Andrej and Karen Brummer

The adventures of the Brummers

Monthly Archives: November 2010

Chiang Rai (again)

It has been a good week back in Chiang Rai with Ben and Christerine at the house.  We have spent time riding on the dirt roads through the plantations around the house, visiting another waterfall, as well as using the afternoons to work on our next project together.  We went to Doi Tung gardens, the Thai King’s mother’s environmental project which was so inspiring – the area, about 2 hours north of Chiang Rai was pretty much deforested, barren land used for growing opium and not a lot else.  In less than 2 decades, the entire area has been re-forested, and the locals who used to depend on selling their opium for income have all been given opportunities to grow coffee, and also be paid for planting more trees.  All of them have been rehabilitated for opium addiction, and the entire community and landscape has been changed by this amazing woman’s initiative.  Dre has also drunk much of this coffee and appreciates the queen mothers effort ;)

Yesterday we celebrated 6 months travelling, it’s hard to believe we have now been seeing this beautiful world for 6 whole months, time flies when you’re having so much fun!  We are truly grateful for the fantastic time we have had so far, and can’t wait for many more amazing and fulfilling experiences.  This is definitely the most awesome period of our lives so far.  Bring on more travels!!!!  Our photos are here.

Final thoughts leaving Laos

The last post was written before our final night in town.  We were both so touched to receive gifts from Thong and his wife and had a long night in discussions with them.

We realised that we need to come back to this amazing town.  We are able to make such a difference here and it’s so exciting to think what is possible.  We have agreed with Thong to come back and help his business and also help him start new businesses.

Thong’s wife spent 3 days hand weaving/stitching a beautiful bag for us which is just amazing.  The Lao’s are such beautiful people and we want to experience more of this awesome country.  In particular we want to help Luang Namtha and Thong’s family.

So our plan now is to spend another few months travelling and building up some more capital so that we can go back to northern Laos and really make a difference in this place.  Watch this space.

The ‘normality’ of Northern Laos

We have had to laugh numerous times in the past couple of weeks at the things that seem so normal to us now and yet still have other tourists exclaiming about.

For example – the most common traffic obstruction on the roads is the dogs.  You have to drive around them, as usually they are taking up most of the road with 10 or so of them sitting in the middile of the road.  Even if you toot they don’t move, most don’t even lift their heads to see what is coming.  The dogs are as chilled out as the people.

- seeing the ‘headlights’ on the front of trucks is really a guy sitting on the bonnet holding a torch

- eating foods sharing the same bowls at Lao’s – there is no ‘western hygiene’ of having your own plate, you just all dig in to the main bowl and it is considered completely normal.

- cooking our lettuce in noodle soups – now seems completely normal and delicious

- spending each morning on our run and most afternoons up at the temple has become a part of our daily routine.  Most people we tell think we are crazy to go back to the same place over and over, but the profound silence and the amazing views keep beckoning us back.

- having to go into shops, choose what we want, and then yell ‘Sabaidee!!!’ many times to get anyone to come and take money off us for the goods we want.

- having to go to the local market to get the shop vendor to come back to his shop, (which is fully open with all products on display) to sell us stuff.

- communicating solely with hand gestures and actions.  We are now fully versed in having quite detailed conversations and all parties understand each other and no words (or at least no words we can understand) have been spoken.

- we have now ‘conquered’ the local Akha community and we have Akha friends who have given us honorary bracelets.  (If you have been to northern Laos you will understand about the bracelets!)  In return we have bought a few kilos of oranges and fish for their families.  So instead of them trying to sell us stuff like the other tourists, they come and hang out with us and share our dinner.  It’s quite fun.

This  morning we were excited to see not one, not two, but three trekking tours leaving Thong’s office, a couple of weeks back with his old sign he was lucky to be getting one tour a week, now today he has three in one day.  We heard his voice calling out to us from in the centre of a crowd of 20+ falangs, ‘Andrej!  Karen!  Please.  I buy you breakfast.  You help me and you bring me all of this business and I want to thank you.’   So it is really, really nice to have made a positive difference for him in this town.

All in all we love this place.  We have talked about getting a house here for a while to just live in northern Laos (we even chose the place we want the house).  For now though we are going back to Thailand to stay with Ben and Christerine for the next week and after that we aren’t sure.  We will probably finally go to Vietnam after that but for now our options are open, and there is no doubt that we will find ourselves back here at some point in the not too distant future.  It is uncanny how this place has become our little home away from home in Asia and we really do love it here.

Market Madness

After a recent skype conversation with our good friends Nick and Amber, we promised Nick we would do a blog post on the foods at the local markets.   So Nick, brace yourself, here are many, many photos of the markets.  Also let it be noted, that taking photos of the meat (or should I say chopped up animals, with legs, head etc still intact) got so gruesome that Dre had to take over the photography so that Karen wasn’t sick.  Big tubs of congealed blood, eyes looking at us and hooves with skin, hair and legs still attached got a bit much for us.  The second day we wanted to take photos of the massive water buffalo skulls even Dre couldn’t do it, because the smell was so bad… so you missed out on a few pics.  Mainly these photos are of veges though – many of them unidentified….there are heaps of photos and hopefully enough to keep you happy!

Going to the markets has been a huge part of our daily life as we usually visit the morning market and the evening market and it’s so nice to see all the local people going about their daily lives, and to get delicious meals as well.  So, Nickman, and anyone else who is interested, here are your photos.

Beautiful Muang Sing

We decided to see Muang Sing the right way this time, and hired a  motorbike for a few days for our 5th Wedding Anniversary both to ride there and also to explore the area on.  The ride there is just breathtaking, and we were able to appreciate it a lot more from the motorbike than we did from the van on the way there last time.  We made lots of stops to see the beautiful forests and when we did arrive in Muang Sing rocked up to our favourite guesthouse and settled in.

The first thing we wanted to do was ride to the Chinese border again, so we set out on the bike only to discover our first flat tyre a few minutes down the road.  We got this repaired at the nearest shop in town, and paid the princely sum of 5,000 Kip (about 55 cents) and left on our second attempt to get to the border.  7kms from town and 3kms from the border, we realised once again that our tyre was flat!  Oh dear, this meant a 7km walk back to town pushing the bike.  Not to worry, we were on the most beautiful road in Asia and the sun was setting so we were very lucky to be there.  After perhaps about 3kms, a Lao guy motioned for us to go to the next house on the left, so we did, and it turned out that guy could fix our tyre.  After meticulously repairing it very skillfully with a grinder to get rid of the previous patch, blowing on the glue to make sure it was ready and patching it up for us, he graciously said he didn’t want any money, it was his gift for us.  We gave him 20,000 (about $2.10) because we were so grateful to have met such a nice, skilled guy who fixed our bike on the side of the road and saved us walking another 4kms back in the dark to town.  Fun times!

We ate at our favourite restaurant and then the next day spent the entire day biking around the outskirts of town.  We visited a few villages and rode up the mountains for amazing views of the rice fields and villages below.  It was such a cool day and we both couldn’t stop grinning the whole day because we were just having such a good time.

After deciding to stay another night and visit the festival the next day at the advice of all the locals, we wanted to go back to the Sechzuan restaurant we ate at last time but found it totally full so settled for the night market and lamented about how the noodle soups here don’t even come close to how awesome our noodle soup lady in Luang Namtha makes them.

We loved visiting the morning market here and got to have the best freshly steamed peanuts ever – something which is quite common here is peanuts steamed still in their shells and they are to die for.

We visited the festival on our way back to Luang Namtha and it was OK – sort of just a massive morning market with heaps more people and much louder music.  It wasn’t really our thing so after the 3km walk to the top of the mountain in the mud and the full sun, we had a quick look around and decided it was more fun riding on the bike through the mountains so left to do just that.  Our photos are here.

Full Circle

When we arrived back in Luang Namtha we instantly knew that it was the right decision to be here.  We completed our ‘circle’ of Luang Namtha – Nong Kiau – Luang Prabang – Vang Vieng – Vientiane – Phitsanulok – Sukhothai – Chiang Rai – Luang Namtha and have spent the past 2 weeks being thrilled to be back.

Immediately Bun Mee excitedly told us about his new trekking business and we agreed to help him write his sign in English, and we were invited to Aleck’s house for lunch.  We spent the first afternoon (and many more) up at our beloved temple – which has pretty much become our lounge as we are up there every day and we have taken other travellers up there and they have coined it ‘our temple’ and we just sit up there and look at the view, much like we did at Manly.

Our noodle soup lady was so excited that we came back that she started giving Karen a special drink each morning made of seeds, she showed us the seeds and we have no idea what they are, but she blends them up with some water and it makes a grey-ish unappetising looking drink that tastes delicious.  So that has been a special treat each morning.

After we completed Bun Mee’s sign, and gathered quite a crowd of people from the town in the process, another guy Thong asked us if we would do his sign.  After a day or so we agreed, because he has good English so we thought we could do more good for him with a new sign.  So we set about making another sign that was different from the first one and still really awesome.  After that he was so happy that he also got us to help him with his website, plus a new website for his new herbal massage and sauna business (that has now opened yesterday), plus a sign for the massage and sauna place – we have been really busy here!

At the same time though everyone in the town is really excited that we’re here – it’s such a strange yet nice feeling to be here and not be able to walk down the street without Lao’s calling out our names and stopping to talk to us, Lao’s calling other Lao’s over to translate their conversations to us, we almost cannot buy our own meals anymore because everyday we are invited to lunch at Thong’s house, plus we have been shouted breakfast by several different people.  Very bizaare and very fun.  The sense of community here is like nothing else – everyone who walks down the street stops and has conversations with everyone else, and a few of the Lao’s even stop to talk to us now when we’re eating in restaurants or at the night market.  It has been really fun to infiltrate this little town and help them as well, it’s been so exciting for us when the tour places have falangs booking their tours now because we have helped them with their marketing and taught them what to say to the tourists to get their business.  It has been a very satisfying stop in our trip and very fulfilling for us to be back here.

We have decided not to go back to Thailand for our wedding anniversary, we like it here too much so we’re going back to our beloved Muang Sing.  Yippee!  Our photos are here.

Chiang Rai

View our location map in Chiang Rai

We arrived in Chiang Rai after a long haul – we arrived at the Sukhothai bus station at 8.30am only to be told that the 9am bus was already fully booked since the trains weren’t running.  So we managed to get on a 9.30am bus to Lampang (the only city in Thailand that still used horse-drawn carriages) and then another bus to Chiang Rai and didn’t get here until about 6pm.

Since arriving in Chiang Rai we’ve done quite a few things; visited the largest waterfall in Chiang Rai, the White Temple – the inside is the coolest we have ever seen and Dre even asked the artist if he would paint one of our houses – the painting is so intricate and fantastic.  It is a new temple that isn’t actually finished yet and so we weren’t really expecting too much, so it was nice to be blown away with it’s coolness.

Our first 2 nights we stayed in less-than-fantastic guesthouses, (a different one each night in an attempt to move to a nicer place) so we were really glad to move into the house with Ben and Christerine when they arrived here.  The house is 12 kms out of town so we have a couple of motorbikes to get around.  It is on quite a large piece of land, with it’s own pond and views of the mountains, it’s really beautiful and quiet.

We also decided to celebrate Guy Fawkes and bought heaps of fireworks and made a bonfire at the house.  It was such a fun night which ended in us all releasing a huge lantern (which is part of the festival that is currently taking place in Thailand and Laos and everyone is releasing lanterns every day at the moment).  It has taken us by surprise how freezing cold Chiang Rai is – our winter clothes have come out and the evenings are very chilly.  It is the first time we’ve had blankets on the bed, and it’s 3 blankets, not one!  It’s a welcome change from being hot all the time though and we’re quite enjoying it.

Our plans for the following couple of weeks have taken a slightly unexpected turn (again!) as we have to go to the Laos border to renew our visa’s today, and also we were going to spend the next couple of weeks staying in Chiang Rai town instead of the house because Christerine’s mum is coming to stay at the house… so this was fine and then everyone we met in Chiang Rai were on their way to Laos and we spent the week telling everyone how amazing northern Lao is… then it dawned on us – we could go back!  Why not?  We are going to be at the border anyway and all we have to do is cross the border and get the bus for 4 more hours to our beloved Luang Namtha.  Ever since we left Luang Namtha and northern Laos we have been searching for the peace and beauty that we found there, and haven’t quite found it…so Laos take #3, here we come!  Woohoo!!!  Our photos are here.

Time on the road

It took about a day to reach Chiang Rai from Sukhothai, and it made us realise we actually quite enjoy bus trips.  We think the affinity started in Canada, when we would spend days on buses and enjoyed every minute of it.  In Thailand, although we were first slightly disappointed that we would have to get the bus rather than the train (due to the flooding), we have been pleasantly surprised to find the roads are excellent and the buses are usually in pretty good condition.  The Thai’s are great travel companions, love talking to us farangs, and the scenery of rural Thailand has been beautiful.  It has also made us reflect on our buses in Laos – the Lao’s have a reputation for weak stomachs, but nothing really prepared us for entire bus loads of people vomiting the entire journey, or the poor elderly lady who we almost thought would die because she was so sick (she consoled everyone by hanging her see-through sick bag in the aisle of the bus for all to see when she wasn’t using it).  Although the roads were terrible and the buses very average, we were still surprised by how much we enjoyed ourselves on these journeys.

In recent days we have been driving around on motorbikes a lot, a freedom we both really love.  Our time on buses, tuk-tuks, scooters/motorbikes, songthaews, and boats has been a part of our trip that we weren’t really looking forward to as much as just being in places; and a part that we have both enjoyed immensely.