Lost In Laos! (part 5) Phongsali

Arriving in Phongsali after having to spend a night in a tent in the Hat Sa boat landing, I was really looking forward to a real bed and a shower! I found the town to be quite interesting. Everything seemed to be made in China! The goods on the market; the cars, trucks and buses; even the hotel I stayed in was Chinese-owned! Going up the hillside were the narrow, rocky streets of old Phongsali. There are still some adobe houses and some French colonial buildings. People here don't see too many westerners and I found everyone to be very friendly. The main reason for visiting Phongsali was to arrange a trek to the forest and hilltribe villages. This is still a new thing here and we were told there were only 3 guides in town. Annetta, the Dutch girl I'd travelled up from Udomxai with, saw 2 other tourists in a neighbouring guesthouse and rushed over to ask them what information they had. We'd not been in Phongsali 10 minutes! That girl moved too fast for me!

Quick Tips:

A few hundred metres from the Phoufa Hotel on the Hat Sa road is a dirt road leading up to a viewpoint on Phoufa hill. If you're walking, look for the short-cut going straight up the hillside into the trees. At a rather neglected picnic area, you pay an entry fee of 1,500 kip to climb the last hundred metres to the top of a concrete stairway to the viewpoint from which you look directly over the town and the mountains to the south.

Best Way To Get Around:

Walk! There's no public transport around town and it's pretty small anyway! Getting to Udomxai takes 8 hours by truck for 38,000 kip (US.50). There's one truck per day at 8am. The awful road to Hat Sa boat landing is covered by a regular 8am pick-up for 4,000 kip and takes 1 hour. Other pick-ups will go if there are enough passengers or someone charters.

Annetta, the Dutch girl I'd travelled from Udomxai with, and I met a Czech couple in Phongsali who were interested in going trekking in the little-visited area. They'd found just three guides in town: one from the Phoufa Hotel who was already out on a trek and two freelancers who call in at the guesthouses looking for tourists. One of these was also out on a trek with two German girls, which left Tonchang, an 18-year-old lad, the only guide available. The Czech couple met the others and said Tonchang was their choice anyway as his English was very good. We met him that evening to get some details and to haggle the price. He wanted US$11 per person, per day for a three-day trek staying overnight in a Pu-Noi and an Akha village. Annetta did the haggling and we agreed on US$9. However, Annetta pulled out the next day and left the three of us on our own.

 

The day before we were due to leave on the trek, we met the two German girls who returned from their trek a day early. Alarm bells rang as we listened to their tale of woe--their guide couldn't speak English; he found the trek harder than they did; and the Pu-Noi villagers they stayed overnight with virtually ignored them and their guide slept the whole time, so the girls couldn't even attempt to talk to the villagers!

 

On the morning of our trek, we grilled Tonchang. He told us we would be going in a different direction to the German girls and staying at different villages. We'd be walking in primary rainforest for a day-and-a-half of our trek and he spoke Pu-Noi, so we would be able to communicate with the people at both villages in which we spent the night. After a lot of sulking from Tonchang over Annetta's late pull-out, we finally got going at about 9:30am, carrying plenty of water, sticky rice and biscuits for lunch. We also brought spare clothes and a sleeping bag each.

 

The first hour was gradually downhill through fields to cross a valley and then gently uphill to Chanta village. From there, we went downhill to cross another valley and more steeply uphill on the other side and into the forest. Tonchang had told us the first day would take us about six hours, so we were surprised to arrive at Khlum Luang, our first night's stop-over after only four hours!

 Tonchang looked for a family to put us up for the night--most people were working in their fields taking in the rice harvest, so we dropped our bags and washed at the village stand-pipe. We drew a large crowd of kids who we quickly befriended, but it took a long time for them to allow us to take photos. The village was of the wooden-huts-on-stilts variety, some thatched and some with metal rooves. (Continued in "Free Form").

A small market, but one of the friendliest I've visited in Laos. At around 6am, it's very busy around the meat stalls for about an hour. At this time, it's still dark, so many of the fruit, vegetable, and herbs stalls are lit by a single small candle.

It's a good place for breakfast with sticky rice vendors selling sausages, fish, and various bits of offal. There are fried snacks, too. Fruit seems to be limited to apples, mandarins, and pomelos. I tried to buy my lunch and breakfast from as many different ladies as I could and found everyone to be friendly and smiley even at 6 in the morning!

After around 7:30, it gets very quiet and westerners are certainly noticed by everyone. I could hear comments followed by some laughing as I passed by. It was fun when I heard these comments, obviously about me, to turn to the ladies concerned as if I understood them and watch them blush! Next door is a consumer goods market where everything seems to come from China! It was in this part of the market that I found the only place in Phongsali that sold film!

We found the villagers to be very friendly in contrast with the German girls' experience in their Pu-Noi village and Yin and his family really looked after us well. As I found earlier in my trip in Borneo, staying overnight in a local village can be very interesting at meal times and this was no exception! We had rat and rice! Actually bamboo shoot and rat stew with wild, green vegetables, sticky rice and lao lao moonshine liquor. Apparently it's rude for visitors to refuse to drink at least one glass of lao lao when it's offered in someone's house and I found drinking that the hardest part of the meal. It's very strong and invariably disgusting reminding me of paint stripper! We slept on bamboo mats all lined up like sardines in a can and next morning started out at about 9am.

 

Two local villagers accompanied us apparently going the same way to go hunting. I wondered how much of this was to help Tonchang find the right directions as there were quite a few forks in the trail! One of the villagers had a home-made spear gun to hunt with. It was made of wood with thick rubber bands for the trigger and the missile was three metal prongs tied together. We walked through primary rainforest most of this second day and we had to wade one river waist-deep. The leeches couldn't believe their luck! We all got dozens of them around our ankles and in our boots and when I took my shoes and socks off to wade the river, I was already dripping blood from 3 different bites after only 1 hours' walking.

 

Birds were hard to spot through the thick forest but we saw many butterflies, particularly by the streams in addition to beetles, dragonflies...and leeches! We carried more sticky rice from Khlum Luang for lunch and we walked a little quicker than Tonchang expected again. We ambled the last hour stretching it to 2 hours to enjoy the forest rife with ferns, lichens and mosses before we arrived at Chanteun, the Akha village we were overnighting in at about 2pm on a damp and cloudy afternoon.

 

The Akha village was a collection of about a dozen bamboo and thatch huts with dirt floors. We stayed with Asai and his family of 3 boys, wife, father, sister and sundry other family members either permanent hut residents or otherwise; it was difficult to tell in the dark of the hut. After sitting inside during a 1-hour downpour, we took a walk around the village. All the female members, small kids included, were wearing their traditional black tunics edged with red and yellow, and the adult women wore headdresses decorated with red and yellow tassles, coins, and metal links. No way would any of them allow any photos to be taken, they all ran and hid when the cameras came out, but I got some pictures of the village and of the young lads after a bit of coaxing.

 

The Akha village had turned into a bit of a mud bath after the downpour but it was beautifully situated on a ridge with a backdrop of cloud-muffled mountains. Most of the Akha's tools were made of bamboo; all baskets and mats were woven from it; water was collected from a stream in big bamboo tubes like organ pipes and there was a bamboo loom in our house. Only the cooking pots were metal. For dinner we had wild, green vegetables, sticky rice and lao lao again, this time supplemented with bamboo-borer moth grubs deep fried! Asai's father, who said he was "about 60," told us a lot about the Vietnam War. There was a lot of fighting in the mountains around his village and they had to move a few times. Tonchang really had his work cut out translating, as Asai's father seemed to talk for several minutes without drawing breath! Both the villages we stayed at overnight were subsistence farming; consuming everything they grew with nothing to sell at market in Phongsali. Asai's father had told us hardly anyone goes down to Phongsali from the village which made me wonder what they would do with the money Tonchang paid them for our food and accommodation. It also explained why Tonchang and the villager that came with us lost the trail! The villager had a sweetcorn field right where the trail used to cut through the forest. There's no forest on that hillside now or any trail, so they had to go searching for it where the forest started again! The trail was very, very overgrown and we had to bend under the bamboo stems and thorny branches to get through before it opened out a bit an hour or later as we approached another Pu-Noi village. From here, the trail was clear & still in primary rainforest.

 

The ritual shoe & sock removing to cross the Nam Long River again where the bamboo bridge had collapsed, revealed a veritable metropolis of leeches on my legs! My socks were almost completely blood-red! From the Nam Long, where we had more sticky rice for lunch, onwards was really hard for me! The trail went steeply uphill for 3 hours! The much younger Czech couple found it easier, but they sweated a lot, too! They found time to stop for some bird watching, but I just trudged on trying to get the climb over with as quickly as possible dripping with sweat and blood!

 

That last day's walk was 10 hours! Tonchang had told us it would be a long 8-hour day and that extra, unexpected 2 hours were really tough. That was the final stretch to Phongsali along an open dirt road in the hot afternoon sun! I managed to get a lift on the only vehicle to be spotted on the road at this time of day which saved me about a half an hour of walking into Phongsali. I'd walked part of that road before the trek and it has some stunning views of the rolling hills beyond Phongsali and there are dozens and dozens of gorgeous butterflies flitting around the many streams coming down from the mountains. I couldn't appreciate any of it this time; I just wanted to get showered, off my aching feet and the pack off my sore back!

 

Next morning, I was ready to walk some more. I felt very little reaction to the previous day's exertions! Only a dozen bumps on my legs from the leeches that had got a really good suck! It was an excellent trek having everything I'd hoped before I'd arrived in Phongsali; lots of primary rainforest, friendly and interesting villages; I hope I learned something about them. Tonchang did work very hard for us when we had finished our days walking and wanted to ask questions of the villagers even though he was as tired as we were. I'd recommend him to other tourists, but you can't find him in Phongsali, you have to wait until he finds you. He's been guiding for a year now, he told us, so maybe some of the guesthouse owners know how to contact him. He goes to different villages on his 3-day trek to the other guides but he also does a 6-day trek which I think is the same one the Phoufa Hotel guide does. His English is very good and the Pu-Noi & Akha villagers seem to know and trust him.

The 4-hour boat ride from Muang Khua ended in Hat Sa, a small village that is the boat landing serving Phongsali town an hour drive away. My Dutch companion Annetta and I arrived in Hat Sa at just before 6pm to find no road transport in Hat Sa and no guesthouse! We were told no one owned any vehicles in Hat Sa, so we'd have to stay the night and wait in the morning. A shop owner by the boat landing offered us his shop floor for 8,000 kip each. Considering that I've been paying 10,000 kip in Northern Laos almost everywhere for my own room, I felt that was a bit steep. Even the 6,000 kip he came down to was too much, so out with the tent I've been carrying these last few months! Annetta was keen to camp so in the darkness, I found a sandy bit of ground just big enough and pitched the tent, not without difficulty, by torch light. It's just big enough for 2 small people, like Annetta and myself. I found a single noodle stall in Hat Sa a 10-minute walk up the hill almost out of the village. It was inhabited by 2 very drunk locals who continually pestered me to drink with them while I ate my noodles. I was pleased to pay and leave!  After a fairly restless night, we were awoken at 5:30am by the locals coming down to their boats and hanging round the tent which was obviously a bit of a novelty for them! I packed up everything ready to leave on the 9am truck. However, this truck ARRIVES in Hat Sa at 9am; it doesn't leave for Phongsali until 2pm when the scheduled boats from Muang Khua arrive! No other options presented themselves, so I unpacked my tent, laid it out to dry in the sun and waited. About half an hour later, another pick-up arrived, having been chartered by a group of Chinese who then took off in a speedboat. Negotiations started as the pick-up driver didn't want to upset the scheduled truck driver by stealing his passengers. In the end, whoever jumped onto his pick-up as he drove away, he took! One hour later, at last, we were in Phongsali. Hat Sa proved an interesting diversion and I found some French in the back of my memory to speak to an old man in the village. The boat landing was also very picturesque in the morning as the mist lifted but I wouldn't recommend Hat Sa as a planned stopover!

Down at the little truck yard in Phongsali, we were fruitlessly searching for the truck for the eight-hour haul to Udomxai! Every driver told me he was going to Hat Sa! Where were all these trucks when Annetta and I were stuck there overnight trying to get to Phongsali?! There was a truck going to Udomxai camouflaged blue amongst the other blue trucks and we were on our way at 8am.

 The initial hour was really stunning. Clouds had settled low in the valleys and the hilltops poked through like islands in a cotton wool sea. It was a beautiful scene but one I couldn't get a good photo of from the moving truck. We picked up a comedian a short time later! A very drunk old man who sat on the spare wheel on the floor behind the driver's cab. Every time the driver stopped to let someone on or off, he'd make his way to the back of the truck as if to get off, lose his balance as the truck started off again and stumble back to his spare wheel laughing like the rest of us! He managed to get off after about two hours! This trip was quite a tough one, as it rained for more than half of the journey. The plastic side panels had to be let down to stop us all from getting soaked, but also it obscured the views.

 

At a village called Ban Buntai, three hours from Phongsali, there are two small guesthouses, so there is a possibility of breaking up this long trip, although the area looked fairly unremarkable. This trip was the first leg in my dash down to Vientiane and the Thai border. I'd be travelling all day every day over the next three days, so I hoped, the further south I got, the better the roads would be, as my bum would have no chance to recover otherwise!