Reflections

This evening
My time on the road is nearly up. So I thought to myself this evening, with sorrow, as I rolled small balls of sticky rice and popped them in my mouth. I sat at a table of Lao girls in the backyard of a home in a Vientiane suburb belonging to the cousin of a friend of a sister of a friend. In other words, a complete stranger's house. I wasn't part of the conversation, it was mine to stare at the neon light balanced precariously in the banana tree above, to be blasted by traditional Lao music from behind, and to eat sticky rice, reflecting on the fact that in less than a month I'd be back in mundane Australia. I'd been shuffled along to this dinner by my Lao friend as some person's brother had been ordained as a monk - this was a kind of ceremonial party. Oh, the random things you get up to when travelling are such fun. The First World has nothing to offer but monotony and the mundane.

This afternoon
Today cycled around town. The afternoon was perfect, I thought to myself, as I rode up to the high banks of the Mekong. I sat on my bike and stared at the river, under the balmy sunlight, the river was still and silver. Thailand is on the other side of the river. I'll be there soon enough.

Death
In other reflections... some people shorten their lives with cigarettes, others with alcohol - I do so with French pastries. I know, already, that I'll die of a tart-induced heart attack. But, I think, it's worth it - today's lemon tart at the French patisserie Le Banneton was divine. Sigh.

Tomorrow
Tomorrow to Pakse in Lao's south. Then to Angkor Wat in Cambodia, then to Bangkok.

Good night.

Happenings in Vientiane

Hello from Vientiane. Plenty has happened over the past days that I better commit some of it to my blog. It's quite a backlog, so I might have to resort to over-simplification or outright omission.

Monk Feeding Frenzy
6am meet old highschool friend (who I'd not seen in 10 years) to feed several thousand monks at stunning stoopa 'Tat Luang' - it's gold and looks as though it was designed by Ferrari. This was the last day of a festival held at the stoopa, the monks had come from all over the country. The monks cannot prepare their own food, so instead rely on donations from the public - they in turn are willing to donate because they get good karma (points in the afterlife). I followed my friend and her family, and many thousands of other Laos (many stunning in their best dress), as we gave rice and other foods to monk after monk - who formed a giant ring around the temple grounds of empty bowls, shaved heads, orange robes and appreciating smiles.


Tat Luang Festival
The same festival concluded in the evening with the largest fete I've ever seen - thousands upon thousands of shops, games, food stalls. People told me how sleepy Vientiane was, but I saw no evidence for it that evening - it was more crowded than the Badaling section of the Great Wall of China. The religious aspect of the evening involved circling candles around the Tat Luang stoopa. There were too many people to get anywhere close to the stoopa - but I got close enough, it was lit up majestically gold in the night. I love that stoopa. In fact, it's my favourite stoopa in the whole world!

Empty waterfall
Today with friend in back of pick-up truck to lunch by some river some distance out of town. Then to some strange waterfalls - the slightest incline of any waterfalls I've ever seen, but on a bed of rock of strange shapes and forms. Anyway, it was completely dried-out due to the fact that this is the dry season, so I walked all about where the water would be falling, or rather, gently declining.

Radiohead
Also going on during my travels is music, which I carry in my iPod (bought in March, now obselete and called an 'iPod classic'). Anyway, recently acquired latest Radiohead album In Rainbows. It's always an exciting day, the day of a new Radiohead release, but the first listen of this album, well, I found to be a challenge, as is the case with any new album by the band. Their style becomes, erm, at the time of first listening, 'weirder' every album. But after time, the new style settles in, starts to make sense, and then becomes seriously listenable, before becoming brilliant. Well, I'm now several listens into this album and it's incredible. 15 Steps, Reckoner, Jigsaw falling into place, Faust Arp, all getting lots of repeats on Yoni's 'oldskool' iPod.

Vang Vieng

Hello from Vang Vieng. 'VV' is a small town in northern Laos - set along a river beside some rather stunning limestone mountains. Like much of Laos, this is a sleepy town and the locals are friendly. But there's something not quite right about this place. It's sleepy in a spaced-out, disconcerting way. It's now apparent to me that this is ... a *zombie town*.

Zombie town
It doesn't take long to realise that the very many young backpackers here are zombies. My first walk around town confirmed it. The place is brimming with them, many out of of their minds or entirely brainless, lying like vegetables in bed-cafes in front of the TV ('Friends' is shown in most such cafes). They just lie there, listless, sipping at their 'special' lassies, watching TV. Sadly, zombies outnumber locals in epidemic proportions. Many of the zombies are travelling around South East Asia in large groups, their only plan to drink, do drugs and enjoy Laos. It's all a bit false, I feel, which is why I'm leaving here sooner than I had planned.

Tubing
VV is also famous for 'tubing'- which is when you get driven upriver, dropped into the river on an inflated tyre-tube, and float downstream, stopping at bars on the way. All very well, it's very relaxing. The only problem is having to socialise with the other tubers - many of whom are loud, drunk and stupid. Of course there are other genuine human beings who tube- I met a few, but on the whole it's drunken madness. I found a restaurant where I could be alone, have a drink, eat some noodles. Then I floated all the way back to town, about an hour downstream. It was very relaxing once I got passed the bars and the techno music. On arrival in town, I returned my tube, had a shower then became a zombie myself at a cafe, watching episode after episode of the Simpsons. It was an Israeli cafe - the menu was in English, Lao and Hebrew and the place full of Israelis.


Countryside
The zombie culture is strange and unpleasant, and contrasts with the genuinely stunning landscape around VV. Yesterday I hired a bicycle and rode around the countryside, entered a cave, met plenty of locals, ate a pineapple beside a cow. All very pleasant. In the evening I made the mistake to take a walk around town at midnight. It was full of thoroughly unpleasant drunks disrupting locals. One English chap thought he'd be a star by getting in the way of oncoming motorcycles. His friends were laughing. The poor Laos were patient and waited until he let them pass. This is just abusing the local culture.


Summary
Vang Vieng is a small place in a very charming part of the world - I just feel sorry that Laos has to endure some of the worst parts of Western culture. Be warned it's full of drunks and zombies, be advised to avoid them, enjoy your stay. Have a pineapple.

Laos - buses, leeches, lime juice, taleban & neo-nazi

An eclectic post from an eclectic few days.

Buses
Today caught bus from Luang Prabang to 'backpacker-central' - Vang Vieng. I'm told the only thing to do here, besides lots of nothing (itself very pleasurable), is 'tubing'. This takes the form of taking a tuk-tuk several kilometres upstream of the river, getting onto a tire-tube, and drifting leisurely back down the river. More about this after I've tried it.

Curious point on the bus journey: lunch at some tiny town, then hang out with a crew of 11 year-old school kids playing snooker. All of them were smoking, and offered me cigarettes, but I declined telling them I don't smoke, never have and that I think it's bad for the health.

Leeches
I made a small journey out to some waterfall near Luang Prabang. I don't have a guide book to Laos, so I have no idea what this waterfall was called. I just said 'well ok' to an offer to join some Australian girls. The waterfall was well, walked over it, through some muddy jungle paths, and, was even attacked by giant leeches. To be more exact, it was only one leech and it was only giant compared to an ant. I pulled the sucker off with my bare hands. Now, at long last, I can say I'm a man - I feel like Steve Irwin.

Lime juice
I love lime, and have enjoyed lime juice and food with lime several times a day since arriving in Laos.

Taleban & Neo-nazi
I'd been growing my beard for close to 6 weeks. It was full and tinged red. I had a similar one in Uzbekistan where I was accused by police in an underground police questioning room, in a friendly kind of way, of being Taleban. Mostly this was because I was standing next to Michael Rayner - whose beard is infamous. On a whim I entered a barber in Luang Prabang and told him to cut my hair and beard. *Not too short* I insisted. His razor was lousy and he accidently shaved the side of my head to the skin. So I've gone from Taleban to Neo-Nazi in a day. I'm off to get some lime juice.

Laos - Luang Prabang

Today was a day spent in Heaven. Technically I'm still on Earth, in a town in Laos called 'Luang Prabang'. This is a very attractive, laid-back town in the hilly jungle-forest along the Mekong in Northern Laos. It's such a pleasant change from China, it's so much more laid-back, less crowded, such an agreeable temperature, the people are friendly, quiet and polite. And then there's the food, which I'll devote a whole section of this post to. It's very much geared up to tourism, there are endless guest-houses, and foreigners. But in contrast to the Chinese tourist towns of 'Shangri La', and Lijiang, I feel the locals in Luang Prabang come out with their dignity intact.

Anyway, let me first tell the story of how I got here, then about my day (eating).

Getting to Luang Prabang
Despite advice I'd heard there indeed does exist a direct bus from Kunming in China to Luang Prabang in Laos. It takes 30 hours. It wasn't the most unpleasant - I had a bed and we made regular food and toilet stops. It's a Chinese bus full of Chinese people (and the odd foreigner). The Chinese passengers made sense in their Chinese context, but once over the border, sad to admit I could begin to sympathise with Thai's complaints about Chinese mainlanders (that they're loud, smoking, spitting, screaming, littering, uncouth monsters!) .

Erm, I usually prefer to take a diplomatic non-committal stance to describe people, but, well, I think this is a pretty objective observation! As we pulled up to a small town in Northern Laos for a toilet stop, we spilled off the bus, there was that now familiar cacophony of the clearing of throats, spitting, screaming (conversation), throwing of bags and bottles onto the streets - it was quite embarrassing. The Lao's running the stores were so quiet, watched timidly and waited patiently for the Chinese Storm to pass. Erm, no offense to my mainlander friends - you all rock, perhaps, I hope, you know which people I'm referring to though.

Eating in Luang Prabang
50 metres into the Laos border I'd already ordered Som Tam (Papaya salad), and what a delight it was. I'd been craving fresh vegetables and lime for weeks in China. This salad didn't disappoint, it was cold, spicy, refreshing and dripping with sour lime juice and fish sauce. I didn't order the grilled mouse (or whatever it was).

Today however, I woke to a forest-fresh morning, dressed in shorts, t-shirt and sandals (the first time in over 2 months), and strolled the town. It's all jungley-overgrowth, guesthouses, French colonial buildings, Thai wats (temples) and other miscellaneous filler buidlings. I ate by the road-side, I had a baguette filled with grilled chicken and salad. This was a new combination of Thai-style food with French, it was a delight. Another curious remnant of French colonialism was the ample crowds of people passing the day playing petank- it seemed very relaxing.

I went back to my hostel and had a leisurely nap. I woke to thoughts of lime juice and spicy-sour-tangy-chewy phad thai (thai noodles) - which I made my mission to find. I found a wonderful spot on the high banks along the Mekong, under giant jungle trees. I had a big grin on my face as I enjoyed my lunch and read my book. Bliss.

I later found a French patisserie and continued the sour theme with a very tart lemon tart. Another evening stroll eventually led me to dinner. I'd decided to splurge a whopping £8.50 on a fancy French restaurant - (buffalo) steak with chips (I'd been craving such a dish for months), a glass of red wine, creme caramel and Lao espresso to finish. Oh, what a delight.

I'm loving this place. It's so incredibly relaxing and to indulge in the food is bliss. No big plans tomorrow - more leisurely strolls, more eating.

Kunming

Greetings from Kunming - the regional capital of Yunnan province, China. My guide book says about Kunming that with Chengdu it's the the most relaxed regional captial in China. I wouldn't know about that, but it's certainly laid back. My first impression of the place was that it was Grot City. But then I arrived late and hadn't noticed the trees. It's not the tidiest of cities, not the most orderly, it's actually quite grubby, but it's certainly fun. In fact, the outskirts reminded me of Bangkok - rust, concrete and billboards. There's not all that much to do or see here, but that suits me. The Yunnan university is very pretty however with neo-classical buildings, green lawns, bamboo, avenues lined with yellow ginko-tree trees, and so on.

Today I opted to get a 'cooking class' which took the form of me paying a small sum to my hostel, the staff then took me to a local market in the morning to buy ingredients, we cooked lunch together, and then we cooked several dishes for dinner. The market was fun, full of bustle, grot, people and vegetables and parts of animals I never knew existed. Cooking involved little more than putting too much oil into a wok at high temperature, adding ingredients, serving. My menu was as follows:

• Tomato with egg - a favourite in China
• Gong bao chicken - chicken with peanuts
• Mapo tofu - spicy tofu dish
• A kind of potato pancake

When you travel you find you tend to bump into the same people again in random places - in fact this happens so regularly that it raises serious questions about the nature of the Universe. Anyway, in Kunming I met a cyclist who I last met in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. He's ridden from Germany to Kunming, and lost over 20ks in the process. We went for Indian food.

Not much more to tell. Today was a sunny day. It was warm - and we're still at 2,000m above sea level.

Dali

Hello from Dali, Yunnan province, home to the Bai people (to me they all look Chinese anyway). After the lofty heights of the Tibetan plateau, there is, in normal circumstances, only one way to go and that is down. Indeed, since I left Litang (at 4000m+) I've slowly made my way back towards sea level. In Dali I feel as though I've found the lowlands where the air is thick, but it turns out the place is still at 2,200m, which is about the height of Australia's tallest mountain, Mount Kosciusko.

Dali is a small city perched between tall green mountains and a large lake. It's an old town, very much done up for tourists - backpacker guesthouses, trendy cafes, pizza restaurants, etc. It's laid back though and the Chinese culture protrudes comfortably about the tourists, and you don't have to walk far to see traditional ways of life. Today I hired a bicycle and went for a cycle to the nearby lake Er Hai. There wasn't much to do there but take a ferry, so I headed back along the road I came. I chanced upon seeing two foreigners on their bikes following a local lady with a baby on her back down a narrow alleyway close to the lake. I decided to follow them, and found myself peddling along muddy concrete, past old men smoking tobacco, dirty kids with big grins, men and women mixing concrete, old houses and rubble overgrown with vines. It was quite charming, and then I caught up with them.

They were Germans who'd found a lady to take them cormorant fishing. I decided to join them. Parked our bikes in a farm, then jumped into the lady's husband's boat, full with cormorant birds. Out we went into the lake and the birds got to work. They're well trained and know what to do. It wasn't long before they returned to the boat to be lifted back in, regurgitating caught fish into a bucket.



I later rode about about the countryside by myself, lost in thought. This is a nice place.

Lijiang & Tiger Leaping Gorge

*please note, some of the photos in this article I sourced from Flickr, they're not my own.

Lijiang
Lijiang is a popular tourist town in Yunnan province and is the 'captial' of a minority group called the Naxi. After an earthquake in 1996, it's old town was largely reconstructed, and with tourism in mind. I'd been warned about this place - of the hordes of tourists, of the endless souvenir shops and of the marginalised Naxi culture. With suitably low expectations, I can say after getting here, that in fact I really like this place.

You have to know what you're getting in Lijiang - this is a modern Chinese city, and it's old town is in fact rather new and is completely separate from the living city. It's a contrived tourist-only zone completely removed from reality, but is very charmingly done and is a wonderful place to stroll at night - by its tiny streams, over its many bridges, under its many red lanterns and past its endless souvenir shops, bars and restaurants. Don't expect genuine, living Naxi culture - it is a kind of theme-park but a very pleasant one. I'm still IMMENSELY sad that my camera isn't work, of course.




Tiger Leaping Gorge
This is, I'm quite sure, the most incredible place I've ever seen. Tiger Leaping Gorge is the name given to a very deep valley in the Yunnan mountains (part of the Himalayan system), after the legend that a tiger once leaped across it (I don't know why, google can tell you if you wish to know). It's the deepest gorge in the world in fact (and one of the narrowest) - from the river below, the valley walls rise a whopping 3 kms directly upwards, from forest through to sharp snowy peaks. The hike takes you along one of the valley walls, with views of the mountains on the other side.

I'd initially decided to skip this 2 day hike, but I met a Japanese person in Lijiang who insisted that I went. The scale of this gorge is nearly beyond the imagination. Again, killing myself that my camera doesn't work - how sad that my camera should die at the most beautiful place I've seen on my trip. The hike here also featured the most memorable peeing experience of my travels - peeing into a beautiful sunset to the sound of the river far below & out of sight, where the ground beings to heave directly upwards, forever, into clouds far overhead.

Tibetan culture

Shangri La
Greetings from so-called 'Shangri La' in Yunnan province, China. The town's actual name is 'Zhongdian', but the Chinese Tourism Bureau decided it better ought to be called 'Shangri La' - justified on the grounds that it's in the mountains (3,500m) and is somewhat Tibetan. Actually this town is a very sad place. It's just a big Chinese city, with token Tibetan architectural flourishes on big concrete buildings, and souvenir-shop after souvenir-shop selling Tibetan trinkets. I suppose there are a good number of Tibetans living here, but what you get to see as a tourist is just the brand-new old town, the shops, hotels, bars and the Tibetan hard-sell. Very sad.


Sichuan > Yunnan
Getting to Zhongdian was a delight of epic, bumpy, long-distance mini-bus journeys through the mountains. Starting at Litang on the Tibetan plateau, we crossed strange landscapes from high-altitude, boulder-strewn grasslands, to densely-forested valleys, to monumental rocky gorges. Culturally this whole route is Tibetan - the people are Tibetan and so is the architecture: attractive white block houses. Some of the most impressive scenery I've ever seen.



Sky burial in Litang
Before leaving Litang I was invited to view a Tibetan funeral. Where in some cultures it's common to bury a body, and in others to burn the body and put the remains in a little jar, in Tibet the norm seems to be to tie the body to a stick on a hill, have a holy man hack it to pieces, then let vultures devour the whole thing - sending the body back to the heavens. It sounds gruesome, and is, I'd never seen a corpse before, let alone one being chopped to pieces - there's a lot of blood involved - yet, the experience wasn't as disturbing as I thought it would be. In fact, it was peaceful in its way, we (few others from the hostel, our pretty Tibetan host, and the relatives of the deceased) sat by a small stream, there were no sounds but for the trickle of the water, the slamming of the sledge-hammer and the tearing of the vultures. There was no mourning, just the disposal of a body back to nature, whose soul had since moved on.