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This should be sub-titled “, the city and beaches”. It was the beginning of the 1-year sabbatical leave that my wife and I took in 1997. Or actually we both just quit our jobs. And as anyone else who makes a journey like this we made all kind plans that in the end did not work out at all. There was one thing we did stick to, that was to begin and end our journey in Thailand.

Our journey began with a flight from Amsterdam to Bangkok with what should be a 4-hour stop-over in airport. But due to very bad weather we were re-routed to Dubai airport and waited in the airplane for more than 1-hour before we took off again to airport. After the stop-over we continued our flight to arrive at Don Muang airport in Bangkok. After waiting for about 20-minutes for our luggage we found out that our luggage was on their way to Manila in the Phillipines. But we were lucky, the plane would be back the next day and then we could pick up our luggage then. As at that time I was still a person who wanted to plan too much we had booked our self already a room at the Trang Hotel (at Thanon Wisut Kasat) for 3 days. In that time a nice Bangkokian neighborhood with good and cheap Thai restaurants nearby. And not so crowded and packed with western tourists like Thanon Silom or Thanon Sukhumvit, but, with the new developments of motorways etc. that all seems to be changed. We had planned to stay for 3 days in Bangkok, at that time the maximum of time that I could bear in Bangkok, and then to stay for about 2 weeks at Koh Chang to relax and adjust. After that we would return back to Bangkok to go to Laos, to visit Vientiane and Luang Prabang. So we went to Kao San road to book ourselves a visa for Laos and a mini-van to Koh Chang.

We had never been to Kao San Road before and when I was walking there I did know why. What a bunch of crazy backpackers are to be found there! Why do people travel all over the world to eat pancakes, watch MTV and walk bare footed on the street? Recently I returned back to Thanon Kao San and under the management of the TAT the street seems to have changed to a place for the yuppie travelers and young Thai high-society. For the yuppie travelers I still do not understand why they travel all over the world to sit here in an American look-a-like and managed bar full of tourists and some Thai who behave themselves like they are falang.

The visa for Laos would take 3 days. This of course became 5 days, so we did stay almost a week in busy Bangkok. As we had been in Bangkok before already 3 or 4 times we just wandered around a little bit and we did visit with people we had met before. As a note to travelers of today, do not bother to get a visa in advance as you can easily get one at the border now. So on the last morning in Bangkok we took the mini-van from Thanon Kao San to Laem Ngop (near Trat) to take the ferry to Koh Chang. The island looks so close that you think you can swim to it! At the island we took a Song Theauw to Kai Bae beach. The trip to it was like a Camel Trophy jungle tour. In that time there were no roads, just mud tracks. I do not know how it is now, as I have never returned to Koh Chang. We finally found a place to stay at the beach front. But after one day we found out that it was dirty and hot. So we moved to another beach, White Sand beach. But there it was the same, expensive, dirty, and hot. As we were missing our beloved Koh Samui we decided to leave Koh Chang as soon as possible and to go to Koh Samui. So the next day we left Koh Chang to go by public bus to Rayong. It is a favorite beach resort for Thai people, so why not for us? Well when we arrived I did not understand why it is a favorite beach resort for Thai, and now living nearby Rayong I still do not understand. It's an empty and long stretch of beach with an even emptier beach road along it, and some small hotels, of which we picked one to stay. It’s a real Thai small family resort where they probably never had falang guests staying before. In the evening we had dinner on the terrace of the hotel that was called a restaurant. Well, they did not have much food, but we managed to order something. Next to us were two policemen having a drink and both carried an M-16 assault rifle. Is it so bloody dangerous here? Well, not at the toilet, because when one policeman walked away to talk with the boss, the other went to the toilet and left his M-16 right on the table next to us and the barrel pointed right at us. Yes, it's dangerous here! In those days I still wanted to have some toast and a cup of tea for breakfast, but the next morning they served us Thai food with coke! After breakfast we left Rayong again by public bus to go to Bangkok Eastern bus terminal, Ekmai on Thanon Sukhumvit. We arrived there early and from the bus station I made a telephone call to Bangkok Airways to make a reservation for us to fly to Koh Samui. So straight from the bus terminal with a taxi to the airport and 3 hours after we arrived at the bus station our flight to Koh Samui was airborne.

We arrived at Koh Samui airport, which is a private airport of Bangkok Airways, late in the afternoon and we went straight to the hotel that we already had booked on the airport in Bangkok. The airport at Koh Samui is a very small and almost picturesque airport with a lovely open-air arrival and departure lounge. It’s a one of a kind of airport that really welcomes you to the tropical island of Koh Samui. The mini-van brought us to our hotel, "Chaweng Cabana", right on the beach of Chaweng. We intended to stay here only for one night and then to move to our beloved "Fair House" where we had stayed about 6 years ago. We were wondering if the old Englishman we met before would still be living there. So the next morning we walked over the beach in direction of Chaweng Noi and once arriving at the place of "Fair House" we could not believe what had happened here. Was this the “Fair House”? The little, lovely beach cabins had made place for concrete bungalows with air-condition and a bath-tub! And the restaurant was converted into a swimming pool! And behind that all was a 3-story high building with 50 rooms. Our memories were totally destroyed! As we still wanted to stay there we managed to make a deal to stay in one of the older backside bungalows for a special 10-day price. And in these 10 days we tried to master the art of doing nothing. That is quite difficult coming from a culture where doing nothing is considered as something bad. In the end my wife did master it better than me and I made a motorbike trekking upon one of the mountains of Koh Samui. Doing that with a 100cc Honda dream was not such a smart idea. Soon the road became a steep dirt track and it began to rain. I found a restaurant with beautiful view-point over the island. Together with a Thai family I took shelter from the rain. But, soon the rain started to get heavier and we all had to move to the kitchen to stay dry. After about one hour of drinking and eating the rain stopped and I made my way back to Chaweng beach. After 10 days we took the ferry back to the mainland and took the train from Surat Thani to Bangkok. We would stay one night in Bangkok to refresh ourselves, and then we would take the night train to Nong Khai to go to Laos.

Laos, Vientiane, and Luang Prabang

We traveled with the second class air-conditioned night train from Bangkok to Nong Khai. I like traveling by train and I enjoyed sleeping in the upper berth of the sleeping wagon. We arrived very early in the morning at the train station at Nong Khai and continued with a tuk-tuk to the friendship bridge that now connects Laos and Thailand at the border crossing point. Before there was no bridge and the crossing of the Mea Nam Khong (Mekong River) had to be done from the center of the city of Nong Khai, where you would cross the river (and border) by boat. Along the banks of the river in Nong Khai is still the famous Indo-China market. We skipped this all and went straight from the friendship bridge to the capital city of Laos, Vientiane. Entering Laos, and especially Vientiane, is like stepping out a time-machine and entering a world we only know of from books and old photos from about 30 or 40 years ago. It really was amazing to explore Vientiane in those days. Actually nowadays, coming from the so westernized , is still a beautiful and really amazing country. I'm happy that I had the chance to see that all in 1997, just before the other kind of tourism would also come to this country. Luckily it has until now never been overrun by tourism. We did choose to stay at a hotel along the banks of the Mea Nam Khong. Well the word hotel is an insult for all the real hotels. Somewhere about 30 years ago it must have been a hotel. But now it was more a storage place for old broken machinery, like the Russian hot water boiler in our room. Or the also Russian air-condition on the ceiling. And that all for 12us$ a night! And in the evening when we wanted to sleep we discovered that under our room the local disco started to turn up the beat and that would suddenly end somewhere in the middle of the night. If I tell you Vientiane is the capital city of you probably are thinking of a city with asphalt roads, high rise hotel buildings, and shopping malls. Well forget all of that! The roads are paved with sand that will be found everywhere, even in the sheets of our bed! No shopping mall, until just a few years ago in all there were no elevators or escalators for public use. And of course no high rise buildings, except an abandoned Russian building. In the evening small restaurants emerged along the river and we had a romantic candle-light dinner with a view over the Mae Nam Khong where we could see on the other side the little lights of modern Thailand. The next morning I discovered why it is good to travel in old French colonies like Laos and Vietnam, you can eat stokbrood with jam at your breakfast! At that moment I did not feel Vientiane would be my kind of town, but now I like the city for its peaceful atmosphere. We did stay for two nights and made a little tour in the city and visited the Wat Siket in center of town and the Laotian version of the "Arc d' Triumph". Just outside the city is a park made by monks to show you the life of Lord Buddha with life size statues. It's really remarkable to see this park with his statues and the rooms of "Heaven and Hell". We had the plan to travel to Luang Prabang, the old capital and royal city of . I was told that traveling overland was dangerous, but now I consider that more a commercial for using the state (=private) owned Lao Air airline. So we booked a 20-minute flight from Vientiane to Luang Prabang for 70us$ pp! Our airplane was an older Russian-made Tupolev with no in-flight service at all. When I look out the small window I see we are flying over the green jungle of the landlocked . It seems that there is only jungle and nobody is living there. Here and there you can still see the un-natural craters dotted around in the valleys', as result of the un-official activities of the military bombings. is a country where the wounds of the colliding of the super-powers are still be visible. And unfortunately sometimes invisible underneath the earth where still even today are to found many landmines made in the . Luang Prabang is declared a World Heritage Place b the UNESCO and consists of a new town near the airport and the old town full of temples. This old town is situated on a peninsula between the Mea Nam Khong and the Mea Nam Say. When we were there there were only 3 hotels in this part of town and we did choose the less expensive one, the Say Nam Khan Hotel for 18us$ at night. It's along the Mea Nam Say with a veranda overlooking the small road between the river and the hotel. Behind us between the old and the new town is a mountain, called Phu Si from where you can see a beautiful sunset between the mountains surrounding Luang Prabang. We had planned to stay here only 2 nights, but we felt so comfortable and easy here that we spent 5 days sitting on our veranda and walking through this peaceful town. Every morning all the monks would go out to accept their offerings of food and all the streets looked orange from the hundreds of monks that were still practicing Buddhism in Luang Prabang.

One day we made a sight-seeing trip on a slow old cargo boat going over the Mea Nam Khong to visit some hill-tribes living in the jungle. That is when I realized that the green jungle that we had seen from our airplane while flying to Luang Prabang was not as un-inhabited as I thought. All along the river banks you can still see the remains of the forgotten secret war that has been overwhelming this now so peaceful looking country. Abandoned military transport boats, parts of bombs now used as household tools, and many other machines made for destruction of human lives. The final goal of our boat trip was the Ban Phanom cave with a temple inside with hundreds of Buddha images hidden away before the war.

As our visa was almost expiring we had to return to Vientiane and to go back to again. When we arrived at the departure lounge of the airport of Luang Prabang we saw a big group of colorful hill-tribe people who were bringing one of their eldest to Vientiane to the hospital. The whole village came to say goodbye! They were walking around like they had never seen a concrete building, TV's, and white people from outside Laos. Well, probably they never had seen all these kind of things that we take for granted. The airport authorities were not too happy with the group of hill-tribe people and they were requested to leave the building. When we were walking over the platform to our same old Tupolev we could see that the group of hill-tribe people also had found their way to the platform and they were standing all together under a big tree next to the platform. That was one of those moments that I hate myself for being too lazy to carry my camera with me always. This picture of that colorful groups of people under that big tree, waving to their friends, is now only in my memory. But, it will probably remain there forever.

Back to our home base, Thailand

We had a smooth flight back and left Vientiane the same day to stay for a few nights in Nong Khai in . From Nong Khai we took the bus to Loei. It was a local and slow bus, and also very crowded. So the most of the 6-hours during ride we had to be standing. Unfortunately we did not know how beautiful the mountainous area of Loei could be otherwise we would have planned a stop on the way instead of staying in Loei city. The city itself I still have in my memory as a typical Thai-Chinese country city, nothing special. We stayed for one night and moved on to Sukhothai to visit Sukhothai historical park. From there on we continued to Bangkok to take our flight to Hanoi in Vietnam. But that is part 2 of six months traveling in South East Asia.

Chang Noi