Chelsea's Phonsovan, Laos slide show!

A little bit of food…

One major part of our trip has been eating. While in Luang Prabang I have taken some pictures of what we are eating. Unfortunately we found a bakery with the most amazing bread, so some of it is Western Food. (Stephanie P. I tried to set up food scenes like you do…. yours are better. Everyone go to Hostess in Rain boots and look at her blog!)
Breakfast     
 


Rice Pork Soup- We eat this a lot. The soup contains broth, rice, pig bones (though we are never sure which ones, Mack thought that this particular batch was pig knee), pig blood, and though there was none in this bowl sometimes we get sausage meatballs.
Little doughnut things with sweetened condensed milk inside. We buy them at the morning market.
Green Tea grown in Luang Prabang
Morning Market
This is where all of the people in town (restaurants included) get meat, veggies, and food for the day. This is a picture of what the meat section looks like. All of the meat is kept out in the open, This vendor used cardboard to keep her meat off of the table. The flies are in HEAVEN as you can see.

Lunch
This is the time of the day where we have been hitting up the bakery JOMA
I ordered this Reuben and I loved it! THICK slices of corned beef, and a little extra garlic somewhere, maybe hidden in the 1000 island dressing. I was pleasantly surprised. Day 2 I ordered a Tuna sandwich, SO Yummy! Mack ordered a BLT on day and chili in a bread bowl day 2.
     

after lunch…pit stop for a beer Lao, to admire the crops and watch young monks play In the river. A person can choose to be a monk at any time, these boys looked to be between the ages of 6 at 12.

 
 
Dinner
After our Beer Loas, Mack and I rode his red rider, and my pink furry down the river. We were so inspired by the young monks we jumped in! For dinner we went 2 places..
The first was a restaurant on the Mekong to watch the sunset and play cards.

here is what mack saw…

we only had spring rolls here, and I forgot to take a pic, but after that we went and had Indian food. This is the closest to India we have ever been, so we were excited because we thought the food would probably taste better than at home. It DID!

February FUN in Luang Prabang

Bike ride through Luang Prabang

So much to do, so much to say!

Ok, so it has been a while since our last blog update, and for those of you following us on facebook.com also, you might be a little more up to date on what has been going on.  From here on out, I am going to try (and Chelsea says she is too) to just write a little blurb each day about an experience.  The trouble right now is that so very much has happened in this last week that it is hard to sum it up into something shorter than a Stephen King novel (I am about to finish “The Dark Half” and I can honestly say now I think I do not care for Stephen King!

First of all, let me start out by having you all watch this video.

White Rhino Porn was shot using only actors that were above the age of 18. If you are not of the legal limit to watch such
 things as White Rhino Porn, you need to proceed to the following site. www.disney.com

The above video was filmed in Chiang Mai.  We got to have some many crazy animal adventures there, it was really fun. 

          Anyways, after we were in Chiang Mai / Chiang Rai for a couple weeks, we headed to a small hippie town in the Mountains named Pai.  We hung out for a few days and did nothing except listen to Thai bands, take yoga classes with a crazy yoga teacher, and hang around a bunch of hippie European’s.  Kind of cool, mostly annoying.  Don’t get me wrong, Pai was great!  The vibe of all the white people is what was obnoxious to me.

         The drive too and from Pai was horrible.  It was like a ride along with the Blue Angels.  Switchbacks the whole way, with a crazy Thai mini bus driver taking these turns so fast I swear we were pulling multiple G’s.  On the way there, me and Chelsea both got sick.  On the way back, Chelsea was already puking all over, so we overdosed on a bunch of motion sickness medicine and were knocked out the whole ride back (4 hrs.)

        Then, for several days we got sick.  Stomach flu, then fever.  Being sick in Thailand really sucks.  Chelsea got it first, on the night we were supposed to go to the Ping Pong bar with our Thai friends.  Hah, she got sick and was puking, I tucked her in and said “I’m off to Ping Pong” and made the popping noise with my mouth.  She really wanted to go. 

        Lets just say there were some very interesting tricks involving balloons, darts, coke bottles and cigarettes.  No actual ping pong balls.  I’ll let your imagination do the rest for you.  The awkward part for me was hanging around the club in general.  Our Thai friends paid to have all the dancer girls come “sit” with us.  Essentially, they pour your drinks for you, laugh at everything you say, allow themselves to be groped, and try to make the big sale to you.  I felt like I was giving the girl that sat with me a break – I poured her a shot of whiskey, and she sat next to me (not on my lap).  I spoke my four Thai phrases to her and she smiled, then left and went and talked to my friend Bly.  “Your American friend is awkward, and scared of me” she complained.  I agreed with her one hundred percent. 

        Of course when you go to a club like “Star 6” with your six crazy Thai buddies and drink a good share of 100 Pipers Whiskey, trouble is bound to happen. 

        I just took a shot with Bly, Teen, Red and Jack when the girl that was ‘sitting’ with me grabbed me from behind by my scarf and pulled me up onto the stage.  Everyone is laughing.  Evil Woman starts playing in the background, as my Thai friends help the girls tie me to the floor spread eagle.  I am pretty nervous, and my nerves manifested themselves as laughter.  I was cracking up.  What the hell was going to happen?

        Well, four Thai strippers did a choreographed dance all around me.  It involved all sorts of ridiculous things, all incredibly funny, all at my expense.  It started with a girl pretending to grind her high heel into my crotch, and ended up with them pulling up my shirt and whipping me with some sort of thing!  Embarrassing, but knowing showbiz I gotta say that it was quite the show.  The girls thanked me and bought me drinks (hah!) they were actually really nice about it.  Bly, Red, Jack and Teen – if you are reading this, thank you for giving me one of the weirdest experiences in my life.  That night when I was at a hooker bar in Bangkok, tied spread eagle to the floor, being whipped by a girl in leopard underwear as a bunch of unattractive old men laugh at me and the girls cheer.  Chelsea really wishes she was not sick and could have been there also!

        After Chelsea got better, I got immediately sick for two days.  Fever, stomach flu.  This caused us to overstay our VISA by four days (we would rather be sick in Thailand than in Laos) but eventually we got up north to the border and took the boat to Laos.  On the Thai side of the border there were signs all over the place that said if you do not go through customs and get your stuff checked, you could go to jail for several years and have a big fine.  So we went to customs, and there was not a single person in the whole building.  Great.  Thailand has been full of these self contradicting experiences.  What do you do?  In America maybe you would wait and try to get ahold of someone, but when your boat is leaving and nobody understands English you just get on the boat anyways.  Turns out customs on the Laos side did not really give a shit either.  It was interesting to cross this border, and then think about Texas where they build an actual wall/fence and give some dudes some really big guns and tell them to guard it.  “Guard the border bro, gotta watch out for those hard working Mexicans.  No hardworkers getting’ in here!”  That’s all I will say on that…

        We hung out in an unremarkable border town called Huay Xiay for a few days, then caught the slow boat to Luang Prabang, where we are residing now.  The boat trip was amazing.  Two entire days floating down the Mekong River, beautiful scenery.  Essentially, I was on the “Slow Boat FROM China”, someone got the old song title mixed up.  The seats were pretty uncomfortable, but we could get up and walk around the little boat.  Not much, but enough to stretch out our legs.  We also got to know a bunch of other travelers!  Tim and Lisa from the UK were great (we drank a lot of SangSom whiskey with them) and Joel from Eugene.  That’s right, we found another American in Asia.  Wow.
Those are the boats to the left!  And it is kind of hard to get the effect by looking at the picture below, but we were winding through some serious jungle, with the occasional little village here and there, herds of water buffalo, and giant rock formations sticking up out of the middle of the river.  It is the dry season, so the water level was really low.
        Now we are in Luang Prabang, and we will hang here for a few more days and figure out where we want to go in Laos.  They have really nice stuff here, we want to buy it all up.  Tons of silk, and the most outstanding fabrics and tapestries I have ever seen.  Unfortunately they are large and heavy, too heavy for my backpack!  I am debating spending a hundred bucks to be able to ship 10 Kilo’s back to the USA….


Cheers,

Mack

ATVA - TIJC - DTGSADM

Warning: when we do so much during the day, it gets dark at 6 and I cannot understand anything on TV, and I have a lack of energy to do anything else while Chelsea sleeps, I write long, annoying blogs.


New photo's uploaded on facebook here!


TIJC

    Thailand International Jazz Conference : totally awesome.  It was outdoors in the auditorium on Mahidol University Campus, tons of people were there, and Danilo Perez and his band were blowin some minds!  I think it worked out to be $15.00 per ticket, which got you into all of the shows for the day.  I think that I have paid at least $50.00 USD to see Danilo Perez in Seattle before, so I was really excited!

Also, hip pop/fusion band ETC was great.  Smooth jazz, Thai love songs, shredding dual keyboard lines, and nice rock star fro's!  Check em out!


 I went with SomSak #1 and SomSak #2, both part of our Thai family.  Somsak #1 is my manager out here, he was self appointed.  Honestly, it is a little odd.  During set breaks and in between songs he would parade me around the festival and introduce me to people that he did not even know.  Make me say, "Sawadee Krap" "Sabai dee mai?" and "Khap Kun Krap" then stand awkwardly while he talked about how I am a great jazz pianist.  These people included the president of the college, the president of the music department, the booking agent, the founder of TIJC, three or four musicians that were playing that night, and several random women.  He really gets results though!  And man, if I would have known that there was a solo competition I could have entered and won 30,000 baht!  And man, I would have won!  Although the final evening acts were great, the majority of the musicians could not compete with the heavy cats in the USA.



ATVA
    Me and Chelsea tried something new today.  We went to a shop of a friend of our friend Bly.  We rented All Terrain Vehicles, or ATV's and went on our All Terrain Vehicle Adventure for the entire afternoon today. We had a total blast, it was something we have not ever done back home, and for the whole afternoon private trip with two personal guides it ran us about $150.00 US.  So we putted around Chiang Mai at first, then took off into the foothills for some gnarley 4x4 action.  At first we were having some trouble with our ATV's but eventually the guys busted em open, went to work on em, and had em up and running again fifteen minutes later.
    We rode around the mountains surrounding Chiang Mai for the whole afternoon.  Our guide James (his Thai name was too hard to remember) took us to a gigantic cave deep in the jungle, to the top of several large  mountains (although still smaller than even Mt. Si) to several temples, up and down the steepest hills you would ever want to drive anything up or down, and along country roads at blistering speeds.  Anyways after about three hours of riding, we were getting the hang of it.  We new how to go down really steep hills, and avoid things that would really jar your body.  A big part of driving an ATV is not only being able to find a route up or down the mountain, but trying to find a somewhat smooth path so that you do not jack yourself up too bad.  We were jacked up, but less jacking was happening after three hours than in the first hour.  Hah, make sense?  Anyways, you might know where this story is going if I have ever told you my first snowboarding experience story.

Jumps.

So me and Chels are both feeling really BA (bad ass) and one of our professional guides who makes a living racing ATV's took us to an old rice field.  The field was all dried out, but the terraces made for great jumps.  So we whip our ATV's around and watch as our guide takes off at top speed and hits the first terrace wall and goes shooting up to the next terrace, approximately a meter above the first one.  POC (piece of cake).
I revved the engine up a little, and shot off on the same path.  Hit the jump, got some air, landed successfully on top.  Chelsea came zipping along and could hang as well!  This just pumped me up a little more!  "Wow, I just did a jump on an ATV and it was POC, I am such a BA!" We blitzed off in the dust of the second story of the rice terrace's, and watched as our guide hit the second jump.

The second jump was by far much bigger and steeper, but it was the same premise.  In my head I justified it as "Well, the machine is doing all the work, its not like this is a PHYSICAL sport or anything".  Whatever.  I shot at the wall at breakneck speed.

When you approach a tall, steep jump on an ATV, it looks a lot like you are driving very fast directly into a wall.  It feels like it also.  Once the front tires hit the slope, in like a quarter of a second the ATV with a 250cc engine ceases to go straight, and basically is driving directly up in the air.  I was kind of expecting this, but not at the intensity that it happened.  I held on for the life of me and flew up the jump.  The immediate change in the direction I was traveling threw me off a little.  At one moment, gravity was pulling me down through my body vertically, the next moment I was being sucked down horizontally.  This pulled my body back away from the ATV, but I held on for dear life.  I held on so good, that it gunned the throttle and I got some serious air.  It felt like I was twenty feet up in the air, but it was more like three.  I was leaning back so far on the ATV I was almost vertical.  I could feel the beast wanting to flip back on me, and at this moment I knew I was not gonna conquer terrace two like I conquered terrace one.  I gave in, and pushed the ATV away from me as hard as I could.  It went shooting off into the dirt.  I fell down on my back, lucky to not get hurt at all.  It felt like I jumped up in the air, and landed on my butt on the ground.  Then Chelsea came roaring up behind me, saw me as she was about to get over the top of the jump, and in order to not crush me she slammed on the breaks, then rolled down the jump/wall backwards.  Eventually because of the grade of the slope, the ATV started to roll over backwards on her.  She hit the ground, and as soon as she did our guide James caught/shoved the ATV to the side so that it would not crush her.

Wow, that was a really close call for both of us.  It was amazing that neither of us got hurt.  After the shock wore off, we could have a good laugh about it.  The guides felt really terrible that we did not spend more time on the small jumps to learn to keep all of our weight forward.  After that epic fail, I had to hit the small jump a couple more times (it was really easy) to make myself feel better.  That level 2 jump will have to wait for another day.




DTGSADM
Down-to-get-suits-and-dresses-made.

Went to the tailor, placed our order.  Two suits coming right up, and a dress for Chelsea.  Chelsea admitted she was picky to me about cloths today when she couldn't find a good silk pattern for her second dress.  Win!

Anyways, here is a totally sweet video we made earlier in the trip that I forgot to upload!  Ch-ch-ch-check it out!

I thought I was safe...

I thought I was safe, but twenty days into Asia I have been struck with a stomach bug.  As I sit here waiting for the Imodium to kick in I will write a little blog!  I know this is disgusting, but I found this online!

Thank you www.wikipedia.org for being so informative.

Over the past few days we have been doing so many things that honestly it gets a little overwhelming trying to write anything about any of it. I will just give you guys a heads up as to what we have been doing over all.  

We left Bangkok two days ago.  We were going to try to catch a sleeper train to Chiang Mai but those were sold out for the whole week so we took the Sprinter Train.  Basically, a half step down in comfort and a little more expensive than taking a bus.  I really do not know what the benefit is.  We got on the train at 6:38 pm and got off of it in Chiang Mai at 7:20 am the next day.  It was hell trying to sleep on that thing!  

One of the weird signs you have to deal with.  I understand the image, but whats with the WC?

Our friend June (Miss Thailand Competition) was letting us crash at her pad in Bangkok for several days before we left, and her husband Mr. Tongchai is very nice and owns a huge company in Thailand.  Anyways, he called ahead for me and Chelsea and basically 'marked' us as VIP personnel for Chiang Mai.  We have had two tour guides the whole time we have been here, under the orders of Mr. Tongchai, and we have a home for as long as we want at the Chiang Mai "Night Safari".  The coolest zoo you have never heard of.  

It is the Jurassic Park of mammals.  Every night they take you out on these tram rides where you can see all sorts of animals in their natural habitat at night.  White Tigers, Lions, Hyena's and other predatory animals as well as elephants, a million types of deer, giraffe's, ox, buffalo, monkeys and so on and so on.  Oh, don't forget the LadyBoy show and the restaurant's and ........ bungalos/rooms for rent?  Totally awesome, totally weird.  I was really tired, but Chelsea actually had a hard time sleeping because our house was right near where the lion's and hyena's were, and they are super loud at night.  Our guides Bly and Rain are totally fun and entertaining to hang with as well.

So awesome!

It seems that one of the themes of this trip for me is to see all this stuff that is not allowed in America because people are so scared to be caught up in a lawsuit.  Sooo much of the really fun stuff we have done would be soooo not even a consideration in the States... and honestly, I agree!  I think we watched a 4 ton elephant do "crow" pose (yoga pose where you balance on your arms) less than 3 feet away from a class of 4th graders.  Like, the elephant was leaning over the kids.  It is interesting, America makes rules about things because of the exception - the one idiot, and Thailand just lets that idiot go hug the panda and get mauled.  

Today we went up to Chiang Rai, where we rented a speed boat and went on a tour of the Golden Triangle.  The Golden Triangle is the point where Thailand, Myanmar (Burma) and Laos meet, separated by the Mae Khong River.  Historically tons of illegal activity went on here, drug trades, selling of illegal things (like slaves) and there has been a lot of fighting over this territory.  It was really weird to see Thailand in comparison to Laos and Burma.  Thailand had hotels, restaurants, temples, houses, everything built along the banks of the river.  Totally modern.  Laos had little huts and shops built on top of the bank of the river, and when we went there we found a huge market.  Very dirty, very cheap.  All the Lacoste you could ever want.  This is where I drank Cobra / Tiger Penis whiskey.  (See video).  

When looking at Burma, you could see nothing. Only dense dense jungle, and a gigantic casino called Paradise facing the Thai border.  Gambling is outright banned in Thailand, so a Thai native cut a deal with someone in Burma to build a gigantic casino to try to attract people over the border.  A few problems with Burma :  Child Soldiers, giant armies of them.  Land mines.  War.  Extreme poverty.  Unless you are in the army, your children cannot go to school.  Less than 1% of people have cell phones.  Less than .1% of people have internet access.  People cannot move there, people cannot leave.  We met two refugees from Myanmar in Thailand, they were our raft guides.  They left their families and hiked through the mountains for three months in order to escape the communism.  They had nothing, and they now have nothing.  They have to stay in the woods in Thailand so that they do not get deported, so they work as rafting guides for one of the elephant camps where they make 100BHT a day, about three US dollars.  Then, they take half of that and send it to their parents back home.  However they said they love Thailand because they can choose what they do here.  They each went to high school for three years, and one of them could speak basic English.  They were really cool, we gave them a good tip.

Anyways, it was frustrating to see a giant Casino just over the border of a country that has so many problems.  Our guides told us it was not safe for white people to go to Burma, so we did not go.  They said the problem is not with the average Burmese people or families, but with the police and soldiers.  One of our guides knows a woman in Myanmar and said that for every 500 Kyat that she made, she had to donate 450 Kyat of it to the soldiers in her town so that they continue to keep them safe.  What..?