No duck in Muang Ngoi!

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Imagine if you will, a village with no tarmacked roads, in fact, no vehicular land transport and accessible only by boat on therusset-opaque waters of the Nam Ou river. A village where the generators that provide electricity hum into life just after sunset for a mere 4 hours of power. No wifi. No hot water. No fridges. Chickens, dogs and barefooted children wander the lanes between flimsy looking bamboo constructed homes. Women bathe in the cappuccino coloured waters of the river washing themselves, their clothes and huge baskets of sticky rice. Men chop bamboo and carry balanced on the shoulders bunches of freshly machete cut morning glory.

Imagine that cockerels are the morning alarm clocks and the steady beat of themonks’ drums from the village wat echo every morning and evening – the sounds reverberating off the incisor shaped mountains surrounding and sheltering the settlement. Peaks rising into sky, reminiscent of the great Karakoram range in Pakistan or the immense Cordillera Blanca in South America but with steep escarpments covered in dense lush forestrather than scree and snow. At dawn, mist veils their tips, slowly dissipating as the sun rises, burning off the moisture in the air to leave a cloudless blue sky.
Imagine, if you will, a bamboo built cabin on stilts, a hammock on its veranda with views out over a huge arc in the river carving its way through the mountains south to Luang Prabang. The air smells of smoke as farmers from neighbouring hamlets gather rice stalks from the paddy fields for burning in the valleys. The silence is occasionally cut by the growl of a small longboat as fishermen weave their way upstream bringing a day’s catch home. In the distance the croak of frogs bounces off the waters and fills the dusky air.

This is Muang Ngoi. Sandy and I have been here for 5 days now and it is one of my favourite places I have been to on this trip. Simplicity. Peace. But only now. Once it was a regional centre of the country but in the second Indochina war in the late 60’s, it was practically obliterated by US bombs. Residents took refuge in the many caves hidden in the karst cliffs. It’s not just Muang Ngoi that suffered from the fighting 4 decades ago. Laos as a country was always seen asa ‘buffer state’ between Thailand and Vietnam and in the Cold War it became the most bombed country in history with the capitalists (the US) and the communists (Vietnam) delivering round after round of artillery on its lands. According to the stats, the US dropped over 2 million tons of bombs on nearly 600,000 sorties. The cost of this spectacular show of decimation? $7.2 billion or $2 million a day for 9 years. Even now, the total number dead is unknown but 1/3 of the Laos population of 2.1 million became internal refugees.

Without the nominal amount of ‘falang’ who arrive each day from Nong Khiaw (the larger town downstream by 1 hour) bent double under the weight of their rucksacks looking for guesthouses, banana pancakes and Beer Lao, life for the villagers would still be pretty harsh. I may romanticise the rurality but Muang Ngoi has seen hard times.

Sandy and I arrived by boat after a couple of days travelling from Luang Prabang. The journey took us first on roads that rivalled the worst in Bolivia(roads where you feel like you have been raped up the arse for 10 hours at a time). Sitting in the back of a packed minivan we yelped and giggled in equal turns as we bounced along the potholed way mirroring the course of the Nam Ou. We spent a night in Nong Khiaw, a sleepy town comprising of 2 dusty streets, a smattering of guesthouses and a solid communist esq bridge built in the early 70’s traversing the river that slices through the town.

To add to my culinary adventures (grasshopper, cicada and silkworm in Chiang Mai), I tried crispy wildboar…. Lao style! Crispy was a slightly misleading adjective to describe these lumps of gristly meat that had been bbqued until every drop of moisture had evaporated from it rendering it flavoursome but utterly inedible. This was some seriously old wild boar…geriatric wild boar would have been a more appropriate description. I reckon it had been roaming the forests for decades before it felt the unlucky blow of a hunter. It was so unyielding in texture, I almost developed lock-jaw from the necessary mastication needed to digest it and eventually gave in, allowing the boar a nominal victory. Alongside the aged meat, I tried Mekong River weed – an interesting taste sensation….reminiscent of the goldfish food Tetra-Fin (sick child that I was, I used to scoop this out the pot with my fingers!) studded with blackened sesame seeds. Palatable in small amounts, this isn’t something I would necessarily order again.

Lao cooking is a few gastronomic notches down from Thai. I am not yet ready to give in to the ubiquitous banana pancakes that appear on every ‘falang’ menu but I am slightly over the excessive seasoning of coriander and chilli to hide god knows what. The portions of sticky rice (a staple foodstuff for the locals) are mountainous. Unlike the meagre portions served in London restaurants where you open the bamboo basket with anticipation to see a mere palmful’s worth of the delightfully glutinous carb, here the bamboo basket lids won’t even sit tight with the upwardsthrusting of the portion. I love the stuff, although here in Muang Ngoi, it tastes a little ‘rivery’.

Touchwood though, neither Sandy nor I have suffered the squirts in too dramatic a fashion. I had a moment back in Chiang Mai where after a particular spicy street-food curry I felt the distant rumblings and gurglings of my tummy acknowledging that perhaps I had put something into it that was gonna give me pain. Serious pain the next day. I won’t go into the details but suffice to say, getting back to the guesthouse in time was not an option and I ducked into some bushes behind a row of parked cars much to Sandy’s amusement. You cannot fight your bowels!

Spending 24 hrs together every day has meant our friendship has reached levels of intimacy that one normally tries to refrain from showing to one’s friends. Morning ablutions from both of us, tend to resonate around the room, such is the rickety nature of our cabin. As my dear friend Shabbs put it after we had a night on some particularly piquant food in London, Br ‘ass’ band practice starts the day! Ok , enough of the toilet humour, the fixations with one’s bowels….the point being was that we are both well and healthy and river washed/cooked sticky rice has caused no problems at all. Phew.

Days here in Muang Ngoi have varied from a leisurely rise (ignoring the adamant cockerels), breakfast on our river terrace followed by siesta in the hammock followed by lunch in the village followed by more siesta, reading or episodes of Dexter (I’m coming to the end of Season 4 already eeek!) followed by 2 for 1 mohitos in the lovely Riverside Restaurant with its low level tablesandhand embroidered cushions, dinner and then more mohitos or Beer Lao until the generators switch off and the entire village is plunged into an apocalyptic darkness. Last night was such a night although Sandy had retired early at 830 ish leaving me and a rather alluring Frenchman (sadly the girlfriend is back at home :-() called Jean-Benoit chattering about” life and the meaning of” under a crescent moon and a sky freckled with stars. Stumbling back along the slippery muddy tract of a path up to the cabin with only my head torch lighting the way, I made it back across both little bamboo bridges to the safety of my mosquito net.

It has not all been chillax time here. Yesterday, I was up at 5am to catch the dawn and whilst drinking thick bitter Laos coffee made palatable with condensed milk, I watched the morning procession of the barefoot saffron-robed monks as they made their way down the one street in the village to receive alms from the villagers. It’s a very peaceful daily event where the monks demonstrate their vows of poverty and humilitywhilst the villagers gain spiritual merit by the respectful gesture of offering sustenance. I hope my photos capture this though I felt slightly uncomfortable bearing my camera at this centuries old tradition and so tactfully stood back using the mega zoom.

Having arranged to meet Jean-Benoit for a hike to some local caves, we realised we had chosen the wrong path and after an arduous climb up the mountain – with no JB in sight we concluded we had come to the wrong ones. We stupidly forgot to bring our torches, so venturing into the caves alone was not the most sensible option. Unfortunately, we didn’t manage to catch up with him (the man is cycling from Vientiane to Bangkok – some 1000 kms - so we had no freakin chance!) and with Sandy suffering leg fatigue from our previous days boat-ride and hike to a waterfall, she and I parted company and I continued onwards alone to local villages – even more remote than Muang Ngoi - through acres of paddy fields surrounded by the towering massifs of the mountains.

As a traveller, one is always striving to get “off the beaten track”, yet the very act of doing that makes the track somewhat beaten. Luang Prabang or Pak Beng are both examples of that. 10 years ago, a handful of guesthouses and certainly no banana pancake s. Now it is a different story in these places. However, the villages of Ban Na and Huay Bo that I reached were really “off the beaten track”. I hiked through forest, forded rivers clutching my boots in one hand and followed buffalo before stopping to rehydrate with fresh lemongrass tea and play with the bemused children as to the presence of a white ‘falang’ in their home. Sometimes I have day dreams about just renouncing London life altogether and actually stopping for a while in one of these “off the beaten track “ places, teaching English. Perhaps I will one day…..shame the ovaries are drying up as the years progress. Or perhaps I could kidnap one of the gorgeous kids and do an Angelina bringing home a brood to Acacia Road. Hmm…. Might need more than Brad Pitt for that!

It was a magnificent day under a scorching sun…just me and the land of Laos…the only sounds the whoosh of scythes as villagers harvested rice from the paddy fields and their distant chatter carried on the breeze. Bliss.

Today Sandy and I departed this place that time hasn’t forgotten but has a long way to go before its consumed in a sea of flat-screened televisions and products from Apple. Sharing a longboat with a couple of other travellers we continued Northwards up the meandering Nam Ou for 6 hrsto Muang Kha where we plan to take a 5am bus to the Vietnamese/Lao border – a journey that apparently takes 10 hours although we are only covering 100kms or so. I fear some major arse raping!

As for the title of this blog, it has been a running gag with us and JB that we wanted to eat duck all the time we were in Muang Ngoi but although flocks of them pootled round the village, duck was off the menu in every eatery. We were on the verge of capturing one and demanding its slaughter (or even just one leg for us to share!). Sadly, our avian desires went unfulfilled but as we were leaving this morning, a woman bearing 2 bamboo baskets of ducks strung across her shouldersand dangling from a length of sugarcane appeared on the main street …..JB sailed off downstream to Nong Khiaw and Sandy and I upstream to Muang Kha with the sound of quacking just taunting us. Hey ho. C’est la vie! Bon appetit….

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