Trains, vans, trucks, vw bug, boats, tuk tuks, planes…you name it I was on it.

Happy Thai New Years! And yes, Thais know how to celebrate holidays. Songkhran is the name given to the 3-day water fest, also known as Thai New Years. From what I could gather from the numerous times I tried to get an explanation of the holiday, I gathered something about receiving blessings from the elders, washing Buddha statues, and alleviating the summer heat with ice-cold water. I had heard that the best city to ring in the holiday is Chiang Mai, so we took the overnight train there on the 13th in order to make it there for the next two days of celebrations. Arriving in Chiang Mai we were smart enough to have plastic bagged our backpack because as soon as we were dropped off the water started to splash. Actually is had started to splash the day before when I went to the weekend marked and got drenched by a bucket of ice-cold water- hence being prepared. Day one we took it on, Christina, Patrick and I walked the outer gate of the old city facing oncoming traffic head on. Usually this move is promoted to pedestrians in order to see approaching vehicles, but in our case we just became easy targets to buckets and more buckets of ice-cold water coming from the beds of thousands of people in hundreds of pick-up trucks (I do not lie). For the first few hours we remained unarmed, but caved and bought tiny toilet buckets to attempt to fight back. Needless to say while we were all very impressed at the festivities we decided to watch from a dry Starbucks the next day.

From Chiang Mai we took a bus to the boarder with Laos, spent the night and then took a two-day boat ride down the Mekong River to Luang Prabang. The boat was quite memorable, the first day (6 hours) we rode in the back, by the engine, under a stack of 200 plus backpacks. A comfortable capacity would have been around 150 people, but I am pretty sure they crammed in a few extra dozen. All backpackers, mostly young, lots of tattoos, dreads, flowy garments and marihuana- paradise for people watching. On day two we made it to the boat early in order to fetch a bench for the 8-hour ride. A glorious journey it was, I promise.

Laos is quite small and quaint. Luang Prabang, an old French colonial town, is protected as a UN cultural heritage site. Very cute, very touristy, very much worth two-days on a hot boat. Vang Vieng is a tiny town 5 hours away, up and down and round and round the curviest road I have ever and hopefully will ever take. I made it, but felt sick for the next two days. VV is known for tubing, something that I would have to say Texans do better than Laotians. But then again they did have trapeze swings set up which make for great entertainment and possible deaths- but we are all still alive and can still laugh at Patrick superb summersault off of the first swing. Our final stop in Laos was Vientiane, the capital. NGO work was quite evident, seeing that most of the automobiles were Toyota Land Cruisers with some logo pressed its front side. After our long journey and countless types, hours and class of transportation, we opted to fly Nok airways to Bangkok, a discount airline that paints bright yellow beaks on the front of it’s birds, I mean planes.

A wonderful, eventful and almost perfect way to conclude my year in Thailand (I use almost since I still have 4 days to arrive at complete perfection). I now leave with the blessing of a new year and new hopes in the near future. Por ahora, fair well.