Up the Mekong River to Thailand

We spent several days in Luang Prabang, relaxing, reading, going for long walks and eating delicious Laotian food. Chicken or vegetable coconut curry with sticky rice, fried noodles with veggies and tofu, glass noodle salad, and the fruit shakes were among our favorite foods. One morning we took a long early morning walk to the outskirts of town, passing the high school and university and some temples and continuing into the forests and fields beyond. It was early Saturday morning and we saw many families heading out to their patch of land to do weeding and collect fire wood. The people we passed seemed very friendly and humble, and the women wore colorful skirts. There were many kids and even some groups of teens going out to work.

The next day, we boarded a river boat to take the two day trip up the Mekong to Huay Sy, a town on the border of Thailand. Our wooden boat was about 100 feet long and maybe 15 feet wide with many rows of chairs, a roof for protection from sun and rain, a toilet, and living quarters for the captain and family in the back. Luckily the boat was not crowded and the weather took a break from the 90 degree plus weather we have been having, so it was a comfortable ride. About half of the 40 or so passengers were foreign travelers, almost all of them young people. The first day’s 10 hour trip was particularly beautiful, passing through mountainous forest and occasional cleared farmland and villages of houses on stilts with thatched roofs and without electricity. The river flow is pretty fast with some occasional light rapids that the boat struggled to overcome. There are many rock formations along the banks and some sticking out of the water that the captain had to avoid, but the young captain steered us skillfully up the river, which varied in width from about 50 to 150 yards wide, I would estimate.

We pulled into the town of Pak Bend around 6:30 pm as the sun was setting and stayed in a grimy hotel with shared bathrooms. The next day’s trip was almost as long and this boat had only wooden seats. We finally arrived in Huay Sy in the early evening and found a room for the night. The next morning, we took the quick ferry across the river to Thailand, and got on a bus to Chiang Rai, a small city where we spent the night.

Luang Prabang

We have been three days in quiet Luang Prabang, the holy city and ancient capital of the Laos kingdom. There are more than 30 amazing Buddhist temples here and many monks live and study at these places. You can see them in their bright orange or yellow robes there and sometimes walking around town. In the early morning, the local people offer them sticky rice in their baskets. Many young people, usually boys, spend a couple of years studying in the monasteries.

Yesterday evening I visited an English class held at one of these temples. I had met a young man at one of the internet places who contacted one of the teachers, a young man about 22 years old. The teacher invited me to visit the evening classes held on the grounds of one of the Buddhist monasteries. There were about 10 students between 10 and 15 years old. I taught part of the class. The lesson involved practicing expressions having to do with introductions, greetings and saying goodbye. We did some role play and it was fun. One of the students was a young monk.

Today a young man who works at our guest house gave me a ride on his motorbike to his evening English class. Again the teacher let me teach part of the class. It was a high beginning class and we worked on a dialogue that used the past tense to communicate personal information about one's background, how long they have been in living a place, what they have been studying, and what they are doing now. After I taught for about 40 minutes first answering personal questions and then going over a dialogue, the teacher took over. Not surprisingly, he spoke mostly Lao in communicating to his English class.

At this private school, the students pay the equivalent of about 40$ a year in tuition fees; the salaries are extremely low in Laos. My friend the hotel manger/clerk makes about $40 a month and has to work about 70 hours a week. Yet, his English skills are pretty good.

First days in Laos

China's phenomenal economic growth over the past 30 years is certainly evident in Jinhong, Kunming and other cities we have visited in Yunnan. This is not to say that there are nohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gift small towns and rural areas of poverty evident. Crossing over into Laos, one immediately sees a great contrast in the level of living. In the villages and small towns of Laos, the houses are generally made of wood and thatch with thatched or tin roofs, appearing more like shacks than real houses. Many of of these dwelling are without electricity and appear to have no furniture inside. The people live without consumer products for the most part, although cell phones and motorbikes are occasionally evident even in the rural areas. In Laos, one sees even more deforestation and examples of clear-cutting. Some areas we passed are totally cleared of the pristine rainforest that once dominated the area. However, there are still many beautiful rivers that we passed, and very often we saw children frolicking in the rivers and older people bathing.

Luang Nam Tha, a quiet provincial capital, lies in a wide, lush valley in northern Laos. We found a quiet, cheap guest house where we enjoyed staying for three days. One day we rented a motorbike and went on an excursion stopping at the teachers college outside of town. The college campus has a relaxed, peaceful atmosphere with many trees and green areas. Most of the students were away doing field work, but we talked with a few friendly English teachers. The college has 800 students and 76 teachers we were told. It is a publicly funded school, but the students must pay up to one million kip a year to attend (about $120 U.S. for tuition, room and board). The teachers told us they are in great need of some good teacher trainers and invited me to stay and help. We were tempted to stay, it is such a peaceful place and help is needed, but we are running out of time on this trip and I don't think we would last very long here in such an isolated place, so we declined the offer. However, it would make for a good teaching experience and if anyone wants contact information I have it.

Later that evening, I visited an adult English school in town. The classes were held in a dilapidated old building. I visited two classes with about 30 students in one and about 20 in the other class. Both the young women teachers used a lot of Lao in presenting and clarifying information. In the first class the students were using "New Interchange" book 3 from Cambridge Press.(1998). The teacher started asking the students what they had done over the Lao new year that had just been celebrated. She went around the room and each student had to say something. The answers ranged from "I cleaned my house" to "I drank a lot of beer". The teacher often used Lao to explain what had been said or to add something, and I noticed she often used the present tense instead of the appropriate past form. After this exercise, the teacher played a listening tape and worked with the whole class to answer the questions in the book. After that, she had the students check an article in their book about the "Ghosts of Silver Town Colorado". Then, she asked me to come forward and read the article to the class which I did, stopping to ask questions about the vocabulary. Next, she asked me to come up and had the students ask me vocabulary or pronunciation questions and asked me to write the words on the board as I responded to their question.

Later I observed another class for about 40 minutes. This class used a book that focused on training for employment with a government or non-profit agency. The book includes grammar points, reading exercises, and some basic information on the countries of Southeast Asia.

Southern Yunnan and into Laos

Coming back from Tiger Leaping Gorge and Shangrila, we stayed a few more days in Lijiang and Dali, two very old cities that we like very much. In Dali, we went on a long day hike again on Cangshan Mountain and we stayed at our favorite hotel, the Yinyuan. The family that runs this hotel is extremely helpful and friendly and they make us feel like family. One day, we asked the older man (about my age - we think he and his wife might be the owners but are not sure) for directions to get to one of the trailheads on the mountain. He said something in Mandarin that I interpreted as offering to give us a ride to the trailhead tomorrow morning. The next morning, when it came time to go, he and his wife accompanied us. We were expecting a ride in his tiny mini-van but instead we went on foot; they guided us to a side road leading up the hill towards the mountain that overlooks Dali. Together we walked for about 40 minutes until reaching the trailhead. There we said goodbye, paid our entrance fees to the soldiers and registered in the book, and were on our way up the steep mountain. It is hard to communicate since my Mandarin is so limited and Ana knows only a few words, but sign language does help.

From Dali we took a short flight down to the city of Jinhong in the Xishang Banna region of China. Xishang Banna is a tropical area of China known for its rainforests and many "minority peoples". It was the last day of the "water festival" when we arrived in Jinhong, and the bus from the airport let us off in the city center where pitched water battles raged up and down the streets. There were thousands of people with plastic pans of water and large squirt guns getting each other wet. There were people riding by on pick up trucks trying to douse bystanders with water. The police were there standing by bu did nothing to interfere in the fun-making. Of course, as tired foreign tourists carrying backpacks and looking for a hotel to stay, we were not too amused as we also were at times the victims of this splashing. At least the weather was really hot. April is the hottest time of the year here, right before the rainy season begins.

We stayed a couple of days in Jinhong, taking one day for an excursion to a town that seemed really dirty to us. We took the ferry across the Mekong and walked along the paved road along the river, but never found the kind of trail off into the wilds we were looking for.

Leaving Jinhong the next day, we took a 5 hour bus trip to the Laos border, crossed the border, and continued on to the Northern Laos town of Luang Nham Tha. From Jinhong to the border, it was interesting to observe the beautiful, skillfully engineered road we were on. The scenery was very green and beautiful, but all the deforestation and clear-cutting was quite disturbing, too. There was the annual spring burning going on and the air smelled smoky and our eyes stung at times. Once in Laos,you notice quite a change as the housing is poorer and the roads often in bad shape; also, the ugly deforestation was much worse with large areas of clear-cutting evident. I have read that foreign companies are responsible for this devastation. I asked a couple of Laotians on the bus about it, and one told me China was responsible and the other said that the local farmers burn down the forests to clear land for planting on the hillsides. I am sure the Laotian government gets a cut of the profits of the foreign companies for urgently needed funds, but one really has to question the wisdom of allowing this. You see many farming families left to live in areas that seem unable to sustain farming after the clear-cutting, and the inevitable erosion that follows. It is sad to see only small pockets of pristine wilderness among vast areas of charred hillsides.

Tiger Leaping Gorge and other Yunnan adventures

Now only a 5 hour bus ride from Kunming by good roads, Dali was once the capital of an independent Yunnan state in the 17th century. This is a region where you see many of the minority people dressed in distinctive, colorful clothing. The old city is surrounded by thick walls and has several impressive gates which one must go through to enter. There are numerous old buildings, typical Asian styled structures. Inside the gates is an area cut off from vehicle traffic, so it makes it nice to walk around. There are many tourist shops selling textiles, jewelry, silver and other items, and the streets are filled with mainly Chinese or Asian tourists.

Dali is located by a beautiful Lake Tahoe sized lake and surrounded by many small villages and very high mountains (with some snow in the upper reaches) that tower over the lake. One day we walked towards the lake passing through fields of onions, lettuce, cabbage, and other types of vegetables and workers loading produce onto a truck. Finally, we came to a village that had very narrow streets, very old buildings and mainly older people relaxing or working. Another day, we took a cable car high into the snow capped mountains and walked about 10 miles passing spectacular scenery with deep gorges and waterfalls. We stopped at a little shack along the trail and ate delicious noodles and vegetables.

After three days in Dali, we took the bus a few hours north to visit Lijiang, another prime tourist destination located within 10 miles of the 18,000 foot snowy Jade Mountain. Lijiang, as many Chinese cities, has a new city and an old city. The very picturesque old city is quite large with narrow cobblestone streets, streams with clear, cold water running alongside the streets, stone bridges and houses with tiled roofs.

After a couple of days in Lijiang to wait out the rainy weather, we took a two hour early morning ride to the starting point of our planned trek through Tiger Leaping Gorge. We hooked up with a young man from Washington state who is living in northeast China studying Mandarin. The three of us hiked all day, first passing green terraced farmland along the Yangze River, passing a small Naxi village and then up over a steep pass called the 28 bends. It was very strenuous but the views of the deep gorge with snow capped glacial mountains rising almost vertically more than two miles practically straight up from the jade colored Yangze river below made it worthwhile. Sometimes we passed people shepherding many goats. In the late afternoon we arrived at a guest house perched on the steep mountain high above the river below. We spent the night there and continued our walk the next morning another until we arrived at another guest house, where we spent the second night in the gorge. In the afternoon we hiked down to the roaring river about two thousand feet below and then back up to our guest house. The following day we took a spectacular day hike and stayed another night at Tina's guest house. The following day, we took a van out of the gorge and switched to another to get up to Shangrila, a city about two hours up from the gorge.

Located at 10,700 feet elevation, Zhongdien (renamed Shangrila to attract tourists) is populated mainly by Tibetan people. It is still winter here; the nights are below freezing and the trees are bare and the ground brown colored. The old city has narrow cobblestone streets like Lijiang, but the roofs are mainly made of wood instead of stone tiles. There are several interesting Tibetan style temples in the vicinity. On the road to Shangrila we passed a small town and observed people preparing the fields for cultivation and doing other tasks. The buildings are often large Two or three storied structures with wooden tiled roofs.