Bolaven Plateau, Loas

For the Christmas break we wanted to go somewhere cold. A friend had recommended the Bolaven Plateau in Southern Laos. This is one of the quieter areas of Laos, and due to the elevation of the Plateau it meant that we were likely to get some woolly hat weather.

We took the overnight sleeper train to Ubon Ratchathani. As a Christmas treat we booked first class so we had a bunk bed cabin to ourselves. This is definitely the way to travel on the trains in Thailand. You can control the temperature so they don't freeze you with aircon, and you have lights you can turn off it's possible to get some sleep. Apart from the shunting which can send you across the bed, you generally wake up feeling like you've had a proper night's sleep.

Once we got to the border and dealt with the scheming border officials who find miraculous extra charges for it being the last Tuesday in the month or something equally stupid, you enter Laos and jump in a minivan to the town of Pakse. Pakse is a small dusty concrete town with a number of overpriced guesthouses, but we needed to go there for a few supplies and to rent a motorbike to take us the 40 kilometres up onto the Plateau. We were lucky enough to get a bike without a footwell, so this meant we had to tie our 3 bags onto ourselves or balance them precariously on the bike. After the first kilometre it started to get uncomfortable. After 10 it was hell. Then it started to rain. Then as we crawled our way up the hill for fear of unseating the bags, it got cold. Instead of stopping and digging out woolly hats and jumpers, we just carried on in grim determination, getting stuck behind the slow tractor like contraptions that were piled high with sensibly dressed warm smiling locals. As you can imagine, we were very glad to reach the hotel.

Tad Fane resort overlooks the tallest waterfall in Laos. The Tad Fane waterfall is a twin stream waterfall that plunges 200 metres down into a deep gorge. The resort was opened as a

way of offering locals an alternative and more sustainable income than logging and hunting. The area is becoming increasingly popular with tourists, and many people can now work in guest houses, as guides, or making traditional handicrafts. This is giving the forests and the animals chance to recover.

There are about 10 waterfalls in the area, and also some really unusual land formations on the plateau. We did a number of guided and unguided walks while we were there. On the first walk we did, our guide took his role as 'coffee plant educator' very seriously (we were still being quizzed on the croprotation and prices per kilo of the different coffees three days later). We then visited a coffee making house and were shown the process of turning beans into coffee. While there we were offered refreshments of tea or coffee. Nick decided to join the locals with a few shots of Laos whiskey, standard breakfast apparently.

For one of our unguided walks we went round the gorge to the top of Tad Fane waterfall. This was the shortest walk we did, but by far the hardest. Sliding down slippery mud tracks while clinging to slimy tree branches of questionable strength, all the while knowing that when you slip and lose your footing you're heading straight for a 200 metre drop, is a bit exhausting. Still, it's a lot easier than climbing back up! We had been told that if you cross the first head of the waterfall, thatit is possible to continue through the forest some way to the other head where you get a better view. We crossed the water by jumping boulders and then got completely bogged down in undergrowth on the other side. Thinking that it's best not to wander aimlessly around in the bushes when near the edge of a gorge, we turned around and headed back. Predictably, when crossing the water to get back, I fell in. It sounds quite dramatic falling in 10 metres up stream from a 200 hundred metre drop, but when the water is only about waste high, you're never in any great danger of getting swept over.

New Year at Tad Fane was quite quiet. Most people only stayed at the resort for a day or two, so we hadn't had chance to make many friends. The open sided resort restaurant was the only place to eat in the area, and they made it nice with a small open fire in the corner. We ended up sitting with the locals while they sang Laos songs around the fire. As New Year approached we bought them all a big bottle of Beer Laos each and they gave us some of their Laos Laos (paint stripper like hallucinogen inducing local alcohol...sip don't glug!) The staff started drinking really quickly, and more and more beers were produced. At the end of the night when we went to pay, we were charged not for 5 staff beers, but about 12. Sadly we entered the new year trying to explain to people that if you ask you'll probably get, if you try and cheat or con, it'll end up costing you. It was a bit of a bad end to the night and left us feeling a little bit disappointed with the new 'friends' we had made.

New Years day we blew out our hangovers with a walk up onto the plateau. We were taken there a few days before on a guided walk and had wanted to go back to get more pictures. It's a crater pocked volcanic area with odd rock formations all over it. The locals go up there with their cattle or to burn down (yes, 'burn down'... a questionable way of getting trees to fall down as they are not allowed to cut them down) and steal the teak trees. One of the things you can see up there is the damage done by the American bombs that got dropped on Laos during the Vietnam War. The plateau is one of the places the American planes dropped the bombs so they had fuel to make it back to their base.

The only other unusual experience we had while in Laos, was the drive in a taxi back to the border. 70% of the hour and a half journey was spent on the left hand side of the road. This is somewhat scary when they actually drive on the right hand side of the road in Laos. All drivers there seem to have a rather fatalist approach to driving. It made Thai drivers look sensible, something I never thought possible.

Bangkok Christmas

For Christmas this year we decided to stay in Bangkok. Christmas is always a bit of a let down in the tropics. You're faced with 2 choices. Spend out a fortune for an overpriced meal in hotel, restaurant or pub, where there will be little atmosphere, garish decorations, bad music, no parsnips or sprouts, and they'll more than likely run out of gravy. Or, you stay home, close the curtains, turn the aircon up high, pretend you're somewhere cold and cook yourself a proper Christmas dinner.

We decided to opt for the at home version, decorated the tree, searched high and low for cranberry sauce and stuffing, spent £5 on one parsnip and £4 for eight sprouts and bought a duck for roasting.
Now the only other time I attempted a Christmas dinner was in Roatan when we all had a particularly bad island hangover and the gas ran out after half an hour of cooking. This time I was determined to be more successful.

I suppose the plan was always a bit flawed with the fact that we went out and started drinking straight after work on Christmas Eve. It became even more flawed when we stared ordering cocktail and shooter combinations and wrapping tinsel round our heads while doing the YMCA dance. I should have realized at the point where we had to stop the taxi on the way home 3 times, that Christmas day wasn't going to go as planned.
Christmas morning Nick was green when he woke up, and we had to take a sick break during the unwrapping of presents. By lunchtime all thoughts of food had been written off for Nick and Christmas day was 'postponed' until boxing day. Not one to let a hangover get me down I did a mini roast chicken dinner and ate my mince pie on my own.

For all it's delays, the dinner next day was delicious. It was however, a good job we postponed it, as it came as a surprise to me when unwrapping the duck, that while it had had all the necessary inside bits taken out, it was still sans feet and head. I wasn't strong enough to dislocate and chop through all the bits, and there was no way that green Nick would have been able to do that they day before.

Not sure what the best plan for Christmas in Bangkok is...maybe just don't stop drinking, then the hangover doesn't arrive and you don't care what you eat for Christmas dinner.

To Burma on a bike...

...or, maybe 'the least relaxing 'relaxing weekend' ever' would be more appropriate.

I may have mentioned before that Thailand has possibly the most public holidays of any country I've ever been to, apart from the obvious fact that it seems that every time I need something urgently from another country's embassy and there seems to be a holiday causing delays, Thailand is definitely up there with the best for 'any excuse for a day off'. Some months in Thailand we can have up to 4 days off for various festivals, including a 'Royal Ploughing Day'.

So, after a rather stressful few weeks back at school, where incompetent bosses, infuriating kids and a daily conundrum of finding a working computer that happens to be installed to a working printer, Nick and I were more than ready to head out of Bangkok for a break on the King's birthday long weekend. We decided to head out into the hills outside Kanchanaburi where we could escape the hordes of tourists and the horrendous noise of the karaoke disco boats that make their way up and down the river when you're trying to sleep.

Sadly these weekends never end up being quite as relaxing as planned, and more than partly to blame due a big 'girls night' the evening before, the quick and easy taxi ride was slow, hot and constant test of concentration to stop myself from throwing up in the juddering, stop starting, holiday traffic. 2 hours turned into 3 and a half, and by the time we arrived all I wanted was a bed.

Due to our great idea of staying outside town, we also had to arrange a motorbike so we could get out there. The directions seemed simple and we followed them to the letter. Directions were correct but we were told to start at the wrong junction so finding the place took a lot of irritating phone calls and wrong turns.

The place we were staying in was really nice with it's own lake and pool. We were shown to our wooden air con hut with a view of the lake. The air-con was broken so we had been given a fan. The wooden room felt and smelt like a sauna in the midday heat so we turned on our over-sized fan and collapsed on the bed. The fan must have been a jet engine in a past life and the whole hut vibrated and rattled when it got going. No catch up sleep that afternoon.

Somewhat tired and cranky, we went out to meet up with friends that evening in town. Not only was it the King's birthday, but it was also the sound and light festival at the Bridge over the River Kwai, so Kanchanaburi old town was looking more like Piccadilly Circus. Buying tickets for the sound and light show was your usual chaotic affair where you have to clamber through hundreds of people to 3 different stalls telling you completely different things before you actually walk away with a ticket in your hand.

The sound and light show was very well done, even though we'd had no other choice than buying the expensive tickets and seemed to have ended up with the worst seats in the house. The display is done with lights and fireworks along the bridge and on a shiny old steam train the goes over the bridge. It tells the story of what prisoners of war went through to make the bridge and how it got destroyed in bombings. They actually have it set up so they can blow chunks of flaming debris off the bridge into the river. Not too environmentally safe, but quite impressive non the less.

After dinner with our friends (no alcohol mind as it's bad to celebrate the King's birthday with a drink...where's that old hair of the dog when you need it...?) we climbed on our motorbike and started to make our way out of town. We quickly became aware of a problem with the bike as it was bumping along and the steering had gone. We drove straight to the rental place (open till 12.00) and found that at 11.30 it was closed with no answer from their mobile phone). We decided it was best to make it to the nearest garage where somebody might be able to help. Driving past the first garage (closed!) the tire finally popped and we admitted defeat. Now away from all signs of life, we didn't want to leave the bike in case it got nicked and we got into no end of trouble, and we had to sit on the side of the road and wait for our most understanding guest house to send a pickup truck to come and get us. It's worth taking note that not one but two policemen drove past us without stopping to ask if we were ok.

Getting back late to a cool room we climbed into bed and fell asleep, only to be woken an hour or so later when a drunken mob of uni exchange students came back from town and gained access to the music system in the restaurant and put on dodgy 80's songs at full blast. A new kind of rattle for the hut.

The next day, after a later than planned start, after the bike had been collected and the tire replaced, we took off into the hills to avoid the busy tourist areas. Beginning to enjoy ourselves as we got out of town, we get that bumpy feeling on the bike again and another flat tire. Now we hire bikes all the time so I'm pretty sure we are not wrecking tires due to bad driving or even over-wieghting, I've put on a few pounds but I'm not at the blowing tire point just yet. We had to sit and wait an hour for the rental place to come, this time with a whole new wheel, before we were on our way again. We thought that as the bike was so obviously fixed what with having a complete change of wheel, we would head of in the direction of the hills that border with Burma or Myanmar as it is now known.

The official border crossings between Thailand and Myanmar are further north so we didn't really expect to see much, but there were some remote Thai villages near the border that we thought might be interesting.

It took us about an hour and half to of driving past rice paddies, small wood hut villages and a few bemused and waving guard posts before we started moving up into the hills near the border. It was around this time that we saw a signpost saying that we were about 18 kilometres from the Thai-Myanmar border. Quite surprised that there was a border post that nobody really new about we thought we might as well check it out. The road got quieter and quieter the further up into the hills we went. Eventually we followed the road around a bend and straight into a rock face. They obviously built the road as far as they could and then just stopped. 100 metres back down the road was a hand-painted sign on a old plank of wood saying something in Thai and '400' with an arrow pointing up the bank to the left. With some difficulty Nick managed to get the bike up the steep narrow track (obviously not a border crossing for cars) which disappeared off into the bushes. We followed it for about 200 metres before I bottled it and said we should turn around. I didn't like the idea of being faced with angry border guards and trying to explain that we drove off road and through the bushes 'just for a look'. I especially didn't like the idea of potentially getting into trouble without my passport which was in the British embassy at the time getting replaced due to an unfortunate incident with a washing machine.

Anyway, after nearly making it all the way to Myanmar, we turned around and drove back to Kanchanaburi. It took us 2 tires and a rather frustrating phone call to the bike shop before we eventually got back into town. The kind mechanic who kindly replaced the inner tube half way home for 100 baht (about £2, for the inner tube and no charge for labour) told us the tire was bad and showed us how it had been put back on incorrectly. Needless to say we won't be hiring bikes from that shop again, and made them drive us back out of town to our guest house. We then enjoyed a quiet evening until being woken up in the middle of the night again by our friendly Canadian neighbours coming back from town and continuing a raucous birthday party all night. Love it! Relaxing weekend all round then!

October hol Part 3

After our time in Chiang Mai, we flew back down to Bangkok for a few days before heading off to different beach locations. Bill and Val were out here for three weeks so they went down to Railay Beach for 6 nights, my mum only had ten days so we went closer to Bangkok to Samed Island. Before going off to the beach we had one more Bangkok institution to see...Thai Elvis at Radio City on Patpong. There are a number of Thai Elvis impersonators in the city, but the one at Radio City is apparently the best, and you also get to see Tom Jones at the same time.

We went down to Patpong after a posh dinner at the Arun Residence and a walk down through the flower market. Walking down Patpong has to be one of the things that every visitor does. While most people have little interest in actually going in the famous girly 'go go' bars, they are a part of Bangkok that everyone is always curious about. Patpong is one of the best places in Bangkok to get high-quality copied bags, watches and shirts, so you can walk through the market while also getting to glance in some of the bars. It's not a place for kids, but they can be shepherded along the middle if you're worried about protecting their innocence!

The Elvis in Patpong performs 6 nights a week complete with sequins, flares and dodgy pelvic thrusts. He must be at least 60 and still manages to put on quite a show. The evening we took our family we got more than we bargained for, not from Elvis but from other members of the audience. We had been there about 45 minutes and had managed to get a good table with a view. Just as Elvis came on 6 drunken guys and their 'girlfriends' came and moved high stools in front of us. Nick politely asked them to move, then not so politely after they refused, and the guys absolutely flipped and started shouting and pushing Nick. Bill was in the toilet so it was only Nick and three of us ladies with these 6 guys getting aggro, Bill got back and backed up Nick while the pushing and shoving escalated, to the point where one of the guys started to threaten Nick with a bottle. While this was happening one elderly guy was leaning over the table and hurling abuse at our mums, not at me, but at the two most certainly respectable ladies in the bar. You will be pleased to know that the staff did absolutely nothing while all this was happening, just looked on from the door. The whole experience left me really shocked, even after peace had been made. In Thailand, to show any form of aggression or any emotion for that matter, is a complete loss of face. It is for this reason that outside of gang related issues, there are very few incidents of violence or even verbal conflict. What was stranger was the fact that these guys looked like professional business men, all middle aged or nearing retirement yet were out staring fights like young English yobs. Very, very odd experience.

I didn’t want my mum coming all the way from cold dreary England without getting some beach time, so we also managed two nights on Koh Samed while Bill and Val went down to Krabi. We stayed somewhere new on Samed; Mooban Talay Resort. Nice place, slightly more up market than I’m used to on Samed, and definitely pricier, but thankfully, not a cockroach in site. http://www.moobantalay.com/

We returned to Bangkok and took my mum to the airport. Nick and I then had one day to recover and do nothing before starting school and facing Semester 2 and the horror of the Variety Show. Bill and Val came back from Railay, and the following weekend we went up to Kanchanaburi to show Bill the museums, cemeteries, bridge and Hellfire Pass, all in 24 hours. More rushing around, eating lots and being tourists, Kanchanaburi has a lot of history to take in. If you visit Kanchanaburi check out the ‘Oriental Kwai Resort’, a bit out of town, but really nice. http://www.orientalkwai.com/rientalkwai.com/

After all this, Nick and I were just about done. Bill and Val had more in them though and took a day trip up to Ayutthaya to visit the old temples. They also did a bike ride around Bangkok on the wettest day of the year, I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much water fall out of the sky. This was definitely one of those trips where you needed a holiday to recover from the holiday.

A continuation of the busiest holiday ever... October hol Part 2

For the rest of our October holiday, we had decided to do a bit of a tour of Thailand with visiting family. It seems that every opportunity we have we are leaving the country to go visit some other countries point of interest instead of enjoying what we have right here. According to many people who have traveled around Thailand, all the best stuff and friendliest people are 'up north', yet in 5 years I've not made it up there. So with Nick's mum and step-dad, and my mum visiting it was a good excuse to go see the best bits we've not been to.
As well as visiting Chiang Mai, we planned to go to the beach, visit the bridge and Museums in Kanchanaburi, and do all the normal tourist stuff in Bangkok, all in about 10 days.

All three of our guests had been here before, so they kind of new what to expect. Nick's mum Val, stayed with us last year so already has the hang of Bangkok and the other two had visited the islands. Sadly my mum's previous experience of Thailand was not so great and left her jaded and 15lbs lighter. She didn't like the food, got seasick for the first time in her life, got chased by trigger-fish on every dive and was subjected to my idea of stylish accommodation (a thatch hut....with it's own toilet). As well as that, the night before we flew back to Bangkok for her connection to London, our room got over-run by cockroaches in a rain storm so we walked out and caught a taxi in the rain to the airport (a taxi which stopped in the middle of nowhere and demanded lots of money off us to take us any further). The airport was closed so my mum spent her last night in Thailand sheltering in on open-sided motorcycle taxi stand outside the airport gates, sleeping across two wooden chairs. Very glamorous indeed.

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With so little time, this holiday was always going to be a little hectic and we had pretty much cram-packed every day as full as possible. That is apart from the first day, which was a good job as my mum put her bags down and promptly fell asleep for the day. That evening we went out on one of the old rice barges for a dinner cruise. Starting at the Marriot Riverside it has sufficient parent 'wow factor' and then heads up river past all the glitzy hotels and the Grand Palace. The nice thing about the river by night is that you can't see how dirty it is and only see the lights shining on the surface instead of any unidentified odd stuff floating by (the occasional dog or cow has been seen in the past). Also the constant supply of slightly spicy 'fragrant' Thai food helps to mask the odd river smells.

The next day we were back on the river in all it's brown, murky, and daytime, smelly splendor, heading up to the Grand Palace and Wat Po. With guests in tow it's always best to avoid the roads at all costs, there's nothing quite like the horror of Bangkok traffic to put a person off the city. The Grand Palace is a truly beautiful place and is a 'must visit' site for anybody coming to Bangkok. However, for those visiting us in the future, you are on your own for this trip. Twice, or in Nick's case three times, is more than enough to get over the 'wow' of the place and replace it instead with great annoyance at the heat and all the people walking into the perfect picture.

After the Grand Palace and a very brief look at the reclining Buddha in Wat Po, we hired a long tail boat to take us on a tour of the canals and through old style Bangkok. This is the only time you get to understand why people call Thailand the Venice of the east, and it's a really great way to see how life used to be. Shops that you pull up to in a boat, kids jumping and playing in the water, and little old ladies with boats full of junk that try and sell you everything you don't want or need.

After a few days of exploring Bangkok, we flew up to Chiang Mai for the 'cultured' part of the holiday. We stayed in De Naga Hotel, a really nice new boutique hotel. Staff are really helpful, rooms are amazing, and the food is really good (even though nobody seemed to eat there in the evenings).

http://www.denagahotel.com/

Our days in Chiang Mai were mainly spent eating, drinking, shopping, playing with animals, and trying to get 5 felangs and a driver in a tuk tuk. The first day we went out to one of the elephant camps outside the city. Here tourists get to feed the elephants and watch them perform all manner of tricks. I'm not usually a fan of anything like this, but in Thailand, although the elephant is a national symbol, many elephants are badly treated. People breed elephants in the hope of getting a rare white elephant (all white elephants belong to the king), which the king will purchase and then make sure the family have money for many years. This means that there are a large number of gray elephants are bred by default and usually end up being brought into the city so their owners can take money of tourists foolish enough to pay to pat and feed them. The mahout camps in Chiang Mai are a safe way for locals to make money while ensuring the elephants are really well cared for. Each elephant has it's own mahout who looks after it and helps train it to do various things like kick a football into a goal, play basket ball and even paint pictures. The odd thing about all this is the elephants actually look like they're enjoying themselves.

After the elephant camp, we enjoyed a leisurely float down a river on a bamboo raft before being taken to a hill tribe village.

Perhaps the best thing about Chiang Mai for me was the 'Tiger Kingdom'. At 5 months old, this a reasonably new addition to the well trodden tourist loop of attractions. It is a centre that allows people to interact with tigers. Again, this isn't something I would normally agree with but I am sorry to say that the draw of baby tigers is too great for me to make my moral excuses. Also that and the fact that Asiatic tigers are very nearly extinct in the wild, so if they can help breed them in a reasonably nice captive environment, hopefully one day they can start a breed and release program.
The centre is a collection of large compounds where tigers of different ages are kept. You can choose to go in with the babies, the 4 month olds or the 1 year olds. The tigers aren't doped and you have to sign liability waivers before you get anywhere near them, but at the moment as it still new, the centre is being really professionally run and you go in with the carers of the tigers.

The baby tigers we went in with were only 4 weeks old and have to be some of the cutest animals I've ever handled. They were squawking for milk when we got in there, and quickly fell asleep after they got fed. Mum, Nick and I liked the little ones so much we decided to go in with the 'big ones' while Bill and Val watched from the safety of the coffee shop. It's quite easy to forget, when playing with 4 week old tigers, just how big and powerful they get. We had been quite blasé about going in with them, but when you get to the entrance and you see them tearing around after each other and play fighting, all teeth and huge great paws, it is a test of your nerve. I have seen doped animals many times before, and these were definitely wide awake. It was an incredible experience to walk around and sit with such beautiful and powerful animals.

On the last night in Chiang Mai I got to do something I've wanted to do for a very long time. After dinner at a restaurant on a hill overlooking the lights of the city, we had arranged a surprise for the others with our taxi driver of three days, and had him take us to a place where we could let off paper lanterns. He took us to a deserted car-park, not my choice of venue, but when I saw how awkward it was to get them off the ground without bursting into flames, especially in the wind, I realized a wide open car park was not a bad idea. It was a bit of luck and a lot of running and jumping from our driver that got all 5 lanterns away successfully. Our folks liked it so much we had to go shopping for some before we left the next day. Ten lanterns taken back to the UK with the aim of being released on New Years eve. Not sure how easy that's going to be with all the alcohol that's generally involved!