The roads in the north of Laos are less arduous than they used to be, although you still can't get anywhere very quickly. From Muong Ngoi we took a boat and a bus to Luang Prabang. We stayed in the old quarter, on the peninsula bounded by the Mekong and the Nam Khan rivers. The town reminds me of Antigua Guatemala, with its old colonial houses and narrow alleys and side streets. We ate a lot here, and we ate well. We wandered the town, entered centuries old wats and sacred Buddhist sites. The city is red and gold and everything beautiful you could want in a city. There are many tourists and side-walk cafes. The night market is lit by soft, white lights, with a white roof. The white is balanced perfectly with a plethora of handmade items- artwork on handmade paper, scarfs, wood carvings and silver jewelry. For Hanakuh I took Sarah to a French Restauarant where they served us chilled, pure water and aubergine dip and good French Wine.
From Luang Prabang Sarah and I traveled on the back of a pickup truck with about 15 other passengers, around precarious winding roads to Luang Nam Tha in the far North. The trip took about 5 hours and we arrived at night, at a newly built bus station, with no information on where were were. This is what is tiring about traveling. Constant disorientation. Eventually we hired a tuk tuk to take us several miles into town. That night we arranged a kayak trip on the Nam Tha river and ate Indian food with bad Daal.
It’s the dry season so the river meandered slowly around the mountain, as if it too was wary of the rubber plantations and slash and burn farming that was occurring in the mountains it had cut. Only a few years ago most of these crops were poppy fields. Sarah and I shared a kayak and we went with an Australia family and two guides. Eventually rubber trees turned back into the forest and we entered into the Na Tha National Park. On the river we stopped at a Lintin Village. Sixteen families live in the village and the people are beautiful. These people came from Cambodia. To thank us for visiting their village (they get a percentage of the profit from our kayak trip), they had handcrafted some ornate purses. Indigo-dyed hands, toothless mothers breastfeeding, children barefoot in oversized tee shirts, chickens and mean dogs. These are no pet dogs. They are scared of people because people eat them, especially black dog. It’s eaten in the winter because it makes you very, very full and it makes your body temperature increase substantially.
After passing through the village we had lunch on a bed of rocks along the side of the river. We ate sticky rice, mustard greens, omelet, fish, and a desert of coconut fried chips over a banana leaf spread. We kayaked further down the river and visited a Khmu village where we saw them making the rice whiskey in a ceramic jar. This is unlike lao lao. It tastes like a very sweet red wine.
We finished the river tour and on the way back we had a flat tire on a bumpy dirt road. Sarah and I took the moment to explore a stream with a jungle canopy, cool water ankle deep. It’s beautiful to find yourself in places you would not have expected to visit.
In the evening we ate sweet potato roasting on a charcoal fire in the town square.
The next day Sarah and I took a bus to Muang Sing for the night. Muang Sing is a small town that borders China and is only two hours from Luang Nam Tha, so we thought we would check it out and try to go into China, even though the border is only open to nationals. Sarah and I rented bikes for a dollar for the day and headed 10km uphill to the Chinese border. It was hot as hill, but we could see the hills of China and it was a beautiful place. Very few people were on this road. Some villagers carried baskets on their heads or bamboo across their shoulders. The scene, when I remember it, was shrouded with a soft and gold light. We passed many sugarcane fields, also formerly poppy fields in an effort to stop opium which has been a huge problem in the Golden Triangle. Sarah and biked through many villages, mostly Akha. We saw a village gate up a hill that is bilt to protect a village fromm evil spirits. We biked back to town at dusk and the light was even soft, blurring the hills and fields together into a smear. We stopped for sunset over a rice field and a hut with a cooking fire, sending smoke into the sunset.
The next afternoon we went back to Luang Nam Tha, but first we took a Tuk Tuk into an Akha Village to celebrate our second New Year of the trip. Everyone was playing darts with colorful air ballons. We played a round and each popped two of the three ballons, winning a sweet orange drink as a prize. A family invited us to eat with them and we walked up the steps into a bamboo hut on stilts. I nearly went week in the knees when I saw the scene, so similar to my last sick New Year. I ate a little rice and refused the lao lao this time. The owner of the “Ethnic Restaurant” in town invited us to the tourism manager’s house. We joined them for a while, refusing to eat the meat. They politely inquired why, and we had a discussion on vegetarianism. We bused back to Luang Nam Tha in the afternoon and slept at Zuela Guesthouse. I ate a whole bag of sweet potatoes. For dinner we had banana flower salad for the very first time, a monumental moment. One of my favorite asian dishes!
Laos was my favorite country. People move at a different pace, and they aren’t too bothered by outsiders. The people are warm, the countryside beautiful, the towns so small. I felt years and miles away from the rest of the world. On December 20th we exited Laos from Huay Xai and crossed the Mekong into Chiang Khong, Thailand.
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