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.