i suppose that since i am nearing the end of this trip, i am nearing the end of this blog. so i guess that means i should do a few last posts before i touch down in the states again, eh? since i last updated i travelled up to the north of thailand. without too much to do i decided to try my hand at riding a real motorcyle (not the wimpy little scooters. too easy). so i splurged and got a honda phantom.


my bike

after i drove around in circles inside the city for about an hour trying to figure out how the hell to get past the moat (yes, a real live water moat) and out into the world i headed up into the hills. part of the reason i couldnt find my way out of the city and into the hills is that the air quality in thailand rivals that of bangkok (good luck with that, atheletes). so i spent all day cruising around the hills because a) they are beautiful and b) they are about 10 degrees cooler than town.


rest stop


dork

i was hoping to get away from the tourist trap that seems to be most of thailand and see some more rural, real life type villages. and i thought i would succeed. i'd drive around for half an hour and not see any other tourists, then bam! "Hmong village" aka place where the tourists all go in big buses to buy overpriced fake souveniers. this is kind of why i decided against going on a trek. i hear that the hill tribes have been commercialized on and exploited as attractions. that, and i hate walking up mountains in the heat.
my motorcycle diaries fantasy over, it was time to head to laos. i travelled up to the area known as the golden triangle because it is where burma (myanmar, or whatever) thailand and laos all meet. the border up there basically consists of a river. so my border crossing was done by speedboat. from there it was a boat trip down the mekong river to get into some sort of civilization and out of the jungly mountains. now, you can take the speedboat, which distributes helmets when you get on board and flies down the river in six hours or you can take the slow boat which carries with it a much lower probability of death. as much as i hated the sound of a slow boat, i opted for it, as did most of my fellow travellers.


our boat looked like this, but with people, not bags of grain


from inside the boat

on a slow boat you have a lot of time to talk with your fellow passengers and, incidentally i have been running into them in every town since. really makes my trip seem unique... but it is fun to point them out as the "drunk ones" or the "old canadians" or "those girls whose names i forgot." and some of them ended up being really fun travel partners as well.
anyway. the slow boat went down the mekong for two days through great river landscapes. though i must say, when you are sitting on a board four inches wide for that long, the scenery becomes secondary and loses its charm. in retrospect though:


pak bang, the town we stopped in for the night

the boat took us to an old french colonial town on the river called luang prabang. one of the first things i noticed is how nice the people here are. i suppose they havent been destroyed by nasty travellers yet. anyway, back to our little colonial town. mostly what you do there is wander around looking at more temples and spending a lot of money. but it was a cute town.


stairs and stairs and stairs


temple, again


buddha, again


nothing special, just thought it was pretty

i went, along with a couple of my fellow boat travellers (jason and loraine) to another river town called vang vieng. it was mostly too hot to much of anything. but they have a booming tubing scene. so you throw yourself in a rubber innertube and the local kids give you a push (while hitching a ride for as long as they think they can get away with it) and you're off. along the way there are various bars and restaurants with rope swings and various sorts of sketchy things on the menus and if you stop they pull you in off the river with big bamboo poles.


jason and loraine


if you look closely, its me in a river. i have no idea who that guy is.

weatherwise, it is as hot as you may imagine from all those vietnam type movies. but it is also humid. so out of nowhere comes this downpour (i suppose you would call it a monsoon) but it is still hot. gross. i got caught in a huge monsoon with the bright idea that i would watch it from a hammock in a little bungalow. by the time it was all over, the bungalow was barely standing and i was huddled in with the bamboo, because at least it wouldn't break and become a wind propelled spear.
for now, i am writing from vientiane, the capital, but tonight i am off down south to a place called the four thousand islands. my plan is to beat the heat in the river while looking for those ugly pink river dolphins. then it is off to cambodia with me. perhaps i will write from there.