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Published: February 11th 2012
We left the beautiful city of Luang Prabang on Wednesday, February 8
th and caught a 9AM Lao-style slow boat to a village up north called Nong Khiaw. We were very lucky as there were ten tickets sold for the boat so the first 8 people were crammed into one boat. We had ticket number 9 and 10 and had another boat all to ourselves!
The trip to Nong Khiaw itself should be a staple of anybody’s visit to Lao. Even though it takes a long time – a bit more than 7 hours – the scenery is absolutely breathtaking. The trip starts on the Mekong, with hills and pastures on either side. The scenery changed the more north we went – the mountains became higher, are more green and there also a few scattered small villages with fisherman tending to their boats and kids playing in the river. Local people often waved to us and screamed Sabadieeee!! We always screamed back Sabadiee, or Sabadiee Bo (which means ‘how are you’). Once we got to around 2 hours south of Nong Khiaw, the scenery became even more amazing.
However, if we were to do this trip again, we would most
likely reverse it – i.e., take a car to Nong Khiaw (3-4hs) and take the boat back, as the current goes north to south and our trip upriver was significantly slowed down by this. Not to mention there were a few moments when water splashed all over us (luckily our iPad and Kindle both survived).
We arrived in Nong Khiaw around 4:15 PM and made our way over to the Riverside hotel. The village itself has one dirt road, large bridge connecting the east and west sides of the village and maybe a total of 6 restaurants and two tour outfitters. Riverside lodge was really nice. We were living in a beautiful bungalow with a deck on the side of the mountain overlooking the river, the bridge, other side of town and the sunset.
We did encounter one disappointment in Nong Khiaw. Our plan was to take a day tour to the 100 waterfalls, which was only run by one of the outfitters. Unfortunately they were closed on both the day we arrived and the next day. Suzi tried her best to book over the phone but that didn’t work as well. In the end, we were better
for not going as we met a very nice couple from Seattle (more below) and did another amazing tour the next day.
On our first night, while playing our current favorite card game Rummy 500, a couple came up to us and asked about my Seattle Mariners baseball cap. It turns out they were from Seattle as well. We made friends and after our failed attempt for the 100 waterfalls tour we ended up going on a tour of a cave and two villages (the only way to get to them was by boat) the next day. Thank you Ron and Nancy for sharing the Nong Khiaw experience with us – we had a blast!
The cave and village tour was a full-day filled with fun. We took a boat north along the river with very nice seats (i.e., airline style not wooden stools with cushion, which we had the day before coming from Luang Prabang). After an hour of beautiful landscape (including water buffalo bathing in the river) we arrived at the first village. We took a hike to a cave, explored it with our amazing guide Tong and had a very delicious local lunch (the group
had sticky rice with beef and chicken but I opted for noodles with cabbage).
Our guide Tong told us his story during lunch. He is from a very small village from the north of Lao (35 families, 200 people) with no electricity. He is one of 9 children and the only one that speaks English and was able to leave the village for more schooling. In Lao the education system has to overcome a major obstacle – distances in a lot of the country’s remote areas and lack of funds for families to be able to house the children far away from home (and lose their help at home). The main reason for this is that only the first two to three years of primary school education are in the local village (and sometimes even a few villages over). After that, the kids have to go to a larger village with another 3-4 years of schooling. In our guide’s case this required him to walk four hours to school and back each day!!!! He said he sometimes was able to stay with friends if he was too tired to walk back home. If he wanted to finish primary school
and go to secondary school, the closest one for him was in Luang Prabang, which was a major challenge for his family financially but he ended up being able to do this (which is where he started learning a bit of English). Amazing story that made us grateful for the opportunities we had growing up.
On our way back from the cave I ended up talking to him for a while and told him that we brought two sets of books – 100 pack and a 10 pack – both from Big Brother Mouse we mentioned in our prior post. We decided that we would leave the 10 books at the other village that were visiting on our tour and he suggested that if we really want to make a difference we should not leave the other 100 at Nong Khiaw but try to get one of the more remote villages in the jungle/mountains.
The next village was basically around 20 houses with a small dirt road in between. We found the village elder (he couldn’t be older than 40) and shared the children’s books with him in front of the local library. He was very thankful and
we went to explore the village and purchase some local handicraft – one of the only sources of income in the village. On our way back we already saw people reading the books we brought.
We decided to organize a full day car with our guide as he said we will certainly require a truck or a jeep to get to the remote village he had in mind for us to visit. We decided to book the car for the whole day and have it take us back to Luang Prabang – it would give us flexibility to leave the village when we were ready (and not worry about only two minivans going back to Luang Prabang that day) and also leave some extra money in the local economy.
The ride to the village itself was quite an adventure, we started around 8AM and got there by 9:15AM or so. The dirt road was very hilly, with many stones and holes – our driver grimaced quite a few times when he scratched his transmission. About 25 minutes outside of the village we encountered a river that was too high for the truck to overcome; we used the bamboo
bridge and finished the last leg to the village on foot.
The village itself was positioned on a plain in the middle of high mountains, quite a stunning view. We took a while to find the village elder (with tremendous help from the driver), then took a few minutes to explain why we are there (Big Brother Bear book package included English/Lao directions that we used to communicate that we wanted to go to the school and read a story before we hand out books).
The school was a mid-sized bamboo hut with dirt floor, wooden benches, two chalk boards and filled with local kids. Our guide from the day before told us that this was the center village that had kids coming from even more remote points. There were around 50 kids in the school with a teacher who was teaching the kids how to count at the moment when we arrived. There was a huge uproar when we entered.
We explained that we would like the teacher to read the book that we found out was a story about a famous Lao prankster (i.e., local Dennis the Menace) and the kids loved it (even our
driver and the village elder were laughing out loud). It was also quite funny to see the teacher and the village elder play out a scene from the book in front of the kids.
After story-time was over we took out all of the other 99 books from our bag and that really stirred up the excitement amongst the kids. We laid out the books in an organized fashion (math books, adventure books, Lao traditional books, etc.) and invited kids to take one book each. It was an unforgettable moment to see them so happy to pick one little book each. We also gave the teacher more books for his use during later classes as well as to distribute amongst kids who weren’t in school.
We started getting ready to go but they sat us down and sung two songs to us, both with the teacher playing the drum and one of them with a few girls dancing. It was a really warm good bye and after that we resumed our hike back to the car and embarked on our 4h drive back to Luang Prabang.
We are currently getting ready to land in Siem Reap, Cambodia,
where we will spend the next hour days exploring Angkor Wat and the city itself. Lao exceeded our expectations – an extremely friendly country with beautiful scenery!
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Mom
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Wow!
How beautiful - the country, the people & you two. It's inspiring!