Chiang Mai, Laos and some Cambodia

• Sarahblythe's Profile
• About this blog
• Entry from Phnom Penh

Trip Start Sep 17, 2009 Previous
Entry Trip End May 05, 2010 Next
Entry

  Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Tourist Towns

Occasionally when travelling in Asia, particularly south-east Asia, you come across a strange subset of town called the 'tourist town' where the only industry is catering for tourists. These towns have...

a) a massive selection of western style restaurants selling roast dinners
b) far too many tour companies (half-heartedly disguising themselves as tourist information centres) selling almost exactly the same tours
and c) a disproportionately large number of tourists compared to the size of the town

As soon as we arrived in Chiang Mai it was obvious that this was one of those towns but, to be honest, having been travelling for five months it was a fairly welcome change. I'm starting to see south-east Asia as the holiday within our holiday. Everything is set up for short term tourists here  - everyone speaks a bit of English, tour companies will sort out all of your travel arrangements, there's loads of cheap accommodation - everything is just ... easy!

Our first day in Chiang Mai we breifly had a look at the major temple of the city but quickly realised that the sights were fairly unspectacular and instead did exactly what we should be doing in a town like this - eating jacket potatoes and burgers! A leaflet caught our eye in town though, advertising a "real", "authentic", "not show fight" Thai boxing match that was by chance happening that night. We'd wanted to see some in Bangkok but the tickets were over 40 pounds and here was our chance to see it for under a tenner, excellent!

As we expected having read the suspicious wording of the leaflet, the fights were just for tourists but it really didn't matter too much - we could hardly have told the difference between that a real championship fight. The interesting thing was that it wasn't really as brutal as I thought it would be - there's a lot more tactics than I'd imagined and also a lot of strange half-dancing ceremonies. The other strange thing is that it's all set to a kind of soundtrack of bongo drumming jungle rhythms which makes it all seem weirdly harmless. The oddest thing about the night though was that half way through this "real" "authentic" boxing match they suddenly blasted out some kind of eurovision pop and all of the bar ladies and ladyboys started dancing what looked like a sort of Thai macarena!

The other major attraction at Chiang Mai is the treks going out into the surrounding jungle to stay overnight with some of the local hill-tribes. We booked ourselves on a quick two day trek complete with white water rafting and a very touristy elephant ride! It was fairly hard going at first, going up and down some very steep hills in some seriously sweaty heat but it was nice to see a bit of the country having been in towns for so long and some of the scenery was pretty special. I even heard Sarah say that she enjoyed the trek. At the end of the first day we ended up at a tiny village in one of the valleys which i think they were trying to pass off as a traditional hill tribe but that was nonsense really. The were really nice people though and we drank lots of lao whiskey with them and tried one their huge straw hats. Sarah made good friends with slightly mad and drunk Thai women called Aya who wanted to take her away to something in the next village (our trek guide told Sarah very seriously that she shouldn't go!).

The next day was a pure tourist town tour stuff. A quick but fun ride on an elephant in the morning followed by a quick walk to a nearby Lisu hill tribe village. You could tell that this one was more genuinely a hill tribe because there was a big sign in English saying "Welcome to the Lisu hill-tribe village". There were also lots of women hassling all the fat tourists with huge cameras around their necks (who'd appeared out of nowhere in big tour groups) to buy their "traditional" handicrafts. We were made to wait here for half an hour or so before we were driven down to the river for some white water rafting, which was good wet fun!

Slow Boat to Luang Prubang

The following day day we made our way slowly to the Laos border where we stayed the night before hopping on to the "slow boat" which takes around 90 passengers down the Mekong River, arriving at Luang Prubang two days later. It was pretty much all tourists (one of the weird things about travelling in southeast asia is that you hardly ever seem to get the same transport as the locals which is a shame) but, even so, it was a nice way to travel. The scenery on the Mekong banks is very impressive - its all dense jungle clinging to sharp cliff faces and the occassional rural community of bamboo huts - so it seemed to go very quickly.

The boat was full of the drunk australian travellers ("Go hard or go home!") that we'd been trying to avoid though, so it was a relief to get to Luang Prubang after two consecutive eight hour days in a boat with them!

The town itself is a sort of drowsy old Lao town that's been perfectly preserved for hundreds of years. The main centre of it is dominated by a group of buddhist temples and on every street corner you'll find monks dressed in bright orange robes - in Laos every boy has to spend a year after school as a practising monk, a sort of spiritual national service.

The following day after our arrival was Sarah's birthday so we got up early and went to a Lao cooking course that we'd booked in the day before. The woman, Hahn, took us to the local market and talked us through all the strange vegetables and the weird meats (everything from sheeps brains to snakes and live frogs to ants eggs). We spent the rest of the morning making some fresh spring rolls, a sort of fish pie cooked in banana leaves and the national dish, laap.

It all tasted amazing but, unfortunately, it gave us both our second round of food poisoning in the trip! But we refused to stop this from getting in the way of our packed birthday schedule, so after a bit of sicking we headed out to get a Lao massage. It was very painful to be honest but it was my first ever massage so i think i just wasn't used to it, but a good experience all the same. Sarah was about three booths down from me and was giggling every five minutes from awkward rubs and tickles but enjoyed it more than me. We met up with two Chilean girls in the evening for drinks and that was pretty much the last thing we did in Luang Prubang. The rest of the time we just stayed in bed recovering!

Tubing and Family Guy

Next stop was Vang Viang, one of the oddest places we've been for a while. It's a sort of traveller's playground in the middle of the laos mountains where there are probably three times as many tourists as locals. The main activity is 'tubing' which basically involves jumping inside a massive tractor inner tube and floating slowly down the river. The first section of the river is lined on either side with ridiculously cheap bars which give out free shots and fries and have huge slides into the water attached to them - great for the drunk australians but we opted to float on past it! The rest of the river though is pretty much completely empty and you just bob along in the sunshine looking at the jungle and limestone cliffs and whatever else that passes you by, then you stop for lunch, then you get back in the tube and float to Vang Viang again. Before we got there though our tubes were hijacked by a load of Lao kids (so there were now three people per tube) who we thought were just hopping on for the final rapids but actually they just wanted money for showing us where to get off! They were exceptionally cute though (as all the kids in south east asia are) so we gave them around 5000 kip (40p) and went on our way.

The town, like any tourist town, has far too many western food restaurants but the difference is that here they were all characterised by different American TV shows - one had a huge crowd watching Friends, another The Simpsons, another King of the Hill. We decided eventually on the Family Guy restaurant, ate a burger and watch Family Guy for a couple of hours. The next day we left Vang Viang a bit bemused, thinking we could be pretty much anywhere in the world.

Vientiane

We'd heard a friend of ours was going to be in Vientiane at the same time as us thanks to the world of facebook. Richard, who we'd met in Japan and who has featured before on this blog (I'm sure the most avid readers amongst you, if there are any (!), will remember him) had worked his way through Taiwan, china and Vietnam and was now in Laos at the same time as us. Small world.

So really the only things we did in the capital were having lunch with Richard, drinking with Richard and even bowling with Richard which was all very nice and it was good to see him again. The city itself is a typically lazy lao place which hardly seems like a capital but there's enough bars and restaurants to pass the time. The highlight of our time there though was seeing Crystal Palace (who's games are hardly ever on even at home) live in the FA Cup in some random bar!

Rural Laos

After a fairly horrible night bus we arrived 10 hours later in Sai Pha Don or Four Thousand Islands which is right in the deep south of the country next to the Cambodian border. Here the Mekong splits into a hundred different waterways and creates countless islands in between them. We'd been recommended to go this place by a few people so we were really looking forward to it. The accomodation is extremely basically, just a hut overlooking the river with one light. It took us a while to get used to the heat there but once we had we had a good time, spending a couple of days just chilling out, swimming in the river with crazy lao children chasing us, chatting to very nice but very serious and passionate russians, reading, eating and lots and lots of sleeping.

Cambodia

After a miserable days of travelling on buses from 8am to 12pm we arrived in Siem Reap in northwest Cambodia ready to see Angkor Wat, the largest and most famous temple complex in south east asia. Siem Reap itself is the ultimate tourist town, the only difference is that its more upmarket and has a lot of obviously very wealthy holiday makers. Here you could find Lavazza, posh bars with immaculate wicker furniture and even order champagne! This wasn't the Cambodia we were expecting, nor is it typical of a country that ranks amongst the poorest in the world.

Unfortunately on the first night I came down with a fever which meant I couldn't go to Angkor Wat the next day. Luckily Sarah had met a Finnish girl and a Polish girl the day before so went with her instead. All I can tell you about it was that the pictures looked very nice indeed! Oh well, maybe I'll come back another day. We spent the next day doing a bit more recovery (recover seems to be an annoyingly common activity on this trip!) and then went out for some drinks with the two other girls and I saw Sarah drunk for the first time for a few months, desperate to get everyone to go to the karaoke bar outside of town. We declined.

Yesterday we got to the capital, Phnom Penh, and it seems like a really charming city. There are some really nice french colonial buildings and the people all seem really nice. In fact the people in Cambodia are all reallly nice. Considering the stuff that happened here as little as thirty years ago it's incredible that they are so friendly, so happy and have such a good sense of humour.

Plans

We;ve been trying to plan our trip in a lot more detail recently and I think its going to look a bit like this if you're interested....

We're going to Kampot today, perhaps with a quick detour to Kep and the tropical Rabbit Island, before heading back to Phnom Penh to pick up our Chinese visas. We'll head off into the south of Vietnam, through Siagon, up to Hoi An and Hanoi. Then we're going to do a big loop inside China, from Guilin to Yunnan, Sichuan and then towards Beijing and Tianjin. We'll then hop on a boat to Korea have maybe a week there before flying back from Seoul. We're looking at a few flights in between April 20th and May 3rd. We'll let you know...

Slideshow Share

Post your own travel photos for friends and family More Pictures

Tubing in Vang Viang

Angkor Wat

Previous Entry Next Entry