Low Season
There are advantages to travelling in low season -
even-cheaper prices being one of them - but there are downsides too.
Repairs and maintenance are done during this period: the museum in
Kuala Selangor was closed, for instance, as were the hilltops in Kuala
Trengannu. The weather, in particular, is worse. In Luang Prabang it
rained pretty constantly, which made walking around town enough of
a chore, much less anything further afield. It's been harder to get
confirmed tours - cancellations in Chiang Rai, Luang Prabang, and
Saigon (the original dates of my upcoming Gecko's trip).
Not the Plain of Jars
Laos
still doesn't make things particularly easy for a traveller though even
the last couple of years have seen major improvements - visas are now
30 days instead of 15, for instance. But there's one international ATM
in the country - in Vientiane. If one comes in with a Credit Card, no
travellers cheques, Australian Dollars (hideous exchange rate for them
in Luang Prabang), and only a week's worth of cash, it makes one more
likely to go to Vientiane quickly... which is counter productive
because once someone reaches Vientiane from the north they're more
likely to leave Laos quickly. No, Vientiane is not my favourite city.
Laotian hyper inflation is also problematic since even a day's worth of
kip is a sizeable wad, which makes it difficult to carry Lao currency
securely. The Plain of Jars, near Phonsavanh looked like an
interesting place to visit. If enough people had been going from Luang
Prabang (a proposed tour was cancelled), I would have put in on my
credit card and (reasonably) happily coped with the gouge. Instead, no
Plain of Jars for me.
A Failure to Communicate
"One
day" can mean the next day. As I discovered at 4pm on Saturday when I
turned up to collect my Cambodian-visaed passport from the closed
Vientiane travel agent's, it can also mean the same day. Writing on
the receipt that it could be picked up at "4pm on 21/07/06" didn't help
either - exact dates tend to blur - but "4pm today" would have. So -
instead of leaving that evening (or even better - on the day before)
for Cambodia, I got to spend the weekend in Vientiane.
I don't hate the place, it's more that I'm absolutely indifferent to
it. Such indifference appears to be a common reaction by visitors,
which is odd, because Vientiane has French colonial buildings and
traditionalish wooden ones and fusional ones. It has trees and temples
and monuments. There are arts and crafts galleries. It has tables for
dining at sunset along the Mekong waterfront. Yet, it leaves me cold.
It's very odd. It's not that the overhead wires provide visual
clutter: Most of Thailand has that. It's not that touristy places are
spaced out: Solo was similar. It's not that there are ugly buildings,
though there are: Nothing I've seen is as bad as places I've worked.
It's a little more attractive further away from the centre. Yet it's
not a city I ever need to see again should I return to Laos.
Language
Thai, I found difficult. It has five tones and a
voiced/unvoiced/aspirated split on consonants (see below). I know that billions of
people speak a language with these features, but they're not something
that unpracticed English speakers easily distinguish, much less produce properly. The written language
has vowels marked before, above, and after the consonant (which has a
default vowel). There are tone markings, but these behave differently
depending on which class - there are three - a consonant belongs to.
Lao has six tones.
voiced: "d" as in Dog
unvoiced: "t" as in fooTy (Australian pronunciation)
aspirated: "t" as in "Too
