We arrived at Luang Namtha after, you guessed it, a long crammed 7 hour bus ride – complete with all the usual suspects… an overcrowded, past-capacity bus, no A/C, economy-minus leg room, axle-breaking pot holes, that one Lao dude that loudly yells into his phone on an full-of-angry-passengers bus, (I can’t tell if I’m disappointed or impressed by his lack of social awareness) oh yeah, and passengers casually vomiting, sometimes into a bag, sometimes onto the floor (depending on their aim and again, social awareness). The roads in Laos are bad.
Let’s cut to it. First day: we rented a scooter and wandered out into the countryside to take in the views and catch glimpses of small villages, living happily along the sides of the road.
The people of Laos are incredible happy, it’s easy to forget how poor of a country Laos is – everyone is smiling, seems content with their lives and don’t seem to seek happiness from materialistic goods. The priority is on health, community and happiness. Malnutrition is nonexistant, kids are laughing and playing in the streets and mothers are busy cooking up local foods sourced from the jungle. The social system just works.
With a dash of over-optimistic, bite-off-more-than-we-can-chew attitude, we gathered the confidence to book/commit ourselves to a 4 day trek throughout Nam Tha National Park. We booked with Forest Laos Retreat, a company sporting the best reputation in town, run by a crazy adventurer dude from Holland who had a “sure, you can totally do this ridiculously gnarly 4-day trek just show me the money” mentality. We found ourselves picking our own adventure, one filled with a gnarly mountain hike that no other tourist had done since December 2016, long days of kayaking and three full nights of jungle sleeping. Instead of rolling his eyes or trying to persuade us otherwise, the boss smiled and made the arrangements. Most tourists book 1 or 2 day adventures, perhaps the crazed adventurer would opt for a third day.. but 4 day? Yeah right. The plus side of booking a 4 day adventure was that no other tourist signed up, which meant that we were essentially on a private tour.
The following morning we showed up, bright and early, ready to go… but mostly still questioning what we had signed up for. Did we overstep our abilities? Did I regret carrying Emily’s cans of espresso up ridiculously steep, difficult trails? Did we take on the all-mighty king cobra deep in the jungle? Did we die? Well friends… read on to find out.
Day 1: Walking into spider webs and touching weird, prickly jungle-leafy stuff.
Morning numero uno: we meet our guide, who’s name literally was (and actually I hope you read this sentence more than any other sentence, otherwise this blog might get weird) Porn. Yeah, you read that right, his name was Porn. After meeting Porn (it’s a little weird typing that three times in the last minute), we drove to a local giant market to pick up some ingredients for lunch.
While Emily and I are bathing in our allowance of 15 minutes of free time/recess, Porn was busy collecting rice cooked in banana leaves, delicious fried pork, peanut sauce and papaya salad – all for less money than Emily and I would have spent on two coffees at a touristy main-street restaurant. With recess/passing period over, we loaded back up into truck.
Eventually we made it to the drop off point to begin hiking… I say “eventually” because along the way we hit a cow that galloped its way onto the middle of the road from a cliff, but that’s not important. Cow was fine. Car was fine. We begin hiking through local farm rice paddies, on tiny access trails that wander further and further up the hill, deep into the jungle. When asked whether local farmers are okay with trekkers moving through their lands, Porn told us to hike quickly and to keep a low profile. We hike for a few hours on seemingly random, super steep jungle trails that look more like tiger migration routes before making it to our lunch spot. Porn broke out the goods from the morning market and we feasted on an incredibly delicious, and nutritious (surprise, surprise) lunch.
One of our key insights from this journey was that bamboo is incredibly useful and macheting any bamboo tree you desire is accepted and encouraged. Porn chopped down an entire bamboo tree and made us three some fresh chopsticks to help with lunch. Impressive.
We hike for a few more hours, past a nest of angry swarming bees that have been known to attack large groups of trekkers (again, advice: move quickly and keep a low profile) before reaching a small village of 200 people, situated on the banks of the river. Our location for night one.
We bathed in the river, walked around the lively town, filled with smiling kids and trotting pigs, ate dinner with Porn and struggled to keep a tiny fire alive (I really don’t get why I’m so bad with fires) before settling down in a small cozy cabin for the night.
Day 2: Lazily Kayakin’ + Fisherman Camp Chillin’
Our second day started better than the first, mostly because there weren’t any cars to hit cows with, but also because we were fed a delicious breakfast. It turned out that Porn was a talented chef, adept at picking things (or machete-ing, call it what you want) in the jungle and converting them into delicious meals.
[Some kind of cooking bag.. I think?]
We had a real Gordon Ramsey meets Bear Grylls on our hands. A delicious omlette with fresh veggies and local pork and sticky rice cooked in bamboo leaves with homemade chili paste, made from fresh picked chilies and an interesting sour mystery fruit I can’t even attempt to recall correctly. Rice and chili paste, we found out, would become an intergral part of our daily meal for the following three days, so it was really good that we liked it and that I didn’t further inquire about the mystery fruit.
Day two was our easiest day of the trek, with the goal of making it to the Fisherman Camp, only a few hours down river – seriously, all we had to do was sit in the kayak. Emily and I split into two seperate kayaks, Emily with Porn, myself with an additional guide that came along for the day. After a strenuous day of trekking, I’d like to emphasize how easy of a day this was. I would occasionally try to paddle the kayak before being told by the guide to stop paddling. I would also try to help set up a river-wide fishing net, strung between the two kayaks as we floated down river, before being semi-scolded by the guide (in local language) for doing it wrong. So Emily, myself, and our two babysitters sat and lazily floated down river.
Fisherman camp was a lovely little spot, situated in a small private tree grove alongside the river – complete with all the usual desirable characteristics of quality jungle accommodation: bamboo structure cot beds, water spouts, ghetto cooking facilities, a bathroom which I just won’t even get into and palm-sized, nightmare-inducing spiders. It gets dark, like really dark, at 6:30 in the jungle, meaning dinner and bedtime followed shortly thereafter.
Day 3: More kayaking & gnarly water-fetching
Day three included more quality time on the river. Here’s the thing about kayaking, it’s easy when the river has a natural gradient that makes it easy to lazily float down stream. Hell, I would even call it enjoyable. It, however, is a real pain in the ass when the river is big enough to move at glacial pace. Without explaining the entire water ecosystem of Nam Tha National Park, I’ll just say that we connected from the smaller jungle river to the bigger main river. The bigger main river flowed at glacial pace, which meant that our arms were ridiculously sore from paddling. Eventually, we make it to a tiny village alongside the river – our dropoff spot for the third segment of our journey, which I like to affectionately refer to as incredibly-gnarly-bootcamp-jungle-hike.
The goal was to trek through the thick jungle up to a epic cabin perched on the peak of the tallest mountain in the park, complete with stunning 360 degree views. We met up with two local guides that helped Porn and us reach the summit.
Difficult and gnarly jungle mountaineering, complete with machete rampages from all guides, that’s how I would describe our experience. Oh yeah, and sweaty. We did eventually make it to the peak viewpoint and to the cabin nestled directly below. And for the record the peak did have a nice, 360 degree panoramic view… as long as you could imagine it through the dense fog and impenetrable clouds that surrounded the peak.
I guess we came at the wrong time of the year, but hey – it’s about the journey, not the destination, right? The trickiest logistic difficulty in building a cabin at the top of the peak is finding water to cook with/drink. It was slim pickings. We learned that a big part of the reason that the two local guides came up with us is so that they could fetch us water, which was a super gnarly 45 minute per way trek down 3-400 meters of the mountain.
[When’s the last time you saw a web like this on your way to drinking water?]
Yearning for adventure and feeling the need to help, we tagged along…and got lost along the way, before machete-ing our way to the tiniest water stream/spout and lugging it all the way back up to camp. Our two guides and us kept laughing and smiling about how gnarly the water trek was, before meeting back up with Chef Porn at the cabin. We capped off our night with BeerLaos and LaoLao, the local whiskey (incredibly strong and also a great sleep-aide).
Day 4: Machetes & Tumbling down hills
The trek back down from the cabin to the village was gnarly. Like, probably-the-craziest-hiking-in-my-entire-life gnarly. We went down a different path than we came up and opted for the secret shortcut path, which would cut an hour off our estimated 6 hours of trek time. I only realize this in hindsight, but it now makes sense to me that a shortcut down a mountain means you’re going to take a steeper way down than the long, less steep way around. That’s extactly what we did. More steeeeeeep hiking, more communal eating around prepared vegetables placed on bamboo leaves, more avoiding spiky and prickly things, more… you guessed it, machete-ing.
As mentioned, we found out that no other tourist had stayed in the cabin since last December, and no one had taken the secret shortcut since long before that. This meant that the hiking process included alot of search and discovery. Most of the time it felt like we were lost. Luckily, with Porn on our side, we slashed our way through the forest, throwing ourselves down the steepest, muddiest jungle hillsides I can possibly fathom, before finally reaching the river at the bottom.
We made it. We survived some of the craziest, smile-inducing adventuring I’ve ever done in my life. We drove in the back of a pick up truck towards town for an hour, said our goodbyes, before swiftly and desperately taking showers/drinking ice cold BeerLao.
Also, we didn’t die.
LUANG NAMTHA > NONG KHIAW