Sabaidee!
Trip Start
Jan 06, 2005
1
5
20
Trip End
Apr 13, 2005
Luang Prabang,
Lao Peoples Dem Rep
Monday, January 24, 2005
the morning of our intended departure, we randomly met an american-lao man named sam at our hotel's restaurant and had breakfast with him. he managed to convince us to stay in huay xai an extra day and come with him to his wife's nephew's wedding at a nearby village. a few hours later, we found ourselves sitting at a table surrounded by his police and army commander friends from the village and being offered numerous glasses of beer lao and lao-lao (lao whisky) by various men and women at the wedding. the people in lao do not sip beer at all but down it like shots, something i am completely incapable of doing. by the way, beer lao is a really excellent beer which has apparently beat out european beers in a blind taste test. unfortunately, it is partially owned now by carlsberg (most everything in lao is foreign-owned).
the entire wedding was being paid for by sam so it seemed like everyone in the village and beyond had come to feast on the free food and alcohol.. a few hundred, or perhaps 1000 or so people! sam seemed to really enjoy being the 'wealthy american man' and with the cost of living in lao, he was living large and liked to be flashy and important. i think he invited us as his guests to add to his prestige.. we got a lot of attention at the wedding which was a bit strange. he even went up to the mic to announce who we were. from then on, all these people came up to chat with the westerners and as the day wore on and more beer lao and lao-lao were consumed, the more drunk the people got. we kept having to go up to dance to the cheesy lao pop music with people (everyone dances in a circle with men on one side and women on the other, and move very minimally, except for these twirly motions with your hands). it was a very interesting experience, but then as the time ticked on, some of the older drunken men started getting too creepy (jessica even got the international voulez-vous-couchez-avec-mois handshake by one especially creepy man) and so we asked sam if we could leave. i did get a chance earlier to speak to some very nice younger people though who had studied in hanoi for a few years so could speak vietnamese, and were just excited to speak to me in vietnamese - what a difference it makes to be able to communicate and have real conversations since all i could say in lao are words like "hello", "how much?", "thank you", "what's your name", etc.).
after huay xai, we took an 8-hour hellish but interesting bus ride to luang nam tha, a town also in the north. in lao, there are no options of taking different classes of transportation so you basically ride the same as the locals (which i think is a good thing). the bus was completely stuffed with people - when the 2 aisles of seats were full, they squeezed seats in the middle and had people stuffed between the aisles. the very limber luggage guys would climb in and out of the bus through the door and windows to climb onto the roof where all the luggage was tied, all while the bus was moving. apparently, the road we travelled during the 2nd half of the journey is one of the worst roads in lao. many major roads have been paved throughout the country now but they have yet to do anything to this stretch, so it was a very bumpy and dusty ride (we were filthy by the end of it from the dust flying up from the road), and we would occasionally encounter pools (more like lakes) of water that the bus would have to slowly crawl over. very interesting ride but i'd be happy never to have to do that again!
we left for muang sing in the morning, about 2 hours north-west of luang nam tha, on a songthaew, a common method of transport for shorter journeys - it's a sort of pick-up truck with the back converted into 2 rows of passenger seats that face each other. in muang sing, we signed up for a 3-day trek into the mountains and forests (with some deforested due to logging and slash-and-burn agriculture) in the area. lao is trying to avoid the exploitative mistakes that thailand has made with their trekking tourism industry and has made it illegal to trek any other way than with these ecotourism organizations that minimize the impact of foreigners trampling in and out of hill-tribe villages at will, and disturbing the natural ecosystem. i read the process in the office of how they implemented and started these programs and they sounded pretty good: ensuring minimal disruption to the villages and environment, community participation and decision-making, and contributing to the local economies of villages. while all that is good, i have to admit it still felt a bit odd to be going through hill-tribe villages as gawking tourists (one of the critiques of ecotourism), but it is a source of income for these villages at the same time. they get paid for providing accomodations and the meals are made using local produce and meat purchased from the villages we stay in. we spent 2 nights in 2 different akha villages, sleeping in huts similar to their own homes, one village at 1500m on top of one of the mountains, the other a bit further down another one. our guide was a really great hmong man (and an excellent cook!) named sarwang and he took us to his village as the first stop on the trek. we bathed the 2nd day at the village water pump, with sarongs wrapped around us (like all the akha women do), while kids gathered around to watch the funny falangs bathe. a very strange experience. i didn't quite get that clean. some of the kids at the first akha village (as young as 5) taught us how to say dirty words, something we didn't know until we found out what they meant at the 2nd village!
the trek was supposed to be 'moderately difficult' but day 2 just about killed us (up and down and up and down and up and down mountains from 9am to 5pm) and jess and i were sore for days after (just finally recovering now!).
after muang sing, we headed to nong khiaw with the only reason being to take a 6-hour boat ride down the nam ou (river) to luang prabang because we heard it was the boat ride with the most spectacular scenery in laos.. unfortunately, after staying in this tiny, boring (but pretty) town for a day and a half (the full day during which it actually rained, an unusual thing during the dry season here), we ended up not being able to take the boat and headed to luang prabang on a songthaew (stuffed full of people, of course - including a few people hanging on to the back of it while standing on the ledge) instead. by the way, nong khiaw is now known to me as 'ratville' because of the abundance of rats in some of the guesthouses! one guy we met told us of waking up at 3am because rats were crawling on him. this was in the exact same bamboo bungalow we had booked for the night so we left there pretty quickly before that happened to us!
we arrived here this afternoon and have been enraptured by this beautiful town so far! it's very relaxed and pretty here, surrounded by mountains and full of wats (temples) crumbling old colonial french architecture - reminds me a bit of hanoi but quieter and nicer. colonialism obviously sucks but you cannot deny that the architecture that was left behind is nice (eek!)..
french colonialism also left behind french bread and coffee, but in the case of laos, no infrastructure (like roads and trains).. and of course, poverty. lao is the 10th (i think?) poorest country in the world.
some quick other things about lao:
-the people are very friendly and easy-going.
-western-style 'efficiency' is completely non-existent here.
-the country's landscape (in the north at least - we are not going south) is beautiful.
-my $50 USD that i exchanged for just over 500,000 kip equals more than half of the annual tuition (which is 800,000 kip) for the university in luang nam tha, according to our trekking guide sarwang (he was telling me about how he wanted to go to school but it was too expensive for him. he also said that in the capital of vientiane, the tuition is 2,000,000 kip). my 500,000 kip lasted me almost a week here as a tourist (a meal costs about $1-$2 USD and a double room in a guesthouse costs about $2-5 USD, depending on where you are).
we are going to stick around luang prabang for a few days before heading a bit further south (last stop being vientiane). so far, we've gone crazy shopping in the market but decided to take a break to use the internet.
