Indochina Traversal - part 3 - Thailand

We spent most of the day continuing down the Namtha and into the much larger Mekong River.  Our driver made frequent stops on both sides of the river - the left side being in Thailand - delivering and picking up unknown cargo.  This is of course without any discussion with Lao or Thai immigration nor customs.  Well, up to him so long as he got us where we needed to go.

Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge

Due to the pressure of our schedule - we were to fly out of Yangon on January 3rd - I was anxious to cross the border from Lao into Thailand before the end of the day, so I'd asked for my family to be dropped at the base of the Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge.  There was no pier here, so the driver found a spot without too much mud and reasonably stable rocks which we jumped to, having thrown off our backpacks.  It wasn't quite clear how to get up to the bridge and where we would go through immigration, but we found some steps and walked 1/2 hour, passed through Lao immigration and took the bus to the Thai side.

The transition into Thailand is quite obvious - a very different feel.  Thailand is more worldly and the Thais either themselves more enterprising or perhaps it's just that the tourist industry is so much more developed.  A bit of a come-down from the sense of both isolation from the world and connection with the immediate we'd felt for the previous couple of days, but at the same time the convenience and familiarity of developed Asia was comforting - 7 Eleven etc.

Chiang Kong: Lao can be seen the other side of the Mekong

Our plan was to get to Lampang because they have a centre there where you can be trained as an elephant mahout (handler) - I was thinking of getting the children to do it if possible.  Also, Lampang is not a great distance from the border with Myanmar.  But getting there is a little complicated - we had to over-night in Chiang Mai.  In many visits to Thailand, it would be my first time in this the northern capital.  Not a bad place, but very much a tourist town these days.

This elephant successfully painted a scene with similar skill to a young child.
I believe it was principally repetitive training - but impressive none-the-less. 

We saw the elephant centre, though it was mostly a form of amusement park that targeted mainly local Thai tourists.  My older children were asked to go down amongst the elephants to assist in the show - which was a treat for them.

The town of Lampang, though has real charm.  There's a long street adjacent to the river - Thanon Tlard Kao - with a number of beautiful old wooden houses with a variety of architectural styles.  There is a night market on this street - foods, trinkets.  Very much a local scene.  I have a feeling Lampang might be gathering a bit of a vibe based around this street - expect higher prices and more tourists.

 

Grand old mansion and the night market

Indochina Traversal - part 2 - Down the River

In order to avoid dangerous rapids the low water had exposed we took a bus 4 hours over un-paved road.  It was no more than 60km, but low road quality and one landslide slowed us down.

In Luang Namtha, about to depart.

Noodle soup and beer before we get on the river

Our transport for the next two days

The boat is basically the shape of a dugout canoe but powered by a 4 cylinder car engine driving a prop.  This is not the same thing as the speed boats that ply the Mekong - I took one of these 20 years ago - you had to wear a crash helmet and went at high speed over rapids.  This time it's slower but well adapted for the use.

Other than our fellow travelers (the two couples) and us - my wife and I and our 3 children there was only the driver (or captain?) and a "mate" who's job was to use an oar at the front for extra maneuverability when we entered rapids.  Neither spoke any foreign languages at all.  None of us spoke any Lao.   We didn't see any other foreigners until we were well up the Mekong the following afternoon.  This was fine.

It was initially exciting - due to the experience of the boat, and then both relaxing and interesting as we meandered with the river through rain-forest interspersed with tiny villages or river-side subsistence farms.  This is a very remote place with no access by road.  The river is the highway and boats like ours the biggest of the transport due to shallow water.  Most of the population use much smaller canoes, either using a single oar or a small out-board engine.

Take your kids to work day

The village we stayed at was multi-ethnic - united by profession rather than ancestry.  Most of the villages we had visited were each populated by just one of the 40 or so ethnicities in the region.  Here they were boat workers of various types who had gathered to form the village due to its convenient position on the river.  There is no land road to the village at all - the only accessibility is the river.

Where the action is.

The village population is no more than a hundred.  Life is obviously slow.  Walking around, up the slope of the bank where it perches I felt I'd stepped into a separate existence, parallel to the one I was familiar with.  It was disorienting but fascinating.  I painfully felt like an intruder but there was no hostility from the people there only a little shyness.  Emotionally it was intense and exhausting.

Everything happens under the huts - here spinning and weaving

The village is clearly bread-line poor.  It is mostly subsistence, with a small amount of cash derived from the river trade, which is seasonal due to the water level and some weaving.  From earlier conversations back in Luang Namtha generally for villages here in northern Lao, there are only a few months per year when there is economic activity at all.  The rest of the time the people here survive at the whim of the weather, the river and the surrounding forest.

While food is cooked on hap-hazard wood fires on the bare earth, the satellite dish is correctly mounted and positioned.

However, at every small village we visitied about 1 in every 3 huts had a satellite TV dish - even while few people had shoes.

What future these little girls?  Very hard to judge.

We stayed on mattresses on the top floor of a house built with funding from a scheme to encourage eco-tourism. 

Indochina Traversal - part 1 - Yunnan and Luang Namtha

This was actually a family trip - all five of us went including my wife (not just Dad and kids).

It took some planning and I had worries about how everyone would hold up, my youngest being 8 (a boy his older brother being 11 and sister 14), and none being used to backpacking - because that's what it was: our first family backpacking holiday.

I was not completely sure the time available was enough to complete the trip, and since I of course needed to book and pay for the flights ahead of time, that was real concern.  Further I hadn't heard directly from anyone who had crossed the land border to Myanmar (other than the internet) so there was some risk we'd be stuck there.  I should add that while the backpacking aspect was for the great fun of it, it was also to keep costs low since we have little disposable income so getting stuck - there or anywhere - would have been more than irritating if it had meant taking a flight down to Bangkok and another to Yangon purchased at the last minute.

Well, none of these negative scenarios came to pass, and while the trip was far from any prior expectation in terms of actual events, it was, in the end utterly wonderful for everyone.

The plan

My idea had been to impart experiential learning for all of us but perhaps particularly the children within a loose cultural framework: the Buddhist cultures of upland areas of Indochina.  These areas historically have been effectively a contiguous region of nations that have remained distinct from their geopolitically ruling countries due to the mountainous and forested landscape.  We needed to traverse some reasonable subset of this region taking cheap local transport without needing any special or difficult to obtain visa arrangements.
I did a little internet research on the hill cultures, but there's not much detail easily available outside academia seemingly.  Well, anyway the idea was to find out for ourselves.  I came to the conclusion that we should see a little of such each of Yunnan, northern Laos, northern Thailand and a part of Myanmar.  The map above shows the loose original plan.  Broadly we ended up following this, though the realities of doing so were not as expected - that's the "experiential" bit!

Yunnan, Surprise Surprise, Can Be Cold

We flew from Hong Kong to Kunming (a return flight), then took a one-way to Xishuangbanna (also called Jinghong or "Banna").  Since it was our first backpacking and we'd be arriving in the evening I'd looked on-line and booked what seemed a reasonable hotel for the first night.

Local architecture

My thought was to use this as a base and do a simple trek in the nearby hills.  I had an image of Jinghong as a village, basically of some mix of Chinese and Hill Tribe nature.

Multilingual

I had two surprises: Jinghong is a much more a city than a village and is very much Chinese.  Ethnic hill tribes people live within the constraints of a normal Chinese city and must conform to those norms.  It's not their city.  That's not to say there's any sense of repression (none visible) - but certainly we hadn't arrived at in the cultural space I'd been looking for.

Eat your vegetables

The other surprise was the cold.  All research (and prior experience) suggested it would be mild - dry and warm, but not hot and certainly not cold.  We had barely enough clothes and hotels in the region were not at all built to insulate from this low a temperature (5 - 15C typically).  This was an irritation, but we were aware of hot-humid conditions enough to agree we had the better alternative.

Delicious street food

Market food

So, while not a fascination of Buddhist ethnic diversity, Jinghong is nevertheless an interesting place as every Chinese city is - but with a regional flavour.

A wide variety of street food is eaten, due, surely, to the diversity of culture in the region.

Snacks

We visited a botanical garden for instance - but the interesting aspects were the walk there and the behaviour of other, mostly Chinese tourists there and towards us.  We're reasonably used to and expect this: often we're more interesting to other tourists than the tourist site itself.

I'm the interesting one...

Jinghong rests on the banks of the Mekong River - I took my older son down there, observing, even in the city, that locals use that fertile land to grow various crops.  We walked down amongst them.  We would experience the Mekong again later in the trip.

City farming by the Mekong

Christmas in Lao

"Laos", the normally given name of this country is not correct.  It's better to refer to it as "The Laos" since the 's' is in fact a plural, the country being formed through the uniting of three kingdoms.  Some, to avoid the missed plural, call the country just Lao.

We arrived there after taking the bus from Jinghong, overnighting in Mengla.  There's a sharp reduction in wealth on crossing the border - there's a shanty just there - and the road is worse.  Of course this is the far reach of a large, poor and underpopulated country.  It becomes apparent quite soon that much of the funds that reach this area come from the north.  It's also clear that the locals are dubious of the implied quid pro quo.

This time of year is high-season in Lao and in particular the trekking areas in the north around Luang Namtha, therefore I had pre-booked at a recommended guest-house there, Zuela, for the 3 following days.

Bamboo Oven

Our arrival in Luang Namtha was really the first real backpacking: we arrived at the bus company's premises which was rather distant from where we wanted to get to.  Of course it was a little different this time for how it had been for me when I first started backpacking, since I immediately pulled out my GPS phone with MapsWithMe installed which already had Zuela tagged.  Still, arrival in a strange, poor town where none of us spoke the language was exciting and a bit unnerving for my wife and the children.  So we traipsed through this new world for 1/2 hour to the guesthouse - it was a great feeling for me - sharing freedom of backpacking with my family.

Opening the Oven

The feast.

But we had (rather non-backpacking-like) time pressure - so we organized a 1-day trek in the rainforest combined with visits to villages of ethnic minorities for the next day.  It's possible to do treks of up to a week, sleeping each night under a lean-to.  That will be for when the our children are older.  We did, however, eat food found by our guides in the forest, combined with what we had bought that morning in the market, and cooked in a bamboo "oven".

The villages are poor, quiet and slow.

Hand-woven scarves are promoted as a way to bring in needed cash

They use a particular dye made from local plants.

We stayed for three days, including Christmas, which was uneventful - no-one made much of it, not the locals who are Buddhist or Animist nor travelers who've come this far to get away from such things.

This guy is "The Chinese" who's lived there 40 years.  He sells noodles or exchanges it,
weight for weight for rice since villages very often have no money at all.
He then uses the rice to make more noodles.

A "machine" to de-husk or crush various agricultural products

In the Luang Namtha market

This is a trap for snakes or rats, made entirely from forest materials.
The animal goes in one end and triggers the other causing the log to fall.

Down the River

We had to head to Thailand but could reasonably spend a day or two getting there.  The plan was to go to a town near the border by bus, stay there and look around, then head across.  But then I saw advertisement for trips down the river (the Namtha).  I'd thought this was only possible earlier in the year due to the low level of the river, but on asking, they said is was possible (on an adequately small boat).  Could we organize to go all the way to the Thai border?  Yes we could!  - but we'd have to book the whole boat, which was pricey.  A fellow traveler then mentioned he'd seen a note up on a notice board asking if others were interested in joining their trip - so I inquired.   In the end I convinced them - two couples - to join the trip I was organizing.  There followed two full days entirely disconnected from the outside world - we saw no outsiders and met no-one who could speak English.