Nong Khiaw
Trip Start
Nov 01, 2005
1
83
95
Trip End
Nov 01, 2006
Nong Khiaw,
Lao Peoples Dem Rep
Tuesday, September 5, 2006
Muang Ngoi
So another 2 hours up river,
This time to a town that isn't acesable by road, river only to Muang Ngoi.
When I got here it immediatly struck me, why would you ever leave.
Get off the boat and step right one step and you can rent a bungalow overlooking the river, with hamock for 80 euro cent a night, the view is really spectacular.
A great place to realax for a while, read a book, watch life unfold by the river.
Everyone goes down to the river to wash clothes teeth and bathe.
Two boats arrive each day, bringing an average of about 8 tourists a day, this is low season.
The village folk gently look for their custom, no pressure.
The bugalow is an all natural contruction, wood, weave and thach, as are most of the houses around Laos.
You don't have to do nothing of course, we took a trip by boat and walking up a river to another waterfall.
You can also walk to caves and the surrounding villages and there are loads of cool giant milipeids on the way.
I walked to the next village, should be two hours but took me four with detours and my dodgy knee. This village is really remote, only walking paths, not even a horse or mule, two hours to the town with river access etc. There are more villages beyond but I didn't feel up to another three hours in slippy flip flops.
I decided to rent a bungalow in the first village, called Banna.
At 40 euro cent a night it wasn't too much of an expense to rent two bungalows at the same time. It think they take the attitude here that they'll make their money back by charging alot for food. Even this, obviously stratigic, village had it's collection of US bombs.
I was the only foreigner staying the night in the village, the kid of the house was playing with giant horned bettles a bit like you would with toy cars, you know racing them and crashing them.
The dad got a cooked one for dinner,
they invited me to eat with them, good Lao food, sticky rice, you roll and squish it like dough, then dip it. Young bamboo which is really delicious, and crickets for a bit of protein I guess, the Bettle was only for the dad.
Walked back to Muang Ngoi the next day and they were having a festival, we were invited to eat and drink with them.
Lao-lao is the local distilled rice drink, strangly a bottle cost the same as a bottle of beer at 80 euro cent.
posted by conor at 7:38 PM 0 comments
Nong Khiaw
So the next leg is an 9 hour boat journey up river to a town called Nong Khiaw.
Sure you can get there by bus faster and cheaper but where's the fun in that?
There is a bridge just after you leave, and then at Nong Khiaw 9 hours later.
Loads of kids playing at the river bank as we go by and the scenery is great.
Nong Khiaw is tiny and quiet, kind of like every town in Laos.
We walk out to the caves where some of the comunists ran afairs when the americans were bombing, sure enough there was a big bomb crater at the entrance.
And boy did the americans bomb Laos, shhh, it was a secret war but they made Laos the most bombed country on earth.
All of the tinyest villages have loads of man sized bombs. They use them as fence posts garden ornaments and a source of scrap metal to make knives etc.
Anyway on the walk it started raining and all the leeches came out, yuk.
Big ones like an earth worms crawling end to end, creepy, and big balls of tiny ones, they crawl up your shoes, into you socks and leave nice little bloody wholes in your ankles when they leave.
It gets really slippy when it rains and I fell over, sore knee in pain lieing in a load of leeches and stinging ant, fun!
Anyway took it easy a read a book for the afternoon.
At night the bridge is guarded by guys with machine guns.
posted by conor at 6:22 PM 0 comments
Laos medical services
So Luang Probang proved to be a nice place to hang out.
I went on two day trips to waterfalls,
one obviously had more water than normal as it was flowing through the picnic table area. Since there are medical services here I decided to get my knee checked out.
So they took an x-ray and determined no broken bones, sprain they said, fine.
The experiance did seem to be more about extracting money than anything else, ahh well I made my contribution to the Laos medical services, and even got skipped to the front of the queue.
