The Road to Luang Prabang

At 9am a mini-van swung by our guest house and we were whisked across town to the bus station where we and about 30 other people were packed like sardines into three mini-vans, our bags slung up on the roof, and after a little rearranging, we were off!

'Off' being relative because this road was just FULL of potholes, mud pits, hairpin turns, and the like... not the worst we've ever been on, but, tucked in the back with our knees to our chins, our mournful early thoughts were that this was going to be a LONG ride. Luckily, it was also a stunning ride as we headed up and into and around and through the mountains of northern Laos. Entire villages were tucked along the curves, with stilts holding them up over sheer drops, and each time we emerged from behind a mountain another gorgeous vista was spread below us.





All this beauty served to lull us despite the high speed and violent taking of turns that our driver was committed to.

About 4 hours in to what was billed as a 6 hour ride, there was a thud directly beneath me, and a scraping sound as we screeeched to a halt. Ben looked left, and saw our tire go whirling past us and over the side of the mountain. Driver was absolutely unperturbed. Getting out of the van, he sent some local kids who were standing around to go look for the tire. We passengers were a little stunned, but pitched in by scouring the road in search of the nuts. Driver pulled out a hammer and went at the wheel well with a vengeance. Was this the end of the road for us today, you might ask? Not at all. The kids reappeared with the wheel, the driver put that wheel right back on, and we loaded back up and took off. At first the driver was definitely testing the waters carefully, taking curves slowly and carefully, pulling to a stop twice to get the hammer back out when the wheel got a little wonky again. Soon his confidence was back though, and we were tearing around curves like our wheel had never flown off at all.

Big sighs all around when we pulled into the bus station outside of Luang Prabang.

Vang Vieng, Laos

Vang Vieng is a small town conveniently located halfway between Vientiane and Luang Prabang, in Northern Laos. It's in a beautiful location, with caves and cycling draws, but has become a fixture on the backpacker trail for its special take on tubing (mom, that's sitting on a big inner-tube and floating down a river; often beer is involved). The river there is pretty clean, and flows between mountains, villages... and bars. About a dozen bars, with bass beats throbbing, mud volleyball, crazy zip-line and trapeze style swings out over the water, and cheap whiskey buckets, line the first two kilometers of the trip. As you float by, they throw out ropes and haul you in for the party.

I was prepared to look down my nose at all, but I have to say that it was a GREAT party.

We spent two days in town, and the highlight was really where we stayed... a gorgeous little guest house just on the outskirts of all the action. Based on a recommendation from some girls we'd met farther south, we splurged on the $10 dollar bungalows down and across the river from the guest house proper. Our place was BIG -- we felt like we should have been subletting the extra bed! -- and we had our own bathroom and hot water and hammock. A minor detraction came in the form of the dessicated tarantula corpse that we found in the bathroom. I mean, what, exactly, lives up in the rafters that was going around killing tarantulas? But it all faded into the background when it came to location. Just look at where we were:

Massage Stop & Vientiane

From Don Det we regretfully took the boat/mini-bus transfer to the lovely southern town of Pakse. Fellow travelers report that outside of Pakse are some lovely waterfalls and Khmer ruins, but with an overnight bus to catch that night, we decided to spend our afternoon there in a different way.

Ben, a great lover of massages, had convinced me, the cheapskate, that we were due a little luxury, and we were directed up the street to this hotel, where we were told we could grab a shower and a massage. It looked wayyy too fancy to me... I figured that they'd take one look (and smell!) at us with our ratty t-shirts and shoo us right out the door. That and I imagined that any spa services that this place was offering would be just a tad outside our budget. How wrong I was. For $5 a pop we each had an almost warm shower (we'd been almost two weeks with the cold showers in this stretch) and a fabulous Lao massage. We'd both gotten stuffy noses while staying in the green paradise of Don Det, so the menthol rub-down that came with the massage not only left us tingly, but cleared our noses right out as well.

After street-sandwiches and a beer with some fellow travelers from the islands, we boarded our overnight bus for the capital. These sleeper buses were totally different than the ones we became so familiar with in Vietnam -- on each side of the bus were bunks of almost-full length "double" beds. It was a very cozy night's sleep for Ben and me, though perhaps might have been less so if either of us had been stuck spooning a stranger.

We arrived in Vientiane at 6am, and lucked out in that our shared jumbo tuk-tuk from the bus station ended up driving us all over town dropping other people off, allowing us to see lots of beautiful wats in the morning light. After finding a hotel, we set out to look for a cobbler to repair Ben's sandals (success!), and to find the Arc de Triomphe look-alike in the center of the city. We had been promised ugly by travelers moving the otherway down through Laos, and the sign on it's wall seems to support that view...
That afternoon heavy rains moved in, and so we ate, napped, emailed, and took it easy in a city that it is easy to relax in. While everyone had told us there wasn't much to do in this tiny capital city, it was wonderfully laid back and if we'd had more time, we would have loved to stay another day or two soaking up the great French food and architecture and the slow pace.

Da Last Don (Det)

Ahhh, Don Det. I like Don Det. It's a place where you could easily spend a few weeks and drastically lower your blood pressure, take some time away from the impending collapse of the global financial market and ponder a multicolored sunset over the Mekong.


Located on the Cambodia/Laos border, Don Det is one small dot in an area known as 4,000 Islands where the Mekong branches off creating, well, thousands of small islands. Connected to the slightly larger Don Khon, Don Det has emerged as a special kind of backpacker hideout - very basic accommodation (shared flush-it-yourself-with-a-bucket toilets, electricity between 18:00 and 21:00 and cold showers) for less than 1 dollar a day.

As an aside, if anybody should travel here, be careful of bungalows with supports in the water. While seemingly innocuous, we saw some folks taking apart a building we learned had earlier collapsed with a couple of travelers inside! While neither were physically hurt, the woman was apparently in shock and the couple had all of their belongings take an unexpected swim. Here you can check out the frame.

With the influx of Western travelers, many of the farmers on the island have discovered a relatively lucrative business opportunity. This doesn't change the fact that our residence was a few meters away from any number of chickens, dogs, cats, cows and water buffalo. Grandma still ran the household, and although no English emerged through her crimson betel nut stained lips, she smiled and shooed us to a prime bungalow just the same.

We were lucky to stay on the 'sunset' side of the island, a more quiet area still just a couple hundred yards from the other side of the island where boats docked from the mainland. We had a great vantage point to check out long-tail fishing boats puttering up and down the river as well as monstrous thunderclouds bearing down on us (it is monsoon season after all).

Now 'keeping yourself busy' on an island such as this is not necessarily a priority. We woke early and went to sleep early and spent a lot of time eating, playing rummy and going for walks. This isn't to say that we were necessarily lazy, we did have a couple of very legit 'see-stuff' days - dolphin day and bike-ride day.

Dolphin day was, as you can imagine, a day where we went to see dolphins, namely the endangered Irrawaddy dolphin. Native to SE Asia, the dolphin is able to live in both fresh and salt water. Now going to spot dolphins is a risky business as we had no guarantee that they would be there when we were. Riding in a van to a launch point then taking another long tail across the river back to the Cambodian side we arrived to a smallish island with a few benches. As we were getting off the boat one of the other passengers let out an 'Oh! I saw one!' and sure enough we found a pod of 5-20 dolphins hanging out. Now these dolphins are not of the Flipper variety jumping out of the river to do tricks, but it was a special opportunity to see these big-brained mammals surfacing just a dozen yards away.

Less interesting, but still impressive was a waterfall that we stopped at as well on the way home. While not very tall at all, the falls do have the distinction of having the largest quantity of water flowing down in all of SE Asia.


Bike ride day was our attempt at making it around the circumference of both Don Det and Don Khon without taking a tumble into an irrigation ditch or a water buffalo along the way. We rented some bikes that looked suspect (that ended up being fine) and set off with our friend Joost (pronounced Yosht), a medical student from the Netherlands. The ride was fantastic if a bit bumpy and muddy, but we were lucky to have just a bit of rain as we stopped for a break. One of the highlights was a small 'beach' that we stumbled upon with some sort of crazy quicksand. If you dug your feet in and started moving around you would, unsurprisingly, start to sink. Even more fun was jumping around in a small circle and creating a sort of trampoline/divot depression area.

I'm not feeling particularly able to do justice to just how beautiful the ride was amd this post is already overdue, but I hope that the pics will help. I'll just say that as nice as it may appear on the monitor, it was even more beautiful in person.

Border Adventures: Cambodia to Laos

6:20am: impatient tuk-tuk driver from the bus company shows up for our 6:30am pick-up. We are not ready.
7:30am: our 7o'clock bus leaves with us crammed into the front and our bags crammed into the back
8:30am: we get a flat. driver puts on temporary spare
10:00am: we're off again
10:30am: we stop at a car shop for the experts to fix the wheel. we order noodles; they forget Ben's noodlesoup 4 different times
11:30am: we're off again
noon: we stop for a pre-scheduled meal/pee break where driver gets free food. we're not hungry
12:30pm: on the road at last
7:00pm: it's dark. the bus stops, a pick-up truck pulls up, and the driver starts tossing our packs out the window to the truck. that's how we find out that the bus doesn't actually go where the ticket says, to the border town of Stung Treng... the pick-up will take us. we pile into the back.
7:30pm: we are unceremoniously left in front of an office called Hua Lean (our tickets say Hua Lian), where the people are very puzzled to see us and call up two men who zoom up on motorbikes to tell us that the bus company whose ticket we have and used that day... no longer exists and hasn't for 3 months. this is a small problem because we paid for a through ticket to take us on to Si Phan Don (4,000 Islands) in Laos the next morning. they also tell us that this has never happened before in the last three months that this company has supposedly not existed, and obviously it must have been our 3 separate guesthouses where we and the other travellers bought our bus tickets, THEY must have been the ones ripping us off, but why don't we come back to their hotel to talk it over.
8:00pm: they tell us they work for the van company that would have been our transfer three months ago, but now they will help us out, do us the favor of taking us across for just $11 each.
8:03pm: we don't tell them to go fuck themselves... but we want to
8:04pm: Ben picks up his bag to leave
8:05pm: Orro, a wonderful Cambodian guy who we would run into everywhere we went for the next two weeks, managed to reach the guy in Phnom Penh from whom he'd bought a ticket, who reached a (the?) bus company, who called Orro back, and said they'd come pick us up tomorrow morning afterall.
8:10pm: the hotel staff tell us this new driver who is supposed to pick us up is untrustworthy and will abandon us at the border. we have no idea what is going on and decide to wait til the morning to see what happens. but where to stay for the night?
8:15pm: they show us a $5 room with no fan, holes in the sheets bigger than my hand, and cockroaches of a similar size who don't give an inch when the lights go on
8:16pm: Ben demands a nice room in the main building for the same price and picks his pack right back up to walk out again -- he's fed up, and they know it
8:20pm: we are ungraciously shown to a very nice room, and sullenly tossed a key
8:30pm: we look for food with Orro and his Belgian friend, Chris. I am grumpy, Ben is angry, we're all hungry and confused. nothing is open but one place that overcharges.
9:50pm: we get home, realize we have tv with HBO and discover that Flight of the Conchords is about to come on. sweet mercy at last -- this makes everything all better.

The next morning, miracle of miracles, a driver shows up and we, Chris and Orro, and two Israeli girls jump in and are whisked to the border. Getting through the Cambodia side requires just a single dollar bribe apiece (much cheaper than the entry 'fee'!), and the Laos side requires the same. After all stamps are stamped and we are officially in Laos, we sit. And wait. And watch as cars of locals pull up to customs, slow to a roll so that the passenger can hop out and deliver a fish, or a chicken, or some perfume, to the customs officials, hop back into the car, and continue on their merry way.

Eventually we were picked up, driven 20 minutes down the road, told to get out, to go to the dock, to leave the dock and walk along the bank, to wait, and finally to jump into a long-tailed boat which ferried us across a full-bodied and fast-moving Mekong to reach, at long last, the glorious peacefulness of Don Det: paradise tucked away among Laos' 4,000 Islands.

Phnom Penh, take 2

After saying a weary goodbye to both Angkor and Pierce and Hannah, we took the bus back to Phnom Penh in preparation for making a run to the border for our planned crossing into Laos. If you are, perhaps, looking at a map of Cambodia whilst reading this (mom), you may notice that this doesn't seem to make much sense, but we'd been told the roads through the north-central part of the country were so bad, and likely washed out, that nothing would be making the run through. We later heard from a Cambodian friend that we could indeed have taken a direct bus from Siem Reap to the border town of Stung Treng, an unhappy place of which you'll hear more soon, so who knows.

I was fine with going back to Phnom Penh because I wanted to see the Royal Palace which we'd missed out on our first time around. The morning after we arrived back in town, a sleepy Ben reluctantly climbed into a tuk-tuk with me, and off we went under a sunny and cloudless sky. We arrived at the palace 45 minutes before it was supposed to have closed for the regular 3 hour lunch break, but the guards were closing up shop already, and told us there was no hope for entrance and we'd better come back at 2:00. At this point Ben was all for going back to the hostel and calling it a day, but I was determined to see the darn Palace, so we killed the lunch hour(s) with internet and some food. Around 1:45 the clouds began to roll in but we made it back to the Palace gates, paid the comparatively exorbitant entrance fee, and spent about 20 minutes inside the grounds before the skies opened and we were deluged for the next two hours. The entire place flooded. In the end, we saw those famous sloping gold roofs, took some pretty pictures, and got really really wet... check! another day of rainy season sight-seeing, and a farewell to the capital.

Angkor! Day 3

On our final day at Angkor we went farther afield, setting out first for Banteay Srey, 25 km outside of town and considered by most people to be the loveliest and most artistically perfect of the temples. It is especially famous for its (sometimes dirty!!) detail work.

On our way to Banteay Srey, we stopped by the Cambodian Landmine Museum, a small set of buildings run by a man named Aki Ra who laid many landmines himself during years as a child soldier under the Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese, and is an expert now in the ongoing process of trying to rid Cambodia of the UXOs which maim and kill thousands of Cambodians every year. He and his wife use the Landmine Museum as a base to support more than 20 children, many of whom have been injured by UXOs.

After Banteay Srey we decided to push on to a unique site called Kbal Spean which is made up of a series of carvings along a river bed. To reach Kbal Spean we took the tuk-tuk even farther, along deeply rutted and muddy roads, past flooded countryside, to get to the turn-off. From there, the site was about a mile hike in, along a great jungle path which eventually led us to the river as well as a fantastic waterfall.

We could only get a small picture of Kbal Spean's full scope because the rushing water of the wet season obscured many of the largest and most intricate carvings (look close, you can just make out some carving-work...), but our driver led us from spot to spot along the river to find some of the smaller stone bas-reliefs.After a long and bumpy trip back towards Siem Reap, we turned down a small country road to find one final spot, Banteay Samre, a big sprawling temple which was nearly deserted and made especially dramatic by the rain clouds gathering overhead and the heavy humid quietness as we walked around. Tired from another long day, I was happy to finish off our Angkor tour with such a perfect final temple-wander.

Angkor! Day 2

For day 2 of our three day Angkor adventure, we woke up at 4:30 to arrive at Angkor Wat itself before sunrise. Well, we arrived REALLY early, and spent half an hour using flashlights and a pre-dawn glimmer to check out what we could of the iconic temple complex. It was very dark and nearly deserted except for a few other intrepid tourists who had also decided to make the foray into the temple itself. Unfortunately, the very top tier was closed for reconstruction work, so we couldn't climb to the vantage point we'd hoped for. As the sky began to lighten we headed back out front to try to catch the sunrise over Angkor Wat... and found a couple hundred other people waiting for daybreak. Ah well, we got the shot. And the shot. And the shot.

Taking advantage of our early start, and stopping only for coffee, we set out on the "big loop" to see some of the temples slightly farther out than Angkors Wat and Thom. We headed straight through the Angkor Thom complex, stopping only for the magnificent head adorning the eastern side of the North Gate.

First stop was Preah Khan, which, along with Ta Prohm, was one of my absolute favorites. They share a certain similarity as each are curled, here and there, in the grasp of huge trees, and feature plenty of crumbling corners. We continued on, stopping at some smaller structures as well as the lovely fountain and reservoir area of Neak Pean, the smaller temple of Ta Som, and Pre Rup, a beautiful Angkor Watlike temple made of a redder stone and built with several layers around the central tower whose corners were punctuated by elephants. By Pre Rup, we'd put in most of an 8 hour day and it wasn't even 1pm yet... time to head back to our guesthouse and rest. As we headed home we stopped in for a quick look at Prasat Kravan, a small structure made of brick (and now fully reconstructed) with a very different feel than the rest of the Angkor temples.

Angkor! Day 1

Our first day at Angkor, we skipped Angkor Wat itself and headed for Angkor Thom, a huge complex encompassing the royal palace and buildings. First up was Bayon Temple, a hugely intricate structure with at least three distinct levels, and it's signature faces. Walking clockwise, we arrived next at Baphuon, a "temple mountain" which was actually so heavy that it had partially collapsed the hill which served as it's foundation. Restoration records were lost during the decades of fighting, and it is still being reconstructed. The causeway leading up to it is intact though, and you can still get a sense of how impressive it must have been. As we wandered further along the edge of Angkor Thom, we scrambled around a few smaller, unmarked temples and monuments before having to take a break to wait out a heavy rain. Luckily for us, the rain cleared after a few hours, and we checked out the Elephant Terrace and Terrace of the Leper King before moving out through the Victory Gate. From Angkor Thom we went to Ta Keo which had not been decorated in the intricate style of some of the other temples, but featured some long sets of steep steep steps. Here are Pierce and Hannah making their way -- caaaarefully -- down. We also went to Ta Prohm, a beautiful temple left much as it had been found, tangled up in the trees that have grown up in and around it. When Pierce wondered out loud why no one had ever made a movie in the Angkor ruins, Ben noted that they had: Tomb Raider. This is the temple where some of the famous scenes were shot. At the end of a long day, we stopped off at Banteay Kdei, a big temple complex whose length is what made it's biggest impact on my tired legs. A long central corridor stretched back with courtyards and rooms opening off of it. I guess it would have been more of a monastic nature than a temple proper. It was also a notable stop for us because it's where Ben's right sandal lost it's sole:We ended the day with a stroll across the way to overlook a huge reservoir/ceremonial water basin (archaeologists still aren't sure which) by Srah Srang -- remnants of a hugely developed urban area which once surrounded the Angkor temples and supported tens of thousands of people as well as served as a ruling and religious center.