3/24-

3/24/2011
-spent the morning seeing the crew of the Hounde off on their journey (the boys from Vermont who built a boat to sail down the Mekong). they took with them 5 gallons of water, and 5 gallons of "True Manhood" whiskey, among other supplies, haven't heard any word on whether or not they made it, my guess is that they didn't make it past Vientiane, the boat is totally illegal (falongs aren't allowed to own property in Lao), also, they were having engine trouble almost immediately after setting off.

putting the Lao flag on the boat

-the boys left around one, didn't do much the rest of the day, spent some time wandering around the city to new spots, and swam across the Nam Khong river, until dinner time.
-Met Clay and Colin for some Lao Barbeque, which is a really excellent thing, i wish i had a picture, but basically you have a table with a hole cut in it, and they bring out a big pot full of hot coals, put this in the center of the table, on top of this goes a tin half sphere, with holes cut in it to let the heat out. this is surrounded by a small round basin where you pour a stock out of a teapot. generous slices of pig far are used to grease the sphere bit, which you use to cook yr meat, and then the surrounding broth takes on the flavor of all of the meat and pig fat in addition to a whole medley of delicious veggies and glass noodles to make a delicious soup.
-then to Utopia...
3/25/2011
-spent the morning doing interweb stuff, and the day, chilling by and swimming in the river, another delicious riverside dinner.

way behind...

didn't have the computer so no updates for a while, been a busy two weeks, hope i can remember most things.
2/23/2011
-woke up had a crepe, and met my friend to go to the waterfall, got a tasty pineapple shake and negotiated with the tuk tuk driver to go to the waterfall, wound up paying $5, which is a little much, but it was a long ride and the guy sat and waited for us the whole time we were at the falls.
-At the entry into the falls they have a bear rescue center, spent a while watching the bears. 

-Playful critters they are, they had all sorts of toys and bear hammocks set up. funny to see a big sun bear hanging in a hammock just like a person.  they also had a strange and completely inaccurate portrayal of other bears from around the world set up.

-

-From there it was just a short walk to the waterfall, which has these beautiful blue pools underneath the main falls.

-There were a lot of people around, so the lower pools were crawling with falongs, to avoid this scene, we hiked up to the top of the falls and swam there.

-headed out to the front to buy some beer to drink before we caught the ride back, on the way back with our big beer Lao(s) we passed the british girls we shared the tuk tuk with, they were ready to go, but we were not, so they had to wait for us to be ready to get the ride back, but we drank quickly and were back before an hour had elapsed.
-sat and talked music for a while before going our separate ways.
-Ate some indian food for dinner, ran into colin briefly, but he was on a mission. spent the night hanging at Utopia until closing time as usual.

more Luang Probang

3/20/2011
-Met my freinds from Washington for breakfast Crepes.
-Took a walk to Phosy (pronounced "pussy") looking for replacement shoes, mine are completely coming apart, no luck on the shoe front, but bought a carton of cigarettes for 20,000 kip (thats 25 cents a pack), and a massive bag of peanuts.
-Stopped on the way back at the Kaysone (the leader of the communists in Lao) Memorial, which had remarkable views of the Mekong.
-Beautiful sunset:

-Had dinner on the Mekong with Clayanne and Colin then went to Utopia where i met up with another freind from Cali and chilled there til sunset.
3/21/2011
-woke up feeling like shit. Another damn cold.
-spent a while on the interwebs, drank some tea, ate some sudafed.
-went out to eat some soup, trying to feel better.
-felt a little better so down to the river, where these three crazy kids from Vermont were building a boat, Hounde, to sail down the Mekong, hung out with them on the river for a bit, then sat at the guest house with a lot of folks drinking beers and eating rice cakes and peanuts.
-Then to Utopia with the Hounde crew and Oren, where we met up with American girls, and two great french guys.
-When they gave us the boot at 11:30, went to a local bar that stayed open later, Yen Sabai, then to the bank of the river where the boys had a fire pit, so we built a fire and stayed up late with a whole lot of people drinking and talking shit, i went to bed at 4 AM and i think people were down there til almost 5. fun night.
3/22/2011
-woke up late, still feeling shitty, walked into town to sit on the river and have my morning caffeine and cigarette.
-after this walked down a bit and wound up running into the same San Fran folks from Tat Lo, Psyched to see them, we sat and talked for a while and made plans to go to the waterfall the next day.
-ate some lunch, then met up with Colin and Clay Anne, had dinner with them, then down to the night market where i recorded a street musician playing the Erhu.
-back to Utopia

Luang Probang

3/18/2011
-woke up late, catching up on sleep. had a banana pancake and tea at the guest house.
-walked around town, trying to get my bearings, the usual, whenever i get to a new place spend the first day walking around figuring out the lay of the land.
-Walked up to the huge gold stupa on the hill in the center of town:

-heard over amplified chanting in the distance coming off the river.
-followed the sound over the old soviet bridge that goes over the Nam Khong, and into a sort of residential area, wound up at a Wat at the elbow of the river on the far side from the old town. they had a huge PA set up with air-raid style speakers, and a single monk was chanting into a microphone, surrounded by people paying their respects and the metal trees hung with offerings. i made a sizable donation and asked for permission to record. they said it was ok, so i set up, unfortunately there was a dog in the temple that hated white people, standing next to me and barking, sort of ruined my first recording. went outside the walls a bit, and recorded off the PA speakers. I watched the same dog bark at every Falong that came through. spent maybe a half hour recording, and amassed a small army of curious children, hard to keep them quiet, you can hear them in some of the recordings.
-spent a while there, then wandered back into town.
-went to the night market, they shut down a main street everynight and there are tons of vendors selling handicrafts, bought a nice shoulderbag for $2.
-Ate a big dinner, called it a night early.
3/19/2011
-went for another walk around town but took the camera instead of the recorder, took some pictures:

-wandered around, saw three kids run up to a tree with a big bamboo pole, and excitedly pull a huge milky white spider out of the tree, which they grabbed with their hands.
-there was a young german watching this spectacle as well, went for a beer with him, he'd been studying abroad in Thailand, and was visiting Lao before heading back to Germany.
-wandered around some more, wound up stumbling upon an Erhu player at the night market, sat and watched for a while, but unfortunately didn't have the recorder.
-went to this place called Utopia for dinner, truly a Utopic spot, watched the moon rise from a huge bamboo deck over the Nam Khong. 

-went to another bar, Hive, where unbeknownest to me they were having an "Ethnik" Fashion show, which was super weird, a lot of Lao girls in traditional garb walking the runway. That was followed by a group of Lao B-Boys doing a breakdancing show which was pretty fun, reunited with the american girls there, and met an awesome dude from cali, Oren.
-Hive sort of cleared out, so we returned to utopia, had a nice time, got a hookah. The girls had taken to much Valium, and the drinks on top didn't help, one girl wound up disappearing, and around closing time we found her passed out on the floor of the bathroom.
-The bars here close at 11:30, police enforced curfew, so the girl that had passed out in the bathroom went back the guest house, but the rest of us went down and chilled on the river.
more to come...

Very Inflammable Persons

3/16/2011
-Spent most of the day sitting at a cafe in deep conversation with Alex, wandered around the city a bit and had some deliciousdollar duck noodle soup for dinner. parted ways with Alex
-caught a Tuk-Tuk to the bus station at 7, bus left at eight. it was rainy and cold outside for most of the ride, the seats were pretty comfortable, but i was definitely missing my sleeper bus. sat next to an 18 year old American girl who was travelling with three friends and a puppy that they had adopted on the road.
stopped at about one AM for a snack, the food was free, but i didn't have any because i was already struggling to fall asleep and figured food wouldn't help.
-then back on the bus, headed up into the mountains.
-at about three AM on an empty stretch of mountain road the bus came to a sudden stop and started smoking profusely from the engine. people started yelling about a fire, and there was a panicked crush for the door, luckly we were sitting in front, so it just took some shoving to get out, Cami, the American girl, got punched in the head. Her freinds and puppy were sitting in the back over the flaming engine, and were passed out cold when the fire started. Left their shoes, bags and the puppy on the bus. when we evactuated the bus it was pouring rain and frigid cold. luckly i had a raincoat and a flashlight in my bag, i was still freezing, but at least not soaked. we had to hike up the road to get away from the cloud of noxious smoke. Took about 20 minutes to put out the fire which had tendrils reaching over the top of the bus. they were pouring water on it, which probably didn't help the situation. but eventually it went out. we went into the bus to try and find these poor girls bags, shoes and pup, rescued the bags and the shoes but no sign of the tiny pup. also opened the roof hatches to ventilate the smoke. finally the pup turned up wandering the street around the bus and crying pathetically. after hanging out in the rain waiting for the smoke to clear, people started to filter back into the bus. most immediately fell asleep, which was sort of a surprise to me, i didn't sleep until the next morning, and then only for an hour.
3/17/2011
-treated to a beautiful sunrise over a remarkable mountainous rainforest, from inside the burnt out bus, also treated to a terrible headache from whatever terrible burnt plastics and shit i had been inhaling in the bus all night.
-had to wait until noon for another bus to pick us up. then still had a five hour ride to Luang Probang. which took even longer because about 20 K out of town the road had turned into a total mudpit and we had to wait for the traffic ahead of us to be extracted from the mud.
-then while our bus was slogging along, a rock busted the brake fluid tank, so the bus came to a stop again and let out some smoke, everybody on the bus, frazzled by the previous bus fire immediately started to evacuate. but we were so close they just topped off the fluid and continued on. didn't make it to Luang Probang til about 7 PM been awake for over 36 hours, with maybe one hour of sleep. Luckly managed to find a cheap nice guest house quickly. Ate some food at the guest house and passed out pretty early.
-what was supposed to be a 8-9 hour bus ride turned out to be 23 hours, the average speed of travel was 15.3 Km/h
Pictures and such from the lovely town of Luang Probang soon.

3/14-3/15

3/14/2011
-Morning tea, then to immigration office, played the window bouncing game, and filled out some forms that made no sense completely wrong. they try to squeeze every last dime out of you at the office costs a couple thousand for the form, more for them to make a copy of your passport etc. finally got shit sorted and went to pay, they wanted $40 US but i didn't have dollars only Kip and the exchange rate was 10,000 to one for some damn reason, even though gov't propagandha is all about using kip over dollars, but the gov't itself punishes you for using Kip explain that shit to me...
-they held onto my passport at the immigration office, so had a bit of trouble getting into the American embassy, but eventually they let me in and i turned in the forms and paid the money to get my passport replaced, had to go back the next day once i picked up my passport, so they could copy it, ah the joys of bureaucracy.
-wandered around for a bit, hung out by a massive bronze sculpture on the mekong, behind the presidential palace, there were a shitload of exercise machines set up in the park as well, just in the view of the palace and nowhere else.
-back to the beer garden where i met a lovely couple from Washington, talked to them for a while, and went to dinner together, had two dollar duck noodle soup which was excellent.
-they went to bed and i went to wander around a bit before going to bed.
3/15/2011
-next morning went to have my morning tea and do internet stuff, and there was a kid with a big black eye and lots of cuts, he had the look that people get when they really want to tell a story, so i invited him to sit with me, and he laid quite a tale on me. he was a wounded Iraq war vet on the tail end of a nine month trip across Asia. Really a cool kid, from a rural poor family in TN, his journey was coming to an abrupt end due to a fiasco on the Slow Boat to Luang Probang. In the chaos of the offload and people trying to sell accomidation, he noticed a girl get offered a room for 160,000  LAK, while he was offered the same room by the same guy for 30,000 LAK, so he tried to get the guy to give the girl a fair price. things escalated, and wound up with the guest house guy throwing a punch. which turned into a brawl, where this kid came out on top in a serious way. guesthouse dude left, but returned a short time later with his brother and two other friends on motorbikes, armed with big sticks. he broke his guitar over the face of the first dude, which incapacitated him, and left him with no weapon but only three attackers. as one might imagine, they preceded to fuck him up pretty bad, broken foot, fat scabbed bitemarks on his back, pitch black eye, and an untold number of scrapes and bruises. he only escaped by jumping in the mekong and swimming to the other side. where he waited to die, until a south american guy he had befriended on the boat, chartered a small boat to go pick him up. spent the next night in jail, for fear that if he was out and about he would actually be killed. the next morning had a meeting with the police, the original assailant and brother. speaking no Lao, of course this meeting did not go in his favor. his choice ultimately came down to $250 or six months in Lao jail. Unfortunately, did not have $250 readily available, so it was looking like he was going to serve time and his injuries were going to go untreated. luckly, the same South American guy showed up to try and get him out, because the boat was leaving, and paid to free him. when i met him he was killing time before taking a plane back to the states. crazy.
-talked until about 1:30, then went off to get my passport and go back to the American Embassy, pretty easy, extension was sorted and passport stuff sorted.
-back to the hotel, ran into an Irish guy, Alex, who was just getting settled and had quite an impressive beard. spent the next two days hanging out with him. Impressive character all round, had a deep interest and skill at picking up language, deep insight into the world, well educated, a remarkable writer, and was on a bicycle journey around Asia.
-sat on the banks of the Mekong and had a drink with him, talked all sorts of things, then went to find dinner, we were both interested in getting out of the tourist district and finding some real Lao food, so we wandered for a while, conversation flowing like water, until we found a Falong free establishment well off the track, had some excellent beef hotpot, but realized part way through we were doing it all wrong.... no matter, was still delicious.
-spent the rest of the night on the balcony sharing music, really a wonderful treat.

dinnertime here, more soon

more from Vientiane

3/11/11
-forgot to include my hospital adventure, all the days blend together and i rarely know what the date is, not to mention what date i did things in the past, anyways, i was having ear troubles, couldn't hear fully out of my right ear, i was pretty sure the problem was just impacted earwax, so i went to the Lao hospital to get it dealt with, went into the ER and they sent me to what i guess was the ear doctor's wing, in a different building and upstairs, when i went up it was seemingly empty until i found a nurse sleeping in a room, i woke her up as nicely as possible and mimed the problem. she phoned the doctor, who had just dipped out (i guess), and he came with the head nurse who spoke a tiny bit of english. i explained the problem, and he started rooting around in my ear with big picks and a little suction vaccum thing. it was pretty painful, but he pulled a big wad of black shit out of my ears with assorted steel picks, and suddenly (30 mins later) i could hear fully out of my right ear. which made me realize i am not hearing fully out of my left ear. walked down by the nurse to pay, wound up costing 170,000 kip or slightly more than $20
3/12/11
-tried to go to the immigration office to extend the ol' visa, but forgot that it was saturday, so was of course sent away.
-walked down the street to the Lao Arc de Triumphe, which was built from concrete donated by the Americans to build a runway during the Secret War. some quality signage:

 hey you! no passing a grass!

-wandered around some more, not much exciting, saw all the gov't offices
-Went to the Lao national Museum, that was interesting, a lot of weaponry and pictures of the "American imperialists" and their "puppets" also a supprising amount of ancient "tobacco" pipes, i think using tobacco in the same sense headshops in the states call bongs tobacco pipes. some incredible old buddhist relics and an extensive section on the various gov't offices and what they are currently doing.
-headed to dinner, there were huge fireworks on the Thai side of the Mekong, not sure why. had dinner at a weird bar/restaurant, five stories up overlooking the mekong, populated about half and half Falong to Lao. ordered dinner and Beer Lao Gold, which was in no way different then regular Beer Lao, except slightly more expensive. Had a weird weird conversation with the people sitting across from me, they were three laotians, with not much in the way of english, a girl who was apparently celebrating her birthday, who told me she had a husband from england, a man around her age and an older woman who spoke no english. I think she (the older one) was trying to sleep with me, there was lots of suggestive gesturing, they kept suggesting that i come out dancing and poured me tons of beer. lots of toasts later i was drunker then i wanted to be and bid them goodnight and went to bed.  
3/13/11
-after my morning tea, went to a Wat known for its hundreds of unique buddhas stored in specially made alcoves all through out the inner sanctuary. very impressive, especially the inner room you're not allowed to photograph, about 25 ft walls with 14 foot wraparound murals done in the 1800s, and more alcoves where another large grouping of two-by-two buddha's sit. lots of pictures:

-wandered around to two more Wats, no pictures but saw lots of incredible architecture, murals, Stupas, wood carvings and sculptures.
-went to dinner at this wonderful indian/malay restaurant on the river and main road, i had been to a few nights before. got a delicious dinner, but while i was eating there was an awful motorcycle crash involving two teenagers. they were both going pretty fast, with no helmets and collided front to front. Both were out for a minute, while everybody around gathered, it was crazy to watch the sudden appearance of hundreds of people on the street, gathered around the crash, people rushed to help, pulling both kids from under their bikes. One kid was passed out cold, a group of other teenagers shook him vigorously after extracting him from the bike, and dragged his still unconscious body somewhere up on the river walk after a good deal of shakings. the other accidentee was conscious but struggling to walk, bleeding from his leg, and holding his shoulder, he was supported off by a middle aged falong and a few twenty something Lao, presumably to go to the hospital.
-The bikes remained where they had fallen surrounded by maybe 40 people, traffic started moving and just skirted the motorbikes which took up a good third of the two lane road. although the right and left lane could not both fit on the road, there was surprisingly little honking or anger. the police showed up maybe 30 minutes later, interviewed one witness, measured the distance across the road and the distance of the motorbikes from the curb, spray painted around the bikes and left.
-beer garden then balcony time...
more soon, have wifi in the current guest house.