This town has one road and no cars! I don't even think I saw a motorbike...so the air was super! We stayed at a guest house in the center of town mainly because of a talkative lady who ran the place and it had comfy hammocks! One of the first things to do was to construct a new Channukiah, (blogger is telling me I am not spelling Channukiah right but it is offering no better suggestions.... a wise man once said to me, only bring up a problem when you have a solution, so f*ck off blogger and lets build Chanookyahs!)
This is possibly the first even Chanoukiha built by a Lao man. He is hammering bottlecaps into a piece of wood for us! We lit the candles in a restaurant and attracted some curiosity from the locals....
From the town you can hike half an hour to a cave...there is a man charging 10000kip, around 7 dollars to go to the cave and to the villages up the road. The cave was neat and the village was alrtight...The scenery was great! Here is a harvested rice field...with a low cloud cover... It was cloudy every day until noon when in 3 minutes the sun would come out and kick your ass for the next 5 hours...
Another field deepr in... It was expensive ot hire a guide to go up a mountain and I figured I could just do it on my own...I was very wrong... There are the beginnings of many trails, and afer a few minutes i was crouching so low I could smell my feet. Then the trails would end, and with a few more thorns in my skin then when I started I would head down and try another... After a few of these I decided to walk in the fields and that a guide would be necessary to get to the top of one of these mountains...
I don't think it was Santa Clause, but someone was dropping presents over this part of Laos... Here are a few relics, they are all over, turned into planters, benches and anything else you can think of... The USA has left many of these gifts all over the country... I think they were trying to boost the economy as the metal can be sold...The only catch is that bombs are prone to exploding.
Here is the view form a restaurant at sunset... This is why I have been wanting to climb one of these mountains!
The next day I had my chance... We were a group of four and our guide... It was Isreal time for the day and my companions were very kind to keep the conversing to English... It is incredible that most people I meet speak as good English if not better than I do French. I grew up with French around me and they only learn English in school... Shouldn't all Montrealers be completely fluent? French is forced on us so hard and every action has an opposite reaction, I think most of us push it away. This type of learning doesnt allow for any enjoyment. There is little or no push to explain how incredible it is to know another language...To be able to communicate with more people..and French leads to Spanish and Italian and romance!
Back to the trek
We went the cheap route on a guide and looked and through our hostel got one that spoke no English (or Hebrew)... But he had a machete and the shoes every other guide weras...They look like dress shoes but they are on peice of rubber...
We started by being canoed across the river and then hiking in a field...We followed a stream for a while and then headed up.... For short bursts we were on something resembling a trail then climbing a dry streambed...and clombing is the right term, over rocks and boulders and trees... The whole time I had my head bent low as while our guide was constantly using his machete he is much shorter than all of us... That is my greatest complaint of Thai and Lao guides... Part way up our guide stopped for a swig of Lao Lao... Home made rice whiskey... we had water... The climb was tough and fun...at one poitn our guide told us to wait and he took off to find out whre to go...a few minutes later he was back and up we went. As we were nearing the top he left us again and we were just tlaking for what seemd like a while when we wondered if he was cming back at all... We were somewhere up in the jungly mountains, with no discernable trail near us... After what felt like 15 minutes but was probably closer to 10 we heard him... And he led us through throns and over rocks to a great lookout!
Here is the town we were staying in and the valley with the rice fields form the other pics...
Somehow our guide stumbled onto the trail on the way down and we got to the bottom skidding and skiing and sliding and grabbing...It was fun... Once down we had to walk in a river to get out... we didnt know this was coming and it was fun and scary being barefoot in a stream where the bottom is not always visible... When we got back to the boat to cross the river there was no boat! Yonathan (husband to Efrat seen above) and I had been tlaking about swimming back and this was the last bit of motivation we needed ... Our guide found a boat to use and we used our arms... It was refreshing after a full days exercise....
