1-19-07

I've spent the last few days in a small village in Northern Laos called Muang Noi. It took a 4 hour bus ride and over an hour slow boat ride but it was worth it, even when we had to get out of the boat and walk because the river was too low. Muang Noi is amazing, there are guest houses everywhere and there are "restaurants" but the village still feels like a village, not some tourist trap with some old temples thrown in. In fact there was only one temple and it didn't look like a temple at all, I would have completely missed it if I hadn't been woken up in the mornings by their bell and the sound of monks chanting, that clued me in.The villagers go about daily life, drying out swamp grass to eat, reforging old knives and doing what villagers generally do.

Just outside the Muang Noi are roads that lead to other villages, rice paddies and water buffalo that don't really care about anything other than eating dried out rice stalks. However, one road led us to a cave ($.50 admission) which was about the coolest thing ever. The first day we hiked in a ways until we realized we needed our torches (flashlights) to go any further. I just happened to have mine and so the five of us waded through shoulder-high water as far back as we could go. But we didn't get to the end and knew that there was still a lot to go. So the next day we all came back (each of us carrying at least one torch) and we spent a few hours exploring every bit of that damned cave, from the stalactites and stalagmites to the bats and all the way back till we found the source of the river and some graffiti that said "HELP! 10-7-2006" The whole time we were a little worried about cave-ins and getting lost since none of us had ever been that far inside a cave. We were always asking ourselves "Farther? Do we go farther?" luckily we did keep going and though my camera lens clouded up from the condensation I was still able to get a few pictures. It was the first time I'd ever gone back that far in a cave, let alone without a guide or anyone else who knew what they hell they were doing. And why did I do this? Risk being trapped if there was an earthquake? Cause I walk up volcanoes barefoot! That's why! Am I right? Only for the men!

The days before the cave exploration a few of us decided to visit another village in the hopes that it would be even more rural than Muang Noi. Well, we found two other villages and they were both more rural. The first one overlooked a dried up rice paddy and a couple signs that pointed to guest houses and restaurants. We met a few French people at the village while drinking tea, they'd been there for 10 days and so knew a lot about the area but hadn't really explored any of it. They told us about the white arrows in the cave that showed the way back out if you got lost. After we had our Laos Tea we walked to another village where we had some food, I was trying to find betel nut but the closest thing I could find was raw dried meat from these little dear that they hunt. So I had that instead, delicious! On the way back we ran into a couple of locals who were carrying matchlock rifles. I didn't know working matchlocks still existed, let alone were being used. They locals were very shy about letting us see them though, so I wasn't able to get a picture. Maybe wikipedia can help. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchlock



The second to last night in Muang Noi I was talking to the girl who runs the guest house I was staying at. I was asking how much it would be to buy a duck because Muang Noi has so many ducks and you can never buy them in the restaurants because there is no dependable refrigeration. So Huan started telling me how Laos people do this wonderful thing with Duck's blood, making a soup out of it or something. Of course the only way to get blood out of a duck is to kill it so we eventually found a duck that wasn't too expensive. Anyway, the spare you gory details we get all the blood out of the duck and then her family barbecues it and makes soup of of some of the meat and organs. Luckily I was able to snag some of the liver and roast it for Doug and myself, island style. It's the closest to foie groe I've gotten yet. It turns out the duck meat was very tough, Huan kept laughing at how hard it was, she said the duck must have been 10 years old, but then again she's crazy. The soup was a little better but I was so dis-heartened with the tough duck meat that I just drank the blood, it's good with bear Lao. Just kidding, this picture was Doug's idea. We just added some of the blood to our soup the same way I'd had it in Chiang Mai. This set off Huan again, laughing and pointing at us. It turns out Laos people don't actually add the blood to the soup, they make something else out of it entirely. Of course they never told us any of this but it didn't matter because my soup tasted much better.