Great days, different ways.

Heh. I'm clever.

Bad news: my camera doesn't even work to download pictures from. Soooo this is gonna get a bit text-heavy.

A few days ago, I spent the day touring around an area called the Bolaven Plateau in southern Laos. For the sake of not hearing about how I "don't learn", let's pretend that my form of transit was a donkey.
Aaaaanyway, so I was cruising around on my donkey and had a really great day. The day started - after a night spent at a little mountain-lodge-feeling kinda place (with the constant hiss of the rushing waterfall nextdoor) for ~$2.25 - with a post-run morning shower in Tad Lo waterfall.

The Bolaven Plateau is a fairly high-altitude region that over the past 20-30 years has become dominated by coffee production. As I drove (I mean, rode) along, I saw that most houses had big tarps out front with massive amounts of some sort of berry drying on them. I figured they probably were coffee beans, but decided to stop and find out for sure. I pulled over and turned off the donkey (and took off my donkey-riding helmet) to investigate. I wound up meeting a really pleasant gentleman who spoke remarkable English (considering this really is out in the middle of nowhere) at a tiny little market on the side of the road. He'd studied agriculture in university in Vientiane and then returned to the area to buy a coffee plantation. He told me all about growing and harvesting coffee, as well as his passion for cock fights (can't say I share his passion, but it was funny to hear that his wife accuses him of loving his fighting cock more than his daughter). To my surprise - against the trend that I assumed was universal of big companies coming in and stealing locals' livelihood - apparently all the coffee is grown by Lao families, which then make good money selling it to big Vietnamese coffee companies. Fascinating!

After about an hour of chatting, I kick-started my donkey and continued on toward the town of Paksong. Just as I was thinking that I really would like to find somewhere to sample the locale's crop, I saw a sign outside of a house saying "Fresh Coffee Roasted Daily". So I downshifted the donkey and pulled right over. Turned out this was the house of a Dutch man who'd about a year ago fallen in love and married a Lao (actually, a "Bolaven") woman. He lives there and helps with her family's plantation, but spends most of his time pursuing his hobby of coffee-roasting. I went in planning on having a cup of coffee and continuing on, but again wound up sitting and talking for about an hour and a half. As I walked up he was just finishing a round of roasting, so he threw the beans right in the grinder and poured himself and me a cup of coffee. It was phenomenal - I've never had coffee that tasted so... fresh!
He also reiterated what the Lao man earlier had said: that the coffee plantations really are all locally-owned, and are a great source of income. Regarding the former, he told me an anecdote about the biggest Vietnamese coffee company (Dao something) wanting to buy land but not being allowed, so they instead gave a bunch of coffee plants to a Bolaven village and contracted them to do the growing and sell to the company. Pretty awesome! Regarding income: apparently a coffee picker (not even plantation-owner) makes 6 times the wage of the average waitress, 4 times that of a police officer (officially, at least) and 3 times a teacher with a university degree. Yeesh. Us coffee drinkers of the world say "you're welcome"...?

Just those two conversations, as well as the beauty of the scenery I donkeyed by (and a bizarrely delicious scent of buttered toast that I kept smelling on the road), made for an awesome day.


After a (not-so-awesome) overnight bus trip that night, I arrived for a day in Vientiane, the capital of Laos. Finding myself groggy and disoriented in a bus terminal at 6:00am in an unfamiliar city, being hassled by tuk-tuk drivers, I felt my composure quickly slipping. Then, suddenly, Kathrin materialized in front of me and said exactly what I was trying to figure out: "Where do we go??" in exactly the tone I was asking it of myself. It's amazing how just being in a shared situation of total disorientation can create instant superbestfriendships. She was also just in Vientiane for the day, in the midst of a 10-day saga of replacing a lost passport (yeesh). So we became instant Vientiane touring-buddies. There's not a whole lot to do in Vientiane (a day was really enough), but it was a lot of fun just bumming around town on a bicycle with some random witty Italian buddy. It turns out she and a friend are planning on coming to San Francisco in March, too! I got all excited thinking about where I would take someone on a tour of the Bay Area: at least one day would have to involve a burrito from Chunky's, a trip across town on the trolley (yeah, yeah) to Ghiradelli for a sundae, and a prompt food-coma in Ghiradelli Square.

Anyway, it was just a fun day. After Kathrin left in the evening (to the Italian embassy in Bangkok after having successfully gotten her emergency visa for Thailand), I decided it was high time I had another massage (my first since leaving Thailand). I found the local massage school at a temple and definitely had the best hour-long massage of my trip so far.... for about US$5. Awwwwesooooome.

Thinking this was probably going to wind up being just a great day through and through, I dropped off the bicycle and headed off to my hostel to shower before dinner. At which point I realized I had NO idea where my hostel was. I had dropped my backpack off there about 12 hours earlier and apparently not done quite such a bang-up job of noting where it was located. For the first half hour of walking in circles, I mostly just laughed to myself. For the second half hour I started getting a bit annoyed. When I finally found it after about an hour and a quarter and realized I had pretty much walked right by it about a dozen times, most of my warm-fuzzy feeling from the day had worn off. To top it off, the front desk guy was passed out on the couch in the lobby area, and when I was finally able to rouse him to get my key, he didn't do to good a job of hiding the fact that he was three sheets to the wind. Greeeeeat.
Regardless, still a fun day.

I'm now in Vangvien, north of Ventiane. I'll be here, enjoying tubing down a river walled by massive limestone ciffs probably until tomorrow, when I head to Luang Prabang. And then to Vietnam for a whirlwind North to South tour.

Ta ta for now!