Dirt Biking through Laos: Vientiane to Vang Vieng

Go Laos, way to be beautiful!!!

The view from our hotel in Vang Vieng.

After a 24-hour travel experience (Kratie, Cambodia to Paske, Laos, to Vientiene, Laos) Andy and I picked up dirt bikes in Vientiane and were on our way. (See what I did there? Skipped over the icky bits and made it all sound so easy!)

Here's a little background on how this all came about: Andy and I know each other through running the  Ragnar Relay. Back around December, I mentioned to him that I planned on traveling in SE Asia this spring or summer. Turns out he was thinking of doing the same! Me: Want to travel together? Andy: Sure! I was thinking of doing it on a motorcycle, would you want to do that? Me: Ok sounds cool! And that, my dear readers, is how my major life decisions are made.

All geared up on top of a mountain in Laos!

We left the city, and biked 150 kilometers through lowlands then up into the hills and over a super-curvy little mountain. The mountain part was mostly in the rain, which makes for quite the beginner's dirt biking experience! Considering that this was my third time on a dirt bike ever, and first time on a dirt bike really outside a parking lot, I'm feeling pretty darn pleased with myself for surviving and enjoying it. 

I assume that most of my readers are not dirt bikers (neither was I until about 6 hours ago), so I'll explain that they're manual, like a motorcycle, but with more suspension so they have a higher center of gravity. 

Our first stop along this dirt biking tour was the riverside town of Vang Vieng, a so-called "backpacker haven," that now, in the semi-off season, is actually quite nice. (Though we are techincally backpackers, we're not really the stereotypical "backpacker/traveler" type.) The ride there was beautiful, through bright green rice paddies, blue and cloudy skies, and jungly mountains. Seriously, I cannot get over how spectacular this country is. 

Kaeng Kyui Waterfall

We spent a day in Vang Vieng, and here's where the dirt bikes come in handy: we can just go places -- no tuktuks, busses, or taxis required -- whenever we want! And we can go places those other vehicles can't, because dirt bikes are meant for potholes and mud! 

First we biked to Tham Phu Kham ("Blue Lagoon") cave outside the town. It was big, with interesting rocks and stalagmites and stalactites and crevices to explore. 

There are a lot of caves in the area, but I'm not much of an underground person (i.e. I don't love caves), so one was enough and afterwards we headed to the cave's nearby lagoon and rope swing to cool off.

[It has recently come to my attention -- as in I just googled -- that the Tham Phu Kham cave was supposed to have a big Buddha statue. We saw nothing like that...so maybe we misread the map and went to the wrong cave? Meh oh well, it was still pretty cool!]

The next stop for our day was Kaeng Kyui Waterfalls, about 15 fun kilometers to the east of town. As you may recall from my Erawan Falls experience in Thailand, waterfalls are my jam. Much more so than caves! I led Andy on an Mollie-style adventure, clambering up a rocky waterfall just to see what there is to be seen. 

And we totally lucked out weather-wise! It rained until about 10 am, then was overcast, and then sunny! Monsoon shmonsoon. The ride back from the falls was beautiful!

We have the dirt bikes for six days, and plan to tour to the max around Northern Laos. So wish us luck and safe riding and sunshine -- I'll keep you posted!

Best of the Week #109

Let’s start this week’s Best of the Week with Football in Kabul, because it’s amazing, and I encourage you to read it. 

In other news, it’s been a slightly weird week here in DC.  On the mostly awesome and not so weird front, the Washington Monument is now aglow.  It would have been amazing if it was lit in time for July 4, but, alas, it wasn’t to be.  But, I must say that driving into DC at night is a lot cooler now. 

Not so bad!

On the mostly weird and not at all awesome side of things, someone car-jacked an ice cream truck this week.  Yes, you read that correctly.  An ice cream truck.  Like an ice cream truck that sells cold, delicious treats.  Someone car-jacked one of those.  You’re better than this, DC.   

Oh, hey, let me just car-jack this ICE CREAM TRUCK.

Also, this guy’s back in jail, and not a moment too soon.  I guess that whole let me take video of myself possessing a loaded gun in Freedom Plaza and post it to the interwebs thing didn’t work out for him.  Oh, and turns out the drugs didn’t help his case at all.

Regular readers know that since I’ve taken over the Best of the Week while Mollie’s off adventuring, I’ve used it as a platform to encourage folks to bike DC.  We live in a city that is pretty bike accessible, and we might as well take advantage of it!  But I’m also aware that biking can seem scary.  I got my start on the streets of Boston, so I’m probably not as sensitive to the “I don’t want to get hit by a car” factor as I should be.  That’s why this map is amazing!  It’s filled with reader-contributed helpful hints that make biking around DC easier (read:  more convenient and less sweaty).      

This could be you!

Changing gears (bike metaphor, get it?), I, for one, love shameless corporate sponsorships and product placement (my shameless promotion of bikes (see above) probably clued you in to this long ago).  Will Smith’s sunglasses from Men in Black?  Fantastic.  James Bond reaching for a Heineken instead of a vodka martini, shaken, not stirred?  Even better.  This scene from Talledega Nights:  The Ballad of Ricky Bobby?  The pinnacle of cinematic achievement.  Well, there many things that make this scene amazing, but the shameless product placement is one of them.

And so I was interested to read this week that health insurance companies might be next up in the product placement bandwagon.     

"Their product is essentially the same," he said. "You cannot really differentiate one insurance company from another. But you can differentiate who has the wackiest mascot, or scenarios that are fun to watch." Essentially, Percelay says, we may soon see health insurance versions of the Geico gecko.

In particular, health insurers will have to craft a message to attract healthy, young customers. "There could be product placement of Oxford [Health Plans] within a Jackass movie," Percelay says. "So subliminally, when Steve-O is bungee jumping with a rubber band off the roof of a building, perhaps that rubber band has an Oxford logo on it." (Yes, we know it's whether there will be another Jackass movie. This is a hypothetical.)

Speaking of health (kind of), the human body is a beautiful thing.  The professional athlete’s human body?  An even more beautiful thing.  And that’s why The Body Issue, in which professional athletes show off their naked professional athlete bodies, is, without question, your BEST OF THE WEEK!    

Decent view...

Happy weekend, folks! 

Seeing the Sights in Angkor Wat, Cambodia

Siem reap is the touristyest of all the touristy places I've been. Just a couple kilometers from Angkor Wat, this would-be-but-for-tourists small town is beautiful but completely out of place amid Cambodia's extensive rice fields and roadside villages. 

There's a street called Pub Street  in the middle of the town, with its name announced in lit up letters across the road, packed with restaurants and street massages and fish pedicures and tuktuk drivers, all eager to help out "sir and madame" in any and all ways possible. It's like a combination of New Orleans at Marci Graz and a classier Adam's Morgan on a Saturday night.

 It was weird and surreal, but I enjoyed it for the two nights of our brief stay. After a dinner of Cambodian bar-b-que (who knew that was a thing?) we got banana pancakes and $1/15 minutes foot massages, then went "out" (so silly) at a bar called Angkor What? and a club called The Temple. Again, so surreal. We're in Cambodia!

But before the silliness we soaked in as much of the wonders of the Angkor Wat area as possible. (Angkor Wat is just one of many Buddhist and Hindu temples and ruins in the area.) 

We shunned the insistent tuktuk drivers (Oh no madam too far too far!) and rented bicycles to explore for ourselves. 

Let me tell you, there are A LOT of ruins. We agreed that one day of ruins was the perfect amount of time for us, instead of the recommended three. 

They were really cool though -- especially the Hindu ones with their Legends of the Hidden Temple carved faces, and the ones with huge trees growing amidst the ancient mossy rubble -- but by three o'clock we'd seen enough, sweated out all traces of liquid in our bodies, and we're ready to call it a day at our hotel's rooftop pool (such classy travelers are we!). 

Thai-style 4th of July, aka Fireworks in Bangkok!

Longtime readers of this blog know that I am into 4th of July. Whether in Tahoe or DC, at the beach or on the National Mall, it is a big holiday in my life. And when I'm in Thailand, twelve hours ahead of the US, that just means I get to celebrate this great holiday before everyone else!

So while you were all running your 4th of July 5Ks, or enjoying your fireman's pancake breakfasts, Andy and I were setting off fireworks in Bangkok.

It was our first full day in Bangkok, and quite the day it was. We started with a run (my second since leaving America oof!), trying to find a park but failing miserably and running around the streets of Old Bangkok for an hour. Honestly, I don't know if my exhaust-filed lungs will ever recover...

Then we started our tourism. We hopped in a tuktuk, that took us to a couple temples and sights to see. The driver tried to get us to buy things along the way (he gets commission I'm sure), but we are at least a little savvy and were having none of it. Then we ended up at the Grand Palace, which is the main sight in Bangkok and definitely worth the price of admission.

As we meander around the city, we stumbled upon a firework shop on a side street. Andy's eyes lit up, "Today is 4th of July! We should set off fireworks!" Yes!

We tried to ask the shopkeeper if/where it's ok to set them off, and she seemed to think parks were a-ok. (I say "seemed" because language barriers are like that game Telephone, in that you never know how your meaning is getting garbled along the way and vice versa.)

So a few hours later, after exploring the most epic flower market ever -- seriously, picture about five blocks plus a full warehouse completely packed with every kind of flower imaginable -- we found a park.

We snuck in, furtively looking right and left and wondering if setting off fireworks in a public park on a Thursday night in Old Bangkok constitutes a crime. The coast was clear, and there were no signs saying we couldn't set off fireworks. They sold them to us here, so they must be ok here, we reasoned.

We launched our first mortar into the city sky, and with a BOOM! it exploded pink and white above the trees. 

Woah that was loud!

Should we do another one?

Yes hurry quick before someone stops us!

I was about to light the fuse on Fireworks in Bangkok Take 2, when an agitated but smiling (they're ALWAYS smiling) Thai policeman ran up our little grassy knoll, waving his arms and yelling "No! Stop! No!"

Uhoh busted. I put on my biggest Thailand smile and played dumb of course, "Hello! Not ok here? We're so sorry! Yes yes ok we'll leave now!"

We left the park and pondered our options. Five more mortars to shoot...where to do it? I remembered a bit of open space next to the little canal near where we bought the fireworks, so let's try there?

Location number two was a success. There was a parch of grass with not too much around (well, a major road on the other side of a wall, but at least there was a wall?), and we were able to shoot off all five fireworks before someone came to stop us. And the man who did come to stop us was again smiling so big it was hard to tell if he was here to reprimand us or just to enjoy the show! Turns out it was the former...sorry Bangkok, but happy 4th of July!!!

Eating Our Way Through Bangkok

No more alone time for me! I met up with Andy in Bangkok a couple days ago to embark on the final month of my adventure. He's taking a month off work, and I am, as you know, funemployed, so here we go Southeast Asia!

One thing I have learned about myself through my travels is that I am not a city person. I like living in a city in America, but when traveling, I find them loud and polluted and hot and hurried and dirty and crowded. Turns out I am tangibly happier when in a small town or the countryside -- it's just so much nicer. 

BUT here we are in Bangkok and I'm making the best of it. We're seeing all the things, walking to all the places, and eating all of the food! And Thai food, as you probably know, is especially awesome. From the street-side restaurants, to local ice cream flavors, to fancy roof-top restaurants; we're on a mission to try as much of it as possible. 

On the streets, there many many many are food carts of street snacks. We tried these little taco-ish things that I'm guessing were made of buckwheat flour, then covered with a bit of egg, dried fruit (maybe apricots?), then sprinkled with what looks like shredded cheese but we later learned is made of egg.

There are also tons of little "restaurants," i.e. a cart and movable kitchen set-up with plastic tables and chairs on the sidewalk. Some places you order what you want, others have already-made pots of curries you can point to. I guess I should have taken more pictures...

The next step up are restaurants, many of which are open to the street, but have actual real estate and fans (woot). At such a place we got what was recommended to us as the "best pad Thai in Bangkok." I expected a bit of a tourist-trap, but this place was legit and full of Thai people. We both got their special -- shrimp pad Thai covered in egg. So good, and I think about $2 per plate.

The next day we walked to a big public park and OMG look at the giant lizards that crawled out of the pond when it started raining!!!

On the way back we stopped for lunch at a roadside soup restaurant. I asked for chicken soup, and they brought me a steaming bowl, which was full of all kinds of chicken. Literally. The look on my face was clear, priceless, and absolutely terrified. 

I tried to psych myself up to eat around the offensive parts, buuuuuttttt, adventurous eater though I am, there are feet in this soup. With little chicken toenails! Laughing at the horrified look on my face, they smilingly switched it out for a bowl of normal chicken noodle soup. Much better thanks!

Andy got the fish ball version. I don't strongly dislike fish balls, and they're not super-fishy tasting at all, but they have a strange bouncy texture that throws me a bit.

Post-lunch we got some desserts to go -- let's call them Thai empanadas, filled with coconut, sweet bean, and pineapple.

We also bought some chrysanthemum tea, which is supposed to help sore throats (damn the pollution!), and an assortment of unidentified dried fruits while walking through China Town. The sales people are all pretty happy to let you try things if you ask, which is great for confused foreigners like ourselves.

For dinner on our last night in Bangkok (and last night in Thailand -- Cambodia here we come!) we splurged for a fancy rooftop restaurant and bar. I was super-dressed up for my traveler self (i.e. skinny jeans), but awkwardly underdressed for the location of course haha. Oh well who cares! The view was awesome and the food was pretty great too!

We got pork and shrimp spring rolls, pork belly with crispy fried basil, tofu with cashews and vegetables, and asparagus with mushrooms. 

And for dessert LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT IT! We stopped at a street cart for this: a crepe-ish pancake (but butterier and crispier), filled with fresh banana and topped with sweetened condensed milk and chocolate sauce. Why don't we have these in the US???

Sweetened condensed milk is all over the place here -- on desserts and in drinks/coffee yummmmm -- and I am such a fan!

So like I said, we're off to Cambodia (Angkor Wot) to see what that country had to offer. I'll keep you posted.

Oh and a parting shot from a grocery store aisle in Thailand. Because one of these things is not like the others...