Most beautiful island ever.

So I told you we were in Phuket, right? Well we were. And the plan was to head up to Phang Nga to do some kayaking before heading on to Bangkok, but we ended up taking a little detour after learning about a wonderful place called Koh Yao Noi from a wonderful cafe owner who sensed our waning fascination with the Scandanavian holiday mecca that is Karon Beach, Phuket. I actually had a lovely time in Phuket: did some pretty great snorkeling, lazed on the beach without getting sunburned, dabbled in medical tourism (the ear doctor when she looked in my left ear: "oh wow"), and met some interesting people who weren't even close to backpackers. However....it was not what Sarah and I had envisioned when we were planning our beach time at the tail end of this trip. The cafe owner guy pointed us to Koh Yao Noi and suggested we make our way to Phang Nga from there, by boat instead of by bus.

Best suggestion ever. Where Phuket was completely overrun with sarong shops, overpriced bad western food, overpriced bad westernized thai food and concrete, Koh Yao Noi was quiet, cheap, almost deserted, friendly, and breathtakingly beautiful. This was the view from our bungalow. No joke.


I really am trying not to like cats. I really am....but bungalow owners had 4 cats that were some of the cutest creatures I have ever seen in my life. Ko Samet may have the happiest dogs on earth, but the happiest cats were definitely here. We were just going to stay for a day, but that turned into three. Whoops. The monkeys.....oh the monkeys. I need sound effects and hand gestures to talk about those, so I'll do it later. Annnnd here we are in Phang Nga Town with only five days until I leave for home and Sarah heads off to Egypt (five!).

Definitely excited to be home for awhile and can't wait to see you all. Love you!

Whew

After 30 hours of travelling, we finally arrived at the Little Mermaid Guesthouse in Phuket. Do any of you watch Lost? Do you remember the episode with the flashback to Jack in Phuket? I'm pretty sure they filmed it in some completely different place. There are many wondrous sites here, but they involve quite creatively obscene outfits more than picturesque beach bungalows. More on that in another post....I am so behind!

There's tons of stuff I didn't get to talk about in Lao, but rather than run through all of them, I'm just going to make myself a reminder list so I can remember later.

Ok Cambodia....We flew to Siem Reap from Vientiane on December 1st with the intention of staying 2 nights then leaving for Bangkok to catch our December 4th flight. However, the protests were still going strong, so we decided to linger in Cambodia for another day or so and take our time with the Angkor temples. We found our guesthouse, dumped our stuff, and then met Mr. Pidor, the guesthouse's unofficial tuk tuk driver. He was incredibly patient and knowledgeable and listened to all over our ideas for iteneraries without telling us how ridiculous they were and nodding and smiling when we yelled that we'd changed our mind and wanted to go with his idea. The temples were absolutely amazing. Just....amazing. Mr. Pidor picked us up at 4:45 each morning to go see the sunrise. The first morning he took us to a mountain temple where we'd gone to see the sunset (along with 100 other tourists) the night before. It was mildly terrifying and incredibly creepy making the 10 minute hike up to the temple by ourselves, in the dark, and with what we later learned were monkeys making strange noises in the trees around us. It was completely worth it though when we climbed the treacherous stairs to the top of the temple and could sit there in silence and sloooowly start to make out the outlines of the temple towers. We had the whole place to ourselves for about 15 minutes before 5 or 6 more people showed up to watch the sun rise with us.

The food in Cambodia was also amazing. Mr. Pidor always took us to breakfast and lunch spots that were reasonably priced and delicious. Psic chicken? I'd never heard of it, but it was killer. As was a sour soup with lime, chicken, and tamarind. Oh! And there was ice cream! The real deal and in a cafe with giant beds and pillows. I realize this experience was completely manufactured so that people like me would come spend money, but whatever. You manufacture some caramel cashewnut ice cream, and I'm there.

Mr. Pidor's "best friend" was conveniently a regular taxi driver, and agreed to drive us to the Cambodian border where we could catch the bus to Bangkok. We'd heard horror stories about this road and were braced for the worst, but it was completely fine. We rode for 3 hours past hundreds of bicycles carrying impossible amounts of cargo, and then walked the last 30 feet or so into Thailand along with a parade of men pulling carts of chickens, baskets, etc. From then on we were back to the land where we always feel like we're being a little bit taken advantage of :-P

Catching up

Another random list! (Also, I was racing the clock....so my apologies for the incomplete sentences and spelling errors. I promise I'll run a spell check one day.)

1. Food: I'm way way behind on food. We've had some amazing food in Laos, and it's surprisingly different from the food we enjoyed in Thailand. I'll start with tonight and work backwards, I guess. We met a lovely man and fellow foodie at dinner last night who said the best meal he'd had was at the Luang Prabang night market. We didn't even know they had food there, but sure enough, there was a little alley at the end crammed with stalls and tables with random people crowded around them. The food was fantastic. We had a whole fish grilled over charcoals, spring rolls, and dessert (mine was a quarter of a pumpkin that had been steamed with coconut pudding/flan-esque something or other inside.....sarah got coconut stuffed bananas). Deeelicious. Last night we ate "Thanksgiving" dinner at an American owned restaurant around the corner form our guest house (more on this below, too). It ended up being a bbq where turkey was the special meat option of the evening. We all gathered around a table, then the waiters came and removed the center tiles from the tabletop and lowered in a pot full of glowing charcoals. We then got a basket of glass noodles, herbs, vegetables, etc....a bucket full of chicken broth, and a platter full of raw chicken and buffalo meat. I'll have to rustle up a picture of this contraption, but you basically set a piece of pork fat on top of a domed grill that was on top of the charcoals. There was a ring around the dome where you could pour broth and add the vegetables and noodles to make a soup. After griling up our meat, we slathered it with a peanut tamarind bbq sauce....soooo good. Not Thanksgiving dinner (although Jeff, the lovely man mentioned above, ordered some potatoes that he mashed up with some of the broth....that's as close as we got), but pretty excellent. Before that there was some phenomenal fried fish (with ginger, lime leaves, and chiles), more amazing fruit shakes, and oh! (I just remembered) the most incredible bakery in southeast Asia. Mango crumble. Mango....crumble. We've gone every day. One day we went twice. This morning we discovered they had pumpkin pie, and apparently someone there knows how to make the real deal. It was phenomenal. Luckily they have another location in Vientiane.

2. PAD: This whole protest, airport closing thing is absolutely ridiculous. Nobody seems to know what the PAD's problem is. The only answer I can get is "they don't like the prime minister for some reason". I'll wikipedia it soon. We're not planning on being back in Thailand until December 4th, but we do have a ticket out of Bangkok that day. They need to stop being ridiculous. Them and the government. If they don't, we're starting to entertain ideas of changing our tickets home, hanging out in Vietnam, and flying from Hanoi to the US.

3. Thanksgiving dinner: I sorely missed family, scalloped oyesters, cranberry sauce, stuffing, and pumpkin desserts. We heard from Jacob via email that there was a Thanksgiving gathering at Lao Lao garden, so we went down there last night to chekc out prices. On our way to the restaurant, another American (he was the first one I'd met in Luang Prabang) mentioned he was also on his way to Lao Lao and we ended up joining him. We ended up at a big table full of Americans longing for the full meal but ready to settle for turkey cooked on the Lao-style bbq. It was a blast. And Jacob was there! (We randomly ended up at the same table.)

4. Now I have to go because the battery is dying on Sarah's laptop :-/

Love you all!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Eat extra pie for me.

Luang Prabang=Absolutely Amazing

Today was our first full day in the absolutely beautiful Luang Prabang. Aaaabsolutely beautiful. It's surround by mountains and made up of small streets lined with French colonial style buildings and overflowing with plants and flowers. Also, they have taken all of my favorite colors (all of them) and decorated everything from temples to Tuk Tuks. It's beautiful. We've had some delicious Lao food and some interesting Lao coffee, but spent the rest of the time strolling around. We did make it to a couple of Wats: one covered in sparkling mosaics and the other on top of a small hill where we could watch the sun set over the mountains. Beautiful.

In other good news, all the beautiful souveniers are very expensive, so I can't buy them! We're calling all the shops and markets "museums" now. Tonight we visited the nightly handicraft street museum.

The kids here (at least the ones we've met) are a little on the bizarre side. Sarah got attacked by one weilding a handful of straws at a cafe the other day. One girl was very very curious about why on earth I had bought my dress. (I don't think it's that offensive? Black shirt dress?) And two little boys (we're talking 4 or 5 years old) thought it would be hilaaaarious if they ran up behind me and tried to lift up my crazy black dress. Hilaaarious. Tomorrow we're going to hang out with some more kids at a literacy center. I'll report back on those.

:(

Sigh. We said goodbye to Chiang Mai today. My mom asked me when we first got here if there was a city that I could compare Chiang Mai to. I think I said Florence just because of its energy level/size/accessibility, but I ended up falling for Chiang Mai the same way I fell for ol' Firenze. (And actually, now that I'm typing this, I'm remembering that last night as I was running out to get some last minute bus supplies I ran into a couple from Florence who had also fallen in love with Chiang Mai.) The community was friendly, the cafes and restaurants charming, and the river a hub of activity.

Things I will miss:

1. Libra Guesthouse (clean room, our own bathroom, ridiculous but friendly family running the place, and the "American Breakfast")
2. Tuk-tuk man on the corner (Every day he stood out there and asked "where you want to go?!?" Today we told him we wanted to go to the bus station. On the way there he was very curious about where we'd been walking off to every day for the last 3 weeks without his help.)
3. Kanjana's (Best pumpkin curry and mango sticky rice ever. Friendliest chef/dishwasher wife/husband team ever.)
4. Crazy expats and their wealth of well-intentioned advice
5. Goodview Restaurant (good view)
6. Sunday night market (endless dirt cheap samples of tasty Thai treats and handicrafts galore!)
7. Old City alleyways
8. Well-dressed dogs
9. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Today we hopped on an early AM bus to Chang Khong on the Laotian border. It only broke down once! After the bus driver tried banging on some things (literally) to try and fix it, we got a new bus, where he cranked up the music and didn't even bother putting his unform shirt back on (I wouldn't have either). We succesfully crossed the Mekong River into Laos without much fanfare (what it lacked in fanfare it made up for in visa fees). And now....Sarah and I will work on mastering the dollar/kip conversion rate which is much less fun than the dollar/baht conversion rate. Woo :-P

Mae Sariang

This weekend Sarah went to Chiang Rai to do some leadership work, and I headed west to Mae Sariang to do some relaxing and cycling where I didn't fear for my life. It has been so lovely! I bought a book yesterday so I could read it in the riverside restaurants this weekend, but it was such a good read that I'd finished it before the bus ride ended. (Water for Elephants...great book) So today after a lovely bike ride through some Karen villages and a hike to a mountain temple, I began Nanny Diaries which someone had left on the guest house shelf.

It felt so good to get out on a bike, breath in mostly smog free breathes, and go for a few hours without seeing a farang (foreigner). At first I was trying to take pictures of everything, but then I decided today could be my 100% "enjoy the ride" day, and I'd capture things on film as necessary tomorrow.

After I got back from the ride, I went out to walk around and find dinner. I noticed all the cafes were absolutely packed, and then I remembered that today was the princess's funeral. I felt a little awkward being the white girl with Nanny Diaries to plop down and interrupt their event, soooo I went back to the guest house where the crowd was a little more mixed but where they still had the funeral on so I could get a sense of what everyone was crowding around televisions to watch.

Tomorrow=early AM breakfast, morning market, more biking, eating at the cafes now that the funeral is over, river sunset, bus to Chiang Mai.