After the beauty of Muang Ngoi the majesty of Nong Khiaw's resident mountains seemed a little diminished but it was still a breathtaking sight. A vast mountain rises up straight from the river and the town struggles for air on both banks, connected by a deceptively long bridge.
Some Like it Hot
After such a long time in the wilderness we decided to pamper ourselves on our return to relative civilisation and took a trip to a local steam bath. This involved sitting in a boiling hot shed built over a huge tank filled with water and herbs under which they set a fire for 10-15 minutes at a time. The intervals between your two or three sessions are spent dripping in the comparatively cool evening air drinking small cups of green tea. This is meant to be extremely good for the skin, resting the muscles and for curing colds. We were certainly relaxed when we left, we were so hot we were almost comatose.
American No Get Tour
When you're tired of sitting in bars beside the Nam Oh drinking Beer Laos the only thing to do in Nong Khiaw is to get on a bike and explore the countryside. One of the closest sights that we wanted to see was Tham Pha Thok, the vast caves where many of the locals lived during the American bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail. For once we were anxious to assure the young guide who met us at the cave entrance that we were British, not American. He showed us the long jagged scars on his leg and the warped angle of his arm before he asked us our nationality. "English? English good. Australian good. American sorry no. Many bomb here, me and my sister both hurt by bomb. Sorry no American, no get tour."
The caves were half way up a sheer limestone rock face. Now reached by a flight of steep concrete steps our guide told us they used to have only a bamboo ladder. Inside the caves were large and fairly even under foot. They were very impressive, until you remembered that for many desperate people they were home. It quickly became dark as we walked through the sleeping area, the place the local government met to talk and finally the vast hospital. The floor of the hospital cave was far below us in the gloom and the ceiling impossible to see. Our guide told us there were huge spiders and bats up there, the people who lived in the caves used to eat the bats with sticky rice but the spiders he said were no good, they are too poisonous. Needless to say I was not keen to hang around or take the perilous bamboo ladder down to the hospital floor, which was where our guide said he had been injured by UXO. Hundreds of bombs were dropped here he told us, so many that in one place they made a huge crater in the ground, forming an unnatural pond by the caves entrance, a lasting reminder of the horrors that were endured here. Many people died he told us over and over again, many bombs, many died. The atrocities of the war appeared much earlier than we had anticipated on our holiday. I was prepared for it in Vietnam but I didn't think we would find it here, in this quiet, easy going country, in harmless little Laos.
When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Wasted
Much of our time in Nong Khiaw was spent relaxing and drinking Lao Lao cocktails. Lao Lao is a locally made rice whiskey that people tend to brew up themselves, so you never quite know what you're going to get. It's strong and clear and not really tempered with much taste to mask the alcohol. It'll blow your face off if you take too large a slurp. The cocktails we found were a great invention, mixing the toxic spirit with coke and corriander or just lemon juice and sugar. One fateful evening we were plied with the lethal stuff from a bottle containing all sorts of dubious looking vegetable matter by an extremely exuberant local proprietess named Mama Lao. We drank for a while with an unfortunate Australian who was recovering from a vicious bee attack on the bridge. I'm sorry to say that the result of that particular evening was my decimating the peaceful beauty of night time in Nong Khiaw by throwing up off the edge of the bridge and losing my camera in the process. Lao Lao is not for the faint of heart.
In many ways Nong Khiaw was peppered with disaster. We'd had to do more and more laundry (in Udomxai the situation became so desperate I contemplated leaving the room wearing part of the soft furnishings) and lazily made the unwise decision of leaving it with the hotel. Professionals they were not and our washing came back blue. Sadly the Lao people do not understand the term refund.
Further chaos was caused during nap time when nature threw further fury at us in the shape of a massive spider sprinting towards us across the bed. Theo galantly threw me from harms way and hunted down said spider with a flip flop but I still insisted on changing rooms.
So chaos abounded in Nong Khiaw and though we enjoyed our time chilling out by the river we were not sorry to be moving on, having spent so long in one area. We had thoroughly soaked up the infectious lethargy of rural Laos and were ready to go back to the action packed city life.
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