Lost In Laos! (part 2) Luang Nam Tha

My first visit was an overnight stay on my way to Muang Sing. On the way back, I stayed three nights waiting for others to charter a boat down the Nam Tha river with. I hired a mountain bike for 10,000 kip (US) for the day (ordinary street bikes cost half) and spent two days riding out of town and into the countryside. As is common with most northern Laos towns, there is a lot of beautiful countryside and many ethnic villages an hour or so away. I was also up early each morning to visit the market near the bus terminal. Around 6.30-7am, the market is at its liveliest and it's a great place for a cheap Lao breakfast. I was a sucker for the steam buns sold by two vendors by the south-east entrance. Many Akha, Hmong, and Lenten people can be seen at the market in their traditional clothes and you can also see many interesting items for sale brought down from the hill villages, particularly food; various small birds, bats and frogs. I was quite happy with just my steam buns!

Quick Tips:

The eco-trekking centre and tourist office situated behind the post office both have a hand-out entitled "11 things to do in Luang Nam Tha". Number one is interesting; visiting Luang Nam Tha museum. You pay 5000 kip to stand around in the dark; there is no power in town for lighting until 6pm when the museum is shut! However, there are some more reasonable suggestions that will keep people occupied in and around town for two or three days.

Best Way To Get Around:

Luang Nam Tha is small enough to get around on foot but the real interest is out of town which makes hiring a bike a worthwhile investment. The truck from Huay Xai cost 60,000 kip (US), two very sore buttocks and took wight hours! To Muang Sing is just 2.5-3 hours by pick-up for 10,000 kip. The two day boat trip to Huay Xai down the Nam Tha river costs US (to Pak Tha US) for the boat for up to six passengers.

There are around half a dozen places in town that rent out bikes, and nothing much of interest in town unless you strike out into the countryside. On my first day, I cycled south past the boat landing onto the road to Ban Na Lae. The dirt road follows the Nam Tha River and passes a couple of Lenten villages. The Lenten women wear a black tunic edged with burgundy, white puttees, have their hair piled up with a single coin nestled in it and remove their eyebrows when they're very young; they look very striking! The men tend to wear baggy blue trousers with a black shirt. The Lenten people always settle by streams or rivers. The rutted, dirt road's puddles were the playground of dozens of beautiful butterflies; after around 10km from the boat landing, the road was so bad, I was getting covered in mud cycling through the more and more frequent and bigger ruts, so I had to turn back.

Second day, I cycled along the Muang Sing road hoping to find a trail into the forest to walk. After cycling 11km, I succeeded in finding only a trail to someone's banana plantation. It's a good road, but very hilly, and in the hot sun and after the previous day's exertions, I couldn't go any further, but there are trails into the forest at around the 17km mark. There are a waterfall and a weaving village closer to town, which I didn't visit, and a number of roads and tracks to other villages. The tourist office behind the post office has a very basic map of the area.

With the intention of trying this trip before I arrived in Luang Nam Tha, I was very happy to see a note in the tourist office from a French couple looking for others to charter a boat with—and even happier after meeting a German/Thai couple near the boat landing who also wanted to do this. There is no longer any local passenger traffic from Luang Nam Tha, so chartering is the only way to do this trip. Going downriver from Luang Nam Tha cost us US$90 for the boat as far as Pak Tha, where the French couple and I were getting off; an extra US$10 was shared by the German/Thai couple and the last-minute arriving Dominican for the further two hours to Huay Xai.

We set off at 8:30am and sailed for around eight hours in the long, wooden canoe with two short stops. We passed a number of Khamu villages and decided to stop and visit one. However, the one we chose was deserted, save for an elderly couple! Everyone was out working in the fields. It was as if they'd heard strangers were coming and fled, leaving behind a few pigs and chickens! Our second stop was at a village that had the boarding school for the area. Our boat pilot wanted to drop something off for his son. The hundred or so kids were very curious about us, but when we moved towards them, they scattered! Some of the younger ones were very scared of us. We arrived at Khon Kham, the boat captain's village, at around 4pm, washed in the river, and stayed the night.

The village was friendly and curious, and we slept on mattresses on the first floor of the captain's family house. We were fed very well with sticky rice, wild vegetables, eggs, and larp (a minced-meat salad); Lao-Lao moonshine was plentiful but not particularly palatable! The following day, we stopped briefly at a cave system and arrived in Pak Tha around 2pm on a very hot afternoon. The scenery over the 2 days was very hilly, a continually rotating tableaux of primary rain forest, secondary growth, and cultivated fields punctuated with fishing villages and steep, craggy cliffs. Not much bird life beyond Kingfishers and Yellow and White Wagtails, but the real interest for me was observing and photographing the life on the river. In the morning and late afternoon, the men are out fishing, cutting bamboo and mending or building boats; as school finishes at midday, the kids are out in the afternoon playing on the river banks and greeting the passing tourists with frantic waving and shrieking, "Sabai Di" (Hello). It was a very quiet and relaxing trip, and the advantage over the road is that the river wasn't potholed and dusty—but my bum still hurt after two days!

After a day and a half coming downriver from Luang Nam Tha, this 4-hour boat trip was just a turn around the village pond! The boat from Huay Xai arrived at Pak Tha police checkpoint at around 1pm, and I and the French couple I'd met in Luang Nam Tha were very disappointed to see it packed to the gunwales with tourists. The only Lao people were the half-dozen crew members. I made myself as comfy as possible on the piles of luggage, as all the seats were already taken. I was even more disappointed to see many people on the boat sleeping, reading, or just getting drunk and not even looking up at the great scenery we were passing through!

The Mekong river is much wider than the Nam Tha, and the views are more extensive, but there wasn't the intimacy with the people we passed on the riverbanks, as they were further away. In fact, there were few villages on this stretch of the river, but the rolling hills, steep cliffs, and forest were very picturesque. Not as relaxing a trip as the Nam Tha, as this was a big passenger boat with a very LOUD engine, but it still beats Laos's roads! Even noisier are the 6-passenger speedboats that ply the Mekong. These boats are deafening, and they hurtle along at breakneck speed. I can certainly believe the many reports of accidents in those things. Our slow boat arrived in Pakbeng, Udomxai Province, at around 5pm, where everyone overnights before heading off again in the morning. I wasn't going any further by boat but taking the road up to Udomxai.

Arriving in Pak Tha on a very hot afternoon after a day and a half on a boat from Luang Nam Tha, I wondered what on Earth there was in Pak Tha except for the boat landing, police checkpoint, small guesthouse, three tiny shops and about 20 houses. It took a little walking around to realise that Pak Tha was actually about half a km further down the Mekong on the opposite side of the junction with the Nam Tha river.

The following morning, as the boat me and the French couple wanted to catch to Pakbeng didn't pass until around 1pm, we took a wooden canoe across the Nam tha to Pak Tha village. Down on the banks of the Mekong, there was so much activity that morning. No wonder the village itself was so quiet! There were people bathing, kids playing but the principal activity was fishing; circular nets hurled into the water from boats on the river; from the banks with rod and line and many women were catching tiny fish using a net at the bottom of a bamboo pyramid frame that they dipped in and out of the water. All three of us took a lot of photos and all this activity was back dropped by the mist slowly clearing to reveal the green mountains on the opposite bank. The people were very friendly and didn't seem to mind us taking pictures and it was well worth the overnight stop in Pak Tha.

My second day in Laos and my first experience of the infamously awful Lao roads and what a trip to choose for the first! The boat trip to Xieng Kok by the Burmese border wasn't possible from Huay Xai unless I sat around and tried to rustle up some people to share the boat with and I wanted to get moving. The lady at the BAP Guesthouse told me that transport left from the speedboat jetty 4kms south of town at 9am. Having then walked there to arrive in good time, I found out that the actual departure time was 11am!

The pick-ups making the journey take three passengers in the cab behind the driver and his assistant and an infinite number ("comfortably" 10 but usually 15+) on two rows of seat in the back. Room is then made in the middle for cargo, extra passengers picked up on the way and sundry bags of fruit vegetables and animals rendering the journey cramped and not too comfy. Two of these pick-ups left for Luang Nam Tha together with ample room for the six of us in each. We hardly had time to enjoy this spacious luxury before we stopped at a warehouse and had 6 50kg bags of rice loaded into the space in the middle of the rows of seats! We didn't realise how lucky we were as we set off again because, 45 minutes later, the first pick-up broke down and all it's passengers then piled into ours! So, squashed together on a wooden bench, feet on rice sacks, knees under our chins we set off for only another seven hours on a road resembling the face of an acned teenager! We stopped every two hours so we could get out and oil our rusty limbs and get some circulation going in our nether regions! Five minutes later and we were bumping and rolling on our way again. In the wet season, a lot of these unpaved roads become impassable for small vehicles and landslides and treefall can block the roads completely for days.

In the dry season, dust is a huge problem. Luckily, there are few vehicles on the road to stir it up but something to clamp over ones mouth and nose when the need arises is a distinctly good idea. If you end up stuck behind another vehicle well, you can forget about the views and just start thinking about the shower you are so looking forward to when you get to your destination! You'll be enveloped in a huge dust cloud while the driver tries to manoeuvre a way round the culprit- not very easy on narrow, bumpy, windy, hilly roads when you can see only as far as your own windscreen!

Certainly it takes a bit of roughing it and stamina to make these journeys that even the locals find tough but, this is Laos and the scenery along the way; traditional villages, rivers, mountains, forest, etc. is worth the effort and there becomes a sort of cameraderie with the local on the vehicle as you start to squirm to try and find a bit of your bum you haven't used yet to sit on! The ever-smiling, waving kids at roadside help take your mind off the discomfort and, hey, you're ready for the next leg of your journey next day!