Rambling Onwards

There were five tired and hungry travellers hunting down breakfast at 8:30am on Vang Vieng's main street after Lao National Day, the sleepiest morning that Vang Vieng ever saw. About one two three* month ago, that was us.
*I've been terrible with uploading photos so this has changed from one, to two, to three months. #cries.

From our last day in Vang Vieng, Laos - the day we hired motorbikes for a second time, went to a cave and proceeded to sit on platforms with our feet dangling in the river. And yes, I'm the tiny one at the back.

Thinking back about it, those precious few weeks overseas feel like a lifetime ago - I've settled back into Sydney, gone back to work, struggled to sleep for the right amount of hours and somehow being in another country feels very normalised. In hindsight, I feel like my experience as a volunteer at SAE LAO (read it first) wasn't very impactful as a short-term volunteer due to the circumstances with the government banning SAE LAO from teaching during the time I was there, but I do think that it was a heavily eye opening experience about the world we live in and how lucky I am to have all the opportunities I've had as a kid and the luxuries we take for granted in the first world.

Day 14 to 16: Luang Prabang, Laos

Midday, Main Street Luang Prabang.

Evening, Main Street Luang Prabang.

Luang Prabang is my favourite Laotian city. It's located four hours north of Vang Vieng by bus on an albeit very bumpy and at times, broken, road through some amazing, picturesque mountains and the quaint city is located on the intersection of two rivers - the Mekong River (which we spent a decent amount of time in when we were in Vang Vieng) and Nam Khan. It's more developed than the other areas we visited in Laos - the streets were cleaner, there were school children on WeChat on their phones and washing my feet in the shower was finally worthwhile. The tuk tuks there were smaller - usually three wheeled affairs - and we put our Lao haggling skills to the test, haggling our way through the markets for anything from silk (or so they say) scarves to bookmarks to keyring elephants. Everyone sells the same stuff - and some vendors will offer you a price that can be haggled down by almost half if you push hard enough.

There's also a food alley where you can grab dinner (noodles, BBQ meat, dumplings etc) and Lao desserts - except I was plagued by crippling stomach cramps that made me want to hurl over the last two days #travelbug. Quite sure I got sick more times overseas than I have in the last while with the fever and the stomach cramps.
We also saw a huge avocado (two times the size of the ones we see in Sydney) which ensued some frenzied photo taking. We also managed to find a solid cafe that served Lao coffee (with condensed milk of course) and some decent pastries.

Cakes at the night markets.

Lao Coffee!

Luang Prabang seems like a sleepy town during the day - but at night it comes alive thanks to the daily night markets, crowds and the Luang Prabang Film Festival that was running during the two nights we were there. Watching a film in Lao (we were too far away to read the English subtitles) was an interesting experience - the film was quite melodramatic and long, but it reminded me of Asian dramas (albeit production was much cheaper) and telenovas in terms of values and entertainment. In all honesty I was quite tired by the end of the first day so I ended up falling asleep partway during the film (it was over two hours long) but I'm glad we stayed til the end.
We saw Christy off at the airport the next morning before getting picked up by Elephant Village Sanctuary for our 1 Day Elephant Mahout Experience - another surreal experience on par with the kayak-zipline-tubing day tour we did in Vang Vieng and well worth my $142AUD. I learnt how to climb onto an elephant (the elephants are well trained to lift their foot up to help you but wow still took strength haha), say the Lao words that mean 'go', 'stop', 'left', 'right' etc and we rode the elephants into the nearby river & gave them a bath later in the day involving a lot of splashing.

Fun fact #1: Elephants flap their ears when they're happy.
Fun fact #2: Elephants splash you back if they are enjoying their bath. 

Me and my elephant for the day (and Mahout guide riding on top).

Baby elephant! (like 3 years old though)

Riding an elephant for the first time.

Bath time!

Our guides also ferried us down the river by boat to a local waterfall/natural looking swimming pool - I managed to graze myself climbing up the waterfall but the water was super refreshing and the falls made a great massage. Comparing the facilities here to Blue Lagoon in Vang Vieng also made me realise that this area was definitely much more developed - but in terms of overall I hear Laos is still behind their neighbours Vietnam and Cambodia.

Being a third wheel #noshame.

Practically a natural swimming pool with included waterfalls that are great for massages.

Day 17 to 19: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia & home
I was sad to leave Luang Prabang - but at the same time I was eager to be rid of the stomach pains and spend some time in Kuala Lumpur as well. We got to traverse the city by foot and metro (their metro system isn't that great tbh) and we were treated to a beautiful view of the KL skyline in the infinity pool in our Airbnb apartment block. We also did a decent amount of makeup and skincare shopping, ate street food, sussed out the best places for exchange rates and made it to Batu Caves - but couldn't climb up the stairs to the top because I wasn't wearing the appropriate clothing.

Batu Caves! Protip: Wear long pants and a shirt covering your shoulders when visiting Batu Caves and other places with cultural significance.

Infinity pool by day.

Infinite lights by night.

Arriving home was an odd experience. It felt good to be back but at the same time I felt disconnected with the people from the life that my friends led when I was away and it was hard to just explain to others how I felt and how life-changing these kinds of experiences are. You always here about how travelling changes you and how you perceive things back home - but this is the first time I've experienced it. There's something about walking in pitch darkness in the country, staring at how bright the stars are and being scared shitless about getting jumped that brings people together and it's not something you can easily share. People back home don't really hear about how exhausted/lonely/bored you might be, and similarly it's hard to describe how exhilarating it is to zipline through the tree tops knowing that the only way to brake is to reach up and clamp down on the rubber tire bit with your hands.

For weeks after I got back, I felt like I'd caught the travel bug. I wanted to go back to SE Asia, visit Japan/South Korea like a lot of people my age were doing and someday traverse South America. I read an article recently about 2 guys travelling for 8 months across SE Asia, China, Russia and into Europe and now one day I want to travel Russia via train. I always wanted to go on exchange as well - and hopefully one day soon I'll make that happen, even though the thought of going overseas and living there for at least 4 months scares me. My one solace was my family road trip to South Australia via Broken Hill, Adelaide & Melbourne which was really cool as well, even though so many hours was spent in a car and I despised fast food by the end of it - but I did get to spend NYE in another city.

But hey, I believe that one day I'll make it.

Where do you want to travel to?

With love, Sarah x

Read Part 1 of this trip.

Thanks for being great travel buddies & for all the great mems - and credits to these guys for some of the photos I posted (especially the higher quality ones since I took all of my photos on my phone).

I don't know where to start. It's hard to summarise three weeks overseas - travelling and somehow finding your way through the countryside, four cities and two countries - into a acceptable length of text. Even though it got a bit tedious with the fundraising and planning during semester, our post-exams trip was well worth it in the end.

I don't remember who took this photo. Rip.

If you didn't catch on from my sudden spike in instagram posts (or you never read this post), I went on a volunteering/travel trip to Laos organised by Global Village @ Arc UNSW. We stayed with SAE LAO Project, about 20 minutes from Vang Vieng by tuk tuk, which is essentially a ute with a roof and sides for the tray and their equivalent of a taxi.

Here's a map of our travel route in Laos, which is also a well-worn path among backpackers:

I'm so grateful that we did take the time to do our research and get the most out of our short time in Laos - here's a snapshot of our adventures as we backpacked (well, suitcased) through this amazing country.

Day 1 to 2: Sydney -> Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (3hr stopover) -> Vientiane (Lao Capital) -> Vang Vieng

We left Sydney on a night flight with AirAsia and spent the rest of the night travelling back in time - first three hours, and then another one even though Laos is north-east of Malaysia. #wut

Cheap carrier flights are good and bad - they're cheap, but that means they're cheap. That means no inflight entertainment, you have to purchase any food, they don't give you blankets - nothing. It's alright for short or night time flights though, since you're just sleeping most of the time anyway.

There were camera wars, racing our way through security and running down walking escalators - and eventually, sleep. We landed in Vientiane at around 9am local time and although initially it was a bit scary not understanding the language, it's fine to communicate in broken English works (until you learn a bit of their language).

A street in Mi'xay, Vientiene. Those electrical wires look intense.

We managed to get a taxi to Soutchai travel agency in Mi'xay to catch our minibus to Vang Vieng just fine. Unfortunately we had a hiccup with accomodation the first night, but after wandering the streets with our suitcases trailing behind us making enough noise to announce us as stuck-up tourists and wondering where we would end up if we couldn't find somewhere to sleep, we finally found a place to stay (but hey this makes a great story).

Our minibus driver stopped several times at roadside local markets like this to pick up a chip-like substance for the Lao people on our bus. It was pretty funny tbh. They also drive on the right side of the road.

THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW:

• Visas for Aussies are $30USD
• A prepaid sim card with about 5GB internet for a month was about $10-12AUD (get one you'll thank yourself)
• I used a Commbank travel money card (free for students) - we found the lowest withdrawal fee was at JBD ATMs if you withdrew less than $2m, but ANZ ATMs give you a good deal especially if you're an ANZ customer if you withdraw more than $2m in one go. Would recommend withdrawing $1m at a time, something which I didn't do so I wasted a bit more money on fees. 
• There are a lot of travel agencies, so shop around (or haggle) to get yourself the best deal for buses and tours and bike/motorbike hire
• People there are nice, but you're going to get ripped off so haggle your heart out for tuk tuks, food, accommodation, clothes, souvenirs etc. You might not have as much luck at convenience or legit looking stores though. 
• Cheapest accommodation we got was $30.000 kip a night per person (with some haggling and luck) but the most expensive was somewhere between $60.000-$70.000 kip a night per person as a budget traveller.
• Bring a backpack rather than a suitcase. It will make your life easier. 

Day 3 to 13: SAE LAO / Vang Vieng & surrounds

The first morning, three of us woke up super early and went exploring/looking for breakfast. We stumbled across a local store serving noodles, soup, fresh rice noodles and an assortment of breads, and were treated to a spectacular sunrise.

A bowl of super tasty rice noodles (laksa soup but not spicy I think) and a few Asian rolls (the kind that goes with congee) cost about 20.000-30.000kip, $3-5AUD! We went back to this place later in our trip because it was so good.

As per our luck, we missed the tuk tuk that we were supposed to be on (and already paid for) and we ended up paying around 20.000kip each for another tuk tuk to get to SAE LAO - all because we thought the tuk tuk left at 10am instead of 9am. Whoops.

Where we hung out & ate our meals at SAE LAO.

First lunch at SAE LAO!

There were four adorable kittens and mama cat, and our resident dog, Cafe, who lived with us too. Cafe is such a smart dog - and because he has such a cute reaction we spoiled with head scratches (especially behind the ears) when we were there. We also shared the site with mama pig & her piglets, ducks, chickens and fish, some of which were caught & eaten while we were there.

There's also a switch that pumps water into a water tank for use in taps and showers - we would yell 'bom min nan!' if we needed water and 'nam teng' if the water was overflowing. (Disclaimer: I can't remember if that's the accurate spelling lol - Christy was our Lao expert).

Our main volunteering job was meant to be teaching, but unfortunately we weren't allowed to since the Lao PDR government had banned SAE LAO from teaching English classes to the local school kids. When we got there it'd been a month like this already, and the education coordinators were hard at work trying to get the syllabus rewritten for approval. We ended up helping with other SAE LAO onsite projects (a filter for the kitchen, start building a shelf and a small hydroponics style nursery), harvesting the rice fields and a fundraiser in town.
Edit: As of end of January 2017 they are back up and running!

Hard at work on our water filter for the kitchen!

Helping with a fundraiser at La La Land Bar one afternoon.

Even though we look like we're chilling, the rice fields was tough and it really made me appreciate the food we have and how easy it is for us in Australia - it got quite hot even though the rice farming sessions were 7-9am and 3-5pm. It's also something where everyone in the community jumps in to help out with. We're also surrounded by mountains everywhere in the countryside, it's beautiful. | Photos from resident photographer, Christy.

I enjoyed meeting and spending time with the other short-term and long-term volunteers, and it was nice to have our meals together as a family. Cooking was rather fun, even though I managed to burn the tips of two fingers and was quite uncertain of how my cooking would turn out. We had our own 'ricefields' song thanks to Elodie, a nurse/singer from France, and we had fun going into town, having dinner together and then hitting up a bar or two before Buddha days or if someone was leaving. I miss sitting in the back of a truck (ute) and feeling the wind whip around us (although it must feel like that for dogs) and and doing things that you would never dream of doing in suburban Australia like sitting on the top rack of a tuk tuk at night, or hiring a motorbike and riding around town & to waterfalls.

Just casually riding on the top of a tuk tuk. | Photo: Christy

Buddha days are the equivalent of our Sunday - except which day it's on changes from week to week. It's a day of rest for the Lao people - a day where no one does any hard labour, which equalled a day off from volunteering for us.

There were two while we were with SAE LAO - the first we spent motorbiking to Kaeng Ngui Waterfall (5km down a dirt track with a short hike) before exploring town, haggling down some cool pairs of pants, finding a cute restaurant for dinner where you sit cross legged, and took a tuk tuk back. Bike hire was around 60.000kip I think? And 10.000kip worth of fuel would have been enough but we were ambitious and bought around 15.000kip worth of fuel instead - only to never reach our second destination.

Started our own bikie gang!

Contemplating Kaeng Ngui Waterfall.

The second Buddha Day we booked ourselves a Kayak-Cave Tubing-Kayak 9am-4pm day tour including a decent lunch (our guides killed two chickens for chicken skewers), great tour guides & tuk tuk transfers for 80.000kip (around $13AUD). We were really lucky - we booked it with Wonderful Tours the night before after doing some haggling/price comparing and they also put us on the wrong tour group so we got ziplining (70.000kip/$12AUD) for free!

All decked out for our zipline around the treetops - it took about 45mins to complete the whole thing and there was something like 8 ziplines? Yeah good fun. | Photo: Andrew

Are we bikie gang enough yet?

We also checked out the night life - we found that there's two good clubs - Sakura Bar and Viva's. They look quite derelict in the day but it's great at night - and what's better is that Sakura gave out free Lao Whisky mixers between 8-9pm! They also have balloons containing nitrous oxide for 20.000kip - also popular. Reggae Bar is also where you go for shrooms and other stuff - and they've always got reggae music playing. We bought soju from the convenience store for 20.000kip a bottle (~$3AUD) and made friends with a bar owner who let us do soju shots at the bar - and as you would expect a few of us got drunk that night, along with another night where we managed to sneak soju into a club in cider bottle. We took pancakes as drunk food (since there was nothing fried at that time of night) and I already miss the food from the street vendors.

Good ol' sandwich from a street store - they range from 10.000kip to 20.000kip but of course you can haggle.

Another classic - although this is a savory bacon cheese pancake for around 10.000-15.000kip. Most pancakes are sweet.

If I'm honest, it was difficult at first to accept that my feet were going to get dirty and wet (from the leaking kitchen sink) which made me feel a little like a clean freak, but after the first few days I stopped thinking so much about it - and by the end I cared a lot less. I feel lucky that it wasn't too much of a culture shock - I didn't find the flat floored shower-bathroom too weird thanks to having stayed in similar places in Guangzhou, China. Quite a few funny things happened in the bathroom - the sink fell off the wall; water would run straight from the basin to the floor (ie no drain); one girl decided she was impatient and washed all of her clothes with powder and stomping all over them; and we ran out of water halfway through showers, a luxury I do appreciate in Sydney.

Volunteering in another country was such a worthwhile experience I wouldn't have gotten anywhere else - from all the new things I saw and experienced, the people I met, learning their language and just being in such a drastically different but beautiful place - and I am so grateful to my angst which told me to apply for it last semester, even if I didn't know anyone else doing it. The experience itself is something I would recommend and it was well worth the money (was relatively cheap). Thanks to our coordinator, Austin, for organising and to my GV fam for the amazing experience.

Saying goodbye to SAE LAO.

Ready for the truck ride out to town!

The GV crew with Cafe, Sae Lao's resident dog.

I also had some fun travelling to Luang Prabang & Kuala Lumpur afterwards which I've written about in another post to avoid making this excessively long. If you do have questions please shoot me a message - trips like these are such worthwhile experiences. It'll change how you see the world (not kidding).

Until next time!

With love, Sarah x

Read Part 2 of this trip.

Last photo we took together at Luang Prabang airport - bye Christy!

It's been about four months since I've written (or had the capacity to write) something on this blog but after spending a lot of time at home this week and a lot of time just doing nothing during the midsem (even though I had four weeks to catch up on), I finally feel like I can. It's hard a lot of the time since I don't have anything substantial to say especially if I'm living and breathing revue, uni and work - but it's good to have time again (even if it means procrastinating).

I am quite happy with this photo. #photographyadventures Thanks to my sister for being a great model without wanting to be xoxo. She also has a great book blog, so check it out.

My dad decided to bundle the family in the car and drive us down to Port Botany/La Perouse on Sunday and the result was a day by the seaside and a lot of photos. Even though this was meant to be family time, I ended up wandering off on my own (or with my sister) and we kinda just took a lot of photos and I spent a lot of time watching a couple try to take wedding shots down on the rocks. I honestly felt bad for her since she was trying to navigate those rocks in high heels - but it's all part of the things you do for art. They'll have some amazing photos for sure.

My dad shipped us off (in a car) to Port Botany, giving us about 15 minutes notice. It was nice watching planes take off and land, and ships arrive and leave the harbour - it was surprisingly calming.

Actually, my family make good photo subjects.

So what's been happening?

Law Revue has come and gone along with the more insane highs and lows (compared to last year), I became a Producer for Med Revue and I signed up for something called Global Village, meaning you can expect a lengthy post in December about my experience as a volunteer for SAE LAO in Laos. I stayed in Bondi for a week with a friend and that was the most fun I've had for while, and I've realised that my eating patterns over the last two months were terrible, meaning that my body would crash and I would lack energy a lot of the time. I started a new job in marketing located a few minutes walk from the famous Bar Luca (literally the most amazing burgers in Sydney), I lost some demerit points for a really stupid reason and it's been a tough juggling act between holding onto some friendships, making new ones and letting a relationship grow. But I think it's all worked out, in the most part.

I've also been putting a lot less of my life online - maybe it's because I no longer feel a need to (but let's be real, it's just too time consuming). Maybe this is because studying social media technologies in an arts course also puts me off (trust me, I've written an essay about selfies) or maybe it's to do with turning the big 20. Either way, live life how you want to because you can still enjoy life - which is the most important part.

Yeah, this was actually a candid. I look somewhat awkward in the posing one - but hey at least I didn't have to struggle and walk on rocks in 10cm heels. | Photo: Katrina Wu

I actually spent a chunk of my time watching a bride and groom take their wedding photos and I didn't know whether to laugh or feel sorry for the bride when she was trying to walk on rocks in 10cm heels in a wedding dress. It looked like a massive struggle and I'm glad she eventually took off her shoes - but it just makes me think, those shoes will be ruined. Ruined for art? I think so.

I also spent some time people watching - I find that peaceful even though it sounds slightly creepy. It's not though, I promise.

La Perouse & the 'Wikipedia bridge'. So beautiful and peaceful, despite all the traffic, trouble finding parking and the abundance of people.

The warmer weather makes me want to hit up some beaches or new, scenic places with friends and have a nice day chilling or exploring, but inside (aha) I know this won't happen until November with all the assessments, exams and events happening in the next month and half. Somehow, it's just not the same with family, but it is different in its own way.