Andrej and Karen Brummer

The adventures of the Brummers

Monthly Archives: January 2011

Luang Namtha by motorbike

We again decided to spend some time biking around Luang Namtha province.  And, even though we had decided we wouldn’t go back to Muang Sing this time, the temptation was too hard to resist!  We absolutely love riding around on these deserted roads, usually the only other traffic is animals or other bikes, so it makes a very relaxing adventure.  We firstly went to visit Alack again, to help him with his English manual that he is writing for his school, plus explored some more of the old town of Luang Namtha.  We were really lucky to stumble across a Black Tai tribal dance rehearsal for an upcoming festival.  We managed to get lost on the many backroads too!  We were amazed to find people who even 5 minutes out of the old town had not seen tourists before.

We stopped heaps of times again, the views of the National Park are too awesome not to stop and see properly.  We lingered for ages at the site we want our house to be and just generally enjoyed the views and serenity of the park and roads.  At one point we were surprised to see an elderly Akha woman who was obviously really fit and healthy ‘mowing’ the grass verge on the side of the road with a machete!

After we had lunch at our favourite rice paddy restaurant, we found Elu! It was really exciting because the past few weeks we have heard so much about her and her daughter’s new baby.

It was nice to see the newly planted rice paddies turning green again, and we noticed that there seems to be 3 different methods for planting rice. We aren’t sure if this is because of the kind of rice, or just different ways of doing it.  It seems either the field is cleared and the new rice is planted, or the old, golden plants are left in the ground and the new rice is just planted around it, or, they plant one field thickly with rice and then when the plants are about 10cm high they transplant them, spacing them out, in the other nearby fields.

So once again we have really enjoyed exploring the remote areas of Luang Namtha and have again been touched by the kindness of the people.  It is hard to ride past anyone without being offered food, or a drink, or frantic waving and huge smiles.  We’ve probably said it before; Luang Namtha is a very special place. Our photos are here.

Kayaking the Nam Ha river

In true Lao style, Thong phoned us as about 8pm the night before he had organised kayaking for us to tell us about it.  At first we explained to him that we were really keen to go kayaking with him in a day or two, and we already had plans for the next day…. then he told us that he had already booked the tuk tuk, invited his friends to come with us, and bought all of the food for the picnic lunch.  So, we altered our plans and prepared for a day of kayaking the next day.

The Nam Ha river was even more beautiful than we imagined – definitely the most beautiful river kayaking we have ever done.  The pristine protected forest in the National Protected Area lining the rivers edge was so diverse and the tiny villages dotting the shore were really interesting for us to see.  We kayaked with Thong, Paet, and Paet’s aunt and her friend.  Also joining us for lunch were the tuk-tuk driver, his wife and child (also Thong’s friends).

We were really surprised at how many rapids there were in the river and by the time we arrived at the confluence of the Nam Ha and Nam Tha rivers we were pleasantly drenched.  After the bigger rapids we had to shovel heaps of water out of the kayak.  We think it would be a pretty hard core river trip in wet season!

The picnic lunch was amazing, Paet stopped along the way to get some fresh river weed, plus they had heaps of salad ingredients from both the market and the forest and made one of the best salads ever.  Plus fresh sticky rice (random fact:  the stickier sticky rice is, the more recently it was harvested.  When your sticky rice falls apart it is getting old!) and heaps of fresh fish cooked over the open fire as well as 3 different kinds of chilli – fresh, dried with salt, and freshly made shrimp paste chilli sauce.

After the picnic we kayaked to the nearby Khmu village to catch our tuk tuk back to town.  The kids there were gorgeous and many of them asked if we would take their photos.  It was an awesome day and we are so glad that we got to see Thong’s own area of the river.  Our photos are here.

Out and about in Luang Namtha

Our first couple of weeks back in Luang Namtha have been really good.  We have spent quite a bit of time around the river this time, exploring the walking tracks and getting lost, finding the newly planted rice fields and generally seeing the local life outside of the town.  It’s been interesting and amazing to think that there is still so much of Luang Namtha that we haven’t seen yet.  The Akha’s have been excited to have us back and each day they run up to us and fill us in on which of them is staying in town, going to Muang Sing, going to meet Elu (Elu is the first Akha that befriended us and her daughter has just had a baby so she is staying in Muang Sing to look after her) etc etc.  And of course all of that is communicated with hand gestures!  It’s funny to think that they seem to find it really important to keep us updated with their movements – as though we will not cope in town if we don’t know where they are.  It’s really cute though and they seem to enjoy it so all good.

After we had been in town a few days we got invited to the wedding of the sister of the first guy that we did the sign in English for last time (are you confused?).  Thong took us there and it was kind of cool being at a wedding with hundreds of Lao’s and being the novelty white people.  We also met up again with Dikla (the Israeli girl we spent time with in Cat Ba Island) and so invited her to the wedding aswell.  It was interesting to see – basically there are heaps of tables all stocked up with bowls of food and Beer Lao, when you arrive you just sit at any table and the food bowls and Beer Lao keep getting refilled all night.  So even when you leave the table, the food bowls are overflowing.  It made us laugh when half way through the night Beer Lao Truck pulled up at the wedding and all the males at the wedding rushed to unload the truck and re-stock the wedding supplies.  (As a side note:  did we mention that most towns have a Beer Lao House which supplies the whole town with crates of Beer Lao – literally a 2 storey house where the entire bottom storey is filled with Beer Lao and the family live upstairs?  Beer Lao Truck for each town belongs to that specific house.)  The wedding dancing consists of each couple walking in a circle and moving their hands.  Not really dancing as we know it but pretty fun anyway.  We then also got invited to the wedding after party the next day – this was a real honour because there were only 20 or so people at that – only family and Thong and us.

We also went to visit Alack again, (remember the dude we were helping with his English from last time?) we went to his house for lunch one day and he invited us to his graduation the next day.  So we visited his school to attend his graduation from English teachers college and it turned out to be a really special day.  The new English teachers all wanted to talk to us, because the person teaching them English was Lao so it seemed there was a fair amount of grammar etc that was lost in translation.  The school principal came out to meet us and said that we were the first westerners to ever visit the school and the school was very honoured to have us as their guests.  We were basically treated like royalty and they insisted we stay for lunch, homemade Khao Phoun (local noodle soup similar to Khao Soy).  We were shown the library with it’s meagre collection of books and promised to bring more books for the school next time we visit. We found it really interesting that Alack was writing the school curriculum for English – an actual reference book that the school will use going forward.  We are going to correct all of his English in the book so that they have a guide book which actually makes sense in English.  Also interesting is that the school has it’s own rice fields, which both students and teachers plant and harvest the rice twice a year; both for the school to eat, and to raise money for the school.

Other than that we have been spending a lot of time with Thong, Paet and Mona (mainly eating Paet’s amazing cooking!) and were lucky to fluke being in town for Lao Presidents Day which meant that for the first time ever, we saw our temple all lit up and finally realised that the lights draped around it are actually used sometimes.  The ‘temple guy’ has befriended us also, now that he realises that we are the crazy falang that are up there twice a day most days, although he doesn’t speak so when we told him our names he just pointed at himself and then pointed at the temple.  He has started charging other falang to take photos but always just wai’s and smiles at us.  In any case he thinks it’s a huge laugh that he sees us all the time so at least we are keeping him amused.  Our photos of the past couple of weeks are here.

This is more like it!

View our location map in Muang Khua

Our welcome back into Laos was awesome.  Kids standing on the side of the road waving at us with huge smiles, everyone saying ‘Sabaidee’ and just general friendliness made us feel right at home.  After a few hours on the bus on the Vietnamese side of the border, we crossed into Lao and from that point on everything got better.  The landscapes, the people, the smiles, everything is just better in Lao.  We had to drive through 4 rivers to get to Muang Khua, and when we did get here we had to cross the biggest river (the Nam Ou river which we travelled from Nong Kiaw to Luang Prabang further south on our first visit to Laos) in a boat and then walk up into the town.

Muang Khua seems like any other typical Lao town that we’ve been in.  Within a few hours of arriving we had managed to exchange currency with a Lao family in their house, and then crossed the suspension bridge into the local village and got invited to have Lao-Lao rice whisky with some guys who had decided that right then was a good time to celebrate the 2011 New Year.  Many Lao-Lao’s later we went back into town with some American guys Sam and John and had a delicious dinner of Lao food which is just 1000 times nicer than Vietnamese food.

We spent the next day chilling out on the river’s edge, walking into the forest and sitting on the balcony of our guesthouse admiring the mountains.  Dre also watched a freshly shot Muntjac deer be prepared for cooking and then cooked over the open fire while Karen decided the mountains and river were more enticing to look at than the Muntjac.  The photos of the Muntjac are in a separate album here (so you don’t have to look if you don’t want to!).  All of our other photos from Muang Khua and our journey there are here.

Then we prepared for another day on the bus – first stop Oudomaxi and then on to Luang Namtha.  Thong excitedly met us at the bus stop in Luang Namtha and informed us his wife had cooked dinner for us, so we had another awesome night with Paet’s cooking and Paet, Thong and their baby daughter Mona’s company.  We’re so glad to be back here in Luang Namtha!

Escape from Vietnam

View our location map in Dien Bien Phu

Finally we have found somewhere in Vietnam where people smile back at us, kids wave and giggle when they see us, and people are nice to us!  Dien Bien Phu has been a refreshing and awesome way to finish our time in Vietnam.  Thankfully there aren’t any other tourists here so the locals treat us like normal people instead of ATM’s.

We spent some time wandering around the local market, went to see the ‘Eiffel Tower’ and also climbed up heaps of stairs to the town monument to get really nice views over the town, rice fields and mountains.

Now we will get the bus to Muang Khua in Laos before heading back to Luang Namtha.  We can’t wait!

The above post was written while we were in Dien Bien Phu and our internet wasn’t good enough to publish it…. As if we needed more evidence that it was a good idea to leave Vietnam, 3 times during the day/evening at Dien Bien Phu we told 3 different receptionists at our hotel that we would be leaving at 5am the following morning so we wanted to get our passports back that night.  All of them assured us that would be no problem, we could collect our passports at 10pm or just before 5am when we were due to leave.  Luckily, at 10pm Dre went and retrieved our passports.  The next morning at 5am we went to check out and the entire place was deserted.  No receptionist to be found, no security guard, we couldn’t find a single person.  This would have been OK if we weren’t locked into the grounds of the hotel!  We walked around the grounds trying to find a way out and the big gate at the entrance had 3 massive padlocks.  Eventually we realised that the only way out was to scale the fence keeping us in – it was either that or be stranded in Dien Bien Phu for another day.  So we literally had to escape our hotel.  We broke out over the filthy fence and ended up with a fair bit of black dirt on us. We didn’t care though, we practically ran to the bus station and jumped on the bus that would lead us back to the safe haven of Laos.

Totally addicted to Laos

It would seem that we can’t stay away from Laos for too long.  We have spent the past month longing for several things in Laos; the amazing, kind, gentle, friendly people, the delicious food, walking down any street and being greeted with smiles and ‘Sabaidee!’, and just the general laidback-ness of the place.

Yesterday we spent the day out on the water on another gorgeous cruise through Ha Long Bay, which was totally amazing (and cloudy and freezing!).  On our arrival back in Hanoi we both felt relieved at our decision made a couple of days ago that we are now ready to leave this place.  We are sad to say that with a few exceptions, the local people we have encountered here in Vietnam have really lessened our enjoyment here and we’ve spent the past month listening to horror stories from other travellers about their Vietnam travels.  In fact, the only people we have met that are enjoying their time here are on 2 or 3 week holidays (any holiday is good when it’s a quick break from your normal routine, right?) – no one who is travelling long term has expressed positive feelings about this place, sadly.  At first we were very reluctant to listen to these reports, but as time has gone on, we have realised that for everyone to have the same stories there must be some truth in them.  One girl we met even said that last time she came here 2 years ago it was one of her favourite countries, and this time she has been shocked by the people and scams here and is really disappointed at how much it seems to have changed  (we heard this same story from someone else who had been here 4 years ago).

It is such a shame for a place with so much natural beauty to have this ruined by the behaviour of some of it’s people.  Everyone including our Vietnamese friends told us that Cat Ba island is the most laid back place in all of Vietnam (a few people also recommended the Central Highlands) and although up until a few days ago our intention was to travel south down the country to see for ourselves, we too have had our share of unfortunate Vietnamese adventures so we’ve decided to get out of here.  We are back in Hanoi now and today we fly to Dien Bien Phu on the Laos border, and tomorrow we will begin our overland trek back into our Asian homeland.  From what we’ve heard hopefully Dien Bien Phu will be a nice way to leave Vietnam on a high note!

As soon as we made the decision to follow our hearts and go back to Laos we have both been really excited, so that’s a sure sign that it’s the right thing to do.  We have really enjoyed the beauty of Cat Ba and it’s surrounding bays, but probably for every awesome, friendly local person we have met we’ve probably met 5 that just want to scam us by selling us something that is not real (for example, most of the boats to Bai Tu Long bay actually just go into Halong, plus many, many more stories like that!).

So as much as we hate to say it, it seems that either Vietnam has changed a lot in the past year or two, or maybe we’ve just had bad luck, but either way, this country for us has not been what we hoped for.  We’ve had heaps of fun here and seen some amazing things – Ha Long really is up there with things you must see in your lifetime – but we’ve also had heaps of frustration.  Who needs that when you can just be in places that are fun?

Last day in Cat Ba

We were very lucky on our last day to be given some advice from our favourite dinner guy “Little Man” to walk up to the helicopter landing pad from WW2.  Apart from it being a grey day, it turned out one of the best things we done in our entire 2.5 weeks here.  We had extensive views over Lan Ha, Ha Long and Cat Ba bays which was so beautiful!

It made us comment to each other yet again about how there seems to be Vietnam, and then Vietnam which the locals think the tourists want to see.  This particular walk is only about 30 minutes from the centre of town and is totally spectacular, but it’s not advertised anywhere at all!  We only found out because Little Man had walked up there himself and recommended it, which is crazy since it’s pretty much the coolest thing we’ve done on the island (apart from the Ha Long cruise).

The same goes for food.  Every day we see Vietnamese eating amazing looking foods, with many vegetables and fish, but you just cannot order that stuff on menus.  They have a very limited range of Vietnamese food that some powers that be must have decided foreigners would like and it is very much foreigner food.   In light of that, we were estatic when Mr Tuan, our hotel manager invited us to dinner with him and the hotel owner for our last night, since we had already stayed with them for 18 nights so they wanted us to have a farewell dinner.  Real food!  How exciting.  In every place we’ve been in Vietnam there are always a few people in town that go out of their way for tourists and try to make up for all the other people who are scamming everyone.  Mr Tuan is definitely one of them and we have been so lucky to stay with him and have him look after us.  When we arrived for dinner, which was an awesome, delicious fresh fish and vegetable hot pot, Mr Tuan also brought out a bottle of french wine for us.  We were pretty pleased about this, and then when it progressed onto honey liquer shots we just went along with it.  Before we knew it we were all having a great time and lets just say the restaurant was very vocal with the four of us laughing and talking.  It was a really good night and made us feel good about having been on Cat Ba for so long.  Vietnam really does have some amazing people and the views here are definitely worth seeing in everyones lifetime!  Our photos of our last day in Cat Ba are here.

Happy New Year!

The past week or so on Cat Ba island has seen us celebrating a fair bit!  We have accidentally become sort of like travel advisors for other distraught travellers who have made it through the gaunlet to Cat Ba.  As we mentioned before we came here via Halong Bay so were very lucky – it seems the stories of why not to come via public transport were true and heaps of people arrive here in not-so-happy states.  The upside of this for us is that we have made quite a few friends here!

We have spent a lot of time on the beaches, and coastal cliff walkway and have also motorbiked around the island and visited the national park again also.  We really have been very lucky to stay here for a couple of weeks and getting to see the beautiful bays of Ha Long, Bac Bo and Lan Ha and Cat Ba every day.

Our time in the National Park was particularly fun because we were the only ones in the spot we chose to hang out in and there were millions of butterflies around us so it was really cool.  We took the bike on the path that was meant to take us to the lake in the park, funnily enough though the neither the map or the guy we rented the bike off mentioned that after a few km’s the path became stairs – not so bike-friendly.  It turned out to be a really nice afternoon though to just sit amongst the trees in the sun for a while and also ride along the pretty coastline.

One crazy phenomena here is that because it’s the middle of winter, there is a lot of mist/fog/cloud around and it means that most of the time you can look directly at the sun and it is sort of just like looking at the moon – not bright, and ranging between white and dark red depending on how high it is in the sky.  The photo above was the last sunset for 2010 which was pretty cool!

For Dre’s birthday we pretty much just chilled, ate, drank and spent time seeing the beautiful bay.  We saw yet another awesome sunset and then went to dinner with some of our new friends Mike (from USA) and Dykla (from Israel) which turned out to be a hilarious and really fun night.

New Years Eve was much of the same, we got our hopes up early in the night because the Vietnamese set up a stage with lights and flags and massive speakers, and at about 5pm started playing some really cool music – like actual western music that is cool and not just the stuff you usually hear in Asia… so we were getting all pumped that we would have awesome music for New Years and were really enjoying listening to it… and then it finished at 9pm!  What? – it’s NYE!  So many people were mystified as to why it would finish so early, but hey, that’s just part of the fun of being on this crazy continent!  We ended up finding our Canadian friends again that we’d met the day before so welcomed in the new year with them and Mike and Dykla.  Our hotel showed us the Sydney fireworks on TV and we were sad to have missed them after the awesomeness of last year, but then reminded ourselves that we are here in Asia which is still pretty fun in itself!  We are really looking forward to 2011 and seeing more of the world, re-visiting Luang Namtha and seeing our families and friends again.  We miss you guys!  Our photos are here.