Louse? Loud? Low? Laos!

Belatedly, I'll describe the rest of my vacation.

I said a fond farewell to my friend Katie and the street-side head massages of Siem Reap and flew up to Luang Prabang in northern Laos all by my lonesome. But you know what? It wasn't lonesome at all. As I expected, I loved traveling alone. I deliberately didn't plan this trip in much detail, so that I would have the flexibility to take advantage of whatever opportunities came along.

I knew things were going to be a bit different in Laos as soon as I got on the plane there. The flight left an hour early, because it had only 5 passengers and we were all ready to leave. I'm talking about a full-size plane with just 5 happy and slightly bewildered people on it. The perks of traveling during low season, eh?

On my first night in Luang Prabang, I arrived at sunset with no idea where I would stay beyond a recollection from my guidebook that that there were nice hostels in a wide alley behind Joma Bakery. I wandered down the alley a bit and decided to stay at the place that was cheapest and had the most people sitting at its outdoor tables. This ended up being a great decision, because the hostel had a nice social atmosphere and I met some really nice people to roam around the city with. Also, Joma Bakery serves the best iced coffee I've had since I left home AND bagels with smoked salmon. You have to be away from these things to understand how nice they are to find again. I recommend you all try a bagel and smoked salmon fast for about 6 months, for its purifying spiritual effects.

Sunset down "my" alleyway.

The next day I ran into a nice German woman from my hostel as I was finishing my smoked salmon bagel breakfast, and we decided on the spot to go visit a waterfall we'd both been planning to see. Kuang Si Falls is about an hour or so away from Luang Prabang by back-of-a-pickup-truck-style tuk tuk. Surprisingly enough, there is a sun bear preserve at the entrance to the waterfall, so that was a nice plus. Some of you may know that I have an obsession with swimming in natural bodies of water--an obsession that leads to a few questionable decisions, most notably the famous "I want to touch a tree!" incident of a few years back (the entire Soltan nuclear family groans as they read this). In this case, though, swimming at the waterfall is perfectly safe and encouraged. There are about 6 different levels of pools that you can swim in. There is even a rope swing that I was too chicken to try. (My decision to give the swing a pass was affirmed by returning to my hostel to find a man nursing a broken finger from the rope swing. He said the doctors at the clinic said they see an average of one injury a week from the rope swing. I still kind of wish I had done it, not going to lie.) Anyway, here are some pictures. The water really is as wonderfully luminescent as it looks, and so refreshingly cool. Rivals the gorges of Ithaca, I've gotta say. 

Look how happy I look! It's because I'm about to swim outdoors.

After returning from the waterfall trip, my newfound friend and I joined a group of 3 British guys from our hostel at a really lovely outdoor bar called Utopia where all the tourists go. The Brits were amusing to talk to, because they made me feel as if I were in a sitcom. They were college friends, now in their early 30s, on an epic extended trip through Asia. Each of them was from a different part of England, and they spent a lot of time teasing each other's accents for being too posh or not posh enough and just generally ribbing each other in stereotypical English fashion.

Things in Laos close early. Utopia closed around 11:30 pm, and everyone poured into the streets and onto tuk-tuks to go to the hottest (and only) night spot around: the bowling alley. Against my better judgment and grandmotherly desire for an early night, I decided to go along. The bowling alley is a little ways outside town, and rumor has it that the owner has some police connection that allows him to get around the mandated local closing time. Bowling badly until 2:30 am turned out to be a lot more fun than I thought.

My days in Luang Prabang kind of blend together in my memory now, but I consider that a good thing. It's a lovely city for walking around, since it's studded with nice cafes and baguette stands and fruit shake places and views of two rivers. Every few blocks you stumble upon a stunningly ornate (sometimes overdone, in my opinion, but no one's asking me) Buddhist temple. I realized how much I missed being in a place where you could wander around and stumble into interesting places. I mean, there are SIDEWALKS there! At one point I found myself in a really cool gallery space that's some sort of project-launching place for a new botanical garden outside Luang Prabang.  I also stumbled upon an awesome photo exhibit of photos from temple archives at one temple. It was mostly really lovely black and white photos of monks. I was in heaven (oops, mixing religious metaphors--should I say "I found nirvana"?). I also visited some moderately interesting museums, got caught in the rain and stopped for delicious and filling bowls of noodle soup, and generally bummed around in a very enjoyable way. In the evenings I usually stopped by the night market, which was eerily quiet compared to other ones I've visited. It was very touristy, but none of the vendors yelled at you at all. How nice. I ate dinner in an alleyway full of $1.20 vegetarian buffets several times. I developed a strong customer loyalty to a crispy fried dumpling stall, where I had some nice conversations with the owners about the dumpling business. 

Overall, the experience has earned Luang Prabang the dubious and wordy distinction of "only Southeast Asian city that I've visited so far that I would consider as a honeymoon destination." It's not exactly something the Luang Prabang tourism office is going to be printing on bumper stickers anytime soon, but it's something. 

Have some pictures!

Temple ceiling. 

Gallery space I mentioned.

Night market with temple. 

Rawr!

Pre-sunset view from the top of a temple at the top of some very high steps.

Look, Ma, I'm a real writer! Not really, but I did buy a notebook in Luang Prabang and write things in it.

Nong Khiaow

This is where I consider exercising willpower and breaking this off into another blog post. But then I think, "No! My readers are in it to win it! They'll read to the end no matter how long my posts are!" This may or may not be true, but I don't win any prizes for people finishing my posts, so I'll just do what I want. 

After a few blissful days in Luang Prabang, I took a slow boat up the Mekong to a smaller town called Nong Khiaow (the English spelling of the town's name is open for debate). The boat ride was 7 hours, but it didn't feel long at all. I spent most of the trip with my jaw hanging open at the scenery. I felt as if I had stepped into one of those pictures of mountains rising from the water that you might see in your favorite Chinese restaurant back home. Between that and watching fishermen fishing, waving to kids swimming, ogling water buffaloes, and reading a book, I spent an entrancing seven hours. Plus, I met a very pleasant and interesting Belgian woman who ended up becoming a good travel companion for the next leg of my trip. (Apparently, I am best at making friends with European women in their early 30s--that's somehow my best demographic.) 

As I watched the captain of our boat navigate small rapids and areas where the water was extremely shallow, I thought about all those times my history classes and history of science classes talked about specialized knowledge that comes through experience--the kind of knowledge that western scientists' "local guides" provided and got no credit for when the scientists' discoveries were published, etc. I've never seen such a good example of this kind of know-how firsthand than the captain's navigation skills on the river. Not to romanticize or orientalize this kind of thing, though; I guess we all have access to knowledge like this on some level. For instance, I know some of the unspoken codes of navigating around Philadelphia that a transplanted Malaysian would need to take time to learn, etc. Just something to think about. 

Ever seen a floating gas station before?

Nong Khiaow is a pretty sleep town. For much of the time I was there, there were long bouts of power outages--but wifi was available in many places when the power was working. Here's the view $8 a night buys you in Nong Khiaow (and an $8 room was a splurge for me on this trip):

I bet you're wondering: What do you do all day in a town like Nong Khiaow when the power is out? Well, you spend the evenings talking for hours with your Belgian travel buddy and your newfound European couch surfer friends at the newest Indian place in town while you order plate after plate of food. During the day, you take a walk to a cave, where a 15-year old Laotian boy attaches himself to you as your guide, shows you his village, and takes you swimming at a small waterfall. (Remember what I said about outdoor swimming leading to questionable decisions? But how dirty can the water be when locals come to the waterfall with their shower caddies to wash up and even brush their teeth? Ok, yes, still pretty dirty.) 

This is the cave I visited. There is still evidence there of where local people hid out to escape from US bombing. This trip made me think that it's actually really irresponsible of me not to keep myself more informed about US foreign policy, now and in the past. 

On the way home from the walk.

The waterfall doesn't look impressive, but it felt really powerful when you sat with your shoulders under the falls. Excellent massage. 

From Nong Khiaow, my new Belgian friend and I ventured one hour north via a boat packed with tourists and locals. I sat next to a tiny and wiry old woman who offered me some of her sticky rice and carried a huge bag up a treacherous, muddy hillside when she departed from the boat. I was in awe, given my own clumsy struggles with my relatively small backpack at the tender age of 23. The next village up was Muong Ngoi, where I only spent one night. Although there were tourists there, the town was not particularly touristy. It has only had electricity for a few months. 

Muong Ngoi, Main Street

I had one of the best meals I had in Laos at a small and very slow restaurant where my friend and I were the only customers. We shared fried bamboo, ginger tea, and laap, a ground up meat and herb dish served with sticky rice. While we waited for our order, the owner of the restaurant's kids played and slurped noodle soup at another table. Her 2-year-old son, clad in a T-shirt and nothing else, came over to our table to babble at us and play, so the wait didn't feel as long. 

Here's the room with a view $4 a night buys you in Muong Ngoi:

Ok, here's a thought I've had about traveling that will make my mother swallow her tongue when she reads it: It's all about calculated risk. Some of the most seemingly inadvisable decisions I made while traveling turned out to produce the best experiences. I didn't mention before how my friends and I decided to go swimming in a river at Angkor with all the little kids who sell postcards there, but we did that. And we had a splash fight. I still have no odd waterborne diseases to show for it, but I definitely paused before I went in. 

So, speaking of questionable decisions: someone told my friend and I that night fishing trips in Muong Ngoi are absolutely breathtaking, so we found a young fisherman and booked a spot in his boat for that night. It was just us, him, and his cousin, who drove the boat. I'll admit that when I walked down to the dock at 11 pm, trying not to slip and readjusting my headlamp like an inexperienced miner, it struck me that I was taking a risk. The night was pitch black, and I worried for a second about the fisherman and his cousin dumping their passengers on an island to die as they sailed off with our handbags in tow. That didn't happen, though. Instead, we sailed quietly through the twists and turns of the river, with the captain's headlamp scanning the water ahead of us and the forests besides us. Our guide told us he was looking for ocelots. The sky was full of stars, and the mountains rising on either side of us were full of more fireflies than I have ever seen before. It was, as promised, absolutely breathtaking.

Despite the fisherman's best efforts, my friend and I were terrible at fishing by throwing out a net. There's a technique to it that is completely lost on me, but I did enjoy wading around in the dark. The fisherman, as one would expect, had much better luck. He and his cousin built a nice fire, and his cousin neatly gutted the small fish with a pen knife, split a bamboo pole in half to hold the fish over the fire, and cooked them. This made me realize that I have very few real life, hands-on, survival skills. I can't even build a fire to save my life (and it probably could save my life in certain situations). The fisherman's English was great, so we all had a nice chat around the fire as we ate our fish feast. On the way back he had us sail for about ten minutes with the motor turned off so we could enjoy the scenery in peace. It was one of the loveliest experiences of my trip. 

Fish, chilies, salt, and sticky rice. What more do you need? I've been craving a repeat of this meal ever since.

Ok, I could say more about my trip, but I'd better stop. I ended up back in Luang Prabang and, after a 10 hour ride on a local overnight bus through the mountains, in Vientiane at the end of my trip. That bus trip was the only time I've come close to being car sick, and it made me realize that I can put up with nearly anything. Seriously, no one can say I'm high maintenance now. Or, ok, ok, they can, but I will never believe them, and you shouldn't either. 

I didn't really like Vientiane, so why blog about it?

I will say that going to Southeast Asia makes you realize some things are possible that you never would have thought could work:

CAN!

I have plenty more thoughts related to this trip. My friend said, for instance, that everyone seems adventurous to people back home when they backpack through Southeast Asia, but we're all basically going to the same places marked out in our Lonely Planet guides and not really having adventures or discovering anything. Truth. So don't idealize my trip. I'd better stop here before I lose my audience (or before the lone person who has stayed with me up to this point in the post falls asleep).

Books on my trip:

I FINALLY FINISHED REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST ON MY FIRST NIGHT IN CAMBODIA. It was EXCELLENT. The ending is BRILLIANT. I want to buy a used copy and keep it on my shelf for rainy Sundays and the bathtub and moody days. 

Leaves of Grass. You should read it if you ever want a self-esteem boost or miss America. Both applied to me.

The Handmaid's Tale. So good and so chilling. Thanks for the recommendation, Breanna!

Man's Search for Meaning. Read it, angsty twentysomethings. Read it.

A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams by Michael Pollan. Now I want to read everything he's ever written.

Selected Poems of Robert Frost. Eh. Too rural for me.

The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell. It's about the Pilgrims. An interesting read, though I'm not quite sure what I think about it overall.

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. Maybe this is sour grapes because I didn't really understand the book, but you'd think a genius would be better at avoiding overuse of the exclamation point. Also, we GET IT, you have the same chaired professorship at Cambridge that Newton used to have. You don't need to mention it in every chapter. 

At Home by Bill Bryson. Fun and informative. 

Is traveling sometimes just searching for a different scene to put behind your book? I think maybe I need to slow down on the reading--I'm not always taking things in properly, and I tell myself I'll reread them, but I don't. There's too much to read out there. It's like deciding on whether you'll try to see a lot of sights or take things slowly while traveling. 

Ok finally signing off, with love to all.