Exploring the north

Laos – beautiful, green, rugged, and so remote that Internet is hard to come by. I’m trying to write every day so I can keep up with our travels, but finding an Internet café may happen every few days or so and we can forget about wifi until we reach Luang Prabang, our final destination.

After the Gibbon’s experience, Tim and I spent several days in Luang Nam Tha, a small town in northwestern Laos that is just beginning to embrace eco-tourism through hill tribe treks, mountain biking, kayaking, and other activities. We rented bikes and explored the surrounding dirt roads and paths that wound through tiny villages of stilted wooden huts and half-naked brown children playing tag. It’s just the beginning of the rice harvest, so workers with broad cone-shaped hats were out in the fields cutting the golden stalks of rice and piling them in large heaps.

We visited several golden stupas sitting atop high hills with amazing views looking out over the green valley floor. For lunch we stopped at the Boatlanding eco-resort located next to a river a few kilometers outside of town. Settling down at one of the large wooden tables, we spent the hot and humid midafternoon sipping lemon-mint slushies and cold beer and flipping through National Geographic magazines.

Back on our bikes we slowly peddled down a stone-embedded dirt road, past more villages and rice fields until we met the main road that would take us back around to Luang Nam Tha. After frequent stops for photo ops and a brief encounter with a long-distance Thai cyclist that resulted in a photo of Tim and I, one of Tim and Him and one of Him and I, we made a final detour to a nearby waterfall. It wasn’t very impressive, but most of traveling is about the voyage, not what lies at the end.

Tired from a full day of cycling and sun, we returned to our guesthouse for a shower and some down time before dinner (which was a great meal at an Indian restaurant) and then retired early for a good night’s sleep.

We left Luang Nam Tha around 11 the next day for Muang Sing, a 2-hour bus ride north almost to the Chinese border. We were contemplating whether to do a hill tribe trek, but the hotel we stayed at was 5 minutes away from an Akha village and as we passed through, both Tim and I felt like we were just spectators and not necessarily welcomed. We opted not to do a trek and instead returned to Luang Nam Tha the next day. From there we will travel down to Udomxai and then north the Phongsali – where very few tourists go.

Gibbon Experience Adventures

Day 1

I’m sitting 200 feet off the ground in a circular treehouse looking out over the tops of bamboo, eucalyptus, and banana trees. I feel clean and refreshed, rejuvenated by the icy rain water from the shower hose in what I must say is the ultimate, most beautiful outdoor shower that I have ever been in. The floor is a wooden grate through which the lush canopy can be seen and the view from the open air window looks our over the valleys and ridges of the Bokeo Reserve.

Tim and I are two out of seven Gibbon Experience trekkers who endured the long drive from the Laos border town of Houay Xai in the back of a crowded pick-up truck. We managed to fit 16 people in the back, in the cab, on the roof, and on the fender. After about an hour on the winding paved road, we turned left onto a deeply rutted and obscenely muddy track. After crossing a fairly deep river, we slipped and slid, climbed and descended until we finally arrived at the rural Laos village where our Gibbon Experience will commence. The operation was started by outsiders but is now almost fully in the hands of the local people. It is an exhilarating blend of jungle trekking, zip-lining over deep ravines, and relaxing in treehouse bungalows. The seven of us (2 Israelis friends, 2 Aussie girls, 1 British travel writer and Tim and I) plus our rather blasé guides donned our packs, pulled up our socks (in defense of leeches) and headed into the wild jungle. The path was steep and muddy and we were soon soaked through with sweat, but the anticipation of the ziplines propelled us forward. After huffing and puffing for about an hour, we arrived at the guides’ base camp and rested until we were relatively dry and breathing normally. From there we stepped into our harnesses and cinched them tight like diapers then hiked another ten minutes (uphill) to the first of many ziplines. The guides quickly showed us how to attach our carabeaners to the cable and then we were off, soaring high about the treetops and looking out over a cast expanse of unexplored wildness – somewhere in that tangle, tigers prowled, gibbons preformed acrobatics, and flying squirrels leapt from branch to branch. It was incredible.

I’ve been zip-lining in the Monteverde Cloud Forest of Costa Rica and I remember it to be an adrenaline rush, but it doesn’t come close to the Gibbon Experience. Treehouses, 500 meter cables, tiger scat, blood sucking leeches, I was thrilled. We hiked and zip-lined for a good three hours – six cables in all and a lot of carved mud steps held in place by bamboo poles, leading us steadily upwards or steeply down.

Our final destination was the two-story thatched-roof treehouse where I now sit listening to the ringing of cicadas and watching the sun set behind the jagged ridges. A Laos boy comes zooming in like a monkey with a simple dinner of sticky rice, vegetables and meat and we all sit around the bamboo table, eating by candlelight and sharing travel stories. Our beds are thin mattresses on the floor with a white cotton mosquito net overhead to protect us from biting insects. Tired from the days’ excitement, we blow out the candles early and fall asleep listening to the crickets and thinking about tomorrow’s adventures of zip-lining through Neverland.

Day 2

We woke to a view of mist-shrouded valleys and the sun’s weak rays illuminating the forests’ ridges. Breakfast was zipped in and after eating (sticky rice again) we pulled on our harnesses and wet socks and muddy shoes and sailed out of the treehouse. We did about an hour of zipping before embarking on a two-hour hike to a waterfall. We may have arrived earlier, but frequent stops were needed to pull off sneaky leeches. After a refreshing swim in the cold pool beneath the cascading waterfall, we ate lunch (sticky rice) and tended to our bleeding wounds. Leeched secrete a substance that stops blood from coagulating, so we all had mini waterfalls of blood running down our ankles and feet.

The guides led us through a maze of forest paths and ziplines to our new treehouse where we would be spending our final night. It was still early, but we all needed a rest, so we snacked on roasted ful beans and fruit and took turns studying the forest with binoculars for any signs of life. We never did see any gibbons, but we got a quick glimpse of a red squirrel with a big bushy black tail and a black and white weasel looking mammal. Before the sun set, we did a circuit of four of zips around the treehouse without our guides. I felt completely safe without their supervision, but if we had been in the States, they would have been shut down years ago.

Day 3 – our final day

Our final morning in the Bokeo Reserve was spent zipping and hiking back to the waterfall for a late breakfast, then a nice flat and relatively dry hike through bamboo forest and rice paddies back out to the village. We soaked our feet in the river for an hour and a half and watched naked children splash around and dig holes in the dirt. When the jeeps filled with the next round of Gibbon Experience trekkers arrived, we did a quick switch around and waved them on their way, looking sympathetically at their sandaled and sockless feet. Back at the main road Tim and I said goodbye to our friends and settled down to wait for a van or truck to take us to our next destination, Luang Nam Tha.

We ended up hitching a ride on a Japanese press tour van filming the International Mountain Bike Tour of the Mekong, a week-long ride from Thailand to Laos. Tim and our escorts spoke in Japanese, so I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on, but the van was nice and the scenery beautiful. In Luang Nam Tha we checked into a nice guesthouse and ate some Indian food. Exhausted from three days in the jungle, we were both asleep before 8:30.

Pai by Moto, Chiang Khong by bus

We heard the rain hitting our tin roof throughout the night, but we weren’t prepared for what we saw in the morning. Our nice little private guesthouse on the other side of the river from Pai had been a sweet refuge from the backpacker inns and bars lining the streets of the town. After a night of hard rains, however, the calm river had become a rapid current of boiling brown water and, after further investigation, had unabashedly destroyed the two bamboo bridges that connected us from them. As usual, I awoke before Tim and, after discovering our predicament, followed a long and very muddy trail that wound through thatched huts and rice paddies and eventually met up with the main road into Pai.

Knowing that we had an early bus to catch the next morning, I found another guesthouse in town. After coffee and some minor confusion as to the whereabouts of each other, Tim and I packed our bags and said goodbye to Sak and the puppy and made the trek up and over the flooded river via concrete bridge.

In the afternoon I convinced Tim to put away his laptop and drive me around on a motorbike. Neither of us had any driving experience, but that didn’t stop us. We buckled our helmets (yes, Dad we did wear helmets) and swung our legs over the seat of our white Honda scooter and headed out to explore the hills and valleys surrounding Pai. We had no real direction and no reliable map, but we found ourselves climbing a steep and narrow road to a waterfall. Tim did an excellent job navigating around chickens, children and oncoming headlights. The waterfall was beautiful, but there were too many people and we were eager to explore more on our bike. So, we left the hippies to their jewelry making and the tourists to their picture taking and took to the road once more.

I tried my best to navigate by our map, but all we could really trust was our knowing that up was away from town and down was back to Pai. We passed small villages comprised of stilted houses, gilded temples protected by dragons, drunk men singing in the street, and always rice fields glowing green in the filtered light. The sky above Pai (and maybe all of northwestern Thailand) is in constant battle between sun and clouds, creating intense intervals of golden light streaming down in rays and dark interludes of rain-laden clouds. As the sun slowly sank into the mountains, we concluded our tour by petting elephants at Thom’s Elephant Camp. They had just come back from giving rides to tourists and were now being chained up for the night. I’ve heard mixed things about elephant riding in Thailand and I feel that it’s not a guiltless tourist activity, so I pacified myself by stroking their leathery trunks and taking pictures of them with chains around their necks.

We woke up early this morning to meet our bus that would take us back down to Chiang Mai (via twisty-turny mountain road) and then northward to Chiang Khong, a border town between Thailand and Laos and famous for the commencement of the touristy slow boat down the Mekong to Luang Prabong.  The trip took about nine hours from point A to point B, but we stopped along the way and the scenery kept me captivated and unaware of the time. We were supposed to cross the river into Laos tonight, but the bus arrived late so we have to content ourselves by gazing at the lights out over the Mekong River from a riverside bar with free wifi!

Vote for me on JPEG

If you haven’t noticed the nifty new link to the right and down called “vote for me on JPEG”, I encourage you to check it out. I have a few photos that I’ve submitted and any support would be much appreciated! Thanks!

Chiang Mai to Pai

** Because I haven’t had Internet access recently, this entry is written over a course of several days**

I feel like we’ve been bouncing back and forth from cityscapes to rural countryside, one extreme to the other, Chiang Mai to rice fields. I’m writing from the tropical sanctuary of Pun Pun farm, an eco-village and sustainable building education center located about an hours drive northwest of Chiang Mai. There is a cooking school called You Sabai a short distance walk from the farm as well as the Panya Project, another eco-village and organic farm, at the bottom of the ridge. Banana trees, papaya trees, mango trees and passionfruit vines dominate the land and the houses are build adobe style with thatched or tin roofs. There is no wireless, so I’ll be posting this once I get back into wi-fi zone.

Tim and I left Chiang Mai yesterday afternoon after meeting up with Tim’s photographer friend, Ryan, who lives next to Pun Pun. The three of us met a sang tao (a hooded truck with benches on either side) in a nondescript alleyway with our luggage and several bags of snacks – boiled bananas in a honey syrup, dried and flattened sweet potato-like strips, and a chicken leg for Tim. The luggage went up on the roof and the three of us plus five or six Thai’s and three out-of-breath girls from Alaska who made a last minute decision to travel out to the farm, squeezed into the back of the sang tao and we were on our way.

We stopped at a market outside of the city and bought some fruit and veggies to sustain ourselves over the next few days. The roof of the sang tao was loaded to overflowing with bags of produce and meat and fish that would be taken to rural areas and sold at other markets. After 20 minutes of browsing, we all piled into the back of the truck once again, this time crushed knee to knee and elbow to elbow with bags and boxes filing in any open space.

It took about an hour to get to Pun Pun. The outskirts of the city slowing transformed into lush green rice paddies, simple houses built on sticks, and mountains undulating into the horizon. We let the Thai woman off with their produce at another market and picked up a few more supplies. I incited shy smiles and embarrassed laughs as I wove through the maze of wooden tables laden with fruits and veggies, taking pictures of women sitting on their stools chatting to one another.

The sang tao driver dropped his remaining passengers off at the entrance to Pun Pun and the six of us walked the half mile or so back among the banana trees and rice fields to our destination. Because it’s in its relatively early stages of becoming an eco-village, the members of the Panya Project abandon the site for a few weeks or months during the rainy season, leaving a local man to oversee the farm. A few days before we arrived, however, he up and left without informing anyone that he was leaving. So, Tim and I became temporary caretakers, sharing a bamboo hut with some ants, termites and mice and sleeping on a mat on the floor. With the help of Ryan, we cooked our meals over a fire or in a solar oven. It wasn’t You Sabai food, but it was edible.

We were hoping to take a three-day Thai cooking course at You Sabai, but unfortunately they were closed this week. The couple who run it, however, are having their one-year anniversary party on the 21st, so hopefully we’ll be able to help out in the kitchen and learn a few Thai cooking tips.

We filled our days lounging on adobe benches up at You Sabai or Pun Pun, collecting passionfruit, reading, playing Scrabble and taking walks through the rice paddies and mango grooves. It took us two days to figure out that it rains every afternoon. Tim and I were caught in one rainstorm after hiking out to the end of the road, past the reservoir. We slipped and slid in the red mud and crossed a small, but raging river via two logs bridging the gap. It was an adventure, but I was glad to finally slog up to our bamboo hut and grab fresh clothes and a towel for a shower.

Ryan is a professional photographer and on the third day at the farm I became his private workshop student. He usually teaches classes a few times a month and he does freelance work around Thailand and other parts of Asia. We started off by sitting on the floor of the main bungalow at Panya, looking over his work and discussing what makes a good photo. From there he had me changing all the settings on my camera, taking photos of everything, explaining how everything in photography is connected and how to make my images more powerful and more meaningful. At the end of the day I was leaps and bounds ahead of where I was when I started. Ryan convinced me to start shooting in RAW and to use the manual setting – both of which will give me more control over my pictures. Maybe you will see a change in the images I post on my blog?

Tim and I left the next morning before the party because we wanted to have at least a day in Pai to explore and meet my friend (I worked with Craig on Riverberry Farm for a summer before he moved full time to Pai). Ryan drove us half an hour on a motor bike with an attached cart to where we could catch a sang tao. It felt good to be on the move again. We ended up waiting on the side of the road in hopes of catching a ride to Pai. After about 20 minutes a Thai man in a big black shiny truck pulled over and we threw our bags in the back and climbed in. The sky began to darken, however, so Sak invited us into the cab. He had just come from Chiang Mai to bring his dog to the vet and I had the pleasure of stroking her four-day old pup.

The road to Pai is long and winding. It climbs over ridges, snakes around bends, dips into valleys and at every turn there is a spectacular view. It took about three hours to reach the small town. Sak runs a guesthouse, so we didn’t need to worry about where we would be sleeping. To reach it we had to cross a bridge made from bamboo and held up by bamboo. After dropping our bags and taking a much needed shower, we set off to explore the town. Pai has the reputation of being a hippie/backpacker destination and we could definitely feel the vibe. Stores selling bohemian clothing, Buddha statues, and every tour imaginable from Paintball to elephant rides, lined the narrow streets. Massage parlors prevailed like Starbucks. I loved it. We snacked on banana and coconut smoothies while strolling around town then treated ourselves to an hour-long foot massage. It was divine. Craig and his wife happened to be in town for dinner so we met up with them and caught up on the last five years. It was good to see him and he seems to be loving Thai life.