Kamikaze Canuck

After bidding farewell to the eccentric owners of The Green Tulip Guesthouse, we decided to book it for Laos by way of minivan.  We made the right decision.

 5 hours later we had arrived at the border – The Mekong River (below)

 

Before we could stretch our legs from the long bus journey, we were on a long-tailed boat being shuttled across the Mekong river to the Laos border control.  In minutes, we had cleared customs and checked into our dump guesthouse for the night “The Friendship Guesthouse”.  Friendship guesthouse?  Who makes friends here? The guests and the cockroaches?  I digress.

 

Upon waking, we boarded a van full of French people heading for Louang Namtha, Laos.  One of them squawking at the van driver: “Allo?  Deed you know dis bus waz zupposed to live an hour ago?  Allo?  Maybe you deed not know that.”  Jackass.  My patience was growing ever thinner.  I had thoughts of asking him if he had an important business meeting in Northern Laos that he was running late for – and if so, where was his labtop and briefcase?  Sorry, I’m venting.

 

ONWARD AND UPWARD,  we have arrived in Louang Namtha.  We’ll pause now for a brief geographical lesson:

 

As you can see, Louang Namtha is very close to the Chinese border – 50 km in fact.  The town market (called “The Chinese Market”) is full of Chinese merchants who make the trek over the border to peddle their respective product.

 

The difference from Thailand is immediately noticable.

 

Rolling Green hills of Jungle seem to go on forever, interupted only by the odd bamboo hut that breaks up the landscape.  On one side of the road, colorfully dressed women are scrubbing their daily washings in the river, on the other, an old woman and her young grandson are embraced in a tug o’ war, fighting to gain control of a large pig that seems to want none of their attention.  Children run beside the road in filthy clothes, and all around us families are building fires in front of their huts in preparation for dinner.

 

This is what travelling is supposed to look like.

Settling in our new home was a breeze.  The helpful manager “Noo” helped us with our belongings into our riverside bamboo cottage.  Beautiful scenery and a comfortable, clean room had never looked so good (maybe because we had just left the “Friendship Guesthouse”).  By this point, Megan is getting used to the cold showers and I can hardly even detect a whimper from the shower room during her morning showers.

 

Later in the evening, the guesthouse owners invited Megan and I to join them in eating a more traditional style dinner – NOM NOM NOM.  The food was great.  A giant hot-pot was placed in the middle of the table and all types of meat were strewn over the center of the “pot”, while assorted veggies and noodles were placed in the nearly boiling moat around the edge of the dish.  Several Beer Lao later made the night a….

as 

 

Our guesthouse, the Laos Hilton.

Dinner must have went well, because we were invited to a Laos wedding the next day.  But I’ll leave that story for another time.

Here’s the pic of Meg and I before heading to the Laos wedding – The “after” pic did not quite look like this…….

 

To celebrate our 3rd and final day in Louang Namtha, we hired a local guide to take us on a jungle trek and to meet some of the local ethnic villages.  This blog is getting lengthy so I won’t go into huge detail, but here are some of the highlights.

Above: A rice grainary.  If you look close, the support are wrapped with slippery bamboo so the mice can’t get at the harvest.

 

Above:  Our guide slowly barbeques some fish for the lunch feast. 

Our guide “Gell” whittles a flute out of a bamboo shaft.

Done!  8kms later.  Our buffet dinner at the “Banana Restaurant” will be well deserved tonight….