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Other entries in Luang Namtha

Lost in the Jungle!!!

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Well while most of you back home were enjoying a nice Thanksgiving dinner with friends and family I on the other hand was lost some where in the jungles of Laos and forced to sleep on banana leaves......Well this might be a little long but if your reading this you must have time so here goes........ After crossing into Laos from Thailand I went to the bus station where I was going to be taking a 9 hour bumpy bus ride north close to the China border...... It turned out that there was no bus that day so I had to cram into the back of a small truck loaded full of Lao people....... I thought over the last year of traveling I have seen my fare share of crappy transport but this beat everything..... the road was rough and I had to sit on a little wooden bench seat and my legs were jammed in between some boxes...... within only 20 minutes my ass and legs were both completely numb..... The dust was as thick as snow....we wrapped clothes around our faces....we looked like a gang of bandits..... I finally made it to Muang sing around 7pm.... I then quickly setup a 3 day trek of the following morning..... I would be joined by a German couple and 2 guys from London...... We set out around 8am I had to first stop at the market o buy a jacket since the weather up here gets cold a night.... The 3 day trek was going to take us through a bunch of tribal villages.... Mostly Akha tribes..... I should first so say that the main town Muang sing isn't really a town it's very remote.... Power only 4 or 5 hours at night and no phones or internet.....so the fact that we would be hiking days out into the jungle from here means It was going to be very very remote..... We made it to the first Akha village by 11am...... there were naked babies running around......topless women cutting wood.... It reminded me of pictures I saw when I was a kid in National Geographic magazine.... They wore bright colored hats with silver coins on their heads....... There were pigs and dogs and chickens scurrying around..... Men sat smoking opium..... I was completely lost in the village life that I just stood there for a few minutes watching...... but before I knew it our guide said we had to move on..... So we said bye and headed deeper into the jungle......along the way wild pigs would run by and water buffalo with their dumb looks on their faces would stare at us..... The trail got pretty tough within only 1 hour..... Hard packed mud turned into slippery wet chocolate.... The German girl busted ass and got a chin full of mud...... we hiked up and down mountains.... Across rivers were our shoes got soaking wet..... At one point when I was jumping down off a log I slipped and twisted my knee.... It felt like someone had just stuck an ice pick right through my knee cap..... I limped on for other hour or so until lunch...... at lunch my foot felt strange so I took off my shoe to find a huge bloody leech draining the blood from me......my sock was covered in blood....... Now that we all realized there were leeches which the guides didn't tell us..... We spent the rest of the day stopping every 10 minutes for a "leech check" .... I have been on treks before and most of them give you plenty of time when hey say 6 hours hiking they mean 3 to 4 hours at a normal pace and 6 hours if you crawl..... Well not this company..... Even though I was slow going we still were making good time...... we hardly ever stopped only to quickly look for leeches.... It seemed like the day would never end.... every time I asked the guide how much longer.....he would say 1 hour more even though he just said that 40 minutes ago.... I felt like the boy in the car "are we there yet" ...... I was just in so much pain I wished someone would just take me out of my misery..... I have never felt that much pain before other then getting my tattoos...... finally just before the sun wet down we made it to the Akha village.......when my eyes first set sight on it I said "thank god....get me out of here" .... But wow what an amazing sight such a cool place..... I kind of felt like Christopher Columbus as if I just discovered this lost tribe all by myself...... but before my day dreaming could go any further I hear "hey jimmy come shower in the river" it was Arnold...... all I really wanted to do was just sit and rest my knee..... So I sat down on a log and ate some bananas as I watched the tribe people go about their lives..... One of the local tribe guys comes over to me holding a chicken by its feet..... he starts to say something.....but not understanding him I nod as if to say yeah sure whatever....he then holds up the chicken and with a quick snap breaks its neck......my head pulls back and my eyes bug out....then I hear our guide standing behind me say that this is our dinner...... the man then takes a seat next to me on the log and starts to pluck the feather..... After a few minutes I get and stumble away.... That night the guide says that we were all going to get massage...... I thought he was just messing with me cause my knee hurt so bad...... but nope he was right.....after dinner 6 Akha girls come walking into our hut.... My eyes lit up.....so we all laid there in our hut and got massages while the chief of the village got drunk on some rice whisky Stefan had brought....... He actually got so drunk he passed out... and at that point so did I ..... Not from alcohol but from pure exhaustion..... The night was freezing cold and my little stinky pig blanket they gave me didn't help much..... But I was so tired I slept like a baby..... we woke up at 6am.... The village was too noisy to sleep anymore..... the pounding of the rice could wake the dead.... I stood up to find that my knees where not functional..... I could barely walk.... It was like someone nailed pieces of wood on both sides of my legs so I couldn't bend my knee..... the guide came to me and said "are you ok today?" I said "yeah sure couldn't be better" he then said that to day was going to be the hardest day.... Around 7 or 8 hours hiking.... And he worried that if I was too slow that we wouldn't make it the village by nightfall and that there was no other villages around..... so he said lets see how you do before lunch and if your going to slow after lunch he knew a short cut that would take me to a different village where I could get a motorcycle to take me back to the main town...... so we set out for a day I will never forget..... I will speed things along here..... the hiking was tough even if you had 2 good legs... my pace was terribly slow.... I realized that I was going to have to take the short cut out..... I hated that thought of giving up.... But there was no other choice and I felt bad that I was holding up the group... so after lunch me and the guide named Phone but sounds more like Pawn set out back to Muang sing and the others continued on with the other guide..... before we left the 2 guides had an argument cause pawn wanted the other guide to take me but he said he didn't know that way.. so pawn ended up taking on the job of getting my ass out of the jungle.. at this point it was about 1:30pm and pawn said it would take us between 2 and 3 hours to get to the village..... and I should add that the sun goes down at 6pm on the dot... so I hobbled off from the group down the mountain... it was slow going cause down hill was the worst for me... the pain was intense.... We walked for about 2 hours with hardly any breaks.... I missed having tall Stefan in front of me to knock down all the spider webs...... but pawn only stood around 5 foot tall so I spent the rest of the day eating spider webs...... between the spider webs and my knee I thought could things get any worse?? ..... but oh yeah they sure can...... after about 3 hours of hiking there was still no sight of the village.... I could see from the look on pawns face as he looked at different trails wondering which one to take that we might be lost.... And sure enough we were we spent the next hour trying to find the right trail and now these trails started to get smaller as if no one has walked on them in years... they were mostly grown in and at some points there was no trail at all... pawn was trail blazing with his machete in hand... this is when it really started to suck cause now I couldn't even see the ground were to put my foot and one wrong step and your off the side of the mountain... I followed close behind pawn as a dog follows his master.... At some points I would lose sight of him cause he was moving very fast cause he knew we were screwed... at no point did I ever think of the possibility that we might get stuck here overnight... but pawn made it all to clear for me.... As I finally caught back up with him I find him standing there with a funny look on his face... he then says "I think were lost" I say "no shit!" he continues to say that we would have to wait until morning to find our way out..... I guess it never dawned on me that the sun was fading fast.... At this point it was almost 6pm..... just when I was thinking how could it get any worse... well this is how... now we were forced to sleep in the jungle with no food or water no blankets.... Shit for that matter we had nothing other then my ipod which was dead....... Pawn began to look for a place to sleep....he cut down banana leaves and started to make a make shift bed... I looked at it and didn't know if I should cry or laugh......but I did neither..... I tried to keep a positive attitude and not freak out and also not get mad at pawn..... It wasn't really his fault he was only trying to help me...... so I tired to make the best of the situation.... Pawn and I were both starving so he look around for something to eat...... he found some plants that we ate the night before..... they weren't that bad when they were steamed but now with no fire or pot they tasted as good as grass... I ended up not eating anything.... We spent the rest of the night telling our life stories.... I started to picture what pawns family might look like and also felt so bad cause his life was so rough compared to mine..... Although he doesn't think so he says he feels very lucky to have the things he does.... A warm feeling started to come over me.... I felt very close to him as if we had been best friends for 20 years... It was a good thing because the night got very cold and with no blankets or jackets we needed to huddle together to stay warm........ at one point I wished my body would get so cold that my legs would go numb and I wouldn't have to feel the bugs biting me..... around 8pm our conversations came to a halt as if we both were just too tired to talk and sick of being stuck in the jungle... so we laid there side by side on our backs looking at the stars between the tree branches...... a few hours pasted and we didn't say much... pawn was going in and out of sleep and I was trying to not think about all the sounds and bugs all around me.... I tried to find a happy place in my mind...... I started to visualize being home in my warm bed with clean white sheets that smelled like fresh flowers with my cats laying next to me...... at this point me day dreaming turned into real dreams of being home but then quickly turned into strange dreams of being chased by a midget ridding a giant bumble bee.... I felt as if I was stuck in the movie "Honey I shrunk the kids" ...... I only woke up once during the night because pawn put his arm on me and I jumped up thinking something was trying to eat me..... sometime around 5am when I was drifting in and out of consciousness I saw a man with a gun standing in front of me.....my eyes half closed not sure if I was dreaming or not...but before I could figure it out he taps my foot with his gun barrel as if to see if I was alive..... I then quickly sit up and say hello and can see that he's a guy from a local tribe.... He is only wearing a pair of dirty ripped short with one of his nuts hanging out.... I turn to pawn to find him sleeping like a baby curled up in a fetal position...... I give him a shake and then point to the gun toting man..... pawn whips the boggers out of his eyes and springs to his feet.... He starts talking to the man and then pawn says to me that we would follow him...... as we started walking pawn said he wasn't sure which village the man was from cause the guy only spoke Akha and pawn only knows a few words in Akha....so he said we would find out when we get there and he also said that most all chiefs of the village speak Lao so we would be able to get where we needed to go..... along the way the man stopped a few times to shoot down some birds.... I think this guy should try out for the Olympics cause he was shooting birds I couldn't even see.... One of the birds he shot down was so pretty it made me sad to see such a beautiful creator taken from the sky....but I guess at least they wont waste it......... so after about 2 more miserable hours of walking with my knee killing me I finally see the village.... And said "thank god" but then pawn says that this is not the village we need...but that the chief would be able to give us good directions.... You should have seen the look on my face....if I could have I would have thrown myself off the side of the mountain..... but when we entered the beautiful village it was hard for me to stay mad... while pawn talked with the chief I sat and watched the hunter guy clean the birds and get them ready to eat.....pawn comes over with the chief and introduces him to me...... pawn says that we were about 5 hours from the village we needed....i felt as if I wanted to just stay here in the village and not move for days......pawn then says that 5 or 6 men from the village are taking gifts to the chief of that very village today and that they would escort us so are dumb ass wouldn't get lost again..... pawn then says lets eat here before we leave and points to the freshly killed birds that the man was cooking.... So we all sat around the fire and ate rice and bird meat.... I feel bad to say that the little bird that I loved so much only 2 hours before actually tasted really nice..... or maybe I was just so hungry that anything would have tasted amazing..... so after breakfast we set out for what I was hoping to be my last day in the jungle..... we followed close behind 5 men and 2 boys..... the men carried huge bags of what I thought was rice but now think it was opium and one of the boys held 6 chickens in his hands and the other boy pulled 2 pigs by a road........ we walked and we walked and we walked some more..... I don't think the tribe guys understood that I couldn't walk fast or maybe they just didn't care...... cause I spent the day try to keep up with them...... finally around 2 pm we made it to the village..... pawn worked out some sort of shady deal for 2 guys on motorcycles to drive us out... we spent another 2 hours bouncing around on the backs of scooters...... I finally got to the main town around dinner time and I wolfed down some crap food that made the bird I ate for breakfast seem like a T-bone steak..... I then arranged for a massage in my room..... I actually was too sore for a massage so I got an hour long head massage and passed out for the night..... the next day I jammed my crippled legs into a small seat on a 8 hour bus ride to Luang Prabang....... THE END!!

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