February 23, 2014
Hi there all and happy end of february....things here in china are motoring along for me and now i have even started to get things organized for ghana...very excited about that, but can't make that my focus....yet....we have had a rainy month of february, but today the sun...and the pollution...have returned to shanghai...i guess you either get rain & low pollution or sun & high pollution....i just realized this weekend that i am four months away from my last flight out of china....which is both exciting and sad...but of course i am leaning toward exciting, because i head to a new continent and a new adventure....although, there are lots of things left to do here in shanghai, so those four months will fly by and be quite busy....
this update itself is a focus on the 3rd part of my winter break trip to laos...and what a trip that was...i think i officially found the most laid back country in southeast asia....the people were chill, the food was spicy, the days were lazy and the scenery was beautiful...it was a perfect place to hang after israel....if you have not been here...its a mellow, beautiful place, with much to offer....i would highly recommend a visit....i only made it to luang prabang...but i loved this town and this country from that visit....woot!!! on with the pictures....
for my first two nights i wanted to stay in a locally owned eco-lodge outside of town, close to the mekong river....and i got exactly what i wanted...in this shot you can see the pool, where i sat for most of a day, chillin' out and reading the last book of the game of thrones series...as you can see, it was sunny, but the water was chilly....the pool was "infinity" style, but naturally landscaped into the property on the top of a hill...laos was a very "hilly' country, of which i had no idea before i got there....i was in a section that was tropical and hilly...and loved it...
this was what greeted you when you arrived at the place i stayed...in the thatched roof cage was a very cool bird, that could mimic anything...it could sound like the land-line telephone or someone whistling or a cell phone or the little 2-year-old boy who lived at this eco-lodge with his parents who owned the property...but i am not sure what kind of tropical bird it was and forgot to ask...sorry....
after my two nights 30 km outside of town i moved into town...and this was one of the bamboo bridges you could cross to get to other sides of the rivers that surrounded luang prabang....the bigger river in the far left of the picture is the mekong...the smaller river is the nam khan (this has the bridge over it)...the bridge leads to a smaller "island" of luang prabang with many temples on it...it was a nice walk in the sunshine to visit...
laos is a buddhist country...so everywhere you walk you see monks in their orange or saffron colored robes...they are men or boys of all ages who give up their worldly possessions and connections and try to reach a stage of enlightenment....laos is like thailand in that all men and boys must become a monk for a period of time to try and reach an understanding at least of what it means to be buddhist...in thailand it has now changed a bit in that a man or boy can become a monk for one day and can say he did his buddhist "duty"....i am not sure if it has reached this stage in laos...but there certainly were a lot of monks throughout luang prabang....and here were some boys on the walking bridge....love the colors of their robes :)
i loved the color of the robes so much that i took pictures of them everywhere....here are some that have been washed by the monks at a monastery/temple and have been hung in the sun to dry...again, love the colors....
luang prabang has many buddhist temples and some of the oldest in the world...it also has many that are UNESCO world heritage sites...including the one you see above....named wat xieng thong....or temple of the golden city....the enamel and mother-of-pearl work at this temple is amazing...actually the entire town of luang prabang is a world heritage site....
but the back wall of this temple, which you see above is an amazing glass mosaic...simply stunning, especially when the sun shines through....all of the temples in luang prabang are working temples, meaning buddhist still come here to pray and monks still live here talking with followers and giving prayers and comfort for those that need it....it is a step back in history to come to a place like this...a sleepy, peaceful, buddhist town that is just awesome!
luang prabang is also home to a lot of artists...many of whom paint monks wandering through the streets and fields or buddha or mandala-type works...and all on hand-made paper....there is a lot of beautiful artwork in this city and here you can see some of it being sold along the streets next to the mekong....
one of the temples i visited as the sun was going down was this one, where monks were chanting their evening prayers...you can see them through the doorway....with the pictures above the doorway showing the scenes from buddha's life....in the courtyard of this temple (wat)...were two boys playing a fierce game of marbles...it was so cool to watch them and have the chanting going on as well...such a mix of old world and new world....and when the monks were finished some of them came and watched the game with me and wanted to practice their english....they told me about going to the local library in the afternoon and speaking with monks there as well, who wanted to practice their english...which i did the next afternoon...it was terrific...such peaceful and happy people :)
this was the entrance to the temple where the chanting was happening....the steps were guarded by naga...the snake that protected buddha when he sat beneath the bayan tree and meditated until he reached enlightenment....there is just something about this way of life that i love....and being in luang prabang reminded of this everywhere i turned....loved it....
at night in luang prabang they have a vibrant and street night market that takes over the main street of the town...here you can see some of the stalls and the mostly women selling embroidery, tapestries, t-shirts, lanterns, bags, jewelry and artwork....this night market happens every night and villagers from up to 2 hours away come to sell their wares here...it was fun to walk up and down and see what was for sale and what other travelers were buying...i don't buy much anymore, as i know if i do, i need to ship it to my next port of call....so mostly i just people watch....
during one of my days in luang prabang i took a cooking class...i am starting to do this more and more when i travel...so i can learn how to make "local" foods....for the one i did in luang prabang, i was taken first to a local market to learn what types of veggies and meats they use in their cooking, as well as the spices...many of the veggies were similar to thai cooking and chinese cooking...but i did feel that the spices in laos were more intense than thai, chinese or cambodian food....here you can see some of the veggies for sale....
this woman....so cute....was selling baskets for rice and other hand-made tools for the kitchen...the baskets to her right in the picture are used by students and families and monks to carry their daily supply of cooked rice for meals, because for laotian meals, rice is a main ingredient....i loved this woman's face....
here is a shot from the cooking school's platform where we cooked...it overlooked a lotus pond and was where they grew their own spices and some vegetables....all organic and extremely peaceful...this was the one place in laos where i couldn't hear motors from boats on the rivers or on the roads from the motor bikes....it was incredible...and our chef was great....a young, laotian guy who was both good at his craft and at cracking jokes :)
here is a shot of some of the ingredients we used that day to make 3 different dishes and a dessert....everything was fresh and tasty and combined to make quite spicy, flavorful food....some cooked in lemongrass and some cooked in banana leaves....and even one dish made with water buffalo, intestines and bile....i did a vegetarian version of this with tofu...but got to see and smell all of the other ingredients....it was a great class and a fun day :)
luang prabang is situated in the hills and in the center of town is phou si....a hill many folks climb to watch the sun go down over the town and the mekong river....i was headed up the hill when the sun went below the horizon...but had to stop and take this shot before it was completely gone....at the top of the hill is a another beautiful temple....just a relaxing and peaceful place everywhere i looked and walked....
besides seeing the monks everywhere you walk in town, you can also be part of the alms giving ceremony, which happens every morning as the sun rises....in the picture above you can see what i gave to monks - bananas, crackers, banana leaf-wrapped sweet rice cakes and in the basket on the left, cooked rice for the day....this has become very popular with tourists as you can see below....
but as you can also see it has become a tourist trap sort of thing...most of the people around me were polite and not sticking their cameras in the monks faces...except for the guy in the black jacket....by the middle of this procession of monks i really wanted to punch him in the nose....he was right in the faces of the monks and they were obviously uncomfortable...but that did not stop him....
after i ran out of food i moved to the other side of the street to watch the processions and be more respectful....the procession lasted for about 30 minutes and there were quite a few monks....from many different temples...one of the coolest things i saw though was the monks donating some of their alms received to little kids who obviously came from very poor families and were collecting food for their families....it was incredible to watch the generosity of the monks for those less fortunate than they, even though they give up everything except for their robes, their carrying bag and their bowl...this alms ceremony happens throughout luang prabang every morning around 6am...as i left very early in the morning the next day, i saw it again from the back of a tuk-tuk in less populated parts of town with tourists where just the locals were giving alms....
laos is an extremely beautiful tropical country...and is known for its waterfalls....i made it out to one set before i left...and here you can see the beautiful waters you can swim in....this really reminded me of the lake portion of croatia....the water was very similar in color....these pools you could swim in....this set of falls also had a black bear sanctuary where they rescued abandoned bear cubs and injured black bears and raised them....pretty cool situation for the bears i think....
just another pretty shot of the pretty water in the area...there were tons of waterfalls to choose from...plus many folks did mountain treks, mountain biking and kayaking in the area...and if i had had one more day i would have gone out on the river in a kayak...but it was not to be...overall though, i loved luang prabang and would recommend stopping and hanging in this town to anyone...it was so chill and easy to relax in...something you don't find in the big cities of southeast aisa....
and of course here is the last shot of me....this is one of the dishes i prepared at the cooking school...it was a fish in a tangy, spicy sauce that cooked in a banana leaf....tasty!!!! and so ends the trip of my winter break....laos was the perfect spot to end in...warm, sunny and chill....i loved it and wondered why i had not made it there sooner....but i guess later is better than never....if you have never considered laos, you may want to add it to your list....you will not be disappointed....
hope you enjoyed the past few xmas trip updates...next to come will be a stop in harbin, china, where i went to the snow and ice festival for a weekend this past month...it was incredible....my next trip for spring break will be to maynmar, one of the newest destinations to open up in southeast asia...it is shaping up to be quite a trip and i look forward to the new experiences and adventure that awaits....
i have a short time left in southeast asia and i hope to enjoy every moment of it....i hope you have had a great start to 2014...and are enjoying the year of the horse from the chinese horoscope....hopefully i will have the next update out soon and until then....enjoy the ride of your own adventure....remember, if you have any questions or want to just say hi and send me your life update...please do....it's nice to hear from folks and know what they are up to :)
have a fab day :)
dani
feb. 8, 2014....
hey there all...trying to get one more update out before school starts up again and i run out of time....this "stay-cation" here in shanghai has been great...relaxing and filled with different tourist attractions in the cool town i live in...some of them have been hell-ascious and some of them have been fantabulous....i will be sending you shots sometime in the near future...but for now i need to finish up my xmas trip...and still will not do so with this update...but this one will focus on jordan...
cat and i only made it to jordan for two days...but in those two days we were blown-away with the beauty of this country...we went to petra and wadi rum....plus spent the night is a great/comfortable hotel in petra...it rocked...and if you do not have petra on your bucket list, you MUST add it now!!!! the pictures i took and the ones i will post here, do not do this amazing site justice...but i will add them, because some of them give you a glimpse....now i have seen quite a bit of the world on my trips, but this has to be in the top five of stunning places i have been to...go there....you will not be bothered by arab spring stuff here and they know how to treat tourists....at least in these two places....we loved it...
so on with the pictures...i am not going to have a ton of descriptors...but will tell you some things about jordan, it's king, petra and wadi rum...but i really think in many of these pictures...they speak for themselves and i can only say stunning and amazing, so many times ;) so on we go to jordan....
our day started quite early....and we were walking into jordan as the sun was coming up...this was a relatively smooth process and really was not as "scary" as some have said in blogs and other things i have read....you gave people some money and they let you leave their country....you gave some other people some money and they let you come into their country...smooth and easy....here's the entry sign as we were walking from israel to jordan....
there definitely is a difference between israel and jordan that you experience as soon as you cross out of "no man's land" and into one of these two places...if you have never walked across a border, the "no man's land" section is usually quite weird...big fences on the sides and empty space, usually just some dirt....and here was no different....but as you probably know, jordan is an islamic state...so as soon as you get there, the traditional dress for women is this...i loved this woman's face...BUT this is one country where they are working on women having the same rights as men....one of jordan's many "different" rules from much of the islamic world....
petra + blue sky....this is the start of the walk into petra...an UNESCO world heritage site...and recently described as one of the 7 new wonders of the world....petra is described as a caravan-Nabataean city....that has been inhabited since pre-historic times....the cave with the stairs above it in the rock above is a tomb....as are many of the structures i knew about before i got to petra...the steps are supposed to help the dead ascend into heaven....
in order to get to many of the tombs and the old city, you need to walk down this natural, windy path in the rock, called the siq....as you can see from the pictures, this place is formed out of sandstone...so there are sooooooooo many different colored pieces of rock here, it is mind-blowing - red, orange, brown, yellow, black, etc. and sometimes there are random trees and plants embedded in the walls.....
the closer you get to the main part of the city, the higher the walls of the siq climb....which made this a perfect place to build a city...as there was no way to approach it without someone knowing you were coming....they also had this amazing way of capturing and shuttling water here....as you can see on the left side and right side of the picture...they had set up a series of gutters that ran along the length of the siq and into the city proper....incredible engineering....
of course one of my favorite things was to look upwards from the bottom of the canyon and see incredible blue skies....i just couldn't get enough of them....jordan seems to be a country that is well organized and well-run....they have a king....king abdullah 2....it has a constitutional monarchy in place....so the king has much power...but he seems to be a good guy....and his wife...queen raina is impressive as well...she is actually a person who was not born into royalty...but instead met the king, before he was the king....at a dinner party...where it was love at first sight....but both of them do terrific things for this country....
this is probably one of the most famous types of pictures from the siq as you get closer to the main city....this does not do it justice in any way....and i wish you could see all of the colors of the rock and just how incredible this first look is....this is called the treasury of the pharaoh and is not really a treasury, but instead is a tomb.....this is one of the grandest of them all...and as beautiful as it is on the outside...it is quite plain on the inside...although you are not allowed inside...we could peek in, and there is nothing to see there....maybe because they have been lived by nomadic peoples since the demise of the original people who started and lived in this city.....
this is the full shot of the treasury....and in this picture you can see just how big it is in comparison to all of the people in front of it....the carving is magnificent and the color of the stone is stunning...and it changes with the light of the day...as you will see later in the post from when we were leaving....this really is an amazing site and probably my favorite spot in petra....
this is a closer view of the top of the treasury....we had a terrific guide who described what all of the different parts were of the treasury, but i don't remember it anymore...plus he was a geologist and chemist and found out i liked science, so then we also got all of the information about the rocks, engineering, construction and stableness of these buildings....he really was great!
one of the things i kept doing was taking pictures of the rocks themselves...as they were just amazing....the sandstone was shaped and formed by millions of years of water....and left behind some incredible patterns and what almost look like paintings in the rock....i loved them....
in this picture you are seeing what some of the apartments looked like that were carved into the rock...not everyone lived this way...but many people did....today there is nothing inside of these "caves", but you can climb in them and on them....these were really close to the theater that was carved into the rock here....
at one point petra was taken over by the romans....so not only do you have the older Nabataean versions of parts of the city....but you also have one main roman road that goes along another part of the city with columns and cobblestone roads and a church and a monastery....it's pretty crazy to think about how many different people lived here and how it was kept a secret from the world for so very long....by the nomadic people of jordan....burckhardt, a swiss explorer convinced the jordanians that he was muslim and just wanted to pass through here to get to a more important city....they had no idea he was swiss...and when he came to petra he was amazed...so when he returned to switzerland, he told the world about what he saw and this ended up becoming a tourist destination....based on this man's lie to the people from here...interesting beginning.....
up on one of the other hills is another set of tombs, called the royal tombs, found in a stretch called the king's rock....these were huge...you can see people at the base of them if you look closely....such incredible architecture....
the colors of the tombs was stunning...here you can see where i had reached them and was trying to get a vertical shot of the red sandstone...the inside of the royal tombs held nothing, but fire pit stains from the nomadic tribes who had inhabited this city and its tombs for years after everyone else had abandoned them....but the outside of the tombs....simply beautiful...
more of the stone pattern pictures....i just couldn't get enough.....so why are the king and his wife such good people....well, mostly because they do many things for the jordanian people...whether extending trade agreements, or fighting for the rights of women, children, journalists, the lower economic groups of the people of their country, or expanding the roads in the country, or pushing tourism in jordan and inviting the world to come and visit this place....it is said that once a year the king dresses up as a poor peasant and goes to a local hospital to see if he can get fair and equal treatment....if this has happened only once...i think that is pretty impressive for a king to do....
here's cat in front of one of the main tombs on the king's wall...you can see from this picture just how big the front doorway truly is...even the steps up to the front are carved out of the rocks...just incredible....
you leave petra the same way you walk in...through the siq....so the last building you see again is the treasury....and in the afternoon light, it looks different from the morning light when you get there...but is equally as amazing and incredible....i loved this building....it surprised me, even though i had seen it pictures before...they did not do it justice...this place is simply magical.....
we spent an entire day in petra....and even that was not enough...but the next morning we had to head back to israel with a quick stop in wadi rum along the way....the landscape of jordan is completely different from israel....the colors of the rocks and the shape of the mountains are so very different...in this shot again, i was mesmerized by the blue sky...i just don't see that every day in shanghai....
from petra we headed to wadi rum....also known as "valley of the moon" in arabic....wadi stands for valley and rum stands for the word elevated or high....as the highest mountain of jordan is located in this valley....again, more red sandstone....which is just such a contrast to the sky...its truly beautiful...
this part of the desert was actually "soft" sand....you don't get that from the big cliffs, canyons and mountains here...but in this section....it was hard to walk up the big hill...as the sand was like any other desert, soft and you sunk in it when you walked....
we only got to see about 2 hours worth of things here...but everything was amazing and we wished we had the time to see more....there was much evidence throughout the places we went of the people who had been there in history....plus, every now and again you came across green trees and plants...but this tree was completely white....loved it....
above you can see some of the past Nabataean graffiti found on the rocks in the valley...this particular grouping was where bedouins would write their name on the wall when they were passing through in case other bedouins needed to find them...this was a form of communication and a way to see who had come before you during the warmer season when the tribes were more nomadic....
my last shot of the desert is one that is based on placement...it looks like this rock is ready to roll, but i am sure it has been in the same place, in the same position, for thousands of years and i just loved it....i thought it was a fitting end to the time we spent in jordan.....
but of course the last shot has to be one of me with my favorite building...i loved this tomb...actually, i loved everything about petra...the walk in, the first view of this building, the wandering down the old streets and through the old tombs, the meal we had there, the terrific and knowledgeable guide we had....it was just an incredible place to visit and if you do not have it on your must-do list, you really, really, really should add it....this is a fantastic place and i do not think i even half captured what it looked like and felt like to be there...it was simply outstanding....
so even though i was only in jordan for two days....i do think i would go back there...it is a country that seems to have its act together...they promote tourism, they have rulers that care about and for their people, they have amazing natural landscapes to share and they have friendly folks who were helpful and accommodating....what more could you ask for...
i hope you enjoyed this update as much as i enjoyed my time in jordan....i hope all of you have had a great chinese new year....happy year of the horse....i am hoping to have the last update from my xmas trip out sometime in the next few weeks...laos....the laid back jewel of south east asia....drop a line and say hi if you wish....hope you are well
have a fab day :)
dani
