Rio de Emocion

Bangkok is similar to many Chinese cities. It’s a massive sprawl of ugly apartment buildings and expressways casting the streets in their shadows. It’s still dark at 5 am in the morning after I leave the diesel train and hop into a tuk-tuk, a motorcycle with a ittle carriage welded to the back, for a fast ride towards Khao San Road, the one of the most disgusting places in the world. By the time I get there the sun is illuminating the street and the few old white dudes with their arm around a hooker are heading to their rooms on a mission.

Khao San Road in the morning, yet too early to be packed with Aussies and Russians shopping for fake-brand clothes and troutty tattoos.

Bangkok is smurfing alive. My British colleague in China described the city as “oozing with atmosphere” and he was right. It doesn't look as gritty as movies make it out to be, but then again I've only been in the city centre. It's hard to describe the feeling because I've only been there for a day, but it just feels like there's life in every corner of the city. Rides on the motorcycle taxis are exhilarating and cheap too, and they easily pass the constantly stuck-in-traffic cars.

A typical Bangkok street. Graffiti aplenty.



It's all malls and overpasses in the city centre.



The highway overpasses are immense. There's also a lightrail called the Skytrain that functions as a metro system through the city.

There is a protest going on in Bangkok but things are pretty peaceful, even if two days ago a number of bombs went off. The protesters are unhappy with the prime minister, whom they describe as a “retard” and a “whore”. At the present moment, a coup has placed the city in the army's hands. I have no idea what's going on right now. The same day I saw what was going on in Ukraine, and decided to get a plane to Kyiv the next day. My original plan was to stay in Bangkok for longer and see if I could train at one of their muay thai (thai kickboxing) gyms for a few months.

Down with the system!

The food is cheap and good. They’ve got your basic fried noodles (aka pad thai, always good), prawn soup (tom yum goong, also the title of a cool martial arts movie starring Thai actor Tony Jaa). Didn’t really get to try that many things since I was there for only one day. I saw on my newsfeed what was going on in Ukraine and decided that’s where I had to go.

The fried larvae weren't too tasty - like fried dough with a crispy skin.

Laos, my next destination after a long journey through China, is a small and sleepy country. The people here just don’t give a trout. They spend their days chilling in front of their shop, waiting for life to pass by or farming their fields. There’s also too many white people in the cities here. They ruined Laos! It’s become mainstream now.

Ugh, these nagas in front of a temple in Luang Prabang are just so 2012.

There’s a thing called the 'Banana Pancake Trail' which is the typical backpacker route through Southeast Asia. Everywhere these backpackers go, banana pancake stands pop up on the streets, cause what’s better when you’re on the other side of the world than eating the same trout you’re used to at home? I tried a pancake. Not that great, they fry the outside so it’s crispy and oily at the same time, and too sweet. There’s a night curfew throughout the country so there’s not much of a nightlife. Even the capital, Vientiane, has only like one or two bars.

People takin' it easy while I'm stuck waiting for 4 hours on the next bus in Luang Namtha, on the border with China.

The road from Luang Prabang to Vang Vieng is horrible. It's basically sharp left turns for hours on end, sometimes to the right. In the afternoon, a few hours before I left, an Israeli traveller left me with a big bag of weed. I smoked a bit, left the bag with a another traveller in the hostel, and then of course got real hungry and filled up on sweets and chicken skewers. I puked all of it out on the leg of a Spanish tourist in the bus. Then an hour later I puked again, this time nothing but the fluids that were left in my stomach. Felt hungover and sick the next day, so I chilled it in Vang Vieng with delicious banana milkshakes instead of moving on straight away to Vientiane.


People take it easy in Luang Prabang, as tourists will pay anything for an 'exotic' piece of chicken on a stick.

Vang Vieng has to be the worst place in the world. Aside from like, landfills and war zones. Since like the 70s, hippie backpackers have been coming to this place to smoke opium. Later on the drunk australians came to float down the river in inner tyres (‘tubing’). Then afterwards everyone would go to one of the bars and watch endless reruns of Friends/Family Guy on DVD while drinking ‘happy’ shakes. The tubing and opium have been gotten rid of by the authorities, but the TV bars are still there, and there’s more white people than ever staring like zombies at reruns of shows they’ve already seen countless times.

Vang Vieng is pleasant enough past the bars.

There’s not much I can say about the people. They seem nice enough because every white person to them is essentially a walking bag of money. Didn’t have enough time to get to know anyone, though there was some student in Luang Prabang, second biggest city in Laos, who came to the hostel to improve his english. He seemed nice enough.

How Laotians feels about Final Fantasy.

Lesson to be learned: try to get more involved with the locals. There's plenty of stories to be found.

More photos!