We left Laos via a boat trip up the Mekong River. It was a fancy pants boat, complete with lunch on board and a bar, and the trip took two days. The alternatives were the bare bones boats, which would have been fine, or the speedboats, for which you wear helmets and
life vests and hope for the best. Apparently they are quite prone to flipping over and oh...killing their passengers. Whee!
Many of the villages along the river are
accessible only by river, and what a river! This is the low water season so you can really get a good idea of how tricky this river is to navigate. The rocks reach up from the bottom of the river looking like giant teeth waiting to eat the bottom of a boat. The water runs brown like the Mighty Mississippi with a strong fast current and the banks on both side are about 10 to 15 meters below the trees, it gets that much higher during the wet season. The exposed sandy riverbanks are planted with crops near the villages, peanuts and sweet potatoes mostly.
We came back into Thailand and went first to
Chiang Rai, where I fell in love with a hedgehog at the night market. I was
persuaded that travel with a hedgehog would be difficult so I eased the pain of
separation with much shopping for silly cute things that only a
pre-teen girl would love. Thankfully, we have about five of those back in the US who will be getting packages from Bangkok so I'll be able to close my backpack again. From
Chiang Rai we went up to the mountains, near the border with Burma, the tea growing region of Thailand. It was nice, but a bit dull, so we hightailed it to
Chiang Mai, where
we've been for six nights now.
What do we do when we get to a City? Go out to dinner, go to movies, ride around on bikes, shop, all the usual. But wait, I hear you say, why did you leave SF 'cause that's pretty much what you did there? Uh, yes... yes it is. We saw three Hollywood movies in five days. (Night at the Musuem, funny, American Haunting, stupid, and Holiday, sweet chick flick complete with crying SNAGS, sensitive new age guys.) The air conditioned shopping mall/ movie complex is a good place to be during the hot part of the day and the food court serves some of the best Thai food we've had, and
definitely the best Pad Thai. I said to one of the owners of the first guesthouse we stayed at that we were going to a movie for the hot part of the day and he gave me a
puzzled look, "Hot? It's not hot in January." It is if you're a weak blooded westerner.
A word on shopping in Thailand. Hello size extra-large. Most of the teeny tiny little women in the department store where I went to try and buy underwear (mine was holding together by mere threads after five months) would have had to shop in the
children's section in the US. The poor saleswomen helping me finally found some that were XL and didn't look like big granny pants. I stocked up. The t-shirt I bought? Size XL. The
Capri length sweats to bike in since my
Capris are falling apart and are held up at the waist with a safety pin that keeps stabbing me? Size XL. And I've lost weight since we started traveling.
Sheesh.
Apparently there is big bussiness in having suits made for you when in Thailand. Loads of shops offer 24 hour turn around. They do dresses too, but everything looked too much like something one would wear to a job, if one had a job, and it freaked me out. So instead I went to a little shop run by a brother sister team - he designs, she sews, and bought two dresses and a top (one size fits all thank you very much!) and then shocked Rich by actually having new clothes on when he got back from a bike ride.
