Tag Archives: taxi

One Last Time

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At a Swensen’s in Thailand… hopefully. We may actually get to go to India tomorrow! Swensen’s was pretty much all we did today except for swimming twice. The first time we were at Viva Gardens and Ethan and I swam by ourselves. Well, there were two little boys in the pool too, but they stayed in the shallow end. Ethan and I are such tall people that we could only be in the deep end (1.2 meters). Well, only in the deep end until we raced. We had one really long race at the end: three half-laps with different strokes (the crawl, backstroke, and breaststroke), touching each of the fountains on the spout, and all sorts of crazy things. Ethan eventually won and I was very disappointed.

At Swensen’s we all had chocolate ice cream (of course) and after that Mom and I looked at clothes in the Tesco Lotus (Swensen’s is in the building) while Dad and Ethan lurked. Once done there, we returnd to Viva Gardens one last time, picked up our luggage, and rode in a green taxi (green!) to BS Residence. After Ethan and I did our schoolwork for the day, we went swimming with Dad as Mom ordered supper from The Pizza Company. (Guess what we got?) It was a very successful day! Ciao!

When in Vientiane (Laos)

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Are you starting to see my series of posts called ‘When in {insert city name}’ yet? If you have or haven’t, it is true, there is a method to my (increasing) madness. At any rate, there is new news; we have finally figured out what to do while the Indian Embassy people get us our visas; we will go to Laos. We figured that out last night, and now are in Laos, in our new guesthouse.

Laos:
Laos is a country wedged in between Thailand and Vietnam, with Cambodia at the bottom. Its capitol is Vientiane and that is where we are staying for the next four days. It is very much like Thailand, except for the food, which is (in my opinion) better. Also, their currency is a Kip, and $1 US is worth about 8,000 Kip.

How we got to Laos is something along these lines:

We woke up around 8:00 and got ready to go to the airport so we could catch our flight after going through passport control and security before leaving the country and 11:45. Today was different from yesterday, we actually got our tickets and checked our bags. That was a major improvement. Then we wandered around the big airport in search of the post office, which Eryn insisted was on the 4th floor, but as it turns out, it was on the 6th floor (like the signs said)…..

Once we got that done, we went out and to security on the 5th floor, and my mother insisted (unknowingly) that we should go through the full-body scanner. That was interesting. Then we went on to go to passport control, at passport control, they did nothing very interesting, and we moved on to the 4th floor again (this time on the other side of security) and found our gate, D1. There was a Star Alliance Lounge right down the hall, so we sat in there, eating pastries and drinking hot chocolate, until it was time for our flight.

The flight was supposed to take an hour, but I think it took less than that, but that may be just me. When we got to Laos, we went through immigration and stuff like that, grabbed our baggage, got money (kip) at the ATM, and hopped on a taxi to get to the Vayakorn Guesthouse.

Mista Boon

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Today we got up early (again) to go on a ride with Mr. Boon to the Boatong Waterfall. Once there, we changed into our swimsuits and took off down the steps to one of the lower levels in the warm-ish water. But, since you don’t know what in the world I am talking about, I will describe the waterfall:

The waterfall is made up of four levels, level 1, level 2, level 3, and one that I made up…….Kind of. The top level (1) is the one that you first see when you drive up to park, it is made of limestone and it is surprisingly not slippery. The next level down (2) is about 80 meters down the hill and you take steps to go down to it. There, there are some ankle-deep pools that you can wade in and you can climb the waterfall up to the first level or go down to the third. On the third level down, there is a tall and steep face of the waterfall, but it is still easy to go down, and there are some more ankle-deep pools below it. The level that I made up was the one at the very bottom and it had some deep-ish pools that you could jump into if you decided you wanted to go down some more rocks (or steps, the steps go all the way down).

What we did was skip level 1 because there were a lot of people there, but we stopped at level 2. While at level 2, we climbed up a little and then went down the other side, then waded in the litlle pools before Eryn and I went down the waterfall to level 3 (our parents took the stairs). At level three, I climbed the face a couple of times, and in between, some college age girls wanted their picture with me for some reason. Then we went down to the level that I made up and saw a family jumping in of the edge of a ledge and into a deeper part. I decided to do that and it was a bit colder than in the shallower area. Then Eryn joined me and we both jumped in half a dozen+ times into the water. We (being my father, Eryn, and I) decided that it would be fun to go up, actually, Eryn and I decided, but my dad just followed us. We climbed up steep limestone walls and through shallow pools before reaching the top, where Eryn scraped her toes and started to bleed.

When we arrived at the top, we found my mother sitting there with all of our stuff and we put on our flip-flops and walked up some more stairs to the spring of the stream that created the waterfall. The spring was crystal clear and there were little fish in it. There were also buckets attached to bamboo poles that you could dip into the water and pour on each others heads. We tried out the dippers, and as it turns out, a quart sized amount of water can seem really heavy at the end of a piece of grass.

When we got back to the parking lot area, we saw that a lot more people had come, so we decided to grab ice cream and leave.

Bonjour

Water and Mist make you WET!

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Today we went on a drive with Mr. Dew, a coworker of Mr. Boon and went to a waterfall, at the waterfall, it was all misty because there was so much water coming down, which meant that it was a little bit hard to take a picture because the mist kept coming and getting on your lens……How wet. At the waterfall, there were several different lookout places going up the hill to the waterfall’s top. Eryn and I went up the path to get to the top of the waterfall, but as it turns out, (after we had walked through lots of mud and gone uphill a lot) there wasn’t much of a view because there were so many trees and the rangers had blocked off the “slippery route” that went to the edge of the waterfall. Still, though, I got a couple of good pictures. Also, in the lower parking lot, there were several ice cream stands and Eryn and I got chocolate while my mother had the [last] magnum chocolate bar. Sadly, though, when Eryn and I were almost done with our chocolate cones, we saw (to our disappointment) that the bottom was filled with strawberry jelly, not chocolate. Still, though, it was okay.