Trekking!!!!

Alright, so this is definetly out of order. This post concerns June 30 and July 1st. On the 30th, we set out for our trekking/homestay adventure in Nam Thuen National Park. We left our bikes at the Tuk-tuk (taxi) driver's house (sketchy? little bit, but everything feels so safe here) and set out with our guide/interpreter Say for a very bumpy taxi ride to the trail head. We took just the essentials, plus food: several pounds of rice, veggies, various meat products and several live catfish in a plastic bag full of water. We hiked a couple muddy kilometers to a small village were we met up with a local guide and headed off through the jungle. It has been raining pretty good here for a couple weeks, so it was pretty wet and all the rivers were up and muddy. We waded several swamps, crossed multiple jungle rivers in canoes of extreemly questionable integrity and forded a one river up to chest deep. SO AWSOME!! We stopped for lunch: Dried BBQed beef, some kind of garlic/pork sausage thing that was cured (not cooked) by aging it for several months in bannana leaves, BBQd pork skins and pork liver, steamed mustard greens, and sticky rice. All layed out on Bannana leaves on the jungle floor and eaten with your bare hands. So tasty. Dont forget the whole raw Thai chillies that you eat strait; it wouldnt be a Lao meal if your face wasnt on fire afterwards. Continuing through the jungle, we came to a cave entrance where a rive flowed full-fledged from the limestone cave mouth, and later to a large cave that we had to canoe through in a boat that leaked almost as fast as you could bail. On the other side of the cave, we went swimming and started collecting the large water-snails that were everywhere in the flooded fields we were walking through. After another 5km or so, we arived at the village we would spend the night at, with about 2 lbs of snails in a plastic bag. These we took over to one of Say's friends house and cooked them up--steamed and dipped in a mix of fresh chillies, cilantro and fish sause (about as spicy as the surface of the sun), they were really quite good..along with a couple of Beer Lao and sticky rice to put out the fire. Then we went back to our home-stay place where they cooked up the catfish we had been packing around all day. I dont know how they did it, but it involved a lot of garlic and lemon grass and it was the best catfish Ive ever had bar none. Several guys from the village, Say, Evan and I, all sat around cross-legged on the floor and ate with our hands out of a couple communal pots of catfish, steamed veggies, sticky rice. So legit. After that, we went over to another person's house (it turned out that he would be our local guide the next day) and sat on his porch and passed around a bottle of Lao Lao (Lao moonshine--about as smooth as warm Old Crow). People there were eating micelaneous water buffaloe entrails cooked in a sauce that incorporated the juice you get from squeezing the contents of the ruemen (basically water-buffalo dung). Even if we hadnt already eaten two huge and delicious dinners, Im not sure I would have partaken because it smelled--not surprisingly--like cow shit.

The next day we woke up around 7, had a huge bowl of (basically) top ramen for breakfast served with (you guessed it) sticky rice. We then set off through the jungle again, climbing steadily for about15 km. It was interesting to see the change from lowland floodplain forest (pretty open with lots of big hardwood trees) to the thick bamboo jungle at slightly higher elevation. Not much in the way of birds or critters--even though its a national park, I think the local villages hunt this area pretty hard and pretty much anything is fair game for the stew-pot. As we walked through a small village, we saw several guys with rifles and our guide explained that they were hunters. They were packing AKs and other automatic rifles, but I guess you make do with what you have.

In the afternoon, we went swimming in a huge spring. It a couple hundred yards across during the wet season, a spot wherea big river flows straight up to the surface out of a limestone tube. Very neat. After that, we jumped a ride on a rickety old tractor/rice cultivator and bumped and choked on diesle fumes for about 10 km till the road became too steep and deeply rutted. We hiked about 3km more, and made it to the main road where a tuk-tuk was waiting to take us back to Thakek. It was a great experience all around--we'de been hoping to get out into the jungle but not able to do it on our own what with things like landmines, and geting lost, etc. It was just Evan and I on the trek, and our guides were all about our age and very friendly and knowlegeable about the area. Super fun.

Take care, yall. We'll be in touch as much as possible.