Simon & Rosie's Travel Journal: Back to Thailand

Chugging across the narrow expanse of river separating Laos from Thailand, we were both very much looking forward to getting back to some of our home comforts. Three weeks in Laos had left us "riced out" and in such a poor country, finding decent food was a chore. Chicken, rice, noodles, chicken, vegetables and rice: the most common options when dining out. It wasn't all bad, and we did have a delicious wood oven pizza in Luang Prabang with lightly smoked pepperoni and a doughy yet crisp base - it even came with a free beer.

But again, for a country where many people still live in single room wooden huts and a deep vein of communism still runs through their lives, food is little more than a means to survive. When speaking to a volunteer at a social mobility charity in Huay Xai, he told me that the Lao people simply do not understand many western concepts. Enjoying an evening out to a restaurant, for example, or that of competition in business - even in some cases, the meaning of profit. For them, owning a business was merely 'something to do to survive', rather than a way of making money (or at least, making more money than your neighbour's restaurant, bar, cafe or shop). And indeed, without the amount of choice consumers in developed countries are used to, what would they spend 'more' money on anyway? There are no Ikeas, there is no Amazon.Laos, they don't have giant retail parks to while away a Sunday afternoon in. Some may argue that this is a good thing, but given the levels of deprivation we witnessed, the romantic portrait of communism starts to crack, particularly when you learn that the government (at local and national levels) make life for foreign charities trying to help, very hard indeed.

So when food poisoning struck yet again, being in a town with a pharmacy that opened as and when the owner felt like working, and a convenience store that only had about ten products on its shelves, it all got a little frustrating. We needed little more than a pack of diarrhoea tablets and a few cold bottles of Gatorade to re-hydrate our systems, neither of which we could buy. It got even more disheartening when, upon recovering, one finds the ubiquitous rice and chicken combinations the menus of every restaurant in town when seeking a homely meal to comfort a battered digestive system.

You must forgive us then for not indulging in local Thai cuisine at the first opportunity (as worldly travellers no doubt should) as, upon arriving in Chiang Mai (northern Thailand), we spotted an American bar/grill near our hotel and walked straight in to feast on giant bowls of chili cheese fries and ice cold glass bottles of Coca-Cola - it was bliss. We are now very much looking forward to a month in Thailand, where the exotic sits side by side with the familiar. We can sit on plastic seats and eat Thai street food one night and have a mountainous burger the next. Beer and massages are still cheap and in many places, a Thai curry will set you back less than pound. 7 Elevens provide cheap snacks and drinks on every corner and Boots, Tesco and Starbucks are never far away. It does feel a little bit like cheating, but having been away from home for so long, a familiar sight, smell or sound can be an extremely welcome addition to a day of exploring - many Thais even dig Jesus so we've even seen a few christmas trees, which Rosie is very happy about. While we flick through photos of friends and family playing in the snow at home, we're slapping on the sunscreen and downing iced smoothies in curb-side cafes. The temperature is thirty-something degrees and we're about to head even further south. It's going to be a Christmas to remember

Country Synopsis: Laos

Likes - The scenery. Laos is a beautiful country. The bus journey from Vientiane to Luang Prabang was particularly memorable. At one point, while snaking our way through a high altitude pass, the view from the window was like something out of Lord of the Rings. Enormous jagged lumps of rock formed a mountain range like nothing I'd ever seen before. Near vertical cliffs of splintered grey stone stretched thousands of feet up into the sky, puncturing the rolling green hills of the valleys and grasslands far below, before tearing through the clouds and falling straight back down to earth again. Each peak grew higher than the last, forming a steadily climbing horizon growing the north and the south, culminating in one single behemoth of a mountain may as well have had giant winged dragons circling around it's cloud capped summit.

Dislikes - Food poisoning. I won't go into details, but when toilets in bars and restaurants often don't even have a sink (and the few that do don't have soap), it was pretty inevitable that we'd spend a large proportion of our three weeks in Laos fighting off increasingly resilient bacteria. This isn't to say that Laos is particularly "dirtier" than Vietnam, Cambodia or China, it's just that during our time there, something got in us....something evil.

Favourite Beer - Like the good wholesome communist country that it is, there is really only one on offer. The imaginatively named, available everywhere at just a few pence, Beer Lao. Some places also stock a stronger and darker version called (naturally) Beer Lao Dark which I didn't get round to trying but heard good things.

Favourite Meal - The aforementioned pizza in Luang Prabang's Hive Bar. Sat in a tropical garden, under the stars and with a scattering of candles illuminating the overhanging palm trees, it was a perfect setting for a near perfect pizza (it just could have been bigger!). Oh, and then there was a fashion show and hip-hop dance performance on the makeshift stage beside us - only in Asia!

Favourite Day - The Gibbon Experience day one. An exhilarating off-road ride into the middle of nowhere sat in the back of a Toyota Hilux, an incredibly demanding hike through thick jungle followed by a couple of hours soaring over the treetops on zip-lines before spending a night in a three storey tree-house (and then doing it all again the next day!).