Into the Wild - Down the Mighty Mekong

In planning our trip, one of the things we have to work around is visa requirements that require us to consistently move countries.  Since we wanted to go up north to do all the fun things we've done, the logical route was to go into Laos from northern Thailand after our 15 days were up.  On a map it makes sense, but what we discovered was that northern Laos is very remote and difficult to get around in and there is only one city of note, the difficult-to-say Luang Prabang.  From Chiang Mai, Thailand to Luang Prabang on a map is only 250 miles, but the reality is that we were in for some serious, third-world traveling fun!

In researching the trip, we quickly found out that the main part of the trip would be a two day river trip down the mighty Mekong river through the wilds of Thailand and Laos in cargo ships that had been converted into people carriers.  To say online advice varied is to seriously understate the matter.  The reviews were polar opposites: either this would be the best and coolest thing we'd ever experienced, something straight out of National Geographic, or two long, hot, cramped, terrible days interrupted only by a "Heart of Darkness" style stay in a muddy backwater surrounded by cows and mosquitoes.  Time to find out!

The first leg was a 4 hour trip from Chiang Mai to the Thai-Laos Border.  We were not surprised when our minibus was late and took an hour to get out of Chiang Mai, nor was there much surprise when we stopped at the driver's "cousin's" store for lunch about an hour into the trip.  The surprise was that the store was a dry-processing plant.  Yay!

Surprise number two was when we stopped in a place called Chiang Rai about 45 minutes later.  Chiang Rai is a small, unremarkable city, except for one thing that we were unacquainted with:

Ta-Da!  What a thing to be famous for!

As I had been sleeping directly before seeing this, I thought I must still be dreaming, and it was not a good dream.  This is a functioning Wat, designed by a local "artist" who had a "vision" and then made what he saw.  His vision was something along the lines of "The Divine Comedy:" you have to go through hell to get to heaven, and other things that made absolutely no sense whatsoever.  What a "vision!"  Here's some more fun!

Probably better to not look to close

One of our van-mates.  What fun and interesting people you meet here.  Remember this man.

Behind that craziness was this fun little gem!

Gold house too, 

We also saw "The Predator" on the way out.  Why not?

One more van-mate.  Not related to the other hippie, surprisingly(?).

After that we were back on the road, and made it to the border in only 7 hours.  A new record!  After the crossing, made on these fun crafts:

This is the official way to get from one country to the other.  I'd love to see the unofficial way!

We settled in for our first night in Laos!  Yay!

The next day we made our way down to the docks (muddy bank) to get on the boats.  We'd heard of wooden benches and sitting on the floor of the boat, but we were pleasantly surprised to find car benches attached to 2x4's sitting on the boat.  Expectations exceeded!

These would be our home for the next two days.  Fine crafts they are, too.

Melanie on our fine craft

 

Another day at the "docks"

Permission to come aboard, captain?

After waiting for roughly three hours, and having people crammed into every car bench seat and were underway for day one through the jungle.

Life on the river

A day in the life of a Laotian fisherman.

Life on the banks

 After a few minutes, the late-comers who had been stuck in the engine room came to the front, figuring it was better to be stuck on a hard, wooden floor than with a super loud engine for six hours and started a fine backpackers party.  Guitars broke out, locals joined the fun, and fun was had by all.  The favorite song was, of course, CCR's "Rolling on the River."  It was being sung by a Spaniard, so the accent was fun but that just added to it.

Steve the Pirate was there too!  And some cute kids.

Beautiful

 The main fun on the first day was the tree-hugging, peace-with-the-universe, expose-the-evils-of-American-corporations, weed-smoking, I-worked-for-the-Peace-Corps-until-they-sold-out type of hippie, who was such a walking cliche of the highbrow independent, from Aspen Colorado of course, that it was all I could do to not laugh out loud sometimes.  He was trying WAY to hard to impress the girl from Belgium who was sitting beside him, which led to a three hour nonstop seminar in everything pretentious.  One second he was blabbering about karma being a learning experience, the next about volunteering in Haiti, the next about his documentaries.  At some point I took the below picture hoping to capture him for posterity

I apologize for my glazed-over eyes.  Only so much nonsense I can take.

 and they obliged by photo-bombing us, of course.  Other topics include: eating green, European world views, the evils of Bush and American imperialism (gag), he hit all the required topics to be cool and independent and earthy.  Finally, after 6 hours, day 1 was finished.  A beautiful finish it was too, a fantastic sunset in the jungle.

One of the most beautiful of our trip.  Can you beat this?

We had read we'd be stopping for the night in a tiny, muddy collection of shanties in the middle of the jungle.  I figured we would be sleeping in mud with pigs as roommates while malaria-ridden mosquitoes feast on our flesh, but we were again pleased with what we found.  As the ships can't travel the river after dark, they stop in a town whose only purpose is to act as the halfway point for the boats.  We found a decent restaurant, an air-conditioned room for $7, and food for the next day.  And no pigs for roommates (no jokes required)!  Expectations exceeded again!

What a fine place!

Day two was more beautiful cruising through the jungle, but our vantage point was different.  The boat was the same, but we arrived late, which meant that we got the last spot available, in the kitchen behind the baggage hold in the back of the boat.  Or, since there really aren't any good seats on those boats, you could look at it as an exclusive private cabin with an uninterrupted view and kitchen!

We did have some interesting experiences with the crew, including eating with them (sticky rice, old meat, sausage stored in the guy's pocket, and pickled spinach!  MMMMmmmm! - Brannan only), seeing them nap the day away on the backpacks, and climb on the roof to sunbathe.  But pictures are the best way to describe a life of the river.

The other boat on the river that day, I passed the time pretending we were racing it

Rural Laos

This is a cave where they put the worn-out Buddahs from all over Laos

The other boat goes for the pass!

The final day comes to an end - what a journey!

 The second day was 8 1/2 hours on the boat - ugh!  We were PSYCHED to finally make it into Luang Prabang, with the voyage behind us.  So psyched that we went out to eat at the most expensive place we've eaten at in Asia.  It was worth it, at least for Melanie.  We usually play the "Who has the better meal" game, and she won hands down that time, with a Caesar Salad, thick, perfectly juicy steak with herb butter, and cinnamon ice cream.   

Hail to the victor!

Overall, it was one of those fantastic-yet-awful experiences that I didn't enjoy at the time but am glad that we did.  Turns out all the reviews were right at the same time!

Side note - for some reason this didn't post when I completed it.  Bad news: it's been a while since we had a new post.  Good news: you lucky duckies will be getting two posts in two days when Melanie completes her post about our adventures in Laos and Bangkok (again).  Yay!

More fun in Chiang Mai - including elephants!

Northern Thailand certainly is not lacking for fun things to do. After the Tiger Kingdom and Zorbing the day before, we went zip lining! It was a huge zipline course in the jungle canopy that had 34 lines and some rope bridges, and two places where we were lowered down to a platform on a rope line. SOOOO much fun!

Our guides were really fun and hilarious They would pretend to not catch you at the end of the line, or catch you then fake drop you, they would shake the bridges and pull on the ziplines so you would bob up and down as you zipped across. And they would joke the entire time; one girl asked him how many more lines we had to do and he turned to her with a straight face and said "I don't know, this is my first day." 
What a jokester.

Looking like pirates ready to gear up

Here goes!

Coming in for a landing

 Our adventure was called Flight of the Gibbon because you fly through the trees like a gibbon monkey. We even got to see 3 of them!

Kind of hard to see, but there's a brown one down below the black one in the sunlight

One of the rickety bridges we had to walk across

One of the cool platforms with a spiral staircase

Wheeeee! Here I come!

 One of the lines was called the Superman/Spiderman. They would hook the cord to your back instead of the front so you were zipping down face first. Then when you landed, you had to grab a large net at the end and climb up to the platform. It was really fun, and much less scary than it sounds!

Brannan "Superman" Beasley coming down the line

And now he's Spiderman

At the first rappel point, where they lowered us down onto the next platform by a rope, the guides were fooling around of course. They would drop everyone really fast for a second and then catch the rope so the person would scream thinking they had been dropped. Such jokesters. Well, they did it to Brannan, and the other end of the rope got caught on the tree!  So he was left dangling there for a good 2 or 3 minutes while one of the guys monkeyed halfway up the tree to free the rope. My turn came next and needless to say, he lowered me nice and easy and boring. Some people have all the fun!

You can see the platform below us where we were lowered

Going down!

We had a great time soaring through the tops of the trees like monkeys. We were so high, we rarely saw the ground below, just the tops of more trees!

After zip lining, they fed us lunch and then drove us down the road to see a waterfall. It appeared that the local monastery was on field trip because there were monks everywhere, even some guiding tours of other monks. So we hiked up a little ways to see it.

"And this here is a waterfall"
"Ooooh" click, click

It was hard to get a picture without any monks in it!

It was a long, fun day and everyone slept on the van ride home.

The next day we decided to take it a little easy and go visit some of the wats (temples) in town. Chiang Mai is a lot like the Layton/Kaysville, Utah area.  Except here there are Buddhist temples on every corner instead of LDS stake centers.
We went to see probably close to 10 wats  in a very short walking distance. They are all very similar, dragons at the entrance, gold or glittery glass on the front entrance, and a big Buddha inside.

Done and done

One wat took us by surprise by having wax figures of famous monks (we think) inside. They were so lifelike that everyone entered the wat and made a wide berth around the figures, looking at them out of the corners of their eyes to see if they were real or not. We did it too! It was a little unnerving.

This lady walked up and put her face right in the face of the monk to get a better look. That's when I was fairly sure they were wax figures.

Here's another one sitting with bronze busts... pretty sure it was wax too. Pretty sure.

The next day was Christmas Day! We had found some santa hats at a random street store that appeared to sell every banner or cheap decoration for Christmas and New Years. So of course we wore them all day when we set off to ride elephants!

Merry Christmas!

The Thai people thought the hats were great and would laugh and shout Merry Christmas to us when they saw us.

We booked an elephant training tour where they taught you how to feed the elephants, how to give them commands, how to ride them, and how to wash them. It was a lot of fun to get to learn all these things and be with the elephants all day instead of just an hour ride through the jungle (which you can also do). They also made us wear ridiculous clothes since we would be getting dirty.

Merry Christmas from prison

Our fun crew for the day: A family of French-speaking Swiss, 3 Scotsmen, 2 Argentinians, ourselves playing the part of the crazy Americans in Santa hats, and our guide Mr Bowie. And a partridge in a pear tree.

We got to ride the mama elephant, so the baby followed us around while we rode

 On the drive up, we stopped at a market to buy bananas or pineapples to feed the elephants. We bought some bananas and had a fun time feeding the baby.

More please!

Then it was time for our training session, where we would learn commands (in Thai) for the elephants. Brannan thought that it was pretty sad that elephants knew more Thai words than we did!
First we learned the words to tell them to put their leg up so we could climb up their leg onto their back, and we would say it again when we wanted to get off. Or you could give them a command to put their head down and you could jump up and over their head to get on, but only a couple people tried that!

Then we were able to give them some bananas and say "Yayaa" which means "no more fruit" when it was gone.

After that, we learned how to tell them to turn right, left, reverse, stop and go. We both got on at the same time, sang a round of Jingle Bells from atop our elephants, and then carried on with giving them the commands.

Turn left ... "Saai"

Turn right... "Kwaw"

 Stop was "yood", reverse was "toy" and go was "baai". The elephants were very smart and could understand our accents very well.
After that, we had some lunch before we went for our rides.

Christmas Dinner... God bless us, every one!

Then it was time for the rides! We led our elephants down to a mud pit to give them a mud bath. They are similar to pigs in many ways: they felt like pigs, very bristly and rough skin, and they love mud! It helps keep them cool and keeps the bugs off.

But pretty soon, the inevitable mud fight broke out. By the end, all the elephants were out of the mud pit and there were only dirty people left in there!

All the elephants gathered around thinking "Puh-lease. Grow up..."

 Then we were off again down to the river to rinse them off (and us).

The elephants loved the water. We had buckets and just threw water all over them. The baby was hilarious because the water was deep enough that he could lay down in it and be completely covered. He would lay down on his side and disappear, and stick his trunk out of the water, then flip over and swim circles with his nose out. So funny! He was rolling around with his feet sticking up out of the water and jumping out and diving back in. It was like watching an excited little puppy.

All clean! Mostly

Such a fun day! Brannan even got a kiss by one of the elephants. She would stick her trunk on your cheek and suction so it would kiss you. She had to be coaxed to kiss the other kids, the trainer had to pull her trunk over. But Brannan walked over and all of a sudden she was so eager! She planted a big wet one on him.

Coming in for a smooch!

We certainly had a memorable Christmas! One that will be hard to top, I'm sure. 

Merry Christmas!