Rolo on Tour

(40) Heat

4 09 2011

It is a Saturday night at Bangkok airport, for my inner time clock it is something like 2am after a long flight. It comes to a showdown between me and a policeman at the passport control point. The reason: On the immigration card I had to write the adress of the hotel I was supposed to stay. But I just wrote „Bangkok“. The conversation went like this:

Policeman: You have to write down where you are going to stay.
Me: But I don’t know that yet. I never make a reservation.
P: Ok, so think about where you want to stay and write that down.
M: I can’t, I don’t know any name of a hotel in Bangkok.
P: So in which area of Bangkok do you want to stay?
M: I don’t know anything about the neighborhoods of Bangkok.
P: How do you want to get to the city from here?
M: I don’t know. I will ask at a tourist information about that.
P: How many days will you be in Bangkok?
M: I don’t know.
P: How much time will you be in Thailand?
M: I don’t know.
P: Where will you go next?
M: I don’t know. Maybe Laos.
P: So you come here and you don’t know anything about Bangkok???
M: Exactly. But I will find out later.

He checks my passport. Oh, this guys has passed a lot of border controls. Maybe he is not crazy.
He lets me through, I walk to a tourist information, ask about a good area with cheap places to stay, they tell me how I get there. I walk around a bit and find a place where I can get my well-deserved sleep. It is so easy.

Of course I could have invented a hostel or faked that I knew exactly what I was going to do. But if I have learned one thing from hollywood movies, than it is that small lies turn into big lies and then you lose the woman of your dreams just to win her back in the last 2 minutes of the movie. That sounds like a lot of trouble so I’ll just stay honest.

I can tell you that I have not always arrived to a new place clueless like I did here. Let’s think back 10 months:
I was on my plane to Mexico. I had searched the Internet for hostels in Cancun and compared them all on Hostelworld. I found „the best one“ and made a reservation there for 2 nights. I paid and printed out a receipt which confirmed that. I printed out directions about how to get to the hostel from the airport. I had a guidebook with me in which I had a map and many information about the area I was flying into.

But with the time it has become very clear to me that I’m better off with the „no plans“-strategy. Plans are changing and the most important thing is to keep your flexibility. Also researching costs a lot of time and effort and you can do all this also when it is actually time to make those decisions.
I found that some things are just not that important, as for example all the hostels and guesthouses will be more or less the same, so why put so much energy in finding „the best one“?

Ok, after this little detour let’s get back to my travels:
Seeing this part of the world for the first time 2 things I noted very quickly. First the people here are so skinny it is really very hard to find a local who has a gram of fat on his/her body.
Second the heat is just killing. It is supposed to be rainy season which means that it should also rain a lot but at the beginning there just was no rain. The average number of showers per day was increasing drastically 😉

As mentioned above I first set foot on Asia in Bangkok. About my time there I can only tell you that what happens in Bangkok, stays in…..

Just kidding. But as I will return to Bangkok later on and don’t want to split the Bangkok time in 2 separate post, I’ll move on to my next stop right now, which was the ancient capital of Thailand named Ayuthaya. Much of it was burned down (as a consequence today the capital is Bangkok), but there are still lots of ruins and temples to see, which are scattered around the city.
So now we can play a little game, which is „Find the Buddha(s)!“

You found them all?

In the north lies the – with travellers quite popular city – Chiang Mai. Their police likes to present themselves in a quite amusing way:

If only that would resemble reality…

After a long time of not doing anything fancy it was time again to raise the adrenaline level. I found out that I could get a really good deal to go bungee jumping (the high price was the reason I did not do that in New Zealand), so I gave it a go.
It does not look too bad when you are watching from below, but when you are up there of course you doubt that it is a good idea to leap forward. The „No refund for non jumpers“-policy though helps to do the decisive step 🙂

Jumping time

Most importantly as a consequence you will smile for the rest of the day :-)!

From there I decided to let my prediction to the policeman come true – and went to Laos. Here the first place I have been to was the quite quiet capital Vientiane. There they built a park with lots of religious statues:

The Buddhapark near Vientiane

To have this point of view you have to crawl into the following thing:

Bigmouth strikes again

After only one night I went to one of the weirdest places I know on this planet: Vang Vieng.
Why? Well, it attracts party people from all over the world to do something called Tubing. The basic idea is a tuk-tuk drives you up the river, you rent a tube and drift all the way back to the village. But in reality for most people it is kind of an excuse to get drunk in the middle of the day. To accomplish that several bars have been built along the river to serve that wish.
I said no thank you to the bars and was just relaxing in the tube, waiting for the current to bring me back. Quite boring, so I wonder how good is this activity if it is only fun being drunk?
One more comment: I hear people say that Tubing is dangerous. Well, that is not true at all. If you are with the tube there is no way you can come anywhere near drowning.
The dangerous thing is that people get totally pissed in the sun and then think they can cross the river swimming to the other side to catch the next bar. Well, some of them just overestimate themselves.

Once the sun is setting people get back to the village and can watch Friends or Family Guy in every restaurant. Apparently someone has decided that these are the best TV shows to watch drunk.

So I went a bit disappointed further to the north to the city of Luang Prabang. Consuming lots of fruitshakes, eating lots of Lao-style sandwiches and grilled fish on the night market I was mainly waiting for my visa to Vietnam. Killing the waiting time I could do some elephant riding – not very comfortable once you remove the saddle. But quite interesting to see how these giants can still maneuver in very hilly and/or muddy areas. And also how much they eat, they hardly take a break of doing that!