H
ere at last! Back in Bangkok and eagerly awaiting our flight.
Like horses champing at the bit, WE CAN’T WAIT!!!! Apologies for the lateness
of this, our last blog in Asia.
It’s been a crazy 2 weeks since landing in Laos, with not much internet connection
and even less time. Also, we keep thinking we get to share all of these stories
with you in person soon so feel like we can hang on to them a bit longer!
But for completeness sake I’ll quickly recap…
Forgoing the 3 day bus journey for a 1 hour
flight into Laos allowed us just enough time to see
the gorgeous little town of Luang Prabang. Beautiful wide streets, crumbling
French villas and loads of Wats decorated with coloured lanterns for the
festival celebrating “Bun Awk Phansa” (End of the Rains Retreat). The morning
started at 6:30am watching a stream of about 60 saffron swathed
monks walking silently down the street collecting alms from kneeling locals.
The rest of the day was spent wondering along the river banks watching boat
races, eating baguettes and getting foot massages. The night market swallowed
us whole with its beautiful stalls of fresh silk, paper lanterns, paintings and
food. Eating barbequed pork on a stick with finger-fulls of sticky rice at a
wooden table in a smoky alley filled with vendors, locals and grubby, smiling
children under a full moon. This is why we travel.
Early next morning saw the beginning of our
slow boat trip up the Mekong for 2 days passing pristine jungle, remote mountain villages and naked
children playing in the shallows while water buffalo looked on. Sadly no sign
of the tigers, elephants, sun bears, or clouded leopard reportedly inhabiting
these parts, but it’s good to know they’re out there somewhere. There were some
signs of the logging industry threatening to gorge on Laos, like so many other countries in South East Asia. Interestingly, it has become more
obvious the more north we’ve come, which also means the closer we are to the
Red Giant. (Legally or illegally, I guess the hungry dragon must be fed.)
By the time we reached the small border town of
Huay
Xai the full moon festival celebrating the end of the rainy season was in
full swing. We also met up again with Natalie and Harriet, the same girls who
joined us in Borneo for the diving. Our reunion was
celebrated with a sky full of paper lanterns and great big paper boats covered
with candles released onto the river. Beautiful!
The next day began the Gibbon Experience, a 3
day adventure playing Peter Pan deep in a Laos reserve that involved some hefty
hiking, sleeping in tree houses 40m above the ground and zip
lining/foofy-sliding across the jungle canopy. A mind-blowing experience that
must be the closest realization of those flying dreams everyone has when
they’re children. Incredible enough to put even the thought of leeches and
spiders at the back of our minds. (Although not enough to keep them away from
our feet! Pete, who shall henceforth be known as Pablo, Sanchez or Pedro due to
the fuzz on his top lip (in honour of Movember), fended off leeches left right
and centre and managed to survive with only one blood-sucking bite.)
Back into the border town after a pretty hairy
drive on roads that made the Transkei look like the N1 out of Cape Town. After a good shower and dinner it
was a sad farewell to our travelling buddies again before a good night’s sleep
in preparation for the border crossing the next day. A relatively painless
experience with a quick ferry across the Mekong to the Thai border and a 5 hour bus ride to Chiang
Mai. Two days of relaxing before the legging it to Bangkok.
In Chiang Mai, Pedro decided to take the day
off for a good sleep in while I went off to do a day of Mahout training at
Chang Siam Mahout Elephant Training Lodge (say that fast
20 times!). Nestled in a little valley with a beautiful stream, I met Dodo, a 4
year old ele with a penchant for sweet vrot bananas. With him, our little group
of 5 learnt the necessary commands to control an elephant before being given
fully grown ones of our own:
1.
“Song-suun”
– lift up your leg so I can stand on it, grab your ear and swing myself onto
your neck
2.
“Huh”
– move…forwards preferably
3.
“How!!!”
– Stop!!!
4.
“Toy”
– go backwards…pleeeease!
These commands were given with gentle barefoot
nudges to the back of the ele’s ears. But while they made us feel like we had
some control, we were very aware that the massive animals beneath us couldn’t
give 2 hoots what we were trying to say to them. After about an hour in the
jungle plodding along, trying to stop our elephants from scratching their
backsides against passing trees and eating their daily 70kg quota of jungle, it
was time for a river bath. And what a bath! While the elephants lay on their
sides completely submerged by the stream except for the tips of their trunks,
we scrubbed them down with shoe brushes and got soaked by the mahouts who
leap-frogged from elephant to elephant trying not to get wet while dumping
buckets of water over us. A farewell trunk-full of water in the ear later I
drove back to town to meet Pablo who had spent the day getting a massage and
sorting out some “admin.” The rest of the eve was spent eating and catching up
with some university friends who were fortuitously in Chiang Mai the same night
we were.
Another day of eating and massages before
catching the overnight sleeper train to Ayuthaya, the old capital of Siam. Saw some pretty impressive ruins,
including a Buddha head wrapped in tree roots, but this still palled in
comparison to the glory of Cambodia’s Angkor Wat. Squeezed in our last
meal at a local night bazaar before crashing in the heat and hiding in the
aircon for the rest of the night.
Second last day and we arrived safe and sound
in big, bad Bangkok. Finally found a hotel near the river and
managed to catch the Royal Barge Procession, the royal version celebrating the
end of the rainy season and a Thai tradition that’s over 700 years old. A
stunning farewell to round off an incredible 7 month adventure.
South East Asia has been quite the geographic,
gastronomic and cultural experience. Thank you for sharing it with us here and
we look forward to sharing more with you all in person.
God bless and see you soon!
Love Pablo and Amanda
xx
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| Colourful Lanterns in Luang Prabang |
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| Pork on a stick...Yum!! |
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| Umbrellas in the night market |
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| "Jo ma" coffee house...a little touch from home? |
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| Monks receiving alms early in the morning |
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| View up the Mekong from the slow boat |
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| Riverside hamlets along the Mekong |
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| Waterfall in the jungle |
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| Zip lining into the tree house on the Gibbon Experience |
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| Our toilet...a room with a view! |
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| View of the zip line across the valley |
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| Rice farm in the middle of the jungle |
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| A leech!! |
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| An ele kiss from Dodo |
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| A bathing ele |
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| Going other places...a postbox in Thailand |
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| Sleeper train |
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| Buddha head in a tree, Wat Mahatat, Ayuthaya |
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| Final dinner in Bangkok...next stop SOUTH AFRICA!! |
