Hello again my friends,
I always feel like I am kinda keeping up on this thing but then I check the last time I updated and realize it's been about a month since I wrote anything! Damn, I am gonna be back before I get a chance to finish updating this thing and then no one will want to read it.
Brit and I are now in Central America after a long hectic journey to get here from Bali. You guys and gals don't get to hear about it yet though cause I'm still so far behind that you gotta wait and hear about some other weird adventures first hahaha. We only got about 3 months left of our journey. The plan right now is to hit all the countries in Central America which are: Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Belize. We might have to scratch El Salvador though cause it is a bit outta the way for us and we may be pressed for time, bummer. For some reason everyone thinks I am in South America and am going to be traveling around there for the remainder of the trip...this includes my own family who I have told seeeeeeveral times that I'm not going there. Maybe this time they will understand that, if they read this that is.
So now let's move onto this beast. This entry is gonna focus on our short little romp through Northern Thailand and then our travels through Laos. I'm gonna combine the two and hopefully breeze through it cause I am still getting people telling me the blogs are toooooo looooooonnnnnggggg.
We caught a flight from Hong Kong into Bangkok which wasn't quite long enough for me to finish the movie I was watching. I was watching "Warrior" and the plane landed before I got to find out which brother won at the end. It was on my mind the entire trip till I found a guy who had the movie on his computer and I hounded him to copy it for me. I wasn't very happy with the ending.
Quick side note here. Brit thought this was funny and I left it out of my previous write up. For some reason I couldn't see the signs for Men's and Women's bathrooms in China. I kept ending up in the female facilities. This happened on numerous occasions and I was even showering in the girls showers and one point. Brit kept coming in and being like "What the fuck are you doing in here!?" I swear they weren't marked with gender but whenever I went out to look they were clearly marked and I couldn't figure out how I kept missing them.
Yes, I am getting distracted now. So we landed in Bangkok and caught a cab to Khao San Rd which is the world famous backpacker street in the grimey city (actually a lot cleaner and nicer than I expected). At the time I thought Khao San was the most horrible place I had ever been in my life. We got outta the cab to the world's busiest street filled with more backpacker people than we had seen during our entire trip combined. Shops were everywhere and music was blaring so loud from the dozens, perhaps hundreds of bars and clubs on the street. Everyone seemed to be there just to get fucked up. Now I am not some big time traveler or anything (this is my first trip) so I don't think I have some snobbish attitude when it comes to going to new places, but I'm pretty sure 95% of the people on Khao San were just traveling for the purpose of getting wasted, smoking weed, doing mushrooms or getting their hair put into dreadlocks. Rather than actually see the country they are in. Despite this we decided to stay due to the craziness of it and the cheap accommodation. Our flight got in at 1am and we were so tired but the wildness of Bangkok got to us and we stayed up till the early morning hours partying and checking the place out. We stayed in Bangkok for a couple days not doing tons other than checking out the sights of the city. Mostly markets and cruising along the river. We took and long-tail boat on the river to the famous floating markets (I'm sure most of you have seen the quintessential "Thailand" picture of boats filled with colorful fruit). Both me and Brit were excited to check it out and were horribly disappointed when the market turned out to be 1 guy in a tiny boat coming over trying to sell us some WWII era bananas.
After our short Bangkok excursion we caught a train up to Chiang Mai where we were meeting Brit's friend Amber's mom Randy. We met up with her and she was gracious enough to donate one of her apartments to us since it was empty after she had moved into a new place. She also gave us free eats at her restaurant Miguel's. Delicious Mexican food. Also included in the deal was use of her scooter which we used to burn around the city. We checked out lots of markets, got cheap massages where they bent and broke me in all different positions. I vowed to Brit I wouldn't get any more Thai massages and would only get the nice chill oil rub downs but still ended up getting the massages all the time. We went to some temples and to a wild waterfall which you could climb up. To get to these places I had to ride the scooter on the highway which was sketch due to the high speeds and large vehicles trying to cut me off every 2 minutes. We also got to go see some Muay Thai which I was excited for but it ended up being very staged like WWE style. They even had a midget fight. I am not very much into midget humor. From Chiang Mai we caught a bus up to Chiang Rai, a bit closer to the Laos border. Our nights there were fairly uneventful. We just wandered around and went to local markets. One night we got caught in the rain for a few hours which was monsoon style full of thunder and lightning. Everyone in the market was huddled in a small little space hiding from the rain. One other notable thing about Chiang Rai was our super hippy hostel that had black lights everywhere and psychedelic paintings covering every inch of wall. From there we caught another bus to the border where we switched to a boat that took us across the river and into Laos.
Laos was a pretty big stop for us which we weren't really planning on. The first stop had us in a small border town that I can't even begin to pronounce the name of let alone spell. I think it was something like Huay Xie? Although I'm not sure and am much to lazy to look that kinda thing up. From here we booked a 3 night tour into the jungle called "The Gibbon Experience." It was expensive but we'd been recommended it a few times and it sounded awesome. What it is, is a large system of ziplines in the jungle which takes you into tree houses way up high from the ground. I believe the one we stayed in was about 40-50 meters? Don't quote me on that though, it may be horribly wrong in either direction. All I know was that it was super high and if you fell you would probably die. We got shuttled in and had a huge hike to get to the ziplines. After a couple hours of trekking we got there and the ziplines were wild. The first ones we went on were pretty tame only a couple hundred meters long and around as high as the tree houses. As we got deeper in though they got crazy long like half a kilometer and ended up going canyon to canyon rather than tree to tree. We were up super high and the guides left us alone so we could zip as much as we wanted. It was a rad few days where we got to zip, trek and spot wildlife. We were lucky enough to see the gibbons swinging around in the trees on a couple of occasions. Our crew was super solid and we made some of the best friends we have on our entire trip! I would say that it was one of my favorite experiences of the trip, well worth the money...aside from the hand-size spiders that hung out on the walls. One of which ended up sleeping with Brit and I in our bed ugh.
From whatever that city was called we headed to Luang Prabang which was a real nice French style town that looked more European than an Asian city. The place was pretty much a hangout and chill spot, which is what we did. One day though we went out to some waterfalls in the area which were amazing. The water was a crazy blue color and crystal clear. It had rope swings and trees to jump from, plus you could climb up the falls and jump off them to the pool below. One of my favorite trip days as well. In Luang Prabang we met up with a friend from France we met on the Gibbon named Benjamin. He was a funny guy and tried to teach me French but this ended up in me trying to teach him some broken German only to get laughed at by some actual German people walking nearby saying that everything I was teaching him was wrong. They continued walking down the street mocking me.
Our next stop was Vang Vieng which was hellhole number 2 of the trip. We got in and pretty much the entire population of the town was drunk backpackers stumbling around through the streets treating the locals like shit. The big draw here is the famous tubing. You rent a tube and float down a river going to all the bars on the riverbanks that give you a free bucket drink and bracelet if you come in. The floating itself was fun but only lasted a couple minutes since the bars were so close and most of the time was spent actually in the bars. I personally hated it due to the hordes of drunkers surrounding me and the constant number of people trying to get me to take shots or drinks. It always led to me saying "no thanks, I don't drink" and usually led to people "ribbing" me calling me a pussy or something along those lines. I would have liked to punch these dweebs but everyone was so drunk and retarded I don't think it woulda been worth it. We were tubing with some friends which made it tolerable and Brit enjoyed herself. One saving grace was the ziplines and diving boards they had into the water which I could play around on while everyone else got boozed. All the bars in the actual town were better cause you could just chill and drink milkshakes and smoothies for like .50 cents each while watching endless episodes of Friends. All the menus still had weed shakes and mushroom shakes though and the majority of the people in the bars/restaurants were wasted. We ended up tubing a couple days and partying the nights away.
We partied with a couple from England named Mark and Rachel whom we met on the Gibbon Experience as well as two people from Montreal named Elie and Isabella. All great people. Elie stood up for me numerous times when the workers at the bars started gettin on my case for not drinking. I just laughed at them and told em to frig off but Elie would be willing to put up the fists over it. He did all this despite being Brit's size at about 5 foot 2.
We left Vang Vieng en route to Vientiane which is the capital of Laos. From there we planned on getting our Vietnam visas and heading into the country. On the journey once again I got very sick in the bum. It was only like a 2 hour drive but like 20 mins in I could feel it coming on and knew it was gonna be a rough one. I tried my best to tough it out but could only last another 20 minutes before I started getting super stressed out. I had to get Brit to tell the driver to stop cause I was much to embarrassed to do so myself. Best for her to seem like the one who had the shits. The driver pulled over in a spot where there was no bathroom and pretty much 0 tree cover. I bolted off the bus and made Brit come with me so it didn't seem like I was the only one who had to go to the bathroom. I tried hiding behind some trees but they were only about a quarter the size of me so I was pretty much hiding behind a couple twigs. Brit, as well as the entire bus, just sat there watching me as I basically poured 2 litres of water out my butt. Fun times. I got back on the bus with my head held very low.
We made it to Vientiane on a Friday and couldn't get our visas organized till Monday so we had to spend much longer in the city than we had planned. The place was very uneventful since there was little to do. We tried searching for a temple where you go into a sweat sauna but to no avail. Mostly we just wandered around the place and hung out in our super grimey hotel room. Once we were organized we decided to make one more stop in Laos before going into Vietnam, which was the Kanglor caves.
We got a bus down to the cave which is a 7km cave that you go through on a longtail boat in complete darkness. It sounded very Indiana Jones. We got there and realized the place was located in the middle of nowhere. There was 1 guest house where everyone stayed and only a couple places to eat. We stayed the night and the next day went to the cave. The trip was decent and pretty spooky. When we got into the caves it was pitch black. When the lights went out you couldn't see a thing. I dunno how our driver was navigating the river cause there were rocks and shit sticking up everywhere for us to run into. We got stuck a couple times and had to get out and push our boat. At the end we got to a green lagoon we could swim in. It also had some pretty swell rocks we could jump off of. The place was also swarming with butterflies and they swirled around you like a tornado.
After the caves we had a crazy journey to get to Vietnam. It entailed a few loooong rides in the back of pickup trucks, a couple different buses, an overnight in some dump of a city and even more buses. Finally though we made it to Vietnam!
Laos was a very fun place that kinda caught me off guard. I wasn't expecting to enjoy it much cause I didn't know much about the place. Both me and Brit ended up loving it though and had some of the best stops of our entire trip. The Gibbon experience was amazing and probably ranks in the top 3 things we did over the whole trip. One major gripe I do have about the place is the food. Not the type of food or anything but you get sooo little, it sucks. You order something a local guy beside you is eating and they bring you about 2 bites worth while the local dude's plate is overflowing. What a rip.
That was a pretty long one...ooof sorry guys. Hopefully you made it through. I've gotten into the habit of writing all the stories I got in detail and it's making things way to long. I'm also not gonna have much to tell you when I get home! Oh well I hope you friends o' mine still enjoy reading this bad boy from time to time. I'll hopefully update again soon so I can finish it all before I get back home when everyone will lose interest! Only a couple months to go.
Love you all, and I'm getting excited to see everyone when I get home! Bye for now.
Dan. RWRWRWRWRWRWRW
I always feel like I am kinda keeping up on this thing but then I check the last time I updated and realize it's been about a month since I wrote anything! Damn, I am gonna be back before I get a chance to finish updating this thing and then no one will want to read it.
Brit and I are now in Central America after a long hectic journey to get here from Bali. You guys and gals don't get to hear about it yet though cause I'm still so far behind that you gotta wait and hear about some other weird adventures first hahaha. We only got about 3 months left of our journey. The plan right now is to hit all the countries in Central America which are: Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Belize. We might have to scratch El Salvador though cause it is a bit outta the way for us and we may be pressed for time, bummer. For some reason everyone thinks I am in South America and am going to be traveling around there for the remainder of the trip...this includes my own family who I have told seeeeeeveral times that I'm not going there. Maybe this time they will understand that, if they read this that is.
So now let's move onto this beast. This entry is gonna focus on our short little romp through Northern Thailand and then our travels through Laos. I'm gonna combine the two and hopefully breeze through it cause I am still getting people telling me the blogs are toooooo looooooonnnnnggggg.
We caught a flight from Hong Kong into Bangkok which wasn't quite long enough for me to finish the movie I was watching. I was watching "Warrior" and the plane landed before I got to find out which brother won at the end. It was on my mind the entire trip till I found a guy who had the movie on his computer and I hounded him to copy it for me. I wasn't very happy with the ending.
Quick side note here. Brit thought this was funny and I left it out of my previous write up. For some reason I couldn't see the signs for Men's and Women's bathrooms in China. I kept ending up in the female facilities. This happened on numerous occasions and I was even showering in the girls showers and one point. Brit kept coming in and being like "What the fuck are you doing in here!?" I swear they weren't marked with gender but whenever I went out to look they were clearly marked and I couldn't figure out how I kept missing them.
Yes, I am getting distracted now. So we landed in Bangkok and caught a cab to Khao San Rd which is the world famous backpacker street in the grimey city (actually a lot cleaner and nicer than I expected). At the time I thought Khao San was the most horrible place I had ever been in my life. We got outta the cab to the world's busiest street filled with more backpacker people than we had seen during our entire trip combined. Shops were everywhere and music was blaring so loud from the dozens, perhaps hundreds of bars and clubs on the street. Everyone seemed to be there just to get fucked up. Now I am not some big time traveler or anything (this is my first trip) so I don't think I have some snobbish attitude when it comes to going to new places, but I'm pretty sure 95% of the people on Khao San were just traveling for the purpose of getting wasted, smoking weed, doing mushrooms or getting their hair put into dreadlocks. Rather than actually see the country they are in. Despite this we decided to stay due to the craziness of it and the cheap accommodation. Our flight got in at 1am and we were so tired but the wildness of Bangkok got to us and we stayed up till the early morning hours partying and checking the place out. We stayed in Bangkok for a couple days not doing tons other than checking out the sights of the city. Mostly markets and cruising along the river. We took and long-tail boat on the river to the famous floating markets (I'm sure most of you have seen the quintessential "Thailand" picture of boats filled with colorful fruit). Both me and Brit were excited to check it out and were horribly disappointed when the market turned out to be 1 guy in a tiny boat coming over trying to sell us some WWII era bananas.
After our short Bangkok excursion we caught a train up to Chiang Mai where we were meeting Brit's friend Amber's mom Randy. We met up with her and she was gracious enough to donate one of her apartments to us since it was empty after she had moved into a new place. She also gave us free eats at her restaurant Miguel's. Delicious Mexican food. Also included in the deal was use of her scooter which we used to burn around the city. We checked out lots of markets, got cheap massages where they bent and broke me in all different positions. I vowed to Brit I wouldn't get any more Thai massages and would only get the nice chill oil rub downs but still ended up getting the massages all the time. We went to some temples and to a wild waterfall which you could climb up. To get to these places I had to ride the scooter on the highway which was sketch due to the high speeds and large vehicles trying to cut me off every 2 minutes. We also got to go see some Muay Thai which I was excited for but it ended up being very staged like WWE style. They even had a midget fight. I am not very much into midget humor. From Chiang Mai we caught a bus up to Chiang Rai, a bit closer to the Laos border. Our nights there were fairly uneventful. We just wandered around and went to local markets. One night we got caught in the rain for a few hours which was monsoon style full of thunder and lightning. Everyone in the market was huddled in a small little space hiding from the rain. One other notable thing about Chiang Rai was our super hippy hostel that had black lights everywhere and psychedelic paintings covering every inch of wall. From there we caught another bus to the border where we switched to a boat that took us across the river and into Laos.
Laos was a pretty big stop for us which we weren't really planning on. The first stop had us in a small border town that I can't even begin to pronounce the name of let alone spell. I think it was something like Huay Xie? Although I'm not sure and am much to lazy to look that kinda thing up. From here we booked a 3 night tour into the jungle called "The Gibbon Experience." It was expensive but we'd been recommended it a few times and it sounded awesome. What it is, is a large system of ziplines in the jungle which takes you into tree houses way up high from the ground. I believe the one we stayed in was about 40-50 meters? Don't quote me on that though, it may be horribly wrong in either direction. All I know was that it was super high and if you fell you would probably die. We got shuttled in and had a huge hike to get to the ziplines. After a couple hours of trekking we got there and the ziplines were wild. The first ones we went on were pretty tame only a couple hundred meters long and around as high as the tree houses. As we got deeper in though they got crazy long like half a kilometer and ended up going canyon to canyon rather than tree to tree. We were up super high and the guides left us alone so we could zip as much as we wanted. It was a rad few days where we got to zip, trek and spot wildlife. We were lucky enough to see the gibbons swinging around in the trees on a couple of occasions. Our crew was super solid and we made some of the best friends we have on our entire trip! I would say that it was one of my favorite experiences of the trip, well worth the money...aside from the hand-size spiders that hung out on the walls. One of which ended up sleeping with Brit and I in our bed ugh.
From whatever that city was called we headed to Luang Prabang which was a real nice French style town that looked more European than an Asian city. The place was pretty much a hangout and chill spot, which is what we did. One day though we went out to some waterfalls in the area which were amazing. The water was a crazy blue color and crystal clear. It had rope swings and trees to jump from, plus you could climb up the falls and jump off them to the pool below. One of my favorite trip days as well. In Luang Prabang we met up with a friend from France we met on the Gibbon named Benjamin. He was a funny guy and tried to teach me French but this ended up in me trying to teach him some broken German only to get laughed at by some actual German people walking nearby saying that everything I was teaching him was wrong. They continued walking down the street mocking me.
Our next stop was Vang Vieng which was hellhole number 2 of the trip. We got in and pretty much the entire population of the town was drunk backpackers stumbling around through the streets treating the locals like shit. The big draw here is the famous tubing. You rent a tube and float down a river going to all the bars on the riverbanks that give you a free bucket drink and bracelet if you come in. The floating itself was fun but only lasted a couple minutes since the bars were so close and most of the time was spent actually in the bars. I personally hated it due to the hordes of drunkers surrounding me and the constant number of people trying to get me to take shots or drinks. It always led to me saying "no thanks, I don't drink" and usually led to people "ribbing" me calling me a pussy or something along those lines. I would have liked to punch these dweebs but everyone was so drunk and retarded I don't think it woulda been worth it. We were tubing with some friends which made it tolerable and Brit enjoyed herself. One saving grace was the ziplines and diving boards they had into the water which I could play around on while everyone else got boozed. All the bars in the actual town were better cause you could just chill and drink milkshakes and smoothies for like .50 cents each while watching endless episodes of Friends. All the menus still had weed shakes and mushroom shakes though and the majority of the people in the bars/restaurants were wasted. We ended up tubing a couple days and partying the nights away.
We partied with a couple from England named Mark and Rachel whom we met on the Gibbon Experience as well as two people from Montreal named Elie and Isabella. All great people. Elie stood up for me numerous times when the workers at the bars started gettin on my case for not drinking. I just laughed at them and told em to frig off but Elie would be willing to put up the fists over it. He did all this despite being Brit's size at about 5 foot 2.
We left Vang Vieng en route to Vientiane which is the capital of Laos. From there we planned on getting our Vietnam visas and heading into the country. On the journey once again I got very sick in the bum. It was only like a 2 hour drive but like 20 mins in I could feel it coming on and knew it was gonna be a rough one. I tried my best to tough it out but could only last another 20 minutes before I started getting super stressed out. I had to get Brit to tell the driver to stop cause I was much to embarrassed to do so myself. Best for her to seem like the one who had the shits. The driver pulled over in a spot where there was no bathroom and pretty much 0 tree cover. I bolted off the bus and made Brit come with me so it didn't seem like I was the only one who had to go to the bathroom. I tried hiding behind some trees but they were only about a quarter the size of me so I was pretty much hiding behind a couple twigs. Brit, as well as the entire bus, just sat there watching me as I basically poured 2 litres of water out my butt. Fun times. I got back on the bus with my head held very low.
We made it to Vientiane on a Friday and couldn't get our visas organized till Monday so we had to spend much longer in the city than we had planned. The place was very uneventful since there was little to do. We tried searching for a temple where you go into a sweat sauna but to no avail. Mostly we just wandered around the place and hung out in our super grimey hotel room. Once we were organized we decided to make one more stop in Laos before going into Vietnam, which was the Kanglor caves.
We got a bus down to the cave which is a 7km cave that you go through on a longtail boat in complete darkness. It sounded very Indiana Jones. We got there and realized the place was located in the middle of nowhere. There was 1 guest house where everyone stayed and only a couple places to eat. We stayed the night and the next day went to the cave. The trip was decent and pretty spooky. When we got into the caves it was pitch black. When the lights went out you couldn't see a thing. I dunno how our driver was navigating the river cause there were rocks and shit sticking up everywhere for us to run into. We got stuck a couple times and had to get out and push our boat. At the end we got to a green lagoon we could swim in. It also had some pretty swell rocks we could jump off of. The place was also swarming with butterflies and they swirled around you like a tornado.
After the caves we had a crazy journey to get to Vietnam. It entailed a few loooong rides in the back of pickup trucks, a couple different buses, an overnight in some dump of a city and even more buses. Finally though we made it to Vietnam!
Laos was a very fun place that kinda caught me off guard. I wasn't expecting to enjoy it much cause I didn't know much about the place. Both me and Brit ended up loving it though and had some of the best stops of our entire trip. The Gibbon experience was amazing and probably ranks in the top 3 things we did over the whole trip. One major gripe I do have about the place is the food. Not the type of food or anything but you get sooo little, it sucks. You order something a local guy beside you is eating and they bring you about 2 bites worth while the local dude's plate is overflowing. What a rip.
That was a pretty long one...ooof sorry guys. Hopefully you made it through. I've gotten into the habit of writing all the stories I got in detail and it's making things way to long. I'm also not gonna have much to tell you when I get home! Oh well I hope you friends o' mine still enjoy reading this bad boy from time to time. I'll hopefully update again soon so I can finish it all before I get back home when everyone will lose interest! Only a couple months to go.
Love you all, and I'm getting excited to see everyone when I get home! Bye for now.
Dan. RWRWRWRWRWRWRW
