Northern Laos Adventures

According to my guidebook, Mueng Sing in northwest Laos 'is a small town that grows on you by the hour'. I have to disagree. Situated in the Luang Nam Tha district, just 10 km from the Chinese border, this apparently is an ideal spot to see a mix of traditional hill tribe cultures. A couple ladies dressed in traditional costumes bullied me into buying a bracelet this afternoon, so I have had a cultural interaction of sorts. The town itself is a sleepy farming town, currently surrounded by dried-up rice fields. We're on the edge of a national protected forest area and through the haze of what we think is pollution from factories across the border and smoke from slash and burn agriculture, you can see the vague outline of a nearby series of hills. The dusty streets are almost empty, but the occasional chicken, dog or piglet meanders past every few minutes. The pollution seems to have done something to the sky and everything is coated in a yellow tinge in the few snapshots I've taken this afternoon.



I wrote that honest but whiny account of our first day in Mueng Sing the afternoon we arrived. Sitting on a patio in Luang Prabang shortly after Lisa arrived in Laos, we started planning our Laos adventure and realized quickly that if we wanted to get back to Luang Prabang in time to celebrate the Laos New Years, we only had 6 days to get ourselves north, see something of interest, and get ourselves back to the city. A few spots were ruled out due to the long boat ride required or the torturous way the Lonely Planet guidebook described the bus journey. We landed on Luang Nam Tha district because it sounded beautiful and rural, yet reachable in a totally feasible way. Was it beautiful? Well, beautiful is stretching it a bit. Rural? Most definitely. Reachable in a feasible and not torturous way? The bus rides were the biggest adventure of all. I find I sometimes get caught up in developing expectations of what a place is going to be like, and when I fixate too much on these expectations, it's easy to miss out on how fascinating the reality is. We didn't necessarily find the 'something of interest' we were expecting in Luang Nam Tha, but having had time to reflect on it, it was pretty fantastic in a weird, but highly entertaining way.


Heather & Lisa's Northern Adventures
1. The Bus Ride that Never Ended
Our bus ride from Luang Prabang to Luang Nam Tha took 9 hours but only covered a distance of a couple hundred kilometres. The first two hours were speedy and we engaged in lengthy conversations about how the bus company must be totally delusional about the length of time required. If anyone was delusional however, it was us. We soon hit winding mountain roads and then dirt roads which slowed things down considerably, and turned what had just been a sweaty ride to a bone-jarring, sweaty in a whole new level of nastiness sort of way. My brother Brian would have appreciated the driver's intolerance for toilet breaks, having dealt with driving my small bladder around for years. The bus would come to a sudden stop in the middle of nowhere and passengers would quickly begin to disembark, leaving Lisa and I speculating on what was happening. As we speculated we were wasting precious moments, as we soon realized that the driver was stopping for a brief roadside bathroom break - emphasis on the word 'brief'. The driver tended to just start to drive off regardless of whether everyone was back on the bus, so we resorted to a two-man system - the person who was closest to busting ran off into the roadside shrubbery to squat and pee while the other stood lookout to watch the bus and make sure our ride wasn't leaving without us. Running through a ditch with my pants still undone was not one of my most dignified moments, but desperate times calls for public humiliation.


2. Bicycles and Ice-Cream
I think there's something sad about my life when two hours riding a bike through the villages around Luang Nam Tha can leave me with a delicate backside, which was still feeling bruised 4 days later. I mean, what kind of pansy am I? Clearly I need to work on toughening myself up, or more specifically, toughening up my bottom. I consoled myself afterward with a bowl of the best ice cream I've ever eaten. Coconut flavour, which I think was made with a combination of both coconut milk and condensed milk, which is the national sweetener of Laos. My butt still hurt afterwards, but the ice cream took the edge off, I have to admit.


3. Journey to Mueng Sing
The village of Mueng Sing, our chosen starting point for a trek, was 58 kilometres from the town of Luang Nam Tha. We went to the local bus station early because, well, we're a bit anal. This aspect of our nature's proved to be quite beneficial as we quickly learned that with local public transport it pays to be early. The bus to Mueng Sing was a sawngthaew, which literally means 'two rows' - a converted pick-up truck with benches along either side of the truck bed. Forty-five minutes before our scheduled departure the bus looked like it was already half full. That perception of course was very wrong, as we soon learned that it's feasible to cram twenty people into the backside of a pick-up truck, a small one at that. The sawngthaew was so overweight that half of us had to get out and help push the truck out of the station so the truck could start up. Lisa ended up squatting on a small stool in the aisle way between the two benches, in amongst bags of rice. While I managed to keep a butt cheek on the bench, I was unfortunately positioned between the two sickest people on the bus. An elderly woman who'd just gotten checked out of the local hospital with a broken arm was seated on a stool in the aisle in front of me, clinging to the railings on the back of the truck cab, supported by her daughter. She spend the trip looking like she was on the verge of passing out and horking onto the back of the cab. On my other side was young woman who clearly had motion sickness problems. I tried to distract myself when she was vomiting over my shoulder, but I wasn't completely successful.


4. Our 'Trek'
Reviewing our trekking options at the local tourism office, and taking into account how sweaty we got from just walking a couple blocks from our guest house to the tourism office, we decided a one-day trek was more than adequate. This proved to be a very good decision. A one day trek meant of course that we really weren't in particularly remote areas. But a 15km hike between local villages in 35 degree heat (that's before the humidity, which was horrendous) was really as authentic as we needed. The hike at times was a bit bleak. We visited a sugar cane field that was being harvested - all of the sugar was heading north to China. The hillsides surrounding us were partially deforested, the natural vegetation having been replaced by the local villagers with rubber trees, which after 8 years, start producing rubber which can be shipped to China. Evidence of China's investment in Laos is everywhere - roadways, dam projects, national monuments. Chinese tractors drive through the streets of Mueng Sing. And most transport trucks you see are heading north across the border with natural resources. (Trucks do the routine journey full of tractor parts and cheap, Chinese-made clothing, from what we could tell.) Midway through the hike when we stopped for lunch in one of the Akha villages and rested at the chief's house, it was cheap, Chinese beer he served us. Drinking warm, nasty-tasting Chinese beer in a local village with pigs snuffling nearby - can check that off the to-do list! (For those of you who know my drinking habits well, you'll know what huge progress I've made over the last few months in the beer department!)

5. Toxic Udomxai
Having survived our nine hour bus ride north, but still experiencing nasty flashbacks, we decided to split up the southbound journey into three bus rides spread across two days. Backpackers take rides across this country that last 24 hours or more, but I have no problem with the fact that I'm a bit on the delicate, spoiled side. We overnighted in the city of Udomxai, which is seriously unattractive but seems to be the travel hub of the north and a booming Laos-Chinese trading centre. Udomxai was a whole new level of bleakness from an environmental perspective though, as the sky was absolutely grey at 3pm when our bus rolled into town, and there was ash falling from the sky. There was just an empty, depressing quality that hung about the place. I think if we'd wandered too far off the main street we would have stumbled across an opium den without too much effort. The highlight (and I do cringe at calling it a highlight, but that's what it was for me) was seeing a pair of Siamese twin dogs on the street. They seemed to be joined at the back hip joint, and maneuvered around quite naturally. They also looked well fed and happy, so I've got to assume they are well treated. Our theory was that it may have had something to do with the radioactive nature of the environment they were raised in, but that's just pure speculation. What didn't make sense was the dogs didn't look identical, which threw me off a bit. So either some really devious kids with super strong crazy glue had stuck them together, or I need to study up on Siamese twin anatomy in the canine species.

When our bus finally pulled into the station at Luang Prabang I don't think I'm exaggerating to say we were deliriously happy. A couple hours chilling on a patio fixes a lot of things though - and we saw some of the real Laos as we travelled, which is what this was all about.