How To: Getting to Laos

1. From your cheap guesthouse in Siem Reap (Angkor Wat's home) buy a ticket (4 bucks) to Poipet at the Cambodia/Thailand border. The guy at the guesthouse may tell you the bus leaves at 8am, but that could mean as early as 7:30 or as late as 9am. When it arrives to scoop you up, don't expect anyone to tell you what to do with your bag, and don't be annoyed when it ends up in the aisle of the 20-seater mini-bus and has 17 dusty shoe prints by the end of the trip. You will probably be sitting by one of the sweet windows that opens, but you'll also be covered by a sheen of red dust after the bumpy 6 hour journey. Expect to find dust in your bra that evening.

2. Everyone gets off the bus in Poipet, but you are probably going to be the only one not getting on a different bus to cross the border and further trek to Bangkok. Just walk away from their Package Deal and find a moto (motorbike/cycle taxi) on the street. Have the guy take you to the border.

2. Go through Cambodian immigration, and walk 100 hundred meters to Thai immigration. The guy with the forms may ignore you, so be persistent. Fill them out, get questioned and hopefully stamped. Walk another 200 hundred meters- this time past all the tour buses and their minions.Walk around confused in the stifling heat, ask someone where the bus station is. They point west.

3. Start walking and ask someone else. It is 7 kilometers west. Take a moto taxi to the bus station. Don't be mad if the driver ignores the 9kilos on your back and drives 90kph.

4. Arrive at the 'bus station' without any information. Look at your book and choose a city on the road to the Thai/Laos border nearest. Get lucky and find a bus leaving in 10 minutes. Forget about peeing and try to enjoy the fancy 4 hours in comfort.

5. Arrive in Bari Rum around 7:30pm. Get a cheap room with a small television and OMG cable. Watch American Idol by satellite, but you won't find out if Tifani makes it because the connection cuts out. The room is 210 baht for the night- about 5 dollars.

6. Wake up at 6:30am, get ready leisurely and head to the train station to check the schedule for Ubon Rathathani. Find out that the best train leaves in 20 minutes. Run back to the hotel, gather your things, check out and run to make the train. Make sure you sit next to a Thai guy who speaks some kind of pig latin and buys several portions of fried grasshoppers, snapping them in his mouth joyfully.

7. Upon arrival, argue with a moto driver about the cost for a ride to the Warin Market, where you're likely to get a bus. Plan to pee at the market, don't worry about it now.

8. You have seen no other falangs (foreigners) since the border, but you seem to be expected at the market. As you climb from the moto, a severely pregnant woman hanging out of a slowly moving bus yells to you "CHONG MEK? CHONG MEK!" Yeah, you shrug, and she ushers you on. The driver says "Phibun! You go! Change bus Chong Mek. OK!?" No time to pee.

9. The bus is hot and sticky, crowded with smiling Thai, their eyes glued to a television set showing a national comedy sketch show in which squeaky whines and beat-em-ups dominate. Don't mind that, something pulls your eyes to the door. Something looks out of place. What is that? It looks as if one of the cushioned seat backs has split- is that cotton? Oh, no, it is just a PRAYING MANTIS. You can't take your eyes off it. Is that real? Then it starts to move, along a rail and finally along the door frame where it licks and ponders. Take pictures. An hour later at Phibun Mangsahan, you're still staring. Be careful leaving the bus, walking under it. Take a photo close-up. The driver will laugh at you.

10. A sawngthaew (a truck with two rows of benches along the bed and a roof) seems to be waiting for you. Go to Chong Mek.

11. Once at the station in Chong Mek, take a moto taxi to the Thai/Laos border. On the Thai side, you pass several small offices before the correct one for your departure stamp. Make sure to spend a few minutes listening to the angel-voiced blind musician. Give him some money- paper money, please. On the Laotian side, good luck finding the office. You'll pass a bevy and even small market area before the proper station. Find out you unnecessarily got your pricey Visa in Phnom Penh because they now offer visas on arrival at the crossing. Get cheated by an officer who claims there is an "immigration card" fee even though you have one given to you by the Laos consulate in Cambodia. Curse him.

12. Take an unneeded moto Taxi to the the sawngthaew stop for Pakse, across the Mekong.

13. The Sawngthaew driver wants the Kip (local currency) equivalent of a buck for the 1 hour ride. Seems fair, and the only one going the whole way of the 20 squished in. Women with bundles of lives ducks and chickens, baskets of noodles and fruit, file in and out, as the vehicle seems to stop every kilometer.

14. Once in Pakse take a jumbo to a guesthouse. Make sure the guesthouse is full so you have to walk around a while before finding another place.

Welcome to Laos!

New Feature, etc

Album of some of my favorite photos from this trip- click on the right for the next photo, on the left for the previous, or in the center for a larger version!

I'm in Cambodia. Everything is still India for me- I think about Indian currency and people and food, poverty and homes and transport. My last meal there was a thali, a set meal with several vegetable curries and often a choice of naan (bread, as seen here) or rice and sometimes with yogurt, salad, papad (fried or baked thin round sheets of lentil flour) and pickled vegetables or fruit. I was so happy the next day, but Thailand left me dreary right from the start...




I had managed a bit of fun on an island that feeds both hedonistic locals and tourists, greed spilling from their suffocated lungs and pocketbooks. It is clear to me that Thailand is more, and I will have two more short visits before returning home to find some peace and peaceful people there. Now that I have a guidebook I can more easily sort it all out.




All of a sudden, in the thick humidity of anxious greed I realized that Cambodia was very close- one hour to the border in fact- and visas given on arrival. So I went to the border and after sorting through some immigration issues with extra cash (no comment), I made it.



Cambodia is gorgeous- dry like many other parts of Asia now, but still brilliantly green. I love it. The children are ferociously friendly, with broad curious smiles and calls of "hello!" at every turn. After some time near the border I headed for the capitol, Phnom Penh.

What a strange place it was, modern, with beautifully paved roads and a fantastic national museum, but there was this marketing mechanism pulling you into the Killing Fields and pushing you to buy t-shirts with land mines on them and books about Khmer Rouge atrocities from fatherless children... It took a few days in Cambodia to realize where I was- the class discussions (when I was teaching Anthropology) about poverty and third-worldness and the fiber-optic cable they were laying through the whole of the country- the connection took time, as silly as it sounds even to me. This is the place where the Holocaust came alive again in the 1970s. Children play there, children beg there, bones pokes through the paths of the Fields and bits of tattered clothing litter the landscape.




Something appeared in Thailand and Cambodia that had been absent from my eyes thus far in Asia- the blatant sex industry. In Thailand, the single guys seem to think the girls like them and that they are on dates- the sheer number of 30-50yo men by themselves or with 22yo girls is staggering. They are paid, they are always paid. But when I saw these mixed couples I wanted to believe that he was an ex-pat and she was a friend or a legitimate girlfriend. Unfortunately this is not true- the girls follow the offers and money- something even I was privy to witness. Cambodia's industry is cheaper, less structured, and centers around brothels and chickenfarms, small villages consisting solely of Cambodian and imported (sold) Vietnamese girls- some as young as 12. It is still very possible to buy children, and efforts of the government and sometimes self-serving NGOs has not made a sizable dent.

Apparently, one of the HOTNEWASIAN destinations is the temple complexes Angkor Wat, Northwest of in Siem Reap. So HOT that today I listened to two nurses from Washington state catch-up after a surprise run-in and talk about dirty alleys and street food making them sick. Three days visiting temples and it wasn't enough. Even in February the heat can be stifling and the tour groups are a pain, but there are bags of secrets to discover- the predictable nature of both means shady reliefs facing West and deserted temples if you time it just right.









Not much time left, here or anywhere near here. San Francisco is soon, New York is soon... But before all that, I head North through Thailand and then spend some time in Laos before kicking my way back to Bangkok and flying to Singapore, Tokyo and then San Fran. Miss you.

Bunny!

I'm sick and achy and everyone here is naked.

Bangkok, like India's beach mecca Goa, is a haven for parties and coconut-colored tans. I hate it, I want India back. The plan is just to be in Singapore for my flight out in early March. I don't have any useful guidebooks left (just Mongolia!), so the route is up for grabs among the sweltering skies, jungles, and stone-carved deities.

I want India back- a place where people fleece you out of necessity, not greed. A place where men and women so enthralled me with their conservative dress that the avalanche of calves and thighs poking out of short denim skirts has thrown me dizzyingly backward. A place where surprises greet you by the moment, where your tears are washed away by an old (albeit 11 year-old) friend running to catch-up and say goodbye. It may be a niche I need to discover, or the gardens, classical dancing and temples of splendor, but I'm too worn out to try. This is the first time in the trip that a feeling of lethargy and apathy has overcome me. I'll sleep some more, and try and find out if I can catch a ferry from the Cambodian coast to Thailand's spur in my journey southward.

I'm working on a site extension (organized like the notebook but with thumbnails) with my favorite photographs- high resolution- from this trip. If there are any images you'd like to see added, comment and let me know.

p.s. Happy February! As a child I believed that natural law required your first word of the month to be 'bunny,' so on this day, I started with a single word. Anyone else?