South East Asia Continues....

From Raya Island Thailand

If you read our blog entries and look at our pictures on Picasa you might get the impression that this trip is just a glorious vacation. There are certainly trying days for all of us but on the whole we have managed to do incredibly well for living with one another for 24/7 for the last four months. The combination of travelling for long hours by train or bus, poor weather, lack of sleep, and grungy accommodations creates the environment for a perfect storm. Quite honestly, we have held up very well.

If you read Jeff’s earlier blog entry then you know we met another very kind and generous person, Wery, on our train trip from Bangkok to the border of Laos. Meeting someone like Wery on our travels more than makes up for the hard days we have had. We are currently in Hanoi, Vietnam and are experiencing some of those day. We have taken the time to make some telephone calls home, post our 600+ pictures from the last month, and ensure we get a couple of Blog entries completed for our friends.

The good news is that our Blackberry is up and working in Vietnam (I broke the screen in Northern Thailand). The kids have had significant time on the internet today to play and send emails. Elaine is a little under the weather (bathroom problems). I think we know can say everyone has experienced a little of this on our RTW trip.

From Raya Island Thailand

After leaving northern Thailand and flying to Phuket (pronounced Pket) in the south, we stayed at a nice hotel for four nights on Karon beach where we had poor weather for two of the four days. We had a great pool all to ourselves and the kids had a blast and got some homework completed. We then headed to a small island south of Phuket called Raya Island where we spent 5 incredible nights on the ocean with GREAT weather. We stayed in a hut on a cliff overlooking the ocean and adjacent to a stunning white sandy beach. We got a great deal on our stay after several hours of negotiating in Phuket which certainly added to our experience. We have stayed in a variety of accommodations on our trip, from 5 star to just the opposite. Our memories of Raya Island will be with u s for a long time (hope you enjoy the photos on Picasa).

We then headed to Bangkok from Phuket by overnight bus and stayed in a good clean hotel in Bangkok where we fixed our Blackberry (we had parts courier to our hotel from HK). Next we headed to the Loas Border via overnight train. The only tickets available were 4 upper bunks separated from one another. A situation that could have been horrible actually turned out to be a very rewarding experience. Jeffrey sat with Wery, Elaine met a gentlemen who had recently left a brokerage house in France (I bet there were more than one on the train) , and Sam and I sat with a young Thai gentlemen that was in his 2nd year of law school in Bangkok.

After our great time with Wery, we left the next day for Vang Viang. We hired a Minivan drive us the 3 hours based upon an agreed upon price the day before. Most of our day was driving through the curvy mountains road (actually as far as I could tell there was just the one long road). We passed through a few towns, and many villages, each with the same, slow Lao way of life. The Lao people are very relaxed and laid back, like they all possess one speed only. This is great most of the time, though apparently infuriating in emergencies ! The villages and the landscape mostly looked the same - gorgeous 100% - and we fell into a trance watching this totally foreign world pass by my window. When we arrived, the driver asked for additional $$ and we stayed our ground but then realized a miscommunication occurred between the driver and the organizer that was neither his fault or ours. We gave him some extra $$ and reminded the kids that people were not out to cheat us but that the miscommunication occurred because we didn’t speak Laos and he didn’t speak English.

Vang Vieng is set on the Mekong and is lined with breathtaking limestone cliffs. It also is home to a huge backpacker culture, a lot of drinking, drugs and strangely enough: continous Friends episodes in many of the bars. Vang Vieng is the Lao version of Ibitha or Ft. Lauderdale during spring break. There are still small children washing their bodies in the river, and bent over women carrying loads on their tired backs, but there is also a street of souvenirs, and sunburnt early-twenties jumping off bars into the river. Beer Laos is, btw, EVERYWHERE - on the shirts (which everyone wears), glasses, restaurant signs, tablecloths - most places don’t serve any beer other than Beer Laos.

From Laos - Vientiane Nov 3

The thing to do in Vang Vieng is go tubing. For the lily-livered, this means you sit in an inner tube and laze down the Mekong (perhaps the world's best Lazy River). For an added challenge, there are bars approximately every 50 meters serving everything from Beerlao to spiked shakes - try and stop at as many as possible. for the super-keen there are huge, rickety, swings that you can climb up and swing down into the river. No, safety is not first here, but it is really, really fun.

From Laos - Vang Viang Nov 4

Samantha and I went tubing. We had so much fun we talked Elaine and Jeff into staying another day so they could experience TUBING the next day with us. We spent the next day TUBING, which is the thing to do in Vang Vieng. We flopped down into our rubber tires, and let the river take us down stream. When we wanted to stop by one of the many bamboo bars on the banks, one of the Lao men in the water would chuck a rope attached to a bottle out, and drag us in! The bars (Samantha called them restaurants) enticed people to come with outrageous ROPE SWINGS, ZIP LINES, SLIDES, which we really had a fun time on. The bars were packed with soon to be drunken young tourists. Some of them had been tubing for SEVEN days in a row!!!
From Vang Viang to Luang Prabang it took nearly 6 hours as the road goes up and down and round and round as it winds through mountainous and beautiful scenery. We shared a minivan with some other very nice people, a couple from Germany, a young men working for an NGO, and a couple from Switzerland who were working in Shanghai, China at the Swiss embassy (Marco and On).

We need to get some fresh air......we will finish up telling you how we got to know Marco and On in our next entry....