Chapter the Third: Chiangmai welcomes the Gemsters

The north-east corner of the 700 year-old moat around the old city of Chiangmai ("New City").

The "Sunday Walking Market" stretching from Tha Pae Gate
all along Ratchadamnoen Rd, and then some.

A & B hone their bargaining tactics.

Dog fashion - the Xiengmai twist on the skinny model debate.

McBeetle TV snacks. Will you have flies with that?

Night falls.....

...and noise rises.

Chiangmai taxis (Red trucks = "rot daeng", also Two-Row = "songthaew")

Pursued by not one Black-Jelly Juice vendor, but TWO.
Escaped ok this time.

Just your regular drum tower (Wat Chaimongkon, just south of the Chedi Resort)

Up the Yellowish Brick Thanon To Mt Doi Suthep and the Queen's Winter Palace. Alan spots some orchids in the mist.

Wat Doi Suthep

Kuhn B chooses a smallish real estate for eternity -
or at least until his next incarnation as a beetle.

For him the gonnnnnng tolls...

Trough time at the Chedi Resort.

Sorry, make that High Tea with the Ambassador (who was, erm, indisposed that day, so the assistant manager had to stand in).

Chapter the Second: Luangprabang or bust

Bangkok is to Luangprabang as a crocodile is to a gecko. At dusk, the peak-hour, this was the scene in the epicentre of the busiest 'tourist' precinct of the main street (Sisavangvong St). Tuk-tuks here are 'jumbos'.

Ta-wenty minutes later, this was the same street. Cars are so rare that you can generally hear any vehicle coming from some distance. We saw two streets with (council) lighting in the entire town. Any other street-lighting is an accidental by-product of private enterprise such as restaurants etc.

The brightest street, at least for a short time after dusk, was the local night market. Ironically, Laos actually produces enormous amounts of hydro-electricity, but the government sells it to Thailand and pockets the profits rather than supply its own citizens. A walk through back-streets reveals that the population - apart from some wealthy expat residents - lives largely by candlelight, and therefore hits the sack early.

Next morning (after ghastly un-coffee at breakfast), Marie plays 'chicken' with local traffic along the 'esplanade' of the Mekong River. She got bored after a while, so wandered off to graze on the strawberry trees shading the jumbos. Oddly, the locals don't seem to eat the yumacious fruit.

The bakery (!) provided about the only semblance of nightlife apart from the handful of shops which stay open till late (8.30-ish). In the pic above, our explorers (without their customary pith-helmets or blunderbusses) were secretly snapped by CIA in a [you guessed it] ...jewelry shop. In the bakery you can buy government-brewed Beer Lao, quasi-cappuccino [don't do it!] , or fruit smoothies; Coca-cola and McDonalds are prohibited :-) There are 2 government-sanctioned nightclubs, conveniently located some distance outside the town to keep the population pure. A third club was closed recently, allegedly due to being located too close to a wat. Having said all that, Lao people are absolutely delightful - polite, respectful, if sometimes over-shy. Maybe it's us who are still post-colonially over-assuming, brash, and unreasonably demanding.

Monks' quarters in a monastery in the grounds of a Wat... and the Naga dragons guarding the stairs leading up to it:


Halcyon daze. A local suki restaurant next to the Mekong... and the nearby Boules Olympics 2007, running every morning, patronised by jumbo-drivers between trips. Hey, it's a fast life here:

Then donning our pith-helmets and priming our flintlocks, we set off up the Mekong in search of legendary secret caves crammed with ancient Buddha statues... and, with any luck, large treasure chests full of glittering bling with no 7% VAT. We had a V8 Chrysler truck motor mounted on the canoe in case the oars failed, but heroically succeeded at battling the current and rocks.

We escaped being eaten by anyone, although we were very nervous about suspicious riverbank villages like this one [above] which, on closer inspection, sported a few satellite dishes above houses. We kept our powder dry.

Eventually reassured of our safe passage, we nevertheless had to mix our own cocktails... and climb stairs without the assistance of sedan-chairs or peeled grapes:

The Gates of Hades, guarded by a less-than-fierce Cerberus. Notice Kuhn Ba-lenton, ecstatic after discovering an ancient 300-month old Buddha statue in a previously almost unknown cave. To help it get known better, Kuhn Cerberus was charging a minimum donation of 1000 kip EACH for hire of a torch (1000 kip = about 10c).

We've been to Luangprabang before with our daughter Anna, and we'll doubtlessly do it all again as it's so convenient to Chiangmai. Waterfalls next time, chaps? Fave weekender hangout in Laos.

Chapter the First: Gemmies Do Bangkok: an historic Aussie culture delegation

The first thing Kuhn Alan and Kuhn Brenton did in Thailand was to open a new sapphire specialist shop, "Bedford Sapphires (Asia) Inc.", in the Mahboonkrong Centre, near the 6th floor food-court. (We had known all along there were commercial and gastronomic sub-agendas.) In this pic Alan's describing a medium-size "Bedford Bonanza" doorstop to a passing Thai pedestrian, even before the glitzy official galah opening at which Dolly Parton was to be the keynote speaker. (Her tuk-tuk must have got lost somewhere between Pat Pong Road and Soi Cowboy).

Then it was off to the Weekend Jatujak market, with its 15,000+ stalls. Luckily we had all done our marathon training in advance, but nevertheless took the precaution of hiring Nepalese sedan-chair bearers, cocktail-wallahs, and Esky porters.

Meanwhile, back at the Foodhall basement of the mega-luxurious Siam Paragon Centre, diets were collapsing in decadent disgrace on all sides. Harrods, eat your epicurean hearts out:

(*Note Kuhn Ba-lenton's hand-pump and throat ramrod for more efficient eating)

Outside, Skytrains rumbled on relentlessly above Rama I Road:

The Adventurers Twain took a slight diversion to Ayuthaya, Thailand's abandoned 14th-century capital to the north of Bangkok.
Because it is there, of course. Odd you should ask.

This was the tower where Queen Rapunzel let down his hair. No, I jest (he-he). It was the observatory where Thailand's King Mongkut predicted an eclipse in 1807(?ish) more accurately than any western astronomers. He died a few weeks later from malaria, poor chapster. We all had pre-emptive anti-mozzie spray called (ahem), "Eclipse".

Alan runs terrified after spotting a giant Dengue wriggler emerging menacingly from the water.

Phra Buddha takes a power-nap. Alan wishes he could be doing the same, but can't yet line up his toes with quite the same panache. Appearance matters. Ommmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Kuhn Marie consoles Kuhn A. "Only another 8576546 re-incarnations to go before you can achieve your Nirvana CD".
Ah sucks, we all know you can get one cheap cheap, just over the Burmese border at Mae Sai.

Later, at a local wat, a Buddhist monk threw a sanctified sheet over Kuhn Ba-lenton, chanted an incantation or two, then whisked it off... and Ba-lenton was a mightily changed man. Indeed so...

A and B sat down for a while and kept extremely still (see photo above). Before long, they had collected enough gold leaf to pay that night's hotel bill. The game was up, though, when Ba-lenton could no longer withold a sneeze induced by a brat of a Thai kid reverently stuffing gold leaf up his nostrils.

Shedding gold leaf as they fled, A and B did a rapid tour of the ancient city of Ayudhaya, pursued by angry Thai policemans many many, all doing highly cinematic wheelies in tuk-tuks [add sound FX of breaking glass, skidding etc., & stock footage of petrol-tankers exploding].

Finally, the Gang of Four managed to escape on a luxury cruise-boat along the Chao Phraya River back to Bangkok. Here Kuhn Marie inspects her other Royal Palace after a Thai smorgasbord gnosh-up plus a glass or 2 of coconut wine which had been maturing all afternoon.

Suffering from C.R.D. (Chronic Retail Deprivation), the lads drag us off screaming to the glittering bling-bling shops along the notorious Silom Road area of BKK (where even bona fide Frenchmen have forgotten how to make coffee drinkable):

...after which we graced the Grand Palace with our newly re-blinged personnages but, dis-gracefully, neither the King or Queen had been informed. The King was allegedly in his Counting-House (counting out his Baht), and the Queen was 'out' (having a weekend fling in her Moscow hill-station in order to cool down).

So, in a huff and intent on carrying off a few kilos of gold concealed cleverly in Kuhn Marie's fake Guccuitton-Endeavour handbag, Kuhns A and B were alarmingly confronted by the Royal Thai Guscorps Guards:

...who promptly arrested and frog-marched them both off to see their Leader, the feared general Gustavo the Grate, whose face went a livid green when he learned of the existence of a rival warlord in outback Australia:

But Fortune smiled yet again for our untrepid adventurers, who had only to endure an hour on the rack before revealing Gus's true address. Free yet again, and with handbag intact, they set off to hunt for that elusive yellow football-sapphire at the end of the rainbow...

...and indeed they found many among 6 floors of SOLID BLING (plus a few diamonds, rough stones, gold, silver chains etc). And even better than that, a semi-acceptable COFFEE shop:

Having tricked the hapless Thai jewellers into swapping all their chests of treasure in exchange for a few plastic Australian trinkets and Chinese-manufactured koalas, A and B wandered contentedly off, pushing groaning treasure trolleys over to the Siam Square area of Bangkok. On a pavement, some musicians had heard they were coming and busked for their pleasure:

A and B discovered that Thai art galleries are full of images of gratuitous violence - not recommended for family viewing:

Disgusted, they packed up their sapphire-studded swags and headed off to Laos in a rattly old Russian turbo-prop with secondhand Chinese engines (within their 3-month warranty period).
The Great Asian Coffee Hunt was on in earnest.

Be watching this space for Chapter the Second, LUANGPRABANG, coming to a small screen near YOU. Will our brave adventurers discover the pot of caffeine at the end of the rainbow?