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I’m sticking to my Patrick Leigh Fermor timeframes writing this blog and plan to take at least 40-80 years writing this. This is a reference to A Time of Gifts (published 1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (published 1986), and The Broken Road published in September 2013 (after Fermor’s death) which told the tale of his trip walking from Holland to Constantinople in the early 1930s. 

Perhaps because PLF didn’t finish Broken Road before his death, the Constantinople bit is almost entirely missing, but there is a chapter on Greece which he went to after he arrived in Constantinople on 1935, which I still haven’t read as I was so disappointed about the lack of detail there was on Constantinople, I didn’t feel like going to Greece (we’ve since actually been to Greece, which was part of this 50 year Backpacker trip). I feel at least I didn’t have to wait from 1986 to 2013 to find out that there was perhaps never going to be much detail on Fermor’s time in Constantinople, which could be a good opportunity for a documentary entitled Tracing the Footsteps of PLF & Working Out What He Did in Constantinople in 1935. 

I can’t help but think of the series Breaking Bad which, by chance, I also got into in 2013 – the year Broken Road was released – which I first saw on Australia’s ABC TV a few years earlier (maybe in 2009). It was airing on a Monday night when I had seniors hockey in Lyneham in Canberra. When I got back home from the game, I’d watch part of an episode, as it’d already started by the time I got back and slumped into the couch. It looked a bit weird and I couldn’t get into the story. Some middle-aged guy in his underwear standing by a road with a gun and a campervan. Something about meth. So I tuned out and didn’t commit to the series. That was until around 2012/2013 when I started being able to stream the series on some platform and got hooked, like Heisenberg’s meth customers. I binged and binged and finished the entire series that had been released to that date, and, luckily I ended up  just having to wait a few months for the final 8 episodes to come out. Again, by chance (well I’d obviously planned it a bit otherwise I wouldn’t be there) I was in the USA in August 2013 when the final series of Breaking Bad was released. I actually went to a Dodgers baseball game with Breaking Bad star, and Dodger’s fan, Byran Cranston (and my niece Tali). Well Bryan was in the crowd. Maybe I should call him Mr Cranston. You can read about it here: You Gotta Try a Dodger Dog. To continue to name drop, in a most tenuous way, I also saw Mike Tyson in LA at a cigar shop. 

This is very Gonzo Journalism right. And did I mention I’m going to see Monty Python’s Eric Idle this weekend on the Gold Coast? Wow, I used to almost literally cack myself when I first saw the Monty Python movies, and now, like Bryan Cranston, I’ve well and truly outed myself as a middle-aged man. Well, the title of this blog – 50 year Backpacker (the misspellings of this in various blogs is a homage to Fawlty Towers – another indication of being over 50) – probably already gave you a good idea I was middle aged, but I doubt/ hope I’ll reach 100. 85 would be fine, to be honest, as long as I can still get an erection (not sure why that’s the first thing that comes into my head, not still having my marbles or general health or anything like that, just being able to get an erect penis). Not sure why that will be relevant at that stage of my life, and certainly evolutionarily speaking having the ability to have sex at 85 is probably not that important, especially as I already have two kids and a vasectomy. Plus there’s all these sustainability issues in the world, so let’s not add too many more people, especially in developed countries where they use most of the energy and cause most of the sustainability issues.

So, none of that has anything to do with Luang Prabang – but to round off the Patrick Leigh Fermor/ Breaking Bad story, I only started reading his books maybe in 2017, so I didn’t have to wait at all for the last edition as it had already come out. And as I was in the USA in August 2013, I was able to buy the very last episodes of Breaking Bad on iTunes which weren’t available in Australia at the time. I also went to Mexico for the first time in 2013 (I already have lot of blog posts and Juanito’s Travels pages about that – including the time I got stoned in Palenque on that amazing Mexican weed), which led me to go to Mexico several more times, and then marrying a Mexican. Just as PLF visited Greece again in World War Two in the decade following his walking trip of Europe. I really might read those Greece chapters.

It’s only been a year since my wife and I were in Luang Prabang (in 2023) so I don’t want to be overly ambitious and exceed my idol PLF in rushing through this thing, but then agin I’ll be over 90 in 40 years, and planning to be dead by then, so I might just hurry things along just a little. The two eras of PLF’s 1930s and my 2010s and 2020s Juanito’s Travels (though I do include a few stories from the 1990s, including in this 50 year Backpacker blog) are difficult to compare. We live in a post COVID pandemic era with the ability to travel easily to anywhere in the world – just a few weeks ago my daughter was in Mongolia at an eagle festival, which used to seem so far away but which now can be fitted into a week’s tour with some nice people, but also an annoying British tourist who insisted on using drones despite the Mongolians telling him the drones would upset the eagles (according to my daughter). We can also publish from anywhere in the world using a rose gold Apple MacBook Air (or inferior windows/ android product). In these 2020s many have moved, permanently or temporarily, to places like Chiang Mai in Thailand to become Digital Nomads. We just got very wet in Chiang Mai as the Thai New Year Festival of Songkran was in full swing.

Patrick lived in a post ‘Spanish Flu’ pandemic era (well, it’d been a few years since the flu pandemic but still it was more post Spanish flu than post mid-1300s Middle Ages bubonic ‘Black Death’ pandemic which many historians believe Ghengis Khan may have accidentally contributed to – and the cause of Genghis Khan’s death may have been plague). PLF has to also find paper and pens and stuff – he had a paper based diary, which was stolen on his journey but which he got back. Patrick also had to contend with Nazis and very patchy wifi. And, because PLF was walking, he couldn’t just pop over to Mongolia for a week to see some eagles. He would have respected the eagles and the Mongolians though, and I’m sure he would have definitely not used his drone in the area like that stupid British tourist.

Those Nazis Patrick saw in his first book, or was it the second – I’m not even going to stop to look that up – even burnt books. It’s hard to burn the internet. Even if you used all the kindles in the world as kindling it’d be tricky. You’d have to go find its source which I think is yet to be determined but which may be high up on a Mongolian plateau, next to Ghengis Khan’s body.

Back to Luang Prabang. Like Patrick, I’ve not been quick to finish what I’ve started, and I wander around getting distracted. But I keep thinking it was more important that we took the journey – to Luang Prabang and other places –  than document it. Possibly a thought PLF also had, though as far as I know he never went to Laos. He did go to Peru though in 1971, the year before I was born, and wrote Three Letters from the Andes to his wife. I send my wife funny gifs, pictures of what I’ve been eating that day, and updates on my erection situation, and to let her know it’s all still functioning down there, and hopefully will do so until I’m 85 when I may or may die. Eric Idle is 81 (in 2024). He was born in the month Karditsa in Greece became the first city in Europe to be liberated from Nazi occupation in World War Two, after a campaign fought by ELAS, the Greek People’s Liberation Arm, and 10 years after PLF (Patrick Leigh) set off on his walking tour from Holland to Constantinople. Other more horrific things occurred in 1943 in Europe including the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in Kraków. But let’s look on The Bright Side of Life and focus on Eric Idle being born, and now coming to entertain me on the Gold Coast. Like I wrote in Munich from Dachau to Oktoberfest: And as I walk, I think how I can keep promoting a world of inflatable unicorns, bratwurst, beer and joy. Because the alternative is sadness.

Back to experiencing the journey rather than focussing on documenting the journey. There’s been millions of journeys in the past which are now just stories told in small circles of friends and families along with random people on Insta and other platforms. Like Genghis Khan’s trip to Europe in the 1220s–1240s which has now virtually been forgotten. Well, his trip was more of an invasion, but he only took one photo that I can find (which I suspect may be AI generated).

​​It felt good in Luang Prabang. Once we’d recovered from the slow, oh so slow, boat down the Mekong we got into the slow life of the little city – which has a population of 467,157 (2020) which is cannily close to the population of Australia’s capital Canberra, which has 456,844 (2022). As with everywhere in the world, including Canberra, which was voted by Lonely Planet as one of the world’s three hottest destinations in 2017, tourists have discovered Luang Prabang and are continuing to discover the place, in great numbers.

My friend Howie, who lives in Canberra, didn’t like Luang Prabang so much, saying the monks who collect alms in the mornings have just become a tourist attraction, with tourist photographers waiting around to take photos of them. And that it was ‘just like Thailand but in Laos’. If you haven’t been there, the Buddhist monks of Luang Prabang walk around in the early morning collecting alms. That is offerings of food for their daily sustenance, their breakfast and lunch (they don’t generally eat after 12pm so not so much dinner – something I got used to when doing my vipassana meditations which I write about in a chapter of The Adventures of Kosio & Juanito.

Juanito, who is me, if you hadn’t gathered already,  is still here but I haven’t heard from Kosio for some years and I’m tempted to go try and find him in Sofia, Bulgaria, one day, hopefully before he’s passed away – which is something Buddhist monks have to do (both live off alms and, like all of us, pass away). Eric Idle also talks a lot about death and his song Always Look on the Bright Side of Life is now a favourite at people’s funerals. I’d like to have Particle Man by They Might Be Giants if my kids are reading this, or TMBG’s version of Istanbul (not Constantinople). If there’s time they can also read out the whole section of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s book relating to Constantinople. As I said, it’s not that long.

Patrick Leigh also visited Bulgaria where he got lost on the coast, fell into water, and entered a cave and then met some fisherman.

You have to get up early to watch the monks gathering their alms in Luang Prabang, which isn’t a big issue given the heat and you’re well prepared by having regular siestas during the day. The monks are definitely a tourist attraction, but there’s also genuine spiritual practice being practised. I mean you have to be humble to live off the donations of others. If people don’t show up, you don’t eat, so you also have to have a lot of faith in humanity. You also have to be patient to not worry about the intrusion of rude tourists in your daily activities which have been going on for generations since the 7th–8th centuries CE when Buddhism first came to the lands which are now called Laos.

We spoke to one of the stallholders we bought a few t-shirts off of at the Luang Prabang Night Market and he also let us know the important function of the Buddhist Monasteries in education in Laos. There’s not much in the way of education in small Laotian villages  – of which we passed a few on our slow boat journey down the Mekong River – so young boys become monks for a while and while at the monasteries get an education both academic and spiritual. Once they’ve spent a few years there they mostly leave the monastery to make room for the next cohorts. Much the same way schools and high schools function in Canberra. Girls in Laos have less opportunity for such an education, so the money tourists bring in, even though we all gawk at the monks collecting their alms, is probably not that bad, I guess, considering it expands the economy and what not. We did see many girls attending school near our hotel, wearing their communist inspired, but still rather smart, uniforms.

But perhaps the more important lesson visitors to Laos might take home is that maybe us tourists are too hung up on money and could do with just chilling out and observing a tradition dating back thousands of years, even if we are obsessed with taking photos of it.

I do believe it’s not polite to stick your cameras and phones in the faces of the monks and I always think you should consider yourself a guest in anyone’s country rather than prance about like a post-colonial colonialist thinking the native population should be at your beck and call. The lack of basic politeness was something I noticed a lot on my trips. Not with all, but with many tourists.

My wife and I ended up spending 5 nights in Luang Prabang. It was hot there in April. Really hot. It wasn’t as smokey as PakBeng though, which was a relief. We’d venture out in the early mornings, walking along the dusty streets watching all the scooters go by, with hardly one rider or passenger wearing a helmet, and then make our way back to the hotel for an afternoon siesta before heading back out in the evening.

Sometimes I went out for a massage once or twice but I didn’t find anything that was much chop on the massages in Thailand, where they give you a really good workout. And post massage they offered a horrible herbal tea which was for ‘stomach health’ or something like that, which mostly just had a pretty strong laxative effect. I learnt from the first massage to avoid accepting the offer of tea with subsequent massages.

Most mornings we frequented a very nice French style cafe a few blocks from our hotel. Talking of post-colonialism, it did have really good baguettes and some nice jam, plus smashed avocado which my wife had been craving for weeks. The coffee was pretty good as well. The Laotians had very nice coffee beans and I ended up getting a few packets to take to Mexico and Australia, including one at the airport on the way out of Laos, using the remaining Laotian Kip which you shouldn’t take out of the country as you can’t exchange them for other currencies in other countries.

We also had a nice brew one morning down the bottom of the Phousi Hill, after we climbed to the, I think World Heritage listed, temple at the top, which offers a nice view of Luang Prabang. I definitely recommend climbing early in the morning if you go in the heat of April. After you’ve watched the monks collecting their alms, which you do at a few spots, including the street where the Night and Morning Markets are.

I really loved Luang Prabang, there were plenty of temples well frequented by the local Laotian people, where you can experience, and be part of, more local activities. The local feel was something I felt was missing from some of the bigger monasteries and sites in Bangkok which were more accessible by boat loads of cruise ship day trippers annoyed the hell out of me at several spots and who should be banned from ever travelling. I mean if you only have enough time to go to a place for a few hours, you don’t really have time to travel and you should just stay at home and watch Netflix! See my Bangkok blog post for some frustrations with over tourism in Thailand.

We had a wonderful time on our last, or second last morning at one temple on the edge of Luang Prabang, down by the river, not far from another fancy French cafe where we had baguettes for morning tea. I felt a peace there I hadn’t felt for years. A peace I’m not feeling now, so much, but which doesn’t necessarily need a place, like a Buddhist temple in Luang Prabang, to be felt. Though, it doesn’t hurt to visit a Buddhist temple in Luang Prabang to get that feeling.

As Vietnamese Buddhist monk and writer, and now passed away dead person, Thích Nhất Hạnh writes in his book No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering, the peace of Buddhism can be experienced anywhere as long as you acknowledge the truth of suffering and how to transform suffering.

There were many intimate temples in Luang Prabang – that is, ones where you could find a space to meditate and experience local practices. I think we visited at least one every day we were there. We didn’t want to head out of the city after the slow boat, even though the tour operators and Tuk Tuk drivers incessantly tried to get us to visit waterfalls and elephants and sites out of Luang Prabang as we walked around the city. You get used to zoning them out, and can’t blame them given the money a tourist brings with them and the very low average wages in Laos. Google AI tells me that the average monthly salary in Laos is around 900,000 to 1,200,000 Lao Kip, which is about $100–$135 USD.

I’m glad we didn’t cave into the tour operators and just chilled in, and walked around, Luang Prabang. You don’t miss what you don’t miss when you just wander around exploring. That’s the good thing about travelling a bit slower.

We spent quite a bit of time in Luang Prabang not doing much at all. We’d get up. Find some place to have some breaky. Go to a temple up a hill, a temple on the river, or some temple down an alleyway. Then we’d have brunch or lunch. We’d rest in the hottest part of the day. In the evening, we’d mostly go down to the night market and try some of the cheap and delicious treats they had on offer before wandering around the market stalls. We hardly bought anything, just scoping what was on offer at the various stalls before, on the last night, getting what we thought we liked and was good value.

We visited the National Museum of  Luang Prabang. It has some really nice stuff in it, although it is a bit run down, especially the gardens. The place used to be the former king’s mansion, prior to the communist days I assume. There’s some spectacular gold gilded artwork in the main building and some American cars President Nixon gave to the Laotian government to gain their support during the American War (or the Vietnam War as it’s known in the USA). Also at the National Museum we saw a traditional Lao play/ musical which we enjoyed. Though the sound system was pretty dodgy and sounded very 1960s communist engineered, it was still beautiful. You can get tickets for that at the National Museum and it makes for a nice evening.

What else did we do in Luang Prabang? I don’t know, I mostly remember the night markets, temples and feeling more of a Buddhist than I had for years. Something I think I’d definitely go back to experience. A few Laotions did invite us back when we’re older and retired.

While I’m not necessarily looking forward to getting old, I’m very much looking forward to retiring and spending more time in places like Luang Prabang. I’ve just had 2 weeks off on mental health leave from my government job, this is my third week and I could really get used to the lifestyle of organising my days the way I feel most like doing – like writing blogs no one reads.

Meditating at a Luang Prabang temple could be a good start to most days.

And that’s pretty much it.

But before I go, I forgot to mention a hand crafted knife I bought at the Mekong Elephant Park in Pakbeng that I mentioned in a previous post.

Well, there were considerable dramas around that knife which were the result of going from Luang Prabang to Laos’ capital Vientiane by fast train.

I might give more details of that in my next post though.

Bye for now. Be happy.

After a day on the uncomfortable and rather crappy slowboat between Huay Xai and Pak Beng (which on previously blogs I may have called Pakbeng), on the way to Luang Prabang, we woke to find the river valley blanketed in smoke from the many fires farmers had lit along the river, and perhaps even in neighbouring countries. I’ve only ever seen worse smoke during the Black Summer bushfires in Australia in 2019-20 that frequently left the south coast of New South Wales, and the city of Canberra where we were living at the time,  engulfed in smoke for days at a time.

We were so nervous about the smoke. It had been lingering and following us for the last week when we had been in northern Thailand. The hotel didn’t offer much of a sanctuary, with the doors in our room not quite sealing properly, and being ever so slightly ajar, which let a little of the smoke it. Otherwise the hotel was nice, despite the aircon also not being very powerful and just barely managing to keep us a little cool overnight in the horrendously high heat (but just enough). I suggested to my wife that we try and cut short our stay in Pak Beng – which we’d scheduled for 3 nights and head to Luang Praband a bit earlier, perhaps the next day, and then, if Luang Prabang was too smoky too, to head over to Vietnam a few days earlier. But, one thing thwarting that plan were visas. Pinche (Spanish for lousy or crappy) visas! We’d gotten our Vietnam visas online already and we couldn’t enter for another 10 days or so. A good tip with visas is to put your entry date a week or so before you think you’re going to enter so you can allow yourself a bit more flexibility (really a note to myself as I was in charge of all that!). You usually can’t alter visas once you’ve got them so the only other option is usually to apply for another whole visa – which, thanks to the internet, I started the process for the next day, but which turned out to not be as the first one I applied for.

While we contemplated an escape from the smoke, which felt like smoking 30 Marlboro Reds (the cowboy strength cigarettes) a day, we embarked on our booked excursion to the Mekong Elephant Park, which was just across the Mekong from our hotel, and which was the one and only reason we’d decided to stay in Pak Beng. In terms of booking, we’d been emailing back and forth to organise a date for the past few weeks, perhaps even a month, sometimes emailing the elephant sanctuary organiser Helen and other times the hotel owner, Benoit, who was helping organise things. Once we arrived at the hotel we realised Helen and Benoit were wife and husband. Benoit ran the hotel bit and Helen the elephant park bit, or so it seemed to me – actually Helen may have even said that to me. So there was a bit of cross-over with communications. In the end they weren’t too fussed with the bookings and were relaxed and flexible, at least during these off peak times, and were happy to change the days about to fit our schedule. I mean the park was literally directly across the river from the hotel which was not exactly overflowing with guests at this time of year with the pinche heat (hovering around the high 30s and perhaps even low 40s, Celsius) and smoke. I can’t overstate the heat in that region at that  time of year (mid-April) – well I can I guess but that’d be rather subjective – and we were going through litres and litres of water each day, plus several showers.

After a decent but rather average breakfast – don’t expect great culinary delights in Pak Beng, though the food in town is decent enough – we headed down to the bottom of the hill to the high season (I think around November-February) reception part of the hotel, to wait to go down the hill further for our boat ride to the park. Pak Beng is very hilly, and even more hilly at this time of year when the Mekong was low, perhaps at its lowest, level. We met a nice Canadian woman, also waiting for the elephant park adventure, and started chatting to her. She was the only other person going over the park today. Most tourists appear to just stay one night in Pak Beng, after a long day on the slowboat from Huay Xai or Luang Prabang (depending on the direction they had been going – look at a Google map and you’ll get the idea), and then just get up early then do another day on the slowboat onto Luang Prabang (or Huay Xai if you had started at Luang Prabang). And, especially at this time of year there were few left to undertake any activities in and around Pak Beng.

There we were, three of us crazy ones, in the smoke and already almost blistering dry and dusty heat, despite it only being around 9 am. After a while Helen came up and introduced herself and explained the upcoming day’s activities over at the elephant park. We then crossed over the river in a little boat and we sat down in the jungle and Helen explained the philosophy behind the park. The elephants there were all rescue animals and the park tried to keep them in as close to their (the elephant’s) natural state as possible with an eventual aim of breeding up the elephant population to build up the ever dwindling wild elephant population in Laos, which was then around 800, but possibly as low as 600. They were trying to conserve rather than exploit the elephants. Helen explained we weren’t going to be able to ride, or bathe with the elephants or see them doing any circus tricks. We were just going to go along and watch them walk, and walk along with them, as they did natural elephant things. 

The decline in elephant numbers was almost entirely due to human activity and had nothing to do with tigers I found out. Helen informed me that tigers were now extinct in Laos (no tigers have been seen in the wild there since 2013), a fact that was as almost disappointing to hear as the small number of elephants that now remained in the wild in the country – that was still called the Land of a Million Elephants. The stories we tell ourselves when reality is around 999, 200 to 999,400 short of the mark. As a side note, Otto English has written a good book called Fake History, which details the lies and exaggerations we tell ourselves. Like the Australian state of  Tasmania still having the Thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger) as an emblem despite European settlers having killed them all off around the 1930s when my favourite travel writer, Patrick Leigh Fermour, was making his way from Holland to recently renamed Istanbul (once Constantinople). Or Berlin still having the bear as it’s city’s symbol even though they were hunted to extinction around 300 years ago.

And still, despite the numbers of elephants dwindling, most of the tourist souvenirs feature elephants. Us humans can be quite delusional at times. Let’s see hope we go with climate change. I’m not that optimistic about our chances.

Helen was fantastic, she was so positive and knowledgeable about elephants. Our foreboding about the smoke quickly lifted as we were transported into elephant world which was also helped by the smoke literally easing off a bit. It was still there but rather than blanketing us it just sort of hovered about. Perhaps the jungle trees helped or maybe the valley we’d made our way into after the chat with Helen, with high hills on either side, offered us some protection. After the chat we were introduced to our first elephant, the oldest one, a female – she had a name, but not sure she knew that, and I’ve forgotten it – who suddenly appeared from a small dusty trail that led down from the jungle with amazing stealth. Elephants aren’t that rowdy it would seem, perhaps they wanted to make sure the long-extinct tigers didn’t hear them. I asked Helen about the affect of having a top predator, like a tiger, leaving an ecosystem.

‘Humans do that job well enough’, she said, or words to that affect, it’s difficult to capture people’s quirks of descriptions at times. 

Being from Australia, I asked about whether we had to be careful of snakes, particularly cobras, which I would have loved to have seen (from a safe distance).

‘The Mahouts, saw a baby cobra the other day and cooked it up.’ Again words to that affect, apologies Helen, all writing is somewhat fictional.

The Mahouts were the elephant handlers. ‘That’s not nature!’ You might say. Well I did say they were trying to keep the elephants in as natural state as possible, but just letting them roam about on their own was not possible anymore. Elephants are very valuable, and even in a Buddhist country, with one of the Buddhist precepts being Not to Steal Stuff, an elephant may end up being stolen, or even used for meat, or Chinese medicine, or put to work logging. Laos is still a very poor country and most people live a kind of subsistence lifestyle – especially outside the few big cities (basically Vientiane and, to a lesser extent, Luang Prabang. I did ask Helen many non-tiger and non-cobra, actual elephant questions which she was very happy to answer, but I also threw in some general Laos ones. I asked about the people we’d seen along the river who had been panning for some sort of minerals. They were panning for gold she said. There was hardly any gold about, but with the river being so low this time of year they could access the alluvial sands and perhaps get a few specs to supplement their meagre income. We had seen them all along the river as we spent the many hours travelling to Pak Beng. Along with lots and lots of buffaloes!

Back to the Mahouts. They tended to the elephants, following them around their whole lives, sleeping in the jungle through smoke, rain, heat, with no aircon to speak of, avoiding/ eating cobras and other dangerous/ edible creatures. Practically everything is edible it seems in Laos, and they also had to ban people from eating a pretty bird, a kind of swallow or something, that was currently nesting around the town (town being perhaps a little grandiose a description for what was more like a river-side villager). A Mahout would be allocated a younger elephant when they were also young and they’d grow old together, which worked out well as the older elephants would slow down a bit at the same time the Mahouts were also slowing down. While each elephant did have a primary Mahout, there were back up ones that could step in and take over an elephant when the main Mahout had breaks and went back to visit their families, who they’d see less than the elephants.

The Mahouts also kept and eye on the elephants medical needs and helped treat them for scratches cuts and the like, along with Helen and the western medicine she brought, which could become fatally infected. Helen was no French colonial slouch when it came to elephant care. She also spent days and weeks out in the jungle with the elephants and the Mahouts. She had also learnt Laos in order to communicate with Mahouts. The Mahouts also seemed to get a fairly decent wage and the Pak Beng community were seeing the benefits of increased tourist trade since the elephant park opened, so it was a win for the environment and a win for the local economy. I hope we can see more of such things and less human-centric exploitative tourism.

The older female elephant walked off to do some medical checks or something. We walked further into the valley until we came to a fork in the path. Helen called down the valley to the Mahouts hidden somewhere in the jungle to work out which direction we should go to find the elephants, as the elephants, to a large extent, determined where they hung out and the Mahouts just tagged along for company/ protection. The Mahout yelled back. Again, this is my memory, it’s likely to be at least partially fictional. We walked up the path a bit to find the other elephants. And then maybe 200 metres along, we met the stars of the show, the little baby elephant, maybe 6-8 months old, I can’t recall exactly.

These beautiful creatures just went about their business, which is mostly just walking around eating, walking more, eating more. They are big so just feeding themselves takes most of the day. The Mahouts did supplement their diet a bit but as Helen explained, if you feed them too much they become lazy, and perhaps just as importantly, bored. Which leads to mental health issues.

Rather than being at our beck and call, the elephants, to as much an extent as possible, led us around rather than the other way around. Of course there was a certain amount of gentle persuasion, mainly food rewards, for the elephants to show themselves to the tourists. I mean we were paying for an elephant tour and while we were happy to largely leave the animals alone – which extended to not even touching them, and keeping our distance – we did at least expect to see an elephant. And the little tours largely paid for the Mahouts, the elephants’ medical attention, hiring the land, purchasing more elephants at some stage, all the things that were supporting the activities of the park and the overall elephant conservation efforts.

But at that time we weren’t thinking of all that. The ‘aunty’, older female elephant joined the mum and the baby. We were just happy to tag along and watch the elephants go about their business. We were treated to the baby – called Boua – playing around in the mud, maybe just 10 metres from us, under the watchful eye of the mother and aunty. Afterwards they walked along the path to a larger man-made watering spot. The aunty was regularly having to push the baby along the path so she wouldn’t dawdle. But before that, the only other elephant in the park at the time, a male, was introduced. It was fascinating to watch the natural behaviours of the mum and aunty when the male arrived, they stood either side of the baby and shielded her from the male. Apparently males can intentionally or otherwise harm the little babies, and the females had a natural instinct to prevent this.

Helen kept explaining elephant behaviour to us. She told us how they had had to hire another male elephant to impregnate the mother, as the resident male wasn’t able to perform the task effectively. The Mahouts called him a ‘ladyboy’, but it may have just been that his sperm wasn’t up to scratch, or he didn’t have the right technique. She told us how, due to the lack of opportunities to learn behaviours from natural herds (you can imagine with such low numbers in the wild the herds would also be very small and scattered), elephants had lost a lot of ability to fend for themselves, and to learn behaviours from older elephants. Most elephants in Laos were in captivity, working in logging or tourism and were taken from their mothers at an early age and trained up in one of those areas.

The mum hadn’t even had much of an idea about sex initially (although perhaps we’ve all been there!) and hadn’t been into the whole idea, until the aunty had a word to her and she realised it wasn’t all that bad. When the baby had been born, Helen had joined the Mahouts out in the jungle for weeks before the event to monitor the progress. When the baby was born Helen explained that often they aren’t breathing as their lungs could be full of fluid and that a more experienced mum would gently step on the baby to help expel the fluid. This mum didn’t know how to do that of course and she’d never seen it done before, and when the baby was born she just looked at it, in a heap on the ground in the jungle, wet and at that stage lifeless. Helen and the Mahouts waited as long as they could, and with great risk to their own lives they stepped in and intervened and pressed the baby’s lungs to help expel the fluid and then, the baby breathed for the first time. Had Helen and the Mahout not had had the trust of the mum, things may have turned out quite different.

After a few hours we headed up and had some lunch with Helen and our fellow Canadian traveller. It was some laab (I think) again, one of Laos’ national dishes. I think it was chicken. We chatted with Emmanuelle, our newly found friend, and heard of her adventures through Laos. We thought we had been adventurous just going down the Mekong, but she had been to much more remote parts of Laos. I was constantly surprised on our journey how many places people had visited and felt so happy that, post-COVID, people were out and about experiencing different cultures and places again. They had a few local Laotian wares for sale there after lunch, some materials and a guy who made knives from recycled metals. I bought a knife. the Knife would later be subject to much drama, so, if you are ever interested, remember that knife and I will come back and tell you its journey in another blog, which I will eventually write.

After our laab (or perhaps before) we watched the elephants getting some medical treatment. It took a lot of time and patience to get them to the stage of allowing certain medical treatments. Like us humans they were so keen on needles and the like and they’d have to train them up over months just to get used to certain procedures. I admired the dedication of the Mahouts, and Helen, and everyone there, to make such an effort to add 1 more elephant to 600-800 left in the wild in Laos. Even though they weren’t truly ‘wild’, they were far wilder than those that people get to swim with and take selfies with and ride and the like, the ones that get bored, disengaged and who generally have shitty-ish lives. Like Helen said, why do we need all that tourist stuff that is certainly not in the elephant’s interest and solely to do with us humans wanting a picture to post? And we certainly agreed, we were happy just to see these magnificent creatures in as wild a setting as we are ever likely to see. I’d encourage others to do the same. We got plenty of photos by the way so you won’t even miss out on that aspect. We just didn’t contribute to making the elephant’s lives miserable at the same time.

The day ended with a trip down to the banks of the Mekong, where the male and mother elephant slid down the banks of the Mekong and took a dip. I imagine a great relief from the heat. The mum was a bit hesitant and not confident enough to go in by herself without the male about.

It was undoubtedly the best day of our trip thus far, and if it wasn’t for the crappy showboats, I’d say we’d certainly go back again. I have suggested to my wife that perhaps we fork out the money for the fancy private boat next time so we can go see the elephants again. Let’s see if I can convince her, I’m already hoping we can go back to Laos in a few years.

We headed back across the river to the hotel, changed into our bathers and went straight to the pool. I’d foolishly worn my favourite white shirt with koala mariachis on it that day, and when I took it off I realised the dust and the like had permanently stained it and that it was unlikely to ever see use again. I think I ended up deciding to leave it in Pak Beng, or perhaps I ditched it once we got to Luang Prabang.

Later that evening we walked into town and had dinner with Emmanuelle at the one and only Indian restaurant in town, had a Beerlao or two and then retired to bed, having resigned ourselves to another day in Pak Beng before getting on that boat again for Luang Prabang.

In February 2024, months after visiting the Mekong Elephant Park Emmanuelle sent me a message that the baby elephant Boua had died. It seems the poor little elephant contracted a herpes virus and died in her sleep. There are many tragedies in the world, and this is perhaps not the worst, but thinking of the poor baby elephant the team of Mahouts and Helen were so dedicated to rearing, dying there in the Laotian jungle, was particularly sad for me. I felt for the mother and aunty elephants, and the whole team. I was not alone in my sadness and I could see many messages to the team on Instagram. I hope the future of theses wonderful creatures, in their wild and natural state, and not just as entertainment for tourists, improves enough over the years so the fantasy of  Laos’ being the ‘land of a million elephants’ becomes less of a mockery to the few hundred left in the wild and more a reality. But this is not going to happen by buying t-shirts, tea towels, hats and other merchandise with pictures of elephants. It will only happen through the efforts of the good people, and elephants, of places like the Mekong Elephant Park in Pak Beng.

I have some videos of our wonderful experience at the Mekong Elephant Park posted on my Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/C3t8jCdhvIp/?next=%2F&img_index=1

17 April.

Well.

The slowboat down the Mekong starting at Huay Xi and then stopping off overnight at Pakbeng (which I also call Pak Beng, which is actually closer to the name) and then onto Luang Prabang.

It sounded like a romantic thing to do. See some tigers, jungle animals – monkeys, elephants and the like. Chilling on the pristine river for a couple of days like Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart on the African Queen.

Well. That wasn’t how it was, at least for us.

But let’s start from the beginning. If you really want to go on the slowboat you can do it, fairly easily and reasonably cheaply. I thought it may be difficult but it’s actually literally a piece of piss to organise. You can buy tickets in Chiang Rai (Thailand) at every travel agency, or just straight from your hotel. Then you can get a bus or taxi from Chiang Rai through to Huay Xai (Laos) where you get on the boat that takes you down river to Luang Prabang with a night stopover in Pakbeng (also Laos). Unless you’re crazy enough to go the other way, up river, then you’d get a ticket from Luang Prabang to Huay Xai with a night stopover in Pakbeng. I mean I imagine that way is just as easy to organise but it’s just probably even slower than the already slowboat given it’s fighting against the natural current.

We did it a little differently, we went from Huay Xai and then booked three nights in Pakbeng. The difference being we had to buy two tickets, one from Huay Xai to Pakbeng, which we booked through our hotel in Chiang Rai, Northern Thailand, along with a taxi ride we shared with Francisco and Nathan. Hi Nathan and Francisco if you’re reading this!! I know you’re not reading this so hopefully the ‘hi’ vibes make it to you some other way. I might just send you both a message on Instagram later. Maybe we can hang out in Phoenix one day. Or do you live in Tucson? Anyway, we’ll work that out on Instagram some time.

So my wife and I started our slow boat trip in Chiang Rai. We got picked up around 4-5 am, dunno exactly but it was still dark and wasn’t light until around about an hour into our trip, which was about halfway to the Laos border or maybe later. Huay Xai is just over the border between Thailand and Laos. So after chatting with Francisco and Nathan for around two hours – who both loved Songkran by the way (unlike my wife which you may have read about in the previous post), like they couldn’t get enough of it, they kept going for days with the water fights and were happy to see in Chiang Rai the festivities were still going – we arrived at the border.

Jan and I had organised our border e-visas when we were back in Australia so when we got there we got across the border pretty quick after paying a few baht to the border official as some sort of ‘administration fee’ in cash that most likely went straight into the guy’s pocket. Well, actually, come to think of it, I think we first met up with other tourists and we all piled into a big bus and drove from the border (on the Thailand side) to the border crossing immigration area on the Laotian side. No! Hang on. We went through the Thai immigration bit and the guy said to Jan, ‘hey this is the last day of your visa’ and smiled. Then we jumped in the bus and drove across to the Laos immigration bit. And then we got out our e-visas like pros and we like looking at all the non e-visa people filling out their forms and I was thinking ‘losers’ as I’m very childish.

Well, we didn’t have to look at them ‘losers’ too long we had our e-visas so we practically just walked through, paid the dude the kinda of bribe ‘tip’ thing and we were in Laos not having to look at all the non e-visa dudes – including Nathan and Francisco, who we liked, and certainly didn’t consider ‘loser’ if they are reading this, and still like we hope we can hang out sometime, maybe you guys come come to Guadalajara when we’re there or visit us here in Australia? Jan will be back at the end of next week (depending of course on when you read this, she could be already back (in fact she is). Or we could be in Guadalajara again as we’re going to go for Christmas/ New Year one year. We’ll message on Insta and organise). Anyway we kicked back on the Laotian side as we waited for all the poele filling out their forms and waiting in lines and such then finally got back on this truck thing to continue our journey.

So once Nathan and Francisco and the others we don’t know the names of – well Jan might, but I doubt it as we didn’t ask anyone’s names, so Jan won’t know either – got through they gave us all these pin on badge things that said (or maybe stated is more correct): Daily transfer to Laos, Slow Boat to Luang Prabang. We then stopped off at a little tour office where we could got to the toilet, get some Laos money (the good old Kip, fine currency!), SIM cards for our phone, and some supplies for the trip. This was mostly organised by the tech and business savvy kids of the office, who I assume were the owner’s children. We were to find that Laotians love having many children, and they are very often put to work! Though when not working they just chill do colouring in, like the one in the photo below. In all seriousness they were a great help and super friendly. And it was all run from this nondescript little shop down the road a bit from the border crossing.

They gave us all a roll with egg and salad or something, and a drink to take with us. But since we were in mid-April and the temperatures were around 35 degrees everyday, we also got a few more bottles of water. Oh, and the hotel gave us these huge doggy bag breakfasts with heaps of other food. And I bought a beer.

We asked the guy at the tour place to book us the Pakbeng to Luang Prabang leg for us so we didn’t have to work out how to do that in Pakbeng. Apparently it was easy to buy the ticket in Pakbeng, but he still took our money, after being up front and telling us it’d be cheaper to buy it in Pakbeng he literally said, ‘if you pay me it will be more expensive, you can buy the tickets in Pakbeng, but I can take your money if you like’, but we didn’t want the hassle (I also found it wasn’t neccessarily that easy to buy a ticket in Pakbeng, but it is possible at the tourist point just up the hill from the ferry departures and arrivals place if you want to do it). He didn’t give us a ticket or anything, he just got our WhatsApp contact details and told us to send him a message and a photo of us when we were ready to get on the ferry in Pakbeng for the Luang Prabang leg so he could tell the people on the boat we’d already paid.

So.

We organized all that stuff and then got back into the truck and chatted to Nathan and Francisco on the way to the slow boat, which was only maybe another 20-30 minutes away. We stopped around 30 minutes at the shop while everyone got SIM cards and supplies.

Once we got there we found the river was low, being the dry – and I can’t emphasise enough, HOT – season. So, we had to walk down a big hill with all our luggage to reach the boat and the river, which was just below the boats, all the time sweating like sprinklers. Then we got on the boat, found some seats in the chaos and headed off down the Mekong for Pakbeng. Even though we had numbers they didn’t seem to correspond to anything so we just grabbed some free spaces. This was all mostly organised by the tag system. Tourists tagged in a certain way got on our boat, while others I think, but can’t honestly remember, we shuffled off to other boats. I think a few people had fancy boat tickets for example so they were sent off to the fancy private boat while we got on the public ferry.

There was a mixture of locals and tourists. At least half to three quarters were tourists though. As it was a public boat, anyone with a ticket could hop on. I suspect tourists paid a lot more than the locals. I kind of hope we did given the average annual income for Laotians is only $356 Australian dollars. I think we paid around $25-30 Aussie dollars for the trip, maybe less. I think if you know where to go you can get a trip for much less.

By the way, before I go on, apologies to locals for which the slowboat is an essential way of travelling between towns. Forgive my whining touristy ways! I’m sure it’s not too surprising how soft westerners can be though. I hope for your sakes you get an improved service one day as you are more important than tourists, though the money they bring in is probably welcomed.

The slow boat seats were crappy, uncomfortable and not level. I mean one side was up a bit and the other side was sagging down towards the ground. My butt often straddled the two areas and one cheek often went to sleep and I had to slap it from time to time so it didn’t lose feeling forever. On top of that there was some sort of hard metal thing that was in the middle of the little that remained of the cushion – very little of that soft fluffy stuff you expect to find in a cushion was to be found. There was some shade overhead, enough. later in the day, to keep the scorching middle of the day sun, albeit mostly stuck behind a firey haze of smoke, off our heads. The boat had open sides so what little stiflingly hot breeze was around could waft through. Kind of the way air-fryers work I imagine. Sweat poured from every crevice despite it still being early morning upon departure.

But a short break from our first day in Laos, which was now five (now 8) months ago. I’m writing this now in front of a TV where I’m watching a show about YouTube (and in fact since I’ve taken so long to finish, I’m now doing this in front of my work computer as I wait for some work to do). Yes I’m watching actual TV on a TV, I actually got out on the roof and hooked up the TV to a rooftop aerial, mainly because I can’t decide what to watch on any streaming services. Which is partly because there seems very little worth watching on the paid streaming services. So I’m watching actual TV again. It’s kinda retro, like the slowboat, but it does have the advantage of not having to think about what to watch, there’s just always stuff playing and SBS TV Australia has a world movie channel, plus an endless range of Scandinavian crime dramas (SBS also have a streaming service by the way, mainly for Australians). It makes me want to go back to reading books. Which I do a little. I’m reading one about Ho Chi Minh at the moment (well now, as I’m nearing finishing this post, I’ve also finished the book!). I’ll get to how I got into Ho later on (he’s cool, pragmatic, and deserves to be on every Vietnamese banknote, is my summary). Unlike YouTube (which was the show I started to tell you about on SBS) I’m not trying to gently lead you down some path of radicalization (although Ho was certainly a revolutionary, just against a bunch of pricks from France and later the USA). I was just interested in Ho after visiting Vietnam and the Vietnam part of these travels didn’t happen until after Laos, which I will get to one day. Anyway, there’s no algorithms in books that control their content (unlike YouTube). As far as I know that is. I asked ChatGPT to confirm this and it said: books themselves do not have algorithms that control their content. Which is good enough for me.

Oh, where was I? The slowboat, down the Mekong. Yeah it really, really sucks as a boat. You do, however, get to see a bit of life along the Mekong. Unfortunately one of the first things you notice is that Laotian people dump loads and loads of rubbish in the river. Along the way I watched a kid eating a few seats ahead of us. He’d eat something and then chuck the plastic packaging straight into the river, with his mother sitting right next to him, totally unconcerned by the littering of the Mighty Mekong. I wanted to throw the kid and the mother in. After throwing several empty chip packets, he had a bowl of noodles, I watched him for a few minutes, watching the plastic bowl, watching him, and pretty much as soon as he was done he chucked the bowl over the side and it drifted along in the boat’s wake – I think that’s a boating term, wake.

And I got even hotter. And we still had almost 6 hours to go to get to Pakbeng. Which was only roughly the halfway mark to Luang Prabang (which we’d take in a few days time).

Because it was April, the scenery was dry and dusty. Because everyone was dry it made everything easier to burn, and apparently Laotians love a good burning off in April (and maybe May) and the place was covered in smoke with the culprit fires sporadically springing up along the steep hills that lined the banks. And what’s worse of all, there were no tigers! I kept looking and not one freakin tiger to be found! Not even a monkey!

There were plenty of water buffalo though. The ones below were from the second day of our river trip (if you have a keen eye and realise they’re not on the Mekong between Huay Xi and Pakbeng), which, unlike most of the tourists, we weren’t doing on consecutive days. We stayed 3 nights in Pakbeng so we could go visit the Mekong Elephant Park in Pakbeng, across the river from where the slowboats drop you off and pick you up.

The waterbuffalo were really cool.

Anyway, eventually we made it to Pakbeng. Honestly the worst day of boating I’ve ever experienced in my life (again, whinging tourist, guilty as charged). It was so bad I haven’t had the energy to actually finish my post on the experience for a good 8 months now (at the time of writing). Once we got to Pakbeng we had to lug our luggage (well mainly me with the heavier stuff as my wife was just able to cope with one or 2 of the smaller bags) up the narrow steps that led up the very steep banks of the river. My shoulders threatened to pop out of my sockets on several occasions as we inched our way up from the water’s edge.

When I got up my wife said, ‘oh I sent some guys down to help you’. Some guys had asked me to help with the luggage but I assumed they were going to hassle us to go to their hotels so I said no. I now dearly wished we’d paid someone just to take the stuff up! I mean we probably only needed to give them a dollar! Why?!! Oh well, regrets, I’ve had a few. But surprisingly few on such a long trip (which still had Vietnam, Cambodia, Austria, Italy, Greece, Turkey and Mexico to go at that stage!).

On arrival accommodation providers swamp you and try to get you to go hither and thither. There’s not much to Pakbeng though so most of the accommodation is just on the main street, which is just a couple of hundred metres of dirt road with a slight bend in it.

We were staying at the hotel associated with Mekong Elephant Park (just across the river from the park) but they hadn’t arrived. An Indian guy who ran the only Indian restaurant in town – which was pretty decent, and which we frequented for every meal, apart from the hotel breakfast and the first night where we went to a Loatian place where I went for buffalo laab (a Laotian dish), kind of minced buffalo Loatian style which was a bit chewy but nice (sorry buffalo!). Some of the restaurants had signs saying ‘my wife cooks very well’, and indeed the buffalo laab was made by someone’s wife. Anyway the Indian guy called the hotel for us and they came picked us up.

This is the laab, with a delicous Beerlao (not too cold, you may have to add ice!):

And so, we had arrived in Pakbeng, after over 7 gruelling, boring, uncomfortable, hot and smokey hours. And since it makes me hot just thinking about the slowboat, I will finally, after 8 months finish this post with a few tips!

Tip 1 – bring plenty of water for your trip. Food and drinks are surprisingly expensive on the slowboat. Well, by local standards.

Tip 2 – don’t go on the slowboat if you can afford it. It is not at all romantic! Splurge on the nicer private boast where they have meals and stuff!!

Tip 3 – if you’re going on any boat down the Mekong between Huay Xi and Luang Prabang (with that stop in Pakbeng), slow or otherwise, don’t go in April. The smoke is horrendous, the heat is horrendous.

Tip 4 – if you’re something of an influencer, or you organise tours down the Mekong, maybe get the locals to stop dumping all their shitty rubbish in the Mekong! You’re going to make it so no tourist wants to visit the place if there’s crap everywhere.

Tip 5 – bring cash to Pakbeng! We were lucky to have Thai baht on us we could use at the Indian restaurant. There were only 2 ATMs in town when we were there and neither of them had cash, so we had to survive on what money we had with us for the 2 days we had in Pakbeng.

I also have one reflection. Despite the hassles of getting there, Pakbeng is actually worth a few night’s stay, if only to visit the Mekong Elephant Park! Man, that is amazing! And if you’re going to suffer hours and hours on an uncomfortable boat down a littered river, in the heat and smoke, you might as well spend at least two nights halfway! Anyway, next post I will do the Elephant Park, and maybe some more Pakbeng. I think if it wasn’t for that Elephant park my wife may still have been upset with me for taking her down that damned river on that damned boat!

And I’m done with Slowboats – except I will have to mention the next leg from Pakbeng to Luang Prabang in a post.

Thailand was back in April. It’s now about mid-June (actually now it’s mid-September as it seemed like I started this post but never finished – what’s finished anyway?!), and mid-morning, at least when I’m starting to write this post, and I’m looking over at the Mediterranean Sea from my hotel balcony on the Greek Island of Samos (well now sitting on the coach in Australia with SBS TV playing in the background). In the distance I can see Turkey. Not far off in the distance, even with a kayak you could probably get across in four hours maybe, depending on the wind and currents which at the moment look like they’d want to take you somewhere down towards Egypt. A few Greek patrol boats are heading out to what I presume is the maritime border with Turkey that must be somewhere between Samos and Turkey. Yesterday they went all out with fighter jets, large and small patrol boats, quite the spectacle. All to keep refugees from entering the EU on what from the movies looks to be mainly very unseaworthy vessels not even as robust as a kayak.

Tomorrow we’re going the other way, in a nice big ferry with visas and passports in hand for, what I hope, is a relatively straight forward crossing. Amazing what difference a few bits of paper make. Something I reflected on in an earlier post when they wanted to deport me from the UK in 1995 where I was only saved by a faxed copy of my Irish proof of citizenship. You can read more about that here.

But, being a stickler for strict chronological telling of a story, I return to April and our trip from Chiang Mai to Chiang Rai and then over the border to Laos and down the mighty Mekong River which started with a bus trip from Chiang Mai to Chiang Rai. For the purposes of maybe being helpful if you’ve picked up a Lonely Planet and are planning to do something similar, we booked the bus online using the VIP Green Bus departing from Tambon Wat Ket – I have no memory of where that is anymore, just book a taxi through Grab (SE Asia’s Uber) to take you there, that’s the beauty of SE Asia. I totally converted to using Grab for taxis in Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam (the last two we further on in our trip and I plan to write about them at some point in the next few months). In Cambodia (ok, I’m jumping both geographically and chronologically again) you could even use Grab for Tuk Tuks, which are fun but if you get prices directly from Tuk Tuk drivers, you’re bound to be fleeced or, in Thailand (where tuk tuks weren’t on Grab at this stage) you’ll probably be taken to some gem store, sex show or some shop you didn’t want to go to. See my earlier reflections on gem store scams that I, and many fall for. Even just a few weeks ago we spoke to a traveller on Koh Chang island and she told us she was on her way to a temple and a Thai tuk tuk driver told her the temple was closed and offered to take her and her son about Bangkok for a tour. This always ends up in something like a gem store. Luckily she didn’t buy anything and the guy in the shop was pissed off. When a tuk tuk driver tells you a temple is closed in any part of SE Asia, it is a lie. Except on one occasion when we were in Phnom Penn, Cambodia and one told us the royal palace was closed – which it actually was, but just for lunch and then only for an hour or so.

So, buy your bus ticket and get on the bus, using Grab, and tea etc bus from Chiang Mai to Chiang Rai, it’ll all be pretty easy. They may or may not tell you you’ve arrived in Chiang Rai but usually there’s someone on board who either knows you’ve arrived, or there’s a general consensus that you’re there. Just don’t follow anyone randomly thinking they know you’re in Chiang Rai, wait until you get to the actual bus terminal which is by the night markets in Chiang Rai and ask the bus driver, ‘is this the final stop for Chiang Rai’. To double check use Google maps.

We were in Chiang Rai for 3 nights. It was mostly uneventful. Sonkgran festivities continued so venturing outside was still dangerously wet, so we decided to mostly hang out at our very fancy hotel by some river a little bit out of town.

The first night we had dinner out at the food markets by the bus station where we were dropped off. I’m surprised I don’t have a photo of the meal, but we were a bit tired and on the grumpy side so for once perhaps we just ate and went off to bed. It was a very good bed, a four poster with a mosquito net, very big, very comfy. Probably the best hotel we stayed at in our whole trip in SE Asia. The meal was something so spicy I could barely finish it. I think it was a khao soi, which I’d tried in Chiang Mai, except there it was nerfed up to western tastes.

I also bought a grey shirt that said ‘Chiang Rai’ in Thai at the markets. They had some pretty decent deals there.

The hotel was a good hang out after our 10ish days in Thailand. It may have been 12 come to think of it as my wife could only get a 15 day visa on a Mexican passport so we had to be out on the 15th day but wanted to maximise our time in Thailand. The only crappy bit was the smoke. We hadn’t noticed it so much in Chiang Mai, but boy Chiang Rai was pretty badly affected. It was smoke from burning in farming and forest areas in Thailand, nearby Laos and I think even China. It was on the news, my friend Kurt – who features in my page on Guadalajara which is here – was in a flap to tell me how dangerous the air was. But hell, what could we do, we were there, in the smoke and we weren’t turning back.

We did venture out to this White Temple. There was meant to be some bus going out, but the guys at the bus station said a bus had gone off and they weren’t sure when it’d be back so we shared a taxi with a woman from Slovenia, or Slovakia, or perhaps Poland, but I think it started with an ‘s”. The White Temple was much more contemporary than what we’d seen previously in Bangkok and Ayutthaya. Actually talking of Ayutthya, it was there that we met the young French woman who was with her parents who suggested that we spend more time in Chiang Rai. Not sure I mentioned that yet. Anyway, I wasn’t that into it. The White Temple, that is –  but in general Chiang Rai wasn’t too exciting, not that we could tell that much as half the shops seemed to be closed for Songran – it seemed a bit pretentious and unnecessarily garish and not really in keeping with classic Buddhist architecture. That was the point I guess, I got that, but I still didn’t like it, but luckily it was pretty small and easy to see in an hour, a blessing in the heat. Look and interesting enough, just too artsy for me.

It was still so fucking hot, people’s phones were frying and giving out warnings, I saw one guy even chuck his in the fridge for a bit to cool it down before it exploded. We had a run-in whilst there with a rather dick-headish tourist who demanded my wife get out of a photo and then went on some racist rant about her English skills. These people who think they own photo ops, it pissed me off no end. I wasn’t nearby when the rant happened as I’d gone outside the gate to sit under a tree while my wife looked around more. When she told me about it I went on a rather un-Buddhist rant about him being a fucking idiot and told him to go fuck himself and gave him the finger. His wife and child were there, but he was a prick. I think he was Russian. My wife was a bit scared after that so we kind of ran away back into town and hid away at this Irish pub. But outside of Mexico I’m not that scared of standing up to people. Mexico, you have to be careful.

And oh, there was also this gold bit at the White Temple that led over to a Ganesh statue, also garish and a bit pretentious in my opinion, but might be your thing, who knows, I probably don’t know you so can’t say.

The Irish pub turned out to be a hang out for old Irish blokes looking for much younger female Thai companions. Not like young, young, call the police type young – though later we may have seen some of that in Cambodia – but definitely women not within 3-4 decades of their older male companions. And before you go commenting on my wife and I’s age difference, she’s just 6 years younger than me. Although I am also Irish-Australian and she is also very hot, so I was glad I’d splurged on the fancy hotel away from the town where the Songkran wetness continued. Ok, getting distracted here, my wife is still in Mexico, and now, as I write now, I’m not in Greece, nor Cambodia, as I wrote up there in brackets I’m in Australia. Palm Beach, Queensland, Australia and she’s still in Mexico – but only 10 more nights until she returns, and well, yeah sure, I’m getting super horny. I guess like the old Irish guys who hang out at the pub. Not sure how ethical that is but it wasn’t like they were hiding away and it seemed more of a not so unpleasant business transaction between consenting parties. The guys seemed fairly respectful.

There was this pretty golden clock in town. We didn’t see much else there as most places were closed. There weren’t even that many weed shops there. Even though I felt like a bit of a smoke I had grown unaccustomed to smoking over the years so it made me feel a bit too sleepy really, so I didn’t bother with it. Plus we were going into Laos in a day or so where weed isn’t legal and I couldn’t be bothered paying some fine to a cop for the privilege of smoking a joint and falling asleep, so I obtained the last few days after smoking the last of the weed I’d bought at Lollipop in Bangkok when we were still in Chiang Mai. It was kinda good there as I’d step out of the wet drenched crowd for a few minutes and smoke my spliff and then all the water troubles didn’t seem so bad. I’ve also been smoking for the last 2 weeks I think. Only at night mind you, with a glass of wine, a beer, a tequila or a mezcal. Today is the first day, pretty much since I returned to Australia in late July, when I haven’t had any of these. It’s also the first day I got motivated to write a blog post, so there you go, those correlations are not necessarily causation there may be something to think about there.

We did end up going into Chiang Rai town one more time, just back to the Irish pub, but otherwise we just enjoyed the hotel grounds and took the opportunity to do laundry. Little attention is paid to doing laundry in travel writing. I’m sure Patrick Leigh Fermor mentioned it a few times. He did at least write about how smelly his and his travelling companions’ clothes were after going mountaineering in Three Letters from the Andes. They seemed like they hadn’t been able to wash clothes for a few weeks. So you always have to be mindful of having a laundry day however exciting your travel adventures are. See below, we were having great fun waiting for our clothes to wash. Thailand is a very clothes washing friendly place. Also weed-friendly, good place for a massage, great place for food and probably paid sex – again as long as it’s ethical and respectful I have no problem with that, but we were fine on our own in that respect.

So on our last night we just ate dinner at the hotel, swam a little, and for me I got in the habit of wandering down the river and drinking a can of Chang in the smokey haze while obsessively trying to avoid mosquito bites. I had layers of insect repellent on and was constantly vigilant, but there weren’t many about, one of the good things about the dryness and heat. To be honest, the heat didn’t worry us that much. Sure you didn’t want to spend too many hours exposed, especially in the middle of the day, but as long as you had good aircon the nights were very pleasant.

And that was pretty much it for Chiang Rai, more food and hanging about at the hotel, very overpriced food at the hotel, and hanging out at the super awesome hotel room in Chiang Rai. The next stop was the Mighty Mekong River and the showboat down that river, which, to get to, we’d have to cross over into Laos. For the sake of simplicity we got the hotel to book us a taxi to take us to the Laos border and at 4 or 5 am we were packed and ready to go. That’s it, more on the slow boat next blog which I may even start writing tomorrow night, if I can be bothered.

 

I’ve spent the day in bed in Luang Prabang, Laos. My body finally succumbing to the round 37-39 degree heat we’ve been subjecting it to every day, and the constant input of rather spicy, and at times perhaps dodgy, food. My current tummy troubles may not have been from food and could have been from a tea (maktoum tea) that is meant to help with digestion but can also lead to flatulance, nausea etc that they they gave us after a massage. Who knows, we’re freaking our body out everyday with new experiences, maybe it just gave up for a bit so it could have a rest. But, in the category of probably too much information I had all the above symptoms and was feeling shit for a whole day.

Since starting the previous paragraph we’ve travelled through Chiang Mai & Chiang Rai in Thailand, then over into Laos where we travelled by slow boat from Huay Xi to Pakbeng. We spent a couple of days in Pakbeng and visited an elephant sanctuary organised by a French woman called Helen and then boarded the slow boat again to Luang Prabang, which I now see as the Paris or Melbourne of South East Asia. The slow boat really, really, really, really sucks by the way, but I’ll do more on than in a later blog.

I was hoping to finish off my story of my 1995 trip to Ireland, the UK, France, Thailand and India before starting this trip around the world, but that didn’t happen, I’m also unlikely to finish writing the blog posts for this trip any time soon as I figure it’s better to travel around and experience things and try and remember what we did rather than take out too much time from travelling to try and stay up to date.  So I’ve still got a bit to go on India and Thailand (1995). Laying in bed sick in Luang Prabang, maybe a week ago now, does remind me of my visit to Varanasi, India in 1995, so I might as well do a bit on that, perhaps I’ll come back and fill in the gaps later, plus look at how many typos I have throughout this story. It’s not that I’m a bad speller it’s that I’m a terrible typer.

I’d come back from Jaipur and Pushkar to New Delhi and checked up on whether I could get a seat on a plane for Bangkok, but the Thai Airways people said I’d have to wait at least four more days (or it might have been 3), so I went to my travel man at the fancy hotel which I used to do number 2s to avoid the public toilets and asked him where I could go for a few days while I waited to see if I could get on the plane.

He said with a sideways nod of his head, ‘Varanasi is very shanti (peaceful)’.

‘Ok’, I said, ‘I’ll go there’. And he booked me on an overnight train to Varanasi. I arrived in Varanasi a bit before dawn and grabbed a motor rickshaw down to the Ganges River where I quickly haggled with a boat owner to take me out on the river. We were in the centre of the Ganges when the sun began to rise and its reddy/ orangey haze spread across the landscape. It was one of the most amazing experiences in my life.

The complete opposite of the slow boat trip from Huay Xi to Luang Prabang – again, in a late post I’ll explain how suck-full that is.

Back to the Songkran (Thai New Year) festival in Chiang Mai though!

We travelled from Koh Chang to Trat and then flew from Trat to Bangkok. Had I known how much time we’d been waiting at Trat I would have just booked us a ticket on the bus to Bangkok as we ended up arriving late int he evening and having to spend a night in Bangkok, whereas if we’d taken the bus we probably could have arrived earlier in the afternoon and flown from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. Should have, could have, didn’t. In the end we arrived in Chiang Mai on the 12th of April. Once we’d settled in we explored the old walled area of the town, grabbed something to eat, visited a temple etc. We could see the preparations for Songkran were in full swing, but still didn’t quite know what to expect. I knew Songkran had something to do with water and water fights and generally getting wet. With the 38 plus degree days we had everyday it wasn’t something that sounded that bad. A bit of a cool down.

We saw buckets, water pistols, and plastic phone and wallet protectors on sale. There’s a manky looking moat around the walled city and along its edge people had buckets on strings that they could throw in a retrieve water.

‘Songkran doesn’t start until tomorrow’, I said to my wife, as we walked along the narrow paths at the edge of the road and the moat which were increasingly being taken over by stalls selling offensive water weaponry and defensive gear. It was looking ominous.

Even though Songkran wasn’t due to kick off until the next day, after three years of COVID shutdowns this year was obviously being highly anticipated by the Thais and there were many mischievous smiling faces about as we walked by, and indication of what was to come!

  

So we basically just managed to get a bit of breakfast and visit one temple before we had our first, delicate wetting, I think it may have been a little kid with a bucket dripping some water on our back. We laughed and walked on, then we started to see more and more.

‘I think we need to go back to the hotel and prepare for this.’ I said to my wife. So we made our way back and yes, on the way we got a few more splashing. We got into our bathers and waterproofed our gear before heading out again in the afternoon.

Then the serious chaos began.

Basically every time we left the hotel in Chiang Mai for the next two days and headed anywhere near the main streets near the ancient walled city with the moat around it – if you visit you’ll see what I mean – we were totally drenched.

At first it was fun, just some light pouring of water down our back, then we’d get a few water pistols from kids, but then the whole buckets of water came out and we walked along dripping wet, my thongs squeaking with the water. Sometimes the buckets of water had ice in them, and even with the near 40 degree heat it felt cold. It didn’t stop, every step you took there was more water, and then more water. The only places you were safe were in the restaurants. And it wasn’t just locals, foreigners, often hanging out in the safety of the second floor of restaurants rained down barrages of water pistol fire. Those guys I’d have to say were the worst sort of pricks you can imagine, how is that remotely fair that you can fire water down on people and yet there is no way to retaliate. Every foreigner who does that needs to be dragged down and thrown into the moat, which looks quite feisty and toxic, and, which I may have said already, but it’s worth saying again, is retrieved by ropes and curets and dumped on people.

The streets looked as though torrential rain had hit, but every drop came form people’s water pistols or buckets. The only good thing about it was that you could hardly feel the heat, which is I guess why they have it at that time of year.

I think usually Songkran just lasts a couple of days, but this year, the pent up Sonoran festivities continued for days. The next day the level was even more intense, and the day after, when we were leaving for Chiang Rai, it looked as though the water fights continue unabated. There was some reprieve when you got into the back alleys away from he Main Street, but from where we were staying it was near impossible to go anywhere without encountering some water and henceforth walking around soaked.

There was a slightly religious element to the whole thing when we saw a Buddhist parade with floats with Buddha statues, where people were putting water on the Buddha as a cleansing thing, and the monks on the floats were offering water blessings onto the crowd. There were also Buddhist monks splashing water on people passing by the temples, and, out of respect, nobody returned fire (or water).

The rest, in my imagination, bore as much relation to the original festival as modern day Christmas shopping does to the birth of Jesus.

We did take a break down a backstreet where found a nice coffee shop. The Thais do really nice cold coffees now and it’s not too hard to find them around. We met one guy there from Syria and started chatting. He used to have a cafe in Syria.

‘But now, coffee is a luxury, no-one in Syria has money for such things’, he said. And, not seeing much hope in his own country, he applied for a visa for Thailand, which took some years but which he finally got. He missy have been good at making coffee because even an Australian in Syria who had visited his cafe, presumably some years earlier, had been impressed by his piccolo!

We were only in Chiang Mai for two nights (though arrived very early the first day, and late on the last day so had close to fours days there). We had planned to stay a bit longer, but changed our itinerary after we were told my wife – travelling on a Mexican passport – could only stay in Thailand for 15 say (see earlier post about visa-on-arrival hassles) and partly because some dodgy hotel on Booking.com cancelled one of our bookings after they realised it was Songkran and they could get much more money from tourists for the time – watch out for dodgy hotels on Booking.com, seems like the company does nothing to prevent fictions ratings and you soon discover that some of the worst places have a bunch of 10 star ratings from fake visitors from Russia, Sierra Leon, Greenland and Antartica (the last few I’m being facetious). I suggest just checking the worst ratings of a highly rated place. If there’s a bunch of 1s and people like why the hell do they have a 9 star rating, it’s because they’re fake. Usually a pretty good one still has a few bad rating of 3s, 5s, but not heaps and usually for trivia things. The 1 ratings are usually big warning signs! As is tonnes of 10 ratings! We also met a young French traveller on a day trip to Ayutthaya, near Bangkok, who really loved Chiang Rai so we decided to extend our time there a little.

I couldn’t tell you much more about Chiang Mai from Songkran as that absolutely dominated everything and it was impossible to see the ‘normal’ everyday life in Chiang Mai, due to the water wars. But on your first morning we went to a great French Cafe – the Chouquette bakery and cafe – which had fantastic coffee with almond milk and baguettes as good, or better as you get in Paris. But then when we went back the next day they had a sign saying it was closed for a week for Songkran.

As with the Songkran wars taking over our sightseeing in Chiang Mai, as the Syrian guy said, ‘If only the world fought with water rather than bombs, it would be a much better place’. And for two days at least we could still walk around and find great street food, even though we were always saturated. I stopped every afternoon for a few puffs of my joints from Bangkok (again Legal!) just away the water fights. It was nice to chill in that way, but it did also make me a little tired. Mexican weed is better – but generally not legal in most states there, oh, the irony of that. it beggars belief!

I certainly can’t disagree with the Syrian guy though, better to be shot and bombarded with water while being stoned than have the real thing make you leave your country for a better life elsewhere. Good luck to the guy, so greta he was still able to be resilient after all his experiences.

P.s. some of the hazy imagery here is not just due to the fact I still use an iPhone 8 or something like that, it’s also because you have to protect your phone with waterproof casing, which is sold everywhere and if you don’t want your phone destroyed buy it!.

And Happy Songkran to all!

 

It’s our last day in Koh Chang (the picture above is Ayutthaya, Bangkok, just so you’re aware, I’m trying to right about now, and the last few days, and I’m doing it over several days so even I’m confused, so good luck to you!) we’ve been staying at the Oasis hotel up a very steep hill (if you stay here, and it is wonderful! make sure the bloody taxi driver will take your luggage up the hill, it almost killed us as we haven’t exactly packed light given we’re heading right round the world), perched close to the jungle. We’ve had a shower in our outdoor bathroom and were lucky to see some monkeys foraging this morning. One in our neighbour’s rubbish bin. They ransacked ours a few nights ago to find old chocolate wrappers (view from the bathroom below).

We’re waiting for our taxi to take us up the road to the ferry and then across to Trat where we’re flying to Bangkok to stay the night and then head to Chiang Mai. Our Chiang Mai leg has been growing smaller and smaller. Originally scheduled for four nights, we’re now there for just two nights as we had to cut our stay in Thailand a bit shorter due to my wife, who is travelling on her Mexican passport,  only being allowed a 15 day visa. I also thought I’d booked a flight from Trat (closest airport to Koh Chang) to Bangkok and then onto Chiang Mai in the one day. Turns out I accidentally booked an overnight stay in Bangkok, so there you go, poor old Chiang Mai is down to two nights. So much for plans, this has totally left my google sheet spreadsheet in disarray. But as my friend Howie says, ahhh… all wonderful things to worry about – spending more time in Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai or Luang Prabang? Well, we’re now in Bangkok again! Kind of doing the time jump thing they do in the movies with LATER. And also the ‘A few days earlier’ thing, as I haven’t even really mentioned Ayutthaya.

A Few Days Earlier

Ayutthaya. We went on a day trip to Ayutthaya. It was very, very spectacular. Also very, very hot. Still around 38 degrees C max. Sometimes it became unbearable and I’d just find a sprinkler, that the gardener had on to try and keep the grass green, to stand under. Ayutthaya is a large site, spread out over what seems a few kilometres. It used to be the old capital – there may have been several old capitals as I think I heard the same of Sukhothai – which we’re not visiting now due to time limitations. We travelled by mini bus between the locations and had a wonderful bunch of people with us. There was a French woman Jenane, or Jeneane, something Jenish, who was travelling with her parents for a bit after being in Laos, Malaysia and a bunch of places. She gave us good tips for Laos and also northern Thailand, which meant we decided to spend a few more days in. Chiang Rai and Luang Prabang, and potentially skip the town of Vang Vieng altogether as she described it as a ‘bunch of concrete’ and a place where your scooter will get stolen with great frequency and gay abandon. It’s 6.51 a.m, and we’ve been up since 5 a.m. so my metaphors or whatever you call those describing things are worse than usual.

We also had Pad, or Patricia, on our trip. She was from a small village in Spain – the glam instagram type – like us. She didn’t even have a hat. Not sure how she survived the day. We had good chats with both Jeneane and Pad, and also a few words with some Venezuelans. Good for my wife to be able to speak Spanish with people.

I’ve put some pictures of Ayutthaya around the page – you’ll have to guess which ones are Ayutthaya and which ones are Koh Chang. It’s such an easy trip to organise from Bangkok (Ayutthaya not Koh Chang which is a 7 hour plus bus and boat trip which usually leaves Khaosan Road around 5am) and we paid around 600 baht each, including a fairly decent basic lunch. The highlight on all the tourist brochures of Lord Buddha’s head in a tree is a little underwhelming and the guard there is constantly having to tell women to cover their shoulders in respect for the Buddha and all genders to sit and not stand when taking a photo with the enlightened one. I enjoyed climbing the temples, which I might post on my instagram so I can do a story or video, which I don’t seem to be able to do with my blog posts. I have one where I’m casually strolling up the steps which was an ominous sign as on the way down with the heat and loss of salt and potassium and the like my legs cramped something horrid. Bring bananas and electrolytes on those scorching days! I also enjoyed the well thing at one site where you drop money down for good luck, see below. In any weather it’s well worth a trip. But if you have a choice, don’t go in April, or probably September, but at least in September you’re likely to get a refreshing drenching of rain, where in April you will be slowly baked over the course of the day.

A Few Days Later – and 28 years earlier

So I’m back now, sitting at Bangkok airport waiting for the plane to Chiang Mai after spending a few days on Koh Chang. Koh Chang was interesting, for me not amazing, I remember my first trip to Thailand in 1995 (which I said I’d park mention of until the end of this 50 year backpacker trip, though it may pop up organically from time to t time) where I visited Koh Samet which was a cute and fairly quiet island (at least back then) with crystal clear water and isolated beaches, where I had to swim in my underwear as I hadn’t packed any bathers or traje de baños as I call them now. Where I rocked up without a booking and ended up sharing a room with an American girl I’d met on the boat, and where I ended up cold sleeping on the floor as I was a gentleman and gave up the bed for my travelling companion, and I’d left my sleeping bag in India to save weight as I figured Thailand was so hot that I wouldn’t need it, and yes, when I had visited Thailand in March that would have been true but in December when I visited the 2nd time, and then, it is cold at night. Back in 1995 when the American’s friend arrived we found a nice quiet beach in the north where we got separate cabins, and for me, at least enough bedding to stop me from freezing.

I still have the card from that place:

In April 2023, freezing was not an issue on Koh Chang. Very sweaty, and it was the one time we booked a hotel without air conditioning. And I have to pause writing this blog as we now have to board the plane, lucky my wife is paying attention as I’d just sit here typing away until they called my name to make me come on board.

To be continued…