Issan: Here We Go!

Last friday i got a rather disappointing call from my friend Rick saying that he wouldn't be able to start our Issan trip until March 14. but Hil and i have this whole week off so we decided to set off early and hopefully meet up with Rick and Chan somewhere along the way. monday we went to Phrae which is not really more than a couple hours outside of Lampang. we actually found it very similar to Lampang though a bit smaller. we spent much of the first afternoon trying to find transport to this place outside of town called "Phae Muang Phii" which means "Ghostland" in Thai. this place is a park with crazy rock formations formed by erosion (or ghosts). anyways, we couldn't really find anywhere to rent a motorbike and all the public transport was super-expensive. we kept walking around Phrae and as we walked past this one shop for the 3rd time, the woman there asked us what we needed. we sat down and talked to her. she had about 1 million poodles and fed us oranges and water. after about an hour of chitchatting, she told us that her husband's aunt would take us to the place the next morning. she said "don't be afraid. she's an old woman." later that night, the woman called me and started talking about prices. i was thinking, "oh no this is totally a scam" but it ended up quite to the contrary.

when the woman picked us up the next day, she was very friendly and had a nice clean car. she told us that she used to be the assistant director at the Agricultural College in town. as we drove out to the park she jammed out some Elvis which she called "old-people music." the ghost land looked very much like a canyon you would find in america. however there were weird outrgrowths of rock that looked like mushrooms and/or male anatomy. it was a nice place full of butterflies and birds chirping.

after that, she took us to the big temple and pilgrimage site for buddhists in that area. the temple was called Wat Phra That Cho Hae (wat=temple, phra that= chedi in Laos language and Cho Hae=a chinese-style silk that was wrapped around the chedi when it was first built). we walked up a bunch of steps to find a chedi under construction. however the main wiharn was decorated elaborately. there were these little flowers made out of glass mosiacs on all the walls and the ceiling looked like Laos-style with red paint and gold guilding. the most interesting thing about this temple was this custom of using a long stick as a kind of fortune-telling. people would measure their armspan on the stick and mark where their hands landed with rubberbands. then they would pray while holding the stick and finally ask it a question. then they would re-measure their armspan and if the rubber bands had "moved" the answer was "yes." if they stayed the same, the answer was "no." i've never seen anything like this and couldn't imagine how the rubber bands would move. hmmm. anyways, here are some pics of the temple.

finally, our tour guide, Petchura, took us to this huge house made entirely out of teak wood and then fed us a fabulous vegetarian lunch before dropping us off at the bus station. when we were getting ready to give her the amount of money we'd agreed upon she, gave us back change and said to hilary, "you really look like my daughter." she barely charged us anything even though she drove us around all morning and gas can be so expensive these days. i felt so grateful that people are still honest and not greedy. she said that now that she's retired, she really enjoyed taking us around. i think it gave her something to do in her free time. so the morning was great but the afternoon was a completely different story.

we wanted to end up in Loei by the end of the day but first we had to take a bus through Phitsanulok. we thought this wouldn't be too difficult but it ended up being quite the ordeal. the first bus took an hour longer than we were told and the air-con seemed broken. the bus stopped 10 miles outside of phitsanulok for half an hour just so they could give business to this local rest area. when we got to the bus station, we found out that there wasn't a bus to Loei until 6 pm (which gave us 2 hours to kill). the bus station was in the middle of nowhere and we were already peeved and tired. of course, the bus didn't end up coming until 7. we were so happy to sit down that we didn't notice how janky our seats were. we were in the second-to-last row so as the bus started driving, the seats started flopping forwards and backwards at a violent rate. these chairs couldn't be put into an upright position so we had to kind of lay while trying to protect our necks from whiplash. it was like being on a psychotic rocking chair. to top it off, the air con was blowing full blast and i didn't really have any "winter" clothes. i ended up wearing a hat (to keep in body heat) and wrapped myself up in the window curtain of the bus. i really felt that this was hitting a low point. then the woman in front of me reclined her chair so much so that she was literally laying in my lap. hilary and i were so tired and slap-happy by this time that we couldn't stop laughing. the loudest monk ever was sitting behind us (apparently he's the abbott of Loei province) but he kept looking at us like we were crazy. it was probably the longest 4 hours of my life because we couldn't sleep due to the violent seats and there weren't any lights on so we couldn't read. i have never been so happy to get off a bus. we got a taxi to our hotel which ended up being a brothel. cool. the room was scummy and the bedsheets were itchy. ew! i ended up sleeping on top of my towel because i didn't want my skin to touch those nasty sheets. luckily this morning we were able to move into another hotel and ate a wondrous breakfast of mangoes and sticky rice drizzled with coconut milk. today should be very chill and then tomorrow we're off to Chiang Khan on the Mekhong river.