Catching up AGAIN! Adventures in Laos, Like A Trip to the US Embassy!

Catching Up, Again!

I'm really not the greatest at sticking to a daily blog. If you want to know the day by day you'll have to follow @brandonfrye, hes great at it! I'm trying though, but after full days of adventuring, I honestly want to shower and go to sleep! Here is the latest, and yes it includes a trip to the US Embassy here in Laos!

Post Angkor Wat we literally slept in and didn't get started until after lunch. We had this stinking cough that just wont budge, so it was important that we take it easy. We did venture to the pool, I filmed a class for my online studio and we got ourselves together to check out the Angkor Museum. What a plethora of information! In all my time studying yoga, this is the best timeline of who was who and when things were happening. I was incredibly impressed and snuck photos of all the boards outlining the history to resource in Yoga Teacher Training. After spending a couple hours here, and when I couldn't comprehend another historical event, it was time to go!

We made our way down to the Night Market and waited for a friend of mine. It's always weird, but fun to meet up with someone you know in a foreign country. Brytta is a fellow yoga teacher who wrote a blog about my travels and adventures teaching last year. She has been teaching in Siem Reap for the last month and it was great to meet up with her. We are going to be working together to bring the idea of traveling and teaching yoga into Yoga Teacher Training next semester!

A Village on Stilts

After our rest day, we were feeling up to exploring more on the outskirts of town. I found an NGO that gives back 100% of the proceeds to a school in the village we would be visiting. Of course this was the trip for me. We were picked up in the afternoon and headed out of town. Our guide Paren, was amazing. We stopped at a roadside stand and got what I call Bamboo Rice Cakes, I think Brandon refered to them as something else, but its all the same. Sticky rice, stuffed into a piece of bamboo and cooked over a slow flame. You crack open the bamboo and can use one of the pieces as a spoon to scoop out the goodness! They add a little dash of sugar and condensed milk to the rice and the result is a really great, filling snack. Not vegan of course, but that is not the point. The point is, you are on the side of the road in the middle of Cambodia with a man who is sharing his local snacks with you, you eat it, vegan or not!

After our bamboo rice adventure we stopped for doughnuts, of all things! It was so neat to see how the locals make little snacks. I got tickeled as this one lady had on a sweatshirt that said 'hip hop anonymous' we shared a really great laugh about it!

Alright, moving forward, we made it to the floating village. The houses are all on stilts that must be 20-30' high if not more. As the rainy season really begins to pour down, the lake Sonle Tap, will fill the rivers and the water will rise to the floors of the houses making them look as though they are floating. Water is life in this village. They were all in the process of prepping their equipment for the upcoming season, fish baskets, traps and the like. It is vital they have a prosperous season to support them through the dry season. We rode on a shallow hull boat out to the lake that feeds this village. We passed a Vietnamese village along the way, plus many other creative and unique house boats and houses on stilts. Arriving to the lake, it looked more like an ocean, except muddy, really really muddy! While the sun set was not all that impressive due to all the cloud cover, the fact that I was standing on the steel roof of a shallow bottom john boat in the middle of a lake that provides life for a lot of people in Cambodia was reward enough. What a great way to end our trip to Cambodia.

Lets go to Laos!

Wait, our flight was cancelled! But theres a Starbucks! Wait our flight is still cancelled! What the heck is going on! We met with the Lao Airlines agent, who was an hour late getting to work. He was able to book us on a flight that left at 4pm (granted it was now like 3pm) we would fly to Bangkok and then go to the transfer desk and get the ticket for the next flight to Vientiane, Laos. Awesome! We scurry through security, grab a quick snack and are at our gate just in time to board. For the quick 1 hour flight they served up a meal, it always surprises me. After years of flying back and forth across the US I have never had a complimentary meal. Here you get on board for an hour and you get a box lunch!

With four hours to spare in Bangkok we decided it was smart to go ahead to the transfer counter and get our next ticket, just to make sure everything was good. Come to find out, I didn't have enough space in my passport for the Visa on Arrival that Laos administers. The gate Lao Airlines employee was so great, he went above and beyond to call immigration and see what they could do. With a letter and approval, after a number of phone calls and pictures sent via smartphone of my passport pages, we were on our way to Laos! One contingency... I had to promise to go to the US Embassy first thing the next morning and get new pages added to my passport.

Arriving in Laos, after another in flight meal for the one hour flight, we breezed through immigration. I guess they knew I was coming and knew just what to do. When we got to our hotel I immediately made an appointment at the US Embassy for 8am the next day.

The Embassy used to be in town, it has moved and is now not a convenient. We got a taxi and landed at the Embassy, only about 30 minutes later than my appointment... "lao time" as I call it. They were extremely nice and let me know that they could most likely work with me, but were curious what my additional travel plans were. I explained we were headed back to Thailand, then to Myanmar where we already had an EVisa, then back to Thailand and on to Indonesia before returning to Shanghai to get our return flight to the states. All of that sounds great except the Indonesia part.

What they were going to have to do is issue me an Emergency Passport with just 5 pages. They explained this should not be a problem in any of the places we were planning to go. In the last year he only knew of 1 instance when Myanmar did not accept an Emergency Passport but he was under the impression it would be fine. Indonesia, however, is pretty strict and will not accept this type of passport. So here is what we have to do. Upon arriving in Bangkok, go to the US Embassy there and send off for a full validity passport. It should take 10 days and then I can travel to Indonesia on that passport and veto the Emergency Passport. That seems like it would work out, we are planning to go back to Bangkok anyways, I'll fly to Myanmar on the EP and then back to Bangkok and get my full validity passport! So she punched a hole in my old passport and here I go with it in hand and my new one, plus a smile on my face for getting it sorted.

Did I mention it was pouring rain while we were trying to make our way to the Embassy! New Passport, Check!

Adventure Time

The US Embassy was quite close to a place called Buddha Park that we were wanting to check out. We took advantage of our location, hopped on the green bus on the red line number 14 and took off! Just 8,000 kip for the ride, roughly 1 USD. Buddah Park was amazing, a cluster of concrete monuments and buddhas and even a tree with representation of the 3 realms, hell, earth, heaven. Something we have seen all over the world. It always fascinates me how no matter where you are at, there is some kind of description of an underworld, this world, and an ascended world. We played around the park, listened as the school children laughed and giggled while playing a scavenger hunt. It was a really great moment. Brandon did get bit by a fire ant, in the hell realm of the tree, which was kind of ironic.
We ate coconut ice cream, with peanuts, not sure why that is the go to topping, but it was delicious and just what we needed for the afternoon. An hour or so later we hopped back on the green bus, red line #14 and headed back into town. One of the stops was at the Friendship Bridge which is what connects Laos with Thailand and you can walk or drive across the border. We met a lady from Holland and chatted with her the entire bus ride into the city. When you find an English speaker in these parts, it's an oddity, but nice to chat!

Arriving back in the city we walked through the market and stumbled upon a number of Wats and Temples on our way to the hotel. I love just exploring and seeing what you can find. Seeing other people doing the same, and offering all the respect possible to the statues, monuments and moments in these sacred places.

Back to the Passport

As we made our way back, my mind wondered back towards my passport stuff. I left the Embassy excited that it will all work out, but the more I thought about it, the more I was feeling a little crunched for time. We are scheduled to leave Laos on the 29th, but when I looked at the Embassy website in Bangkok the only appointments they had available were on the 29th at 8am and not again until July 2nd. We talked it over and decided to leave Laos a day early so I could get the appointment on the 29th. Lets say they send off for the full validity passport on the 30th with a July 4th Holiday, surely it would be back by the 10th or 11th, we fly to Bali on the 12th. But if I couldn't even get an appointment until the 2nd, there is no way that timeline would work out.

Back to Adventures

With that sorted we had one more full day of adventures. We set off the find the Arc De Triumph of Laos! Lunch first, of course, and we found PIZZA!! After days of sticky rice, pizza sounded terrific!!

Ok, Patuxai is the 'Arc de Triumph' of Laos and it is VERY much like the one in Paris. The lady from Holland told us that she heard the concrete was donated by the French and the Lao used it to build the monument, another thing I read mentioned that the concrete was gifted by the US. I'm not certain on that, maybe you know more?

Continuing on, it was hot and muggy and we took a breather at a local coffee shop. Italian Soda is such a great break on these hot and humid days!

Not much farther and we made it to Pha That Luang, a major temple site that was build in the 1500s and is said to hold the collarbone of Buddha himself. We explored around, again listening to giggling of school children and helping them with their scavenger hunt (it's a method teachers use to encourage the kids to ask questions in English and interpret answers in a really fun and interactive way) We found a huge reclining golden buddha, the best part about that scene was the monks listening to hip hop and cleaning the back side of the stupa while we are all taking pictures at this golden buddha. It made me laugh, a lot! I took a few minutes to give honour to Buddha at one of the shrines. There were two drums beating in rhythm back and forth and I felt like I was in the middle of the vibrations and in a legit moment of stillness. It was beautiful.

Found ourselves a tuk tuk and took off back to our hotel! Wearing our masks, of course, to keep the air quality as best as we could get it. This tuk tuk driver made me laugh with his surgical mask and Harley Davidson durag and camo jacket. The tuk tuk was pretty suped up too! We were happy to make it back and give ourselves a break from the heat and get a little nap in.

Dinner looked like a quick meal of veggies in ginger sauce, it was just what I needed!

Last Day in Laos

With just a few hours to spend in the city we scooped up some breakfast and ran down to see the Mekong! We walked down quite a ways to get to the water, I imagine in the full on rainy season, the water makes its way to the road. It's interesting to imagine. Walking around again we grabbed a couple more Italian Sodas and then quicky made our way through, yet another market, past more temples and lotus ponds to a photography place to get more passport pictures made. They came out really good! It's things like this that I love, while in the photo shop there was a monk getting some of his certificates laminated. I found it incredibly cute!

Packing up now, next stop Bangkok, Thailand!

A quick, but bumpy flight through a thunderstorm into Bangkok and we have made it to our hotel! Only a few funny glances at immigration due to my new passport but all good. We woke early this morning to make the 8am appointment at the US Embassy in Bangkok. Good news, they can guarantee my passport will be back on the 13th (we leave for Bali on the 12th) but they have been coming back extremely quick and she expects it would be here by the 10th!

Now, nap time and then to see what Bangkok has to show us.