Laos
It's been a month since I've been on the road and I just discovered this text at the introduction of my Lonely Planet travel guide that I wanted to share with you.
Life on the road
Welcome to your new life. The birds are singing, the sun is getting stronger, you climb out from under your mosquito net and head down to the shared toilet at the end of the hall. The mirror is to short, the sink is too low and the whole room needs to be sprayed down with bleach. But this is your second week on the road and you've stopped noticing grout.
The toilet is a squat and you precariously balance over the target area. As usual you forgot your toilet paper, so you scoop some water with a shallow bowl from the nearby basin to 'wipe'. Then you take several more bowls of water to 'flush' the toilet and rinse the 'seat'. Now it is time for a shower (cold water for this penny-pincher) and a desperate search for clean clothes.
Today is the day you pack up and move to a new town. Arriving at the bus station, the bus is flanked by touts and drivers all thirsty for your business. First you haggle the price to the guest house. The driver's price is always inflated with the ' I'm new in town tax '.
The guest house has a shady courtyard with chicken scratching around and half dressed babies playing in the dirt. The room is dank and noisy, so you thank the testy clerk and set off down the road. You use your budget senses to sniff out the best score in town and in a few hours you're camped in the shade with a steamy bowl of noodles and a sweaty bottle of beer.
This text is a spot-on summary of what life is like in Laos. This communist country is beset by economic hardship and instability. No smog laden metropolis, no aggressive entrepreneurialism, it's Southeast Asia's slowest and gentlest country, where life never moves out of first gear.
You feel a strong French influence as soon as you cross the border, particularly in the architectural choices and the culinary taste. Breakfast here consist of delicious baguette assorted with croissants, boiled eggs and fresh coffee. You can wash your dinner down with delightful bottles of Bordeaux or Bourgogne.
The most astonishing about Laos is the untamed nature. 85% of the population still relies on agriculture as a primary mean of survival and therefore the natural wonders of mother nature are left to their initial beauty. This country is like a gorgeous woman that needs no makeup.
I left Pai the morning after my previous post. I spent the evening with some interesting and entertaining travel mates from Germany and Canada. Late in the evening, after a full day on the bus, we arrived in Chiang Khong, of which I can only say it's some shit hole town next to the border you want to leave as you get to. You're only stranded there because the border twenty meters across the Mekong is closed. We tried hard to make the best out of our time there until the guest house owner decided to pull out his guitar, ruining both Simon & Garfunkel songs and our dinner.
After crossing the border next morning, we were left with two options to reach the Unesco stamped city of Luang Prabang: slow boat or speed boat. The former takes two days, the latter six hours. A no-brainer. But the flip side to that coin is that speed boats capsize every odd week. The full gear required to get on board includes a pair of earplug, a helmet, life-jacket and bare feet. Your valuables should be wrapped in waterproof bags in case the skipper should accidentally lose this high-powered tail boat and crash into a pig crossing the river or bump into a logs floating on the Mekong. It's not uncommon for these rafts to simply break for no reason and simply sink. Awesome !
speedboat
The first five minutes you wonder what caused you to brain-fade and accept this trip from hell, but soon you relax and just enjoy the isolation and let your mind drift around the wonderful scenery. Credit where it is due, the skipper was displaying the extent of his talent when gliding at 70 km/h through some tricky s-curves. Truly amazing.
Luang Prabang is an enchanting town with a unique atmosphere and an incredible Buddhist and French colonial architecture clustered together on a small peninsula surrounded by mountains.No wonder people feel at home in this town and sometimes stay a week more then planned.
Another interesting thing in Laos is the currency. Whilst two other currencies are unofficially in circulation (the US Dollar and the Thai Bath), the Lao Kip remains the de facto mode of payment for daily needs, unless you feel the urge of being constantly screwed over with an ever fluctuating exchange rate. One hundred US Dollars will roughly buy you one million Kip. The highest denomination is the 20.000 Kip note, which is rarely available and therefore after spending a few minutes counting over, you exit the bank with a brick thick stack of 5.000 bills that makes you feel like a walking ATM.
Vang Vieng is a little town on the way to Vientane. It has a main strip stuffed with bars featuring the usual loud music and sweating Farang getting wasted. If it's recommended by Lonely Planet, that's what you can expect. I wonder if the choice of brand name of that guide was meant to be purely ironic, but the more you follow their recommendations, the less "lonely" the planet becomes. It always amazes me why people would travel several thousands of kilometers, end up sleeping in bamboo shacks flanked along dirt roads in mosquito infested towns only to be glued to television sets watching 5 consecutive episodes of "Friends". It beats me. It leaves you wondering if tourism isn't simply a more modern form of colonialism.
After a few days chilling out there, we packed and left to Vientiane, where in all fairness, there's not much more to do then swinging back some cold Beerlao gazing across the Mekong. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
I will drink one to your health, and wish you all the best.
Cheers!
Rem
Life on the road
Welcome to your new life. The birds are singing, the sun is getting stronger, you climb out from under your mosquito net and head down to the shared toilet at the end of the hall. The mirror is to short, the sink is too low and the whole room needs to be sprayed down with bleach. But this is your second week on the road and you've stopped noticing grout.
The toilet is a squat and you precariously balance over the target area. As usual you forgot your toilet paper, so you scoop some water with a shallow bowl from the nearby basin to 'wipe'. Then you take several more bowls of water to 'flush' the toilet and rinse the 'seat'. Now it is time for a shower (cold water for this penny-pincher) and a desperate search for clean clothes.
Today is the day you pack up and move to a new town. Arriving at the bus station, the bus is flanked by touts and drivers all thirsty for your business. First you haggle the price to the guest house. The driver's price is always inflated with the ' I'm new in town tax '.
The guest house has a shady courtyard with chicken scratching around and half dressed babies playing in the dirt. The room is dank and noisy, so you thank the testy clerk and set off down the road. You use your budget senses to sniff out the best score in town and in a few hours you're camped in the shade with a steamy bowl of noodles and a sweaty bottle of beer.
This text is a spot-on summary of what life is like in Laos. This communist country is beset by economic hardship and instability. No smog laden metropolis, no aggressive entrepreneurialism, it's Southeast Asia's slowest and gentlest country, where life never moves out of first gear.
You feel a strong French influence as soon as you cross the border, particularly in the architectural choices and the culinary taste. Breakfast here consist of delicious baguette assorted with croissants, boiled eggs and fresh coffee. You can wash your dinner down with delightful bottles of Bordeaux or Bourgogne.
The most astonishing about Laos is the untamed nature. 85% of the population still relies on agriculture as a primary mean of survival and therefore the natural wonders of mother nature are left to their initial beauty. This country is like a gorgeous woman that needs no makeup.
I left Pai the morning after my previous post. I spent the evening with some interesting and entertaining travel mates from Germany and Canada. Late in the evening, after a full day on the bus, we arrived in Chiang Khong, of which I can only say it's some shit hole town next to the border you want to leave as you get to. You're only stranded there because the border twenty meters across the Mekong is closed. We tried hard to make the best out of our time there until the guest house owner decided to pull out his guitar, ruining both Simon & Garfunkel songs and our dinner.
After crossing the border next morning, we were left with two options to reach the Unesco stamped city of Luang Prabang: slow boat or speed boat. The former takes two days, the latter six hours. A no-brainer. But the flip side to that coin is that speed boats capsize every odd week. The full gear required to get on board includes a pair of earplug, a helmet, life-jacket and bare feet. Your valuables should be wrapped in waterproof bags in case the skipper should accidentally lose this high-powered tail boat and crash into a pig crossing the river or bump into a logs floating on the Mekong. It's not uncommon for these rafts to simply break for no reason and simply sink. Awesome !
speedboat
The first five minutes you wonder what caused you to brain-fade and accept this trip from hell, but soon you relax and just enjoy the isolation and let your mind drift around the wonderful scenery. Credit where it is due, the skipper was displaying the extent of his talent when gliding at 70 km/h through some tricky s-curves. Truly amazing.
Luang Prabang is an enchanting town with a unique atmosphere and an incredible Buddhist and French colonial architecture clustered together on a small peninsula surrounded by mountains.No wonder people feel at home in this town and sometimes stay a week more then planned.
Another interesting thing in Laos is the currency. Whilst two other currencies are unofficially in circulation (the US Dollar and the Thai Bath), the Lao Kip remains the de facto mode of payment for daily needs, unless you feel the urge of being constantly screwed over with an ever fluctuating exchange rate. One hundred US Dollars will roughly buy you one million Kip. The highest denomination is the 20.000 Kip note, which is rarely available and therefore after spending a few minutes counting over, you exit the bank with a brick thick stack of 5.000 bills that makes you feel like a walking ATM.
Vang Vieng is a little town on the way to Vientane. It has a main strip stuffed with bars featuring the usual loud music and sweating Farang getting wasted. If it's recommended by Lonely Planet, that's what you can expect. I wonder if the choice of brand name of that guide was meant to be purely ironic, but the more you follow their recommendations, the less "lonely" the planet becomes. It always amazes me why people would travel several thousands of kilometers, end up sleeping in bamboo shacks flanked along dirt roads in mosquito infested towns only to be glued to television sets watching 5 consecutive episodes of "Friends". It beats me. It leaves you wondering if tourism isn't simply a more modern form of colonialism.
After a few days chilling out there, we packed and left to Vientiane, where in all fairness, there's not much more to do then swinging back some cold Beerlao gazing across the Mekong. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
I will drink one to your health, and wish you all the best.
Cheers!
Rem
 |
posted by Remco @ 10:58 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Your provider may also offer Medical practice management (MPM) and Electronic medical records (EMR) software. These are significant buying decision gynecology medical billing services and you may want to consider them separately from your decision to hire a billing service provider.
Post a Comment
<< Home