Nong Khiew, Where I Feel Better

From Luang Nam Tha Monique and I headed to Nong Khiew.

The bus we took was less than comfortable; it must have been twenty years old and appeared to be patched with cardboard and staples. It rattled uneasily underneath us, and every so often a woman who worked for the bus company would swivel in her seat to cast anxious looks at the overhead luggage rack rocking from its mooring on the ceiling. Maybe she was looking to see whether the safety pins and paper clips would hold. The road was only half paved, and where there wasn't pavement it had simply been leveled to the stony mountain soil. With each rock we lurched over I imagined pieces of the bus sloughing off until we were only enclosed inside a bare, skeletal frame.

Nonetheless, the landscape was spectacular.  The road climbed and twined around mountains, affording us views of the ranges for miles, mountains rolling over one another, towering on and on into the misty distance.

This photo was taken from a rest stop. For real.

 From the side of the road the ground fell away into steep valleys flattened out for rice farming, with a few shelters scattered on the hillsides and in the vivid green paddies. In some places, though, the mountains were scarred and bare from logging.  Laos keeps logging despite problems with deforestation; they're desperately poor and China is more than happy to pay well for the lumber.  The hills have been cleared and burned, leaving them bald. They looked mangy in contrast to the thick jungle.

After a six-hour ride we tumbled off the bus, sweaty and gritty, our bones vibrating from rumbling over rocky, dusty roads. We caught a tuk-tuk up the mountain and finally arrived in Nong Khiew, a sleepy, remote mountain village that straddles the Nam Ou River

 which cuts through abrupt mountains mossy with jungle.

It was a beautiful place, but there wasn't much to do there. It was too hot (and again, expensive) to go trekking. So we rented tiny bamboo bungalows and relaxed in the hammocks hung on the little porches outside.

And lying there, reading or dozing in the breeze coming off the river, I somehow started to feel a little better. I can't put my finger on why.

Culture Shock, Finally: Luang Nam Tha and Muang Sing

After one night in the border town of Huay Xai, I and my new friend Monique (she's on the left):

Modeling traditional hill tribe accessories.

decided to head northeast to Luang Nam Tha.  It's home to about 150,000 people, making it the largest settlement in Northwest Laos. It's on the national map of the country.

And there is nothing there.

This place would barely make it onto a map in Thailand at all. It's got two banks, a post office, a few restaurants and a store or two and that's the whole place.

We went there to go trekking in the mountains, only to find that because it was low season we would have had to pay for a guide just for a few people, making it absurdly expensive. So we rented a motorbike instead and headed north through gorgeous countryside:

Deep jungle:

A slow, tempting river (it was hot):

And orderly agriculture filling any open space:

to Muang Sing, a stone's throw from the Chinese border. This town is even smaller than Luang Nam Tha, but it sprawls out in a wide, flat valley.

We passed teenage girls coming home from school in their traditional Lao wrap skirts, all carrying umbrellas to prevent their skin from darkening in the sun.

All along the road were little bamboo settlements:

A lot of Laotians live this way. According to the 2005 Census done by the Lao Department of Statistics (the internet is a wonderful thing), about 73% of Laotians live in rural areas, down from 83% in 1995. Keep in mind that the criteria for measuring whether a village is in a rural or urban area are fairly relaxed on their definition of "urban": to be considered urban a place has to have a population of 600 people or more than 100 households, a road for motor vehicle access, a majority of households in the village have electricity and running water, and there needs to be a market in town. Not exactly Manhattan.

In Thailand, I went on treks through the mountains to see people living this way. It turns out that all I needed to do was take a drive through Laos.

When I moved to Thailand I spent my first month with 35 Americans in one of the most Westernized, touristy areas of what turned out to be an incredibly Westernized, touristy country. When I moved to Northeastern Thailand to teach I was still with Americans and could speak enough Thai by that point to introduce myself and order food.

So I never really dealt with culture shock until I got up into Nothern Laos. In Muang Sing, tribeswomen selling bracelets in a restaurant ate the leftovers off my plate and asked for the rest of my bottled water. Both nights I stayed in Luang Nam Tha the electricity went off and stayed off for hours with no promise of ever coming back on. I suddenly realized that I was a tourist traipsing through the 44th poorest nation in the world.

It didn't feel great.

One Step into Laos

After spending an evening and morning in Chiang Rai, I took a bus two hours away to the Mekong River and Chiang Khong to cross the border into Laos.

It was very dramatic. I stopped at a hole-in-the-wall office in Thailand and told them I was leaving, then climbed down the sandy bank of the Mekong and clambered into one of these long-tail boats.

It took about 90 seconds to cross the mighty Mekong and suddenly find myself in another country.

Apparently they're planning to build a bridge at this border crossing. It should be finished in 2012. I saw no sign of it.

But in any case, I was eating Larb Gai and drinking Beer Lao and watching the sun set over the hills of Thailand an hour after I left it.

A few things made it immediately apparent to me that I was in Laos:

• The woman who ran the guesthouse I stayed at for the night was hysterical. She was truly funny. Thais think everything is funny, but very few of them actually are. 
• At the restaurant where we ate dinner ("we" here being me and my then-new friend Monique, a Dutch girl I met at the border office)  we had to track someone down to order what we wanted. In Thailand the server stood over you before you ordered, sometimes unnervingly. Once we had our food, we never saw any of the staff again- literally. When we were finished and wanted to leave we tried without luck to find someone to take our money. We tried again the next morning. Nope. Sorry, Mekong Sunset Restaurant.  

One Night in Chiang Rai

After leaving my friends in Pai, I decided to stop over in Chiang Rai for a night before heading into Laos. Chiang Rai on it's own is not incredibly interesting, but it's about halfway between Chiang Mai and the Lao border, so it makes for a convenient stopover.

Also, there's the White Wat, or Wat Rong Khun, which is totally wild.

I stopped by on my last morning in Thailand.

The White Wat was begun in 1997 and is the brainchild of this man:

That's a cardboard cutout, in case that isn't apparent.


He's Chalermchai Kositpipat, an artist who mixes traditional elements of Buddhist and Hindu art with contemporary images like, uh...

The wat is a work in progress. Mr. Kositpipat estimates that it will take another 50 years or so to complete, even with his large staff of artisans working hard at it:

To get to the main area of the temple visitors cross over a bridge that signifies the escape from the cycle of rebirth into the Abode of the Buddha. Underneath is the artist's representation of the human world, which to me seems overly grim:

...but then again some sources tell me it's a representation of hell, in which case it seems about right. These guys guard the way:



 to this:



I wasn't supposed to take photos inside, but I couldn't help sneaking a few. You'll see why.

Inside the temple one wall includes the traditional Buddha portraits and a wax statue of a monk. I heard a Japanese tourist ask a guard in all seriousness how long the monk sits there everyday.

On the opposite wall is this image (this is a print in an adjoining museum, which I also wasn't supposed to photograph, which is why it's covered in glare):

Looking closely into the pupils, one has George W. Bush and one has Osama Bin Laden. Walking around the museum that was a common theme; one of the paintings had the two of them straddling a rocket that was blasting into space and was entitled something like: "Love one Another". It was all very odd, to be honest.

Interwoven into that illustration are small but distinct details. Let's play spot the pop culture icons.

I don't love it. But I have to hand it to the guy who took thousands of years of traditional Buddhist art and had the hutzpah to twist it a little bit, even if it was in a strange, somewhat dirivitive direction.

Update

I am in Hanoi! ...which is a madhouse, especially after spending almost three weeks in the sleepy, slow PDR of Laos (PDR= either People's Democratic Republic or Please Don't Rush). I have three blogposts ready to go, but none of the internet cafes can deal with uploading photos.

Please direct your complaints to the Government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

Laos!

I am in Laos! And it is beautiful and much more different from Thailand than I imagined.

One of many differences is that the internet cafes are absolutely dreadful. So I'm afraid  posting may slow down or even stop altogether until I go to Vietnam in a few weeks, at which point I'll have to spend days on end catching up.

Apologies to my loyal readers (i.e. my parents).

Motorbiking Pai: Sunrise to Sunset

On my last full day in Pai, Kait and Judith and I decided to catch the sunrise, so we were up and out at 5:30 a.m. We headed south on the main road, then turned west on the country road that led to the waterfall, where we had seen an abandoned bamboo platform the day before.

These bamboo shelters are all over Thai farmland. This one turned out to be a bit more permanent, with an outhouse and a water keeper. But it was clearly deserted.

We sat there listening to the birds wake and call to each other and watched the sky lighten over the mountains until the sun appeared out of the clouds, glowing orange. 

It was gorgeous.

Then we got on our bikes to find some coffee. But on the way back we passed this sign, which we had seen the day before.

And we were intrigued. ("What the hell is a landcrack?" "It's the fruit- it's so good it's like crack." "Try our fresh red sorrel juice- it's highly addictive!" etc) So we wandered across the road to a farm where the farmer makes red sorrel juice (?) from young tamarinds:

It was delicious, actually. Very sweet, but really good. It would make a mean sangria. He and his wife also brought us fresh fruit from their garden, including bananas, potatoes, peanuts, two kinds of mango, tamarinds, papaya, and even a little bottle of sweet sorrel wine, which we killed, even though it was about half past seven in the morning.

This was barely half of it. 

He also found this beautiful caterpillar and brought it over to amuse us:

And held his massive, majestic, evil-looking rooster. He offered to let us hold it for a photo op, but none of us took him up on it seeing as it looked like the devil incarnate.

But still, what the hell is a landcrack? We wandered up the hill to find out.

Turns out it's a fault.

See that wood in the lower left corner? That's a railing. Take note, Pai Canyon. 

This guy's backyard first split in 2008 and again in 2009 and 2011. He can no longer farm because of it, so he makes a living from the garden and the land crack as a tourist attraction. He seems to be doing OK at at; when we came back along the road later that day to go to the waterfall again the place was full of people drinking his fresh red sorrel juice.

We left him a healthy donation and went to get a cup of coffee at the coffee shop with the flowers growing on the roof- I posted a photo of it last time. It's called Coffee in Love, which makes no sense and is so, so Thai.

Here's Judith sitting on the deck looking pensive and pretending she hasn't just eaten a piece of blueberry cheesecake at 8 in the morning.

After that, we went home for a nap. The owners of our guesthouse asked where we went so early. They must have thought we were nuts- we either left our bungalows at 2 in the afternoon (after my birthday) or 5:30 in the morning.

We went back out that afternoon for a swim in the waterfall, and then Kait decided she wanted to go to the bat cave about an hour away from town towards Mae Hong Son. She had heard from someone that the bats all leave the cave in a rush at nightfall (which I actually saw in Kao Yai National Park, and it was fabulous, but I haven't gotten to writing about that yet...), so we headed out at about 5.

The road was fantastic- just as winding and sinuous as the one into town from Chiang Mai. It was a lot of fun on a motorbike. (Sorry Mom.)

 And the scenery was beautiful.

But it took us a long time to get there, because of the hairpin curves and such. We saw the sun setting from the tops of the mountains.

And when we finally got to the cave, it was pretty much dark. And it turned out that we were almost two hours late for the bat exodus. So we turned around and headed back. In absolute darkness. On one of the most infamously winding roads in Thailand.

And that's how I learned to drive a motorbike in the dark.

(Again, sorry Mom.)