Nicole schreibt...

My trip to Vietnam and Cambodia had felt oddly incomplete two years ago, mostly because I really regretted not seeing the old Lao capital Luang Prabang. So I soon got the travel itch again and since Laos alone isn't really worth the long journey, I decided to finally plug the last gap of knowledge in South East Asia and travel around Thailand as well. For some reason, touristy Thailand has never appealed to me, but it also felt odd to leave that one country out, so here I was on my way to old Siam at last.
After a non-too exciting flight, I got to Bangkok by 2pm and took the shiny new Airport Express into town. Someone had said that the old express buses serving Khao San Road had been axed and I could get a bus at the terminal of the Airport Express at Makkasan. Well, they failed to say that the bus is a regular public bus who zig-zags around quite a bit, gets stuck in Bangkok's infernal traffic and finally dumped me on a major road with no clue where to go next (and if the nice lady sitting next to me hadn't told me my stop was coming up, God knows where I had ended up). Had I known, I had rather spent a bigger amount on a taxi or tuk-tuk.

Anyway, I finally made it to my hotel, the Khao San Palace. Having a swimming pool and a rather upmarket appearance I had not really expected to find the same chavvy backpackers that hang around the entire area there, but there they were in their full tatooed, drunk, smoking glory at the poolside. Yech. I'm in two minds really about fabled Khao San Road, where I had booked the hotel half for financial reasons (much cheaper than other areas of Bangkok) and half out of curiosity. The upside is that it's lovely to stroll around in the evening, lots of street stalls, cheap clothes, very cheap food (a full plate of Pad Thai with all trimmings setting you back around 1 Euro), health spas, travel agencies and lots more (and yet none of the sleaze so associated with other areas of Bangkok) and great to enjoy a good meal in an outdoor restaurant while watching people drift by. The downside is really just the kind of scummy chavs (most of them British) that descend on the area and that make you wonder how they can even afford to go to Thailand and why they bother if it's so much cheaper to get drunk and stoned in Spanish resorts. Ah well. I didn't do much for the rest of the first day, just hopped into the pool for a bit, then took a walk around the area and went to bed early.

Since I had been to Bangkok before, there was no need for the grand sightseeing tour, so next morning I decided to walk to Hua Lamphong Station to get my train ticket to Phitsanulok, thinking that even if it was quite some way to walk, I'd just enjoy the walk through crazy Asian streets. But the long thoroughfare through Bangkok's Chinatown was rather crummy and smelly and more than once I wished I had taken a tuk-tuk instead.
At least once there (and having got the ticket I wanted), I could take the metro onwards, change to the Skytrain to get to the river, then the river express boat upriver and finally a cross-river ferry to Wat Arun, the "Temple of Dawn" which I hadn't seen the first time round (except from afar). It looks rather shoddy from far, but once you're up close you can see the elaborate porcelain trimmings that cover the major temple pillar, not to mention that from up there, you have a fabulous view over most of Bangkok and the Grand Palace across the river. And once back on that side of the Chao Praya, it wasn't all that far to walk back to Khao San Road, where I spent a few hours chilling by the pool before an evening walk and dinner.

I ended up doing not much on the last day of 2011 either, just walked around Bangkok's modern commercial heart Siam Square and had a nice quiet dinner on Khao San Road, which was filling up quickly with all the chavvy backpacker scum intent to turn new year's eve into a drunk drugged-up chaos akin to the Love Parade, so I rather fled to my hotel room and get some sleep, since I had to get up early anyway to catch my train.

I had read on the internet that Thai trains are rarely on time, but what boggled me was that the express to Chiang Mai departed on time and contrived to keep racking up delays just by going slowly. While it crawled through the countryside I couldn't help dreaming of yellow-nosed Eurostars and the bright red Thalys hurtling their way through Flanders fields. On the upside, free breakfast and lunch were being served on the train (of questionable quality) and they had no music or videos blaring as the Vietnamese train had. By the time I tumbled out of the train at Phitsanulok it had clocked up an impressive 90 minute delay.
My luck was in at last, as I met a nice French guy who wanted to share a tuk-tuk to the bus station and we found the bus to Sukhothai together. Once there, I could call my hotel and they came to pick me up, which was even better. I hopped into the pool once, but the direct sunlight was gone from the area already and I was also really hungry, so I didn't stay long and instead went for a walk into "town" but as it was New Year and Sunday most shops were closed and what little was open was rather crummy, so I returned to the hotel to simply have dinner in their nice little restaurant before chilling in my room.

Next morning it was on to the Historical Park in Old Sukhothai - the nice kid at the hotel reception gave me a lift to the bus stop even, then it was 30 Baht for a Songtaew ride. Considering all the hassle to get to the actual historical site - train, bus, songtaew - it was not all that impressive, but maybe Angkor Wat had just spoilt me too much. Sukhothai is roughly the same period (in fact it was for some time ruled by the Khmer who also built Angkor) but not much has been left and certainly nothing half as grand.

Yet, it was nice to bike around on a rented bike and enjoy rural Thailand outside the fenced-in central area of Sukhothai. Before I headed back to my hotel in New Sukhothai I even met my Frenchman again who said that Sukhothai and Ayutthaya were pretty much the same, so that made me feel less guilty about skipping that place because I felt too lazy in Bangkok to venture out for a full day virtually immediately after my arrival.

Then it was time to leave Thailand behind (for now) and head to what had been the ultimate goal of this tour: Laos' royal town of Luang Prabang, which I just hadn't been able to include on my tour of Vietnam and Cambodia two years ago, something I've really regretted since. Arriving at Chiang Mai Airport the next morning, I was genuinely happy at the very sight of a plane, knowing that it would take about one hour to fly to Luang Prabang and 12-13 hours to take buses. So even though the Lao Airways plane was a tiny old turboprop (and the flight attendant one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen in my life, certainly pretty enough to turn me into a lesbian there and then), I was glad to take to the skies and cross into the neighbouring country. The airport pick up hadn't materialized, so I had to take a taxi to the "Paradise Resort" and by the time I got there at 5pm, it was too late to hop into the swimming pool, but even so I enjoyed the peace and quiet of the serene gardens just before sunset and then a cold Beerlao on the verandah of my own bungalow.

Luang Prabang was the seat of the Lao monarchy for many years and French colonialists fell over themselves to get a transfer out of hellishly hot and noisy Saigon into this tranquil little town in the mountains where the Nam Khan river meets the Mekong and where nothing much ever happened.

When I got into town next morning, it wasn't hard to see why the French loved the town so, because Luang Prabang oozed serenity, peace and quiet from every pore - especially after the crowded, noisy hassle of Thai towns I noticed immediately how much cleaner and quieter it was here with abundant greenery everywhere. I did the climb up Phousy Hill first thing before it would get hot to enjoy the view, then strolled around the peninsula that makes up the "inner city" and visited the most popular temples and the former royal palace, now the National Museum, that looked surprisingly sober compared to the dazzling splendor of Bangkok's Grand Palace or even the old Burmese royal palace in Mandalay.

Thanks to the French teaching the locals something about baking crispy bread, Luang Prabang was also a good place to get some decent baguette, which I enjoyed for lunch, before returning to the hotel for a few quiet hours by the pool. Alas I didn't dare to try and find the rickety bamboo bridge that connected the hotel area to the peninsula, so instead of returning into town for dinner, I stuck with the hotel restaurant.

To explain the next step of my adventure would be rather convoluted, so I'll just say: I wanted to somehow squish the Laotian capital Vientiane into my itinerary and I wanted to save money. I flew from Luang Prabang to Vientiane, where I had intended to hire a taxi for a few hours to take me around the main sights before dropping me off at the Lao-Thai Friendship Bridge across the Mekong.
Sadly, the venture crashed and died as so many do on the language barrier as the driver didn't understand what I wanted beyond going to the Friendship Bridge, so he took me straight there and all I saw of Vientiane was the Mekong shore and some pretty temples, but not the main sights. Oh well, we did incidentally pass the Mahosot Hospital, where so much of Colin Cotterill's wonderful series of crime stories featuring ornery old Dr Siri takes place (and which was one of the main reasons I wanted to see Vientiane for myself), so that pretty much made up for missing the big sights.
I left Laos on the Lao side of the bridge, then took a minibus across the bridge to the Thai entry point, where I had to fill in another arrival card and get stamped back into Thailand - this fuss made me appreciate our Schengen protocol and open borders in Europe for the first time. From the Thai borderpost it was another tuk-tuk ride (shared with another Frenchman, they do keep cropping up) to the train station, where I had booked a berth on the night train from Nong Khai to Bangkok. The second class berth was converted into a nice bed with a mattress, pillow, blanket and curtains for privacy and was actually surprisingly comfortable and I slept well, while the train trundled through nightly Thailand.

To my surprise, it even reached Bangkok with only 75mins delay, so I could take the metro and airport express to Suvarnabhumi, where the Thai Gods of Travelling smiled further upon me, as the Bangkok Airways lady at the Check-in said, I could get a seat on the 9.30am plane to Ko Samui instead of waiting for the plane I had been booked on (at 11.40am). There went my hope for a nice breakfast, but hey, it gave me two more hours of paradise time, so why would I say no? Even better, unlike European airlines, Bangkok Airways served a lovely proper breakfast with muffin and croissant on the one-hour flight that was as welcome as anything to me. I could also check into my chosen hotel on Chaweng Beach already, then after finding a yummy baguette for lunch, I crashed out on the beach by 1pm.
Yes, it had all been much easier to just take a flight from Luang Prabang to Bangkok and on to Samui, but then I had missed Vientiane completely and I did want to see the Friendship Bridge and experience the night train, too. Plus, I saved about 200 Euro this way, so I could shop for more souvenirs in Samui!

I had initially planned to do a bike tour to Big Buddha beach, but considering the muggy weather, the fact that shops only seemed to rent motorbikes and that I tend to misjudge distances, I was glad when I came across the offer for a half-day tour around the island by minibus, so I could see even more of Samui and without exhausting myself. So here it is:

As so often, I spent the last day of my trip doing nothing on the beach during the day and in the evening did one last shopping tour along Chaweng Beach Road, which reminded me more of Mallorca's infamous Ballermann-area than of a tropical paradise, but just like Khao San Road, it was nicer in the end to have such a street to walk along, browse shops, have another cheap Thai Massage and a big range of restaurants to choose from, than to be isolated in some pretty resort with no where to go in the evening.

In the end, my gut feelings had turned out to be right: While I loved every minute in romantic out-of-this-world Luang Prabang in Laos, Thailand just doesn't do much for me. It feels overly touristy in a cheap way, catering mostly to all the backpacker scum of the world. Mind you, it's not the backpackers as such I mind (heck, I travel with a backpack too), but this particular breed of chavvy scum that doesn't care for the country or its culture, but simply goes because Thailand is the place to be for cheap booze, drugs and partying and who do hardly ever make it out of that one country to see the great cultural riches of South East Asia for themselves. And personally I feel that I've seen all I've wanted to see in that region now, so I will have to find other areas to explore now...