Vang Vieng

So Saturday morning after deciding we'd had enough of Luang Prabang Fabio and i took the 'local bus' (after an adventurous ride to the bus statoin on a motorbike with a mini cage attached which you could barely see out of, with a driver who spoke no english..) to Vang Vieng. Lucky for us this local bus had about 8 tourists and no locals on it, so we all got 2 seats to ourselves! After a very windy and nauseous few hours we arrived for a toilet stop (1.5 hours after we asked for one..) and were told that as there was too much space on the bus we were to hop onto the air conditioned VIP bus which was quite crowded! Still thats what you get i spose.

The town here Vang Vieng is quite little, population 25,000, and is so beautiful. the town is in a flat area with a river running right by it, and is surrounded by beautiful limestone cliff mountains and caves. The cafe's here all play Friends, The Simpsons and Family guy non-stop, and there are even places wher eyou can pick a DVD for them to play for you! the Laos people are nice but we found one place run bya British guy who kicked us out for not being 'paying customers' (apparently a fruit smoothie and cup of tea dont count us as being paying customers) because we said we werent yet hungry at 4.3opm!! There is so much to do in this town, there is 'tubing', where you hop into a tube and tube down the river, stopping at swings and bars along the way. of course its insanely safe to drink buckets of alcohol, have their 'happy shakes' (i'll let your imagination do the work on that) and then jump into the river and tube back.. tourists do die here but its not hard to figure out why when you see that..

There is also rock climbing (which i did 2 days of, was really tough but really good!), trekking, kayaking (i am going to kayak onto Vientienne, the capital when im finished here), and you can rent a bike and explore the caves. I did that yesterday with Avi, an american guy, and we looked at two caves, stopped for a cold drink and lunch at a cafe in the middle of nowhere, and then left 2.5 hours later when the monsoon rains subsided! Am definately going to do that agian as there are many more caves to see. It was lots of fun trekking to the two caves we did see through muddy rice fields and rivers.. our clothes were pretty well caked in mud by the time we got back to our bikes but it was lots of fun! took us about 20 mins to walk 600 m to the cave.

unfortunately i have had a sore throat for about a week now and i cant seem to kick it, and have run out of home remedies so this is now my 3rd day of hanging out watching Friends and movies and hoping to get better.. i guess at least this is the best town to be sick in as you dont have to walk far at all for internet, movies and food, and the place is teeming with tourists and people to talk to.

My friend Ollie has requested that i provide you all with a link of where i am so go to http://maps.google.co.nz/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Vang+Vieng,+Laos&sll=19.8841,102.141602&sspn=0.012268,0.022659&ie=UTF8&z=16&iwloc=A

Anyway must get going the internet here is really expensive being a tourist town. Also Fabio left the other day so my accomodation has doubled in price from NZ$1.875 to $3.75 a night. lol. (that in cludes two single beds, and my own bathroom with a fantastic hot shower..).

much love,
Ingrid

i have also uploaded some more photos onto www.bebo.com/ingridjones

slow boats and millionaires

I am officially a millionaire. Laos style. which means im quite poor but my wallet is literally bursting with money i can barely close it. I changed US$400 yesterday and in return got 3,433,000 kip. and as their biggest note is a 50,000 and they dont have coins so it makes for one very big wad of money.

I left Chaing mai early saturday morning after very minimal sleep as i was literally carried to one of the local clubs by our trusty tour guide, James Bond after a very fun night of cards and 'circle of death' for all you kiwis who know that game. was also introduced to a new rule called 'shag that sheep', am definately bringing that one back home. Got to see lots of old western men and young thai girls in the club too.. always fun..

Anyway I am currently travelling with a guy from Taiwan whose english name is Fabio. And before the rumours start he has a gf! He's quite fun and speaks pretty good english, though i am making it my mission to have him speaking like a kiwi in no time. We got to spend a lot of time talking on our 5 hour bus ride, then 3 hour bus ride, then 20 minute boat ride on saturday getting into Laos. We travelled local style which was a lot of fun, way better than this tourist air-conditioned stuff which is always turned on way too cold, seriously about 10 degrees colder than outside,sometimes more. you feel like a real dick walking out of the bus wearing a jersy in 30 degree heat! We stayed one night in Huay Xai in Laos then headed the next day to the slow boat on our trip to Luang Prabang. the boat was really small with about 100 people on board, small wooden benches with barely enough room for your legs, and one toilet.. Was definately interesting. We sat right by a canadian couple Kasia and Matt who were really cool to hang out with so we played cards and chatted, read books.. and 6 hours later arrived in Pak Beng for the night. the next day we hopped into a much smaller boat with the same amount of people and had a 7.5 hour day.. we were pretty glad to arrive in Luang Prabong! Was a fun trip but i think its enough for one life time..

In Luang Prabong the next day we all hired bikes and biked around the city, going through some of the local village which was cool to see. also biked along the Mekong River and then discovered there was a night market... It was reasonably big but after about 20 metres you realised most venders sold EXACTLY the same thing. not even similar, just the same thing... so we headed off to the food part of the market. I have become vegetarian here which is proving interesting as the Loas people LOVE their meat, you can buy whole fish on a stick, whole flattened miniature birds on a stick, chicken on a stick, pork on a stick... its actually hard to find food wihtout meat because its so common they often dont tell you it is in the food, you order 'noodles with chinese brocolli' and it comes with pork! ah well good times though. Fabio my travel buddy loves meat so he was in Fabio-heaven with his meat on a stick...

Today we left the Canadian couple and headed off on a boat back up the mekong river (this time much smaller but with much more room) to the Pak Ou caves, of course with the mandatory Loas stop at a village to try to convince you to buy more gorgeous things that you saw at the market. they have really beautiful scarves but i dont want to be carrying them round for the next few months so n oshopping for me! There were two caves pretty much filled to the brim with buddah statues.. some old, some new. was quite interesting.. there are a lot of buddah statues everywhere around here as there are temples on every second street corner!

Anyway must get going as i have been on the internet for a long time.. If you wanna check out my photos i have uploaded more to www.bebo.com/ingridjones

much love,
Ingrid

Chiang Mai

Well i have been up to a lot the past few days! I am up in Chiang Mai in the north of Thailand in the sticky hot weather. The first night i arrived the Sunday-night market was on, which is a massive market that lines a street for miles and miles. We walked for hours and saw less than half of it! I bought some fishermans shorts as it seems the two pair of shorts i bought aren't nearly enough.. and Emily and Dionne bought heaps. I had to control myself as i dont want to be carrying lots of things round and sending expensive packages back home! the streets were so busy it was like a river of people moving along, and there was something there to excite all your senses. good food, fresh juices, lots of street performers (including young children doing thai dancing), and so much to look at! And everything was really cheap, my shorts were $4 each!

On Tuesday i went off mountain biking for the day. i signed up for a beginner/interemdiate course but as nobody else was doing that one i jonied the intermediate one. WAs a bit nervous seen as how i have never done mountain biking before but it was heaps of fun! The roads were mostly like 4wd roads and i took it pretty slow at first but got the hang of it after a while, and didnt fall off once. We biked for 5 hours and our 'provided lunch' didnt get to us till we had finished at 4.30. I was pretty hungry and tired by then, especially as we biked an extra hour back to Chiang mai as the support vehicles were already being used. Was tons of fun though am definately gonna try it in NZ.

Then WEdnesday and Thursday i went on a two-day trekking and rafting trip. We did a few hours trekking the first day, stopping at a waterfall which i got to jump off (it looks much bigger in person than it does in the picture). Was a bit scary but again loads of fun. Our guide was a hoot, he was like a 5 year old kid running off into the jungle to find bugs to scare teh Irish girls, hiding behind banana tree leaves to jump out and scare people, and making us walknig sticks and darts out of bamboo sticks and cutty grass. The next day everyone in my group went off elephant trekking but i chose to stay behind as the way they treat the elephants and the way they get them to be ridable is literally torture.. Was heart-breaking to see the elephants tied up with chains and having 4 people on their backs (including one sitting on the neck) but nice to wtch them playing around while the others were off on them... After that we had a trek and white-water rafting. which was extremely tame by NZ standards. the only thing that made it less tame was that our guide knew pretty much no english except for left and light(right) and stop, and we got stuck on every second rock so that was a laugh.

Tomorrow i am off to Laos which apparently takes 3 days of bus and boat trips so that will be interesting. Must get going as my internet time is almost up

cheers,

ingrid

Almost Myanmar

I almost went to Myanmar! I think i put my toe over the border. Its hard to tell where exactly the border is, but i put my toe over something so im gonna say I put my toe in Myanmar. And i have a photo to prove it! All the volunteers took a day off and went to the Three Pagoda Pass, which was this really little village right on the Myanmar border... That pretty much tells the whole story haha. I also went to learn some meditation stuff but then we didnt have time.

Emily and I just tried to work on a proposal that some Canadian girls wrote for an HIV/AIDS project they are doing here. Except it turns out that what you learn in Canadian business school is to write jumbled large words that make no sense. We cant even rework the proposal because we dont know what it is meant to say, its that badly written. And i am not exagerrating we spent most of our time trying to decipher what each sentence meant, and half the time they just made no sense, at all, whatsoever.

so anyway thats my rant for the day. i have been getting comments about my 'long' blogs so will try to keep it shorter. Also i am trying to upload my photos to bebo so if you wanna see them go to www.bebo.com/ingridjones..

much love,
Ingrid

floating fishing villages

So the past few days a whole bunch of us from the orphanage went out to Pillokhi village on the border by Myanmar. We started friday morning with all our stuff ready to load the rafts and go. Dada (the guy who runs the orphanage) as always way underestimated how long things would take and we didnt finish the rafts till 5pm. By rafts i mean some polls tied together with string and metal ties, floated on a bunch of barrels, with our fishing nets on the top. still it took ages and considering it was about 35 degrees (or hotter) and we were outside with no shade it was hot!! I discovered the meaning of elbow grease that day (seriously you actually get grease in your elbows..). so we headed back to Baan Dada to have a half-nights sleep, and got back on the truck at 3.30am to head back to teh rafts. we actually got onto the boat and headed off at 5.30am, thought 30 minutes into the trip they informed us teh boat (which was about 11 feet long, 2 feet wide, with 11 people and all our gear in it) was too heavy, so three of the girls hopped onto the raft. i quickly realised that was a much better place to be, so 4 hours later when we stopped at an island for a toilet stop i switched boats. the raft was really good to be on. we had nets to lie on rather than just the wooden floor of the boat and it didnt vibrate constatly like the boat. It was really funny to see because there was this really little boat with a little motor dragging these two massive rafts loaded with gear and people (as the thai people were on the other raft). we literally moved about the speed of me walking. it was really hot and i was really glad i had my umbrella for shelter. we also figured out that we could lie on teh polls and put our head in the water to cool down. i eventually hopped in totally just holding onto the polls - the water was so warm it was great. of course in true thailand style the rains then came so i huddled under my umbrella (it turns out i can fit my entire b ody under my travel umrella) to keep warm as my rain jacket is useless. at 4.00 Dada came on a boat to bring us some cold lunch - our first meal of teh day, and we were very happy to eat. we then hopped onto Dadas boat and they took us to Pillokhi so the raftw ould be lighter and travel faster. Dada predicted teh trip would take 8 hours - we were on a boat for 11 hours and teh raft finally arrived after 12.5 hours. One very long day.

we then stayed at this really nice house in Pillokhi on land. For tea we had v egetarian food - and whole deep fried fish. you can imagine how impressed i was with a plate of deep fried whole fish (eyes in and everything) in front of me while eating! The next day we headed off early back to teh fishing area to sew nets. between two of us, sewing for 6 hours, we completed half a net! the boys made the poll and barrels for the nets to go over,, and we finally headed off at 5pm. fortunately the boat ride was only 1 hour this time, but we then had a 3 hour truck drive to get to Baan Dada. the truck is essentially a ute with a top onn it, we had 12 people in the back with all our gear.. was nice and cosy.. we finally arrived back at Baan Dada at 10.30pm tired and very dirty..

Anyway must really go now as there are people waiting for the computer here. will write more in a few days.

Ingrid

Baan Dada orphanage

So I have been spending the past few days here in the North-West of Thailand (right next to Burma/Myanmar) in an orphanage. The girls and I are volunteering here for the next two weeks. Its a really nice orphanage, nothing flash but it has everything the kids need - lots of food (and really good food too), some books and clothes, a place to sleep, some musical instruments (electric guitars and drums etc which have been donated) and plenty of space for the kids to run around. there are 58 kids here of all different ages. collectively we speak 6 different languages as most of the children are from Burma or tribes bordering Burma. the volunteer hut is the nicest though - they have gone all out to make the volunteers comfortable. we even get more expensive food and water to make sure its safe for us foreigners not used to thier stuff. the food is all vegan but its great. we get a cooked meal 3 times a day. there is no difference between the types of food so its like having dinner 3 times a day. its always got vegies, rice and tofu with lots of flavour. they also like to deep fry things for us, so we have had deep fried tofu, mini corn cobs, potato crisps and chunky fries - all very good. we spend a lot of time eating. im eating so much food and yet by the next meal i am starving as we are burning it all off! we have spent the past few days spending hours uponn hours cutting and measuring nets to make into fishing nets for one of thier community projects. in a few days we are going to stay in this village which is only accessiible by boat to help them make the fishing nets. They do lots here. there is a project which lends goats to families so they can have baby goats to raise for themselves, the fishing nets, a weaving facility for widows to earn money, and they are starting up a vaccination programme. all this is organised by one man who also runs the orphanage! He doesnt even have a room he just sleeps in his office. Poor man looks like he's run ragged but he still insists that he needs to make desks for the library (which currently has no books as its the girls bedroom until they have a house built) , and that we are all going to paint the girls room pink. their new house will be built after they build the new kitchen, and before they finish the second story on the eating area/boys room/office. There are a lot of things going on here!

Anyway i should really get going someone else is waiting for the computer. Will up date you in a few days,

Ingrid