19th March
I said goodbye to Eva, who was going back to Nong Khiaw and went out for breakfast where I met Kat from the Philippines again. She, like me, was catching the boat on to Muang Khua which is a town close to the Vietnam border.
We sat in a café with Dion, a young Dutch man who was trying to set up an English school for the local monks. While we sat and chatted we watched as, it seemed, the whole village was invested in building a house or building of some kind. The women were cooking up a feast in the street while the men did the building.
I heard that in the villages if a new person or family wants to move there, they go to meet the rest of the villagers. They all have a discussion whether they will accept them into the village. If its a thumbs up, they get together & build them a house in a day.
Also a lot of the kids know how to survive in the countryside. How to forage & hunt.
Many also have.mobile phones.........
We talked about the fuel shortages and how the prices of petrol, and hence the transport, was going up. We had a joke about the boat having enough fuel, and whether we would have to paddle our way to Muang Khua.
I checked out of the room and walked down to the pier. I waited for Kat who was buying a sandwich. It occurred to me that here in Laos they make sandwiches with 'baguettes' and how this is maybe a throw back from the French colonial days.
We set off on the boat to Muang Khua which took 6 hours, with a boat first, to the Dam, which we had to drive over (a small van picked us up).
We only just all squeezed inside! They certainly like to pack people in here in Laos - sometimes improvising extra seats.
We got on a second boat and meandered through some beautiful scenery - stopping every so often to drop people off & pick others up.
I enjoyed the journey, sometimes reading, sometimes reflecting on life and marvelling at the beauty of the riverside. I also had a thought about how many bombs there might be, sitting on the river bed.
One time, it took a while to start the engine and I wandered if our earlier jokes about paddling were about to come true!
Another girl called Kat, who was on the boat, said she was in another boat, the other day and the guy at the back had to keep bailing out the water........
I made a 'movie' of the boat journey:
At the town there were only guest houses and I ended up getting a room with Margot, another French girl I met in Nong Khiaw. Its funny how you keep bumping into the same people visiting the same places.
It was dead cheap and we had a laugh about the 'ensuite' toilet
We checked out the bus situation for the morning then went for dinner with a German guy, Alexander, who was also on the boat.
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