The Young Man Odyssey

Laos… is spelled Laos. It is pernounced La-O and I apologize for the misinformation in the blogs before. The French did throw the ‘s’ on there at somepoint but it is a silent s. sacre-bleu!

Alex, Steph, and I organized a 3 day, two night backpacking trip for $50. We had a bi-lingual guide who was 24, and another guide to help cook, clean and set up beds, who was 14. He drank a beer with us one night to the delight of both our older guide and the young one himself. But that’s another story.

Anyway, we hiked for a little bit and had lunch at a little village where the huts are made out of bamboo, and our lunch was wrapped in large leaves. It was delicious. From the mountains, we could see into China, we are that close to the border. We hiked another few hours and came upon another village, with no electricity, bamboo huts as well where we would be sleeping. The people swarmed our little hut, lazing around the trying to read my book. At night the village could have not been there, it was complete darkness because no one had lights in their huts. All you could see were the teenage boys running around with flashlights on the prowl for girls. I have never, ever seen the stars more vivid or beautiful, but it was hard to find the constellations because I’m not used to… being in Asia!

The next day was more of the same, but the village we slept in this time was more peaceful and humble. Naked babies wandered the place, as well as pigs and chickens. It is really run to scare the hell out of farm animals, and doing so made the kids laugh.

We encouraged the kids to sing native Akha songs, the Akha is the name for many of the hill tribes around Laos and Thailand. We bought beers from the little shop, it was amazing how they got them up there, and drank with both our guides and had a fine time over dinner.

I killed them with the harmonica. I don’t think I’ve ever played it better, and when I gave it to the kids to play I realized how much I’ve progressed in a year and a half. There is a great picture that Steph took of me playing and the kids watching that I have been promised in an email.

We wrote numbers on the caps of our beer, and moved them around for the kids to guess which number was where. Our 14 year old guide was drunk off one beer, and he burst into outrageous fits of laughter guessing each number. He got most of them wrong. If you have mixed thoughts about myself drinking with a very young man, please realize it was encouraged by our 24 year old guide and he’d drank before. He smoked cigarettes on the trail as well.

It was a wonderful night, and when we returned to town, I had only minutes to say goodbye before the bus took me back to Luam Nam Tha, there is only one road out of Muang Sing (where we trekked) and I would rather have a 10 hour bus journey tomorrow then a 13 hour one. I was the only one on the 2 hour bus ride from Muang Sing, and have never had that experience. We had taken a mini-van to Muang Sing, and the windows were much bigger on the bus, I got to reflect and watch the gorgeous countryside I missed on the drive coming up. I felt very accomplished, and I loved have a whole bus to myself.

Steph had a bit of… stomach issues to put it lightly, and couldn’t make the bus ride. I bid them goodbye and have not had a night alone in about 5 days. It is nice, although I will meet up with Steph and Alex either tomorrow or the next day as our itineraries for the time being are identical.

My spirits are good, as are most after they go hiking for 2 days. There is nothing I love more than backpacking. I will be in Udomaxi, or Luang Prabang tomorrow,

Tags: Thailand, Laos, Vietnam 2006

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 23rd, 2006 at 7:26 am and is filed under Thailand, Laos, Vietnam 2006. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.