The one where the elephant sneezed (but didn't fall on her knees, phew)

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After a few days of hanging about in Luang Prabang and staying in our $3 per night guesthouse - which was really fine and only smelt a little of dog - we decided to check out the local area so we booked a 3 day trekking/activity tour with a company called Tiger Tours. Whilst there are apparently tigers in Laos we weren't expecting to come across any of these, no instead we were off to walk, cycle, kayak and ride elephants.

We started the trip with a leisurely breakfast, you just can’t trek on an empty tummy. The laos approach to breakfast consists either or noodle soup or a begetter. The soup is the best option, although it generally tastes a little bland to begin with you spice it up (literally) with chilies, fish sauce, fish paste, lime juice and soy sauce before slurping it down, trying to make as little noise and mess as possible. The accompaniment of choice is coffee - well a layer of thick coffee, a layer of sugar, a layer of condensed milk, liz doesn’t usually have sugar in coffee but hey when in Rome, of course Tom stays away as he is afraid that coffee might be addictive so sticks to yucky green tea.

After breaky we met our tour guide Phuey and our tour buddies Sammy and Claire. Sammy is a teacher from Edinburgh living in London and Claire works for a well known celebrity gossip magazine, in fact she is one of the people in charge of those 'oooo what is she wearing?!' fashion spreads that we all love to hate, which is pretty cool. We were glad that it was such a small group of people and we all got on really well from the beginning which was great.

One of the best things about the trip that we chose was that instead of being bussed about between the different activities we did almost the whole thing under our own steam so we set off from the middle of town on bicycles into the countryside.

The bikes were in good nick and the hills were a breeze with all those gears despite the hot weather. In fact not to tempt fate but everyday in Laos has been hot and sunny AND since we arrived a week ago it hasn't rained.. this is very unusual. After about three hours we had a pit stop of fried rice before heading across the Nam Khan river in a very small boat painted like a tiger. The boat dropped us off further down the river and we set off to walk to the village where we were to stay for the night.

The village was a Lau Lum village, one of the three main ethnic groups in Lao. Despite there being 2-8 vistors a night passing through the village it seemed to be a real working place with tourism only a small part of their income - unlike some of the ‘hill tribe’ village treks advertised in Thailand which have apparently done real harm to traditional livelihoods in some areas. We were all a little embarrassed to learn that whilst the electricity was provided to the village by generators they turned these off when the trekkers arrive in case they find it too noisy. Of course we all felt very mean about this and tried to insist that they turned them back on but had to accept it as an act of generosity on their part. The village was full of comedy farm noises and the place was crammed full of every kind of animal - buffalos, goats, chicken, ducks, geese, a pony, cats, dogs - and there were lots of kids playing terribly inventive games with flip flops or footballs stuffed with straw.

We were staying in the house of the chief of the village and his family which was a nice open plan kind of affair with small bits sectioned off with mosquito nets. Before dinner (but after a quick wash in the village watering hole) we walked about the village and practised our Laos ("sabqai-dii") with the little children. Sammy had brought some books from the town to give to the children so we spent some time watching them read out loud (actually they could have just been getting very excited about the pictures, we couldn't understand the stories but one of them had a picture of a goat laying an egg and another one had the English translation "one day you are walking down the road and a giant shoe comes along and offers you a cigarette” which was a little bit bizarre. The books are produced as part of a scheme called Big Brother Mouse which is run out of Luang Prabang for people to buy books for children and distribute them to schools throughout the rest of Laos where books are very scarce.

After dinner and a couple of Beer Laos we went to sleep and woke up the next morning to a thick fogg around the village, hiding from view the imposing mountains that surround the place. After breakfast we walked to the village school and gave the rest of the books to the school teacher. The second day we walked a lot further through rice fields and across some of the smaller hillsides. Much of the land we walked across was home to the Hmong people who originated in Tibet and southern China and make up another significant part of the Laos population. According to Phuey the three main peoples are often moved around by the government and land redistributed as some groups are encouraged to move into towns or amalgamate villages to provide better access to village education, whilst it doesn’t seem like the villagers have much choice in the matter most of the people we stopped and talked to along the way were seemed quite happy with the new arrangements. There are also quite strict rules about crop rotation and the kinds of crops that are produced in order to prevent previous slash and burn techniques. We stopped for lunch and a little snooze around mid day in a bamboo shelter used by the farmers to hide from the sun. After about 5 hours of walking we stopped for a swim in the freezing cold river to cool off before arriving at our second village stay.

The second evening a the more affluent Khu hill tribe Pheuy entertained us a game of ‘spin-the-chicken-head’. The idea is to save the chicken head of the bird that we had for dinner and then shake the head around inside two stacked up plates. When the top plate is removed the person to whom the beak is facing takes a turn to drink a large shot of lao-lao, sweet local rice wine. Much fun was had by all, until the next morning when we had to wake up at 7.00 and continue our trek…

The walk to the Thad Se Waterfall was uneventful, especially with some sore heads in the group but we were rewarded with the most stunning array of waterfalls and deep natural swimming pools. Things got even better after lunch when we went to the Elephant Park and met two of the seven elephant who have been rehoused after the decline in the logging industry meant that they were being neglected by their owners. That’s not to say that they don’t still have to do some work, no indeed, one was kind enough to take us on a stroll through the jungle. Perched on a little wooden box ontop of such a huge animal is quite wonderful and even better was Tom had a go at ‘steering’ which involves climbing onto the elephants (incredibly strong) neck and tucking your toes under its ears. The elephants all seemed happy and well looked after, there were no chains or sticks involved on the walk and when her ‘mahout’ decided to play a little trick on us and jump off and hide in the bushes she didn’t bat an eyelid (although this could have been Tom’s superior driving skills?). Instead she was quite content to trot along through the woods, stopping only occasionally to blow her nose, all over us. This is perhaps why the mahout ran away, it is possible that he knew she had the sniffles and to be honest elephant snot is best avoided. We both keep expecting to come down with some mutant strain of the cold virus transferred from elephants to humans but nothings as yet. Luckily just before we got back to the camp our elephant had a little drink in the river, and of course in true elephant style blew lots of water out of her trunk and gave us all a little shower. An amazing experience which we followed up with a 18 km kayak back into Luang Prebang to round off our adventure.

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Photos

Spin the chicken head
and note that we are drinking the lao-lao out of an EGG cup..

The boys
Tom Phey and Sammy the night after the trek catching up on some premiership football

At the waterfalls
Lao modersty dictates keeping clothes on whilst swimming, many of the people a the falls were wearing jeans, jumpers and shoes.

Comments

[caz]

I think that was my favourite blog so far, dont know why just was had me giggling away in my new office, thanks for that! xx