In Thailand it’s easy to do a whole lot of nothing and that's what I've been doing. The friendly people, good food, and hospitable accommodation combined with a very low price tag make it the perfect place for time to simply slip away. Has it almost been two weeks since I arrived in Bangkok from India? Yes it has….
I haven’t really minded the dramatically slower pace of travel while in Thailand. For one, I’ve been having a hard time shaking a bit of travel fatigue from India. I’ll feel fine one day and excessively sleepy the next but now I think I’m coming around a bit and am ready to head into Laos.
I’ll be traveling into Laos with my friend Debs from the UK. She caught up to me in Chaing Mai on Saturday after an awful overnight 3rd class train from Bangkok. She sat on a hard seat next to a fat man who kept nodding off and leaning or her. The scheduled 12 hour trip delayed into a 16 hour ordeal. The last time I heard from her was on Wednesday via email and I hadn’t heard a word since. The last message I received was, “I’ll just keep hopping trains until I get to Chaing Mai”. I wasn’t really sure when she was going to show up.
Debs finally arrived in Chaing Mai around 2pm on Saturday and immediately went to the hotel I originally told her I was staying at. She was shocked to find out, from the front desk clerk, that I had gone back to Bangkok. In actuality I was nearby in another hotel because I had switched accommodations. I had sent her an email with the revised info but she hadn’t got it yet. The clerk somehow summed up that I had gone back to Bangkok. I doubt he even remembered me. I have found that in some cultures people will give you bad information before no information because they are embarrassed or consider it rude to give no explanation.
Needless to say Debs was fuming when she got the wrong, yet bad news. She found a place to stay and immediately sought out an internet connection to send me a nasty email. It was then that she finally got my message about switching hotels and sent me a note that she was in town. When I finally found her she was wired, tired, and running on fumes. We immediately went to a restaurant and I ordered two large sized beers and lots of food. After that everything was ok. We laughed and caught up on things. She was kicking herself for not checking her emails and I was wishing I had met her at the station. I had a gut feeling she would be on the train she arrived on.
The next day we took it easy in Chiang Mai and enjoyed the festivities of the Loi Krathong festival celebrating the 12th full moon of the year by Thai definition. The festival gives thanks to the River Goddess. The streets were packed with vendors selling food, trinkets and all kinds of stuff. The skies were filled with cylindrical paper hot air balloons (lanterns) fueled by a flaming coil of bees wax. The coil is lit and the lantern is held up until the air is heated enough for it float up into the sky on its own. Lighting one and releasing it is said to bring good luck. The lanterns were going off at regular intervals all over town so it really was a beautiful and interesting sight. I’ve never seen anything like and think it would be a great way to pull off a UFO hoax in the states.
We left Chaing Mai via bus on Monday morning and headed to Chaing Rai. After being more or less city bound for the past couple of weeks we planned to find somewhere to walk the next day. Today we hired a long tail boat to take us up the Mekong River to a hill tribe village that specializes in Elephant rides. We didn’t go for a ride but roamed about the local unmarked hill trails and met some of the local hill people. Everywhere you go the Thai people are nice and friendly.
Tomorrow (Wednesday) we plan to cross the border into Laos at Huay Xai. We will likely have to spend a night there in order to figure out how to get to Luang Nam Tah where we plan to do some hiking. Laos should be a lot less developed and not nearly as touristy as Thailand. I expect the travel to be notably different.
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