Luang Prabang Part 2 - Birthday Boun Boun

Pai!

July 20th. A big day. Our first excursion outside the beautiful city of Luang Prabang and time for Mr Riley to pull out the big guns. Why? Because it was my 23rd birthday. And boy was it the best birthday ever! We were picked up by the All Laos Elephant Camp at 9am and headed out of the city with the rest of the group. As we approached the hills we drove through a huge construction site where a new road was being built. The monsoon had hit a few days before and the whole place was thick with mud. It wasn't long before our minivan was stuck. It took some time, a lot of barefoot westerners and a JCB to get it out. I think the locals were surprised at how willing we all were (well, not all the girls) to jump out and take off ouir shoes and help shift the van from the warm gooey mud. When we finally got through we took a short boat trip up river and found ourselves in a forest clearing full of massive footprints and elephant poo and then, we saw them. Lumbering through the forest they were strangely silent as they moved, with their young mahouts perched on top. It was so surreal to see them just walking towards us through the jungle, so vast and yet so graceful. My foolish, western, media saturated brain thought for a moment that they must be CGI or something. We climbed aboard the howdah by means of a wooden scaffold and off we went for my first ever elephant ride.

Our elephant ride!

Yaya!

Our elephant was a little tempramental, she really did not want to go on a walk just then and trumpted away for a while, shaking her head in annoyance. I was pretty nervous, being high up and on a pissed off four tonne animal but the mahout, a 15 year old boy with minimal English, didn't seem too bothered. The view from up there was incredible. We stomped through the jungle for about a hour, hanging over the edge of the wooden howdah to watch the elephant walking. They are surprisingly sure footed for such big, cumbersome beasts.

Returning down river to the camp for lunch we learnt the mahout commands, ''pai'' for go, ''hao'' for stop and ''yaya!'' for no bad elephant, before heading back up river in our attractive, oversized mahout uniforms for some proper training. I thought the heavy denim uniforms might be a little over the top but when you're sat on the neck of an animal that enjoys mud baths and has tough wire-like hair over its entire body you're suddenly grateful that you're not wearing your own flimsy clothes. I tried to angle for what I thought was a slightly smaller elephant when we got back to the clearing but I was still pretty dubious when the elephant stood up and I was way up in the air balanced on its neck. Getting up is no mean feat, even if it does crouch down which it often won't, and it took a substantial bottom shove from Theo and an awful lot of pulling by the mahout to get me properly mounted.

When you're up there all you can see in front of you is this massive hairy head and floppy ears and the ground ahead. Every time she looked around or especially down I felt like I was going to topple off. My nice teenage mahout held on to me for a while before he decided to take a nap, which was very reassuring. Theo's mahout actually got off the elephant and just strolled along behind. I got used to it after a while and started to really enjoy the feeling of "driving" that vast animal through the jungle, not that it listened to my feeble cries of "pai!" when it didn't want to. It was surreal sitting atop an animal so vast it barely notices your weight and you can hardly see any of it from where you're sat.

The author pretending to be a mahout

Boun Boun!

The way down to the river was just a long slippery, muddy slope. I was at the back of the group and watched Theo's elephant slide down, get one foot caught and slither on its knees towards even ground. With a sigh of relief I registered that my boyfriend was still alive, he had not been cruhed by a falling elephant, then it dawned on me that it was my turn. The mahouts seemed to find the elephants lack of grace absolutely hilarious, which we found very comforting. I was so hot and sweaty with fear by this point that it was wonderful to have a dunk in the river. Half submerged my elephant rolled around, enjoying her bath, and responded enthusiastically when the mahout stood on her back, counted to three in Lao and shouted "boun boun!" (spray). Over and over again her periscope trunk came flicking out of the water and doused me. Elephants can hurl as much as ten litres of water out of their trunks at a time and I took some pretty forceful jets to the face. Back on dry land we rode up the slope and then with a graceful slide down while hanging off her ear my elephant ride was over.

Elephant bath time

Hao!

We tubed back down river, which basically involved sitting in the inner tube of a truck tyre like a rubber ring and floating along in the current, and walked over to the less than inspiring elephant information centre. This consisted of a large room covered in pictures of elephants walking, bathing and mating (graphically) as well as various diseases and afflictions in absolutely no logical order or with any explanations. Our tour guide Chai filled the time while we were waiting for the others to finish looking telling us about his home in the mountains and how his father abducted his mother when he decided he wanted to marry her. His grandfather then swung a chicken in the air, for reasons we failed to understand. Each to their own I suppose.

Getting Pally with the Locals

We were so exhausted the next day (and I had some serious groin strain from holding on for dear life) that we spent the day relaxing in the city before renting bicycles for the evening. This was an adventure in itself as it tuned out. We found the bicycle shop deserted and on hunting down a side alley for someone who worked there we found ourselves befriended by three elderly Lao men. They hollered to the shop boy before inviting us to join them. They gave us Lao Lao (oh no!)  and beer and let us share in their meal of fried meat and salad with chilli sauce then a whole dried fish. It felt totally surreal to be invited in to someone's lesiure time like that, we were hardly the only tourists out and about then but the men seemed generally insterested in hearing about where we came from and where we were going. We were pretty woozy by the time we actually got bicycles and only really managed to wobble along beside the Mekong looking for food.

Whiskey Village Deja Vu

On our last day in Luang Prabang we crammed in the final sights outisde the city with another tour. We were picked up by the most adorable tour guide ever, little Touy. Touy was only twenty and was still in training with the company. He told us all about his family who lived hours and hours away in a place with no water or electricity. He told us how he longed to see them and to go abroad but he didn't have the money for either. He had taken the job as a tour guide to learn English and because he liked meeting new people from places he would never see, and learning American slang. Touy stole our hearts immediately, which was good because the tour was slightly chaotic.

At the elephant camp Theo and I of course felt like old pros at the riding and clambered on confidently while the rest of the group wobbled and shrieked. With Theo on the neck and a dutch boy and I in the howdah we set off on a relatively short trip through the trees. It was a pretty easy route compared to the last one and we all took turns scrambling on to the neck. Theo and I shouted "pai!" and "quoa!" at every available opportunity which the mahouts walking along side and taking photos like paparazzi seemed to find pretty amusing.

Leaving the camp we went to a small whiskey village, which really was exactly like every other village we'd been to except that was turned over to the tourist trade. It comprised of wooden homes and dusty streets and stall after stall selling scarves and nicknacks. The only difference here was that you were plied with Lao Lao and rice wine to sample and make you buy something. Back at the elephant camp we had to sit around wait for an angry American couple, who having been forgotten in the morning, had to be taken to the whiskey village we had just left. With everyone grouped together again we travelled to the Pak Ou caves, a stunning set of caves in the side of a sheer rock face dropping straight on to the Nam Ou river. We shot across the river in a frail little boat and climbed first to the higher cave then the lower. The higher cave had a strange metal gate covering its entrance and was pretty dark when you got right back inside. It was full of tiers of tiny Buddha statues brought there by pious Lao People. They showed up like eerie lines of soldiers in the light of the camera flashes. The lower cave was much more open with a Mediterranean style white wall and set of stone steps. It too was bursting with Buddhas of every shape and size but seemed more of an open place of worship than the dark Buddha storage centre of the higher cave.

The Pak Ou caves

On the long drive to the Kuang Si waterfall we had to stop again at the pesky whiskey village and wait in the sweltering minivan while two more girls who missed it earlier looked around. Finally reaching the water park the first thing we saw was an enclosure of black bears, a species being conserved in this area. The black bears looked as relaxed as the locals while tourists gathered just a short walk away, around the breath-taking series of pools at the bottom of Kuang Si. The river is wide and falls in short cascades down into deep blue pools where we swam for an hour or so, avoiding the big rocks and crabs. The main pool is surrounded by people eating drinking and diving in from a rope swing or jumping off the waterfall. Theo and I went past this chaos and found our own private pool for a little while slightly further up stream. It pays to explore. After our swim Touy led us up to the top of the waterfall to see the most impressive cascade. The drop was huge but it was punctuated with a few steps high up the cliff and lots of little side waterfalls contributed to the full picture.

Lastly we stopped at a Hmong village, another one of one room houses and muddy half naked children and cheap bracelets, before making the long drive back to Luang Prabang.

Kuang Si waterfall

The next day was spent almost entirely in a local restaurant waiting for the time to pass. When it was finally time to leave the trip to the airport, check-in, security and boarding all went by very fast. Before we knew it we were taking off, aboard a surprisingly plush Lao Airlines' plane and being given teeny tiny sandwiches and cake!

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Luang Prabang Part 1 - Oh La La

The journey to Luang Prabang was supposed to take four hours, it actually took two and a half. Now every journey we'd done to date on our trip had taken longer than we had expected it to. We were surprised and grateful to finally have a shorter one. However, we spent the whole journey clinging to the seats as the driver threw the bus along the narrow roads like a bat out of hell.

Luang Prabang is a beautiful city. The whole place is part of an UNESCO World Heritage Site so all the shops and signs have to fit into the colonial style brought in by the French. It's continental, slow-paced and elegant and all feels very surreal. The pale yellow houses with their wooden shutters stare out over the wide river on both sides of the peninsula. The orange robes of the monks on every street remind you that you are in fact in Asia, not the Med, and every few turns a wat glitters out from behind its white walls. There are monasteries seemingly everywhere and the streets are packed with monks of all ages, but predominantly very young ones, marching off to the temples.

The author - The view of Luang Prabang from Phu SI hill

Grand Palace My Foot

There is so much to see in and around Luang Prabang that I shall to divide it between two posts. First of all let me tell you about all there is to see within the confines of this oddly mismatched city. On our first day we made a trip to Phu Si hill, a large hill with a golden stupa on top that dominates the old quarter of the city. Climbing the steep steps to the summint was sticky work and we were exhausted by the time we reached the top. We could see the rows of colonial style buildings, the semi-European feel mixed up with palms, motorbikes and muggy heat. The stupa on the top was pretty unremarkable but as we walked back down the east side of the hill we were met by some impressive golden Buddhas lounging on the rocks before continuing through a series of temples that sprang straight out of the hillside. Near the foot of the hill we peered in to the gloom of a temple to see the colossal imprint of Buddha's foot.

The Grand Palace

Close to Phu Si hill is the Grand Palace, former residence of the Laos royal family. It was pouring with rain all day when we visited. The water literally crashed out of the sky, flying up before soaking you again for a second time. On the plus side the city, particularly the tourists sights, was deserted. The palace itself was almost laughably low-key. Compared to the palaces and stately homes of Europe it was small and plain. The furniture was simple the walls bare and the place seemed able to only accommodate the king, the queen and a few children. The only impressive part was the throne room, a large(ish) purple room with its walls covered in tiny glass figures representing folk tales. The palace grounds were similarly unexciting, an exhibition of beat up old American cars that used to ferry his highness around, a chubby statue of the king and a very small Buddha which gives the city its name. The small, bare and crumbling temple we saw afterwards at the foot of Phu Si hill turned out to be infinitely more beautiful.

It's Just a Habit You Get into

At the tip of the peninsula sits Wat Xieng Thong, one of the largest monasteries in Luang Prabang. It's a beautiful place, quiet and peaceful. A collection of buildings sit in a large courtyard, all with gilt walls and intricate glass pictures on the outside, reminiscent of the Grand Palace. Everyday at dawn the monks flood from Xieng Thong and the other monasteries to collect alms. On our last day we rose at dawn and went out into the quiet streets to see the procession. It was incredible to think that we'd been sleeping or reading every morning when this beautiful sight had been filing right past our front door. All down the street Lao women knelt on mats, their left shoulders covered with a sash, and silently doled out sticky rice to young monks. The monks in turn carried vast metal containers slung over their shoulders and periodically broke off chunks of the rice they'd accumulated to drop into the begging bowls of the needy who knelt before them with hands clasped in respect. The only downside was the sheer number of tourists getting involved. We tried to stand respectfully and quietly out of the way but most people either joined in without the due propriety or went right up to the monks and took pictures, powerful flashes illuminating their faces in the dawn light.

The author - Wat Xieng Thong

The monks alms procession - Luang Prabang

Land Mine Legacy

Our last stop within Luang Prabang was the Laos UXO Centre, a small building away from the centre flanked by shell casings. We spent a sobering half hour learning about the terrible daily threat the people of this quiet little country still face. Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam were more heavily bombed in the 2nd Indochina war than any other country in WWII.

The UXO Centre had hundreds of deactivated bombs of all shapes and sizes, including a large cluster bombs, refilled with the 680 'bombies' it would have contained. Each one with potential to kill or maim, they were a terrible sight to behold. The tales and images of farmers and children hurt by the UXO were heart-wrenching. Farmers have no choice whether or not they risk going out and digging in their fields everyday, if they want to eat that is, and though most village children are now taught to be on the look-out for bombies there are still those who forget and pick up the shiny round toy-like objects inquisitively. One particularly grim fact was the information that some villagers are so poor that they go looking for UXO in order to make money from scrap metal. The disarming process as well is terrifying, the teams of men and women having no choice but to dig them up to remove them.

There's Something Fishy Going on Here

We of course had some excellent food in Luang Prabang, the highlight of the night-time attractions being the daily market. Like the Chiang Mai market it took up a huge stretch of the main street and was alive with light and noise. The difference however was that it sold more traditional handicrafts. Beautiful silk carves, wooden bowls, paper lanters and whole range of bags, purses, tablecloths and bedcovers were laid out on water-proof sheets on the ground. The food section was even better, one long alley-way covered in corrugated iron was rammed with stalls and exotic smells. The delicious scent of barbecued meat filled the air and the benches inside were packed with people enjoying buffets and various skewered delights. It was so packed it was impossible to see anything more than ten feet in front of you and on the nights when it rained water poured through roof into buckets obstructing the already crowded walkway. We had barbecued chicken and a plate of rice, veg, fried bread and other treats followed by a chocolate filled doughnut, coconut rice cakes and fresh spring rolls. We also found the best banana pancakes we've had in Laos, where they put the nutella inside with the banana rather than meekly drizzled on top.

The night market

But the best meal we had was without doubt my extravagant birthday feast where, thanks to the French occuaption of Laos, we enjoyed a delicious meal in "L'elephant". We consumed goat's cheese, oven roasted tomatoes and salad on a crusty bread to start followed by duck and italian sausages all while numerous waiters fussed around, drowning us in more bread and free water. In contrast the Lao style papaya salad earlier in the week was one of the most repulsive things I have ever eaten. Imagine going out to sea for a day and catching a tonne of fish before putting them all into a bucket. Then when you get home and empty the bucket you decide it would be a good idea to whip up a salad in the bottom of it. So to the putrid fish juice you add shredded uncooked aubergine, sour cherry tomatoes, chili and chunks of unripe papaya. Then you'll have an idea of what it tasted and smelt like.

And that pleasant fishy shudder closes the first section of Luang Prabang, a beautiful and diverse city experience. It's full of tourists but you can totally understand why, it's without a doubt one of the most atmospheric, historic and cultural places we've been.

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Nong Khiaw - When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Wasted

It was strange going back to somewhere we'd been before, used as we had become to perpetually moving forwards.

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.

Muang Ngoi - Resting Lady

And we thought the buses were rammed! The boat up the river from Nong Khiaw to Muang Ngoi was so packed that its edges were barely six inches above the water level. We all piled in long after we thought the boat was full, people half sat on top of one another like a massive, nautical game of sardines. Another slightly concerning fact was that our driver only had one hand.

A Distinct Lack of Teenage Kicks

Up river an hour later and still in one piece a few jumbled together buildings breaking out of the jungle came into view, flanked by towering mountains. The forest is so dense that from the river you can see only tiny patches of vertical cliff that aren't green. Muang Ngoi is a tiny roadless village. It has only one main street that stretches straight from the monastery to the Resting Lady Mountain. The whole town is struggling for space with nature. It is beautiful and remote and probably the worst place in the world to be a teenager. There are only a few shops and restaurants (which always seem surprised and disorientated to have customers) which cater solely to the tourists and nothing very much ever happens. There are only one or two boats to Nong Khiaw everyday and of course, no road, so no cars or bikes which in turn means that there are chickens and ducks and cats and dogs and all their numerous offspring all over the place.

Roosters wake you up at 5am with their incessant growing, which doesn't matter for the locals because they get up early anyway. Why? Well because they have to utilise the daylight because there is no electricity! Generators provide power for three hours in the evening until 10pm but that's it. Some people (swanky guesthouse owners) have their own generators but not many, but aside from that there's no TV, no music, certainly no internet and almost no phone signal.

The author - Main street of Muang Ngoi towards the Resting Lady Mountain

Still for a tourist it's a veritable Lao paradise. Half the town virtually tumbles into the incredible scenery of the river while the rest has that traditional feel travellers crave while still having the necessary conveniences. Life moves slow here and we found ourselves a little bamboo hut in a small garden in a beautiful location overlooking the side Nam Ou river and the mountains beyond. We sat out front in our hammocks all day watching exotic birds and butterflies wheel around.

It's always warm in Muang Ngoi, even in the pouring rain and we sat in the restaurants at night until we couldn't see the river and the mountains were lost in a swathe of inky blackness. The eateries are cheap and friendly and always have a cat or two to keep you company tend to kick you out at 9 ish so they can go to bed. Back to the bungalow we would go and read until the sad winding down noise let you know that the generators were about to die. After that all you could see outside were the stars.

We sort of had to become one with nature during our stay, which Theo managed much more successfully than I did. While he led hungry chicks up the street like some sort of poultry pied-piper and pondered the feasibility of using lizards to carry messages to each other (there are more of Louis' friends and relative than we care to count in Muang Ngoi), I continued to wrap myself up in the mosquito netting brandishing a flip flop and shrieking if anything brushed against me. There are bugs everywhere, ants in the bathroom, millipedes in the door frames, spiders in the ceiling and once a big fat beetle under the scoop for the toilet (no flush here either). At night the crickets are almost louder than city traffic.

The Resting Lady from the Nam Ou river

In to the Wild

Our first Muang Ngoi excursion was a kayaking trek with Laos Youth Travel led by a young man named Kaow. Like Chiang Rai's Ken, Kaow was super cool. He was dressed in the Laos equivalent of surfer shorts and a Super Dry shirt (that is baggy shorts and a fake Super Dry shirt) while also nonchalantly sporting a baseball hat and spiked earring combo. After paddling us and the kayaks upstream we stopped on a convenient beach and got into the kayaks. Kaow, of course, was a natural. He knew all the routes that caught the best currents and glided along effortlessly whereas Theo and I, who had both kayaked before but not in a double and I had never been on a river, splashed and squabbled and span round in circles. We did OK once we got going but we didn't seem to have any gear between drifting in the current and full race style powering down the river. At one point we had a total communication breakdown and crashed straight through a large bush.

The Resting Lady from the Nam Ou river

Kaow took us downstream and showed us the Resting Lady mountain, a vast peak that resembles a lady sprawled on her side, and generally bellowed questions across the river. He was extremely chatty, which was a pleasant change from all the blank staring. We stopped at a small village to have a look around, it could have been from any era save for the fact that the bamboo huts had all been updated to have metal roofs. It was totally silent, everyone being away in the fields. The only people we saw were a few old ladies and a group of little girls playing some sort of strange game where you fought over your shoes.

Back in the kayaks we paddled to the village from which we would walk to a waterfall. I managed to gracefully leave the kayak but unfortunately lost my balance in the slow boat we were using as a stepping stone to get to shore and fell on my bum, rolling around in the bottom of the boat with my legs in the air. Fortunately Kaow, Theo and the sober looking Laos man who had been driving the boat thought this was hilarious. "Too much Lao Lao (whiskey)" Kaow said knowingly.

At the village we rested and were examined for a while by lots of solemn faced children. Kaow took a great interest in Theo's John Lennon t-shirt and told us with glee how he'd met the man himself last year. He was very upset when we told him he was dead.

The walk to the waterfall took us first through pretty paddy fields with the mountains all around us. We took the winding paths across the fields and crossed little makeshift bridges over streams of water that ran for miles over the tiered plots. Kaow showed us all sorts of things along the way, beetles, frogs and grasshoppers. He told us about farm life and what it's like to live in Muang Ngoi and how he hopes they'll get electricity soon. He explained that the little huts we'd seen scattered across the hills were resting places for the workers and the miniature houses outside peoples homes were for the spirits.
  

Paddy fields around Muang Ngoi

Now whenever we've been anywhere near a waterfall, Theo and I agreed, the one thing our parents always drummed into us was; don't climb on the rocks! However, the jungle around the waterfall was so dense our trek turned out to be a nice stroll up a river. For a good half hour we waded and slipped and scrambled up stream. At one point we ascended a minor waterfall with the aid of a bamboo railing and Theo almost went back over it again in pursuit of a runaway flip flop. Kaow seemed to find it sufficient to simply shout "careful" every time we fell.

The waterfall was spectacular and after our hard climb we were grateful to swim in the freezing cold pool at its foot. Unfortunately, when we got out we both had our first taste of that glorious jungle hazard, leeches. Not only are they stealthy little scamps but no matter how hard you smush them with a rock they just won't die.

Kaow laid out our lunch by spreading out a huge banana leaf and opening up the takeway boxes he'd brought all the way upstream, although he did manage to dunk them in the river at one point. We had fried bamboo, noodles and sticky rice not to mention the most delicious, sweetest pineapple I have ever encountered. The strange thing about fried bamboo is, as Theo pointed out, though delicious everything else in this country is made from it, being strong yet supple, so you do feel as though you may as well stand up and start eating your chair when you want seconds.

Theo sensibly took it slow on the way back down the waterfall, so I was bounding on ahead with Kaow when I stupidly stepped down into a bit of river bed I couldn't see and disappeared up to the thigh in a large hole. Still we made it down and then home in one piece, feeling very pleased that we had managed to walk up and down a river without sustaining any injuries and convinced of what we had suspected before, that we were in one of the most beautiful spots in Laos.

The Waterfall close to Muang Ngoi

Spiders and Heights and Leeches, Oh My!

The next day we decided to do a trek on our own and set off in search of the nearby cave. Following the signs instead of the guide book we came to what turned out to be a different cave and much harder to access. The ascent was unbelievably  steep and there were barely even steps. What's more the earth footholds had been mostly turned to mud by the recent rain and were covered in damp slippery leaves. We were drenched in sweat and covered in bugs by the time we climbed some precarious wooden ladders to the cave entrance. We wandered into the dark, me clutching Theo, Theo clutching the weak headlight we'd been given. After seeing a massive and poisonous-looking spider we didn't hang around. It took us ages to traverse the steep, slippery, slope back down and I was freaking out (spiders in a high place is probably my worst nightmare). Eventually we got back sweaty and tired, thinking the worst was over, only to discover a massive leach lurking in between Theo's toes. From its size it must have been there for a while and it squirmed repulsively around the bathroom floor refusing to disappear down the drain. I panicked and did the worst thing possible. If you ever encounter a full leech, never do this. I whacked it with a shoe. Mud and blood sprayed everywhere. The leech was alive. Theo was bleeding. I was screaming. Now bamboo bungalows have very thin walls, so I'd imagine every single one of our neighbours heard the following:

"Leech!" "Get rid of it!" "It won't go!" "Leech!" "Die leech, die!!" (Whack, another whack, another whack) "Fuck's sake Emma stop hitting it!" "You get rid of it then!"

Stressed out and creeped out we tried our best to relax and recuperate out front in our hammocks, which went fine until Theo's promptly fell from the ceiling leaving him sprawled on the decking. "Too much fried rice" Kaow would have said. 

Our second attempt at seeing the cave went slightly better. Taking a different route out of town the track took us past bamboo homes and scraggy pieces of farmland full of chickens. As the path wound out of town it began to meander up and down past the Resting Lady mountain. Long stretches of paddy fields could be seen between the dense hedgerows that lined the path. On the way we picked up a stray canine companion, as you do. Reaching the fork in the river we visited the cave, a vast craggy place from which one part of the stream springs, and crossed a perilous bamboo bridge to the restaurant. A long time later a round, smiling lady brought us our fried rice then we ate our meal in the company of three cats and four chickens. We ventured slightly further afield down tracks similarly pretty to those we'd walked to the waterfall before heading home. 

Tham Pha Kaew cave

Lao-st in Translation

Of course the main draw of a village like this one is the interaction with the locals. From day one we had young men walking up to us in the street, shaking our hands and asking our names saying "pleased to meet you" over and over again. They seem keen to practice their English (obviously it the young men who are in possession of a decent education here, which is a shame because men talk to men in these countries meaning most conversations tend to go through Theo) and they offer to take us on treks to their friends' village. Our first experience of this was in first attempt at getting food. We placed an order with the teenage girl left in charge and she promptly walked out of the restaurant. Confused we waited and she came back with a BeerLao. That was a start, so we repeated the rest of our order and off she went returning with a man called Noi. A skinny, friendly youth with appalling teeth he sorted out the language problems and then sat down at our table with us as the girl left again. The near-silent minutes ticked by as conversation with Noi faltered and died, still he seemed content enough just to sit. Ten minutes later the girl located the cook and our food eventually came Lao style in dribs and drabs, though I never did get my rice or a drink.

Nam Ou river at sunset from Muang Ngoi

Generally speaking the restaurants in Muang Ngoi could be bit hit and miss, like the time we went the one owned by our guesthouse, which looked more like a shed full of children's shoes and toys than a restaurant and waited over half an hour to get fried rice. Not that you can blame Nicksa, the nice lady that owned the place, she seemed completely snowed under, running the guesthouse and the restaurant, doing DIY, laundry, cooking, hacking down the occasional banana tree and chasing after more small children than we could count. One afternoon we somehow got left with two of her toddlers, who seemed content enough to stay with us. They proceeded to beg for crisps, throw leaves everywhere and take all the empty water bottles out of our bin. All our interactions with kids were a little like being attacked by the touts in the cities. They would run after us down the street giggling and shouting in Lao. One little boy attached himself to the bag and followed Theo down the street. It was with great sadness that we waved goodbye to the hammocks and the view and the dusty street and the chickens and finally, the Resting Lady.

Udomxai - On the Road to Nowhere

The Road to Nowhere

Through the misted rain smeared windows of the bus I saw an old woman and a little girl struggling up hill. Like many of the walkers we had seen (mainly young children) they were barefoot and carried vast loads from straps slung around their foreheads.
The bus crawled along, scarcely topping 15mph as it limped up the mountains. At every instant the road looped back on itself as it carved a path through the steep ascent, affording a jaw-dropping view of the jagged peaks and the tiny villages that balance precariously on the mountainside.
As we drove through heavy rainstorms the peaks became shrouded in mist. Thin wisps of cloud clung to the mountains as if they had fallen from the sky and become entangled in the tree tops. Here and there we passed a landslide, the monsoon sending piles of mud and trees sliding into the road.
Chocolate rivers snaked their way down to the valley floor far below, swollen with mud and water they burst their banks and spread out, flooding the paddy fields. Skinny half naked children ran screaming through the flood waters while their parents sat in the doorways of their wooden homes watching the rain fall with solemn eyes.
These villages that spring straight out of the hillside are a strange mix of old and new. The houses at the top sit flat near the road but the ones further down teeter on impossibly steep slopes on their stilt legs. All the buildings are traditional and thatched but the washing outside is all football towels and brightly coloured t-shirts.
I'd seen these pictures on TV but you never really fully grasp the situation until you see it for yourself. The mud and the dirt and the one room homes and the sheer remoteness of it all just blows your mind.

The Tree of Life

Udomxai is a small central town completely surrounded by imposing mountains. This small basin contains the larges nearby town for most of the surrounding hillside villages and as such is mostly full of motorbike repair shops and the odd bank. They did have some great restaurants though, cheap and friendly and usually with a resident adorable puppy to wee on the floor while you eat.
The sights of Udomxai are few and we saw them all within a few hours. On both sides of the main street a steep flight of steps ascends the hill. On the west side the steps lead to the local temple, a small quiet place, followed by a large golden stupa (a large pointed monument said to resemble the lotus flower). The stupa and the standing Buddha beside it gaze out over a spectacular view of the whole town. On the east side the steps were steeper and strewn with debris, as if they had been flooded by the recent monsoon. At the top stands a strangely deserted mansion house that contains the town museum. By-passing this w walked on to the quieter part of town and the monastery there that contains the "tree of life".
It is said that a tree that stood on that spot contained great power in each of its branches. It could turn any whole are its fruit wise, strong or into a man or a beast. However, when the fruit fell it caused a mighty earthquake and the animals fled so Buddha sat under the tree and controlled the fall of the fruit so all could eat. The tree there now is made of cement with metal leaved and animals that rattle in the wind. 
Our one final errand in Udomxai was to withdraw enough money for our forth coming trip to Nong Khiaw and Muang Ngoi (both without banks). We spent hours traipsing the street to banks, trying different ATMs and harassing a poor pregnant bank worker before finally, four credit cards later, we managed to exchange our travellers cheques and get enough kip. Possibly at the expense of Theo's sanity. I might add that the first thing we noticed on reaching Nong Khiaw was a fully functioning ATM.


And so our uneventful bus hopping through the mountains drew to a close with our arrival at Nong Khiaw. In deepest darkest northern Laos, a place with out internet or phone signal, and we felt for the first time like we'd really managed to get away from it all. 

Luang Namtha - Raining Cats and Dogs and Giant Spiders

The bus wound its way through grand hillsides before climbing through the most amazing scenery I have ever seen. The mountains were sheer and jagged and covered in dense foliage. Staring out the bus window it took my breath away. I couldn't believe that I was actually looking at that place where all adventures start, the jungle!
This was of course our first taste of a Laos bus journey and that too was certainly an adventure. The bus was absolutely rammed, Westerners, locals, children and chickens, no one is left behind even if the bus is full. They have fold down seats in the aisle so once everyone's in you're trapped until the toilet break. Ah the toilet break. This is a free for all where everyone oiles off the bus at once and tried to wee in the same few metres of grass at the edge of the road. There's no point looking for somewhere to hide, on one side there is a sheer drop towards the valley floor and on the other a sheer cliff. One thing I would highly recommend (and fortunately this didn't happen to us) is going at the same time as everyone else because at least then (Lao's are fairly modest people) men and women go in different directions. If you stop the bus specifically for you, which the affable drivers are more than happy to do as no one in Laos is ever in a hurry, then everyone else on the bus will stand up to watch.
Luang Namtha is made up of a string of villages which over time slowly joined together to form a single town. Although to be honest there is still an obvious gap between the settlements and the place looks more like a few separate attempts at a town dotted along a straight road rather than an actual cohesive place.
The tourist part with the guesthouses and restaurants is a fairly unremarkable place. The only events of note on our first night there were trying Mekong catfish, which was not as delicious as I had hoped, and the appearance of a spider so huge in the restaurant (and I know many of my friends and family back home will sympathise with this) that I had to go back to the room and cry for a full ten minutes to regain my composure.
The opportunity of doing much else in Luang Namtha was taken from us by the arrival of the monsoon. In the middle of the night the storm struck and the heavens opened. The rain battered down all night and we were caught by a few more showers while we were there. This not only made everything ridiculously muddy but also cut off the power. Time to move swiftly on.

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Chiang Khong & Huay Xai - For Crying Out Lao-d

Border crossings. You never know how they're going to go. One day one official might decide to charge you a little but extra might decide that they actually don't want to let you into the country unless you pay a separate fee. You can queue for hours or for minutes, and so it was with great trepidation that we approached our first one.
The bus to Chiang Khong, right on the border with Laos, was the first rickety old bus we'd been on. It was noisy and hot and precariously piled with stuff, for South East Asia buses not only transport people they also seem to function as some sort of unofficial FedEx. The journey through town was a hot walk up a fairly nondescript street that took much longer than we had anticipated and my first boat trip on the Mekong lasted for approximately three minutes.
The man issuing our visas was certainly in no hurry but we didn't have any problems. We waited and sweated and he chatted with his colleague as he tauntingly dangled his rubber stamp over our passports.
We took a brief glance around Huay Xai (very easy as like Chiang Khong it is essentially one road) and crashed out in the most revoltingly frilled and fancy guesthouse room I have ever seen.
As we cooled down we foolishly thought the worst was over, but very soon we would come to realise that for us, Huay Xai was cursed.
You'd never guess at first glance that this simple little place of guesthouses and restaurants would be so intrinsically evil, but so it was. The trouble started for us that very afternoon when we tried to use the internet. Every interaction with local people we had was difficult. The Laos response to our questions, which they didn't understand, seemed to be to stare blankly over our heads and walk away. So as you can image it took us a while to find somewhere we could use a computer and when we did no one could tell us how to stop the page randomly translating back into Lao every five minutes. This ultimately resulted in Theo's card getting blocked.
The next day I woke up to find two things amiss, one was my boyfriend rolling around on the bed clutching his stomach and groaning, the other was my sponge bag, which was full of ants.
Very soon I was too ill to get on the minivan we had booked to take us away from the accursed town and we rolled across the street and checked into our most expensive air-conned room yet.
Of course we knew it would happen eventually, we'd been having far too much good luck really, but that didn't make me have any warmer feelings for Huay Xai. The next day we both felt fine so we packed up and got the hell out of there.