Choose another map, showing:

• China
• South East Asia
• Asia
• Eurasia
• Eurasia, Africa & Pacific
• The World

Other entries in Laos

national geographic

for every low point, there's a high point waiting to happen. and in this case, it was extremely high. maybe it'd be torture to live on this roller coaster of extreme ups and downs if it wasn't so much fun!

the day after I got to luang namtha, the sun came out. I rented a one-speed towny bike and rode 10km outside the city. I stumbled across a dam and these crazy guys paddling a dugout canoe within feet of the spill-way. that seemed a little sketch, but saw no lawyers around to hope for a law suit sooooo....

in town, I found a tour office who, just like in luang prabang, had nice photos on the wall. this time of a jungle trek to an akha village with bamboo huts and meals on banana leaves - how charming, I'm thinking. by night-time enough peeps had signed up to make it cheap, so of course I said 'yes' & went home to pack up my dry bag (why did they give me a dry bag, you ask? well, I'll tell you:

next day I meet the dutch family who'se on the trek with me - mom, dad and their 17 yr old daughter. they were great fun, not complainers (hurrah!) and extremely fit. all good qualities cause on the first day, we may have started on a 4wd road, but within and hour was single track through rice paddies and then started with stream crossings, steep hills, steeper drop offs, and loads of icky puddles.

a huge bummer was discovering at lunch that my water bottle had exploded inside my dry bag and soaked everything. I ended up super dehaydrated cause I only had 3 more bottles for the rest of the trip. and at this point, for irony, it started to pour sheets of rain. woe is me! we still had 4 hrs to go but now the trails are full of even more mud to wade through. thank god we all kept smiling and pone and ca, our guides, helped us across every stream crossing (like 50...) and really, once you're completely soaked, wet is wet. so it really didn't matter.

we finally got to the village after 7 hrs of  slipping and sliding - even with our hiking shoes. the guides wore flip flops and had no troubles. kept thinking 'this is SO why we lost the war'....

village life was incredible once we finally got there and worth every hour it took! this is the most remote place I've ever been. there are about 300 people living here. it's all bamboo huts and thatch roofs. NO motorbikes, of course. there really aren't any more wild animals around - they've killed them all through the years, but otherwise there's farming (rice, veggies, corn) and raising pigs/chickens/ducks. there's also a school (no walls, just thatch roof and tables/benches made from logs) but it's holiday so the teacher is gone and the kids have 'time off'.

loads of people are still in traditional dress. women wear these black hats with silver medalions & tassles. the medalions are their family wealth; kind of like wearing your checking account statement on your forehead. and there must be loads of betle nut here cause lots of adults have black/missing teeth fringed in red gums. strange, but I was blown away by how beautiful those toothless black smiles were...maybe my taste in men is changing....

we stayed in a long house away from the village but from the minute we arrived, we had from 3-10 peeps from the village watching our every move. at least I had privacy while I took my shower tho wouldn't be surprised if prying eyes were peeking at my white bum from behind a banana tree or two.  to get to the shower was a skate down yet another slippery slope to this muddy puddle - aka 'shower'. swat off the wasps, don't drop your soap in between the logs, dont take a dive into the mud....wasn't exactly relaxing, but suppose it WAS refreshing...in a muddy puddle sort of way.

when I got back they had already more-or-less killed a piglet (knife to the throat). I say more-or-less cause when they started pouring boiling water on him to get the fur off, there was some unmistakable wiggling (I assume moving means being alive in animals, right? it's only spiders that twitch even after they're dead?) ...  I realy don't have an issue with animals becoming food, but that was a little surprising. in any case, of course I said a silient thank you to this little guy and the guides set out to skin/gut/clean/chop.

a couple guys from the village cooked dinner - we learned that men cooking is typical in akha tribes (dont have a problem with this!). we got to just chill while all that work was going on and got to show the loitering villagers what strangeness we had hauled in our bags: headlamps, contacts, reflective tape on my rain jacket....  but best was getting the kids to draw in my sketch book. they had no fears in trying and loved laughing at what each of them came up with. plus I learned a few akha words from what they drew (house: nyom; fish: nasah; corn: ado). I could've done that for hours but stir-fried pig, cabbage soup and 'cheelee shausen' ('chili sauce' in dutch :) was finally ready & served by candle light (again not for romance, but cause we have no electricity).

after dinner, they brought in girls to do 'akha massage' on us - as if this could get any better?? it was a little hard to fully relax given the audience, but we were all smiles and so the villagers were too. they also gave us these cool purses embroaidered by the girls. what lucky peeps are we?

that night I popped a vicodin to make sure I got a good nights sleeps. SOOOO glad I did. (more forshadowing....) next morning we wandered the village for more pics. saw villagers pounding rice, peeking out from under thatch shutters, naked kids running around in the rain. saw the little huts where the young couples go to spend a night alone, as in away from their families (wink, wink). got the kids to do a few more drawings - including the littlest kids who just made scribbles that made the big kids howl.

by the time we left it was downpouring - ugh. gonna be a long day. first section is a super steep downhill-turned- stream. our feet get instantly soaked so it's honestly easier hiking, not caring about staying dry or not-muddy. but - oy! - when we get to the first stream crossing, its RAGING! for a sec, the guides consider it, but we refuse = its easily waste deep and super fast. what now? guides say we'll hike back up to the village and just wait for it to go down. 'ummmm, how long will that take?' as if the guides can control/predict the weather....

we wait in the school house, make a fire. 2 hours later, they've found a local guide from the village and we set out again - we have to cause at this point we'll already be back after dark. at least this guide knows of a log we can use to cross the raging stream. then he takes the machete and bushwhacks us UP the hill and DOWN the hill (steeeeeeep!) for the next hour to (presumably) avoid more heinous stream crossings.

on a good day, the hike out is 7 hours. this isn't a good day so we take 10+ (tho I really wasn't keeping track). I just know we crossed a bajillion streams, all with hiking shoes on cause most were knee high ragers and you needed the solid footing. at least the water wasn't ice cold like in alaska. and we helped each other so these little kindnesses made a desperate situation not seem so bad.

we had more grilled pig for lunch, plus stir fried rattan (yes, as in what they make chairs out of, but this was actually good!) and more cheelee shausen. pone said to eat fast  and I crammed as much food as I could - grilled pig never tasted so good.

after lunch, more streams, up, up, down, down, mud, mud mud but everyone was still smiling. I asked pone if he wanted to keep guiding but really he wants to be a banker. (only in laos can you go from being a flip-flop wearing jungle guide to a banker and this is actually considered a reasonable progression.) we keep hearing animal sounds, but see nothing. he teaches me to ask 'are you crazy?' in laos: chow pin ba bo?

with still 2 hours to go, it gets dark and we pull out the headlamps. (whoever invented these things never lived ina land of bugs. if you actually wear it, your face is swarmed. I ended up carrying it the whole time...) ca keeps leading us through the rice paddies - have no idea how he knows which land bridges lead where. I'm praying I don't accidentally fall in. leeches are bad enough NOT being in the water... pone is barefoot and stops every 10 minutes to pick off leeches. with every stop, I click off my lamp and notice the stars.

we finally get to our last river crossing but - yow - it's the biggest rager of all. it's WAY too deep to cross, tho the guides are considering it - never mind that it's DARK! this is our only way to the road... and home and beds and hot showers...but we absolutely refuse. they lead us to another spot that turns out to be just as bad and we refuse just as much. so they shout a laos-style 'yoo-hooo' towards the only light we can see across the paddies. the light 'yoo-hoos' back so we work our way over and find a couple living in a one-room, raised hut, with no running water, electricity, I'm not sure they even have a toilet (it's just the 2 of them....).

at this point, it's perfectly clear we won't be crossing that river, but takes a while for us to realize (accept?) that we're actually staying the night with this old couple on their farm, on the wood deck outside that single room. the guides bust out more pig for dinner (going on meal 3 now...), we try to clean up, the couple gives up their straw mats and mosquito net for us (so kind!). I have wet pants, my rain jacket, and a towel to keep me 'warm'. but we're so exhausted - I know I actually slept some cause I remember dreams (like the one where a monk fed me gold leaf...).

the next day, hurrah! the river is totally down. villagers are already crossing it with no prob. we do one last crossing ourselves and clean off all the caked on mud on pants and shoes. finally touch the other side - we made it back safe!!!!  the dutch family was a little bummed that the tour company sold this trek in rainy season, but for me it ranks in the top 5 coolest things I've done since I started traveling. AND I eeked out an extra day on my limited budget so all is great!

Add to del.icio.us Add to reddit

Photos / videos of "national geographic":