Advertisement
Published: September 12th 2006
Edit Blog Post
Nong Kiaw is just 96 km up the river from Luang Prabang and I had heard the boat trip was stunning, so even though it takes only 3.5 hours by bus, I decided to take the boat, which I was told would take 8 hours - but turned out to be more like 10 - including a stop at a local whisky manufacturing (re tourist) village, and then later a breakdown and subsequent stop on a river bank to repair the boat.
Luckily I was travelling with great people - Sarah and Russell and by coincidence another English girl who I met in Vang Vieng as well - as well as 2 Canadian guys and another Londoner. But although there was great company on the boat, and there weren't too many people on board, it did all get quite cramped and uncomfortable & claustrophobic by the end of the trip. It was funny, we were taking bets on what time we would arrive in Nong Kiaw, and we had to revise our predictions upwards twice... I don't think anyone expected we would arrive at our guest house in the dark, while for the whole day being in the hot sun
we had been dreaming of watching the sunset over the river with a Beer Lao! But I felt really sorry for this poor little boy on board, the guy running the boat had his wife and child with him, and this poor kid who was probably about six was so well behaved for the first 8 hours - I couldn't believe how he found ways to amuse himself - but after 8 hours he had obviously had enough, he cracked and was kicking and screaming - I think at that point we had all had enough as well.
So by the time I arrived in Nong Kiaw I wasn't in the mood for doing too much at all. It always seems the day after a long journey you have no energy at all - probably because you get dehydrated as you stop drinking - as you're desperately trying to avoid needing to go to the toilet - as you won't be able to find one anywhere! But the scenery in Nong Kiaw was so stunning I was just happy to sit around and do not much at all. It was incredibly hot weather too - so I pretty much
just sat in the shade for two days reading - apart from a small trip to a local cave and a swim across the river.
Nong Kiaw is a really rural town, and while there are quite a few guest houses, there aren't all that many tourists - the place where we ended up staying didn't have any guests when we arrived, nor any after we left - I felt really sorry for the owners. So the people in the town were pretty surprised to see a foreigner swimming across the river! It was only a couple of hundred metres to swim to the other side, but the current meant that I ended up more than a couple of hundred metres downstream. I would have liked to have swam back as well - but the current made that impossible. Luckily I had a friend meet me on the other side with a sarong and shoes so I could walk through the town and across the bridge back to the other side without offending the locals. It was so funny getting out of the river on the other side - all of the locals around gave me some very strange
looks! But I'm glad I did it as there really wasn't much else that I did in Nong Kiaw.
It was a really beautiful town and it was great to see a place that wasn't entirely dependent on tourists. Every evening at 5 o'clock the people bathe in the river, the women wearing their sarongs, and there were probably as many water buffaloes, chickens and dogs in the streets as there were people. I was really tempted to go further north in Laos - but I also really want to go to the south, so although I am going to extend my month long visa for Laos - I decided to leave the North for another trip!
So I went back to Luang Prabang (this time by bus), and the plan is to head back to Vientiane and then on to Savannakhet immediately, which is another town on the Mekong with a lot of old French architecture. Since there is a border crossing to Thailand across the Mekong at Savannakhet I might head to Thailand for a day to renew my visa for Laos.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.067s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 13; qc: 27; dbt: 0.0367s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb