Vientiene, Laos

The Presidential Palace

Dollar Large Beer

Our 90 day Malaysian visas were not going to last until we wanted to leave at the end of April so we needed to make a ‘visa run’ somewhere.   

The only country in Southeast Asia that we haven’t visited is Laos.  So why not check that box.
 
Roundtrip plane tickets were $300 for both of us for the 3 hour flight on AirAsia from Kuala Lumput to Vientiene.    

We spent 4 full days there in the heart of town. 

Vientiene is a very small Capital city with a population of ½ million.  The entire population of Laos is 7 million.

The telephone man from Honduras was here

Laos uses the US dollar and the Lao KIP as their currency.  About 10,000 Kip equals a US Dollar.  However, nobody wanted our US money unless it was in immaculate condition which only a few bills were.
Fortunately, a 100 dollar withdrawl from the ATM got us a million KIP.   

We thought we had been to some pretty inexpensive places but Laos was by far the cheapest.

A large Beerlao beer will cost $1-2 which is also the cost of a meal.  Best of all, a glass of wine runs about $2.  Quite a change from Malaysia where you are paying US prices of $6-8.

The best word to explain Vientiene is ‘calm’.  The pace is slow, the traffic is slow, there are no people begging or bothering you to buy anything.  It was just calm.

Our Tuk-Tuk guy

We were going to rent bikes but cars are parked all over the sidewalks and blocking the shoulders so we thought it would be better to hire a tuk-tuk.  We found a guy sleeping in a hammock in the back of his tuk-tuk and had him take us around to see the major sights of town.

Many street signs were missing or in Sanskrit so we had to rely on landmarks to find our way around.    

Pha That Luang Temple

There was one street that we called Massage Street due to the abundance of guess what, massage places.

I ended up with a one hour $6 reflexology and Booker got the full $8 massage.  At that price I felt like going for another round.

There was no shortage of Buddhist temples.  We saw probably 8 or 9 that were in our area or the tuk-tuk tour.

Patuxai - The Lao Arc de Triomphe

An interesting observation we made was that while Vietnam hated their French occupation and have tried to remove all signs of this colonial period.

The Lao people have somewhat embraced their history.  French is spoken by a significant minority and is the language of higher professions and diplomats.  We saw a majority of French expats in the restaurants and bars.

Commercialization of the Reclining Buddah

While we’re on the subject of food.  Our hotel had a good breakfast buffet.  We thought that since Laos borders Thailand, Thai food would be plentiful.  We really only saw a few places with Pad Thai and all in all it was mediocre.

We did find a great Indian/Bangladeshi place but another upscale Indian restaurant had all the frills but flavorless food.

Dinner Menu. It doesn't get any cheaper

The big Night Market was kind of disappointing.  We expected a market with Lao handicrafts but instead saw booth after booth of clothing and phone accessories.

During the day, the dusty streets were almost empty of foot traffic.  At night things changed and people were out everywhere.  

The Mekong River Side Night Market

There are plentiful fountains that were turned off during the day but sunset gave rise to the pumps and lights.  

Musicians and dancers were on the stages of open air parks.  The night market was a moving mass of people.  The bars started to get crowded as they commenced their Happy Hour prices.

Music and Dancing at the Park

All in all, it was a great trip.  We could have shortened it by a day but now the Laos box has been checked.

The Fountains come to life at night

Plenty of Elephants

The Black Stupa (That Dam)

Korma, Rafesi, Naan with Beerlao

Dragons always seem to be guarding the Temples

Elephant made from pottery

The President's Guard Shack

Wat Ong Teu

Dinner at Julia's

Party at Julia's House

Southward Hose Storefront

In the house.  Shoes are left at the door.

This year we were invited to the home of Julia Lon for a New Years dinner party.   

She , and her husband Franco, are the owners of Southward Hose & Engineering and has been a good friends since we came to Malaysia.

The party was an open-house which was frequented by neighbors and extended family members from the other end of Malaysia.

Julia did all the cooking because as she said “all the caterers were already taken”.   

The food was great and there was also a family sized Prosperity Salad.  

The Prosperity Toss

Tossing the Prosperity Salad supposedly brings luck and wealth to the tossers.   

Beer, wine, and Whiskey were plentiful which was a nice change from the normal Muslim alcohol-free dietary standards.  

Most Malay-Chinese are Buddhist but there are a few Christians.  Julia is Buddhist.

Now for the Salad Dressing

We were welcomed like family and even though we knew her sons from the store, it was nice have longer chats and meet her parents, cousins, and other friends.  

She was born in this area and grew up here so she had plenty of local friends visit.

Outside dining in the 'Front Yard'

The Chinese work ethic is very driven to succeed and be rich.  The most common thing we were asked by the young kids was what our jobs were, how much does a yacht cost, and how are we able to sail and travel like we do.

For us, it is always nice when someone welcomes travelers who are far from home to participate in a small part of their lives and culture.  We have had this experience from Panama to Fiji to Australia and it really makes you feel like part of the community.

We hope to be able pay it forward to other travelers that we meet in our future.

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CNY 2020

Joss Incense Sticks

100 meter Prosperity Salad

A quarter of the Malaysian population is of Chinese descent.   

Needless to say, Chinese New Year is always a big deal.   

We have seen some nice celebrations while we have been here and this year was no different.   

The entire Spring Celebration takes over 2 weeks.

The area where we are (Sitiawan) is kind of rural and small town so public CNY events are not super huge but they do a good job.

This year there were Giant Joss Sticks that were lit at midnight New Years Eve. 

They finally burned out a day later.  

The higher the toss, the better

There was fire dancing at night on the floating pavilion at the Marina Island Hotel.

Tossing of the Prosperity Salad (Yusheng), Lion Dances, and fireworks were also done by the ferry terminal to Pangkor Island.   

Tossing the Prosperity Salad supposedly brings luck and wealth to the tossers and the higher you toss, the more luck and wealth.

.   

Fire Dancing on the floating pavillion

Drummers at Marina Island

Dancing Lions,

Remnants of the Prosperity Tossed Salad

Smoldering Joss Sticks.  Almost finished

Detail Sanding – The Arsenal

Bosch - Modified Chinese - Hutchins - B&D Mouse and  2"

It is always best to use the biggest sanding pad possible to minimize the amount of ripple in the surface.   The 8” sanding/buffing grinder works well for this.

When the surface gets more intricate and curvy, a smaller disc has to be used otherwise the edge of the sander will cut too deep into the gelcoat.  I have 5” and 6” pads in both stick-on (Velcro) and glue-on pads that can be put on either my electric or pneumatic sanders.

One thing about post-sanding the gelcoat is the amount of dust created.  I really like to wet sand since it minimizes the airborne dust and also washes the dust out of the sandpaper, making it last longer and work better.

 

Hutchins 7544

As explained in a prior post, using an electric sander with water is not such a big deal because of our power setup.  However, since now have an air compressor, the pneumatic sanders are lighter and definitely  the way to go.

Water Injection Adapter

I bought a Hutchins 7544 water injected pneumatic sander since it seemed like a good way to go.  These cost $350 on Amazon but I got a used one on ebay for around $100.   It worked well and can be used with all pad combinations 5”/6”/Stick-on/Glue-on.  After seeing how it was designed, I felt that and random orbital with vacuum extraction could be used as a water injection sander. 

The Hutchins has a small tube that injects the water through the holes in the sandpaper.  Most of the time, I use sheets of sandpaper cut and glued on to the disc so the water just runs out from around the disc and onto the surface anyway which works fine.

Internals of the Chinese Sander

My hack was to connect the water hose to the vacuum port and pump water into the sander.  I bought a $35 Chinese sander for the modification.  It worked well but works better if you sand with the water tube up so the water runs down onto the surface.

2" Pneumatic with velcro and glue discs

Sometimes a 5” disc doesn’t quite cut it so I bought a 2” pneumatic sander.  This is ideal for most small radius corners and close in edging.  This sander doesn’t have any real way to inject the water so I tried attaching the water hose to the frame but in the end, it was much easier to just hold the water hose and dribble it on the surface.   

These sanders come with Velcro pads which are fine but since I also need glue-on, I took a razor blade and cut off all the Velcro,and melted the remaining bits with a torch to make a glue-on pad.  Both pads have worked great except for some cheesy sandpaper from Amazon that just gets destroyed within a minute from the vibration.

Adding a Google Photo Album to Blogger

As explained in the previous post, some work-around needs to be done to regain control of your Google Photo Albums on Google Blogger.

I am mostly doing this post to help me remember how to do this, but hopefully someone else will find this post helpful.

So, if this does not interest you, please feel free to skip the lesson.

This method works when you add albums links to pages but not posts.  I don't know why.

Step 1. 

Insert an image like you normally would do in Blogger.  Insert the image that you would like to have as your album cover.

The New Album

Now you have a picture on the page but not the album.

This is where the interesting part happens:

Step 2.

Go to the Google Photo Album and Click the 3 little dots in the upper right hand corner of the album.

This menu should appear:

Step 3.

Select the 'Share album' link and you should have this:

 
Step 4.

Click the "Create link" button and you will be given a link that is the link for the entire album.

Step 4.

Copy the link.


Step 5.

Now go back to the Blogger page where you inserted the cover picture of your album.


Click on HTML code button and look for the part that is in a format like this below.  Look just before imageanchor="1"

The highlighted text above is the location where the browser will take you when you click on the picture.

Before editing, the browser takes you to a picture, after changing the link to the album shared link, the browser will take you to that shared album instead.

Step 6.

Replace the original yellow highlighted HTML code with the shared link that you copied from the album.  Only replace the part between the parentheses and leave the parentheses

It should look like this:

You can also edit this section of HTML to change the size that the album will be on your page.  In the example above, it is 150 pixels high by 200 pixels wide.

When done, Click the 'Compose' button, the 'Save' button, and press on.

One last thing, remember to turn on Share for your album.

That's it.  Hope I didn't geek out too much.

Photo Albums on Blogger

I started doing this blog in 2012 while in Mexico.

I really didn't like what I had seen in other sailing blogs because they were too much based on drama.  It seemed like every day, there was a different drama unfolding like dragging at anchor, breaking something, bad weather, etc.

I do not like to get sucked into drama and instead wondered why not discuss anchoring techniques, fixing things, or discussing how not to get in bad weather.

Dave Kane on LIGHTSPEED had a blog that I really liked and was like a mentor on writing a good blog.

Sailors like to keep logs of their journeys, myself included.  I used to upload photos to Google Picasa.  This was a photo album site back in those days that people could link to, or look at, to see what it was like to be out cruising.  No drama, no writing, just photos.

These albums date back to 2008 when we were in St. Maarten and cover our trip down the eastern Caribbean, southern Caribbean, the entire trip up to the Bahamas, to New Jersey, back down the US coast to Key West, the western Caribbean, through the Panama Canal, and Central America.

These albums used to be linked on this blog by a thing that Google calls a widget.  Well, Google has removed Picasa and it's now called Google Photos.  However, now the widget link doesn't work and there is no widget for Google Photos.  Go figure?

So,    thanks to some smart HTML coding people, there is a hack that you can use to put Google Photo Albums on Google Blogger.

I will explain this hack in the next post but for now, these albums have been resurrected under the heading tab named "Photo Albums".

Give them a look-see to get a feel for our 'missing' early cruising years of 2008-2012.