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Published: July 21st 2006
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Today we just got back from 2 nights in the village of Nong Khiew that was a 6 (really 8) hour boat ride up the Mekong River from Leung Prabang, Laos. The boat ride was gorgeous with huge limestone cliffs on each side, and random sightings of fishermen in rice hats with their nets or crowds of little kids waving at us. It rained off and on and there was tons of debris (like whole trees) floating in the river which made it pretty trecherous for our driver. A couple of times the boat pulled over and we waited, with no explanation offered of course, until the guys in charge who looked like teenagers came back on and we set off again.
In Nong Khiew, we booked a nice cabana on the bank of the Mekong with a great view. At 7:30am the next morning we were jolted awake by the sound of a series of explosions. I went outside but couldn't see anything. I thought maybe there were fishing with dynamite like in parts of Ecuador. We asked the girl at our hostel and she said "Oh, yes I hear them every morning just over there but I have
Offerings to the temple at the top
Good luck comes to setting the birds free at the top no idea what they are." We asked someone else later and got the same response. I decided it was either something illegal or a government cover-up. Later we met a local woman who had her television on to news in Mandarin so Wendy spoke to her and was told that the blasts were for exploding rocks to build a road. Not as exciting...
Earlier that day we walked down the main road to go to a cave outside of town, and before we set down the path we met an older Dutch couple. The man had blood oozing out of his ankles in several places and I'd thought that he'd been scraped up in the cave. Not so. Apparently, there were tons of leeches in the trees and grass on the way to the cave. The wife was unscathed because they 15-year-old boy/guide had quickly picked them off her but not off the husband. We decided the cave wasn't for us and settled for looking at his pictures on the digital camera instead. I could see the opening to the 2 caves from the road, and the couple filled us in on the history. During the late 1960s when
Sleeping Buddha
hilltop temple in Luang Prabang the U.S. was blanketing Laos with bombs to flush out the Vietnamese out of Laos, the caves had functioned as a hospital and as a school for the Lao people. There are still a lot of unexploded bombs and landmines throughout Laos from that time period, but if you stay on the beaten path it's not a problem.
The next day, we went for a walk to the outskirts of town and came upon a sign that said "Lao government/United States government cooperation project; Opium free" with the 2 flags of the countries. There was also a sign posted outside the relatively fancy compound stating that visitors cannot enter without authorization. The gate was open and we could see 4 well-dressed Lao people with tennis shoes (the first non-flip flop wearers we'd seen in Laos) played badminton on a nice court surrounded by cottages. We were hesitating when a local soccer player we'd seen earlier told us we should go in and talk to them since he didn't know what the place was for. We walked in and I asked the group what the compound was for and one man gave me a gruff "no" in response so we
Buddha cave
hilltop temple in Luang Prabang turned around and left since we clearly weren't going to get an answer. We decided to go play with the kittens we'd seen earlier instead.
Nong Khiew was by far the least touristy of the places we have visited, since it was a small town and there were probably only about 10 or so tourists at any given time. The people and especially the kids were super friendly to us and didn't seem terminally depressed like in Luang Prabang. It has been almost non-stop raining there.
Luang Prabang is really beautiful since the brown Mekong River makes a kind of peninsula around it and there are tons of Buddhist monks walking around in their bright orange robes. Prices for food, lodging and transportation is actually often more expensive than Thailand even though Laos is poorer. It looks like the difference is that the Communist government here controls everything and sets the tourist prices. Every guest house has a long list of rules posted inside the room with everything from the midnight curfew to meeting any guests outside in the entry way but I've seen most of the rules ignored by all. Tomorrow we fly down to Ventianne, the
capital of Laos and then on to Siem Reip, Cambodia to see Angkor Wat.
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