One Belt, One Road, Lots of Potholes

I’m at the airport in Luang Prabang, waiting to fly back to Hanoi, so it’s time to catch up on the past few days in Laos.

After our rainout in Vang Vieng, we took a local (rather than high speed) train from Vang Vieng to Luang Namptha, near the Chinese border. We’d bought tickets on arrival in Vientiane, because we’d heard that they often sell out. Glad we did! For the entire ~6 hour journey, there was never an empty seat in our train car – any time someone got off, they were replaced with someone getting on. The rail line has only been in operation four 3 years, but it’s obviously been transformative. Built by the Chinese as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, it plows through the incredibly mountainous countryside, seemingly spending as much time in tunnels as it does in the daylight. It’s hard to fathom how much time and frustration it saves – especially the high speed options.

The train doesn’t actually stop at Luang Namptha, but instead at the nearly (as the crow flies) Nateuy. From there, we took a taxi for about an hour on the very twist, very potholed road to Luang Namptha. The roads has a number of factors fighting against it – mountainous terrain, intense rain causing flooding and landslides, and a steady stream of trucks coming across the Chinese border. The last one will be improved with the eventual arrival of a (Chinese-built) expressway running across the country. It’ll eventually cut the 15 hour drive to approximately 3 hours.

We got to our hotel mid-afternoon – a nice place, but a decent ways outside the town center. Patch and Rueven rented scooters from the hotel and I hopped on the back for a ride into town. Luang Namptha is far less tourist-centric than Vang Vieng, which was a nice change. We wandered up to one of the markets to get food, then I planted myself at a coffee shop while the other two went to adventure on their scooters.

Later in the evening, I made the hour and a half trek back to the hotel and we ate dinner at the hotel restaurant. Normally I’d be skeptical of such a thing, but this one had a dog and a fake waterfall. What more could you want?

The next morning, we started our two day excursion to a mountain village, through a local trekking agency. They picked us up and took us to a market, then we met up with our “local guide” for the trek. I never fully understood the system for this type of trek – our trekking agency sent us with a guide, and then we picked up the “local guide” at a roadside village. The two had never met before – I’m guessing it’s essentially a system where anyone who has a reason to head into the mountains can freelance as a guide as a way of ensuring that some of the money stays with the folks living in the remote villages.

The trek was about 9km with a few thousand feet of elevation gain through a very hot jungle. We were properly sweaty! It was the three of us, along with two people from Japan – a guy my age traveling with his mom. They were lovely, though rather slow, so we did a lot of pausing for catch-up.

In the early afternoon, we stopped for lunch. At the market, the guide had asked if we “eat everything” to which we replied “yes of course,” thinking he meant our normal “picky western person” sense. So, we were a bit surprised when he built a fire and then pulled out intestines and cow stomach to grill (along with some water buffalo and a river fish). Regardless of the more challenging fare, it was lovely. Though, you know, a sandwich would have been fine.

We got to the mountain village in early afternoon. I’d love to share more about the village and the people who live there. Unfortunately, neither our guide nor the “local guide” actually spoke the language of the people in the village, so they couldn’t tell us much. Our local guide departed at this point to head to his actual village. The trekking agency has access to a hut in the village, where we got setup to sleep and our guide began prepping dinner. I think we’d imagined some more structured interaction, but mostly all the village kids poured into the hut to stare at us.

We did our best to engage, making animal sounds and funny faces. I think they mostly thought we were crazy. The village was full of pigs, dogs, chickens, water buffalo, and goats, which made for quite a racket, along with loads of kids playing and laughing.

We ate dinner and watched the sunset, then enjoyed the stars. Going to the toilet involves just picking a direction and wandering into the jungle, but we were warned to take a stick – the pigs and dogs like to fight over whatever treats you might be depositing.

We went to bed relatively early, and had modestly successful sleeps – the roosters apparently have never seen western cartoons, and didn’t understand that crowing is only supposed to happen at sunrise.

In the morning, our guide made us breakfast, then a villager acted us our “local guide” for the trek back down. The route down was obviously less strenuous, but the temperatures were higher so it was still pretty sweaty. By the time we made it back to our hotel in the early evening, we were properly ready for a shower.

The next morning, we boarded a van for the trip to Nong Khiaw. This was your typical 16 passenger van with 19 passengers, plus plenty of goods being transported. A hot, cramped and very bumpy 7 hour trip across the country! We were all pretty beat by the end, but we were rewarded with our “fancy” stay for the trip – the Nong Khiaw Float House. I had my own little floating bungalow on the Nam Ou river (a Mekong tributary). We explored town and enjoyed a peaceful evening watching the stars.

Saturday morning, we got picked up at our hotel by a boat, and taken up river for a day of trekking and kayaking. We were joined by two French Canadians, whose temperament was much more “French” than “Canadian” – we won’t be keeping in touch. We all trekked to a cave and a hilltop viewpoint, then took the boat a downriver to trek to a waterfall for a swim. It was a very sweaty trek (temperatures were in the mid-90s) so were happy to jump into the ice cold pool.

For our last stop, we picked up kayaks and paddled the rest of the way back to town. The river is of questionable cleanliness, but Rueven was brave enough to jump in.

We ended our night with dinner and more star watching.

After our van excursion, we decided to lean into our privilege a bit and spend the extra few dollars for a private van back to Luang Prabang for our departure. That meant we could depart a little later, so we got to spend this morning lounging by the river. We made it to Luang Prabang mid-afternoon and explored a bit, before planting ourselves at the airport.

I’m really glad we made this side trip to Laos, even if our climbing excursion was a bust. It’s a gorgeous country with a complicated and tragic history. There’s a huge sense of development – I can only imagine what it was like 10 or 20 years ago. It’s far from undiscovered, but it doesn’t feel totally sanitized for tourists yet either. Obviously there’s concerns about it being a vassal state of China, though those are perhaps overblown. It’s a member of ASEAN and, prior to the US withdrawal from the world, had good relations with the west. We definitely heard concerns from locals about high inflation (running the 20s), a consequence in part of Chinese debt, and the “free money” hose of the BRI is a thing of the past, so big infrastructure projects are probably on hold for a while. Regardless, I’d love to come back and see how the country grows and changes!