i'm about to leave lao. i feel a little sad... i think i love this place.
i left charlie and michelle the 27th of december, in vang vieng. it's weird, i'm now on my own up to my own devices and they theirs'. but it was such an incredible time traveling with them. we had our differences but left on such great terms that i'm renewed by the strength we found to overcome our problems and know that this experience has given us bonds for the rest of our lifetimes. i also left them besty. what a tragedy to be w/o her; but what a great opportunity to have had. and i left her in good hands, with michelle. it was crazy, we must have written up a bill of sale about 4 in the morning our last night together. wild!
i chased a girl to luang prabang and upon arriving walked around town finding three friends from vang vieng, an israeli couple and a french girl who lives in phnom penh. and we walked around town and eventually came across the girl i chased here. what a small world it is when you are traveling. i also saw a couple that i remembered from my halong bay tour. call it what you will but you will always see kids you met before somewhere else, especially, if you are all spending time in a certain part of the world.
in any case, the israeli's had met someone who knew someone that we could call and they could hook us up with a dude named goa (sp?) in a hmong village and we could go there and visit this village and stay the night in a families house and the next day they would take us on a trek to a waterfall where we could pick up a ride home. perfect.
we spent that night walking around luang prabang getting some dinner, drinks, and playing cards. those three activities have been constant functions in my life for days now. anyway, luang prabang is beautiful, situated on a peninsula between the mekong and the nam khan. it still has much of the original french architecture in old town and is a world heritage site. it's absolutely gorgeous, small, quaint, and seems mostly that there are a lot of families and grown ups here. no need to state the obvious (that yeah, i guess, i am a grown up). lots of bakeries and expensive guesthouses, like twice what i have been paying the rest of lao. no worries, i found a cheaper one though. good restaurants on both rivers and foreigner food, which is good, cuz i've decided that despite lao being fucking awesome, the food is not that great. they do have the buffets for 10,000 kip though, which you can get for dinner and that's like a dollar twenty five or so. the next day we were to meet a 8 to do some shopping to bring meat to the hmong family we would stay with otherwise they would have to kill one of their chickens or maybe a dog or a cat or whatever. so we met, picked up meat and took the hour tuk tuk ride up to the village.
this village has been one of the highlights of my trip so far. the village has about 600 people and they were enjoying some hmong new year festivities when we arrived. fucking strange. all the kids were dressed in traditional clothing (pretty fancy, hard to explain, i got pics) playing a game where they would toss a tennis ball back and forth. i'm not sure what the point was or if it has historical significance or what they were doing but it went on for a couple of hours. when we got there the dude we were supposed to meet and stay at his house, goa, was not there. apparently, he had to go on a hunt and had called one of the connections in the link of how we had found out about this place but they didn't know how to get a hold of the israelis. so for abut an hour there was general confusion and no one was sure what was going on and they didn't speak that much english and we, of course, didn't speak much hmong or lao even. but it all worked out and eventually we settled into a house of one of the dudes that spoke a little english and he would be our "guide" and then take us to the waterfall the next day. cool. so we dropped our stuff off and he took us on a walk around the village.
i've never seen such happy people, i just walked around smiling at everyone and they would give me the biggest smiles back. maybe they weren't happy, what do i know, but they sure would smile. the kids were absolutely bananas, left to their own devices, with maybe an older brother or sister around they ran around the village screaming and playing games. it was seriously crazy and one of the reasons i loved this place. playing with fire, 5 year olds holding chickens and gathering them and putting them under a bamboo little tent and then releasing them all and chasing them down again, playing with massive machetes, throwing shoes at each other, everything you can imagine. at one point we were playing cards and we must have had a group of about 30 kids surrounding us watching us play, one kid with a plastic bag over his head. it was crazy but amazing. at one point before dusk i chased around a group of about ten kids playing, tag, with me being the only one ever "it." the men around a bocce ball court (which are pretty much everywhere in lao) gambling and playing. the women around but i didn't see that many, so they may have been inside.
this town must be one of the poorer places i've seen as well. all houses pretty much one room woven bamboo huts. i loved them and watched a dude weave something for a while. they did have tv's though (which no one turned on until after dark), and some people had cell phones, but no real running water in the houses and shared shower/laundry/dish cleaning spickets. no hot water. about dusk every house pretty much settles to itself, starting a fire in the front yard (no fire place just basically on the ground) and gets to making dinner. a few neighbor men stopped by to speak with the old man at our place around the fire where we all sat and passed around a glass of beerlao, which they seemed appreciative of. we'd heard they didn't drink beerlao as it was too expensive. don't know if that's true but we bought a few anyway and passed them around. we'd brought some fish and chicken which we ate with sticky rice and it was pretty much delicious. the men and the guests eating first and the women and kids waiting until we were done to eat.
the next morning we woke up at about 7 to the pounding of rice into rice cakes (?), which we would later eat dipped into a kid of syrup, after a long night of freezing sleeping on a wooden cot that wasn't comfortable and i did not bring anything, so only had a meager blanket. they separated us as well, the guys (daniel, half the israeli couple) and me on the wooden cot, and the girls (hadas, the other half, mary-lyne, the french girl, and anna, the german girl i'd chased) on the concrete floor with a little padding. i'm not sure any of us got much sleep. but we survived. we ate three different breakfasts that morning, despite apparent lack of money, eveyone wanted to feed us. we ate the rice cakes, and then chicken soup twice. and then the night forgetten, thanking eveyone we took off on the hike to the waterfall.
it was beautiful hiking through the lao jungle. it doesn't feel much like a jungle to me. not humid enough i guess during the dry season and after the humidity of cambodia and vietnam, this was so much nicer. this was gorgeous though, mountian vistas, banana trees, rice, corn, papaya, and vegetable fields. it was really cool, the guide telling me all the plant fields we passed and how his village harvests them all. i tried to get out who the land owner was and who got money from the fields, but he didn't understand. it was just nice to get out and walk and see things that weren't tourist sight seeing objects. we hiked about 4 hours to the waterfall, where the guides left us and we went swimming in the below pools. amazing waterfall, really cool limestone pools. and then some kind of crazy bear area where they kept bears safe from poaching in some smaller outdoor fenced off areas. it was weird. but cool to see some bears. we caught a tuk tuk from there made plans to meet up the next evening and watch the sunset over the mekong and then go out for new years.
i didn't do much the next day, worked out, went running, computer stuff, was told by my guesthouse lady as they fed me lunch that i could be her son-in-law, which was nice. the sunset was marred by clouds but still beautiful, i mean, how many times will i ever see the sunset over the mekong in lao. new years was fun but nothing special, we spent it at the whitest bar in town, utopia, but had a good time.
the next day we had made plans to meet to go to nong kiaw. a little town just north of here usually just a jumping off spot to an island on the river (not sure which one) where you can stay. a quite little town, i really enjoyed this as well. we got some really cheap bungalows and basically just chilled for two days out by the river. i'm pretty much almost done with all the books i've brought, like 10 and need to keep the next two i finish to trade. my backpack is decently light now and i'm moving back into hotter climates for the rest of my trip. so time to start sweating all the time again and get used to some humidity. i'm racing to bangkok and thailand as my lao visa runs out in one day and i had originally wanted to spend like two or three weeks in thailand, but i've had such good times in lao and cambodia that i do not regret it. so, about eight days in thailand, where i think i'll try to shoot down to the south, before i take off to india.
so, i might have one or two more blogs left that might be interesting to read before i go to india. i'm not sure how interesting my tales will be from there. i basically just plan on going to the ashram and meditating, doing yoga, and chores and whatever else they'll have me doing.
so i'm off to catch the night bus to vientienne and then an early bus to bangkok. it's going to be a long bus ride.
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