Good evening Singapore and welcome to episode number 23 of Sleepless in Singapore. Today is Sunday the 23rd of June 2024 and this episode will be about the continuation of my trip through Southeast Asia, my first trip. So we'll make it from Cambodia to Laos and then from Laos to Thailand again to Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai and then probably into Myanmar. So please make yourselves comfortable, sit down, lie down, relax and let my voice be your guide to a restful night.

The flight to Laos was already quite interesting because it was this tiny prop plane, maybe 20, 30, 40, I don't know, people in there. And what I do remember from back then is that my boarding pass was this like laminated, reusable piece of paper where they just added the seat number with a like removable marker. And I used that to board and then they walked through the plane and collected it again. Which is interesting but I guess it's good. It's very environmentally friendly and very practical, don't need printers, don't need special paper and all that. And still it is better than the handwritten throwaway boarding passes we had on our Bhutan trip in episode 16 or 17. I'm not sure why I remember this specifically.

I also remember that the flight was very interesting. It was a little bit bumpy, it was a very small plane like I said. But it wasn't only bumpy, it was also relatively low, like it was flying relatively low compared to the big ones. And that meant that I could see everything. And that is quite interesting. Like from Cambodia to Laos, I was flying into Luang Prabang, there are quite some smaller mountains, it's very green, you can see the Mekong River from the top which is very brown. Or at least during that time of the year, it was in August 2017, at least that time of the year I guess it's brown. But all in all it was really impressive, it was really beautiful, there was not a lot of civilization or anything going on.

In Laos the only two cities I know are Luang Prabang and Vientiane, the capital city, which I think back then I didn't visit, I only went to Luang Prabang. And so it's not very populated, it's not a very wealthy country, there's a lot of nature and it's very basic in a positive sense. So I landed in Luang Prabang and I made my way from this nice little airport to my hostel, forgot the name, simple place, nothing special, not bad at all, but definitely nothing special. And I showered and I rested and I went out and first thing I did, I went to this market that I can say until today or at least until last year is still the same than many years back. You get tons of street food and while in general Laos or Laotian cuisine is not my favorite, on that market the street food you can get is quite alright. They have tons of different kinds of spring rolls, fried or not fried, they have a bit of meat but not that much and not that high quality, and they have all the kinds of different snacks and it's all quite alright.

I don't know how some countries like Thailand for example or Vietnam as well have developed in such a food heaven and also very internationally renowned, right? You can find Vietnamese places all over Europe, all over the United States and Canada, you can find Thai restaurants basically in every city in the world. And for some reason I have never seen a Laotian restaurant anywhere except for Laos and I have never seen a Cambodian restaurant anywhere except for in Cambodia. And I think I also have never seen a Burmese restaurant except for in Myanmar. And honestly after visiting all these countries, and again all these countries are great, the people are great and I'm sure there is nice food, but I still think it is fair to say that there is a lot of amazing Thai food, there is a lot of amazing Vietnamese food, but there is not that much Burmese, Cambodian, Laotian food that I would bring my friends to enjoy.

Anyway, that market I went to that night had halfway decent street food and even a year ago when I went back and pretty much did the same things as I did back then in 2017 it still had halfway decent food. Actually looking at these pictures here it even looks quite nice. They have these, what is that, octopus and some kind of meat and they put it between two wooden sticks to barbeque it. And then there is another picture I'm looking at with pots of different kind of rice and noodles. So yeah, actually it doesn't look too bad. And I do remember I went to Cafe Thuy, cooking from the heart, and it was very nice service, the people were very nice and the food I had was also quite alright. Again I had some spring rolls and I had some curry and for dessert I had mango sticky rice and everything was quite good.

What I sometimes don't like in general in the Asian cuisine is that sometimes the meat and especially the chicken gets chopped up and thrown into the food including the bones and you eat it and you have to spit the bones. I don't like that. And looking at the curry I had there it looks like there is like bony chicken in there. During the next day I was doing some sightseeing and I met some people I believe from the hostel at the communal area. Some of them asked me to join the very famous Luang Prabang waterfalls and back then they were really beautiful. I remember we went there, we took some kind of bus, they have these mini vans, public bus mini vans to transport people. We took one of those and we went to the Luang Prabang waterfalls. And already down there I took like hundreds of pictures back then with my travel camera with my Fuji X-T3 and I tried to do some long time exposure which means you open the shutter for long enough so that the water will be, the fast running water of the waterfalls will be all soft and nice and white. And obviously back then as a backpacker not having any tripods or any halfway decent or professional equipment it didn't turn out great. Especially what didn't turn out great is I think I had some drops of water or something on the lens because they're all a bit foggy these long exposure pictures. But it doesn't matter I still have it in my memories and I do have some phone pictures that underline that.

It was absolutely beautiful. I enjoyed being there, I enjoyed just sitting there and looking at the waterfalls and walking around and there's a little bridge over the water along the waterfalls so you get a beautiful view. It's completely in the jungle so everything is green and in between you have these giant waterfalls that pour over the rocks from different levels to lower levels. It was great. And I hiked up there, it's a very short hike like 10-20 minutes I don't know, to the top of the waterfalls and then on top of the waterfalls it was also amazing because all these little pools were filled with water and people were jumping in and swimming and there was a kiosk or some person selling beers or drinks. And yeah that was super cool and I'm emphasizing that so much because if you remember in one of the very first episodes of this podcast I went on a trip with my buddy Hatim and we also ended up in Luang Prabang and I was so excited to show him the beauty of these waterfalls.

And not only were the bottom waterfalls still nice but not as impressive as I thought they would be but the top waterfalls and these little pools I dragged Hatim up and he was almost dying because I don't know why but it almost killed him to go up there. He actually said he needed an oxygen tent after he arrived. All these efforts he made to see these beautiful ponds and pools and waterfalls up there, they were all for nothing because it was all gone and even again today I wonder why that was. Maybe we just came at the wrong time, the wrong time of the year or they were like rebuilding something, I don't know. But when we went last year, Hatim and I, in May instead of August, first time I went in August, Hatim and I went back again in May and that time in May all these pools were like half dried out, they were full of mosquitoes, there were tons of like old trees falling in there and there basically wasn't another person out there except for us. And I was really sad to see that changed so much over the course of only 7 years, 6 years.

Anyway if I ever go back to Laos I will check again and I'm crossing my fingers that it will be nice again as the first time. Also interesting in Laos or Luang Prabang you can hike up that other hill and you get like a lot of these Buddha statues, like golden Buddha statues just hidden in the park or at that hill and you get quite a nice view over Luang Prabang. And from the top of my head I don't know how big Luang Prabang is but I assume it's not that big. Oh well, it says Luang Prabang has 50,000, 55,000 even population so it's bigger than I thought it would be because from the top of that hill where I'm standing in these pictures and where I'm overlooking Luang Prabang it really looks like a village more or less. It really looks like, I mean obviously in the jungle so very different but from the houses and the way they are distributed and how tall they are etc. it kind of looks like an image just like the little village I grew up in Germany. But I guess it's a little bit bigger after all.

In the evening of that day for the, maybe not for the first time but it was one of the very few times where I met the what I call professional backpackers at the hostel I was staying in that communal area. And you know there are these people who like, I wouldn't even say half-ass backpacking. I think Philip and I did proper backpacking in our way but there are always some of the people you meet when you travel, at least when you travel like that, who make backpacking like a sport or a competition. They always have to emphasize that they are the better backpackers because they, I don't know, brought less stuff or bigger backpacks or they sleep in cheaper hostels, they spend less on public transport, they found more cockroaches in their hostels. You know, like, silly stuff but it seems for some people it's important to be as basic as you can even though that is not comfortable at all and somehow then they have to brag about that. Or to have seen more countries in a shorter time. Or then also the opposite of course, to tell everyone that you don't do proper backpacking if you don't stay at least for half a year in a country because otherwise you won't get to know the local culture. And funnily enough that's the same people that tell you these stories and then they don't do anything in that country because they don't have the money to even buy a ticket for the local museum or stuff like that. So they just hang in their hostel and drink. And that was one of these evenings where I, only for a bit, only for an hour or two, I met some of these people at that hostel sitting around there and explaining the world to me. Not sure why I remember that because I also met very nice people and I met people who I became friends with and who I saw a couple of times even afterwards. So in general, all good.

On the last day in Luang Prabang I feel like I had the worst breakfast I had in my life. But I guess that's a record too and well, it was so impressively bad that I remember it until today. I don't know the place where it was, doesn't matter. And then I left Luang Prabang again with a plane to Chiang Mai in Thailand. And Chiang Mai, I don't think I have that many things to report except for I really liked it there. It's very different from the Thailand I knew before, which was the islands and the sun and the beach and this ocean feeling. And Chiang Mai is very different, it's at least 15 degrees colder on average. It's in the middle of the jungle on a hill, in general much higher than the islands. And it's nice, it's refreshing. It's not that you need a jacket or anything, it's still, at least in August, it was still a nice climate, but you don't sweat as much as in the south of Thailand. And it has its own little charm. I stayed at a very nice hostel there, even had my private room. I cannot remember the name, but according to my phone pictures, it was in an area or district or street that was called Haya.

Later in Chiang Mai, I met Karen again, who more or less by chance was in Chiang Mai as well. I had met her before, shortly only, in Cambodia at Angkor Wat. And then we met again at the market and did some sightseeing together and we got along quite well. So we decided to do a day trip to an elephant farm together, the Rantong Elephant Safe and Rescue Center. We did some research, I remember back then, and visiting these elephant centers and especially like riding on elephants and stuff like that, apparently is very unhealthy for the elephants. I didn't know that an elephant on the back apparently is very weak, which is why the locals and also from India, I've seen that before, apparently they sit on the head of the animal if they ride an elephant. In all honesty, I do not know if that's true, but long story short, we did some research back then and we took care to go to one of the elephant sanctuaries where, at least according to the material we had, everything was very, very well organized and very positive for the animals and there was also no elephant riding at all.

There was playing with the elephants in a kind of muddy pool, you could get quite close to them. There was another elephant, like a baby elephant that put his, how do you call that long thing in front of an elephant, the nose, around my neck, which I think was the second time I really didn't like being that close to an elephant. The first time I don't really remember myself, but I do remember the pictures, I even still have the pictures my parents took when I was five years old in Taiwan and back then I was sitting on an elephant, on a quite small elephant even, and judging from my five year old face on that picture, I was not happy at all sitting on that elephant. I think I was very, very uncomfortable.

Also in Chiang Mai for the first time I made my own onsen eggs. There was a hike in a park, you could go along and they have these hot springs that have the perfect temperature for making onsen eggs and you could buy very overpriced eggs and these wooden sticks with a little basket at the end, you put your eggs in and you put a stick in the water and you wait for like 40 minutes or so and then you get your eggs out. And then also that same day we went to this old quarry where the holes in the floor, in the ground were filled with water and you could cliff jump from different heights and one was very, like the interesting one they said, it was quite high, I think it was 20 plus meters and you could jump and I didn't because I chickened out but Karen, the friend I made and I took along for that trip, she jumped and well, obviously she survived and everything was fine but it was really high and it took her really quite a while from top to bottom.

We also went to this little village where they have these long neck Karen, I don't know how to pronounce that also Karen, these local ladies that stretch their necks and they have these golden or brass rings around their neck and every time they feel halfway comfortable or probably not comfortable but every time they can they put another ring and that's how they stretch their necks and that's how they become long neck. All in all I had a very good time in Chiang Mai and we saw quite a bit of the surroundings and then we took a bus, one of these mini vans up to Chiang Mai which is even further in the north of Thailand and you should google the road from Chiang Mai to Chiang Rai, apparently has the most turns per distance in the world or in Thailand or in that region, I don't know. The fact is it has hundreds of turns and you know these mini buses, these mini vans in Southeast Asia, they don't exactly go extremely careful and extremely slow and if you have these like 629 or whatever steep corners winding up the mountain and you sit in that car going quite quickly you can imagine how I felt being a little bit difficult with cars for a while now.

Chiang Rai itself, I don't remember much. I think I'm making a mistake here. I think we went from Chiang Mai to Pai and Pai was that very curvy and steep roads and also Pai was that weird place where people go apparently to party a lot and to do drugs and I found it to be a bit of a very weird, very hippie but not in a good way hippie place that I didn't like that much. And then from there we went to Chiang Rai and then eventually back to Chiang Mai and then eventually I flew from, actually we both flew different planes but Karen was still accompanying me. We both flew to Myanmar and yes and then we did some sightseeing together again in Myanmar and that was super cool too.

Myanmar I've never been to again after that, unlike all the other countries I mentioned so far. Myanmar was even a little more different than the other Southeast Asian countries I have seen so far. There are obviously a lot of temples, a lot of religion going on there. I think we also did some proper sightseeing to see all these pagodas. We even got up very early in the mornings or stayed for sunset to take pictures of these temples. We had hired a driver who was bringing us around to different places in Myanmar.

I think we started out in Mandalay and then we made our way down south. It's nice going through the pictures, not so nice for you because you cannot see them, but very nice for me going through the pictures because I haven't looked at them in a very long time. I realize how well we did the sightseeing. We saw a lot of things and a lot of locals. We went to this monk feeding and it was actually quite beautiful. I am not a hundred percent sure if we can still go to Myanmar easily because unfortunately there are also some instabilities in the country. But seeing all this, I think I'd like to go back one day.

Oh yeah, and I remember we went to this monastery that is on top of a very, very steep hill. You have to take like a thousand stairs to get up there, but then you have a wonderful view, a 360-degree view because you can just walk around that temple. We also went to this big lake and that bridge which is one of the oldest bridges in the world. Let me quickly look that up. It's the U Bein Bridge and it's apparently believed to be the oldest and longest teak wood bridge in the world from 1850. It was interesting; it was very full when we went. A lot of people there, a lot of tourists. Looking at these photos they have on the Wikipedia page I will link to later in the podcast notes, these pictures are all pretty empty, no people there. When we were there, there were tons of people on that bridge.

After the bridge and after another long drive, we arrived in Bagan, which you probably know from pictures where they start the hot air balloons, like hundreds or even thousands of hot air balloons, and apparently where they have more than 3000 pagodas. That, I can tell you, is an extremely impressive and extremely unreal sight. I can only hope that it will last for a long time and I can only hope that I'll be able to see that again.

Also in Bagan, I think was the first and last time I tried to eat some betel nut, which is a very, very common thing to do in Myanmar. You have your betel leaf, then they put some lime, then the betel nut, and apparently some even put some shattered glass. Then you chew on it, and the shattered glass is ripping open the inside of your mouth so that the active ingredients get to your bloodstream faster. You chew on it and then you have this like red spit and it gives you terrible teeth. You see it in Myanmar, I saw that a lot. Recently in Bhutan, I also saw that a lot. I'm guessing it's pretty much all over Southeast Asia, maybe for the exception of Singapore. Yeah, but Myanmar, I saw it the most. It's terrible for your teeth; you look really terrible if you do that a while. I also had only a very short bite or chew and then immediately got rid of it again because it doesn't taste very nice. I guess it was too short or too little to feel anything. So yeah, no effect, but luckily also no problems for me.

Also in Bagan, I remember the first couple of times I tried to eat something I was pretty much disappointed about the food. I talked about that half an hour ago in the introduction. So, when in Bagan, I googled and tried to find the best place to eat. I was very happy to find, I think, an Italian chef that had an Italian restaurant there, and there was pretty decent food compared to what we had the days before. But even in general, that was very decent food. There was even an affordable bottle of very nice Valpolicella, and that was a very, very welcome surprise that they have this kind of restaurant there.

Then the last day of August was also my last day in Myanmar, and I left Myanmar from the Mandalay International Airport to my next destination, which I will tell you all about next week. For now, let me read you a short paragraph of Tom Sawyer.