Month: February 2020

WE SAW ELEPHANTS.

Other cool stuff happened because Laos has a surprising number of interesting things to see and also good food but first – ELEPHANTS!!

Please enjoy this photo dump of the most magnificent and lovable creatures; elephants. Seeing elephants was one of my top priorities while visiting Southeast Asia but we wanted to do it responsibly. There are innumerable elephant tour companies in both Laos and Thailand, but most of them care much more about getting money from tourists than they do about the welfare of the elephants themselves. Thankfully, Byron had been doing research into elephant sanctuaries with good reputations, so when we stumbled across Mandalao’s office in Luang Prabang we were confident that they had a good track record of protecting, rather than exploiting, the animals in their care.

We also had a fair amount of luck – the coronavirus has seriously depressed travel throughout much of Asia, which meant tours that are often booked weeks or months in advance suddenly had openings, so we were able to book a walking elephant tour only two days in advance.

The tour itself was amazing. We learned a bit about the conservation work that Mandalao is doing, then headed out to meet our elephant friends – Tem and Peng. We fed them bananas (Tem just used her trunk to grab them out of our hands) and walked with them along a jungle trail to a clearing where we all had lunch.

The walk itself was pretty telling of how well Mandalao treats their elephants. When elephants are used mainly for tourism they are trained to do things on a human’s schedule – walk around for hours with people on their back, stand in water for hours so tourists can help ‘bathe’ them, and so on. Training these massive animals to follow commands can result in very poor treatment. Here though, we were on the elephants’ schedule. Our short walk to the lunch clearing took hours as the elephants stopped to munch some sugarcane, to tear down a small tree in search of tasty leaves, or just because they no longer felt like walking. These delays all felt like a win-win to me, the elephants got to relax and take their time, and the longer they took to complete the walk, the more time we got to spend with them!

The elephants alone would have been enough to make Luang Prabang a great stop, but the adventures didn’t stop there. We also motorbiked to the Kuang Si Falls just outside the city.

The falls themselves were beautiful – lovely views, clear turquoise water – but for me the real attraction was the bears. Yes, bears! Right next to the falls is a small bear sanctuary for Asian moon bears. These bears are often illegally snared and kept in captivity to harvest their bile. Thankfully, many of them have been rescued and are being kept in sanctuaries like the one in Luang Prabang. They are simply adorable.

We also spent time in Laos visiting temples, wandering around the town, exploring the surprisingly large night market, and enjoying the sunset beside the river.

We spent four nights in Luang Prabang, and then the real adventure began – getting to Thailand. We opted to take the “slow boat” up the Mekong River. The journey takes two days. In case you are ever interested in taking this route yourself, I’ve included a guide to the journey below.

Getting from Luang Prabang, Laos, to Chiang Rai, Thailand

• Arrange to buy tickets for both days of the slow boat through your hotel. Be only reasonably confident that you are buying the correct tickets because of the language barrier. Make sure you do not receive the physical tickets until the morning of your departure, or that would spoil the fun.
• Take a tuk tuk (basically a cross between a golf cart and a wagon that serve as taxis) to the slow boat pier, which is just a small concrete building next to the river bank. Hand over your tickets and wait for someone to nod encouragingly to reassure you that you are in the right place.
• Board the boat. This will involve walking down a long, steep set of stairs that have been carved into the stone river bank, then walking across the 8-inch plank of wood that connects the shore to the boat, all while carrying all your luggage on your back. Don’t forget – shoes are not allowed to be worn on the boat, so before you step inside make sure you remove your hiking boots… without setting down any of your stuff.
• You made it on the boat, congratulations! Now you can relax for the next 9 hours. Might I suggest some knitting?
• Okay, great, it’s time for the first stop – Pak Beng. First, reverse the process of boarding the boat by climbing another set of steep stairs (it’s easiest if you use your hands to avoid falling over), then wander the street of this small town until you find a place to stay. You could have booked a place in advance, of course, but again that would spoil the adventure. Also you were only reasonably confident the boat would get you here at all.
• Enjoy a sound night of sleep, then wake up bright and early to gobble down some breakfast before once again boarding the boat.
• Relax for another 8 hours.
• You have arrived at the border, huzzah! Now the real fun begins. There are no stairs this time – no, there is essentially a vertical rock scramble once you exit the boat here (have I mentioned infrastructure in Laos is basically nonexistent?). Best of luck.
• Once you make it to the top, take three breaths of fresh air to remind yourself you are alive.
• Good. Now board another tuk tuk with any other boat passengers trying to make it into Thailand. The tuk tuk will take you to the Friendship Bridge that connects Laos and Thailand.
• Go through Laos’ exit immigration.
• Board a bus to take you across the bridge.
• Go through Thailand’s entry immigration. They will be incredibly rude to you for no reason. Just accept it.
• You made it to Thailand! Only you are not anywhere in Thailand you actually want to be, and the buses to Chiang Rai don’t start until the morning. If you can, team up with the other boat passengers to hire a van to drive you to Chiang Rai.
• Book a hotel in Chiang Rai while waiting for your van to arrive.
• After your two hour van ride drops you off in the center of Chiang Rai, wander the streets for a while looking for your hotel. Google maps is only sort of functional here.
• After 30 min of walking with all your luggage, arrive at your hotel at 9pm. Cry tears of relief when they offer to make you some fried rice for dinner so you don’t have to go back into the city that night.
• Eat. Sleep. Rejoice. You made it!

The slow boat journey was simultaneously relaxing and exhausting. It was also our first real taste of just winging it. Never before had I started a day not knowing where I was going to sleep that night.

Chiang Rai itself was fine. We biked around the city, ate good food, and visited a few temples. The temples were quite beautiful, but it wasn’t clear how much of the beauty had any cultural significance, or if it was just built lavishly to attract tourists. This was especially true of the white temple, which felt more like an amusement park than a temple complex and had pop culture characters painted on the wall of the main prayer area. We weren’t allowed to take pictures inside, sadly, but it was really strange to see people praying devoutly in front of a giant Buddha statue on one end of the room while looking at pictures of Keanu Reeves from the Matrix, Yoda, Batman, a Minion, and a pattern of guns painted on the opposite wall. If there was something deeply symbolic about this juxtaposition it was completely lost on me.

Yesterday we bade farewell to Chiang Rai and boarded a bus to Chiang Mai. In true backpacker fashion we strolled up to the station and bought a ticket for the next bus… that was leaving in four minutes. Four extremely bumpy hours later we arrived in Chiang Mai, where we’ll be for the next couple days before taking a train to Bangkok. In the meantime my plan is to eat as much fried rice as humanly possible.

Knitting update: With the hat finished I’ve been scheming about what to do with the many skeins of yarn I purchased in Vietnam. I decided to start a sweater (we will someday visit cold places on this trip, though not anytime soon). I also wanted to incorporate images from our trip. I’ve become slightly obsessed with dragons after traveling through Vietnam, Laos, and now Thailand, so I found some graph paper and started charting.

I’m using a combination of intarsia and stranded colorwork which is pleasantly challenging, the perfect thing to keep my attention for hours on the slow boat. This is the right front of the sweater so there’s plenty more knitting to go. Elephants and bears are sure to feature somewhere!

This past week was our last in Vietnam. It’s hard to believe that out of the one month (!) we’ve been traveling thus far, we’ve spent three weeks in Vietnam. We could easily have travelled there even longer, but we have an ambitious itinerary set for the year and needed to make time to see other countries. Plus, our visa was only valid for one month.

After we left Da Nang we spent a few days in Hue in central Vietnam. We toured the imperial city, which is undergoing restoration after being severely damaged by bombing during the war.

After Hue we went to Phong Nha, a small town famous for its caves. We stayed at a really cool ‘eco-resort’ just outside the town beside a beautiful lake. We had our own tiny A-frame shack, and felt truly immersed in nature for the first time since we’d set off on our adventure. (To be fair, we weren’t really ‘camping’, we had a fully functioning bathroom in the cabin, but it felt very nature-y).

The first day in our little cabin was wonderful. It was so quiet and peaceful. We could hear birds and the steady hum of night-insects. Our conversation went something like this:

Oh wow this is so peaceful, you can hear the insect chorus and we’re surrounded by trees and it’s so quiet. Wow I just love this we should do this more often, maybe just stay here longer and – OH MY GOD THAT IS A SPIDER ON THE WALL. Why is it so big?? googles whether spiders in Vietnam are poisonous okay yes it is big, like, as big as my palm big but there is only one spider, we can just kill it and then move on with our lives. Byron attempts to whack the spider with one of my hiking boots oh sh*t that thing is fast. Okay maybe it will just leave us alone and… oh no…. *looks around cabin* there are six of them. We are outmatched.

The spiders were everywhere that first night. There was one on the wall right next to where we had been sitting, one on the ceiling, a couple on the ground, one behind a pipe in the bathroom, eventually we just stopped looking. We gave up on the idea of killing them – they were too big and fast and we were like 90% sure they were huntsman spiders which are apparently totally harmless to humans. So I decided I would think of them as guardians of the cabin, protecting us from the insects that could actually hurt us, like mosquitos. This helped somewhat.

Other than the terrifying spiders, our stay in Phong Nha was lovely. We took a motorbike through the mountains to Paradise Cave (I drove us there and Byron drove back, it turns out driving the motorbike is a lot of fun when there are hardly any other vehicles on the road).

I also had a couple days to myself when Byron went off on an overnight caving tour. I had intentionally opted out of caving, choosing instead to savor a couple quiet days by the lake, which I filled with reading, writing, long walks, and, of course, knitting.

Thankfully Byron returned from his caving expedition in one piece and leech-free, and we happily hopped on another overnight train, this time to Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital city. Before exploring Hanoi though we had one more stop to make – a trip to Ha Long Bay.

Ha Long Bay is about four hours east of Hanoi by bus, and is absolutely beautiful. We took an overnight cruise there with three other guests – a man from Brazil, a woman from Peru who now lives in France, and her French daughter – plus our Vietnamese tour guide. Our conversations were a mix of English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese – thankfully everyone could understand multiple languages, even if no one was confident speaking them all, so we got along quite well despite the language differences.

Finally, we returned to Hanoi to spend our last two nights in Vietnam. And at last, at long last, I found a marvelous place. A place much hoped for. I found… a yarn shop!!!

A small one, to be sure, and the vast majority of the stock was not that exciting (lots of Michaels-quality acrylic yarns that I wasn’t interested in working with). But lo and behold I found treasure – fingering weight cashmere yarn in beautiful colors, for about $4 a skein. For those non-knitters, this price is absolutely unheard of in the US. You could easily pay $30 or above for similar quality yarn back home. Naturally, I bought quite a lot. I think it will become a sweater, we shall see.

Today we took a short flight to Luang Prabang in Laos. We’ve only been here a few hours but are already appreciating the relative quiet of the city and the beautiful sunset.

Knitting update: the hat is finished! Well, the knitting bit is finished. I haven’t yet weaved in the ends, but that’s really just a technicality.

This week I understood why people love traveling in Vietnam.

We spent the first half of our week in Nha Trang, a costal city with a beautiful beach and a great boardwalk that you can meander along for hours.

And meander we did! We walked all the way along the shore to a semi-ancient temple (we think). Honestly I’m not 100% sure of the history of the place, but it was clearly a tourist hot spot, and we were able to use the restroom and take some nice photos, so top marks all around.

Much to our surprise, we saw tons of Russian tourists in Nha Trang. Many of the restaurants were Russian owned, and most signs were written in some combination of Vietnamese, Russian, English, and Chinese (with occasionally some Korean thrown in, as with the sign below).

On our last day in Nha Trang we took a half-day tour to a nearby park where we hiked to see a small waterfall and swim in a few natural pools that felt lovely and cool in the heat. The pools were also full of those little fish that eat dead skin, so if you sat still you ended up with a little school of them darting around nibbling on your back or toes. It’s a very weird sensation. Not unpleasant, exactly, but a bit disconcerting. Like a mini pinch that almost hurts, but then fades immediately.

After Nha Trang we took an overnight train to Da Nang, also on the coast, but further north (there are two ways to see Vietnam – south to north, or north to south. We’re going south to north). While there were some things to see in Da Nang we mainly used it as a central point to visit other places nearby.

For ease of adventures, we decided to rent a motorbike. I know! A motorbike on these crazy roads? (See week two’s post for an overview of the insanity that is crossing the street in Vietnam). What were we thinking? The first day with the bike we took it pretty easy, driving along a costal road to see a huge statue and temples in the mountains. Byron expertly navigated the roundabouts (which are really just free for alls with everyone honking for all the other vehicles to get out of their way), and I took the bike for a tentative spin on one of the mountainous side roads.

Our second day though, we did a full on road trip. We biked out an hour and half or so to My Son, a Unesco World Heritage site with ancient Hindu temples. While the architecture was impressive, I mostly enjoyed the peace and quiet afforded by the surrounding mountains.

We then drove another hour and a half or so (it should have been shorter but our motorbike is actually just a fancy scooter and maxes out at 50 km/hour) to Hoi An, a pretty little city with nicely decorated streets, tons of shops, and beautiful lanterns that illuminate the river at night.

It was another hour back to our hotel in Da Nang, and in a shocking turn of events, I voluntarily drove us on the motorbike part of the way. I drove the bike! And killed neither of us! Victory is mine. Plus, I was only mostly terrified, as opposed to 100% terrified. So double victory.

We finished our time in Da Nang with a much-needed day of rest, including a walk on the beach at sunset where I found some cool shells amidst much trash and a couple dead fish (really, the beach in Da Nang is prettiest if you focus on the stunning scenery and don’t look too closely at the details).

Of course, the elephant in the room for most of our trip thus far has been the coronavirus. Everyone is concerned and taking precautions, but some of those precautions have become extreme. Vietnam has done their best to ban tourists from China for the next several months. Some of the locals we’ve spoken to are unhappy about this (less money from tourism), but for others this outbreak has amplified anti-Chinese sentiment. We’ve even seen some stores outright banning Chinese visitors. It’s unsettling to witness such blatant discrimination, a reminder of how easily fear can override basic human decency.

Our travels through Vietnam continued today as we headed to Hue via the most scenic train ride I’ve ever been on. This has only served to amplify Byron’s undying devotion to train travel.

Thankfully our slow travel pace has given me plenty of time for art and knitting. Sadly I have yet to find a yarn shop. We did see one store advertising “sewing and knitting”, which lifted my spirits for a few glorious moments, until I got closer and realized it was actually a tailor shop. Still, I shall not lose hope.