Elephant Village, Khmu Village and Tat Sae Waterfall

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We had an early start today. We needed to meet our ‘Tiger Tours’ guide for today’s tour at 8.30am at Cafe 56 which is right at the other end of town! We allowed 20 minutes to walk to the other end of town, which was enough time to walk right past the cafe which now goes by a different name. Very helpful, not! Anyway, we were right out of cafes so we thought we must have missed it so we doubled back to the cafe with other westerners out the front at 8.30am! On a tiny chalkboard it did say that Cafe 56 is now known as Cafe Namphou (or something like that).

Our guide for the day, Cha, introduced himself and took us over to a big tuk tuk (on the back of a ute rather than on the back of a motorbike) to be driven out to Elephant Village. Elephant Village has nine elephants that they have rescued when they were no longer required to do the logging work for which they were trained. The elephants have a much easier life now that they are employed in the tourist industry. Elephants that aren’t transitioned into tourist work are often left to starve when they are no longer required for logging work. The sad truth is that there is not enough ‘wild’ to return them to the wild and they probably don’t have the skills to survive in the wild anyway. It is not easy to find useful employment for all of the elephants that are no longer required for forestry work.

Our tour started with us buying bananas to feed to the elephants. We then embarked on an elephant ride for about an hour. We went down an alarmingly steep hill hoping that the elephant would not lose her footing!! We then went for a bit of a jaunt along the river before stopping for a photo opportunity on a rock bank in the middle of the river. The mahout had each of us sit on the elephant’s neck while he took photos.

Then it was back into the river, through the village and back to our starting point where we bought more bananas to feed to our elephant hostess!! And she still had room for more bananas even though she had foraged a bit while we were out for our ride. I guess when you have to eat 200kg of food each day that you pretty much just keep on shovelling it in at every opportunity!!?

After our ride we set off on our hike to the Khmu village. Boy, was it hot for hiking!!!! The terrain was not difficult, but the heat made it pretty arduous - for me anyway! The guide made easy work of it (he did an eight hour hike the day before!) and Bernie didn’t seem too bothered by an hour and a half walk in the heat either. Along the way Cha pointed out teak and mahogany trees numerous areas that had been slashed and burned in preparation for planting mountain rice. He also told us that there is a five year plan to make Lao smoke-free by 2015 by educating villagers to adopt more modern farming methods and abandon the old agricultural ways.

Our guide didn’t prep us very well as he did not let us know that we would be visiting the village school. Fortunately I still had a few pens that I brought from Australia so I was able to leave something for the children. Still, if we had known that a visit to the village school was part of the itinerary we could have bought some exercise books and more pens and pencils in town before we left this morning. If we travel in Asia again we definitely need to come prepared with a lot more pens and some exercise books for giving out to the children.

Cha told us that the village is home to 75 families and about 300 individuals. It was surprising how little space was taken up for this number of people! We ate our packed lunch of fried rice with chicken while we were at the village. Cha had carried our food all the way from the Elephant Village. We were offered the opportunity to eat it straight after our elephant ride, but it was only about 10.30am so it was a bit early at that stage for lunch.

However, it was a bit uncomfortable eating the food in the village because we were not sure how well-off they are for food??? There were a couple of young boys watching us eat. The guide with another small group of tourists gave one of the boys leftovers from his group. I could only eat about half of my lunch box so asked Cha if it was OK to give my leftovers to the other boy. Cha said it was OK so I handed over the rest of my lunchbox to the young boy who had been watching us eat. In hindsight it may not have been the right thing to do to take our meal with us into the village?!

From the village we hiked through rubber tree plantations and forest to Tat Sae waterfall at the confluence of Huay Sae and the Nam Khan. The waterfalls are best seen between August and November when there is an abundance of water flowing over the multilevel limestone formations that make up the falls. In March the falls are all but dry!! There is a mere trickle of water at this time of year and that amount only due to the cunning diversion of a small amount of water through a pipe!!! Still, it was wonderfully refreshing just sitting by that little bit of water after hiking for another hour and a half in the hottest part of the day!!

After the waterfall, I was very pleased to be taken back to the Elephant Village by boat. Even if it was a very small boat that seemed to ride very close to the water!!! The getting in and out is the worst bit as they wobble really alarmingly. Once you are seated you actually feel reasonably stable??? Back at the Elephant Village we purchased our souvenir mug and T-shirt to support their work with the elephants.

Back at the Lotus Villa we showered all of the dust and sweat off us before relaxing in the garden for a while with cool drinks. Bernie consumed more Beer Lao and I consumed more iced coffee. The Lao coffee doesn’t seem to give me the caffeine jitters that I normally suffer from when I drink coffee so I have been consuming lots of iced coffees - it makes a welcome change from bottled water!! I am so longing for a glass of Melbourne tap water after three weeks of very flat tasting bottled water!

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