Northern Thailand and Laos

My flight from Bangkok to Chiang Mai landed pretty late, so I took a taxi to my hostel and immediately went to sleep. In the morning, I had an early tour booked (of course).

Northern Thailand is probably best known for temples and elephant sanctuaries. My sister and I had visited an elephant sanctuary a couple months earlier, so I decided to focus on the former. Part of the reason that I wanted to go to Northern Thailand was to see the White Temple in Chiang Rai, which is three hours north of Chiang Mai. I had a tour booked to the White Temple, the Blue Temple, and the Golden Triangle (which is the area where the borders of Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar meet), but it got canceled because it didn't have enough participants. I ended up on a tour to the White and Blue Temples, as well as the Black House. The gimmick of the Black House is just that it's full of stuff that's supposed to be creepy, like taxidermized animals and bones and such, which personally held no interest for me. But if I wanted to see the White Temple then I had to go for it, so I did.

On the way to the White Temple, we stopped at Mae Kachan hot spring for breakfast. They put an egg in the basket at the end of one of these sticks and submerge it in the hot spring. After a few minutes, you have a hard boiled egg!

The White Temple's official name is Wat Rong Khun. According to Wikipedia, "Wat Rong Khun, better known as the White Temple, is a privately owned art exhibit in the style of a Buddhist temple in Chiang Rai, Thailand. It is owned by Chalermchai Kositpipat, who designed, constructed, and opened it to visitors in 1997." Using his own money, Kositpipat replaced the original temple that was on the site, which had fallen into disrepair, and spent millions making it into an offering for Buddha.

The honest truth is that the only reason I went to Chiang Rai at all was to see this temple, and it was absolutely worth every minute in the car. It's even more breathtaking in person.

The bridge into the temple

In the interior of the temple grounds

More photos so you can see the detail

The photos really don't even do it justice.

Kositpipat is still working on his offering for Buddha, which also includes this Golden Temple that's on the grounds behind the White Temple. Talk about dedication!

We had lunch nearby and then we went to explore our other two destinations of the day: the Blue Temple and the Black House.

The Blue Temple, whose real name is Wat Rong Suea Ten. This, too, replaces an ancient crumbling temple, and was completed in 2016.

Inside the Blue Temple

As I said earlier, I wasn't excited about the Black House and then I was underwhelmed when we got there. The Black House's real name is Baandam Museum, and it's full of creepy things like animal horns and taxidermized animals and a chair with the devil's face carved all over it. I liked this little side building though.

Overall, it was totally worth it for me to see the White Temple, and I'm so glad I went. I had Italian food for dinner and went to bed early, for a change, because I had yet another sunrise tour booked for the next day.

My sunrise tour was at Doi Suthep, a mountaintop temple famous for its breathtaking views of Chiang Mai below. Unfortunately, it was a foggy, humid day when I went, so I didn't get the full effect of the view over the city. I did, however, get to watch the procession of monks collecting alms, so that made my trip there worth it.

Sunrise at Doi Suthep. You should be able to see Chiang Mai behind/below me, if it wasn't blanketed in fog.

Interior of Doi Suthep

Monks collecting alms

Naturally, the sunrise tour included two other temples. Wat Pha Lat, which was described as a "hidden jungle temple" but I was still blown away by how beautiful it was.

Buddhist stupa inside Wat Pha Lat

Wat Umong, aka the Tunnel Temple, was the other temple included on the tour.

Closer up of the inside of the temple

That was the end of the tour but since it was a sunrise tour, it was still comparatively pretty early in the day. I went back to my hostel for a power nap and then went out to properly explore the city of Chiang Mai, finally. So naturally that included hitting up three more temples! (Yes, I visited nine temples in two days.)

The stupa at Wat Chedi Luang

Wat Phan Tao, which is all made of teak!

Wat Phra Singh

Three Kings Monument, a sculpture of Kings Mengrai, Ramkamhaeng and Ngam Muang, purported founding fathers of Chiang Mai.

The moat surrounding the old city in Chiang Mai

After I explored the city, I signed up for a cooking class. This was their kitchen garden.

Ready to learn how to cook Thai food!

Our teacher took us shopping at the market before we started cooking

So many fresh veggies!

Showing us how to make pad Thai

I already knew I loved pad Thai so I chose to make pad see ew instead, because I'd never had it. Turns out I loved it!

Excitedly making tom kha soup (and burned myself on the glass bottle about 2 minutes after this was taken).

Making green curry paste

The final product! Green curry chicken, tom kha soup, and a veggie spring roll

That was my last night in Chiang Mai, and in the morning I headed to the airport. I flew from Chiang Mai to Bangkok to make my connection to Luang Prabang, Laos. Thankfully, it worked out that my friends from Korea and I were on the same flight. They came from Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon and we met in the Bangkok airport to make our connection. It had been less than a month since we'd seen each other but it was so, so nice to see some friendly faces.

When we landed in Luang Prabang, we couldn't get over how small the airport was. I actually think that the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport in Avoca is bigger than the one in Luang Prabang. But we landed and grabbed our bags and took a van to our hostel.

Our hostel was on the riverfront and it was tucked away down some alleys, away from the main road, so our driver dropped us off on the main road and gave us directions to find it and drove away. The directions, of course, ended up being wrong, so we walked around for 15 minutes looking for our hostel before we finally found it. Then when we went to check in, another issue arose: I had made us a reservation for 6 beds in a 6-person room even though there were only 5 of us. It ended up being about $5 more per person and everyone agreed that it would be worth a little extra to have our own room. Well, naturally, when we checked in, that wasn't the case. There was a person in the sixth bed in our room, and when I approached the owner to complain or at least ask for a refund, she ended up yelling at me that I "clearly don't understand how hostels work" and refused to rectify the situation. Her argument was that, if we'd had a sixth person with us, they would've just been in a different room by themselves so she didn't owe us anything. I tried to explain that is not how the reservation is listed on Hostelworld, but she wouldn't budge. I never expect a hostel to be 5-star accommodation but between that and the fact that the hostel wasn't super clean and our room was full of mosquitos, it ended up being sort of a bummer.

Not to be deterred, we set out to explore Luang Prabang, which is a very pretty small city that has a lot of French-influenced architecture, and it's right on the Mekong river. The other minor bummer about Laos is that our travels there happened to be during burning season, when the farmers burn old crops and till the soil with the ash, used as a fertilizer. So if you notice the photos all look hazy, it's because the air was full of smoke.

The Mekong River in Luang Prabang

This restaurant was recommended to me by a friend who'd been in Luang Prabang, and this photo on the menu is what it should look like.

This was our view instead, thanks to burning season. Oh well!

While we were out, we made reservations with a tour agency for the following day for a full-day tour that included a visit to a Hmong village, Kuang Si Falls, lunch at an elephant camp, a visit to Pak Ou Caves, and a sunset boat ride back to Luang Prabang. It was a great action-packed day.

Our first stop was at the Hmong village. The Hmong people are an indigenous group native to East and Southeast Asia. Full disclosure, it makes me uncomfortable when the local people are trotted out to give a presentation to tourists, because it feels inauthentic and even almost rude. However, they showed us a lot of interesting things, including tools they developed to farm and live in such a remote location.

On the road again!

Our Hmong host showing us how he plays the qeej, aka a mouth organ

We left the Hmong village and headed for our next stop (and the one we were most excited for): Kuang Si Falls.

There's a moon bear sanctuary on the path leading up to the waterfall. We got to see these guys playing with a tire swing.

Kuang Si Falls

Peter, me, Chloë, Josh, and Ailbhe. We went swimming after we explored the different levels of the waterfall, and the water was so cold!

Josh took this photo of me and he really knocked it out of the park

There are levels to the waterfall so it just keeps going

This is finally the top. The photos don't do this justice for how stunning it really is.

Our next stop was the elephant camp for lunch. Group photo with the elephants!

If it was ethical to have an elephant as a pet I would seriously consider it; I love them that much.

The elephant camp was upriver from Luang Prabang so we took a boat down the Mekong to get back to the city.

Boats parked at Pak Ou Caves

Pak Ou Caves are famous for being full of hundreds of buddha statues, ranging in size from tiny to gigantic.

Our boat dropped us off right near the restaurant where we had dinner the night before, and we walked back to our hostel and had dinner at a restaurant next door. We had planned to take the brand new bullet train from Luang Prabang to our next location, Vang Vieng, the following day, but that ended up being a little more difficult to book than we expected.

Our (shady) hostel sold train tickets but they were nearly double the prices that we saw online, and they also only had them for a train at 6pm, even though the train schedule online said there were several before that. I attempted to buy tickets through the bullet train's app, but I wasn't able to because I didn't have a Laotian phone number. Josh and I decided to take matters into our own hands and took a tuk tuk ride to the train station first thing in the morning. The train station was annoyingly far out of town and our driver took turns on what felt like two wheels sometimes, but we made it! Then when we got there, we were unclear about the process of buying tickets but we joined the line and we ended up waiting for close to an hour. Eventually, we snagged 5 first-class tickets, which still only cost about $20 each. We made all this effort to get train tickets because the bullet train would take us from Luang Prabang to Vang Vieng in about 50 minutes, as opposed to a bus, which would take 6 hours. Tickets secured, we hopped back in our tuk tuk, as the driver had very kindly waited for us, and headed back to our hostel to wake up our friends. Josh and I grabbed a coffee while we waited for them to get ready, and then we went to a lovely smoothie bowl place Josh found for breakfast before we headed back to the train station.

The train to Vang Vieng was blissfully uneventful and we arrived less than an hour later. I'm so glad, still, that we made the effort to get train tickets so that we didn't have to deal with the 6-hour bus ride. We dropped our stuff at our hostel (which was actually a private room for the 5 of us, thank God) and headed to a café to get a snack to tide us over until dinner. Chloë and Ailbhe headed back to the hostel to take a nap while Josh, Peter and I decided to take a stroll through the rice fields. After walking around for about 20 minutes looking for a bridge to cross the Nam Song river, to get to the rice fields on the other side, Josh and Peter jumped ship and headed back to the hostel. I, however, was a woman on a mission so naturally I continued all the way down to the bridge and around to get photos of the rice fields. The most picturesque photos were from inside a resort, and they charged me an entry fee of $12 to get in. I stayed for about 10 minutes so I basically paid $12 to take this photo.

My $12 photo of the rice fields in Vang Vieng. At least it came out pretty nice!

I walked back to the hostel and had a little rest before we went out for dinner. We called it another early night because three of us were getting up early in the morning; Josh and Ailbhe were going in a hot air balloon, and I was going paramotoring.

Paramotoring is like being strapped to an engine with a parachute above you, so that it's basically like open-air flying. I was in a little seat next to a pilot, so I was not flying it myself, just to be clear. The takeoff was a little daunting but it was seriously the coolest thing once we were up in the air.

This is not me; it's a photo stolen from the internet to give you an idea of what paramotoring looks like.

Selfie in the air! You can't see the pilot because he's behind me but I promise I am not flying this solo (lol).

View from above Vang Vieng

Paramotoring over the karst limestone mountains

Truly it was the coolest thing. I'm not afraid of heights, but I am afraid of falling, so this wasn't scary for me because I was strapped into a seat with a parachute attached and a pilot behind me; even if the engine failed, we would've floated down.

I did an early-morning paramotoring experience so I went back to the hostel and slept for a few more hours. Later in the morning, Chloë, Peter and I headed out to one of the many blue lagoons for which Vang Vieng is famous. We went for a dip in Blue Lagoon #4 and very much enjoyed ourselves.

Blue Lagoon #4

Peter and I swimming in the lagoon

We had an afternoon of tubing booked on the Nam Song river. Ailbhe was (rightly, as it turns out) concerned that it would be too long, because they advertised that it ran from about 1pm to 6pm, and she thought 5 hours of tubing would be a lot. I agreed with her so I asked about it at the front desk of our hostel, and the receptionist told me that we could do it faster if we wanted. Part of the gimmick of the tubing is that there are bars along the river where you can stop for a drink, so the receptionist told me that if we didn't stop as much, we could surely finish much quicker. We were sold on that so we decided to go for it.

Our hostel was running a bus to the river, and getting to the river was disorganized and late but we made it eventually. We hopped in our tubes and started floating downriver, at a glacial pace. But in the beginning it was really quite fun.

Tubing on the Nam Song river

We were trying to get a better group picture with the mountains

This was more like it! Too bad we couldn't get all of us with this backdrop.

We only stopped at one bar for a drink and a snack before we got back in the river to continue on. We wanted to be ahead of the large group of half-drunk people from our hostel who were also tubing down the river. Parts of the river were so shallow that we had to get out of our tubes and get back in further down, and Ailbhe lost her sunglasses at one point but fished them back out! It was a hoot for awhile. But the river just kept going and going and we still weren't back to town. Eventually, it was literally dark and we still weren't back yet, and ended up wading out through disgusting muck and walked a half mile back to the hostel in bare feet (because the hostel told us not to wear shoes, since they were driving us and didn't want us to lose our shoes). Lots of it I still remember fondly but in hindsight, I think Ailbhe was right and we shouldn't have gone. The worst part was that we found out later that a group of people from our hostel got out of the river at an earlier (unmarked) point because someone was waiting for them to ask if they wanted to get out early. So if we had stayed with the group, we wouldn't gotten out significantly earlier and wouldn't have had to walk through town barefoot. Oh well. Hindsight is 20/20, as they say.

We had delicious Thai food for a late dinner (since we were in the river for so long!!) and then went to bed. In the morning, Josh had booked us a private van to the airport in Vientiane, because the four of them were flying to Thailand that day. We said our goodbyes at the airport and I was very proud of us that no one cried. I took a taxi to my hostel in Vientiane, dropped my stuff, and set out to sightsee.

I hired a tuk tuk driver to show me the sights of Vientiane, so our first stop was the Buddha Park.

The Buddha Park has more than 200 Hindu and Buddhist sculptures.

There were flowers everywhere and it was a great place to wander around.

There were Hindu sculptures in addition to Buddhas

Pha That Luang, a gold-covered Buddhist stupa. Wikipedia says it's "generally regarded as the most important national monument in Laos and a national symbol."

Patuxay Arch (aka the Arc de Triomphe of Vientiane), built between 1957 and 1968. The Patuxay was dedicated to those who fought in the struggle for independence from France in 1949.

I spent the rest of the afternoon at the American embassy in Vientiane, because, very embarrassingly, I ran out of blank pages in my passport. It took a long time because they were having issues with their printer, but after a few hours, I exited the American embassy with a shiny new emergency passport. The American embassy is far on the outskirts of town and I couldn't find a taxi, so I ended up walking more than mile back in the direction of town before I finally found a hotel. I apologized that I wasn't a guest but asked if they could possibly call me a taxi, and it was double the cost of the tuk tuk that I took to the embassy but beggars can't be choosers!

I had Italian food for dinner that night down the street from my hostel and went to bed early, as always! I headed to the airport with plenty of time until my flight to Singapore, and only as I was in line did I realize that, thanks to my new emergency passport, the passport number on my ticket would incorrect. When I got to the check-in desk, I explained my situation and the customer service rep passed me off to his manager, understandably. She was on the phone for a couple of minutes and then she looked at me and said, "I'm sorry, but Singapore won't accept an emergency passport so we can't let you board the plane."

My heart nearly stopped and then it started racing. I double-checked with her that there was nothing I could do and then I wandered over to a bench to figure out my next move. The next flight to Singapore was literally two days away, and I just desperately needed to make this flight to keep to my schedule, so I started calling everyone I could think of. I needed someone to call the emergency line of the American embassy in Singapore to confirm what the woman from the airline said, because I mean no offense when I say this, but she doesn't even work in immigration; she's an employee of Scoot Airlines. But unfortunately I couldn't do it myself because I was using a temporary SIM card from Laos, and it was the middle of the night at home, so everyone I attempted to call was asleep. After 40 minutes of pure panic, I went back over to the desk and asked the manager again, very politely, if she could possibly re-confirm that Singapore wouldn't accept my emergency passport. I explained that I was at the American embassy the day before and they didn't mention Singapore; in fact, they specifically checked to see if I was going to Indonesia because they don't accept emergency passports. Thank God, the airline manager double checked with someone else and, lo and behold, it turns out Singapore does accept emergency passports, and I was allowed to board the plane. They made this decision literally about 2 minutes before baggage claim closed so it truly felt like a miracle.

Writing this out now, I want to be clear that I'm really glad I went to Laos, and it was a lot of fun. Being there during burning season was definitely a little bit of a bummer but you can see from the photos how beautiful it is even through the haze. I would say, however, that traveling in Laos is not for the faint of heart!