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The day we leave Muang Ngoi Neua is entirely spent in transit. It says a lot about the landscape we're in when a journey of around 100kms takes 12 hours. The longboat is followed by a succession of ever increasingly dilapidated minibuses which take us further up into the highland, ending in Luang Nam Tha, just a few miles from the border with China. I'm feeling grotty, coming down with a cold and my foot is still far from well (Lao Lao lies!) We decide to check into a decent guesthouse with cable TV to catch up with the past weekends' football. A powercut almost stops play, but is fixed just in time to watch Chelsea knock Arsenal out of the FA Cup...happy days 😊
Full of cold the next morning and with a fun ear ache thrown in to boot, we decide to stay in this transit town for another day, catching up with emails and our blogs and trying to blast out my cold with extra chillis in big bowls of noodle soup. It does the job and the next day, feeling much fitter, we catch a crammed minibus to Muang Sing, a market town in an area
populated by Hmong, Akha and Thai Lu tribes, to name a few. The remote location and proximity to so many small hill tribe communities makes it the perfect base for some cultural trekking. But on arrival, we're shocked that guided treks are priced at US$50 per day, which might explain why it's like a ghost town. This is a higher per day rate than trekking to Machu Picchu or the Amazon rainforest, and a bit steep in our opinion. When we speak to the only other falang in town, some decidedly underwhelmed trekkers, we decide to instead hire some bicycles (better for my foot anyway) and explore the area ourselves.
We arrive to a massive thunderstorm, so in no hurry to go into the wild, we instead go in search of food. Tailue restaurant, is the best place in town, with a menu full of regional dishes that we've never heard of, and is a far cry from the 'fried rice and noodles' offerings of every other place in town. Run by an excitable old mama who is delighted that we like chilli, she sets about planning our next meals for us. Her enthusiasm is infectious and over the
few days we're in town, we work our way through her specials which include the delicious 'juau', which are a variety of thick curry pastes, one mixed with peanuts, another with roasted aubergine, which are eaten with balls of sticky rice wrapped in pakchoi.
Our proximity to the Golden Triangle quickly becomes apparent when we're repeatedly stopped by ancient looking Akha tribeswomen, resplendent in their traditional headresses of beads and silvery ornaments, on the pretense of selling fabrics and jewellry. Once they have your attention they wink mishieviously whilst trying to thrust opium into your hands...it's quite an experience trying to get away from drug dealers older than your grandparents. After a few of these encounters and the realisation that most shopkeepers seem to be on a permanent siesta, the penny drops. And when two days running the red eyed man who runs the only cycle hire place in town fails to open up to rent us some bikes, we give up and leave them to their slumber. When we get back to Luang Nam Tha we learn that if we'd stayed in Muang Sing, we could've joined in the Rocket Festival there the following day. But when we
consider the state of some of the people who would be launching their home-made fireworks, we decide it's probably not the end of the world that we're missing it.
It's been a strange few days; we haven't achieved an awful lot though not for the want of trying, but sometimes your timing is just off a bit. And maybe at the start of our trip we might have paid the high trekking prices, but we're at the stage now where we really have to stick to our daily budget. Still, we've seen many of the different exotic tribes in the Muang Sing market, and had those memorable encounters with the Akha ladies, not to mention eaten some of the best meals in Laos. And so we admit defeat, and with our visas about to expire, we head for the border crossing at Huay Xai, another long and winding road through the mountains heading for Northern Thailand. I feel sad to be leaving Laos, which is my favorite place we've visited in Asia, and maybe my favorite from the entire trip. But the excitement of being on the move quicky kicks in once again, with the promise of new adventures to come.
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