off the charts

Luang Prabang is where we were about five days ago. It is a nice, scenic town with several beautiful Buddhist temples. It is also crawling with people who love to make comments like "When I was here 4 years ago, it was much better, much less touristy." As travelling in southeast Asia has has now in many ways become a game of trying to run away from the tourists (while simultaneously forgetting the fact that you are yourself a tourist), Laos is not the tourist scarce haven that your guidebook from 2004 may make it out to be. This is not all bad, but it is not all good either.

With this in mind, we hopped on a slow boat that would take us 8 hours up the Mekong and Ou rivers to a village that can only be reached by boat. We had to stop over one night in a slightly larger village called Nong Khiaw where we drank way too much Beer Lao and rice whiskey with a friend we made on the boat, before making a hungover go at the final hour up to Muang Ngoi.

While Muang Ngoi was certainly not free of tourists, it was a pleasant mix of tourist infrastructure and actual village. Adding to the feeling of rugged isolation is the fact that there are no motor vehicles of any kind, no hot water, and the electricity gets turned off around ten pm in most places. The town is basically one main street lining the river with shops, houses, and guesthouse/restaurants. There are tons of animals roaming the street, including dogs, cats, chickens, and at least one turkey. It's a little chilly up in the mountains of northern Laos, so people like to light little streetside fires, especially in the early morning. The day we arrived, there was a wedding taking up a portion of the main road, where two Swedes who are (rumor has it) going to stay in town and open a business were tying the knot. The three of us were still a little too worn out from the night before to join in the festivities.

The next day, Taylor and I hiked out along a smaller side valley past sharp limestone peaks and out into a wide flat floor of rice paddies. Cutting across the rice paddies and into yet another side canyon brought us to an even more remote and rugged village. This place was the real deal: you can only reach it on foot, all the structures are bamboo houses on stilts, and everyone showers at communal spigets in the center of town. There are two guesthouse/restaurants right across from each other, locked in a bitter rivalry. We tried to climb further up the canyon to find a famed waterfall, but muck, streams, and loose water buffalo ultimately impeded our journey. That night we befriended the toddler daughter of our guest house owner, who is unbelievably cute and goofy. She promptly charged up to our bungalow when we arrived home, shaking her hand in demand of Taylor's tambourine, which we thought she had forgotten from earlier that day. She laughed, danced around, demanded tickles, etc. for a while before stomping off in anger because I would not give her my pen to draw on the journal entry I was working on.


Luckily, our new friend had forgotten my outrageous behavior of the night before when we said goodbye to her yesterday morning. Then we began a truly epic day of travel. We started by taking the hour long boat trip back to Nong Khiaw on a long narrow boat packed to the gills with people and cargo. In Nong Khiaw, we argued with for a while with our driver over transport to Udomxay. The problem was that we didn't have enough people for him to make the trip, so we had to wait around for more people to come, and ultimately pay an extra $1.50 per person (a hefty sum in Laos) for the journey in the back of his caged in pickup truck with benches. The three hour trip was scenic, windy and bumpy. Gentle on the eyes, hard on the rest of the body. In Udomxay, we had just enough time to pound a couple of helpings of sticky rice served in bamboo before our bus for Luang Nam Tha (our final destination for the day) headed out. This trip was on an actual bus, with the luxury of seats. The bus was driven and manned by two dudes with hipster haircuts who couldn't have been over 2o years old. It was also suffering from moderate to severe malfunctions in both the cooling and starting systems. In the last couple hours of the trip we had to stop about every 2o minutes to bum jugs of water from the nearest village, making sure to park on hills in order to pop the clutch. At one point during one of these stops, everyone except us foreigners left the bus, and then some unbeforeseen dude with a flashlight started poking around the bus and in peoples bags apparently looking for something. He didn't hassle us too much. In the end, we arrived here in Luang Nam Tha about 9 pm, which is quite late in Laos time. We were lucky enough to secure both lodging and food before the day was done.