What would you do in a rest day?
■ Wifi is important!!!
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| The corner french cafe and the massage parlor |
In the GCH, the radio for the mobile phone is only available in the nerd corner and camp2.
This is where to book Inthira Thakhek
So climbers want to send an email to the family and friends back home... some climbers are traveling around the world, like a world tour, so they had to contact to the family back home time to time when they can.The wifi is very handy since you don't really need any SIM card if you have a wifi network.
SIM card is available in GCH and in the downtown.
In GCH, you pay a bit more but that is so insignificant, when SIM card itself is so cheap. You have to buy some data card to pay for the data download too.
Even with the SIM card, I can not send my emails as quickly as I do in Japan, and blog updates was soooooo slow so I prefered to do my email exchange all at once in the free wifi places.
In this entire trip, I was very comfortable to get a wifi, in any place. Narita airport had wifi, Dong Muang had wifi too. Even the River Hotel had wifi.
(Japan is so backwards considering the use of wifi. I know Starbucks let us use wifi.)So on your rest day, No1 priority is A FREE WIFI!!
■ Free wifi in Thakhek
Free wifi is available at
Inthira Hotel
A corner French Lao Cafe
The other Cafe on the other side of the street
We spend like 3 hours or so while having a lunch or have some tea time...
Everyone becomes so quiet since all of us are tapping our mobile tools and sending out our messages to the lines, to the facebook, to the blog, or just an emails... SNS is so widespread and we all use it.
■ Before & After
Before and After of those time, we visited
Market
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| live crab |
ATM
Massage
Mekong River
Everything is on the main street so the map is quit easy!■ Market
I think I had more strong impression if I were a first time in Asian country... but I was already in Vietnam and Thai land on my business trip so the market was somewhat familiar to me... I get more excited when I visited a Victorian Market in Melbourne.
In the market, you can get anything you need, so it is worth visiting. There is a lot of fresh fruits and meat and fishes still alive, colorful eggs like blue and pink... deep fried sweets, and things you need in life, soap, toothpastes, shoes...things like that.
I wanted to buy a Lao's traditional skirts woven by women but I could not find the one that seemed authentic... it looked like all machine made.
I think the fashion is so different from what we need in our home country, so I had nothing to buy, and that was same to Lea, a young girl from Austria, a developed country.
I brought Vietnamese traditional cloth once, when I traveled to Vietnam on business, but never wore the cloth again... it was sown for me but if I wear that in Japan, that will be so strange.
Anyway, the market is pretty interesting place to see.
By the market, there is a bank and you can exchange the money there.
I had bought some fruits in the market. Lea bought a toothpaste. It is not that we don't have money to buy, it is more like there is nothing we wanted to buy.
■ Cooling drinks
Along the main street, we'd walk up to the Mekong River and we are soon so thirsty! It is so humid and hot under the sun and we tried to walk under the shade but that so scarce when the Sun is so high.
You don't want to walk in the mid day!
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| this is what I got snack for climbing |
We found the drink booth so we got some smoothing drink like Maccha Latte or Water melon cooler..
■ Money
By the booth, we found ATM and Tony tried to get some money out and it took him a while to figure out how to use the machine.
It seems a large amount of money but Lao Kip has too many digits, so we all get confused.
In the downtown, you can use Thai bahts and Laos Kip, and USD.
The most important thing is
DO NOT HAVE TOO MUCH LAO KIP
since you can not exchange Lao kip to Thai bahts once you are out of the country.
■ Massage
The last activities is massage. There is a massage parlor in close by the Inthlar hotel and it is the same owner as the one in GCH. You would pay extra but that is not as big as you pay to TukTuk to go to the town.
I do not like Thai Massage since it hurts... my leg had black finger print from the massage which was too strong.
I did not enjoy massage so much but I enjoyed foot massage.
The massage usually takes about 1 hour or so.
■ TransportationSo it is about the time to go back. You can pick up TukTuk around the Inthlar hotel anytime.
But if you have people to share the ride, that will be nicer since you can split the cost.
The one ride to downtown to GCH is about 100,000 Kip (400 THB, about 1000yen, 10USD) so what is most expensive is the ride.
Go back before it gets too dark, since the ride is 1.5 times more when dark.
When you get back GCH, it will be already almost a dinner time.