Big Trip Day 23: Laos Superlatives
February 5, 2024
Hi friends!
We’re in Nong Khiaw, Laos, a sleepy little riverside town three hours outside the much more bustling Luang Prabang. We’re coming up on the one month mark of Big Trip, and there’s already so much that’s happened. It’s hard to imagine what we’ll see and do and eat and think about in the next 11 months. This is Dory writing to you now — Justin and I are brainstorming the newsletters together, and then we’ll take turns writing them.
Right now, we’re sitting at a table on a concrete terrace in front of the Nam Ou River, glassy as a lake from the massive Chinese dam a few kilometers downstream. All the same, long blunt-nosed wooden boats are motoring past at regular intervals; fishing, I guess? With the language barrier, we never have any idea what’s going on, just order beers and say hello and thank you and spend a lot of time looking around.
The Lao people are kind and unfailingly gracious. We keep joking about the number of times we would have been slightly screwed or shortchanged if we were in Latin America — on the minibus today, a girl left her iPhone behind and the bus driver asked every tourist at the station until he returned the phone to its rightful owner. It’s impressive, especially given the catastrophic devaluation of Lao currency over the last several years; the value of the kip looks like an intimidating ski slope. Dinner usually costs 150,000 kip; when we withdraw money from the ATM, it’s in the millions.
We’ve been busy the past couple weeks. Busier than we’d like, honestly — we haven’t quite figured out the right pacing for a trip that’ll last a year. We’re used to having to squeeze it all in, see the sights, do the things we want to before work beckons us back home. But on this trip (Big Trip, as we’ve been calling it for the months leading up to our departure) nothing’s beckoning us except the promise of more exciting food back in Thailand, and our fast-approaching Lao visa expiration on February 15.
It feels impossible to account for everything we’ve done since Justin ate a raw crab in Bangkok, but the following superlatives are our best attempt — starting with what I suspect is a category we’ll continue to add to…
Most Surprising Lessons Learned
1. Make sure the dryer isn’t going to hold your laundry hostage for 3 - 5 hours
We’ve packed super light, so laundry is an extremely regular part of our lives. In Bangkok, before we headed off to Laos for our first stint rock climbing, we decided to do laundry the morning of our flight — we didn’t need to be at the airport until 4pm, and we started the laundry at breakfast, when we woke up. Plenty of time! …right? Wrong.
Turns out the hybrid washer/dryer unit we were using at the hostel had a mysterious lock function at the end of the (wildly ineffective) dry cycle, where the screen would simply read “HOT” for anywhere between 5 minutes and forever. During this time, it was literally impossible to open the door — no reset button, not even unplugging the machine would work. In total, it took almost five hours to dry our clothes, pushing us well past our planned departure for the airport. We spent the final moments staring in horror at the "HOT" icon as we contemplated missing our flight. Mercifully, us and our (still damp) clothes made it in the nick of time.
2. Make sure the menu is in the currency of the country you’re currently in
On a whim, we went to a Chinese restaurant in Thakkek. It was fancier than most places — glass windows, air conditioning — but the menu prices looked reasonable, so we went for it. We ate a legitimately excellent meal (green beans with Szechuan peppercorns, stewed eggplant, a pork thing, a few beers, some peanuts…) and Justin went to pay the bill. After some increasingly baffling back and forth, he figured out that the confusion at hand was about currency — the menu prices were in Chinese yuan, not Lao kip, which made our meal approximately 4x more expensive that we anticipated. “A Chinese dinner” is now our official unit of measurement for $20.
Even without menu chaos, eating is an activity here. It takes forever, and every meal we eat requires decision-making. Unfortunately we’ve had a lot of unremarkable food in Laos (lord, save us from another noodle soup) but some true highlights have made their way into the mix. So, some top picks:
Best Snacks
Crispy Mekong River Weed in Luang Prabang: This snack was one of our first truly delicious things in Laos. Imagine nori, but better — more meaty, less shatteringly crisp. It’s seasoned with oil, salt, and sesame seeds, and served with a thick savory-sweet chili sauce that reminds me of gochujang. “River Weed” is a rank translation, but this stuff is delicious. We order it every time it’s on the menu.
Banana and Honey Paratha with Sweetened Condensed Milk in Vientiane: Our first and only night in Vientiane, on a layover between the bus from Thakkek and the fast train to Luang Prabang, we ordered this from a stand outside a halal restaurant for 90 cents. Expertly rolled to paper thinness and pan-fried in a bath of salted butter and oil, this thing was insane. The banana slices on the inside turned into a kind of magical custard, and the folded dough puffed up while it cooked and laminated like a croissant. We would eat it 100 more times if we could.
In between botching daily tasks and snacking, we also rode a $5/day motorbike for 450 kilometers around the Thakkek Loop, a somewhat less well-known motorbike loop among the increasingly chaotic circuits of Vietnam and Thailand. Justin drove, after taking some lessons from my brother Jake in the snow in SLC one day, and then watching a series of Youtube videos — he crushed it. I navigated from the back, hanging on with one hand and scrolling Maps.Me with the other.
Our noble steed was a Yamaha Finn, a 110cc machine that had clearly been crashed repeatedly. The blue plastic exterior was cracked in a dozen places from, surely, other tourists driving it off the road. In confirmation, Justin later got a Thai massage from a German expat named Marcel who told him he once saw a tourist drive their scooter directly into a bush.
But the true superlative from the Thakkek Loop is this:
Lowest Temps Experienced
We’d been sweating our faces off for weeks in the sun in Thakkek, so we didn’t think to bring any of our layers on the Loop.
The morning of our first full day, we woke up to crisp temps and ended up in cold ones — between the wind from being on a scooter, the elevation gain (which we hadn’t bothered to look up) and a temporary drop in temps, we ended up with weather in the mid-40s. Justin wore all three of his t-shirts and my raincoat to cut the wind, I wore two shirts and Justin’s hoodie, and we shivered our way to the Dragon Cave, dreaming of the puffy jackets in our stored luggage back in Thakkek. Despite the cold, our trusty Finn completed the loop without breaking down in a puff of dust. After Googling the kilometer to miles conversion, we realized it had 220,000 miles on it.
Per the Buddha pictured above: a major part of the Thakkek Loop was, to our surprise, seeing Buddhas. From inside temples, but also from the side of the road, whizzing past in a blur of gold or white. Buddhist temples are everywhere in Laos, sometimes more than one in a small dusty village. The gates are nearly always open, so we’d often stop to say hello, bowing our greetings and farewells to the usually elderly caretakers sitting around the tiled interiors. While we’ve seen some big Buddhas in Laos, the biggest Buddha of all wasn’t in Laos at all.
Biggest Buddha
Big, small, painted gold and plated gold and painted white and made of emerald-green jasper. We’ve seen a lot of Buddhas, and we’ll be seeing a lot more in the months to come. But the biggest Buddha we’ve seen so far — and maybe the biggest in the region? — was reclining in Bangkok, in Wat Pho, at the end of a surprisingly long day of walking around in the very hot sun. Justin’s seen his share of Buddhas, reclining and otherwise, during his time in Sri Lanka, but I’d truly never seen anything like it. The 150 foot figure fills the whole building; it’s completely covered in gold leaf, with incredible detailed mosaics on the soles of Buddha’s feet. People crowd around the feet to take pictures, in part because it’s almost impossible to document his monolithic body as anything other than a gold wall.
There's lots more to say, but in the spirit of actually sending an update of any kind, we're going to leave it there. Thanks for reading, for texting us, and for keeping in touch in general during our time away! We miss you all a ton and are so glad we can rely on the magic of the internet to keep us connected.
Love,
Dory & Justin
