Laos, the land of a million elephants

Well, we haven't actually seen any elephants, so like many things in this part of the world, it's a bit of false advertising. But we have seen some incredible things and given the wonderfully warm and honest people here, I'll assume that I'm either blind or haven't looked hard enough. Chang Mai was great and we had a blast doing our cooking course, though I'm quite worried about my new ability to make spring rolls. This could be seriously hazardous to my health. One highlight of Chang Mai is the night market. This frenetic zoo of shops and stalls crammed together with barely enough room for passage is a place where one can lose a lot of money along with their sanity. You can buy pretty much anything, but in order to keep your arm and part of your leg, you have to bargain hard. More to the point, you have to be a real asshole. Unfortunate reality.

Next to this, Laos sits in stark contrast. Walking through the night market in Luang Prabang, I was blown away by how open it was. How friendly the people are and how they aren't hell bent on squeezing every last penny from you. You almost don't have the heart to barter. And it's not just in the market. All around, the people are so honest and happy and beautiful. Travelling in Thailand, you have to keep your guard up all the time, but in Laos, it's much different. And you can feel it in the atmosphere. It's easier to breathe here.

In Luang Prabang, we hired our very own boat and driver to take us up the Mekong river to the Pak Ou caves. The first of these spectacular caves has it's entrance right on the waters of the river. Both caves are stacked with old dilapidated buddha images. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of all shapes and sizes and in all states of disrepair.

But as beautiful and impressive as the caves were, the most amazing part of the day was the trip up the river. This was our introduction to the mighty Mekong who's muddy waters span a couple hundred meters at this point. As our slow boat meandered back and forth up the river, moving at a pace that seems natural and proper, we were treated to some incredible snapshots of life along the Mekong. From the brown of the water and the shore, through the lush green of the surrounding jungle and mountains, to the brilliant blue of the cloudless sky, the specturm of colours seemed so complete. And all along, we passed beautiful images of everyday life. Naked children bathing and playing in the water. Fisherman casting their nets. Farmers tending the crops that sit crammed between the banks and the river. Men tending their boats. Everything was so amazing and exotically pedestrian that we were going through film like it was water. Everywhere you look, you see a photo waiting to me taken. The whole country is a photographers wet dream.

However, that dream turned into a nightmare for me yesterday when I realized the cause of the funny noise my camera has been making for quite some time. Seems that somehow, the shutter got messed up and when I've been taking pictures, it hasn't been opening. In short, all of my photos, maybe back as far as Nepal, are likely crap. This was a pretty heartbreaking realization to make, but I'm trying not to let it get me down. On the bright side, I'll have much less to bore you all with when I get back ....

We're in Vang Vieng now and we spent today tubing down the river. For $2.50 US, you can rent a tube and get a tuk tuk ride 4 km up the river. From there, you just hop into the slowly moving river and float away. So peaceful and relaxing, sitting there watching the jungle and the limestone monoliths, for which this area is famous, pass quitely by. But the most beautiful thing is that every hundred yards or so, you can pull off to the side of the river to where some enterprising local will sell you an ice cold, 650ml Beerlao for 80 cents US. And once you've had a rest or had your fill of diving off platforms and swinging off ropes into the river, you and your beer can just hop onto your tube and float on. A brilliant way to pass a gorgeous sunny day.

But alas, time is short and we'll be heading back towards Thailand tomorrow. I wish we had time to explore Laos more completely. I've really fallen in love with this country. From the people to the scenery, it truely amazes me. It reminds me a bit of Nepal, in that it feels like a backwater. Like it is just quietly ignoring the rest of this crazy world. A great place to be when one is trying to do the same.

Take care and I'll talk to you soon,

Justin

Dangers of Jogging in Chang Mai

Aiden and I are hanging out in Chang Mai, in the north of Thailand, where we just finished our second of three days of Thai cooking courses. Yesterday, we ate so much food that I couldn't eat until the next morning. This continuation of the blatant gluttony that has been our time in Thailand (as Dr. Nick put it, "a slow gorging process followed by assal horizontology") was already getting to me and the course pushed me over the edge. So when I was woken up this morning to the sounds of barking dogs, crowing chickens, and fireworks, I decided that I needed to go for a jog.

Heading out of the guesthouse, things were going well until I reached the end of the alleyway. At that point, I was introduced to the first of the many obstacles I was to face. Traffic. Bikes and cars seemed to fill every inch of road, and most of the sidewalk, while more poured out of each little side street. It was not chaos on the scale of what I saw in Phnom Pehn, but it was still a royal pain trying to get around. With my current physical condition, I could use the odd break, but it would have been nice if I could have kept moving for at least half a block.

The old part of Chang Mai is surrounded by a moat and I was finally able to make my way to it, then hop across the road frogger style. From here, I thought the large sidewalk would afford a decent path for my run. Wrong again. A few paces along this road, I ran into another obstacle in the form of street vendours who seem not to have understood the "walk" part of "sidewalk". This drove me back into the road where I had to skip between clear pieces of sidewalk, parked motorbikes, and oncoming traffic . At the same time, I was being introduced to another obstacle for which most of you will have little sympathy, the heat. At such an early hour, this was a lot for my tired brain to deal with, especially the fact that these people are all confused as to which side of the road they should be driving on. I still cannot get used to the logic of traffic on the left hand side of the road. The amazing "success" of English colonialism has afforded me the ability to travel to almost any country in the world and expect everyone to speak the same language as me. So I guess I shouldn't complain too much about this other side product. At least I think it's their fault. I'll blame them anyway .....

I eventually stumbled upon a nice little park with nice little ponds in the middle and a nice little paved track that I could run around like a nice little gerbal. The Thai radio blaring from speakers all around did little to dampen my relief and I set about trying to work off the spring rolls from the day before. Thinking I was home free, I settled into a pace and receeded into my own little world. This trance was broken when I nearly ran headlong into a pair of people standing still in the middle of the track. My surprise was compounded when I looked up to see that everyone in the park was stopped and seemed to be paying silent respect to a tune playing over the loudspeaker. I quickly surmised that I had just commited a cultural faux pas of unknown proportions. Once things got moving again, I figured I should cut my losses and do the same before an angry mob formed. On my way home, I had to deal with the same melee and accidentally bumped into a Thai woman as I was jumping to pass a motorbike. My horribly feeble attempts to say "sorry" in Thai didn't go over so well, and this reinforced my desire to get home fast. Returning to the safety of our guesthouse, I decided that I'll just have to accept my path towards obescity. Hey, I tried.

Sorry for this very pedestrian story, but I felt the erge to share. On a more interesting note, Aiden and I have been learning TONS about cooking Thai food these last couple of days, so I should be able to repay you by cooking up a storm when I get back. If anyone is looking for a housewife, I'll be accepting offers for the next 30 days.

Take care,

Justin

Full Moon Fever

It’s been a while since I sent one of the messages, so I thought I should let you all know that we survived the Full Moon party. We'd arrived well in advance and settled into life on the island. As the day of the party approached, everything continued to build. Boats crammed full of people arrived continually, the sight of people with backpacks wandering the street looking for a home became ever more common, the restaurants and bars got busier, and the buckets got more and more expensive. We killed the days mainly by sleeping late and lying on the beach. No more trips to the hospital and my good friend the taxi driver didn't seem to recognize me. Somehow, we'd had the date wrong so we were surprised to find out that the party was upon us one day early.

Full Moon on Hat Rin. This is something that is quite beyond my ability to describe. We'd spent most of the preceeding nights out on the beach and the bars had been pretty busy by any other standard. But when we walked out onto the beach that night, it was a completely different story. The entire beach, from end to end, was one mass of people. Every bar along the strip, most of which had been empty the night before, was packed with partiers. Music of every variety, from top 40 to Jungle was pounding out at you as you worked your way through the crowd of people, all in various states of intoxication, that poured out of each establishment. A massive strobe light shone like the sun from the south end of the beach. Vendours of every sort, most selling drinks, crowded the top of the beach. The water just off shore was full of boats floating and swaying in the waves, bringing more partiers or waiting to take them away. With all the people and the 10 baht charge for using the toilet, the ocean had unfortunately become a very large urnal in which, strangely, a large number of people still found room to dance in the waves. And over all of this, the full moon shone so brightly that it seemed to be focusing directly on this place.

The party went on all night, and as it did, some of the people and the scenes you witness got stranger and stranger. People in all states of dress and undress. Overweight farang (foreigner) guys, in their underwear, grinding to the music with Thai "lady boys". The whole atmosphere was like something out of a movie and has to be experienced to be understood. As the sun came up and shed daylight on the festivites, it did little to dim the enthuisam. Walking home, the crowd was thinner than it had been, but it was still impossible to walk a straight line down the beach. For some, the beach had become a bed, but for others the sun was just a change of scenery. I'm told that things kept going well into the day and I don't doubt it. When I crashed, watching the moon turn red with the imminent lunar eclipse, the party showed no signs of letting up.

After the party, and the after party, and the after after party were finished, Hat Rin began to empty. We left as well, heading to a beautiful beach on the north west side of the island to recover in the sun and the brilliant blue waters. Doing little more than eating great food, lying on the beach, swimming, swaying in a hammock, and sleeping, it was a welcome change. However, we've now left that island paradise and I'm now sitting, once again, in Bangkok. Arrived on a night train this morning and we'll be leaving on another one this evening to head farther north. Back in motion.

OK, take care and keep your sticks on the ice,

Justin

Challenging the laws of Karma

Well, Aiden and I have left Cambodia and after a very short stay in Bangkok, we're settling in on Koh Pha Ngan, an island in southern Thailand. We're staying at Hat Rin awaiting the famous, or infamous depending on your perspective, full moon party coming up shortly. Just to give you an idea of the number of people who will show up here, the entire island has accomodations for roughly 3000 people. These quickly fill up in the days before and the day of the party, they expect around 8000 people! However you do the math, that's going to add up to a big mess. Getting introduced to drinking from a bucket (filled with Thai whiskey, Red Bull, and Coke) and spending our days realxing on the beach. Just to make everyone in cooler climes feel less annoyed at us, I'll let you know that we were greeted on the island by a torrential downpour. We're actually in the monsoon here, but it's cleared up for us the last couple of days and we're trying to make the most of it.

The reason I'm writing to you here is not to brag about sun and beautiful blue tropical water. It's to relate the strange events of last night. This is a pretty long story, but I'll try to keep it as short as possible. Hopefully it's worth the effort.

The evening started out pretty well when Aiden and I ran into Debbie, a friend of Haleigh's from Smithers. Seems that the whole world is converging on this beach for the full moon party, so coincidence has become the order of the day. Down along the main beach, all the clubs set out carpets and low tables in front of their establishments where people congregate as the evening gets late. We were sitting, enjoying a bucket, getting to know Debbies friends, and generally having a good time. The stars were out, the waves were rolling in, the bar's staff was putting on an amazing fire dancing performance, and we were really enjoying ourselves. That's when things went sideways.

I felt a tap on my shoulder and looked up to see Matt, Debbie's friend from Seattle, beckoning for me to follow him. Not thinking much of it, I got up, leaving my shoes, and followed him. As I catch up to him, he tells me that there's a girl lying face down on the beach in a pretty rough state. They've been able to determine that she's Canadian, so the logic of the night was that they should grab the nearest Canuck to sort this all out. By the time I arrived, there was another Vancouverite named Adam, a fellow we shall get to know better, already assisting.

Really, there was not much assisiting to do. Someone had the sense to lay her in the proper position so that she could vomit without concern for asphxiation, but beyond that, everyone was pretty much just staring. There were a couple of girls there as well who were trying to find out from this girl what had happened to her. She was barely responsive and starting to get cold, but none of use were sure what to do. We had no idea how she got there, or what it was that got her there, so it was hard to say whether she needed a quiet place to sleep it off or if she really needed medical attention. We eventually got her up, Adam under one arm and myself under the other, and did the six-legged shuffle up the beach to where someone thought there was a nurses station.

When we got there, the glorified pharmacy wanted nothing to do with her. They told us that there was a clinic or hospital 2 km away and sent us on our way. The girl, whose name we had now determined (let's call her Jane), had become responsive enough to shower our feet with vomit, but that was about it. Again, we were not sure what to do, but when her eyes started to roll back in here head, we thought better safe than sorry and called for a taxi to take us to the hospital.

At this point, we figured we would just run her a few kilometers to the hospital, make sure she was OK, and be back before the ice melted in our drinks. So Adam, Matt, and I hopped into the back of the pickup with Jane and headed off. A short while later, we realized that we had gone much more than 2 km and that we were headed, at breakneck speed, along the perilously steep road to the main hospital on the other side of the island. The ride there was an adventure in itself and probably more of threat to Jane's well being that the state she was in. However, we made it safe and sound, brought her into the hospital, made sure she was OK, left some money for her to get home in the morning, and figured we would head home. Having done our good deed for the day, we thought we would ride wave of good karma back to Hat Rin. How wrong we were.

Our taxi driver was waiting outside for us and as we approached he demanded that we pay him 1500 baht for the trip there and to get us back. This was absolute extortion and we told him so. The normal rate is 50 baht per person. He quickly lost interest in taking us back to Hat Rin, but said we had to pay him 1000 baht just for the ride there. He knew he had us between a rock and a hard place, but we steadfastly ignored our situation and refused to pay the stupid sum he was asking. After a few minutes of unsuccessful bartering, he got in his pickup and drove off, leaving us stranded and barefoot on the wrong side of the island. Things were not looking good for our heros.

Going back to the hospital, the nurses said there was no way to call a taxi. However, one very kind nurse offered to drive us the 3 km south to the town where we could get a taxi. Very greatful for this offer, we hopped in the back of her truck and headed towards town. At the end of the driveway, we passed our good friend who's plan to force the money out of us was being foiled. He followed us into town, but we lost him shortly.

Unfortunately, town was not quite the salvation we were looking for. After saying goodbye to the nurse, we found ourselves alone and barefoot on the dark, deserted streets of a very unfamiliar Thai town. The locals were somewhat helpful. A bunch of guys sitting around in a garage declined to drive us home, but offered us a drink. We passed and after talking to some more people and stumbling around for a while, we finally arrived at an open 7-11 (yes, they have them here too) where several taxi's awaited. With some concern for what we would hear, we asked how much it would cost to get back to Hat Rin. We were surprised and relieved when the taxi driver told us 50 baht each.

So there we were, finally saved, with the finish line in site. Given the way things had been going, the smart thing would have been to hop in that truck and get the hell out of there. But no, that would have been much too easy now wouldn't it? Instead, we descided to head into 7-11 to get a road pop and when we returned, guess who was waiting with the other taxi driver? We hopped in the back of the taxi to go, but since our good friend had arrived, our new driver would not budge.

What followed was a half hour staring match that went from annoying, to boring, to scary, and back again. We tried to bargain, tried to talk sense, tried everything, but this guy would not budge. Even the other taxi drivers were getting annoyed with him. But he said 1000 baht or you walk to Hat Rin. Now, we're not really talking about a tremendous amount of money, but after what we'd been through, with our distain for this clown, and just on principle, we were as stubborn as he was. So eventually, we hopped out and started to walk.

Looking ahead to the 3 hour stroll we had in front of us, we quickly doubled back hoping our friend would be gone and we would be able to get a ride. However, we found that all the others had left. As our friend was coming over to have another incredibly fruitful discussion, a farang (foreigner) drove by on a bike. We had a quick chat with him, passing on the condensed version of the night's events. He said that he couldn't take us to Hat Rin, but that his friend could give us a ride in the back of his pickup to the party they were destined for. The party was actually in the exact opposite direction from where we wanted to go, but at that point, any chance for escape was welcome. So off we went north towards this party. Sitting in the back of a pickup driven by a guy I didn't know from a hole in the ground, sitting next to two guys I'd known for the length of this story, and heading off to some remote beach party, all I could think was "how the hell did this happen?" But by then, I was just rolling with the punches and trying to enjoy it.

When the truck stopped, we could hear the pounding bass pouring down the hill from the party. The greasy guy from the passenger seat, with a Thai girl in his arm, infomed us that "Up there man, you can get ANYTHING you want." With a quick nod and a "Gee, that sounds nice", we booked it straight for what appeared to be a taxi sitting on the side of the road. After rousing the driver who was sleeping in a hammock in the back and arranging a reasonable fare, we hopped into one more pickup truck. We gave the guy explicit instructions that he not stop for anything, then lay down on the floor of the truck bed to keep out of sight and headed for home.

In complete contempt for the theme of the night, we actually made it back. And even more surpising, our shoes were still where we had left them! So maybe the winds of karma just take a little while to turn. At least I got a good story out of it, much better than I would have if I'd just spent the night on the beach. From Aiden's perspective, I had just gotten up with Matt and disappeared. I guess there had been several very colourful conjectures about what we might have gotten up to, but as usual, truth is stranger than fiction.

Keeping with this theme of strangeness, we met Jane and her friends today, all of whom are from Vancouver. It turns out that Jane recognized Aiden from UBC and that she had lived in residence there. Between the 5 of us, there were a lot of common aquaintances. We tried to piece together what had happened the night before. Jane's friends had similar experiences, so we think that someone slipped something into their drinks. However, they had just "broken out" of a 10 day meditation retreat 5 days early, so maybe this was the fruit of the karma created there. All very strange, all very confusing, but all good in the end. I just need to lay low for a few days and avoid my good friend .......

Alright, if anyone actually got through this, you're a better person than I. Take care and I hope all is well.

Justin