Trekking in laos
Trip Start
Mar 10, 2007
1
26
153
Trip End
??? ??, 2007
Lam Nam Tha,
Lao Peoples Dem Rep
Monday, April 30, 2007
... Our driver spent the whole drive trying to flirt with his female cohort in the front of the bus, paying no attention to the road, feeling her leg and generally being very sleazy. This was on a winding dirt road through the hilly mountains at breakneck speed too. He crashed our bus!...
We were turning a corner and obviously the girl in the fronts legs were more interesting than the road, he oversteered round this corner, sending us spinning into a 360 degree slide off of the road and into a ditch at the side.Thankfully there were sides at this point of the road and no-one was hurt, but it was pretty scary. For some reason i felt like a right tit, and had all these thoughts going through my head like ( now for some reason this is done in a chris neil voice?) 'Well done ben, been in Laos only 1 day and you've already died, well done'
Anyway we survived and in Nam tha i signed up with the Nam Ha eco tourism project for a 3 day, 2 night trek, in the Nam ha wildlife reserve. Was very good fun, though a lot of walking was involved, and it put to shame the trek i did before, as you didn't have satellite dishes, toyota pickups and people selling ice cold beer changs there when you arrived. Plus no elephant riding here either! We stayed with Hmong Villagers, where i played a bit of rattanball with the local kids ( the adults were too good for me!) which is like volleyball except that the ball is about a tennis ball size, is made of bamboo like strands and you use your feet. The second day was a nightmare due to the moonsoon rains, and we all had several rather spectacular falls down the steep mud slopes we had to climb, i feel my slide on my face of about 5 metres was clearly the best though! Why my first instinct was to throw away my walking stick i don't know. The Evening was spent at a Khamu village after passing through a Lantern village. Some more facts for you now:- The Lantern Villagers are known for the dark blue clotrh that all the women wear, which they dye using a locally grownig plant. The women are also known for their lack of eyebrows (mum you never told use you were from a lantern village!) as they are shaved off when they 'become women', usually at the age of about 15.
After Nam Tha i made my way to Nong Khiaw
