Lam Namtha Tribe

January 9-10, 2010

There are those wonderful times that make travel so addicting when you notice something that is so far outside your culture it fascinates you – for me this is the best thing about culture shock, the instant infatuation and the inability to look away. We were in a continuous culture shock on our overnight stay in the jungle with the Lam Nam Tha tribe. After trekking through the jungle for 6 hours we reached the end of our journey, just across a creek lay a dozen grass roofed huts. Tired and sweaty, we did what the locals do and got ready to clean ourselves up. As we all changed into our appropriate bathing attire a crowd of children began to materialize on the small hill on the other side of the creek. They could not take their eyes off of us. This was our first introduction to the Lam Namtha tribe, in a remote area of Northern Laos.

The village consisted of a chief, about 12 families (70 people) and lots of livestock. The children were amazing and animated. Apart from our spacey guide, we had no way of communicating with them, but that did not stop us from doing the Limbo and talking for hours through gestures by the campfire. For dinner we all sat on small stools and feasted on raw buffalo meat (well I passed that up), rice, morning glories and green beans. After star gazing for a couple hours the entire village went to sleep at 8 pm and we were each lead in pairs to separate huts. Our bed was a hard raised platform, with a thin mattress surrounded by a mosquito net. At 8:15 we watched in the most intense silence as the embers of the fire slowly died out.

The village lives in the utmost simplicity, owning very little. Even the clothes on their backs have been sewn and re-sewn countless times. There is a childlike quality to all of the villagers, a curiosity and fascination that is contagious. They are the most resourceful people. The children are not coddled over or overly protected. 2-year-olds run around with 12 inch knives and their faces are covered in dirt and snot because no one sees an importance of constantly cleaning them. Without overbearing parents they learn from those around them and at very young ages fall in line with the village tasks. After breakfast a five-year-old was teaching Alan how to make a harpoon used for fishing. The men are often the ones with babies tied to their sides in slings and everyone in the community helps take care of each other.

As in any country the universal edict is to ask permission before you take a photo of someone. For the first time it struck me as so odd that we so cavalierly snap photos, taking personal portraits of people who do not even own a family photo. Every day the always camera ready foreigner walks away with countless photos, keepsakes these people will never see. But what is most impressive is that they do not need them to remember what they saw.

-Mika

Al

Muang Ngoi

1.4-1.7.10

Magical would be the first adjective for this special little place.  The town itself is small, the surrounding areas are breathtaking. We scored one of the last bungalows overlooking the river and spent a few days trekking and doing some unsuccessful fishing.  The trek to a local village led us through jungles, rivers, and harvested rice fields laden with cows and water buffalo.  The trail followed the raised earth dividers that separated the rice paddies and at one point we came upon a cow that had just given birth.  We witnessed the calf taking its initial steps and begin it’s very first feeding.  (Alicia grew up on a farm and acted as our tour guide for this very Discovery Channel moment.)

The local village was set against one of the towering limestone karsts overlooking acres of rice paddies.  Almost everything seemed to be done the way it had been for generations before.  Yarn was spun onto small spools and fed into large wooden looms that the women used to make fabrics.  Young children worked side by side with their mothers and the older children hunted and fished in groups.  As we arrived a small group of them had just come back with a snake which was apparently going to be dinner.  MMMmmmm!  Somehow, even in the middle of nowhere, they managed to have satellite TV.  The power came on from the hours of 6-10pm and, like the rest of the world, they would gather round and watch some Thai soap opera or some other reality show.  All people do have the same needs!

The best part of this place was what happened after the sun went down.  With limited power and absolutely no ambient light, the heavens stole the show.  Lucky for us the moon was rising late in the night and we had about 4 hours of pure star gazing.  So much so that the Big Dipper was impossible to find.  We would sit quietly and stare while the night animals played their symphony.  After a couple hours the moon would rise and we could see the fog rolling down the river.  Again something neither of us had ever witnessed.  The fog would engulf the river and neighboring mountains and hover until the morning sun burned it off.  This scene repeated itself every night.

During our stay in Muang Ngoi we picked up a new friend.  Tomer, a.k.a. “The Big Falang”*, hailed from a town just outside Tel Aviv, Israel and was on his way home after 3 years in Sydney.  Our posse, now 5 strong, would leave Muang Ngoi and again head north to the town of La Nam Tha in what I am happy to say was an uneventful trip aside from the usual attempts to extort more money out of us in what we have dubbed the “Falang Shakedown”.  Little did the Laotians know they were dealing with 2 Jews straight out of India and an Israeli.  They really had no chance!

*”Falang” is a term used in Southeast Asia to describe foreigners.  It originated during the French occupations and translates to “Frenchy”.

-Alan and Mika

Another Boat Ride

1.4.10

I’d love to be able to say that Mika and I traveled from Luang Prabang to Muang Ngoi without incident.  I’d love to say that what was dubbed a 5 hour trip that should have put us in Muang Ngoi after lunch was exactly that.  But this is Mika and me, and that’s not the way we roll.

Muang Ngoi is a sleepy little village on the Nam Ou River an hour north of Nong Kiew, accessible only by boat.  It’s another village that is just a year or two away from being overwhelmed by tourists.  At the moment it’s a gem for those that make the trip.  To get there from Luang Prabang involves 2 parts: a 4 hour bus ride followed by an hour longboat ride up the river.   The bus ride was uneventful except for the fact that we left an hour and a half late and at a rest stop we saw a half butchered dog sitting in a pail with a half quartered chicken.  It was one of those things you knew existed but would have been better off not seeing.  We then had to wait another hour and a half to catch the later boat due to our tardiness.  We finally boarded our longboat at 2pm.

We knew there was something wrong from the moment we left, or tried to leave.  The first thing that the captain did before pushing off was take a hammer and screwdriver to the engine (a recycled V-6 from what used to be a Toyota).  A couple smacks and a tweak of something or other and he was satisfied.  We pushed off and headed upstream with as much confidence as we could muster.  The town quickly faded away and we were surrounded by the pristine beauty of the Lao hillside.  I’ve been trying to come up with a way to describe this landscape.  It’s unlike anything either of us have ever scene and it becomes more and more impressive each time we see it.  Imagine towering hills, carpeted in lush jungle in every shade of green imaginable.  They drop, fjord-like, into the river and stretch endlessly to the horizon.  They seem to pop out of the plains as if a giant was pushing through the earth from the underside with a finger.  They are not overpowering in size like the Himalayas, but their density and depth suck you in just the same.  Obviously pictures speak a thousand words, but they will never do them justice.

The river too has a mystical quality that we now understand can only be found in this part of the world.  It winds slowly and effortlessly through the landscape only to be broken every so often by rock outcroppings.  The river’s edges are shallow from the upstream silt and when you walk in your feet sink and the soil squeezes between your toes.  At night the river cools the air creating a thick fog that you can witness form in front of your eyes.

The beauty had just begun to get a hold of us when the boat’s engine came to a grinding halt.  Mika and I looked at Jonah and Alicia and we all just about fell out of the boat laughing!  Two boats in barely a week!  Immediately we tried to figure out who was the bad luck charm.  For the next hour the captain fiddled with the engine.  More tweaking and fidgeting, he added some oil that helped for about 5 minutes before it sputtered out again.  Another long boat pulled up alongside but the only help they could give was comic relief in the form of a Vietnamese traveler who thought this was the funniest thing he had seen.  We eventually managed to get ashore at which point the captain declared the boat unfit to go any further.  Déjà vu!  The boat with the Vietnamese traveler pulled up alongside a couple minutes after, some money was exchanged between captains, and we all boarded our new ship.  Off we went again.  No more than 10 minutes from boarding the new boat we were again ordered off.  It seemed that the boat, with all the extra weight, could not travel this stretch of the river because it was too shallow.  We were going to have to walk and meet the boat about 500 meters upstream!  So we walked and, as expected when you drop a bunch of tourists in the middle of a jungle, we got lost.  You would think following the river upstream would be easy enough but wonders never cease.  Luckily, as if almost scripted, a local villager appeared and guided us to the path that would return us to the boat.  This is why you never worry.  There will always be a villager or a bus or something to guide you back when something goes wrong!

Another hour upstream and we finally arrived.  Just before sunset, 8 ½ hours in all.  Pretty much par for the course!

-Alan

Luang Prabang

12.28.09-1.1.10

1.3-1.4.10

Luang Prabang is a Unesco world heritage town located at the confluence of the Mekong and the Nam Khan Rivers.  The architecture and cuisine are remnants of the French occupation and the baguettes and pastries were a welcome sight, or better yet - taste.  It’s a small town that has become a tourist hub because of its location and we spent our time here doing a little shopping, visiting waterfalls and frequenting the spas.  Like Thailand, Laos is littered with cheap spa’s that cater to Western tourists.  We happen to stumble upon a relatively obscure place populated by only locals that provided unlimited sauna for about $1.15.  Needless to say, it became almost a daily stop.

We spent New Year’s with Jonah and Alicia in LPB which catered to the Western holiday.  A short happy hour at the guesthouse was followed by a semi-traditional Lao dinner at a riverside restaurant.  Good food, good drink and good friends - what more could you want to usher in the new decade.  (A couple notes about Lao food – in general, it is not as tasty as Thai food although the ingredients are very similar: chili, lemongrass, cilantro and similar herbs, noodles, fish and meats (chicken, buffalo, pork) and of course lots of soup.  It is also almost impossible to be full without eating a significant helping of sticky rice!  It begins to explain the Laotians physic.)  The main course of the meal was a Lao BBQ which consists of a nifty contraption that cooks meat in the middle and soup on the perimeter.

After dinner we stopped in town to pick up a couple rice paper lanterns to send off our new year’s wishes.  Along the way we stopped at a local celebration that included dancing Laos in Santa hats as well as assorted small fireworks which we had somehow gotten our hands on.  We made our way to “Utopia”, a riverside bamboo bar, just in time to count down the last moments of 2009.  Jonah and Alicia lit their lantern and, in what would have been a perfectly timed release, they let it go.  Unfortunately instead of going up, it went down!  The gathering crowd “ooh’d” and “ahh’d” as the lantern fell and then just as easily began to rise.  The bamboo roof overhang, however, almost provided the first tragedy of 2010 as it caught the lantern on the way up.  We now had a burning paper lantern trapped in the roof rafters of a very dry bamboo structure which covered a hundred or so celebrating tourists!  After some tense moments, someone climbed a nearby bamboo pole and pushed the mischievous lantern into the night sky.  Jonah let out a final cry, “Our baby made it!”

The rest of the evening was spent dancing without incident and we left the next day for Phonsavah, albeit a bit tired and dazed!

The Plain of Jars

Phonsavah, Laos 1.1-1.3.10

Phonsavah is home to the Plain of Jars, another one of those Stonehenge type worldly mysteries.  No one knows how it came to be or what its purpose was. There are 23 sites, only three that are open to the public, and the jars appear as if out of now where - scattered across the landscape. There are two major theories on their usage: one that the God Spirits used them as containers to hold their rice wine or two that they were used as funerary urns.

Phonsavah is an eerie town with little aesthetic appeal, possibly because it was razed to the ground during the Indochina and Vietnam wars. The land and community are still raw and there has been no effort to cover up the old scars. Fences, hotels, restaurants and shops are all adorned with old bomb casings.  They have been made into plant holders, seats, fire pits etc. So raw in fact that the war continues to destroy the surrounding communities. The farm land is still covered with bomb craters and alters set up for the spirits of those who died. An alter with unusual offerings for the spirits lay in front of a cave.  Our guide informed us that, “the spirits like candy, soda and cigarettes”!  These must not be your typical spirits!

Cluster bombs are apparently everywhere. These bombs were not created to destroy tanks, machines or planes - they were created to kill people. They are very successful and these small, spherical bombs at first glance seem like a perfect toy for children. They continue to wreak havoc on the communities in this province, which was the most heavily bombed area in Laos.  During the Vietnam War, the US flew hundreds of thousands of aerial missions over Laos into Vietnam, dropping over 2 million tons of bombs.  If targets could not be acquired or pilots needed to abort their missions and turn around, they would drop their munitions within the Laos border instead.  Planes were not equipped with enough fuel to return to Thailand fully loaded and landing with that many ordinances still on board was dangerous.  About 30 percent of the bombs dropped on Laos did not detonate, thus leaving the hills, farm lands and mountains loaded with UXO’s (Unexploded Ordinances). There are efforts to uncover them, but the work is long and tedious. Even when we went to visit the Plain of Jar sites we had to stay on a marked path as the ground had still not yet been cleared, nearly 40 years later. Creepy!

The market in town housed the most unfamiliar smells, and as we walked along its stalls my stomach began to churn and ache with discomfort. Large shallow buckets with frogs, eels and small crabs were followed by deeper buckets chock full of large fish flapping water onto the aisles. The usual fruit and vegetable stands stood on the outskirts, but as we approached the small dimly lit interior new sights began to immerge. On a concrete raised platform stood long meat stalls with rows of fresh slabs of furry muscle and innards amongst the occasional whole squirrel. Behind the stalls were discarded pieces of bone and fat, even a cow jaw.

Around the corner we accidentally stumbled onto the live market. As we quickly passed I did my best to ignore the squealing pig being jammed into a bamboo tube flush to its skin. Four more bamboo tubes stuffed with pigs lined the street along with larger containers filled with chickens. Alan was taking his time walking through but I got so frazzled I didn’t notice where I was going and began taking another road that was leading us back to the market. Little did I know that this was going to be a common site all over Laos.

We left Phonsavah just as quickly as we arrived.  We headed back to Luang Prabang to collect our things, meet back up with Jonah and Alicia and head up North.

-Mika

During our tour of Plain of Jars, we had the pleasure to stop by a local whiskey village.  This village consisted of no more than a bamboo hut and an old lady that manned the distillery.  She was making the famous, or infamous, Lao - Lao.  Lao - Lao is a rice whiskey made by fermenting sticky rice.  It tastes a lot like moonshine, burning the back of your throat on the way down and warming your belly for a while after.  The distillery process is fairly simple....the sticky rice is mixed with yeast and water and fermented over several days.  The mixture is then boiled and the alcohol (Lao - Lao) removed.  In Lao style, the distilling occurs in an old 50 gallon drum and the alcohol ends up in old motor oil containers!  I quote our guide in saying that the "first shot of Lao - Lao does not taste good, and the second shot is not much better"!

-Alan

The Mighty Mekong

12.27-12.28.09

It was supposed to be a simple trip down the Mekong River. Two days of relaxing on a slow boat as it meandered through the jungles and hills of the Northern Laos countryside. But why should anything be simple. To say we have had an interesting past week would be an understatement and to think that that would change any time soon would be silly.

The journey started simply enough. We popped our little yellow pills, boarded a minivan to Chiang Mai and then transferred onto a bus heading east to the border town of Chiang Khong. Along the way another young couple boarded the minivan. Mika, with her super Spidey hearing, overheard the couple discussing New Paltz, NY and then mention Katz’s Deli! We quickly began talking and discovered a Jewish couple from Boston who had recently moved from New York– who would have thought! The journey, however, doesn’t get interesting until the next day.

After arriving at 1:30am we woke at 7:30 so we could give our passports to the guide company to get our Thai exit stamp. For the nominal fee of 100 Baht ($3 USD) they would take care of it. Oh, and some guys brother would be there at 8am to exchange Thai Baht for USD because it was cheaper to use USD rather than the Laos Kips. Of course it would. The last time we had seen USD was at JFK four months ago. Unfortunately his exchange rate was a bit higher than anything we had seen posted and of course there was an extra $1 fee because it was Sunday! Now it’s one thing to know you are getting ripped off, but it’s another thing to have it happen at 7:30 in the morning when you are half awake and unable to process conversion rates of three currencies. As it turns out, we probably overpaid by $10-20 and saved 10 minutes waiting in line. What are you going to do.

By 10am we had all our stamps and with passports back in hand we boarded a bus to go the 500 feet to a restaurant to wait for our boat. Conveniently we had to wait 2 hours for the boat. Fortunately for the owner of the restaurant, there were sandwiches and drinks available for us to enjoy. In a pre departure speech, our new Laos guide told us we should arrange for accommodations at his hotel because it was the only hotel in town and by the time our boat got in it would be full. He also explained that the village did not have electricity and only ran on a generator from 6-10pm. Well, once a mistake twice a fool (or something like that), we would not be taken twice in one morning. No Thanks buddy – we’ll take our chances.

At 12:30 our lovely guide instructed us to come down to the boat. Unfortunately, the boat was already full and its current passengers were smart enough to prevent our boarding. It’s was a simple conversation of safety vs. economics. There weren’t enough life vests for the amount of occupants they wanted to put on the boat but there weren’t enough boats for the number of occupants. At one point we discovered that there weren’t ANY life vests on the boat to begin with! Anyway, after another half an hour they were able to rustle up a new boat. The long boats that travel up and down the Mekong are of fairly basic wooden construction. About 15 feet wide and 100 feet long, they sit about 40 people each. They have a roof and the sides are open to the elements and of course adorned with colorful window shades! The captain steers from the front and there is what looks to be an old V8 providing the power in the rear. There are a couple deckhands who mainly lounge about and a woman selling snacks in the back.

We tried unsuccessfully to board the boat first and secure a seat. This didn’t happen. Instead, we found ourselves on the floor with our new friends from Boston. We had a deck of cards, 4 Beer Lao’s, and 6 hours to kill. We would be just fine!

The Mighty Mekong is a wide, silty river littered with rock outcroppings that look like they could slice the Titanic in two. Its shores are sandy and dense with jungle and the views are simply spectacular. The rolling hills are lush with vegetation and the only evidence of human existence is a small bamboo hut or village scattered in the distance. Limestone cliffs stand like guards at tributary entrances and every once in a while we pass a fisherman standing waist deep amongst the outcroppings. Even though we are a couple hundred kilometers upstream, it’s hard to imagine that this is the same river that used to be a war zone.

About 5 hours into our journey, the engine quietly stops and the boat begins to drift. The captain leaves his post at the helm and runs down the center of the boat while beginning to take off his pants. Needless to say, this created quite the scene! The boat was drifting toward one of the outcroppings and the engine was dead. It seemed the captain was going to put himself in harms way, although I’m sure he would have been torn in two if he had. One of the deckhands awoke from his stupor and somehow got the engine to start within 20 feet of the rocks. The boat, without a captain steering, ran straight ahead and marooned onto the eastern shore. Rumors about the engine being broken quickly began to surface although none of the crew spoke English so we’re not sure how that started. Regardless, within 10 minutes everything seemed to be up to the captains standards and we, meaning the passengers, pushed off and were on our way.

Within 30 minutes we were headed for the shore again. This time for good. Whatever the problem was it was not fixed and we could not continue. Amongst ourselves we concluded that it was getting too dark to go on because the boat had no lights and that there was nothing wrong with the engine – but we will never know for sure. Within 5 minutes a bus appeared at the shore along with a flat bed truck. Some negotiating ensued because they wanted the passengers to pay for the bus transportation. It was a fairly straightforward conversation. We said “no” and the crew covered the costs, however, this took the better part of half an hour. By this time it was completely dark. The driver wanted us to load our bags on the flat bed and get on the bus. We carried our bags on our laps.

The bus slowly made its way up the shore and onto what appeared to be a road. The engine whined under the load and for a while we thought we might lose the second motor of the day. The road turned from sand to packed earth to gravel. They were apparently building a road. What was funny is that they were building it at that exact moment! We quickly came upon two pieces of machinery that were leveling the gravel and shaping the road in the opposite direction we were traveling. We had to pull off to the side to let them pass only to have them create a burm right in front of us so we could not move. At one point a Swedish guy got out, and with beer in hand declared that we needed a “shoovla”. Genius! Without a “shoovla”, or a shovel, we were stuck again! 15 minutes later the leveler machine made his way back up the road and cleared the burm. We were back in business. The rest of the ride was a lot of “oohing” and “aahing” as we drove over barely passable bridges, alongside steep drop offs and over what was weeks away from becoming a recognizable road. At one point someone threw up on our Boston friend’s foot! Really - You can’t make this stuff up.

Contrary to what our guide had told us 7 hours before, the town was chock full of guesthouses. There were restaurants and street vendors and the village was full of activity. We couldn’t even hear the generators because they didn’t exist. One thing our guide said was in fact true. Because of our delay, most of the guesthouses were full or too expensive (i.e. more than $9 a night). One guesthouse offered us the floor of their restaurant for less than $2 a piece (which we gladly overpaid for) so we hunkered down with our new Boston friends. They brought in two mattresses and laid them on the floor along with sheets, pillows and blankets. There was even a TV which was playing the latest videos from MTV Laos.

We headed to dinner to recap the day and laugh at life in Laos. As we have said so many times before ….”Welcome to [insert country here]!”

We woke the next day to find the entire family staring at us, in particular our new friend Jonah. At one point the family’s eldest daughter, who couldn’t have been more that 14 told him “You are beautiful. I love you.” Talk about wasting no time.

The rest of the day was fortunately a little less eventful. More of the scenic Mekong but this time on a sea worthy vessel. We made it into Luang Prabang just before sunset with new friends and another story to tell. The journey continues….

Welcome to Laos!

-Alan

Pai and a small town outside Sappong Thailand

12.18-12.26.09

Leaving Chiang Mai, we boarded a bus for the town of Pai.  As is our normal custom, we had heard and read good things about Pai, but knew little else.  Unfortunately the little else we knew included the small fact that in the 3-1/2 hours it took to get there we would make 762 turns. Seven hundred and sixty two painful turns – enough that at some point in time someone counted them.  It was a small fact that we became acutely aware of shortly after I began feeling ill, about halfway through the journey.  Luckily we ran into a generous backpacker with a little yellow pill. The Thai version of Dramamine was a life saver.  In fact, by the time we got 500 turns in, Alan needed one as well!

We arrived without incident and Alan spent the first half hour camped in the shade recuperating with the bags while I wandered the town looking for a place to stay.  We spent most of our time in a rustic bamboo bungalow on the shores of the Pai River. We could watch the sunsets from our porch and sip cocktails from the floating deck just upstream from our house (we have gotten into the habit of calling wherever we are staying at that moment “home”).  It was not going to be hard to stay here for a while!

Due to a recent Thai movie filmed in Pai, the town is overflowing with local tourists. Thai tourists, like their Asian counterparts, love anything that involves a cartoon character and the idea of love.  They had both in Pai and could not take pictures fast enough.  Alan and I deduced that the movie involved a mailbox, a cup of coffee and lots of cartoon love.  Don’t ask – we have no idea either!  The main street was overflowing with “Pai in Love” T-shirts, stickers, hats and every other kitschy item you can think of. It was fun to watch for a while but we mainly focused on the food!  The night market was our favorite.  Alan thought the fried chicken was better than anything you’ve ever tasted (we think they put coconut in the batter but couldn’t break the language barrier to find out), the spring rolls and Pad Thai were perfect and they even had proper pastries!

Due to the high concentration of backpackers and pseudo hippies wandering through Pai over the years, the music scene is fairly impressive as well.  On our first night we ended up at a small venue on the outskirts of town.  We settled in with a couple of Chang Beers and took in the scene.  Three guys were just finishing up their set when Alan yells out, “Brooklyn in the house!!!” Perplexed I look over at him thinking to myself why is he yelling in the middle of the bar and what is he talking about?  He goes on to explain, “Didn’t you hear the last line in the song, the one about Brooklyn and the L-train?”  Let me remind everyone that we have not met another American in months and we are in a small town in northern Thailand.  I am thinking that he must be crazy.  After their set finishes he calls the musician over and asks him about the lyrics. It turns out this Japanese born musician, who now lives in Thailand with his Thai wife, also lived in Brooklyn for 14 years.  He also goes on to tell us how much he likes Prospect Heights and the little bar called Sepia located a block away from our apartment.  I do not think that most people in Brooklyn know Sepia bar, let alone where it is.  Small World!

The next night we caught a Thai film shown outdoors with an old reel-to-reel player that had to be spliced every 30 minutes or so to load the next reel.  I can’t recall the name of the film but my best description is Hindi Bollywood meets Wild Western.  It was typical Good vs. Evil while the two main characters battle for the girl and eventually their friendship.  All while being completely overly dramatic and every so often breaking into song.  Truly entertaining!

We also had time to go to some aforementioned waterfall!

We had heard a lot of good things about a small town just north of Pai outside the town of Sappong.  It’s known for its caves and high population of hill tribes.  So we rented a motorbike, loaded the day pack and started on our way.  The ride provided gorgeous views of the country side and a glimpse into what all of Thailand used to be.  We ended up at a place called The Cave Lodge run by an Aussie and his Thai wife who opened the place in the 70’s.  It was completely rustic, built into the side of a hill and ran all sorts of trekking, caving and rafting tours.  One big attraction in the area was a cave called Tham Lod.  Every night at dusk thousands of Swift birds would fly into this cave all coming from the same direction almost like a landing pattern.  The sky became full of them and it lasted almost 20 minutes.  As they finished coming in the bats supposedly came out.  I say supposedly because it was getting dark, we had forgotten our headlamps (of course!) and we could stay long enough to see.

One thing I should mention is that we saw the birds on our second night at Cave Lodge.  We tried the first night but the directions we got from the Owner of the lodge were so backwards that we had to go back.  After driving the motorbike down one of the most treacherous rock filled roads barely 2 feet wide, we came to a river with no way to drive across.  We found some signs that we could only assume pointed us in the direction of the cave but they were in Thai so who knows.  It started getting dark and worried that we would be stranded having to drive the treacherous road without daylight, we left.

Back at the Lodge….around a campfire that night we opted for Adventure #3, an exploration of 3 local caves as well as a trek through the villages.  We were a group of three with a guide.  We left the next morning.  Now you would think that if you are running an operation such as this, catering to mostly (if not all) Western travelers, you would have a guide that spoke English.  So did we.  Unfortunately, Pad (at least we got his name) did not speak much of anything.  He handed us our helmets and headlamps and indicated that we should follow him.  Well where else are we going to go Pad – we’re 3km from the Burma border for crying out loud!

So putting the fact that we are now going below ground with a guide that does not speak English behind us, the adventure is pretty spectacular.  The first cave, Fortune Cave, had all the stalagmites and stalactites you would expect as well as some pretty tight squeezes during which I repressed my claustrophobic screams.  The second cave, Waterfall Cave, was a doozie.   Most of this cave required us to crawl on our bellies through neck high water to avoid the rocks protruding from the cave ceiling, to get to the waterfall.  It was an experience of a lifetime that I never intend on repeating!  And FYI – when we returned to the Lodge we later found out that someone had recently died falling down the waterfall!  The trail to the third and final cave required us to cross through some of the local villages and fields.  Along the way we hit a small snag.  Apparently, as is common in this part of the world, one of the farmers had decided to slash and burn his field.  Unfortunately for us, the trail went straight through this field.  Pad could not find another way around and indicated that we needed to go through it!  Ok Pad, you go first!  So he did, and so we followed.  We have crossed off “Run through burning fields” from our lists of To Do’s.

The next day we headed back to Pai.  After a delightful Christmas back with new friends and the usual scrumptious street fare, we booked our trip to leave Thailand and head to Laos.  We had hoped to take a less touristy route to get there but could not figure one out.  Thailand may have once been a land shroud in Asian mystery but its days as a slow moving paradise are numbered.

-          Alan and Mika