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December 14, 2005
My favorite villiage in Laos: Muang Ngoi Neua
An hour after breaky in Nong Khiaw, we join a dozen travelers and two Laotians for an hour long 15,000 kip ride upstream. The boat is a bit more rickety that I would have preferred for the trip. At many points the river becomes a bit rough and one of the two people running the boat is occationally bailing water out by hand. We can see the narrow 20m long vessel bend disturbingly as we strike turbulent rapids. Nothing to scary, but I sure wish I had packed all my valuables (iPod, passport, etc.) into one of the expensive AquaPac gadgets that is along for the trip. Duh. In the end, we make it safely to Muang Ngoi Neua. Two days later a group of travelers tells me about how the steering linkage on their boat broke in the rough waters while heading up stream. People were grabbing onto passing shrubbery, yelling commands, woring about how many pictures on the digital cameras they have not backed up to CD yet, etc. The water was not so deep but the current was swift and most belongs would have been lost. Yikes.
Once we made landfall and our packs were unloaded, we were greeted by a lone, friendly young woman named Wan. Everyone ignored her but Levi and I accepted her invitation to view her lodge, The Phetdavanh Guesthouse, on the high street. Her English turns out to be some of the best I’ve heard in Laos to date. Her guest house, which she runs with her family, was fairly nice. Levi and I opted for double room on floor 2 near the dining porch. All the walls are thatch, so sounds carry a little too well. But for 10,000 kip a piece, it’s a great deal. Wan turns out to be a great host, mega-flirt, and great saleswomen as many other travelers show up at the guesthouse.
Muang Ngoi Neua is a pretty out of the way village. There are no motor vehicles of any kind. It’s very much backpacker territory but generally unpretentious. Every restaurant seems to have the same menu leading many tourists to believe in a grand conspiracy. Every Sunday there is a market which is more popular with the locals than the foreigners. There are fresh fruits, noodle soup, various pieces of western clothing for sale…and a watch repair man. Many of the vendors seem to be families that work in short shifts as we saw the same stands staffed by different people through out the day including small children.
Our guesthouse if outfitted with both Western and Asian toilets, cold water shower, and 24/7 electricity. The energy feature is unusual for the town and is apparently produced by a small hydroelectric generator up in the surrounding hills that is shared by a few houses and only her guesthouse. Yea, right. In the daytime I would plug my laptop into the socket-cum-light-socket above the dinner table. Wan would have to run around the entire building turning off incandescent light bulbs so she should crank up the voltage to 240v—she said they’d blow above 200v. If too many florescent light bulbs in the building were on my laptop would drive the available power down too far and the lights would flicker until either I unplugged the computer or we turned off a bulb or two. Once in the late-afternoon/early-evening I was trying to show Levi and Cas (from Canada) a video clip of Levi attempting to cross a stream with shoes on. Very comical. The think was, the additional power that my laptop consumed showing the video drained off too much power and the lights flickered until the video finished. Too funny. In the evening, when many lights in the village started to come on, the power was unusable. I hate to think of what damage all of this has done to my four year old Sony Viao…it just needs to survive this trip!
At Wan’s guesthouse we met many fellow travelers. An unusual amount of guests were Swiss. Specifically, there was Mathias and Nicole from Saint Gallen for the first day or two, and later Patrick the last day who is also from St. Gallen. I think Patrick was originally from a small town in Canton Thurgauer, but don’t remember too clearly. There were also three Swiss from south of the Rosti Ditch, but their Francophile linguistic skills isolated them from the rest of us travelers. One impressive note about the trio from Lausanne was that they were biking across Laos and Thailand. Can you say Veloland Laos? With all of them I tried out my Swiss German and asked about people they might know, like Stefen Hauser, Yann Delisle, and Raphael Roth who are all former colleagues of mine back from the Unit.Net dot-bomb days. There were also two Austrians from Innsbruck who I mistook for Swiss because of their Low-German accents. I think Levi really enjoyed the opportunity to speak German with some native speakers as it is apparently quite tiring to speak a non-native language all the time with people with various accents.
That first night we went out to dinner with the Swiss couple from St. Gallen and John from Manchester, England down at the riverside Nicksa Restaurant. Frankly, it was terrible. My curried vegetables were boring. Levi strongly disliked the cheese pattini (sp?) but they worked for me. We bought a bottle of Lao Lao rice whiskey for only 10,000 kip but even that was a disappointment. The Swiss woman, Nicole, was done for the evening and headed back for the guesthouse. The rest of us (all men) headed off for Say’s Bar & Restaurant. There the English guy was falling off his floor cushion and unable to really speak. So that left Levi, Mathias and I to chat away. We were all pretty exhausted by that point so after only one drink we left. Levi accidentally left his Lao Lao bottle there, but at 10k a bottle it was no great loss.
On our first full day in town, Levi and I headed on a self guided trek. Some travelers we had met the night before, the Swiss couple I think but don’t remember, said it was a colossal waste of 80,000 kip and told us how to do it ourselves. They even said I could manage it in my knockoff Teva flip-flops. So, down the high street we went, made a left at Say’s Bar & Restaurant, past the school, over the creek and there we were at the first highlight: the 5000 kip toll booth. The lady there was really nice. We paid the toll and checked out the cave just 20m beyond. After the cave we hiked on the additional twenty minutes along a jungle lined foot path and through dry rice fields sporadically roamed by water buffalo munching on grass, shrubs and the like. Finally, we arrived at the first village, Ban Na. The view from the deck of the Chantanom Restaurant and Guesthouse was stunning as it overlooked rice paddies and a scenic mountain range. They had these inviting hammocks that called my name. I might go back and spend a night or two there. There were also floor mats and pillow for people to stretch out in the sun and read a book or whatever. Then again, and maybe I’m being cynical, but it seemed more of a grass hut resort for western backpackers who wanted to squat to shit in dirt-floored outhouses, live with out electricity, drink warm beer and then brag about how way native they went than anything else. But it was damn pleasant and at 5000 kip a night it was cheap if you don’t actually eat or drink anything. (Everything else commanded a 30% premium from life in Muang Ngoi Neua.)
After a noodle soup for me, Levi and I headed on toward the next village (Ban Huay Bor) and an alleged waterfall. It took maybe another hour or so before we arrived at a real, live rice-farmer village. These were working people here and they live a hard life. I didn’t take a signle picture while there…it felt to invasive. We stopped off at the Samsanook Guesthouse & Restaurant for a coffee (which they didn’t have) and directions. We ended up with hot tea, a liter of water and a couple of sales pitches for rooms, food, booz and a guide to the waterfall. We headed out ourselves shortly after finishing our drinks and quickly became lost in a rice paddy. There were two other westerners wandering about who we worked our way towards—a Dutch woman and a British man who had spent the previous night in Ban Huay Bor. They told us the waterfall was a joke and not to bother as it was getting late. The Dutch woman was going to spend the next two nights in the village because there was a big ceremony happening soon. We knew some Buddhist monks had arrived for something, but it turns out they were there to supervise the killing of a water buffalo and the following celebration the next evening. Whatever toots your horn…
Levi and I made back for Muang Ngoi Neua with haste. It was getting a bit late and we’d be in trouble if the sun set on us. We made good time and I’ve got a video of Levi getting his feet soaked in a small river trying to cross it Robinhood style with a bamboo pole.
That night was pretty uneventful with the two of us just having dinner at the guesthouse and chatting with fellow travelers. I had the vegetable curry, which was fantastic. But I also ordered the spring rolls, which were no so great. The St. Gallen couple offered to take them off my hands and cancel their order, which was very nice of them. Unfortunately, Wan had already started preparing their dish and wanted to know why I didn’t want mine. She was not happy and grilled me on the subject. There is nothing worse than telling an Asian woman that you are unhappy with her cooking. Next time I’ll just lie and say something like “I am too full” or whatever. Time for bed.
The next day I spent processing photos and trying to catch up on the photo gallery and blogging. This kind of work takes hours. I also bought some nice cotton weaving work from Wan’s guesthouse as gifts for others and myself. In the afternoon two Canadians checked in later to be followed by a weirdo American from Charlotte, North Carolina.
One of the Canadians (Adam) and I had an in depth discussion of current Kanuck-Yankee politics, a fair bit of Bush-bashing, the general state of world ignorance about how ‘green’ Canada really is, and other interesting topics. The other Canadian named Cas, a baseball cap wearing, quarter-Chinese-and-damn-proud-of-it 19-year-old and I drank way too much of his rum and wondered off towards Ban Na village at about 1am with my camera and a liter of Beerlao each. After becoming lost in a rice paddy (my fault, it seemed like a short cut) under a three-quarter moon we finally made it to the unstaffed 5000 kip toll booth. There we took a few inebriated photos and then sobered up enough to realize it was time to head back before the moon set behind the mountains. (I didn’t notice we had taken any photos until downloading the images from my camera two days later.) We stumbled to bed around 0300. This was one of the most stupid things I’ve done on this entire trip, but also one of the most beautiful and memorable. Did I mention that we didn’t even have a torch between us? Kids: don’t try this at home.
The next morning Levi wakes me up for a quick breakfast (noodle soup and garlic bread) and an instant packing routine. We’ve got to catch the 9:30am, 120,000 kip, six hour boat ride down to our next destination: Luang Prabang. In hind sight, I should have stayed in bed.
Posted by stu at December 14, 2005 06:22 AM