travel lightly and carry a big stick

The Mighty Mekong and other irre(l/v)e(v/r)ent stories

OK, take 2. One second power cut just destroyed my last attempt at this journal, only just restrained myself from throttling the cafe owner. Right, summoning zen calm for the second attempt....After a couple of days in Chang Mai learning how to cook pad thai, green curry and numerous other taste bud blasting thai dishes to headed north to the Loas border. A packed mini van ride took us through the flat rice paddies of thailand toward the towering mountains bordering the Mekong on a road that disintegrated gradually as Loas approaced. We spent a night at the border and rose early the next morning to tackle Loas. Breathing deeply the fresh air (a novelty after any trip to thailand) we passed under the 'gateway to indochina' and up to the banks of the Mekong. On the opposite bank, accross 300m of muddy mighty mekong, the Loas town of Huay Xai jutted haphazardly through the trees.Stepping on to one of the longtail canoes - an aquired art with a 50 poundback whilst wearing flip flops that transform any surface to ice when even within sight of water - settled back to enjoy the river we'd come to know so well in the next couple of days. Having journeyed all of around 3 meters toward Loas, the inevitable nigel engine curse struck again leaving us drifting and strandard. Eventually we got to other side, just a bid of mid river boat swapping involved.Huay Xai was fairly typically of Loas, everything in a quaintly delapedated state. Ramshakle wood and corregatediron structures pressing up against mould gathering colonial villas and shophouses. At the border I changed a coupld of thousand Thai Baht (30 quid) into Kip. Recieved for my troubles several one inch wads of 5000 Kip notes - about half a million. Felt deep sympathy for the poor chap next to me who changed 450 dollars into kip and had to hire a wheel barrow to remove his cash. There are only two routes out of Huay Xai, by 4x4 pickup or boat. We opted for the 2 day 'slow boat' to Luang Prabang as opposed to the semi suicidal fast boat (of death), wimping out of the 19 hour on the back of a pickup option.... How many humans can you fit into an oversized motor canoe? No, not the first line of the greatest joke in Loas, but the subject of several serious minded university couses here. Answer - always more. After an hour of suffering, crushed into our wooden bench seats (they were still packing the boat at this point), Jo(hannes) and I had the genius idea of grabbing the pew with a view, so bailed out of the window and climbed up onto the hot tin roof. All would have worked out wonderfully but for the intervention of an over zelous policeman, who wasn't so much concerned that we might die, more that if we are going to die we should do it in the proper way and place - ie suffercation/DVT down below. You gotta love communist bureaucracies. inevitably, once we got back below all seats were gone, so had to make do with a lovely spot in the engine room. Hmmmm only 7 hours to go, think zen think zen..... Really, engine rooms are ok - the ear splitting din isn't great and don't think about why they have put buddist offerings on the engine casing, but once they had bothered to attached the exhaust (hose)pipe and had the decency to point it out of the window its all fairly sellubrious... In actual fact after about 20 minutes one of the crew, who was sitting in the small kitchen behind the hundreds of backpacks piled at the back of the boat, invited us to join him. So dived over everyones luggage and had a great seat on the kitchen floor and could hang our legs off of its balcony.For the next 2 days we travelled slowing down the Mekong. The terrain became incresingly dramatic as we neared Luang Prabang, the mountains on each side of the river becoming loftier and craggier, shrowded perpetually in the low lying monsoon cloud. On each side of the river small villages on stilts are planted into the hill sides, surrounded by brown rice fields, which can grow on the steep sided slopes. In and between these small isolated settlements villagers row their long canoes and bamboo rafts, men fish by casting nets into the river and the children play, diving into the water from riverbank and tree.Luang Prabang is claimed by some (and i'm not arguing) to be the nicest town in SE asia. The oldest part of town nestles on a thin peninsular at the convergence of the Mekong and one of its tributories and consists of numerous temples squeezed between French colonial buildings. A great place just to relax, eat and read. The town also has an impressive night market, where the local villagers bring their handicrafts to sell. A continuous pile of hand woven silk hangings, paper lanterns, umbrellas and silverware fills the main street, illuminated by a thousand light bulbs. Although we spent 3 days there only spent one day out of the town - visiting a local cave full of 5000 buddha images, largely just enjoyed the town and the decent coffee.Vang Vieng a small (backpacker centric) town 7 hours backside murdering local bus ride south was next. The road wound up into the mountains, following ridge lines though hill top villages sitting in the cloud layer. Its along this road where rebels attacked public buses last year. Don't worry - still alive. The scenery around Vang Vieng is simply stunning. Lush green paddi terraces divided up by their dikes and water filled ditches stretch across the valley floors. This fertile scene houses rural villages and is walled in from the world by the sheer sided limestone karst formations that make up the dramatic backdrop. Jo and I hired bikes for the day and taking a canoe to the riverside that has no motorvehicles spent the day riding around the countryside. No one can deny the people of Loas are a friendly lot but can milk the tourist of their cash with the best of them. At a bridge crossing a ten foot wide stream some entreprenurial villages had set up base. Having tacked a sign to the bridge announcing that cyclists must pay 4000 kip to cross they conducted robinhood inspired daylight/highway robbery. We haggled them down to 2500 kip (everything is negotiable) and carried on. We were heading to one of the caves but the road became increasingly flooded as we proceeded. By the end I was wading pushing the bike, Jo struggled on the bike. Having come a km down an impassable road were stunned to find a fully manned ticket office at the end of it (ie a hut +man + wife) demanding another 5000 kip each to look at the cave. They really must have been inundated with tourists here (2 tickets had been told before ) but somehow this enterprise could support a total of 5 workers (work in the loosest sense, well the SE asian sense ie sitting in one place doing nothing for a protracted period of time).We left Vang Vieng yesterday and reached Vientianne. Just stopping here to get cambodian visas and will beheading south tommorow. Ok thats all folks...

posted by justplainnigel @ 2:18 PM