Angkor Wat: Wherein I visit temples and get food poisoning

Dec. 26

We left for Angkor Wat at 8:30 in the morning. Chhuon pulled up right on time and I somehow managed to be ready by 8:30, although without breakfast or coffee. I figured that I'd run into someone selling cans of iced Nescafe at the temple. But Chhuon took my question about whether there'd be people selling drinks there as an opportunity to get me to eat breakfast at one of the restaurants across the street from the moat. They were somehow out of toast, so I had pork fried rice with vegetables. While eating, I made what might have been a mistake by asking Chhuon about eating water snake. He said that it is possible, and then he went on about how cobra, or Drago, as he called it, is a delicacy for the very rich, at about $40 per kilo. And he casually mentioned that, while eating a water snake, one will occasionally come upon an egg and just eat right through it. I don't really know if he meant a snake egg or an undigested bird egg, but either way it freaked me out a little bit. And after I'd brought up water snake, attempting to get me to eat it became a major theme of our relationship, right alongside trying to get me to go see some dancing that I'm pretty sure would look like this to me.

There's not much I can say about Angkor Wat that will do it justice, except that it's enormous, and I think that if you want to be technical about its boundaries, there are people living in a shantytown, some of them apparently Buddhist mystics, inside the southern wall. Also the balloon.

From SEA 3

We then went to Angkor Thom (which is much less imposingly named, but still pretty cool), including Bayon, Phimeanakas, the Royal Palace, and the rest of it.  Then I ate lunch, took a few pictures by the southern wall of Angkor Thom and fed a village of monkeys some bananas.  

From SEA 3

We got back to the hotel at two, I sat by the pool for a minute, and at three Chhuon picked me up to go to Tonle Sap (Tonle Sap means "freshwater lake").

On the way to the lake there are rows of open air hut bars built hanging over the rice marshes.  Instead of tables, they have hammocks.  I asked Chhuon if the hammocks were a sort of motel.  But it turns out that these places are Cambodian night clubs.  Men will lay in these dirty hammocks, drinking, and pretty cocktail waitresses walk around replenishing them.  So, if I ever disappear, look for me in a hammock on the road to Tonle Sap.

I took a boat around the floating villages, where it is completely unremarkable to see a young child rowing himself somewhere in an upside down trash can lid.

From SEA 3

 These kids washed their helper monkey in the lake 

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and scenes like this allowed me to get mildly grifted.

From SEA 3

Then I climbed the hill next to Tonle Sap and watched an amazing sunset from the wat there.

From SEA 3

Back in town, I went to eat at Soup Dragon.  A bite into the meal, I realized that I was getting sick.  Even though I was starving, I suddenly had no appetite.  I got the meal wrapped up and walked to a corner where I'd seen a few beggars the night before.  After I gave my bag to the first woman there, the woman next to her began yelling at me.  She was right--unlike the first woman, her child wasn't just hungry, he was hungry and severely deformed.  My meal had been stir fried duck, except the duck didn't taste or look familiar.  Later I read an angry letter in a Siem Reap tourist magazine, complaining about an article that had dared tourists to eat dog.  The letter listed various anecdotes about people serendipitously finding their missing dogs in local kitchens.

I went in three convenience stores only to find that Cambodia is a country with no Pepto Bismol or even Tums or Alka-Seltzer.  So I picked up some basic vomiting/diarrhea supplies.  Water.  Sprite.  Sugar cookies.  Mentos.  The local pharmacies were closed, but I was dubious that no one would be dealing medicine, even at 10 p.m., in a town full of tourist nerds.  So I wandered around for a few blocks, and just as a 24 hour clinic came into sight, a guy on a motorbike asked me, "Some weed?"  I thought about this for a moment.  It was possible that I didn't have any real illness at all and that my stomach was just reacting to drinking every night for two weeks, in which case traditional medicine would probably be worthless.  I justified my decision by reminding myself that this sort of thing is recognized as stomach medicine by the State of California.

The motorbike driver who drove me home also asked me if I wanted "some weed."  He didn't seem accustomed to ferrying tourists around.  He fumbled with his lines, as though he knew that there were three questions that he was supposed to ask me, but couldn't quite remember how to say them.  Ask me for a ride.  Check.  Ask me to buy pot.  Check.  Then I helped him a little bit by telling him that, no, I didn't want to go to a whorehouse while he was trying to remember the words "pretty girl."  (Aside from the stomach illness, Kristoff had thoroughly ruined that idea for me.)

Dec. 27

On the way back from the lake the day before, I'd gone to see Chhuon's friend's guesthouse in Psar Chaa (Lee Phal Lean Guest House) and was to move there in the morning.  It was, in most ways, a better deal than Earthwalkers, and it certainly had a better location.  So even though I felt pretty bad that morning, I went ahead and made the move.  Luckily, I could tell that I only had food poisoning.  But, because I'm used to treating my stomach badly, it is possible for me to get food poisoning without puking.  I'll just feel terrible until I've actually digested the poison.  It's like that horrible scene in Major Payne when the kids dump a bottle of laxatives into Damon Wayons' coffee and his only reaction is to blow an enormous fart on them in public.  But not funny.

At Chhuon's insistence, I bought some pills at a pharmacy.  Then I spent all morning smoking pot and watching cricket.  Cricket is an impossible sport.  It's completely unreasonably anachronistic, and it doesn't have any terms or statistics that aren't confusingly-named.  But it's played in almost every region of the world.  Also, tell me that this guy doesn't look like a rodeo clown who kills a bunch of teenagers in a horror movie.

But the cricket combined with all of the soccer games that everyone else in South East Asia seemed to be interested in showed me that Obama alone can't cure the U.S. of isolation.  And with the War on Terror, trying to be a part of the international community of nations is, for America, like Barry Bonds trying to have some locker room camaraderie, complete with the insurmountable geographic barriers.

I felt a little better for awhile in the afternoon, and Chhuon picked me up to go to some temples.  I saw Ta Prohm, Preah Khan, Chau Say Tevoda, Thommamon, Bantay Kdei, and Sras Srang.  Preah Khan was crawling with American tourists.  

From SEA 4

This is probably because part of Tomb Raider was apparently filmed there.  Someone once said that Americans learn about other countries by bombing them.  This would probably explain why there are so many more Americans in Siem Reap than there are in Thailand, but then again, when's the last time you heard about someone visiting Hiroshima?  It's probably more accurate to say that Americans learn about other countries from movies.  Having Chhuon ferry me around certainly made me feel a little bit like Sam Waterston in The Killing Fields, except for, you know, the dire circumstances, and everything else.

Thommanom was full of children playing rock-paper-scissors.

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I guess this is what they do when they get a break from being everywhere, trying to sell you stuff.  Walking between two temples just before this, a five year-old girl had forgotten that she was supposed to try to pester and guilt me into buying something.  After asking me just once to buy a scarf, she asked me for candy.  I gave her the Mentos.

Something that inexplicably isn't mentioned about the Angkor temples is that they all sound like this

because they are surrounded by these cicadas.  

From SEA 4

As seen here, the Tomb Raider producers decided to spend millions to get rid of this sound and replace it with composed music that is supposed to be scary but doesn't do the job nearly as well as the cicadas.

I still didn't feel well enough to do anything after eating the blandest food I could find for dinner.

Dec. 28

Chhuon picked me up and took me to the trail for the Kbal Spean waterfall.  It was raining, but a few feet down the trail I realized that, having lived most of my life in Portland, a short jungle hike in the rain in Northwest Cambodia didn't seem like a big deal.  I'm from the rain forest, bitch.  I'll stop going up this trail when I see a python chewing on a landmine.  That's what I thought, or something like it.  

I ran into a monk from Phnom Penh who wanted to practice his English.  He asked me what I thought of Cambodia.  What I thought of it compared to Laos and Thailand.  What I thought of seeing so many people in so much poverty.  He asked me what I thought of Obama.  About Obama, I said that I was hopeful, but that there was so much to worry about now, what with the financial crisis, India blaming Pakistan for Bombay, and the new Israeli attacks in Gaza.  He looked at me like I was very disillusioned and misguided.  Like, why would I possibly think that these perhaps insurmountable regional political crises were my problem?  And, in fact, isn't that attitude partially how Cambodia wound up going through utter hell?  Wouldn't it be easier to simply recognize my insane wealth and fatness as an American and try to spread some of that toward the world's poor?  'My motorbike driver is a landowner here, with whole farms, and I can barely pay rent in the greater New York area,' I wanted to tell him.  'I have student loan debts that would probably cripple the economy of the province we're currently standing in.' And, 'Where I live, there are literally hundreds of thousands of women who won't even talk to me because I make less than a hundred grand and have no chance of being on television within the next year for any legitimate reason.'  But I didn't say anything like that.

   

Kbal Spean itself is small, but there are ancient Khmer carvings in and along the stream leading up to it.

From SEA 4

After the waterfall, Chhuon took me to Banteay Srei, which some regard as the most beautiful Angkor temple.  I disagree.  It's certainly redder than the others, but the reason that it appears to be so intact is because it's been ruined by anastylosis.  By its name, anastylosis sounds like it is probably a highly scientific process involving unique chemicals.  In fact, it's just another word for looking at a crumbling monument, making educated guesses about what it used to look like, and trying to make it look like that.  Sometimes it gets fucked up.  For instance, I guarantee that this scene at Banteay Srei did not originally look like Jungle Book infringement.

From SEA 4

Compare it with, for instance, the craftsmanship in this unreconstructed figure at Thommanom.

From SEA 4

The road back to Siem Reap was muddy from the rain, especially where bulldozers had been flattening mounds of dirt in an attempt to prepare the road for paving.  A small crowd had gathered near the bulldozers when we passed them on the way out.  Someone on a motorbike had slipped in the mud and collided with a bulldozer head-on.  His dead body was covered with a blanket.  I wondered how treacherous things could get during the rainy season. 

I stopped at a landmine museum for a few minutes because it was on the way.

My stomach still required something safe for dinner, so I went to Dead Fish Tower, which reels in frightened tourists by advertising that they do not serve dog or rat.  As one might expect, DFT is laid out like a Cambodian Senor Frogs.  It's meant to evoke the hammock bars, but with three levels and only a few working hammocks.  The food was not good--Pad Thai tasted like it had been drowned in maple syrup--and the service was deplorable.  After I finally managed to get half of the meal in a box, I walked to the night market and gave it to a man who was holding what appeared to be a comatose boy in his lap.

I was still too tired to make much of my last night in Siem Reap, but I walked outside at 11:30 just to make sure that I wasn't going to regret wasting my last night there.  A ladyboy accosted me outside Zanzybar, just around the corner from the guesthouse.  She held my elbow without letting go until I went through the door of the MaxMart to buy some water.  "I wait you here," she said.  At the counter they were selling $15 Viagra and somewhat cheaper Ziagra.  I know that, at some point in my life, I will regret not having bought a pack, just to have around.  

The ladyboy hadn't waited me there, but a woman waived her sleeping baby at me and demanded that I go back into the store and buy her a meal.  I gave her 2,000 riel to stop her protests and turned up the street, where I was immediately met by two more women begging with their babies.  I crossed the street.  As I crossed, a flurry of drivers yelled at me.  "You want tuk-tuk?  Moto?  Some weed?  Girl?"  I was met on the other side by a man begging for a baby he was carrying.  I was done with Cambodia.  The constant hucksterism, the begging, the guilt.  I circled the block, and went back to my room to get stoned and watch the BBC.  As Tzipi Livni defended the assault on Gaza, I realized that she and Hillary are going to be like a couple of peas in a pod.  In the Obama administration's 2009-11 biannual yearbook, there will be a picture of the two of them, sunburnt, wearing sombreros, and having weak margarita mix shot into their mouths from a sort of squirt gun backpack thing worn by a man in a mariachi suit.  You can count on it.

First Day at the Ruins

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Siem Reap

How much?  Varies incredibly depending on where you stay and where you eat.  

Room: $8-$100's

Food: apparently there are some nice restaurants in Siem Reap.  Everything I ate was cheap.

3-day pass to Angkor temples:  $40

Khmer massage: $3-4 in Psar Chaa, $20 at one of the massage warehouses for Japanese and Korean tourists.

Who's there?

Tour groups from Japan and Korea, nerds from around the world and their children, small groups of twenty-somethings who look like Michigan grad students on winter break.

As everyone on the flight marched through Lao exit immigration, we were each asked “Where did you stay last night?” Like BeerLao’s recipe for a great-tasting, well-balanced lager, this was an eastern bloc export from an earlier era. Because, as I mentioned, every structure in Louang Prabang has now been converted into a guesthouse, the absurdity of this question is amazing. I told the official the name of the guesthouse where I’d stayed, and he stared at me blankly for a second. “It’s a guesthouse. Here in Louang Prabang.” I offered. He stamped my papers fifteen times. Clearly their system of border control is working well.

The flight was full of middle-aged American lesbians and their adopted Asian daughters.  Since it's well-known that lesbians hate Jesus and support the idea of a universal world government, I assume that this had something to do with the fact that we were flying between two UNESCO World Heritage sites on Christmas morning.  (Or maybe it's just because they're interested in and sensitive to foreign cultures, including those of their adopted daughters. One or the other.)

We landed in Siem Reap at about noon. The friend I’d had to leave in Louang Prabang had given me a guesthouse recommendation, and I’d shared this with a guy from Cologne I chatted with in the various lines we had to stand in to get on the plane and then to enter Cambodia. He decided to follow me to this place since it came with a recommendation, so we each hired motorbike drivers to drive us there from the airport (this was cheaper than sharing a cab). On the way to the place, Earthwalkers, my driver tried to convince me to stay at a different guesthouse run by his relatives. Paranoid about being swindled, I got the lonely planet out of one of my few backpacks and pointed to Earthwalkers on the map and explained my reasons for wanting to go there—that the guy from Cologne was following me there and my friend liked it—while balancing on the back of the motorbike. “Okay okay,” the driver said. Later I learned that I should have just trusted Chhuon (that’s his name) in his recommendations.

We arrived at Earthwalkers to find that it was up to a mile outside the town of Siem Reap. I had known this beforehand, but I was coming from Chiang Mai and Louang Prabang, which are both very cute, walkable, and temperate. Conversely, trying to walk a few blocks on the roads outside of downtown Siem Reap reminded me of nothing so much as trying to walk down a highway to a Chili’s or Applebee’s or whatever from a motel in the middle of Arizona on a trip I took with my high school baseball team. We also found out that there weren’t any singles left. I took the double room out of exhaustion and loyalty to my friend’s opinion (but mostly because they had a pool). I offered the German guy the second bed, and he smartly went to find a place closer to the town. 

As I checked in, Chhuon approached me to cut a deal to drive me to the ruins over the next couple of days.  $4 for the afternoon, $10 for the next day.  If that's a swindle, you would be an asshole to complain about it, and an idiot to spend awhile shopping around to save one dollar.  I hired him.  He would come back to the hotel in a couple of hours to take me to some ruins for the sunset.

Earthwalkers is situated in a ghetto of cheap hotels and massage clubs that cater to Japanese, Korean, and Chinese tourists on package tours. It is directly across an alley from a place advertising this 

From SEA 3

and the Pyonyang Friendship Restaurant. More hotels were being constructed everywhere.  Earthwalkers had been listed in something called ChildSafe Cambodia and as a result it was full of American families. Just after checking in, I felt the suspicious looks of American mothers directed at me, the hungover single male traveler who is alone on Christmas.  Having thus far appeared slightly more sane and responsible than so many other backpackers, I wasn't really prepared for this.  I think they were wondering about the standards of a safety designation would allow someone like me to rent a room in the same building as their families, and based this on an unnecessary fear of Cambodia and the concerned mother information stream in America that is, other than health scares, essentially a never-ending loop of Chris Hansen and Nick Kristoff.  As though it never occurs to them that, for some American men, it might simply be more fun to talk to European backpacker girls than to stay home and deal with women who will eventually become just like them. Note to other American tourists: If you go to Cambodia and stay at a place that has rooms for $8 a night, there will be hungover single men there.  Even on Christmas.

I rented a bike and braved a) the traffic on excessively bumpy dirt roads, b) various stores that don't sell anything anyone needs, and c) almost being run over on the highway, just to buy some batteries for my camera.  I didn't try to bike again.  The guide books say that it is becoming popular to visit the ruins by bicycle, and this is true.  But it's also stupid.  When you are in a place that is literally full of four year-old children who are trying to sell you soda and t-shirts, a place where lots of people cook their meals over open fires that are fueled by whatever they've found to burn, a place that is world famous for its landmine victims, a place where most people get around on motorbikes that run on an undefined liquid that is sold out of old Black Label bottles at roadside stands, maybe it is time to briefly stop worrying about your cardio and put your environmental self-satisfaction on hold for a few days.  No one I saw touring the ruins on a bicycle looked happy.  But if you do nonetheless insist on trying this, try to get a mountain bike.  The roads are largely bumpy dirt roads.  Also there are no real traffic rules.  So you are guaranteed to get very dusty and to have a few close calls with actual motorized vehicles. 

I had no idea of the exchange rate when I bought the batteries.  Before that, I didn't even know that Cambodia had its own currency.  That's because the official currency in Cambodia is, in fact, the US dollar.  But, it's a third world country, everything is cheap, and there are no quarters, dimes, nickels, or pennies there.  This is where the Cambodian Riel comes in.  The exchange rate is about 4200 Riel/$1, so 1000 Riel notes function as quarters.  It's apparently illegal to take Riel out of the country.  (I'd like to have someone explain that one to me.) 

The midday heat was stifling. How stifling? Well, this is the description of Siem Reap I scribbled as I waited for Chhuon to pick me up for the late afternoon outing: "It's like the American Southwest if it were part of the third world and experiencing a tourist boom.  What visiting the pyramids in Mexico would be like twenty years from now if their drug war ends itself in a maelstrom of mass killings and landmines.  Hot and dusty with a ton of shoddy construction takng place."

Chhuon picked me up and we went to Pre Rup, where I thought it would be a good idea to take a ton of pictures of stone lion asses.

From SEA 3

 (This reminds me when I returned from Europe to find out that I'd taken 1500 pictures of gargoyles and that my friend had taken 1500 pictures of gargoyles with his thumb in front of the camera.)

About Cambodian cuisine, Lonely Planet says, "You're going to encounter food that's unusual, strange, maybe even immoral, or just plain weird."  I didn't have the opportunity to eat anything immoral, but the barbecued chicken at Khmer Kitchen that night was amazing.

From SEA 3

Then I found out that a Khmer massage is exactly like a Thai massage, but with a lot of tiger balm added, which makes it better.  Then I spent a few minutes ruing the fact that my iPod was out of power before passing out.

Merry Buddha/Kissinger-mas

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Louang Prabang

How much?
The exchange rate is about 8,500 kip to $1, so it's kind of hard to remember with any accuracy. But there are basically two sides to Louang Prabang, a cheap backpacker side, and a semi-boutiquey French side where things are a little more expensive, but still really cheap compared to what you would pay for them elsewhere. We paid about $25 per night for our room, which was nice. This was mid-range. We saw worse places for $5-15 per night. You can buy decent food from a stand for $1. You can also have an amazing meal at a nice French restaurant for $20. There are bars and cafes that have good bbq deals. I didn't try one of these, but I think the bbq is probably good.

Who's there?

Rich people from Paris who are trying to give their young children a cultural education and backpackers who want to soak up some Buddhism to assuage any guilt they may have about the fact that they are about to spend two weeks in Vang Vieng eating opium on pizza.

From SEA 3

Louang Prabang is both a major site for Lao Buddhism and an old French colonial town. Because of the confluence of these two pleasant influences, the old town/tourist area is a UNESCO cultural heritage site, meaning that no trucks can drive on the streets and it must be kept super-quaint as a matter of international law. Not too bad, as far as towns go.

We arrived in LP at about 5 p.m. on the 23rd. We wandered around and found a room in a guesthouse (I think it was called Xieng Kei) run by a nice Vietnamese guy from Iowa and his Lao wife. Don't worry about finding a room in this town. Tourism in Louang Prabang is booming such that anyone with a house or other structure within the old city has either turned it into a guesthouse or is in the process of doing so. Having sat on the boat for two days, I thought I deserved to go to this nice cafe for a scotch and some appetizers (while my friend freaked out because she thought she had lost her ATM card, a situation I had tried to help, but couldn't).

From SEA 3

I now firmly believe that every bar in the world should serve deep fried bamboo shoots filled with spiced minced pork. Why are we still fucking around with mozzarella sticks and chicken fingers? It's embarrassing.

After awhile she arrived in good spirits and we ate dinner too. The food was good but not excellent pan-SEA fare served with a nice presentation. I had already calculated that the boat trip had made it logistically impossible for me to visit Vang Vieng, where you have to specify whether you want your food to include marijuana, mushrooms, opium, or meth (really), and for that matter, Vientienne. So I went to buy a plane ticket after dinner and found out that the only flight I could get was on Christmas morning. This was disappointing. So I consoled myself with a Lao massage, which is exactly the same as a Thai massage. I also consoled myself with the fact that the flight was on Vietnam Air and not Lao Air, which meant a difference of about 40 years in airplane technology.

The next day was Christmas Eve. We went to the royal palace and the wats on phu si hill before lunch. The I ate some wings.

From SEA 3

Then we ate lunch at a cute place overlooking the Mekong.

From SEA 3

This included BeerLao, which is mysteriously much better than any Thai beer. A Czech guy had told me that it's said that this is because, in the 80's, Czech brewmasters helped design the beer as part of a communist exchange. The story tastes plausible.

Then we basically wasted time, shopping for scarves and snake whiskey until dinner could be consumed. At one point during the afternoon, I did, however, wander into the public library, where they allowed me to take a recent copy of the Vientienne Times in exchange for a donation. Why was I taking one of the few items from a library in Laos? Because the librarian had explained to me that the Vientienne Times, the only English newspaper in Laos, could not be purchased anywhere in Louang Prabang, and I needed this souvenir. Unfortunately it turned out that, having no experience managing a mining operation or a bank, I didn't qualify for any of the jobs advertised therein.

Christmas Eve dinner was spectacular. Arisai is a cute French restaurant on the main tourist road. I had wild boar provencal.

From SEA 3

The boar was local. Boar, if you don't know, while technically a wild pig, is really a magical animal that combines the tastes and textures of beef, pork, and lamb in one meat. With wine and tip, our bill was $40-something. Then we went to The Hive, where all the backpackers in town were celebrating by wearing santa hats and getting wasted. With boar, wine, and other assorted foods in my belly, getting wasted and attempting to dance just didn't sound like fun. In my mind, I rationalized this as having respect for Christmas. We had some free lao-lao, the name of which is so nondescriptive and bordering on non-language that one would expect it to be the way liquors would be named somewhere along the Siberian steppe ('come, do a shot of Tajik-tajik with us!'), or Arkansas ('son, you want a sip of ozark-ozark before dinner?'). This lao-lao was piss rice wine not strong enough to hide the taste of decomposing snake.

One thing that you should know about rural northern Thailand and Laos that no one else will tell you is that, regardless of where you are trying to sleep, you will hear this sound throughout the night.

On Christmas morning, I got up before dawn. My present was going to see all of the Buddhist monks and novices in Louang Prabang collect their alms for the day.

From SEA 3

This ritual has become a major tourist attraction, profiled alongside breathtaking resorts and fancy restaurants in the Bangkok Airways in flight magazine.

We’re told that all that these monks and novices can eat for the whole day is whatever the old ladies and tourists give them when they make their begging rounds at sunrise every morning, which is some sticky rice and bananas, and they aren’t allowed to eat anything after 11 a.m. I saw evidence that this is kind of bullshit.
(Novices snacking after 11 a.m., but who’s to blame these kids?)

The number of monks and students of Buddhism in Louang Prabang make the Lao appear to be a deeply religious people. And they probably are. But sending a son to be a monk novice isn’t always about religion. It’s really a medieval education system. A boy can be sent to a wat, fed, and taught English and math, for free, and he gets some moral instruction on top of that. Just imagine how attractive that is to Lao parents. Free English. Free food.

From SEA 3

(No one wants to be the novice whose mom bought him the wrong robe.)

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(This group overslept by 20 minutes and didn't get any food. This would have been my group.)

After watching the monks, I had to go catch my flight.

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(At the airport in Louang Prabang. This is perhaps my favorite sign ever. It unwittingly both makes fun of people from New Jersey and references one of those Jim Gaffigan routines that's funny for the first five minutes--of him talking about junk food and his obvious crippling depression that he thinks is a funny laziness--and then gets old quickly.)

The Slow Boat

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What?

Boat from Houay Xai to Luang Prabang

How much? I really don't remember. Maybe 1,000b for the boat ticket, the ride from Chiang Mai, one night in Chiang Khong, and a couple of meals? I do remember that, on the boat, beer sells for 50b or more.

Who's there? Dirty 6 month - 1 year backpackers, German humanities professors, other lost souls.

We finally left for Luang Prabang on the 21st. It's a journey that would take three days. For all those trying to get from Chiang Mai to Luang Prabang on a boat, here are some notes.

• Before my vacation, all I knew about Laos is that Hank Hill's neighbor is supposed to be from there.  Really.  But reading a few chapters of The River's Tale did a good job of catching me up to Laos in the late 1990's.  And it was interesting to compare that description to today and see how much the country has developed in the last ten years.  And to see that that development apparently hasn't been accompanied by any loss of paranoia by the Lao government. So, what works for China also works for Laos. I actually won't be too surprised if China annexes the country as a new province in about ten years.
• If your vacation is one month or less, don't do a boat trip. The slow boat is two days, and you have to get to Chiang Khong, so it's really a three day trip. Why eat up your time that way? Sure, the Mekong is pretty, but aside from the occasional villagers and livestock, you may as well be on the Columbia, or as a German guy I'll mention later said, the Rhine. Lots of rivers are pretty. You can try to speed things up by taking a speed boat, but they make you wear a helmet for that and rumor has it that the ride consists of 7 hours of hanging on for dear life.
• It’s probably not necessary to leave Chiang Mai at noon. We spent about six hours driving from Chiang Mai to Chiang Khong, where we slept (with hourly rooster calls) in a hotel that was not yet completed and smelled like varnish. (This is where we stopped along the way.)

  From SEA 2 1/1/09 5:25 PM

  Chiang Khong is a river border town that doesn’t really need to be seen. Our package to Luang Prabang dictated that we leave Chiang Mai at noon, but one doesn’t need to purchase a package to get to Luang Prabang. If you can get to Chiang Khong on your own, then you can probably leave Chiang Mai later in the day and save money too. The boats often fill up though, so it might be necessary to purchase a boat ticket in advance.
• You’ll head down to the river at 7:30 or 8 the next morning thinking that you’re about to push off on the boat journey. Instead you’ll wait a little bit and then take a water taxi across the river to Houay Xai, to clear immigration into Laos. Between immigration and waiting to board the boat, expect to wait 2 or 3 hours. The boat won’t actually leave Houay Xai until around noon. For stamphogs, Laos is a great destination. Upon entry your passport is stamped about 17 times, filling two full pages, and is even personally signed by an immigration official. And if you’re as lucky as me, it will also be read by a four year-old boy.

  From SEA 3

  I spent the first day on the river sitting next to a stand-up short story author from Berlin who said that he had only experienced that level of border bureaucracy once—when his family drove to his grandfather’s funeral in East Berlin.  Later he got drunk to the point of talking about how he wished he could tell his father off.
• For about the first mile that you drive in Laos, it will be impossible to know which side of the road they drive on.  Half the steering wheels are on the left, half are on the right.  The truck you're in will be driving in the middle.  (I would have noticed this same thing in Cambodia, but I spent my whole time there on the back of a motorbike.)
• Central European teenagers are apparently doing all sorts of illegal work in middle America.  I don't know why Lou Dobbs never complains about them.  The guy from Berlin told me about how he used to work illegally in a department store in Spokane, and a Czech woman told me that she used to work in (wait for it) the kitchen of a Mexican restaurant in South Dakota.
• You don’t need to flush your weed down the toilet before crossing the border. Although Laos has a severely autocratic government that guards the movement of people across its borders with paranoid vigor, they also don’t care what tourists bring in.  Laos is poor enough that they just hope you’re bringing something. If it could afford to train dogs to sniff out drugs, they would either be used by the drug growers to enhance their product or be eaten. That said, bringing drugs from Thailand to Laos probably makes about as much sense as bringing them from Idaho to Seattle.
• The boat will be full of people like this (not sexually, but they all seem to be Hispanic Studies professors from Freiberg). 

  

The crazy British guy we’d met at the bar in Chaing Mai had told us where to stay in Pak Beng, which is where the slow boat stops overnight.  He said to stay at a place on the right side of the road, so we stayed at the only modern structure on the right and were made to feel like suckers for paying 400b for the room.  

Then we ate dinner with a 60-something woman from Toronto who appeared to have spent the last fifteen years traveling the world, trying to get men to desire her, the stoic 20-something Belgian mountain ranger she was desperately trying to sleep with, and two guys who'd just finished their service in the Israeli Army.  They were all proud of the fact that they were paying 150b to sleep in mosquito-infested rat holes, even though for 400b, we had a nice, modern room with no mosquitos and two big thermoses of hot water.  (These seemed preposterous at the time, but they made for a good shower in the morning.)  I had laap,

From SEA 3

which apparently can also be called larp or koi, and which, like many national dishes, obviously started as a way of making bad meat edible.  We were given free lao-lao, which is just what lao people call any moonshine, which usually has a snake in the bottle.  Unfortunately, being moonshine, this means that it ranges from piss to scotch.  Most is piss, but this lao-lao tasted like a fine bourbon.

The second day on the boat was pretty similar to the first.  Here are a couple of pictures.

From SEA 3

From SEA 3

Why Do I Love Chiang Mai?

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Chiang Mai

How much?

room at Pagoda Inn: 350b

Thai massage: 200b

amazing piece of barbecue: 30b

Who's there?

Weird retired guys from Seattle who live in Chiang Mai for 6 months a year, people who fled Italy to open restaurants, backpackers trying to get to Laos, rich (by Thai standards) college kids from Bangkok.

Dec. 17

As we touch down in Chiang Mai at about 9 p.m., our Bangkok Airways plane is playing “Jingle Bells.”

We check into the Pagoda Inn (highly recommended) and go straight to Interbar, where the band profiled in that link has been playing every night for the last hundred years.

(video of their guitarist desperately and successfully trying to get on YouTube by playing with his teeth to be added soon)

We set out to find some drunk food so I could sleep, but we run into two drunk Irish girls in the middle of the street who convince us to go to a burger shack and then a dance club with a small group they’ve formed. After awhile at the club, a British guy in the group convinces me to go to his place to smoke pot, but it turns out that he doesn’t really know how to get there, and as we walk to 7-Eleven for beer, I can see that he has a weird involuntary spasm that causes his whole head to move. I go back to the club to find my friend, but she's already left. So I hire a tuk-tuk to take me back to the hotel. After a long time looking, the driver can’t find it, so he drops me back where we started and sells me pot as some sort of consolation. I walk the streets of Chiang Mai smoking joints for two or three more hours as I try to find the hotel. In the morning I learn that I was only about two blocks away.

Dec. 18

I sleep in and we eat lunch at Aroon (Rai) (awesome red curry--it's in all the guide books). We spend the day wandering around the city and eat at a night market.

Dec. 19

Chiang Mai is known as a major jumping off point for “trekking” tours. The tour that we do on this day mostly involves riding around in a van. We start at, yes, an elephant dung paper factory,

From SEA 2 1/1/09 5:25 PM

the giftshop of which displayed what is apparently a picture of the owner with Steven Seagal.

From SEA 2 1/1/09 5:25 PM

Then we see some villages of sad-looking tribal people,

From SEA 2 1/1/09 5:25 PM

From SEA 2 1/1/09 5:25 PM

a temple in a cave

From SEA 2 1/1/09 5:25 PM

(this was outside the temple, and yes, I did give the olded petsons money),
and a snake show.

(There's more of the snake show on my YouTube page. Unfortunately my camera ran out of memory before the best snake show commentary ever: "He want to make sexy with the snake. Here Mrs. Snake, come and kiss me . . . .")

This sign was outside the snake farm.

From SEA 2 1/1/09 5:25 PM

Later I eat the best thing I’ve ever had at a night market back in Chiang Mai.

From SEA 2 1/1/09 5:25 PM

It's described to me as "bacon," and it may well have been a barbecued slab of bacon covered in the most exquisite sauce in the world. Then we spend the evening talking to weird old guys, many of them from Seattle. One, a creepy, cranky British guy, apparently told my friend that he’d been in jail for attempted murder . . . in Thailand, and that he’d just left the Thai woman he’d been married to for four years because they’d been living in her village where he could not communicate with anybody. So we were the first people he'd spoken to in four years. I didn't find this out until later, but the whole bar made me feel like someone had relocated the Red Barn or Sligo's circa 1997 (3 p.m. weekday version) from Portland/Davis Square to Thailand. Then an elephant walked into the bar.

From SEA 2 1/1/09 5:25 PM

Dec. 20

We're trying to make it to the slow boat to Luang Prabang, but we oversleep again. We'd missed what we thought was only way of getting from Chiang Mai to the boat—a tourist van that leaves Chiang Mai around noon. More on this later. We rent bikes and ride to the Chiang Mai University neighborhood—it’s really cute, and thriving with boutiques and coffee shops. It reminds me of Palo Alto. Or Newbury Street. Then we go to a Thai cooking class, where everything we make is amazing, because we aren't cooking so much as being puppeted by our instructor, who is cooking very well and who somehow makes poo baby jokes seem very cute. Then we go back over to Nimmanhaemin Road (the CMU area) for some coffee (Chiang Mai probably has more coffee houses than any other city in Asia, and there is a particular concentration of them in this neighborhood) and stumble into the Monkey Club,

From SEA 2 1/1/09 5:25 PM

which is apparently the place on Friday for the young Bangkok elite who attend CMU. Compared to the Thai crowd there we are utterly and irredeemably disheveled. I pay an outrageous $4 for a gin and tonic. There's something comforting and familiar about the place.

So this doesn't explain why I love Chiang Mai, but do you really need an explanation? It's cheap, it's cute, it's not too big, it's not too small, there are hundreds of coffee houses, and it's surrounded by interesting nature. I guess it reminds me of Portland. Except that it's 70 in December in Chiang Mai, and you can get outrageous barbecue or curry for a dollar.