To say that China is making its influence known around the world is an understatement. It is made abundantly clear in Laos. They have built a high-speed train from China to Vientiane, the capital of Laos. We opted for the train vs. the bus, 50 minutes vs. 6 hours. Over the course of the the […]
Never have we wanted peace on earth more than this year! For those of you waiting for more posts, we’ve been a bit busy lately. Tomorrow is Christmas, and besides our proper English Christmas dinner, we should have time to do some catching up. One of the more curious things we’ve observed in Buddhist countries, […]
It doesn’t take long to see why Luang Prabang is both a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the most visited tourist spot in Laos. It is one of the mellowest, slow-moving, unrushed places we’ve been. Even the motor scooters take it easy. We landed from our slow cruise down the Mekong and was taken to […]
We had such good luck with Noy on our waterfall quest, that we decided to use him again for a tour of the sights of Luang Prabang. Noy grew up in the country on a farm. His mother passed when he was quite young. His dad moved to Vientianne. When he passed, Noy was on […]
We met Noy when we downloaded “Loca” the Laotian ridesharing app. No “Grab” here. It’s a bit buggy, but it’s very affordable, and has worked well for us. As the salesperson many Lao are, he suggested we hire him to take us to a few of the Luang Prabang sights. At $50, this was cheaper […]
Sunrise To an inveterate sunset junkie, it is forgivable to have forgotten that there are also things we call sunrises. When one’s hotel room looks out across the Mekong River to Laos, facing East, one is quickly reminded of sunrises. We got up early for breakfast so that we could make it to the immigration […]
The Golden Triangle is only an hour and a half away from Chang Rai. We took off in search of coffee for the way out. Stopped at an Amazon. No relationship to the Amazon we know so well, but very common in Thailand. We were told that the Golden Triangle is more or less a […]
All good things must come to an end, and it had become our last day in Chang Rai. Pete invited me to his weekly coffee with a few of his friends. The coffee was grown in the mountains by one of the hill tribes. It was delicious. The conversation was all over the place, as […]
As those of you who followed this blog years ago in Ecuador know, we met Pete in Ecuador in 2015. An amazing thing about “travel buddies,” is that you don’t need to see them all of the time in order to retain a travel friendship. So it is with Pete. In the intervening years, our […]
Colloquially known as the Black Temple, today we headed out to the Baan Dam (translates to “Dark House”) museum. This is another “temple” from the imagination of a Chang Rai artist, in this case, a private art museum comprising a mixture of traditional northern Thai buildings with unconventional and contemporary architecture, designed by Thawan Duchanee. […]
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