Simonmain1's travel blogs:
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Every man should have a boat...
Entry 25 of 44 | show all | print this entry |
After an arduous but beautiful journey we arrived in Nong Kio and settled into some bamboo huts over looking the river. Nong Kio is quite touristy but is also the main market town for the area so was a good mix. The touristy nature, however, did not stretch as far as mobile phones, banks or internet (there was one internet connection in town but it was pretty expensive) so I was reduced to crawling around in my backpack for the emergency dollars I had hidden around the place for a week. Just as well everything in Laos is pretty cheap; with accommodation ranging from $2 to $10 a night normally. The scenery around here was spectacular with the village being nestled in between larger limestone cliffs. One of the cliffs has a set of large caves that were used during the US bombing campaign to house the provisional government - equipped with a torch me and this Swiss girl went through the bank offices, the hospital etc.
Since arriving in Laos I have developed a liking for the washing in the river malarkey with the locals. Not only is it much quicker than standing under a cold shower in a dark smelly room but is a great way to meet the locals and uses the same water anyway. You just soap up standing on a rock and then dive in to wash the soap off, definitely the way forward though am not sure I'll be doing it in the Manchester ship canal when I get back home. Life in Nang Kio revolves around the river, in fact till a few years ago there were no roads. Since the roads came most of the passenger traffic on the river is tourists but most families still go to fish, wash etc in the river everyday. I walked upstream a few kilometers with some other travelers one day and we came to a little village and all the kids came out of the school to wave at us (I pity the poor teacher who was trying to teach them at the time) and a bunch followed us to the river where they just stood and watched us for a while before building up the confidence to come skim stones with us.
A young French lad called Jean also managed to get the whole village out to talk to us by deciding he wanted to jump off the bridge with a climbing rope attached to his waist. Fortunately nightfall came before he could rig the ropes up properly though it was a top laugh helping him and watching the locals' faces as he tried to describe what he wanted to do.
So what do you do to experience the real Laos, make loads of local friends and become a living legend among fellow travelers? You buy a boat!!
So me and some Frenchies who were in the bungalows next to me (well only two of them were actually French, the other two were Swiss and Belgium respectively) bought a boat. Not sure why I ended up in the middle of a French party but it was fun and I learnt some new words (for example helic means propeller) but there were some serious communication issues at times. I also learnt that French people can come across as very rude at times when speaking in English and particularly when their food doesn't come quite as expected. I am not sure how we ended up deciding to buy the boat but it started as a grandiose plan to make our way down the River Ou camping on little islands (where Constance was going to cook us sticky rice in bamboo pots) onto the Mekong all the way to the Cambodian border. But first we decided we should go on an expedition upstream to Muang Ngoi. The purchase of the boat itself took a couple of days and ended up costing us $340 including 2 paddles and a brand new Chinese 6.5 horsepower engine. We also spend another $50 on gasoline, machete (every man worth his bacon in Laos constantly carries his machete with him), tarpaulin, spare propellers (we were advised to take at least 3...), blankets, string etc etc.
So who did I end up on this little adventure with:
Constance: Lovely, bubbly, funny French girl who has been traveling for the last 5 months in New Zealand and Asia. Constance had done some jungle trekking in N. Thailand so was fully equipped in outdoor cookery skills etc.
Remi: Tall, curly haired, slightly angry Frenchman. Me and Remi had a bit of a under-the-surface power struggle on the boat, especially over technical issues where I am pretty sure I new best...for example he had a theory that you should switch the engine power down when turning as you went up the rapids despite my insistence that the propeller needed to be forcing the water past the rudder to turn in a strong current. Anyway, the 1st time this theory was tested by Remi we ended up in the rocks... Remi could be quite rude at times, even to the locals who were helping us - I know if I was a fisherman who had spent my life on the water I'd be a bit pissed with some curly haired Frenchman telling me how best to fix a boat. My little Laotian mate Jay even said to me one day 'Simon, why you come here with this blah, blah, blah man, next time you bring nice people here please'. Remi's English was perhaps the weakest of the group which made communication shouting above the engine noise a bit tricky as well although the day the day the boat flooded he decided to run down the street screaming at me that it was my fault and that I had fucked up the engine rather than just get on with bailing out the water...and the engine was fine.
Roderick: 24 yr old Belg lad who is own his way back to Europe after a stint in Australia. Spoke perfect English and was a top bloke. I had met Roderick when searching for people to get the boat down to Nong Kio so knew him best. By the time we had all separated I thin Roderick had developed a little thing for Constance but not sure if he ever got anywhere.
Annic: Remi's Swiss bird. A really nice girl who spoke brilliant English
So we bought the boat for cash, making some locals very happy with their dollars (more on why they were so happy later...) and we got a 5 minute training section and all seemed quite simple.
Happily smiling off we trotted up the river gently cruising at half speed, stopping to swim at little beaches thinking this is the life...for about 30 minutes until we hit the first rapids. As the driver of the boat is at the rear we had one person standing at the front on the lookout for rocks and rapids. Rapids can be spotted easily but the rocks are totally invisible until you are almost upon them and by the time the command to turn was issued it was generally too late to do anything. I was at the helm when we hit the first rapids and we managed to power through them unscathed and we all clapped and were generally happy. For the next set of rapids we befriended a local fisherman who guided us through for 3 cigarettes...it was quite humorous when we were speaking to him at the shore, Remi pointed out that there was a snake in his boat he had been in all day...a little bit of machete action sorted it out promptly though. Little did we know at the time that there were a much worse set of rapids yet to come as I passed the controls to Remi who demonstrated his new technique of turning with no power and the boat got swept right around until we grounded on some rocks with a new propeller required. To be fair I would probably have crashed as well but I didn't think that at the time. We eventually replaced the propeller (propellers are essentially disposable items on the river and in fact they make them by melting down old coke cans in the villages!!) got the boat going upstream again but the little engine was really struggling (as Jay said to me the next day 'big boat, small engine') and we had to get the paddles out as well to scrape our way through the rapids. After that we made the rest of our way to Muang Ngoi and parked up at the side rather relieved. Immediately upon parking the boat we were surrounded by local fishermen amazed that some ferangs had arrived on a boat. The locals were very strange when the approach the boat, the 1st thing the do every time is walk to the engine, open the petrol cap and see how much fuel you have before then starting the engine. I have no idea why they did this but I saw the routine many times over the next few days. We found a guesthouse and removed the engine (although there seems to be little crime in Laos all the locals told us to remove the engine even though they left their own; but every fisherman always takes his hand crafted paddle with him when he leaves his boat).
Muang Ngoi is quite touristy little village with no cars or bikes but there is a lot of local life going as well. You see every aspect of Laos life in Muang Ngoi from making of Laos Laos (the local spirit made by fermenting and then distilling old sticky rice) to the chickens and ducks that roam everywhere (I have never seen or heard so many birds, they start cock-a-doodle-doing from 4am in the morning and once one starts the whole village resonates). If bird flu hits here as it apparently already has in Luang Namtha in the North there will never be any stopping it. Within minutes of arriving in Muang Ngoi a local lad called Si had befriended me and was badgering me to exchange a Scottish 20 pound note he had - he even offered me it for $20 but as I only had a few bucks left there was no way I could help him. However once the locals new my name was Si (there is a name which sounds exactly the same in Lao) I was greeted with Sai Bah Dee Si every time I went down the street. I also made great friends with a local 18 yr old called Jay; really he wanted us to go trekking with him for dollars but even after I told him I wouldn't be going anywhere he was happy to spend all day helping me. And in fact the day he did find some customers to go trekking he knocked on my bungalow at 7am to say goodbye to me and tell me to bring my wife or girlfriend next time I visited!!
Our bungalows were a lovely family affair with the family sleeping in the open air restaurant area in the evenings. Mama was only too happy to ply us with home made Lao Lao after dinner until some Israelis went and spoiled the whole thing by finishing her bottle behind her back - how an earth can anyone think its is right to do that beggars belief but that's Israelis for you. I had to share a bungalow with Roderick the 1st couple of nights which wasn't really my idea of fun, I am too old for that kind of carryon.
On examination of the boat in the morning we found several leaks - many simply stuffed with old rags and a pretty major on in the rubber seal for the propeller shaft. No sooner had me and Remi waded through the mud to the boat than a gang of local fishermen came to help with only the promise of a beer. It was actually quite an eye opener to see these guys stop on their way to work and spend the day helping us rather than bother to go fishing. Compare this to our 9 to 5 routines back home. The propeller seal was quickly repaired with some nails and an old inner tube (see photos) and the leaks repaired with a mixture of some powder and petrol (though in the end Remi didn't have the patience to let this dry 3 days so it was a bit of a pointless exercise. Walking around the town, communicating by hand language, looking for parts with Jay was great fun though it can be difficult with these uneducated sorts trying to force any kind of nut onto a thread as they cannot comprehend the concept of different thread pitches. In fact it can get very frustrating with the Lao people as they assume ferangs no nothing so will grab everything from you when you try to fix something yourself as they don't understand that someone in the west may actually know more about an engine than them.
Once the boat was fixed we went off on a test run with Jay who wanted to show us how to take the rapids (obviously Remi was pissed that this little lad wanted to drive our boat despite the fact he was only trying to help us out). My run at the rapids ended in a bit of a disaster since their were some kids tubing (the act of sitting in an inflated inner tube and floating down river - more on that when I get to Vang Veng, tubing capital of Laos) which meant I had to cut the engine meaning we ended up on the rocks again!!
We also went for a days trek to some caves and a local village. The caves were pretty spectacular, we had to swim inside for a bit before arriving into a massive cavern. The village was ace and I wish we had gone to stay in the little guesthouse there. We had some lunch at the guesthouse, as 3 people were prepared to order fried rice with duck they were prepared. Me and Roderick then went for a walk into the jungle to try find some waterfalls that we never found, however, a lovely little tick found me and had to be burnt out my leg the next day. In the jungle there was wild grapefruit growing and this young kid kindly went up the tree with his machete and got some for us and then walked us back to the village - that sums up Lao people outside the big towns, they only want to look after you.
After a few days it was time to head back down stream to Nang Koi. We loaded the boat up and paddled out into the river and Remi went to start the engine and in typical Gaelic fashion ripped the entire starting cord out the engine. Armed with a pair of pliers I set about repairing it while fending off local lads who just wanted to ram everything back together and tighten the bolts up thinking this would work. Eventually one local did turn up who did understand engines and together we got the springs and everything back together. We had happily convinced ourselves that the trip downstream through the rapids would be easy - it was not to be we wiped out several times, the worst one being when I was driving we lost the propeller on a rock you would never have seen and then Remi lost of the paddles trying to steer the boat. We ended up going backwards down the river. We were never in danger of being hurt but I think at that point I decided I wasn't going any further than Nang Koi as every local I had talked to had told me the rapids only got worse nearer Luang Prabang. A raging storm, ripping up trees and all sorts, chased us into Nang Koi where we found a top $2/night guesthouse.
And then it was time to sell the boat again. We went round town trying to sell to all but in the end had only 2 offers, one of $100 from the kid in our guesthouse and one of $160 from the bloke who sold us it in the 1st place. So in the end we made a loss of $180, but I have to say I got my full $30 from that boat. I would definitely do it again but next time in a 2 person boat which would be much easier to control. The whole thing has inspired me to do some kayaking at some point to learn how to read the river etc.
Photos
Where I stayed:
Sunrise Guesthouse
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