Our poor taxi driver had to stop and pull over to the side of the road a few times, because he was afraid of being washed away with the rain or crashing into another driver.
When we finally arrived and stepped out of the taxi (with our trendy, full-length neon rain capes on) our flip-flop clad feet sunk into the already deep water as we made our way over to the hotel in the dark. Because the wind and the rain had taken its toll on the sun cover, making the front porch look like it was a mix between an obstacle course and an elite limbo-pole, actually entering our hotel was pretty darn difficult in the dark!
The rain had also caused an electricity shortage, so after we found our way into hotel room we had to stay in another type of limbo, between being wet and sticky from the rain and the incredible heat. Several hours later, the electricity finally returned, and we could take a well reserved shower!
During the next 3 weeks, Luke and I got to explore just a fraction of this beautiful country, sweat, sweat and sweat some more, and spend more time in suspension-less buses and tuk-tuks than I would ever care to repeat, haha. However, it enabled us to cheaply cover large areas of Laos and see several of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen.
Because Laos is landlocked, it of course doesn’t have the beaches of Vietnam, but Laos can rival its forests and natural beauty any day.
Some of the most memorable experiences and places were:
- Kayaking in Muang Ngoi, getting stuck in the water when going upstream and subsequently being rescued by a local fisherman
- Climbing to the viewpoint in Nong Kiaw, witnessing the most enchanting view I’ve ever seen and meeting a few fellow climbers who we would keep bumping into for the rest of our trip; we even ran into one of them in Bangkok!
- Embarking on what we thought would be a “difficult” hike in Luang Namtha, which turned out to be the hike from Hell, where one of our guides would chop down bamboo for 6 hours straight the first day, as we went up and slid down steep mountains and the other guide (who was only a trainee), who chose to wear skinny jeans, struggled with the rest of us on his very first hike. Oh, and also crossing a river (the same river) 10 times. Why? I still have no clue
- Driving a motorbike 17 km on an extremely bad dirt road, not sure if you’re going the right way or not, but ending up climbing around a huge, newly discovered cave in Oudomxay with a local ethnic minority guide who did all of the climbing in flip-flops
- And finally, one of the encounters I will always remember, but with a great deal of sadness as well, was meeting elephants face to face. We had done extensive research of whether there was ever such a thing as an “ethical” elephant camp, and the more we read and the more camps we visited, the clearer it became to us that the answer to that question most likely was “no”. The elephants might have been rescued from circuses or the logging industry, but their mahout (elephant trainer) at the camps (or so called sanctuaries) would still ask them to do silly or degrading tricks and keep them in extremely short chains on concrete floors. I hope there are places around the world that treat rescued animals better than what we saw, but smoking around them, hitting them (which we never saw, but saw signs of), and asking them to bow whenever they are fed is simply unacceptable. Sadly, though, many tourists don’t care about this side of the industry, either because they don’t know, or because they don’t want to know. But now YOU know!:)