Moonshine, it's a LaoLao thing (Laos Part Deux)

Pick of the Day: Guesthouse in a village 4km out of Mong Ngoi.

Style: Squat

Atmosphere: Damp

Extras: This was the bathroom. The shower was a ladle of water, which is a great water efficiency tool. We didn't stay here, just popped in for a beer. But at 5000kip (50p) a night it was a bargain!

19/06/13 to 30/06/13 Luang Prabang, Nong Khiaw, Mong Ngoi and slowboating to the border via Pakbeng

We caught the bus to Luang Prabang the next day and liked it instantly. It is a really relaxed leafy town with a fair few tourists but not so many that they are annoying and a huge amount of cafes and bakeries. We checked into a really lovely guesthouse where the manager went out of her way to recommend great food and bars and generally help us out. The only downside was that our air-con room had no glass in any of the windows which made the air-con a little redundant. However- it was here that we had some of the best local food since coming to Laos. The laap (pronounced Larp) was great as were the local sausages (made with pork and lemongrass), monkey ear mushrooms (super tasty with ginger) and the ubiquitous sticky rice. The local wine was pretty good and we ended up having far too much of the famous Beer Lao as it’s tasty and the same price as water.

Heading into dusk at Luang Prabang, looking out over the Mekong

We spent our first day or so having a look around the local wats which were extraordinarily beautiful with hand-made mosaics made of tiny bits of coloured glass all over the walls and steep, sweeping multi-layered roofs reaching almost to the ground. The night market in Luang Prabang is something to behold as it’s enormous and sells a huge amount of local handicrafts from hand woven silk scarves and tapestries to embroidery, basketwork and then trinkets aimed squarely at tourists such as the ipod speaker made out of a tube of carved bamboo.

The tops of the night market with the temple of the royal palace beyond

Vi at the start of a Papaya salad obsession

Shopping. We disagree over the enjoyment of this activity.

We took a minibus to the local waterfalls (Kuang Si Falls) which was a great trip. There is a bear sanctuary there for Asiatic bears that have been rescued from the chinese medicine trade where they are kept in cages to have their bile extracted. We arrived in time for feeding time where various titbits were hidden up trees and in old oil drums to give the bears a bit of a diversion. They were super-cute.

Bears, always fun.

Found this hotty in the pools

The waterfalls themselves were really impressive with an enormous fall at the top leading down around 8 different levels of mini-falls and plunge pools, 3 of which you could swim in. The water was a clear cool blue colour and full of the tiny fish they have in fish massage places that eat your dead skin which was a little odd at first.  The middle pool was deep enough for a rope swing to have been hung off a tree around 6ft off the water. As we arrived a Japanese girl was psyching herself up to jump off the tree and swing out over the water. It took a little while for her to pluck up the courage to do it and when she hit the water we realised why. She couldn’t swim. She flapped about for a while bobbing up and down in the water before someone swam over and dragged her over to the shore. God knows why she thought it was a good idea to jump in in the first place. Having said that I almost didn’t make it back to the shore myself  after coming off the rope swing as I let go of the rope too late and ended up hitting the water horizontally in a full-body bellyflop from 6ft up. That hurt even more that the moment not long later when I went to lean against a tree to pose for a photo and put my hand in a termite nest. Not my day really.

Finally getting to play with the Go Pro

The waterfalls have calcium deposits leeched from the hills, and gives the water its blue colour

We headed home for a Lao barbeque which is an awesome idea. A piece of metal shaped like a sombrero with a curved top and shallow dish all around the edge is placed on top of a bucket of hot coals. You pour broth into the dished edge and as it heats add mushrooms, vegetables, noodles and seasonings to make a kind of soup. The top is scalding hot and has little holes to let the smoke through and onto it you place strips of chicken, pork and buffalo meat to cook to your liking. Keep repeating and eating til you are full, then eat some more.

This is a Lao ninja dog. Exporting next year

We caught a little boat to the village across the water the next day and had a little mooch around and a look at the pretty wats and get a bit of a feel for village life. It’s a strange place as it’s within sight and swimming distance of Luang Prabang but there are no tourists, no guesthouses and no shops selling handicrafts. There are a few noodle stalls where you can get delicious duck noodles for £1 a bowl which is much cheaper than in town.

Luang Prabang is famous for it dawn monk alms precession. Being at dawn we naturally only saw it once

We tried to get a boat upriver to Nong Khiew but it seems the boat only goes if there are sufficient people wanting to go upriver and the two of us were not sufficient so we got the bus. We arrived in this dusty little town in the hills in the rain and found ourselves a little riverside bungalow for relatively cheap. The local dogs seemed delighted to meet us but there seemed to be hardly anybody else in the town. We paid to go on a trek in the hills the next day through some beautiful rice paddies, jungle and a couple of hill tribe villages. It rained hard all day which put a bit of a dampener on things. Despite our waterproofs we got soaked to the skin and the path turned into a very thick clay-heavy mud which stuck to our shoes and felt like walking with 2kg weights strapped around each ankle. Also, annoyingly enough, the rain brought out the leeches and all of us ended up periodically checking down our socks for the bloodsucking little monsters. However we did get off lightly with only a couple of small leech bites each as did find the biggest leech I have ever seen in one puddle. At full stretch it was over 1ft long and apparently if you get got by one of them you bleed for hours. 

Wet season. Cheaper. For a reason.

But also beautiful

and cooler... Every cloud, eh!

However the countryside we passed through was beautiful, especially as it was rice planting season and all the paddy fields were a lush pea-green colour with the little rice plants poking up. The villages we passed through were all built in the traditional style on stilts with woven bamboo walls and thatched roofs (though some had corrugated iron). All of the villagers we met were farmers and there were chickens, pigs, puppies and naked children running everywhere in the rain and mud. We were pretty chilly and more or less out of dry clothes by the time we got back. Also, annoyingly Ben’s camera had got wet and misted up inside- reducing the photo possibilities for the next few days.

The bum guns in the bathrooms were perfect for getting the sticky clay off

We tried to get the boat back down-river to Luang Prabang the next day but yet again not enough people wanted to do the same journey as us so we were faced with the choices of getting the bus, staying for another day or taking the boat upriver to Muong Ngoi instead. We took the boat. Muong Ngoi is a tiny village, only accessible by river from the south with only occasional electricity. We managed to get a riverside bungalow for 30,000 kip/night (£3). There were, however, rats in the roof which freaked Ben out a little at night. We went for a walk out of town with some of the people we had caught the boat with. We passed by a cave were the locals hid in times of trouble and a small but pretty waterfall. We got lost in a maze of rice paddies and eventually found ourselves in an even tinier village where a wizened old lady served us warm Beer Lao on a little terrace overlooking the paddies and offered us a room in a bamboo shack for 5000 kip/night (50p). Back in Muong Ngoi we got a pretty good buffet dinner and then got a little worse for wear on a mixture of Beer Lao, Lao Lao (local rice whisky, moonshine) and a Cuban cigar. The next day a big group of us from the village managed to get a boat all the way back down to Luang Prabang which was a beautiful 5 hour boat ride through teak forests and past fishing villages.

Sometimes its good to take a punt and head up river. We had a  great laugh with these guys and saw some cool villages

Chillin, if we had planned ahead we could have had the cheapest night yet!

Moonshine... in a water bottle.

We had one more day in Luang Prabang doing a spot of shopping and meeting our boat crew for a few drinks and a bit of random jamming at one of the local bars before it was time to move on. We took a boat yet again to head to the Laos border with Thailand. The journey took 2 days by boat with an overnight stopover in a town called Pakbeng and there was some lovely scenery on offer as well as a great moment where the family in charge of our boat bought a 10kg live catfish from a local fisherman

Said fish.

After a couple of nights in grotty and rather dodgy guesthouses we made it to the Thai border where the immigration official infuriated me by stamping the same page in my passport for the 5^th time despite there being plenty of empty pages free. Then we were free to catch the bus to Chiang Rai and start our Thai adventures.

Welcome to the Jungle (Laos Part 1)

Pick of the day: On the road in Lao, somewhere

Style: Hole

Atmosphere: Grim

Extras: This isn't really about additions, more about the absences. Sometimes though you realise why the locals choose to pee in a bush.

 

12/06/13 to 19/06/13 Bangkok to the border, Vientiane and Vang Vieng

After our short stint in Bangkok we took the overnight sleeper train to Nong Khai to cross the border to Vientiene in Laos. On boarding the train we thought that this might be the best yet. As per usual we seemed to have been separated out into a ‘foreigner’ carriage but the beds looked comfortable with curtain partitions for privacy and even an attendant whose job seemed to be to make our beds for us! We settled in for a comfy night only to discover that on Thai trains they don’t turn the overhead fluorescent lights off. Even at 4am. So we spent the night with our faces shrouded in our own T-shirts in an attempt to block out the light and arrived just as tired as usual.

We seemed to be virtually the only people crossing into Vientiene in order to actually visit the country. We shared a tuk tuk into town with a group of westerners who all worked in Thailand and were doing a visa run to the Thai consulate in Vientiene. It struck me as a bit of a pain to have to skip across borders every 2 months especially for those who had been in Thailand for a year or more but I guess some people just love their jobs that much.

Buddhas, hundreds of them in Vientiane

We arrived at our hostel which also seemed a bit of a stopping place for people on visa runs. It had a chilled bar area and a movie room but no-one really seemed to leave except for visits to the consulate and to go boozing at night. We have to admit to joining them for one night but for the most part the other travellers in the hostel were not really the kind of people we socialised with at home and being abroad didn’t seem to improve them. We discovered that home counties accents become even more grating away from home (I mean is ‘sooo emosh’ really a normal way to express yourself?). Added to that were the usual hippie travellers who went everywhere with guitars and thought it was cool to travel with no shoes and even a guy who claimed to have visions of the future. There were even a few who were clearly used to a different sort of lifestyle as I was in the bathroom on the third floor one day and actually heard a girl call down the stairs asking for someone to come and carry her bag down for her. People who are used to having staff should not slum it in hostels. Needless to say we were not too impressed with the non-resident inhabitants of Vientiene and spent most of our days out and about sight-seeing and consulate-visiting.

Nagas, temple guardians

That Lat, A big gold (not solid) wat. Its on all the money, so we paid a visit

We managed to get 60 day Thai visas (at least we hope we did as they didn’t bother to actually date it) and had a look at the classic golden Wat that is on all the Laos money. We didn’t really sample any Laos food as the hostel only served western food and the night market appeared to specialise in pancakes but we did get some great French and Japanese food. Strangely the people of Laos don’t seem to be as resentful of the French for being colonised as the Vietnamese. They still have most of their road and tourist signs in French as well as Laos and lots of people still speak French. They also make awesome baguettes which is obviously most important.

Not sure if this is about walking on grass or sharing a smoke

Once our visas were sorted we caught the bus to Vang Vieng. The town itself is not much to look at- pretty much two dusty streets lined by guesthouses and noodle shops. The town is bordered by the river on one side and an old CIA airstrip on the other, which remains curiously unused. This old “Air America” airbase is a frightening reminder of the horrific things the Americans did in Asia through a fear of communism.

The old "Air America" base. Now a local hangout

*FACT- There was enough ordinance dropped on the country to be be equivalent to one bombing mission, every 8 minutes, 24hrs a day for NINE years*

MORE karsts.

However it has become famous over the years because of the tubing scene there. For a long time the main thing to do in Vang Vieng was grab a tractor inner tube, get a lift upriver and float back down stopping at every bar along the way. Each bar would hand out free shots and the beer was pretty cheap and there were zip wires and massive slides to get back into the water. However recently there were a few deaths on the river (not surprising really if you think about hundreds of blind drunk tourists and a fast flowing river being mixed together). The tubing scene was almost completely shut down and now although you can still sit in a tube there are only 2-3 bars lining the river. To be honest, we preferred it that way. We spent a lovely afternoon floating down the river. We did stop at the first bar (well, got dragged in by the locals who throw lines out for you) and had a beer and a game of petanque (boules) in the sunshine but it was mostly a very chilled afternoon topped off with an excellent 10,000kip (£1) sandwich at the end. The guesthouse we stayed in was one of the grottier ones with no air-con and dodgy bedding but it was pretty cheap so we were ok with slumming it for a few days.

Chillin on the river. The bar is just early enough that by the time you finish those beers have made you well rough!

The next day we avoided the bars playing endless repeats of friends and family guy and hired some mountain bikes to go and visit the local waterfalls. It was fairly hard work in the blazing heat, not least because the mountain bikes aren’t terribly well maintained and so don’t change gear all that well but after nearly passing out a couple of times we finally made it to the top of the hill where the waterfall was. We were really lucky that not many others had decided to make the trip that day and so we had the waterfalls to ourselves. There were two actual waterfalls (on very big and a smaller one) and a few plunge pools around that made for a lovely place to spend an afternoon swimming and relaxing. We then carried on some easier trails on the bikes that passed through dense, uninhabited jungle which was pretty cool. At the edge of the jungle, before the road cut through back to town we stopped at a goat and mulberry farm for a spot of dinner. We had an amazing papaya salad that was straight off the tree along with laap (minced pork cooked with loads of mint, basil and chilli), coconut curry, iced mulberry tea and delicious mulberry wine. Then at least it was home time for a well deserved sleep.

The benefit of putting a bit of effort in is most people don't, so you get it to yourself!

The following day we decided to go climbing. We hadn’t even known that Laos was known as a climbing destination but it seems a few climbers passing though have bolted some of the cliffs and the locals have learnt to climb and can now guide and hire out kit. We had a hot and sweaty trek through the jungle, wading through two streams as we went to access the climbing but once we had cooled down and dried off a bit we found it was well worth it! The climbing was on amazing tufas and razor sharp limestone with some really interesting lines. We got a bit spanked on the 6as and both of us ended up dangling off a particularly large tufa, dripping with sweat and wondering if Laos people had somehow managed to learn to extend their arms by 2ft halfway up a climb. However we both concurred that it was the best climbing of the trip so far and well worth a visit for any heading out that way. On our way back I ended up running through the jungle screaming at Ben as a herd of cows came stampeding through the undergrowth at us but thankfully they seemed to be intent on catching one of their own and left us alone. We spent the rest of the afternoon chilling and overhearing conversations about the best places to get mushrooms (the ‘happy’ kind) and how corrupt the local police were (very).

The local crag, too steep for these arms....

......So we just enjoyed the view.....

....until its time to bushwack home