From Luang Prabang, I took a bus north to the town of Nong Khiaw. The journey became significantly longer than it needed to be after a broken axle diverted us back to more or less where we’d come from, but eventually we pulled up at a dusty bus stop under towering limestone mountains. The road onwards was blocked by a huge wedding party playing pumping Lao dance music (actually I later learned that it was a baby-naming party), and so we heaved on our backpacks and trudged past the cheers of drunken Lao men and down the road, in search of water.
Nong Khiaw is spread over two sides of the river, and the few backpacker bungalows and restaurants are on the far side, which (incidentally? consequently?) is the prettier side. I found a little wooden bungalow for 30,000 kip ($4), showered off accumulated grime and sweat, and went for a walk away from the town, past rice paddies and wooden huts and buffalo and phenomenally strong old ladies with logs on each shoulder. I was headed for a cave I’d read about, but completely failed to spot the conspicuous English-language sign pointing to it, so it was just a meander down the road and back again, without any real destination. I didn’t mind this, since as we all learn, it’s the journey that matters, not the destination. I went back to the cave today, but freaked myself out by letting myself believe that it was full of demons.
In the evening, I met up with new friends from the bus, since it was one guy’s birthday. Here are some cats:
feed me
The following morning, Saturday, I caught a boat ferry one hour further upstream, to Muang Ngoi. Muang Ngoi is only accessible by boat, has no electricity, no real roads, and only one motorbike, owned by a teenage boy who drives it up and down the 200m ‘high street’ to show off to girls. I feel that Muang Ngoi is what Laos is all about – beautiful, peaceful, isolated, green, with friendly people and abundant lao-lao (homebrewed sticky-rice-whisky). It’s got a nice-sized backpacker community as well, and after a few days here I felt like I knew most people, both locals and foreigners, and almost felt at home.
the high street
some boys cockfighting :(
On my initial exploratory walk, I met a cool Lao guy called Sai, who works as a trekking guide, and it felt right to go on a trek with him. (For the benefit of the two people reading this who know what I’m on about – Sai is like the Lao Pet...) The downside of travelling alone is that it’s more expensive to do activities with only one person. Opposite Sai’s house I spotted three Swedes I’d met the previous night in Nong Khiaw and again on the boat in the morning, and so I asked if they wanted to come trekking. They hadn’t planned to, but thought about it for a bit and decided to come with me. The upside of travelling alone is that it’s really easy to make new friends. We booked a two-day trek with Sai, leaving the next day.
Despite the fact that the generators are turned off at about half nine, Saturday night ended late, fuelled by free lao-lao shots from Sai, and the company of new and only-slightly-less-new friends (and the coincidental re-meeting of a dreadlocked Israeli I’d hung out with in Vientiane). Because I’m a machine, I sprung out of bed at six the next morning with the crowing of the cockerels, and got ready for the trek.
The trek was HARD WORK! I guess I’m less fit than normal at the moment, and the walking was all up and down through the mountains, but we kept up a fast pace. Sai said we were as fast as locals
. One long uphill stretch was covered in huge leeches the size of my finger, and so we had to go up so quickly to avoid getting bitten as much as possible. The slimy bastards still got some of my blood. (Back in Muang Ngoi, I drew a picture of a human leech with two bodies stitched together in the middle and two huge gaping mouths full of teeth and blood. I showed it to three blokes I didn’t really know and they didn’t talk to me much after that.)
freshly-picked tobacco drying in the sun
swedes are so aryan
We spent the night in a tiny Khmu village. The Khmu are an ethnic minority originally from Cambodia. A few of the adults speak a bit of Lao, but mostly the Khmu people are completely isolated up in the mountains, still living in their traditional ways and without much contact with other influences. I find it very strange to think about how cut-off they are – a difficult 4-hour walk even from Muang Ngoi, which itself seems very far away from anything. I wonder how their concerns differ from ours; like what they worry about whilst we’re worrying about Japan or the global food crisis or the polar bears. If your frame of reference was so much smaller, surely you would think very differently? That’s not to undermine their concerns, of course – often the unmaterialistic ‘simple' life is idealised, but I’d say it’s fucking hard work. I also think that it’d be very frustrating, especially for the young people, that they don’t really have any prospects beyond the village. Anyway, it’s very interesting to go to places like this and see how differently people live their lives in all the corners of the world. The people were very hospitable, and generous with the lao-lao toasts.
village
beds
breakfast
The next day’s walk was almost all downhill, and I frequently felt that I was going to slip and hurtle to my death, but I never did. For much of the way, there was no path, and so we just walked down the riverbed in our trainers. The leeches had a feast.
after one last steep climb – the destination is in sight
We had to get a boat downriver to get back to Muang Ngoi. The boat driver brought tubes so that we could float down, as popularised by Vang Vieng. I almost died tubing and had to be rescued by Sai wearing just Doraemon boxers 
but that’s a story for another day.
