Meg and I have crossed the border into Thailand. We're spending the night in Udon Thani -- not the nicest of places -- before flying to Phuket in the morning. From there we'll take a boat out to Koh Phi Phi and meet up with Phil and Maya for some beach time and diving before they have to leave.
Vientiane was nice. It was the only place we visited in Laos that I would truly call a city. Pakse was close, but didn't quite make it. Of course, Vientiane is crowded with backpackers and ex-pats -- and businesses catering to them -- so it didn't have as much of the exotic feel as sopme other places. We spent yesterday sightseeing around the city and resting after the overnight bus ride from Pakse. This morning we rented a motorbike in a futile effort to find a park full of Buddha sculptures somewhere south of the city. It probably would have been more efective to hire a jumbo -- a vehicle like the Cambodian tuk-tuks crossed with a pick-up truck -- to get out there, but the motorbike was an adventure and we did get to see some of the countryside around Vientiane.
We rode a bus from Vientiane across the Thai-Laos Friendship Bridge over the Mekong. The Thai passport control post -- and this is a major crossing mind you -- made the little huts in the jungle at the Cambodia-Laos border seem positively top notch. We spent at least an hour in line because the officer checking passports felt compelled to pull stray staples from old departure slips out of every passport he touched. It was infuriating.
Sorry I don't haven't any pictures up at the moment. The fickle hand of third-world computing has been preventing me from uploading pictures. As soon as I can, I'll get some stuff up so you have something pretty to look at, not just my blathering.
Enjoy.
2 comments:
Blather away, my brother. This running narrative is almost as good as being there. For me, stuck in this 9-to-5 concrete hell (I'm having a bad day, I think), your vision of green, grungy, gooey, grandeur is a breath of humid, dank air. A picture may paint a thousand words, Eric, but your words paint a thousand pictures (yes, I am copyrighting that inane quote!).
Keep it up, -T.S. Eliot's Ghost
hear, hear. how wrong is it that i already miss the third world and all its, um, intricacies?
say hello to gmarc, you two--i passed him the blog address this morning.
dive hard for me. yay for thailand!
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