The Kids

The Kids
Southern Laos....

Tuesday 22 February 2011

The Pleasants Family discover the Laos Sex Trade

You may recall that at the start of our trip we found ourselves having dinner in a brothel in Bangkok. Well we topped that over the last few days.....
Leaving Vientiane, the road was long, straight and dusty. One stretch ran for 30km without a kink in the tarmac and the view was boring, boring, boring and it was HOT. It was not our favourite cycling day. After 60km or so, we started to look for a place for lunch. Mike pulled up at a roadside place with table cloths (he is a sucker for a nice touch) and the welcome was warm, so we settled in for lunch. The family running the place were very friendly and Sam took a particular shine to one of the girls, aged about 17 or so. She was wearing a fairly transparent top with a fancy bra poking out the top. Another girl had heavy eye make up and a relatively provocative top. We began to wonder......Any lingering doubts were swept away when an older guy rocked up and started drinking beer with one of them.....I went to the loo and noticed a couple of private bedrooms on the way. So, lunch in a brothel.

After an (admittedly very delicious) lunch, we went on our way, looking for a hotel. Eventually we saw a sign, 200m down a dirt track, and off we went. It was quite pleasant. We only began to wonder an hour or two later when a van rolled up with an older guy and a younger girl. They disappeared into a room and left an hour or two later. So, overnight in a brothel.

That evening we went out for dinner. First stop a brothel, second stop a brothel, third stop a brothel, finally found a restaurant that wasn't a brothel. After dinner I returned to the hotel with the kids and Mike went to a shop across the road from our hotel to get a beer. An hour or so later I could hear a girl screaming with laughter. He's a funny guy, but not that funny......clearly something was up. Mike came back shortly later, looking a bit alarmed. Turns out that the two girls in the shop were chatting to him (they didn't speak English, he doesn't speak Laos, but clearly they managed). The conversation took a turn for the worse when they showed him a poster of some Laos women (very innocuous picture from the national airline, but with three or four attractive women on it) and asked him which one he liked best. One of them then surreptitiously showed him a picture on her phone of two girls kissing, then showed him another picture of a naked girl and gave him the eye. He scarpered.

Mike likes to think that they may have just been 'excitable young girls' but I suspect not. So, a drink in a brothel too.

The following day we left and things returned to normal. I suspect it was just a 5km stretch of road that has somehow got renowned for prostitution and we stumbled unsuspectingly upon it.

Vientiane

Vientiane is a lovely city. Although first impressions are ominous (scruffy dusty streets), the centre is very attractive, with a wealth of quiet temples and numerous street side cafes. The French influence is clear. We spent three very enjoyable days there soaking up the sunshine, enjoying the food and the kids loved the new playground on the banks of the Mekong.

We stayed in a comparatively plush hotel which was a great bonus (there are only so many rock hard mattresses a family can take) and stuffed the children with hamburgers, ice cream and dumplings (from an exquisite Chinese restaurant - I was in heaven). All in all it was very pleasant and a good break from 'the road'.

Wednesday 16 February 2011

2000km and counting

So, two days ago, en route to Vang Vieng, we completed 2000km, about which we are all rather chuffed.

Since my last post, we have enjoyed some absolutely spectacular cycling and our thigh muscles have grown somewhat exponentially with endless ascents and descents up and down some of the steepest and longest mountains thus far encountered. Once my bike was finally fixed, we left Luang Prabang and headed south. After a couple of days cycling we dog-legged to the west, to the ‘Plain of Jars’ which is a rather sobering place famous not only for its huge ancient jars spread across the parched landscape, about which no-one knows a thing, but also for the extraordinary amount of unexploded ordnance in the area, dropped by the Americans during the Vietnam War. One village has had the bomb disposal squad out 18 times in the past couple of years but continue to find further bombs in their fields, school playgrounds and roads. Our children were kept on a short leash at all times and although we enjoyed our time there, I was constantly uneasy. I can’t imagine living there.

We then carried on south, through some extraordinary karst mountains, to Vang Vieng. I went to Vang Vieng twelve years ago, and it was a laid-back small town with one main street, a few traveller restaurants and a couple of quiet back roads that you could explore by bike. Fast forward to 2011 and it has grown into the backpacker centre of Laos, complete with LOTS of very young, very drunk backpackers who spend their time either 'tubing' down the river (floating in a truck's inner tube), stopping en route at various bars or eating 'happy pizzas' (ie those laced with dope) in restaurants playing endless re-runs of Family Guy and Friends. Funnily enough, we didn't exactly blend in. To be fair we had heard awful things about it and the reality was not as bad as the stories had led us to believe but still, it was a bit of culture shock after some of the more out of the way places we had been. Some places are probably best left to memory and not re-visited.

We are now in Vientiane, having spent today heading south in a songthaew (kind of like a jeep) as our visas run out tomorrow and we have to nip over to Thailand to renew. First impressions of Vientiane are very promising, with lots of French influenced cafes and patisseries, shaded sidewalks and quiet temples.

And some more pictures

 Sam dodging monks in Luang Prabang
 Somewhere in Northern Laos
 Somewhere else in Northern Laos......
 Mummy pushing up a mountain in Northern Laos (note the road snaking its way in the background of the picture....)
 Sam and Meg on a bus when our bikes died outside Chiang Rai in Thailand

Pictures

At last we can add some pictures.....
Temples of Luang Prabang (Northern Laos)


Stunning scenery in Nong Khiew (Northern Laos)


Sam and friend making a ball run (with ever present audience)


Arriving in a village and immediately surrounded.....


Resting in a road-side hut (of which there are fortunately many) somewhere in Northern Laos


Meggles in a temple

Somewhere en route


Dom Chai....some of our more basic accommodation. Mum and Dad, we promise you one step up from this when you visit......

Sam and Tilda (cousin) 'jungle flying'


The cousins (just outside the cave temple in which Meggles has just weeed)


The boys 


The bigger boys (Mike with his brother John)


Snorkelling near Koh Phi Phi


Grandma and the Girls

Thursday 10 February 2011

What to wear on a bike?

I promised pictures, but the computer kept crashing when I tried to upload them, so I'm afraid that was not to be. I did however manage to upload the picture you can see at the top, of Mike and Sam, which has prompted a few comments about their attire. So, to clarify.
Sam - in the picture, is wearing a rather natty pair of shorts that were made by a tailor in Myanmar, out of a left over piece of cloth that he had been making Mike some trousers from. Yes, this does therefore mean that Mike has a pair of rather extraordinary checked troosers which apparently 'will be ideal for golf'.
Mike - in the picture, is clad from head to foot in cycling gear. We started the trip in normal clothes but slowly he has made sneaky purchases from cycling shops and now wears padded cycling shorts (yes, indeedy, padded right over the crotch, need I say more?), a cycling vest and cycling gloves. Very practical or geeky depending on your take on things.
Liddy - Well, here's the thing. I was wearing normal clothes but was having what I shall delicately refer to as 'comfort issues' (M&S lingerie is perhaps not designed with the mountains of Northern Laos in mind), and have now had to ditch my usual bottom half for a pair of lemon yellow cotton pedal pushers. complete with rust marks where they have been on the hanger for the last decade. No, it's not a good look and funnily enough, you may find that pictures of me cycling will remain in short supply. But they are wonderfully comfortable.
Meggles - Generally just looks like an urchin, whatever she wears, as she has taken to playing in the dirt. Daddy's Little Princess, she is not.
So, there you have it, now you can picture us all, even if I can't post pictures.

Friday 4 February 2011

Pictures and Maps

Lots of requests for pictures...hoping to do that in the next couple of days.
Also, for those wondering where Mike's contribution to the blog is, click on the map - he is tracing our route, with comments about what has happened along the way.

Stranded in Luang Prabang

So, you may recall us riding merrily out of Chiang Rai a couple of weeks ago, me gaily describing our newly repaired bikes as wonders on two wheels. Well, it didn't last. My bike started to creak and crank about a week later, with a pedal coming loose and some gear issues that I don't really understand. Then a few days ago, the relentless onslaught that is the roads in this part of the world, took their toll and the creaking ratcheted up a notch and the pedals ceased to work. Fortunately this took place in Luang Prabang, the scenic ancient capital of Laos and as good a place as any to be stranded. Unfortunately, it took place on the first day of celebrations for Vietnamese / Chinese New Year, and the shop that stocks the spare part that we need is owned by a Vietnamese man who has shut up for the week. So, here we are. Its a beautiful, beautiful city but we are a tad bored - the scenery around is spectacular but not so easy to explore without our wheels.
My last entry was posted just before we were disappearing off for an overnight village stay / cave visit. Robin, you found the right cave and the description of the road was spot on. It was a shocker. Fortunately we were in a 4 wheel drive, but it still took nearly three hours to drive 35km, bouncing and bumping all the way. The hills were beautiful and we passed through quiet villages, the peace generally interrupted only by the squeeling of black pigs who were being strapped on the back of motorbikes to be taken to the local market.
Our arrival in the village where we were staying caused quite a stir. They get three or four groups a month, but Meg and Sam were the first foreign kids who had been out there, so everyone and their uncle, sister, fourth-cousin-twice-removed came out to see us. It is currently wedding season so there were a couple of weddings in full flow (cue LOTS of locally brewed wine and drunk people) which added to the 'atmosphere'. The caves themselves were pretty impressive - we all had to don helmets and head torches as there is minimal lighting inside the caves and what little light there is stops after 500m. Huge caverns, mighty stalactites and stalactites and lots of rather butchered explanations to Sam of how these are formed......I regretted giving up geography so early in life!
We were accompanied on our trip by the Vice President of the provincial tourist board. He was a rather dour man and we never quite worked out why we were thus honoured;  something to do with having the kids and him wanting to make sure it was all okay, we figured.
In the morning we ambled around the village; Mike finds this excrutiatingly embarrassing as he can't help but imagine his own reaction if a load of tourists were wandering around Wickham Market and stopped to peer in our back gate and take pictures of our kids. You can imagine his face when we were pulled towards one of the weddings and asked to strut our stuff on the dance floor; fortunately the roof was about 5 ft 6 so he was able to refuse, protesting height issues.
From the cave we travelled by bus / bike to a small village called Nong Khiaw which is in a stunning location on the edge of the Nam Ou River (a smaller tributary of the Mekong). We pottered there, playing on the edge of the river for a day or two, before continuing downstream by boat to Luang Prabang. This was beautiful - really gorgeous karst scenery with not another boat to be seen and just the occasional 'rapid'.
Luang Prabang, as mentioned, is just lovely with lots of old colonial French buildings sporting picturesque shutters, peaceful alleyways with laid back cafes, endless views of the Mekong, and more temples than you can shake a stick at. There are also hordes of tourists, some with little blond kids, so we are not quite so conspicuous.
We will be here another couple of days, then, fingers crossed, my bike will be feeling better and we will be back on the road, heading south.