Vientiane
Pronounced Viencheng, the capital city of Vientiane is a charming place with warm people and plenty of food options. So many beautiful temples and shrines!
Random cute kitty...
While definitely catered toward tourists, you can still see the Lao identity and find plenty of traditional food. Every meal we had was the best food we've ever eaten, and no one dish stood out above the rest because they were all simply amazing, though Charles and I each had a favorite going into it - a beef stew with eggplant, dill and lots of veggies for him, and a minced chicken, coriander, lime and chilli salad for me. Everything has lime and mint and lots of fresh veggies, and is served with sticky rice....yum.
We took a great cooking class that began with a culinary history of Laos, neighboring countries and other popular cuisines like French and Italian. A lot of Western foods originate from early trading with, and colonization of, SE Asia. Dill, for example, we associate with French and Eastern European cooking, but it is a native plant of this region. And lime has been present in every country we've been to, except perhaps Singapore, though I'm sure it's there since it used to be a part of Malaysia. Lime juice has quickly become my favorite refreshment, and the best version was the lime-aloe juice we had in Indonesia. Yum! Anyway, the cooking class was awesome and we got a cookbook out of the deal, so hopefully we'll be able to come somewhere close to reproducing some of these dishes at home. We cooked these five dishes and one dessert!
Baby bananas!
Proof!
The local taxis - half motorcycle, half cart - called Tuk-tuks after the noise they make....tuk tuk tuk tuk tuk
Hey Jason, here's a new building technique for you - sticks!! works like a charm...
After Vientiane, we took a sweaty eleven hour bus ride to go less than 300 miles up to Luang Prabang, which is just about dead center in northern Laos. We though about stopping into a town in the mountains along the way, but we heard that it had become a party destination where many tourists went to do drugs and go tubing down the Mekong in bikinis (a very disrespectful way to dress in a Buddhist country). Every year, a tourist or two dies from being trashed and tubing at the same time - the Mekong's not exactly a trickling stream. At any rate, we decided to skip that and do the whole journey at once.
It was such a sticky ride, but it was beautiful! We went along winding roads through emerald green rice paddies, passing rugged mountain peaks and following the muddy, mighty Mekong River the whole way. Amazing sites - I wish I could have taken pictures not through the blurry windows of the bus. The villages of people were fascinating and ranged from agricultural, weathered looking people carrying heavy loads of firewood or vegetables or water on their shoulders or backs or heads, to villages where the women were dressed in beautiful, colorful silk Lao skirts and probably commuted into a city for work in tourism. I don't regret the ride, but it was certainly very long. Thankfully we had a stop for lunch in the middle.
Luang Prubang
Luang Prabang is so touristy! We knew it was touted as one of the best-preserved colonial cities and a popular destination, but we were surprised at the intensity of it. You can actually spend $300 a night on a hotel room here! Yet we found a lovely place - all hard wood and highly polished, with two balconies overlooking the Mekong sunset - for $18! Crazy ranges.
So yea, not our favorite town, but we eventually found a
couple of spots with good Lao food, and also broke down and ate several western
breakfasts – yum…eggs…mmmm. Charles took another cooking course that was much
more hands on than the first one and had a great time. I, on the other hand,
had a lovely day of doing…not much at all. ahhh.
The hilarious notice in our room - no prostates allowed! But seriously, it's so sad that they need to say # 6
One of the best memories of the trip was made here –
elephant riding! so much fun!! We love these sensitive animals. We did a full
day of riding and Mahout (handler/keeper) training. We even got to bathe them,
though I think they quite enjoyed bathing us as well. Elephants are so amazing
– we learned that they can get really sad and angry if their mahouts leave them
at night and can even injure themselves by head-butting trees! yikes! That’s so
disturbing and touching all at the same time. And when they have a mean
handler, as is often the case when they are used for the logging industry, they
can get so overwhelmed by being yelled at that they just lay down and cry! oh my
gosh – I nearly cry just thinking about witnessing that.
So we started off by learning a few basic verbal commands
(mount, dismount, stop, go, turn left, turn right, etc.), then we took
individual laps around the lawn using the commands. You give them the command
to mount and they lift a foot so that you can step on their leg while grabbing
the top of their ear to “swing” yourself up. In reality, we needed to pull on
the mahout sitting on the elephant as well as on the elephant ear, and even
then, we mostly needed a good shove in the rear from our guide on the ground.
Once you’re up there, you’re supposed to bend your knees so that you’re
basically kneeling on the fold of their ears with the bottoms of your feet on
the front of the elephant’s shoulders, and you’re sitting on their
necks/shoulders with your hands flat on the huge surface that is the top of
their heads. It felt incredibly unstable at first, but after riding like that
for a half hour or so, we were much more comfortable and confident enough to sit
back and relax. After our “training,” we took an hour long jungle ride, during
which Charles sat as the mahout and I sat like a jungle princess in a nice
comfy bench on the elephant’s back, high above Charles (and much, much higher
than the ground).
Okay, I have to put a large version of this picture - I just love Charles's face here...especially contrasted with mine :-) too funny.
Then came the bonus treat – washing the elephants! We were
each given our own elephant to ride (with a mahout behind us on the elephant’s
back), and rode her (they were all females there) down to the river (a
tributary to the Mekong). Awesomely, mine was called Mae-oa, which means Mother
Hangover! Oh yea. By this time, Charles was totally comfortable because he had
done so much riding already, but it took me most of the ride to the river to
really relax and enjoy it…especially on the downhill bits. We rode them right
into the river and had a blast while they bathed us, oh, I mean, we bathed
them. Yeah. They sprayed us repeatedly with their trunks, knelt down so that
their heads were completely submerged and we were in the water up to our
wastes, sat down so that we thought we’d slide right off, and slam their trunks
onto the water creating quite a splash. They did this all at the commands of
their mahouts, who were having a great time. Oh yea, and we did clean them a
little bit by scrubbing their heads, ears and backs a bit.
Charles's elephant knelt for him this time...
Mahout fun...
I love this one - Charles ducking from his impending bath and my amused and slightly terrified look as my elephant fully submerged his front half...
After riding back from our bath, we got to give them treats.
Charles fed a bushel of bananas, half at a time, directly into his elephant’s
mouth! Mine was a bit daintier and took the bananas one at a time with her
trunk from my hand – one after the other with no pause in between. I was
laughing hysterically and could barely keep up with her by ripping off another
banana in time before her trunk came searchingly back. Side fact, apparently
their trunks are so dexterous that they can even pick up a button!
Definitely a priceless experience! And we felt good about
the organization we chose. Most Asian elephants are in captivity and are used
in the logging industry, and are frequently even worked to death or not fed
enough (they eat up to 250 kilos/day!). So this organization buys or
indefinitely leases elephants from the industry and brings them into
semi-retirement. There simply is not enough jungle to set them all free, so the
group gives them a light, 4-hour workday carrying people (a light load compared
to logging) to pay for their upkeep. The staff also has a veterinarian who
treats their ailments and mahouts who truly seemed to love their elephants and
their jobs. After the morning’s work, they are fed and turned out to the jungle
to eat for the evening. Elephants only sleep about one or two hours per day,
since they need to eat so much and only absorb 40% of what they eat. So they’re
well-fed and extremely loved. The mahouts were hilarious and obviously cared a
great deal for the elephants, which was great to see.
Anyway, after we had lunch, we headed over to some
waterfalls for a swim. We weren’t sure about this because of how dirty the
river water was, though we had basically already been swimming in it, so what
the heck. But it turned out to not be river water, but a beautiful cascade of
mint-green water flowing through the forest and over light sand colored and
water-smoothed rock, creating perfect swimming holes. Brilliant. I’ve never
seen anything like it. And we met siblings from Alabama (Julie and Tay) who
were super cool. Yay!
Because we ended up spending more time in Luang Prabang than
we had planned, we decided to forgo the two day boat trip up the Mekong to the
Thailand border, which would have also involved another full day of bus rides
to get to our first stop in Thailand. Instead, we decided to fly directly to
Chiang Mai in northern Thailand. We couldn’t get a flight on the day we wanted,
and ended up spending yet another day in Luang Prabang and saving a bit less
time than we had hoped. But, we met up with a guy from England who had been in
Charles’s cooking class, and ended up walking around with him all day and into
the night…then met up again for breakfast. Fraser was really cool and has had a
lot of truly amazing experiences working in development and travelling all over
the world. So great to meet him – we actually invited him to our wedding (no,
no date has been set) on the spot. Yay!
Anyone notice anything fishy about this skyline (other than the fact that Laos doesn't have any city skylines)...
Hi Kids,
ReplyDeleteThis was one of the best--it is so exciting to see the elephants--to see your facial expressions is priceless!
Love,
Mums