Upriver in a Leaky Boat

Hello again!

One thing about travelling is that it sometimes allows you a glimpse into the future. And sometimes that's a frightening thing.

It used to be possible to travel by boat for long distances along many of the region's rivers. Life for millions of people over thousands of years has revolved around the rivers. Each year, the monsoon would bring floods, along with precious topsoil which was deposited onto flood plains and subsequently used for agriculture. The lifecycle of the river was extremely important.

Then came the hydro-electricity dams. Largely built by the Chinese, these dams have completely altered the life of the rivers. The Ou River, the river that ran through the area we were visiting, has been hugely impacted. It's no longer possible to drive a boat along some stretches. Fish can't migrate past the dams and the seasonal rise and fall of the waters has changed. 

We had planned to do some long-distance river trips but learned that some of them were no longer possible because the routes were blocked by dams. We had no idea how many though until we saw this map. It's incredible - and this information is five years old!

One image that will always stick with me is the sight of a semi-submerged temple, just hundreds of metres upstream from a dam. I wasn't quick enough to get a photo as we whizzed past but it was so sad to see. I found this photo on the net to give you an idea of what it looked like.

Back at Nong Khiaw, where our last blog post finished, we said goodbye to It (we're not sure how to spell it!), the owner of our guest house. She was gorgeous and made us each a bracelet in the colours and design of Laos' national flag. 

We finally began our first boat trip - from Nong Khiaw to Muang Ngoi. There were a lot of people heading there (mostly tourists but also a few locals) so they piled us into slowboats. Somehow, most of us ended up in the boat with no seats. It just had planks about six inches from the floor.

It was an uncomfortable trip but a spectacular one. We motored along past enormous karst mountains and watched the river life slide by. We watched kids swimming, women doing laundry and pigs, water buffalo and cows drink from the river.

The boat was incredible noisy though. We had heard about this from other travellers and tried to sit up the front, away from the motor, but we ended up near the back. The guy at the very back was obviously experienced in these things - he brought earplugs with him! John made do with trying to tie his hat down over his ears. Such a gorgeous look!

We have a noise meter on John's phone so John pulled it out. That's the highest reading we've ever seen!

The river is really shallow and with a full boat we sometimes scraped the bottom. At one stage, just after we had gone through the only rapids on the stretch, we lost our propellor. We started to float backwards and we had visions of getting into trouble going through the rapids backwards but our captain cleverly steered us towards the bank. Branches protruded into the boat and we all had a bit of a laugh but we were soon fixed and on our way.

We arrived at Muang Ngoi. Check out the 'port'. It's just a floating deck.

Muang Ngoi was a smaller version of where we'd just been. It was beautiful and very laid back. There were a lot of tourists during the day but many went back to Nong Khiaw, the larger town, in the afternoon.

We had a gorgeous bungalow in a garden setting. It was great except that it suffered from the Laotian pillow syndrome - high, hard pillows that give you a sore neck in five minutes. We've learnt to sleep on our towels and fleecy jumpers.

Opposite our guest house was the police station. It was made with bamboo matting. I'm guessing they don't hold any prisoners here!

John still had his cold so we just wandered around soaking up the village atmosphere. It was really strange to realise that this village used to be the capital town of the region. It got bombed to pieces during the war. There was so little left that they moved the capital to Nong Khiaw. There was no other signs of the bombings that we could see. The jungly forest was quick to hide the evidence.

Muang Ngoi was lovely. We only saw one car and one motorbike although we heard plenty of roosters during the wee hours of the morning.

The main street was lined with simple restaurants.

There was really only one dusty street with a few paths leading off it. How tempting does this track look? Of course we had to see where it led.

At the end of the path was a small monastery. The main temple was in good condition but the whole place looked empty. There was another monastery at the other end of town that seemed to be more active. We knew it's active because we heard the gong sounding in the morning...... very early in the morning!

This little girl with pigtails was so cute....

..... as were these cheeky boys.

We found a lovely restaurant on the river and had to partake of the Happy Hour 2-for-1 cocktails!

The views of life on the river were wonderful.

To our surprise, we saw porters loading and unloading boats, both here and at Nong Khiaw, using straps on their foreheads. We hadn't seen this anywhere else. Just as surprising was the fact that most of the porters were older women!

The sun set behind one of the larger mountains but the remaining glow was still gorgeous.

The next morning, we picked a wonderful spot for breakfast. The view over the misty river was beautiful.

Before we left home, my Aunty Shirley became very ill. I opened up my computer while we sat looking at this spectacular view and learned that Aunty Shirley probably only had a few days left, at best. We sat at the table and made plans. We always knew that if it came to it, we would go home. It's an indication of how small the world has become that, within two hours, we had booked a boat, a van, accommodation and two flights that would get us all the way back to Melbourne in two days.

There was no doubt in our minds that we were making the right decision, but it was really weird to make such radical changes to our plans. We had just been working through all the things there are to do here - trekking, kayaking and visiting indigenous villages. We had been planning the next part of our journey too, a five-hour boat trip further up the Ou River - with a tuk tuk detour around a dam! 

Within a couple of hours, we were on a small boat heading back to Nong Khiaw. The wife of the owner of our bungalows joined us so she could take her sick baby to the doctor. The boat was quite shallow and unstable - much like a kayak. It was better once it got up speed though.

This time we got great views of the scenery around us, instead of having the views obscured by knees and elbows as it was on the trip up to here!

The journey was so beautiful that we didn't want it to end and we pulled into Nong Khiaw all too soon.

Thanks to a phone call made by our very helpful waiter from Muang Ngoi, a van was waiting for us at the port. Our driver was lovely and we had a good drive back to Luang Prabang. As we drove back though all the places we'd been before, I felt like I was living a children's story book where the characters all return back through the places they visited earlier in the story.

It was really weird coming back to these towns that we never expected to visit again. In fact the whole experience was quite surreal - it seemed that one minute we were sitting in a village contemplating treks and adventurous boat journeys, and next minute we were backtracking through bigger and bigger towns, knowing we'd be home in two days. We still had four weeks planned to go of this trip so our heads had trouble catching up with reality.

We checked into a lovely French-run hotel in Luang Prabang (except the room was full of mosquitoes when we arrived!) and spent the aftenoon organising things.

We awoke to the news that Aunty Shirley had died overnight. It was so sad but we knew she couldn't keep going the way she was.

We had a quick stroll around the morning market then caught a van to the airport and flew to Bangkok. I haven't been there for a long time. This building that looked like it was falling down was very cool.

We had a few hours to spare so I checked out a few temples while John had a massage. This Hindu temple was so colourful. I couldn't take photos inside though.

I also found an enormous Thai temple complex. The details and colour on this were amazing.

Paintings with gold lined the walls inside the main temple.

I don't think I've ever seen chandeliers inside a temple before!

The designs on the doors were made with mother-of-pearl. No expense had been spared.

Many statues were covered in small pieces of gold leaf which were gradually peeling off and being blown away.

Temple rooftops.

We overnighted in a modern hotel where we got upgraded because they mucked our booking up (noice!) then were up at 4am for our flight home. I had to get a photo of this ad at the airport. In Laos, we saw quite a few young girls who use skin whitening cream. It looked ridiculous. Like a fake orange tan, a fake white skin just looks weird.

We got to see some incredible sights on this trip and we met some wonderful people. We had a glance into the future of this region, and perhaps the planet too, and there is great reason for concern.

We're now home. It's been a hectic week with the funeral, which was a lovely tribute to a wonderful lady, and catching up with relatives that we haven't seen for a long time. 

Farewell to our beautiful Aunty Shirley, who always had a smile and a slice of cake for everyone.

Hopefully, it won't be too long before we're back on the road again.


Hooroo,
Heather and John.