What Have You Been Learning Lately?

This is a first for me. The heat tonight in Bangkok is a languid, wet blanket. I love not being cold so I receive this sweaty, sweet, liquidair hug with gratitude. Rachel and I are back in Thailand and survived Laos despite getting very sick in the capital, Vientiane, at the end of an otherwise incredible time in a highly underrated country. Laos is wildly beautiful and I'm grateful to have jumped into the journey there although I didn't know anything about it beforehand...for instance, Laos is a communist country and has a national curfew of midnight. The United States bombed the shit out of Laos during the Secret War , and children and farmers continue to find active, unexploded bombs in the earth to tragic ends. The Lao people refer to their country as Laos, and themselves and their food/culture as Lao Bucolic af. not "Laotian." (We asked around.) The boundary between public and private life in Laos is even blurrier than it is in Thailand. We ate a lot o...

Rachel and I have now made it over the border and into the chilled out jungle town of Luang Prabang, Laos. Like all cute places, I'm already in love and considering staying forever. The journey to get here was long and stressful, though, due largely to the fact that we didn't plan ahead very well, and information on how to do it isn't very good. Things do change rapidly here, and information isn't disseminated very well, so its understandable. However, I'm going to map out our research and how we did it so you don't also end up nearly getting stuck in the sticks on a Laos roadside like we did. The first thing you should know is that there are two bus stations that service Chiang Rai. There is the old station (Station 1) in the city center which is currently under construction and kind of a cluster. There is a new station (Station 2) outside of the center which you pass on the way in from Chiang Mai. Not all buses got to both stations, so be aware of which stat...