To Luang Nam Tha

4/4/2011
-Packed my stuff in the morning, took me a while to find the guest house owner to pay, but eventually succeeded, Paid my bill and walked to the bus station. I don't think i explained that the bus station in Nong Kheiw is really more of a minivan station, minivans from all over show up there and wait until they are absolutely full to leave.
-there were maybe 15 people crammed into a van made for 10, mostly Falongs. i was in the back seat with made for three, with four people including myself. An Italian Poet, a French primary school teacher, and a young Isreali fresh out of military and school.
-it was an uncomfortable ride, there was a seatbelt digging into my lower back and the road was full of pot holes, when i got out there was a big bruise on my back, but the conversation was good.
-also in the van was a German couple i had met on Nong Khiew, we bonded over one of the posters on the boat ticket shack that showed what appeared to be a toddler made out of condoms. we decided the point of the poster is that when you use condoms you wind up with condom babies, but it's ok because they float, which comes in handy.
-We stopped maybe an hour out of Oudomxai, and dropped off the drivers cousin, who was travelling with her child to meet her husband who served in the military in a small town.
-Somehow, we wound up with only three people in the back seat, so there was plenty of room and the rest of the ride was quite luxurious.
-when we arrived in Oudomxai, the bus to Luang Nam Tha was waiting for us, but when we tried to buy tickets we were told the bus was full. not wanting to stay in Oudomxai, the German couple, the Italian Poet and I all said we didn't mind sitting on the plastic chairs in the Aisle, so they let us on the bus. the german couple and i got lucky and actually had seats, i had a window seat near the front, which is about the best one could hope for. I think some nice Lao people gave up their seat for us.
-it was another five hours to Luang Nam Tha, with a lot of stops, because the road is under construction. The Chinese are building a nice road system up north, in exchange for stripping the virgin forests up north of timber. not really a great deal... there are chinese signs and labor camps everywhere
-Made it to Luang Nam Tha around 9 o'clock, but the bus station was about 20 Kms out of town, so it was another hour on a shared tuk tuk before we arrived in the town proper.
-The German couple had a very good guidebook, as have a lot of the germans i've travelled with, much better then lonely planet, which i have found to be virtually useless, at least in Lao. So they went to a guest house a little off the main drag recommended by the book, while the italian and i wandered around for a long time trying to find a cheap guest house. we did not succeed so wound up sharing a double room which was still pretty pricey.
-had some nice conversation with the italian until we got yelled at through the door by a chinese tourist for being too loud, although we were talking at a normal volume.
4/5/2011
-The Italian woke up early to catch a bus to Thailand, he was trying to make it to Bangkok for a flight, which seemed pretty absurd, spending like three days in transport and not seeing anything... but whatever.
-said farewell to him and slept in for a while. Met the Germans at the guest house for breakfast, we were planning to go up to Mong Ngoi in the morning, but they had decided they wanted to take a trek from Luang Nam Tha instead, to see primary forest.
-most of the treks are geared towards village tours but we decided we didn't want to be treating the villagers like animals in a zoo.
-we found a cheap two day trek that was supposed to be through primary forest, with camping in between. we booked this for the next day.
-checked into the guest house the germans were staying in, it was much cheaper and nicer then anything else in town
-spent the rest of the day drinking and talking with the Germans and their French friend, had lots of interesting conversation sitting on the porch of the bungalow overlooking two ponds full of Lotus Flowers.
-got some dinner at the night market, purple sticky rice and some extremely spicy Laap with young bamboo, then back to the guest house where the germans asked for Lao Lao, they brought out some home made shit in a water bottle which was neon green. on the fourth shot, i told everybody that if i took it i was sure to throw up, but they insisted, and sure enough, right after i took it, i yacked all over the german guy's shoes.
-the germans went to bed and i spent a while chatting with the French guy, also met a crazy dude from Tazmania, Sean, who was travelling on disablity money he got from the Aussie gov't for breaking his neck in a motorcycle crash. $750 every two weeks. the french guy went to bed, but i stayed up late hanging out with Sean.
4/6/2011
-Woke up early for the trek, before going to the entrance to the NPA we stopped at a market, where the german guy bought some live birds, we also bought tiny spring powered pellet guns so we could hunt.
-then the Tuk Tuk took us to the entrance to the NPA, we hiked through a village and saw a lady making paper out of bamboo, which was pretty cool. But we were ready to get up into the forest, so we continued on.
-within the first few hours our guides revealed to us that they had never done this trek before, and thus didn't really know where we were going.
-walked along a trail for a while, came to a small stream around noon, the guides cut down some banana leaves, and set up a very nice picnic with sticky rice, buffalo meat, pumpkin sauce, and cooked cucumbers.
-then things started to get weird, instead of following a trail we started to follow this small stream, which was ok for a while, there the stream was shallow so it was possible to walk on rocks without getting yr feet wet.
-later in the day the stream became deeper, and it was impossible to walk and stay dry.
-there were very few large trees left, it was pretty much all secondary or tertiary forest. this was not what we had asked for and no one told us we'd be walking through a stream the whole time. A leech punched a whole right through the "g" on my tattoo, arrived to camp with a sock full of blood.
-around four or five we arrived at our "camp site" which was actually some poor old farmer's house, in a beautiful valley 3 hours walk from the nearest village.
-we bathed in the stream and the guides built a nice fire, and disappeared into the old man's house to make dinner. we made various contraptions of bamboo in an attempt to hang our shoes and socks over the fire to dry, gave up on this plan when the bamboo pole for the T shaped rig i had made with the German's zipties snapped sending our socks plummeting into the fire
-we were to sleep in a small bamboo hut set on poles which was missing half of the roof. we hung out here and waited for dinner.
-dinner was really good, ate with the guides and the old man by candlelight, which was quite nice.
-played a strange and simple card game with one of the guides for a while.
-then bedded down on the floor of the hut. while we were falling asleep, or trying to, we noticed through the hole in the roof that the sky was flashing. Went outside to look, and saw that it was lightning. A storm was approaching.  we moved our bags under a little bit of thatch remaining and covered them with a tarp that was laying around.
-the first gust of wind from the storm took off the tarp and another big chunk of thatch from the roof.
-started to get rained on, layed there for a while, until the guides came and insisted we move into the old man's house which had a solid roof. My new sleeping arrangement lacked a mosquito net, but at least had a roof. the Germans had their own net, which they set up. despite their net, they were plagued by "cockalakas" (cockroaches) all night, i either slept through or did not have any of these even though i was also on the floor and netless.
4/7/2011
-woke up super early to the crowing of roosters.
-while the guides prepared breakfast there was a brutal fight between two cows that threatened to take down the hut.
-the Germans only had one bottle of water left between the two of them, the guides insisted they had more, so they drank their bottle, this was not a good idea.
-the guides initially told us we had a three hour hike for the day, but before we started this turned into six hours.
-after hiking for about four hours, the Germans were starting to become seriously dehydrated and unhappy, I only had one bottle left myself, so was unwilling to share, the only other water was brackish looking boiled stream water. the germans drank some of this and immediately started to feel ill. so there was no water.
-when i asked the guide how much farther, at the three hour mark they said six hours, when pressed, admitted they had no clue. the whole time we had been climbing along the top of a ridge, with no trail and consistently up hill. Keep in mind also that this area was heavily bombed during the secret war and we were passing bomb craters, rule one of areas with a heavy concentration of UXO is that you stay on the established path. Also this forest was even more cleared of old trees then the previous day, we saw maybe one tree older then 10 years every hour.
-Also, the guides were supposed to know about the forest, but only showed us wild corriander, young bamboo, and painted out that the plants we were passing were in fact bamboo, over and over and over again.
-after maybe 5 hours we reached the summit of the ridge we had been trekking along. At this point it was another 3-4 hours to the village where a Tuk Tuk was waiting to take us back to Luang Nam Tha, no one was really sure how long.
-the germans had been with out water for maybe three hours now of serious uphill climbing. to make matters worse, it started to rain.
-At this point the german guy got really angry and insisted we head down, that they could not continue without water.
-After a while arguing with the guide they agreed to take us down. we went strait downhill off of the highest point through bamboo forest, this is where it got really dangerous because of the rain, we were on a 70 degree slope, and the only way down was basically to slide through mud grabbing onto bamboo to slow yr fall. my hands got very badly cut up, and the german girl, Mandy, was really struggling from both dehydration and the difficulty of sliding down hill at high speed. We took a break at a little bamboo hut, while the guides got their bearing and drank rain water.
-at this point i was bleeding and unhappy, the guides were saying that we had maybe a two hour hike to get to the road, and then we would have to walk down the road for another hour to get to the village where the tuk tuk was waiting. i insisted that instead they needed to get the tuk tuk to meet us on the road, or we would just hitch hike back. So one guide split off, and went to the village to get a tuk tuk, and we took a very slippery local trail down the river, the although we were all dehydrated and ready to be out the guide we were left with kept stopping to point out more bamboo plants, even though we were surrounded by them the whole time. where we caught a bamboo ferry to the waiting Tuk Tuk.
-The german guy had totally torn up the crotch area of his pants so by the time we left his underwear was hanging out which was quite funny. while we were on the tuk tuk back, he made the tuk tuk stop and jumped out, with all of his underwear hanging out and no shoes and ran into a local shop and came back with four bottles of water and two bottles of beer.
-when we got back to the tour office in town we spent the rest of the day there camping out waiting for the manager, who obviously never came, but we turned away nine other tourists who were trying to book tours.
-went to bed early worn out from the jungle adventure.