Muang Ngoy
After getting our bearings in Luang Prabang, we felt equipped to head into the wilds of northern Laos. We were headed for Muang Ngoy, a tiny town along the Nam Ou River. It’s not accessible by car, so we bussed as far as Nong Khiew, and then took a boat another 45 minutes or so upstream. (You can actually see it on Google Maps here.)
The town claims one dirt road running dead straight paralleling the river and only has electricity for about three hours a day from 6-9pm. There are rustic bungalow guesthouses overlooking the river, which are typically one-room bamboo thatched huts on stilts with no soundproofing and plenty of chickens and other farm animals going about their lives underneath you. The bathrooms are quite spare: ours included a bucket-flush toilet and a cold-water shower. No sink. But hey, it’s like camping, right? Better, actually, since it wasn’t a squat toilet and there was even a mirror! Plus it was only $6 per night. Seriously, though, after the comforts of Luang Prabang, it took some adjusting on my part. But I was won over pretty quickly on two counts.
1. Natural Beauty.
Right outside our door was a verandah with two hammocks and a table and chairs overlooking the serene riverscape. The water had a beautiful blue-green hue as opposed to the more familiar muddied color we’d seen before and was surrounded by karsts on both sides. Not quite Halong Bay, but along that spectrum, for sure. A quiet place to take in the beauty of nature. What more does one need?
2. The Answer is Babies.
In case the natural beauty wasn’t enough to win me over, town was teeming with babies. So many babies and puppies I might have thought I was in Park Slope. Mothers and grandmothers with babies on their hips and hordes of toddlers running around willy nilly, all with big smiles for you and a wave. Also chicks and ducklings and puppies and kittens and piglets. The cute factor was off the charts. Having a tough day? Watch some day-old chicks learning how to hunt and peck. Do you remember what was bothering you anymore? No, that’s right. You don’t.
During our time in Muang Ngoy, we started to familiarize ourselves with the rhythms of village life: laundry on the line; bathing in the river in the heat of the day; cooking over a fire; watering down the road by your house to keep down on dust; sweeping a lot, always, for the aforementioned fight against dust. Quaint, in its way, but mostly practical. And comforting, at that.
Trekking to Ban Na
One of the draws of this region is the ability to do self-guided trekking with relative ease. Although we lacked a map of the area (I’m not actually sure one exists), our guidebook had a decent description of the walk towards three villages further inland. And so off we set. A narrow dirt path led us out of town, past some of the poorer family homes, past the school, and then into the jungle. The path was very easy to follow, as it was wide enough in most places for a tractor to come through. After a half hour or so, we came to a series of caves and a stream crossing (equipped with a bamboo bridge for the dry season) as well as a toll booth. For $1.25 per person, we were welcome to continue on towards the villages, and with it came our very own animal guide. For real, actually, although it’s not exactly advertised as such. As we crossed the bridge, a medium-sized black dog came flying past us on the path. Around the next curve, there he was again, looking over his shoulder, seeming to be waiting for us. We continued in this manner for a ways, thinking he would have gone off on his own, but then seeing him again around each curve, patiently waiting to show us the way. And so the magic of this country continues as I settle into the girlish gratitude that we somehow have a spirit animal guiding us on this trek. HE chose US. Awesome.
Of course, we definitely lost our way. It was bound to happen. As we entered some rice fields, we took a wrong turn and found ourselves in the middle of a huge herd of water buffaloes. The buffaloes were exceedingly docile, not terribly interested in getting close to us, or having us get close to them, plus Spirit Dog was there to herd them out of our way. They are huge animals. And they look positively prehistoric. They were mostly black, but a few were albino white, and there were a number of babies, too. We would tire of seeing them eventually, I knew, but right then, I was mesmerized. Sometimes losing your way is the best part.
We retraced our steps and got on the right trail again, taking us to the far side of the rice fields and into the town of Ban Na. We’d been walking for over two hours, the last bit of which was punishingly unshaded, and we were elated to have actually found the town. For a rural village, Ban Na has fairly new houses. All still in the traditional thatched bamboo style, they have a crispness that comes with newer construction, the edges yet to be softened by countless wet seasons. The rest of the sights were more familiar: dirt roads; multitudes of small children in various stages of undress; farm animals and dogs roaming freely; mothers doing the wash at the town well; and tiny shops at the front of family homes selling everything from a single-use packet of shampoo to a home-brewed bottle of rice whiskey (a.k.a., Lao Lao). Wanting to partake in the local culture, we decided to splurge the $2 and tote a bottle home with us. We had tried Lao Lao before, and found it to be not so different from a low-grade vodka. The home-brewed version proved a bit yeastier, and a lot less drinkable, but I suppose you can’t like everything you try. Carrying the bottle, we thoroughly enjoyed the looks we garnered from the locals, though. I like to think they were impressed, but there may have been a note of shock in there, too.
100 Waterfalls Trek in Nong Khiew
The self-guided trekking from Muang Ngoy was incredibly rewarding, but there were many more experiences available in this northern region which we were temped by: three-day kayaking expeditions, hiking to a summit and camping on the mountaintop, climbing an extensively waterfalled section of river. As we came back south through Nong Khiew, we wanted to partake in one of these excursions, but came up against an annoying truth about the current state of the tourist economy in Laos: there simply are not enough tourists in the country. And so instead of paying a per person rate for the experience of your choice, you are instead faced with paying a per excursion rate, which quickly exceeds 10+ times your nightly lodging costs and calls into question just how much an experience is worth.
We settled on the one-day 100 Waterfalls trek for $33 per person. It’s still tricky evaluating what price point is worthy of what experience. But what we came to is somewhere between what feels comfortable within our travel budget and what we might pay for such an experience at home.
The day was fantastic. We started off early in the morning with a ride on a tiny boat down the river. It was all still so novel, and being on a small craft, so close to the water, somehow made the karst cliffs that much more impressive in the morning light. We docked near a small village and set out into the jungle towards the river we’d be walking in for the day. It must have something to do with the geology of the rocks here, but we never lost our footing. Not even a little bit. For close to an hour we zigzagged our way up and up this river, scrambling through fast-running water and over surprisingly porous and rough rocks. It was delightfully cool with the river shaded in most parts and our hands and feet always wet. We finally reached the summit, and the most impressive of the waterfalls, where our guide nipped a few banana leaves to make a tablecloth for our picnic lunch of sticky rice, vegetable omelets, falafel, and a pumpkin dip.
The Long Boat to Luang Prabang
Instead of busing our way back south through Luang Prabang, we decided to give river travel a go. We’d heard so many good things about how beautiful the ride was, and had heeded the advice of several travelers to take the boat going downstream so as to avoid painfully loud engine noise, but we also knew it’d be a butt-numbing experience. And we were right. The boat was about four feet wide with laughably small chairs lining each side. It’s like they stole them from a preschool somewhere. What more, if they needed more seats, they’d just hammer another one in to the side of the boat. We were lucky to snag a few that had been hammered in relatively level and which sported cushions. As we waited to depart, we jealously eyed the empty boat next to us which had old captain-style car seats. Now that would have been high class. But I shouldn’t complain; the ride was breathtakingly beautiful, even despite any physical discomfort. I’ll let the rest of the images speak for themselves.
Routeless Ruminations 