Elephants and jungles

Boat Landing Guest House, Lang Nam Tha, Northern Lao

This will be a too-brief attempt to communicate, telegraphically, experiences too diverse and wonderful for the writing time available. (The problem being that I’m exhausted and want to be asleep in about 5 minutes.)

On Saturday we left Lang Prabang (temporarily) for a 1 ½ day “elephant trek” at the village of Xieng Lang, about 15 miles up the Nam Khan valley. Here we stayed the night in a simple but gorgeous lodge overlooking the Nam Khan and a stunning vista of forested mountains. On Saturday afternoon we were introduced to the ‘mahouts’ who look after the elephants at the preserve, learned how to feed bananas to an elephant w/o getting accidentally bitten, and had a beginner ride on 2-person howdahs – wooden ‘saddles.’ Then we crossed the river and did a proper ‘mahout ride’ (sitting on the elephant’s neck – harder than it looks to balance) to the part of the forest where the elephants spend the night. We learned that Pa-ii is “go” and How is “stop.” After the ride we walked back and had a nice dinner overlooking the river, shared with the Dutch couple and Canadian woman who are doing the trek with us.

On Sunday before breakfast we walked out again, met the elephants who were being brought in from the forest by the mahouts, and got to do the best part – riding them to (and into) the river for their daily bath. A chilly ride in the pre-dawn but we got to the river just after the sun rose. A surreal and really beautiful experience: the elephants love their bath and scrub; I never knew elephants can purr. We have one picture of Declan apparently swimming: he is actually sitting on the neck of his completely submerged elephant.

Sunday afternoon back to LP for one last afternoon, which included a long look round the truly spectacular Vat Xieng Thong. Equally beautiful ancient stencil-painting and modern glass-on-stone murals.

Monday: goodbye LP, and thank goodness K insisted on the small extra expense for chartering a minivan instead of taking the public bus from LP to Lang Nam Tha. It may be mind-bogglingly beautiful scenery through the mountains of northern Lao, but the road is brutal – 100 m stretches of OK paving punctuated by 20-50 m stretches of badly-packed rock. Allegedly 9 hours by bus, 7 by minivan, actually 9+ by minivan. But our driver, Humbai, was wonderfully stolid and unfazed by it all. A dusty lunch in Udomxai, which seems more Chinese than Lao, then right up to the border before turning in again for the last few km to Lang Nam Tha, where we have come because it sits on the very edge of the huge LNT National Protected Area.

OK, I REALLY need to go to bed, so I’m just going to say that on Tuesday we left for a 2-day trek into the LNT protected forest, and got back a few hours ago. An extraordinary experience – we have hiked 20-30 km in really, really remote forest / jungle, and we spent last night sleeping on rattan mats in a rattan longhouse in a village of the Lenten people, one of the many non-Lao indigenous people who live in this area. To get there, we drove an hour from LNT to a trailhead, then spent 5-6 hours hiking a narrow trail over a mountain ridge and into a valley that is miles from the nearest dirt road. It was live being in Eden, or a set from the movie The Land that Time Forgot.

Our guides, Pon and Ay, served lunch directly on 3 big banana leaves on the forest floor; it included a weed-and-chili mixture called jaow as a condiment, sticky rice and pre-roasted chunks of cold piranha, heads included, and sticky rice. Then we descended iinto the village, where the Lenten women gathered around for some gawping, laughing and knick-knack selling. Uncomfortable at first, but it’s amazing how many cultural barriers can be broken down by cooing admiringly at a baby. The Lenten look almost Mongolian to my eye, and the married women look very strange – they wear nothing but dark blue, all wear their hair in the same odd double-part, and shave their eyebrows.

A 5-hour hike out today included fording a lovely river and being ferried across another in long canoes by naked 7-year-old boys. More to follow…