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Sabaidi (this is the only Laos I know except possibly for 'thankyou' which I think is khop chai, so I'm practicing it whenever possible).
Everyday is so full of newness, exhaustion and hilarity whic someone somewhere I read compared to being like a child again, but it does make it very difficult to keep both travel diaries and blogs even remotely up to date. It's impossible to capture how much is going on and even photos don't give the beautiful landscape justice now that we are in Laos.
Before raving about the amazingness of this little country, I'll tell you a bit more about our time in Chiang Mai. Actually, first I'm going to go to sleep because I'm tried and I can't figure out how to save what I've written without posting it. Sorry for getting you all excited. Stay posted, I'll update this soon.
Ok I'm back. I'm still tired because I didn't sleep very well because the beds here are like a slab of rock with a (very thin) blanket. Atleast this morning I wasn't woken by a rooster. For the past four mornings I've been woken at 5am sharp and watched dearly for a meatcleaver or a shotgun. The roosters are bringing out a violent side of me I never knew existed.
It all started in a hill top tribal village in Thailand. The villagers we were staying with were lovely (especially when Sarah got sick and they all crowded around her bed with candles and gave her 'magic rice'). The air felt fresh and clean and our guide and Stevie and Saana, the other people in our group were alot of fun. The hard bamboo open hut we slept in, however was freezing and between the cold and Stevie drunkenly mistaking my bed for his in the middle of thenight, I didn't sleep very well. In the morning I was woken by continual rooster cries, pigs grunting beneath my bed and. strangely, Gwen Stefani music which was playing from god knows where.
It took us a two and a half hour walk up a steep hillto get there. On the way up Army, our very cool guide took us with Stevie and Saana. Luckily Army was a believer in regular rests and we stopped alot and played with his inappropriately shaped slingshot. We were lucky because we were such a small group that he could take us to a village his surrogate family were in rather than the other more tourist oriented villages in the area. We ate the most delicious food, his 'sister'/'mother'/'friend'/i never figured quite how everyone fit together cooked us. There was no electricity so we sat around the fire all evening playing the guitar, joking (which takes on whole new levels when half the group can't speak a word of the same language as the other) and watching a child, whose name I never figured out butI called him 'Pyro' who was obssesed with taking sticks out of the fire and playing with them.
In the morning, having established there was no feasible way of committing rooster genocide, me Sarah and Sylvia said goodbye to the others who were on another trek and set off down the mountain with a new guide who could speak barely any English, but was very fond of the phrase 'be careful'. The Thai jungle was much drier than New Zealand, and had the added features of snakes and massive spiders, both of which our new guide took delight in pointing out to us. 'Camera, camera'he shouted, as Sarah, who is not scared but very 'safety aware' backed away from a lime green snake.
But I really can't talk. Later we went elephant riding, Sarah and Sylvia on the front elephant with the mahout (elephant owner/trainer/guide) and me on the back by myself on a smaller elephant. At least I though I was by myself until I saw the spider on the seat with me. Did you know I was scared of spiders? Neither did I until I saw this one and freaked out. I realised that being stuck high up on a jolting elephant clingning on for dear life as we walked down hills (it's much more dangerous than it looks) with a spider inching towards me was one of my worst nightmares (narrowly beaten by being attacked by a swarm of leeches). Luckily I was saved by my knight in shining armour (although I always thought he would ride a white horse, not an elephant), the mahout, who saw I was upset, told me it was ok, and when he realised I clearly thought it was not ok, awkwardly turned his elephant so it was next to mine and grabbed the spider and threw it into the jungle. I love this man.
I was still pretty pleased when I was allowed to get off the seat, which I suspected was harbouring more spiders, and ride the elephant properly, on its neck. This would usually be terrifying because there is nothing to hold onto and when you go down a hill (the whole trek was down hill) you will fall off if you do not hold yourself up on the elephant's head and keep your balance. But compared to the spider this fantastic. Plus having your legs encased in gently flapping elephant ears is one of the nicest feelings in the world.
After I had given my elephant alot of bananas (and been groped by all the other elephant trunks trying to get the bananas) we drove back to Chiang Mai.The next morning we took a saeng thew (a taxi-bus hybrid that we should really have in NZ, although I don't think OSH would approve of them given how safey aware Sarah was of the fact there were no seatbelts), a six hour bus, a tuk-tuk and a long tailed boat to get across the border into Laos.
Laos is a beautiful country and if you haven't been there you should go whenever you have the chance. We loved the little border town, Huay Xai. We loved the two day boat trip downthe Mekong through the beautiful green hills on either side despite the cramped hard seats. We loved Pak Beng, the little hillside town we stayed in overnight, despite the fact we all had to sleep in the same (admittedly large) bed. We loved the crazy monster child who liked to jump on us and roar while we were waiting for the boat. We love Luang Prabang, where we are now, especially the fact that it has no roosters.
I'm off to ride my bike some more around my new favourite town. Sohk dee (yess, three words).
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