The Songkam dilema - Mekong take two ...

We had a bit of a dilema on our hands - Songkam, the Lao New Year festival - put simply, nationally celebrated by a massive water fight, meant that we had to get to Houei Xay by 4pm in order to check in for our "Gibbon Experience". The slowboat from Pakbeng wasn't going to get us there on time so we opted for a dash up the river on a speedboat ... open boats with typical "thai" longtail engines and a requirrement to wear lifejackets and crash hats ... should be ok said Mr W 'cos they have "union jacks" painted on their sides!

Suitably kitted out and bags safely strapped in, we shot off up the river taking only 20 minutes to catch the slow boat up which had left an hour earlier. We literally skimmed up the river, bumping over some pretty big whirlpools and only briefly slowing down to ride up the rapids. After an hour we stopped to swap boats and head on up river in a slightly less stable boat which bent and bounced around at the bow a little too much for my liking - accused of a white knuckle ride by Mr W, he forgets that my legs aren't long enough to wedge myself against the seat in front, so down to a light grip on an almost non-existant hold point!

We stopped a couple of times up river and it soon became obvious that there was an issue with the boat ... we were running out of gas, yes gas - these boats run on gas. Our young driver made for the bank and tied up alongside a tub of a boat and told us to wait whilst he took the gas cannister and "borrowed" a motorised dugout - last seen heading off back downriver to the Thai side! We had a nice break under cover on the tub and our driver duly reappeared with fuel and off we went, arrived in Houei Xay with yet more steps up the side of the river bank to negotiate! Waited on the main road for a ride into town ... an interesting looking character in his minivan with music blaring - somewhat John Wayne-esque - stopped and said he'd take us into town for $10 US. Great we thought but I'd spotted his mutt sitting on the bsck seat, a take on an Alsatian - having had our Thai dog experiences I was somewhat wary of having to get into the back of the van in very close proximity to the dog ... well she didn't move an inch, sat there and took our invasion of her space as a daily occcurence!

Stairs to the fast boat jetty

The fast boat ...

Feet don't reach ...

Back to front skid lid ...

Waiting for fuel

Of pink pigs and opium ...

We safely arrived in Pakbeng some nine hours after leaving Luang Prabang and after having made various stops on the way, some of them involving beaching the boat in order to allow the passengers to disembark.  The tribesman took his corrugated iron roofing, the monks their boxes and the villagers their New Year's gifts of food and bags of rice and chillis.  On one occasion we beached so well that it took the force of several passengers to free the vessel.

Pink pigs ... when we set off from Luang Prabang Mr W spotted what looked like a very big pink pig on the shore, admittedly it was quite a long way off but it did look like a huge pig ... we debated and decided that it must be a pig, only to discover as we went up river that there were herds of buffalos along the riverbank and amongst these were pink skinned beasts!!! Never having seen a pink buffalo before, our pink pig was most certainly a pink buffalo.  You can imagine that this caused the odd laugh or two!

In my dim and distant past I may well have considered trying opium (not!), but we really didn't expect the first question that we would be asked on landing at Pak Beng to be "You want to smoke opium?" - do we really look the types??  

Mekong Scenery

Pink pigs ... well, buffalos really

Monks disembarking

The Hmong's corrugated cargo

Luang Prabang the city of 30 temples ...

After circling Luang Prabang in a thunderstorm in a twin prop plane we finally landed a little later than anticipated! The torrential rain quickly passed and it dried up enough for Mr W and I to find a nice little restaurant on the Mekong called the Antique House, couple of beers later - well needed after finding that our "nice" guest house was far from that described both in the guide book and on the web ...

Ah, so the city of 30 extant temples, it must have been quite amazing in its day. Sadly many of the temples have fallen into disrepair and with little government money to fund repair they rely on their UNESCO world heritage status for their upkeep. By the end of ghe first day we were virtually "watted" out and we only visited two or three on the inside ...  Besides the temples Luang Prabang is very interesting architecturally, French colonial with Chinese influence.  Normally a very touristic place but fortunately, for us, at this time of the year it was quite quiet, so quiet that we kept running into familiar faces on a regular basis.

Wat Xien

Buddahs statues in Wat Xien

Mosaic wall Wat within Wat Xien complex

Mosaic wall detail

Tree of Life Wat within Wat Xien complex

Monks studying

Royal Palace Wat

The Laven of Bolaven

Laos has a population of 6.8 million, it's more a collection of different tribes speaking different languages rather than a nation state ... we visited a "Laven" tribe in a village on the Bolaven plateau which had been relocated from the Vietnamese border and is now supported by various institutions and individuals from Pakse. Enough facts!

Our tribal guide appeared in western clothing smoking a bamboo pipe which he was quick to offer us to try ... coffee yes, but a tribal water pipe, a definite no! Kids start smoking at 4 years old and there was plenty of evidence of that! We wandered around the village and saw lots of interesting sights. This tribe were "animists" who, dare I say it - rather like the Muslims - the men could have up to 4 wives.  This practice is now illegal in Laos but still continues and family groups tended to live together, the biggest family in this village consisted of 90 members all living under the same roof! Imagine that!  Mr W and I were a little perturbed by one of their more morbid practices of preparing coffins for the elderly members of the family and keeping these stored under their houses - worrying thing was that elderly was 50+ ... The women, seemed to have a reasonably tough life, they were up at 3am to prepare food for the men who went to work in the fields (primarily coffee and rice in this area) and then most went out to work with them too!  Their belief in spirits means that a woman is not allowed to give birth in the village for fear of upsetting the spirits, she goes out into the jungle with a female family member and stays there for up to a week after the birth of her baby - a male family member, most likely her father, makes a bed for her to take to the jungle.

The people seemed happy and content with their lot, no shortage of food - plenty of pigs running amock in the village, chickens roosting in very interesting places and food being grown in very different ways ... the only really noticable modern addition to their lives seemed to be tv, that's judging by the huge number of satellite dishes. Apparently these often form part of the modern day dowry along with corrugate iron roofs for the houses ...

Coffins under the house

Girl smoking a water pipe

Happy pigs

Kaffe ... aka Mr Coffee

Part of a trip to the Bolaven plateau, which we took really to visit some of the ethnic minority villages and waterfalls, turned out to be a "coffee" growing educational  trip for us... Not being coffee drinkers we weren't over enthusiastic about the prospect of a coffee farm tour and neither did we intend tasting coffee.

"Mr Coffee" is a Dutch coffee loving national who quit the stock market to travel to the tropics in search of good coffee - or so his story goes.  He married a Lao girl whose family have a long history of coffee growing in Paksong on the Bolaven plateau just east of Pakse.

We started off tasting home grown, hand picked, wok roasted "robusta" coffee - we both thought "here we go, we'll be off the wall for the rest of the day, highly twitchy and extremely irritable", there was no way we could do the tour without the tasting.  I love the smell of coffee, smelling it would probably have been enough but the taste was quite something else, I've never tasted such a smooth, creamy and "sweet" tasting brew - delicious.... Yes, for those of you who know me well I haven't touched coffee for about 8 years ... waited all day long for the after effect especially as we had to taste Coffee's Arabica blend too - nothing came for me, Mr W claimed to have been twitching but that's debatable... a very well spent couple of hours for both of us!

Some facts about coffee

Coffee grows between 20 degrees north and 20 degrees south i.e. In the tropics
Robusta grows between 600 metres and 1200 metres altitude
Arabica grows between 1200 metres and 1800 metres altitude
Both varieties grow in volcanic soil
Coffee is harvested between October and December
Laos produces 90,000 tonnes of coffee a year
Arabica coffee bushes are almost Xmas tree shaped
Robusta coffee bushes are tall and lanky!

Mr Coffee Wok Roasting Coffee

Cooling roasted coffee

Arabica coffee plants

Begin forwarded message:

From: Fiona Wells <wellsfiona@gmail.com>
Date: 11 April 2011 15:14:03 GMT+08:00
To: Fiona Wells <wellsfiona@gmail.com>
Subject: Arabica

Up the Mekong without a paddle ... well ... almost

I think we may well need a paddle shortly ... we left Luang Prabang at 08:40 this morning on the slow boat to Pakbeng (guess ultimately up the Mekong to China!) - we're making our way north to Bokeo province with a stop on the way at Pakbeng.  Good job that the tour agency that we booked the tickets through had us on the boat at 07:40 because it slowly filled and filled and filled with everything from people of all sorts (tourists young and old, locals, tribes people, monks), bikes, motorbikes, corrugated iron roofing, slabs of ice, sacks of chillis, sacks of rice, boxes of who knows what and copious quantities of food.  It seems that all the locals are either eating or sleeping!  We've scraped the bottom a couple of times and ascended rapids rather than descended them - a potentially interesting experience given the partially submerged nasty looking jagged rocks that we've been passing - Mr W's eyebrows raising on a few occasions.

The Mekong is interesting, we've seen it more than a couple of kilometres wide in the south of the country to only several metres wide in this area (north of Luang Prabang) and it is easy to see from the markings on the rocks how high and low it gets in the various seasons - currently quite low despite very unseasonal heavy rainfall. An amazing life supporter for villages and villagers who fish, wash, gold pan, play on the river banks - the steep river banks making natural slides for the village children. Water buffalos happily wallow in the water.  

Mekong Scenery

Logging on the Mekong

Sand Dunes on the Mekong

Fishing on the Mekong

Local children entertaining themselves on the boat

A fair swap...

There were some very peaceful looking nuns sitting inside the temple at the stone carvers' village and one caught my eye - I wanted a photo, so we had to do this...

to get these ...

This nun was the one who caught my eye

The Stonecarvers...

There's a village that specialises in sculpting Buddhas from solid stone just north of Pakse.  The villagers quite literally go into the "stone fields" and find a suitable piece of stone to hew. One person carves the item from start to finish, he is ably assisted by a polisher who keeps a gentle stream of water flowing over the statue so that he can polish it up with a very coarse stone block.  It then has several layers of paint applied before its final gold coating.

Stone carving

Carving a 2 tonne Chinese Buddha on commission

Sanding the Buddha

Painting the carvings

The final product

The Weavers of Ban Saphay

We thought we'd been conned, but then - what were we expecting?  We were dropped of in between some houses and told that the 200 weavers were down through the houses, WHERE??  A closer look under the houses, they're all on stilts in this village, and we saw gaggles of women sitting at their looms -either working or being watched and entertained by friends and family members.  Of course there weren't 200 but we did see a fair number of them.  They were making 50 metre lengths of silk cloth at a time, some of the colours and patterns quite remarkable.

The Weavers' village - WHERE are they??

Preparing the silk lengths

Silk lengths ready for distribution to the weavers

Lady Weaving

Onlookers - friends or family??

Pakse and the South

We're not entirely sure why we came here other than to visit Wat Phou at Champasak, the pre-Angkor Wat Khmer "lost city", a suitably impressive site set at the foot of and up a hill - yet more stair climbing involved here but this time we were pleasantly engulfed in the sweet scent of frangipani.  There was an "avenue of frangipani" all the way up the hill which made a very pretty sight.

Another one of these places that, due to location, you wonder how it was constructed. A mighty feat of engineering to put the carved rock in place.

Frangipani Avenue ..

Wat Phou stairclimbing ...

The front of Wat Phou Sanctuary

Wat Phou Sanctuary

Looking down on the ruins from the Sanctuary - a UNESCO world heritage site

24 hours in Vientiane ...

Exciting - a new country, a new experience for both of us - a rare occurrence.  Not so exciting - the cockroach crawling up Mr W's trouser leg on the Air Laos flight and he dared to tell me about it mid-air!

Arriving early evening we'd pre-booked a room in a hotel on the Mekong which had been set up by an Aussie expat from Perth - comfortable and tastefully decorated but I'm sure Mr W had an ulterior motive as the open plan, almost suspended and low bannistered staircase was a mental challenge for me, and I think I'm zip lining through the nature reserve...

The challenging staircase ...

We checked the local markets out and sauntered around the so called antique shops, took photos of the numerous Wats and wandered back to the hotel in typical "Lao PDR" style - "Lao Please Don't Rush"!!

A fully laden Saamlor

The flip-flop shop - or thong shop for you Aussies/Kiwis/SA's!!

Buddha Statues at Wat Siskat Museum - over 1000 on display

The highlight of the day was a very good meal in a restaurant set up by an NGO to train and ultimately rehabilitate Vientiane street kids.  The kitchen and front of house staff are all street kids, running the restaurant under the supervision of trainers - great job!