Emmy at one of the many temples in Luang Prabang
Week 6: Northern Laos
Few Americans have ever heard of Laos, so it may surprise you to learn that there are actually a fair number of tourists there. In Week 6, we tried to avoid them. Despite all our complaints, we are overjoyed not to see any more old white men walking with one or more young Thai girls. This pathetic scene popped up all over Bangkok and Nan Khay, the two Thai cities that we visited in Week 5.
Sticking to budgets in Laos is strange. Your dinner will probably cost more than your hotel room. If you bargain hard for the hotel room, you might cut it down from $5 to $4 per night, but then you'll spend that dollar when you buy an orange shake for dinner (mangoes are out of season). Since Emmy and I are not about to cut fruit shakes out of our diet, we look for budget hotels. The conventional way to find cheap rooms is to start early in the day, so we tested out the opposite. We began our tour of Northern Laos in Vang Vieng, working furiously on our last Indonesia blog until the internet cafe closed at midnight. After stumbling a mile in darkness where the only light came from the puddle you just stepped in, we learned that the guest-house in the guidebook was closed for the night. We dreaded the long, wet walk back to the more touristy hotels, as well as the stigma of the beaten track. Our last hope was a dimly lit guest-house sign, with no visible guest-house or path-- the road was a sea of mud. Amos waded in confidently, and immediately lost a flip-flop in mud so deep that the flip-flop disappeared from view. Unfazed by mere mud after his stint in an Indonesian sewer, he proceeded barefoot to negotiate a record-setting $3 luxury room. Apparently this guest-house gave up on guests during the rainy season-- we almost felt bad about bargaining when the guest-book showed they hadn't had a single visitor in the entire month of June.
We took a one-day cooking class in Northern Laos. Don't those hats make us look professional? A second after we snapped this picture, the master chef grabbed Emmy's spatula to avoid culinary disaster.
Emmy's favorite part of the class was learning to make these decorations. Can you guess which green flower was made by Amos?
Before we discuss Vang Vieng itself, a word about the flip-flops. Who wears flimsy shower sandals to walk a rainy mile at midnight? All of Southeast Asia. In all our dancing, caving, hiking, climbing, and bushwhacking, we have only worn actual shoes on two occasions. Once for the 13-mile hike at Ban Na (see below), and we stuffed them deep in our bags after 200 feet because the local bridge only went halfway across the first river. And once to hike the Indonesian volcano Gunung Merapi, when we were caught in a rainstorm and hid in a cave, cursing between shivers that we were wearing soaking wet socks. Emmy is an expert flip-flopper, but Amos would get his sandals stuck on an ice rink. He has destroyed two pairs to date, one in the infamous sewer incident and one in the soon-to-be-infamous Pinky incident (see below).
Vang Vieng is famous for tubing, in which boisterous, scantily-clad Europeans ride a rubber tube down the Mekong River, stopping every hundred feet to increase their boisterousness with another Beerlao at
tourist-only pubs. On any given day, half of the tourists in Laos will tour temples wearing their "In the tubing Vang Vieng" souvenir wife-beaters, despite the grammatical inaccuracy and cultural insensitivity. Vang Vieng is also famous for having a street-full of tourist-only restaurants that show nonstop Friends episodes. Amazingly, Americans haven't found out about this place yet. Between tubing and Friends, the Lonely Planet guidebook likens Vang Vieng to the 24-hour techno rave-street in Bangkok. We were overjoyed to discover that a five-minute bike ride will carry you so far from tubing Friends that nobody speaks English, the road is
terrible for biking, and there are no accurate maps or medical services. We were constantly hindered by children and rice-field workers waving, high-fiving, and shrieking "Sa-bai-dee," forcing us to stop and reach for the camera. Too bad our camera was out of batteries. (See below for the staggeringly beautiful photos that we found on the internet). After a 20-minute ride, we reached Poukham Cave, a cave so deep, dark, and disorienting that tourists too cheap to pay the $1 guide fee have gotten lost for days inside. Or maybe they came straight from the Beerlao tubing tour.
Someone else's photo of the staggering scenery of Vang Vieng
We made sure our camera battery was charged for the 8-hour bus ride from Vang Vieng to Luang Prabang.
Luang Prabang is pronounced "loo-ong paw-bong" by Laotians, since they don't have the letter R-- it was imposed by French or maybe Thai imperialists. UNESCO ranks this city as one of the top ten most beautiful in Southeast Asia, with over 20 Buddhist temples, innumerable orange-robed monks, and enough eco-sustainable fair-trade living-wage organic cage-free tourism to please Ralph Nader. Unfortunately, the latter all cost hundreds of dollars, so we toured the temples and cornered the monks on our own. After climbing 500 temple steps behind slow-moving Europeans, we ferried across the Mekong to tour the lesser-known temples at our own pace. We found a 12-year-old guide named Pinky who took us to a cave-turned graveyard for decapitated Buddha statues, but was too afraid to go inside. Amos loved the lack of tourists and arranged to stay the night with Pinky’s family. We returned with our bags in the middle of an evening thunderstorm, climbing a mountain of mud that claimed yet another of Amos’s flip-flops, only to find two policemen blocking our path. Apparently it’s illegal for foreigners to stay the night in Pinky’s village. The police escorted us back to the ferry and made sure that we returned to the town of tourists.
Emmy admires the view as we cross the Mekong River
We refused to let the police discourage us from experiencing Laos village life, so on the way to southern Laos we visited the exceptional village of Ban Na. “Exceptional” because the unfortunate farmers of Ban Na are terrorized by a herd of wild elephants. During our two-day stay, we found that Ban Na was turning fear into profit. Farmers take breaks from re-ploughing their trampled rice fields to lead guided tours to see caves, rapids, and the two-ton terrors of Ban Na. We found no elephants, but we had fun anyways (see pictures).
You don't need binoculars to see an elephant, Emmy. The guides built this elephant observation tower over a natural salt lick. During the diluted rainy season, the guides unfortunately add extra salt under it to lure the elephants.
Amos encounters his first-ever elephant pie. Elephants are terrible digestors and can't process a lot of what they eat, so this pie contained pretty big shoots of bamboo.
We were terrified that the guides were feeding the elephants. Posters in the elephant tower claimed that feeding the elephants would cause them to attack unsuspecting tourists and farmers for food. Luckily, this was the closest thing we saw to a live elephant.
No live elephants, but Mother Nature wowed us with dung beetles and their fecal food.
We took a break from admiring poops and bones on our hike to chase away some butterflies.
The best part of our trip to Ban Na was our homestay with a typical Ban Na family. While the men plant rice and lead elephant tours, the women meet for house-parties where they weave bamboo baskets, fences, and houses while downing shots of debilitating lao lao whisky. Unfortunately, sounds of retching women were all too common by dinnertime.
These crafty craftswomen coaxed Amos into a shot of lao lao whisky, after which he suddenly remembered numerous items of urgent business.
After our dose of village life, we hopped on a luxurious sleeper bus and snored all the way to southern Laos. Get excited as we investigate the US’s top-secret nine-year bombing campaign of southern Laos’s Ho Chi Minh Trail.
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