Boat trip Nong Khiew to Luang Prabang- Laos

After resting up in Nong Khiew we took a boat to Luang Prabang. It had rained most of the previous day so lots of backpackers headed out in an overloaded pick-up truck. We decided to take the boat and there were only 4 of us and 10 seats.

We started on the Nam Ou River and then joined the Mekong River near Luang Prabang. There was lots to see. The families came down to the river's edge to bathe (the women in their sarongs and the men in their undies). We saw black and albino-looking water buffalo cooling off on the river's edge. There were all kinds of bamboo fishing traps along the river as well as nets with bamboo, and plastic bottle floats.

We passed a few groups of divers with goggles, compressors and air lines who were diving for gems and others panning for gold with wooden pans.

The young boys accompanied older men to check and set nets. The boys were very competent in their dug out canoes crossing the river and weaving amongst the water reed islands.

There was a huge thunder and lightning storm near the end of the trip and we had to shelter awhile as it passed overhead. The trip took 6 hours but was very relaxing through the limestone cliffs and jungle valleys.

Nong Khiew - Laos

After Luang Nam Tha we caught a cramped bus to Odomxai. We had to sit in the aisle on child sized plastic chairs and hold on to what ever we could find to stop the chairs sliding around. It was a long and tiring 4 hour trip. We needed to rest up so spent one night in Odomxai in an air-conditioned hotel, the most expensive one in town!

From Odomxai we went by pick-up (tuk tuk)to Nong Khiew (aka Muang Noi). At a junction town an hour before Nong Khiew we got into a smaller pick-up and had to push it up the small hills as it had gear problems!

In Nong Khiew we stayed in a rustic rattan bungalow on the banks of the Mekong River. We looked across the river at a line of rustic tourist bungalows. We could imagine that it would look like Pai in North Thailand in a few more years!

After resting and doing laundry we walked 2 kilometres along the road out of town to a limestone cave that was used by the villagers in 1964 to shelter from the USA planes during the war. There was a huge crater in front of the cave where a bomb had exploded. The crater is now full of water lilies.

During the walk we saw a monkey in a cage, a woman distilling Lao lao- rice whisky, a dead scorpion, huge millipedes, children returning from the jungle with small birds (smaller than sparrows!) they had trapped in cages and were going to eat, a pangolin shell(like an armadillo) nailed to a restaurant wall (pangolins, the locals told us, could fetch $200US for a 12 kilo animal), girls collecting jungle vegetables (like the tendrills off bean plants) to sell, and a caged animal like a possum that we couldn't identify.

We also managed to get bitten by leeches again!

Luang Nam Tha - Laos

It was interesting returning to Luang Nam Tha after being away for a month. According to some of the locals we met, a new government representative was appointed to the local council and he decided to rip all the streets up and have them resealed. In the rain the streets are a bog and without rain they are a dust bowl. We noticed a few of the streets were sealed and drains were being formed so it was beginning to look like a more permanent town.

Last time through we met a local man called Thout who runs a business called Big Brother Mouse. He trained as a teacher but has a business selling books for children. He is sponsored by a Swiss company with the aim of improving literacy amongst Laotian children. Tourists visit him and give donations so he can buy books for schools. He has written some of the books himself.

We visited Thout again and he invited us to his village and to meet his family. His son was only 3 days old so we were privileged to be invited to see him as the first 3 days are set aside just for family to visit the newborns. Thout felt our presence would influence his son to be comfortable with foreigners.

After the birth the mother has to sit with her back to the fire and bathe seven times a day in special herbs. The name of the boy was to be decided by the elders and agreed to by the parents so he did not have a name. The baby weighed just under 3 kilos ( a normal birth weight for Lao babies) and they couldn't believe our daughter Kerri weighed four kilos. We spent the evening eating sticky rice and dried buffalo meat with green chilli paste and fermented local river fish and sharing birth stories!

The next day we went to a bakery we had visited previously and the Chinese owner remembered us and chatted like we were old friends. While buying bus tickets we met 14 year old Muk from Muang Sing and he was on his way to Vientiane. I had given him an English lesson when we were in Muang Sing. We found Luang Nam Tha such a friendly place!

Back in Laos

Market gardens and tunnel houses outside Kunming- population 4 million, like NZ!


We are pleased to be able to read our blog now we have left China!
Tea growing Puer area

We spent one night in Kunming, China and then caught a bus to Mengla and onto the border town of Mohan. We passed through Simao/Puer (it has two names), where there was a 6.4 earthquake and 10 people died and 300,000+ were evacuated. There are still some blue Civil Defence tents in the city and we saw many houses with their roofing tiles missing.





We caught a pick up from the border back to Luang Nam Tha where I have written the last 3 postings. We will stay here and rest after the last 3 days travel and then head onto Udomxai (pronounced oo dom si).


We would recommend anyone travel to Yunnan Province, China. The transport systems work really well and things run on time and you get what you pay for!


Hostels tend to be more expensive than Chinese hotels but hostels are good places to get up to date information on places you want to go to next. Hostels also offer book trades (2 books for 1 of theirs!), internet, travel ticket services, tours and maps.


We are back at hot summer temperatures and it is taking some getting used to after the cool mountain areas!


As some of you may know, Lil had planned to teach in China. Before we left she contacted the EF organisation and they had changed their registration service to an online one. My previous registration with them was not continued. Each time they were contacted we were given a computer response and were unable to correspond with a person so gave up! Lil has been offered a job teaching banking in English in Kunming and private students in Jinghong! After meeting other teachers here and the large class sizes that they have we will continue travelling!

The sleeper train, Chengdu to Kunming, China

We caught our first Chinese train and it was a 22 hour sleeper that went from Chengdu to Kunming. We wanted to leave China before our visa expired so that we would not have problems when we apply for a visa when we enter from the east into China at a later stage.

The soft-sleeper has 4 berths and the lower is cheaper than the upper. This is probably because everyone sits on the lower while they are awake. The hard- sleeper has 6 berths and and is the same except is doesn't have a soft blanket covering the seat under the sheet. We thought the less snorers the better!

John in his Chinese slippers included with the sleeper. They supply, sheets, a pillow, and a quilt as well as a thermos of hot water.

We stocked up with goodies from the French supermarket chain- Carrefours- in Chengdu and had NZ cheese baguettes!
The lace covering on the headboard !

We had the room to ourselves until dark and the Chinese lady who slept with us seemed horrified to share with Westerners. She told everyone in the carriage of her plight so they all came and had a look at us. After some time she settled down and invited us to share her dinner of duck eggs and chicken legs and something else we couldn't identify. In the morning we invited her to share our meusli, bananas, and yoghurt but she declined and gestured that it would make her fat!

Chengdu- Yunnan, China

Chengdu smog: a shock after the clear mountains!

While travelling we discovered from other travellers that the visa we had got for China at the (Boten)Laos-China (Mohan) border was not extendible and that we had to return to the border we had entered. Thinking about it now, we were asked how long we wanted and where we would exit China from, maybe we should have made different choices. We really thought it was like all the other visas that are offered. The visa was unusual as it was on two sheets of paper and was in both our names so we have no China stamps in our passport at all!





We wanted to do a circular route around Yunnan but would have run out of time so John went online and booked a flight from Lijiang to Chengdu.



In Chengdu we stayed at a hostel that was advertised in the Lijiang hostel we had stayed at. It was an interesting place to stay to catch up with the travel news to Tibet. We had thought about going there too but rumour has it that some Americans burnt the Tibetan flag in protest that the Chinese want to build a highway up the Himalayas to carry the Olympic torch. The result of this is that travellers cannot travel overland into Tibet from China and must take an expensive flight! We could look at going there at a later date.





Chengdu has a Panda Breeding Centre and on a drizzly smoggy day we set off to see the Giant Panda and the Red Panda. There are 1000 panda worldwide!
We spent 3 nights in Chengdu and visited the Wenshu Temple and ate at the vegetarian restaurant there.
Lil is in a teahouse drinking green tea. It's like a bottomless cup as it gets refilled from a thermos of hot water. The locals meet at the tea houses-drink tea, play mah jong, eat snacks and catch up on the gossip. A nice place to relax!

Tiger Leaping Gorge-Yunnan, China

We left our gear at the hostel in Lijiang and packed our small day bags and caught a bus for 2 hours to Qiaotou to start a trek in the Tiger Leaping Gorge. It is one of the deepest gorges in China on the Yangtse river- almost 4,000 metres from the top of the mountains to the river below, and over 20 metres wide at its narrowest point.

We stayed at a Tibetan style Guest House along with about 30 other westerners all wanting to do the same walk. We got a map and up-to-date information on the trail and headed out early the next morning in the mist.

We stopped after 2 hours at a small Naxi -the local tribe- village for breakfast.

You can always have rice, eggs and noodles anywhere.

We had to climb up 900 metres and Lil made it with only 3 stops!

We spent a night at a guest house that Michael Pallin visited in one of his TV travel stories- it had a loo with a view! I'm sure it was cleaner for him than for us. We walked with Mette and Christine from Denmark on our final day. The green leafed plant was in the flower box behind them in this photo.

Lijiang, Yunnan Province, China

From our Guest House dining room we are able to look over the old city of Lijiang. The modern city has KFC, Pizza Hut, Jeans West etc. Lijiang was flattened by an earthquake in 1996 and has been rebuilt in the traditional manner and style. It is now a World Heritage Site so it is very popular with Chinese tourists. They outnumber the westerners!

On the top of the hill we visited a temple where these paving stones were in the courtyard. The Chinese character for bat is like the word for good luck and the circular pattern is the symbol for long life.
In a restaurant we had a cold drink and these girls in traditional costume danced for us.
The weather here has been mild and we are enjoying it. In the distance we can see a mountain with a little snow on top.

We have had a lot of problems with our email password since arriving in China and had to ring NZ ihug twice. We hope it doesn't happen again. We can now post on our blog but we cannot read it so please excuse us if we repeat anything as we can't look at what we have already posted.The hostel provides free internet. We are getting better at managing the programmes when all the instructions are in Chinese characters!

Stone Forest- Yunnan, China

From Kunming we caught a minibus to the Stone Forest Park. It is a huge area covered with large stones in a well laid out parklike setting.The guides dress in traditional clothes. The maps around the place are not very informative so you are encouraged to take a guide so you don't get lost.

We met two foreigners who had not taken a guide and were lost for 2 hours and found themselves going around in circles in the blazing sun! They were relieved to bump into us. We didn't take a guide but hooked on to the tail end of a Spanish speaking group from Spain. As we spoke English they didn't take any notice of us, so we got a free tour!

Dali - Yunnan Province, China

Moved on from Kunming to Dali. China is a real surprise for us. We had no expectations when we crossed the border but have found the cities very modern with good infrastructure, transport systems have been excellent, some of the motorways up with the best, accomodation good, food good and the locals friendly. Also very cheap, cheaper than Thailand and Laos. We would recommend Yunnan as a tourist destination for the adventurous with a phrasebook!

Old Dali was rebuilt in its former glory in 1998 and is a fabulous tourist city within the old city walls. The place has a lot of history with the area falling to Genghis Khan in the 13th century. Historians have found fragments of human teeth dating back 2.5 million years ago in this area. Talking of teeth, one of these photos shows a local dentist doing an extraction in the market place!

Most of the tourists are Chinese with just a few foreigners. As the Chinese are becoming more affluent they are really taking to local tourism. There are hordes of them. They have a leader in the front with a coloured flag for all to follow and a sherriff at the rear chasing along the stragglers.

Language is a bit of a problem for us. Lil's Chinese is getting better by the day and our Lonely Planet (LP) guide book is our " bible ". All of the cities, hotels, restaurants and attrations are written in the LP in Character, so we just show the book to the locals and they point us in the right direction. The teenagers are the best to ask for help as they sometimes practice their limited English on us.

So travelling is relatively easy and as Dali is around 1950 metres above sea level the temperatures are cooler than nearer the coast. Around a pleasant 25 Deg. during the day.

In the evenings the local Bai population come into the old City to sing and dance and entertain the crowds. There are a few photos of this attached. Above Dali is a paved walkway of 12 kms so took a chairlift to the start and a gondola down to the bottom. Had a great view of the lake where they use cormorant birds for fishing.

Kunming

Arrived in Kunming a couple of days ago and stayed at a place called 'The Hump' - named after the 1946 airlift of supplies from India to China over the Himalayas by the US Airforce. When we went to our room we found free earplugs! Turns out the rooms were in the middle of a bar and nightclub area. They assured us it would be quiet after 2.00am!

We lasted the night and moved out to Cloudlands Youth Hostel. They were full but we found a really nice hotel across the road and have been able to use restaurant and internet facilities at Cloudlands.

Kunming is the capital city of Yunnan Province with a population of four million. Most Chinese live in high rise appartments and most of the old ones have been pulled down and replaced with modern dwellings. There is so much construction under way in all of the country we have seen - buildings, roads, bridges and viaducts. China is so much more modern than we envisaged.

Arrived in Kunming on the weekend of International Children's Day so there were lots of activities around the city. There is a central plaza and lots of pedestrian streets and they were full on the weekend- full of locals, Chinese tourists, food vendors, musicians, kite flyers etc. - it was wonderful. The city has a fabulous bus system. The buses come along every few minutes and you can travel anywhere in the network for one yuan( about 20 cents ).

Have met lots of other travellers here at Cloudlands and will leave with lots of recommendations of places to stay etc. as we move on to Dali City, Lijiang and Tiger Leaping Gorge.

Kerri, look what we found!