You might have noticed that Simon and I went dark on the
blog during the majority of May. After
such an amazing April, full of travel to rural Hunan province, Tokyo, Thailand,
and Laos, we didn’t have any travel planned for May and being in Shanghai didn’t
feel quite as manageable as it had when we were away every weekend. I think being in Shanghai has been a
challenge for both Simon and I, but in different ways.
For me, I’ve never liked living in cities. Shanghai is home to at least 20 million people,
no matter how you count it, and we live in the busiest part of the whole
city. We are close to “Xintandi”, which
is the most Western upscale tourist area, full of brands you would recognize
like Cartier and Burberry and many Western-style restaurants. But there isn’t a sense of community or “culture”
here, whatever that may mean. And while
Shanghai has done a good job of maintaining green space (probably by knocking
down people’s homes), it is easy to forget the sky exists when I am surrounded
by so many tall buildings.
Not speaking the language is also a bigger challenge than I
expected it would be. It’s weird being
surrounded by 20 million other people but feeling isolated and alone because I
don’t understand what anyone else is saying.
The street signs have both Chinese and English characters on them, so I
can read those and navigate OK, but asking for directions or even saying “excuse
me” when I accidentally bump into someone takes additional skill. I’ve picked up a few phrases such as “hello –
ni hao”, “good morning – zao shang hao”, and “see you tomorrow – ming tian jian”,
and I get a kick out of saying the slang “zao” (aka “morning”) to people when I
get into the office. And while I
expected all of my office conversations – even group lunches – would be 100% in
English, that hasn’t been the case.
Depending on the group and the day, the conversations can range from 90%
Mandarin to 99% English. It’s
frustrating to be trying to understand and connect and build relationships but
not being able to understand.
The view from dinner at a hot pot place. The waitress is auctioning off the giant, live crab in front of her by yelling through the microphone in Mandarin
As you may remember, Simon was planning on coming to stay in
Shanghai during the middle of my rotation but ended up coming at the beginning
to help me get settled. When we got back
from Laos, Simon hit his two-month mark and it was clear he needed a chance to
recharge and that he should head back to NYC to see his family. It was really hard saying goodbye two weeks
ago, but I knew it was important for him to spend some time in New York and I
trusted that I could make Shanghai work by myself. The past two weeks have been pretty low
key. I get home from work after 7p every
day and am in bed reading every night by 10p, so there isn’t that much free
time during the week. During the
weekends, I’ve tried to stay busy and meet up with friends for brunch or
shopping or go explore a new part of Shanghai.
This week I even went to an a cappella concert put on by a Minnesotan
group and it was nice to feel like I was part of a group again.
During one of these excursions, I found my new favorite part
of the city. It’s called the “West Bund”
and there is a bike path along the river that is the closest Shanghai can come
to the Charles in Boston. There was a
cool contemporary/ancient art museum (thanks Clara for the recommendation) and
also an alternative scene. I found
people slack lining and dancing in a drum circle, things I never knew were
possible in Shanghai. It was nice to be
along the river, seeing all the dogs and their owners, and get a little bit of
fresh air. It’s kind of a pain to get to
from my apartment, but I’ll definitely be back there again soon.
Who knew slack lining had made it to Shanghai?
Partner yoga in the park
A nice walking track along the river
I also found kombucha! In Boston, Simon and I were making our own kombucha and it is definitely a sign of home for me. I bought it from an online grocery store built for expats and am so thankful for Lizzie's All Natural!
In the meantime, I’ve been looking forward to another
trip. This one will be different from
all the others. I’m headed to meet my
sister in Brisbane, Australia and spend a week touring around the Great Barrier
Reef. Neither of us have ever been to
Australia and we’ve also never done a vacation just the two of us (that I can
remember) so I am sure it will be a blast.
It will be really great seeing her, and being in a place where I can
(mostly) understand what people are talking about around me. I’m hoping being with family in a more
familiar place doing activities I love (snorkeling, hiking, rafting) will help
me refresh and come back ready to embrace everything Shanghai has to
offer. And Simon gets back to Shanghai
two days after I get back, so I have a lot to look forward to in the next few
weeks!
When Simon and I were wandering around “downtown” Luang
Prabang before our last adventure day, we stopped into the many tour companies trying
to figure out what we wanted to do. To be honest, we maybe had one-too-many-days
in LP, at least for people who don’t like group tours and don’t want to ride
elephants, and we weren’t sure how to spend our time. We talked to a few companies about options
and weren’t impressed with any of them.
I think we were about ready to go back to the B&B and figure it out
in the morning when we walked by this beautiful storefront with giant pictures
of elephants, beautiful wood furnishings, and one employee talking to another
English-speaking couple about their trip.
Their sign outside talked about an “elephant sanctuary”, and I was
intrigued.
Simon saw the look that was growing on my face and asked if
I wanted to go see elephants. I told him
“we already did that in Thailand”. He said
“I know, but we can do it again if you want to.
Would it make you happy to do that again?” My eyes lit up, I giggled mischievously, and
a smile came on to my face and kept growing and growing. I think I even started jumping up and down I
was so excited about the possibility.
(Even as I write this, I get tears in my eyes because I loved it so
much.)
We sat down inside the store and waited (impatiently) for
the other couple to finish their conversation. I heard the employee mention
something about a baby elephant and a tour group of four people or less. When the couple paid for the tour and the
employee was free to talk to us, he came over and started talking about what a
wonderful tour they had. He told us
there were three options – a half-day with 3 elephants, a half day with 2
elephants and a baby, or a full-day. Even though it was more money then we planned to spend, and we had already spent a day with elephants, Simon encouraged me to say yes and I did. We figured we hadn’t seen a baby elephant
yet, so we picked that one. At this
point I was so so overwhelmed with excitement that we were going to get to see
the elephants again. That night I could
barely sleep.
Can you spot the elephants next to the shed?
The next morning, a tour van picked us up and drove us ~45
minutes to the elephant sanctuary. On
the way, we met our tour guide (whose name I don’t remember) and also Mr. Prasop,
the founder of the company, who happened to be riding in the van with us. It turned out that Mr. Prasop has worked with
the founder of Elephant Nature Park, so he knew what we were talking about when
we mentioned our elephant experience from a few days earlier. We asked lots of questions about how he
started working with elephants and what their philosophy is for the sanctuary,
but got the impression there was more to the story.
When we arrived at the sanctuary, we were surrounded by
glorious green mountains. We sat down
for breakfast with the founder and the two other tourists on our trip, and Mr. Prasop
began telling us about himself and MandaLao.
Mr. Prasop has worked with elephants for decades and only recently began
focusing on conservation tourism rather than riding/circus act-type tourism. He told us he used to be harsh on the
elephants, using violence to “teach” them.
The most profound part of his story was when he mentioned Dr. Joyce
Poole, who is a guru-like figure in his story. When he worked with Dr. Poole, she asked him
if he talks to elephants. He said “of
course I talk to them.” She asked him if
he knew what they were saying back to him, and he was stumped by that. She taught him how to read elephants’ body
language and understand what they mean by the way they carry their ears, move
their trunk, or stomp their feet. He
said it made him realize how smart elephants were and think differently about
how to work with elephants. This
exposure to Dr. Poole’s way of thinking changed the course of his career, and
he opened an elephant conservation center in Thailand to start carrying for and
protecting this amazing species. He also
helped bring a new way of elephant training to Southeast Asia, replacing hooks,
hammers, and other weapons with positive reinforcement. It was amazing that he was so open about the “bad”
part of his career but it made him even more credible.
Throughout his whole talk, he had some pieces of paper in
front of him of different colors and sizes and seemed like he was playing with
them idly. When he began talking about
his new venture at MandaLao, though, I realized they weren’t random pieces of
paper. He told us that he was visiting
Laos when he learned what a terrible state the elephant population is. We learned that the original name for Laos
was “Lan Xang,” which means “land of a million elephants”, but due to decades
of war (and landmines) and ongoing deforestation, the elephant population has dwindled to a
very small number of wild elephants. He
said there is one elephant population in a national park that is about to hit
the point of no return and biologists told him they need at least 40 more
elephants in order to keep the population alive.
That’s where MandaLao and the elephant kindergarten comes
in. Mr. Prasop opened up a large piece
of paper that covered the table. “This
is the wild,” he said. He then placed a
small piece of paper on the corner of the large piece. “This is the elephant college, where
elephants go to learn to become wild. And these (the bookmark-sized pieces) are the elephants." He
said you can’t just take domestic elephants and put them in the national park
and hope they’ll survive. You have to
teach them to be wild, to fend for themselves.
The “college” is a space where the elephants don’t interact directly with
humans anymore, but human caretakers do enhance the environment to help the elephants
make the transition. The elephant “students”
can freely enter the national park, but can also find food in the college if
they can’t find it on their own. The
hope is that the college students will eventually join the existing herd,
breed, and bring new DNA to the dwindling population. MandaLao has also set up an “elephant
kindergarten,” which is what we visited, where they begin the education by not
ever riding the elephants or asking them to do tricks. They hope Kip, the baby elephant, and his
mother can be some of the first elephants released into the national park in 5-10
years.
Being a system dynamics nerd, I loved the holistic way Mr.
Prasop approached this idea. He talked
about how to reduce “HEC” – human elephant conflict – by giving the villagers around
the national park jobs that involve tourism, so that they celebrate the
(hopefully) growing elephant population rather than try to kill them. The national park will also take out crop
insurance for the farmers, so that if the elephants trample or eat the crops, the
farmers will be paid back. But
regardless of how compelling Mr. Prasop was (and he was fascinating to listen
to), I could see the elephants across the river and was glad when we finally
got to get up and head down to the water.
Crossing the river, walking up the shore, and waiting for
the elephants to arrive was just as amazing as it was in Thailand. Except this time there was a baby elephant
along with his mother and “auntie”! Kip was
hard to see because the women were protecting him a little bit, but when he
finally got to us we were overwhelmed by his cuteness. When the elephants reached the feeding area
and reached out their trunks, the two other tourists were a little shy but
Simon and I knew exactly what to do. We
reached into the baskets of food, carried as much as we could, and quickly fed
bananas and cucumbers to the waiting elephants.
Kip was definitely making
trouble, trying to get over the barrier and get closer to the food, but it
seemed like the older elephants were showing him that he should stay on the
other side.
Here he was halfway over the barrier
After feeding, we went down to the river and helped the
elephants bathe. This part Kip
definitely didn’t like, and he walked away from us so we couldn’t reach
him. The other elephants seemed to enjoy
it, and participated by using their trunks to give themselves a shower as
well. The mahouts (elephant trainers)
loved “accidentally” sending their buckets of water on the tourists rather than
the elephants, but it was a hot day so we didn’t mind.
After the river, we spent about an hour walking through the
forest with the elephants. There was a
path for the elephants to go on, and a path for us to go on so it felt like an
adventure because we were constantly meeting up with the elephants then losing
them for a second then meeting up with them again. At one point a mahout pulled out a musical
instrument and played a song while he was walking that was very pretty. Kip kept pretty close to his mother but also
liked playing around. He spent five
minutes wrapping himself around a strong vine and trying to break it, it looked
like.
The guide told us that when it’s a cloudy day and Kip isn’t
as hot, he can be a real big troublemaker because he has more energy. Thankfully he is small enough that it’s OK,
but I think they will be glad when he is released to the wild because I think
he will always be less well-behaved than the elephants who still have a memory
of pain from not following instructions.
Kip has never known real captivity, so he’s the closest thing I’ll ever
know to a “wild” elephant.
Our time with the elephants was much shorter than I would
have liked, but they can only do half-day tours with Kip and his mother because
his mother is still eating massive amounts of food to provide for both of
them. Kip is also going through the
positive reinforcement training I mentioned earlier so they need to leave time
for the training as part of his day. It
was hard to say goodbye to the elephants but I was so glad that we were able to
spend another few hours with these majestic creatures. Mr. Prasop told us we could come back and
volunteer in the national park, tracking the wild elephant populations to learn
about their behaviors and the members in their herd. I hope we can go back some day and maybe
visit Kip at the elephant ‘college” or even in the “real world” once he’s
graduated. Until then, we have dozens of
pictures and memories to last a lifetime of our morning at MandaLao.
As our plane began its final descent from Chiang Mai
(Thailand) to Luang Prabang (Laos), I immediately noticed how forested, hilly,
and comparatively undeveloped Luang Prabang was compared to Chiang Mai. I was thrilled that we had decided to spend 6
nights in Laos as I was sure we would find more adventures than we had time to
do. Being the planner that I am, I had
already figured out how we might spend our time: one day kayaking, one day at
the waterfalls, one day at a rice farm, etc.
After getting out of the airport, finding a taxi, and
getting to our B&B,I was surprised by how small the town was. I started to get a little worried that there might
not be as much to do as we wanted. The
first few days were magical: hiking across the river in Ban Xieng Mane Village
was a good reminder of “the real Laos”, and the waterfalls were beautiful. (See Simon’s post for those adventures).
However, in our first two days we more or less exhausted the
adventures that we could organize on our own.
Most of the tourism in Laos is built around hiring companies to take you
places rather than planning and guiding your own trips. My family has always been adventurous, going
to a different place to vacation each year since I was 12, but we almost never
pay someone to organize our adventure.
Couple that sense of independence with Simon’s desire to avoid group
tours and we were starting to feel like our options in Laos might be more
limited than we realized. Plus, the
tours we did see were significantly more expensive than we had planned. Still not expensive by US standards
necessarily ($50 for a day-long kayaking trip), but more than we could afford
if we were planning to take a tour every day.
While trying to plan day 3 on our second night, we went to many of the
tourism agencies on the main road and talked to them about what activities we
might do. We came to realize they are
almost all selling the same trips: the waterfall, elephants, and Pak Se Ou
cave, just in different orders.
But somewhere I saw mention of a kayaking trip and decided
it would be nice to get out on the water.
The Mekong flows nearby, and I had done another trip on the Mekong in Ho
Chi Minh, Vietnam, so it would be cool to see the river at a different point in
its journey. I talked to 5 different
agencies offering kayaking trips and found the cheapest one. (I then checked TripAdvisor to make sure it had
decent reviews.) They told us we were
the only ones who had signed up so we were psyched to be on a “group” tour that
was just the 2 of us. We paid for the
trip and went back to the B&B for a good night’s sleep.
The next morning we were picked up in a van with 6 other
people and were disappointed our group tour had gotten more full. We didn’t get much explanation from the
driver or coordinator in the front seats but were driven away from town. At a seemingly random point in the road,
there was a truck pulled over in front of us with two kayaks on the top. Our van pulled over and Simon and I were told
to get out – everyone else was going somewhere else. This was good news – it meant that it was in
fact just the two of us plus a guide. We
crammed into the small truck, drove a little longer, and eventually stopped at
the put-in. Our kayak guide Lei had us help
him carry the two kayaks down to the river and get set up. When he found out we had some kayaking
experience, he opted not to give us any type of instruction about safety, where
we were going, or how long it would be.
We just hopped in the kayaks and away we went.
Our day kayaking was very nice. It was cooler down on the river (with the air
temperature nearing 100) and I was able to swim once as well. It was nice to see local life along the
river: kids as young as two or three swimming by themselves, farmland, and cows
grazing near the banks. The river is surrounded by impressive limestone cliffs on all sides. I can imagine some day rock climbing might be a new tourist activity, but for now Lei said he only knows of one foreigner who has climbed the cliffs.
We stopped for
lunch at the kayak guide’s village, and we learned that the whole tour company
is run by his village. This was probably
the worst part of the day, as the tour company also provides elephant rides and
the elephants were right outside the lunch spot, chained up and unmoving. Comparing those elephants to those we had
seen in Thailand was depressing, but I guess there was some value in being
reminded of how most elephants are treated and realizing that I can see the
difference between a happy (happier?) and sad elephant. We left the lunch spot sooner than our guide
wanted us to and told him we’d meet him down by the river when he was ready to
go.
After lunch, we crossed the river in our boat and went in to
the Pak Ou caves, which I knew had mixed reviews on TripAdvisor. There was a little kerfuffle about the
tickets with one of the townspeople working there; our guide had paid but there
were still people asking us to buy tickets.
I think some people end up paying twice when that happens, but we knew
that we didn’t need to pay again. There
are upper and lower caves there, and they have thousands of Buddha statues of
all shapes and sizes. It is said that
you must visit the caves before taking a trip on the river, as it will give you
good luck and guarantee your safe passage.
Similar to Simon’s comment that it “felt like watching a foreign film
without subtitles,” I could tell there was something special happening, but I
couldn’t tell what. I had lots of
questions about what we were seeing and what it meant, but no answers. Talking about religion can be a very
sensitive topic so we didn’t feel we could ask our guide Lei to tell us about
it.
See the white stairs in the middle of the picture across the river? That's the entrance to one of the caves
Just a few of the thousands of sculptures
We did, however, end up asking Lei some questions about his
village and his life near the end of the trip and it was nice to hear about
it. His family has lived in the same
village for 50+ years and his whole family is involved in the tour
company. His favorite job is driving, “because
it’s the easiest”, and he wears long sleeves every day so that he doesn’t get
sunburned out on the water so much. I am
sure there is so much more to his world and his hopes and dreams, but this was
honestly more than we learned about almost anybody else we met in Laos.
The last part of the trip was the Whisky Village. It was the
low season even for this “village” which has set itself up as a tourist
destination for souvenirs, but there were maybe only three stalls open when we
were there. We got a chance to sample
Lao Lao, which is the local alcohol and I found mixes pretty well with fruit juice
for a rum-type cocktail. Simon checked
out the bottles with reptiles (snakes, crocodiles, scorpions) inside, and Lei
told us that each reptile is said to infuse the bottle with different medicinal
properties.
After the Whisky Village, we returned back to Luang Prabang satisfied with our “group tour” day. We seem to find our way to a pizza place in every country we visit, so we figured pizza made by a Canadian living in Laos at Pizza Phan Luang would be worth a shot. We crossed the river on a bamboo bridge (which of course there was a ticket for) to get there and loved the ambience - it is basically set up in the owner's back garden. We enjoyed our pizza and talked about options for day 4. We thought it might be time to check out the rice village and decided we would head back into town on the bamboo bridge to talk to the tour companies about arranging a trip...
