A Million Cocks and a White Mosquito Net

Sabai dii

First of all, I want to thank everybody for your b-day congratulations, it’s very nice to get all of this attention

I’ve been traveling in northern laos for the last week, after Luang Prabang I headed north to a place called Mouang Ngoi.
It is accessible only by river, has no road and thus no motorized vehicles, no internet and electricity sometimes comes for a few hours in the evening.

It’s probably not new to all of you who grew up in a small village,
a kibbutz or so… so I will try to tell about with as much enthusiasm as I can so you can enjoy this too..

Village life, what would you expect to see?
Small traditional houses and bungalows on the river bank…
A small dirt street with a few shops and simple places to eat at…
People carrying goods from the boat landing using wheel-carts and their own backs…
All of that can be expected, though still what you see exceeds your expectations… at least it exceeded mine.

Pictures from the way to Moung Ngnoi:

View from the boat

View into the boat

I was amazed by the number of small creatures in the street… small children running around playing with stones and broken parts of ANYTHING they could find…
Chicken, Ducks, Gooses, Dogs and Cats… each followed by a highly disciplined row of tiny versions of themselves… running around everywhere… like a horde of mini-scavengers.
It’s an endless amount of unbearably cute tiny beings…
You can’t walk out to the street and not find yourself playing with some children or puppies… EVERY TIME!

Every couple of days I seem to find new puns about the “million elefants” part is laos’ name… This time it’s chicken! to be more precise and for those who would prefer this word: Cocks.
Laos – A Land of a million cocks.

First of all, I want to break the legend about cocks performing their infamous “koo-koo-ri-koo” scream at dawn… once and for all:
It’s a lie, these naive looking creatures are evil at heart,
they never shut up… you can hear their screams coming from all direction throughout the whole day.
What is right is that they MAKE you get up at dawn… because they start screaming at about 04:00AM… by dawn they break your spirit and you crawl out of bed.

Here is an especially large cock…
walking proudly down the main street

Some more pictures of village life…

Children seem to be much more adult in the village, they roam freely starting from quite a young age… I saw a tiny kid, maybe 3 years old – come out of his house, go to a shop, buy himself a sweet, go back petting a dog on the way, then he came back after a few minutes and paid! It was amazing to see his cool behavior… it was completely natural for him.

Luckily… I got a GREAT photo of him… I hope you like it:

The mountainous area behind Muang Ngoi is inhabited by different ethnic minorities that live in small villages… Unfortunately we did not get the chance to trek up to the villages because of a cash problem some of the guys had.
Here are pictures from the way to Ban Ou which is a small Kammu-Lao village – of which I don’t have any pictures

A cave’s entrance

You can imagine the beauty that a camera can’t catch…
Walking in golden rice fields, surrounded by jungle-overgrown mountains… on a perfect not-too-hot sunny day.

There is no way to overdo with attempting to explain the beauty of this place… but I will try to exemplify this with two photos:

Sunset from my bungalow:

And if we zoom in on it a little bit…
It looks like a pic from Disney’s Lion King… fantasy:

We went to try our pedaling skills on the great mekong, pedaled ourselves for about 300 meters upstream and were caught in quite a strong current… after a few minutes of full power pedaling I noticed that the ground isn’t moving at all… we were pedaling just hard enough to NOT MOVE – but not nearly enough to actually progress somewhere.
We landed on a small island in the middle of the river and proclaimed it our own because it isn’t inhabited… after a few hours we got visited by a pack of baby pigs… I still wonder how they got there

After enjoying doing nothing for my birthday, we went back to Luang Prabang.
Went to take a look at the Pak Ou Caves… turned out the cave is extremely ancient, people have been living there since the area was first occupied by homosepiens. In different time they were practicing different religious ceremonies there, starting from spirit worship through Hinduism and finally Buddhism. Today the cave contains hundreds of Buddha statues and a small stupa.

Now I am in Vang Vieng, this was once a small peaceful village…
Today it is a full time busy tourist town, every building is either a restaurant, an internet place or a guesthouse… or all in one.

People get re-addicted to series from back home…
There are pubs that play endless episodes of Family Guy, Simpsons, Friends and so on…

Fortunately, the landscape is beautiful! The valley is surrounded by mountains with sharp limestone formations sticking out of them.
I hope to get a motorbike, get out of town and explore the area…

Bonus picture – what you can do with some creativity and an unexploded bomb:

By the way… Laos is the most bombed country in history, during the Vietnam war – the US bombed the “Hoo Chi Ming Trail” (which is going from north to south Vietnam through laos)
with 2,000,000$ cost of explosives EVERY DAY for a few years in a row…. most unpleasant

That’s all for now,
A traditional ending to a post – sunset in Vang Vieng:

Merry Hanuka and Christmas to everybody
me.