the extremes.) You fly around corners and through intersections at what must be the speed of light, you and all the luggage flying with it, from one side of the car to the other. Wheels screeching, stomachs turning, prayers shouted to any god who might be listening. The traffic rules are unclear, except one, use your horn ALWAYS. Use it if your are turning, use it if you are stopping, or not stopping, if you are going to hit someone or they are about to hit you, if you just feel like it, always use your horn. So do you sleep while being thrown left, right, left right, forward, whiplash back, rag doll in a hot, loud, cramped car while luggage is falling on top of you? You’ll figure it out.
This particular ride had all of these lovely luxuries. The road to and from Pai is exceptionally curvy and the pit-stops especially shady. Everyone from our group had booked tickets as people had decided that they were going, so we ended up on a few different mini buses but would catch up over slices of watermelon, popsicles and soda.
Almost everyone decked out in bandages and casts from their accidents from the ever popular scooter accident, especially popular in Pai, multiple people we had seen days before were now on crutches or had casts covering at least one major appendage. Battle stories were shared across the wooden picnic tables before climbing back into our metal carriages. With hours still ahead all stops started becoming more annoying. So when at 1 or 2 am we pulled into a mystery parking lot we weren’t even thinking about getting off the bus. That is until our driver yelled at us telling us to get off and be back in 1 hour. What on earth were we doing here? We wandered into a strange, smoky room where everything seemed to be covered in pink plush. A woman escorts us through the strange fluffy room filled with old men looking out of place and strange, to a set of stairs, at the top tables chairs and menus were accompanied by a lovely Thai man singing covers of American songs. He was doing an very impressive job with it but was slightly overshadowed by the humor found in the fact that most of the ‘words’ he was using weren’t words at all. He had obviously learned by ear (extremely impressive) but had never known the actual words, just the noises which resulted in most of the lyrics being strange nonsensical sentences that left me and natalie rolling in our chairs trying and failing to control our giggles. Who cares about the food, the music was the star of this evening. (This place also had one of the nicest, best smelling bathrooms I ever used in Asia. Enough so that all this time later it still vivid in my memory, that is a nice bathroom...)
Some songs were more understandable than others.
This is one of the best
Flirting with Natalie at dinner.
A few hours more on or bus we arrive at the place where we will spend the night. It was the dead of night, a sketchy, small, very yellow and what appeared to be a completely deserted motel. Our driver, Nat and I were the only souls in sight only because we were the last to arrive. There were about 5 rooms designated for renting out for the night. Likely only for those waiting to do border crossing in the same manner as us.
We were told to be up early for complimentary breakfast (oh la luxury) and to grab the necessary supplies for the next day. Sleep came over us very quickly after a very tired over look of our room; made up of a very lumpy king size mattress, a old tv stand with nothing on it or in it, and a bathroom with a light so bright your eyes shriveled in your skull as it came buzzing to life. Only the next night did we find out we maybe should have done a more thorough examination. One of our friends Jay told us he had spent the night on the floor because his bed had bedbugs.
Classic crappy instant coffee and accompanying strange egg sandwiches were passed around while everyone pulled out their large wads of cash and tiny square mugshots needed to get the visa for Laos. As it turns out all of our friends who had booked separately had all also ended up in Motel Yellow.
I’m writing this as a journal, and maybe I drone on a bit too much sometimes, but there are so many details I do not want to forget. Since this is longer than expected, for the ease of reading I suppose I will break this post into 2 different parts. And so ends PART 1
(I don't have many pictures from this part of the story, so you can try to use your imagination for the majority)
