Jinghong

Jinghong, China
May 2018

We crossed into Jinghong, China from Laos on Nico’s bithday. It was an extraordinarily complex journey, involving many bus rides and lots of waiting and not a few moments of confusion. By luck there was an American man who spoke Mandarin on our bus as we crossed the border, and he was heading the same direction as us, and helped us out with exchanging money, buying tickets and ordering lunch. It wasn’t until we said goodbye to him in Jinghong that we really began to realise how different it was going to be travelling in China, compared to the Southeast Asian countries we had come from. No more Google maps (or Google anything), no more Latin alphabet, no English words written or spoken anywhere, no common language. With more luck and the kindness of strangers, we found our booked accommodation, checked in and went out looking for food and a place to have a drink to mark Nico’s birthday. We learned that even ordering food will become quite an adventure. Again, when we looked lost, kind strangers were happy to help us find our way and make telephone calls for us. All this with pointing, gesturing and laughing. How wonderful it is to be able to be lost like that.

The next day in our hotel room, we started trying to devise ways to recognise the Chinese characters, for example, this one looks like an alien with many legs, that one looks like a person kicking a leg out to the side. We used translation apps to find the characters for certain phrases for food and types of meat and drew them in notebooks so we could try to read menus. We learned how to say some simple phrases about ourselves, the usual greetings and how to count to ten.

Luang Namtha

Luang Namtha, Laos
May 2018

In Luang Namtha we borrowed bicycles for the day and cycled out into the rice fields around town to visit smaller villages. We saw women washing their clothes in the river, we saw where the villagers make their intensely strong whiskey, we cycled at dusk past families burning their rubbish in the rice paddies, we sat in a hut in a field to try to escape the burning sun for a while, we chatted with a teacher in a local school who stopped us as we were going past on our bikes because he wanted to say hello and practice some English. The next day we said goodbye to Laos, and hello to China.

Nong Khiaw

Nong Khiaw, Laos
May 2018

Oh boy I am so behind. Photos from 18 months ago in Asia. Better late than never. Here we go.

We spent a couple of days in Nong Khiaw. It was our experience in small towns in Laos that due to lack of interested people, most of the hikes we would have liked to go on were simply much too expensive for us, because there weren’t enough people to split the costs. So we ended up finding our own non-guided walks to do. In Nong Khiaw we had read that the hike to the top of the mountain in the village was a must do at dawn. So we set our alarm, despite the fact it rained all night, and got up in the dark and hiked up through slippery paths for an hour or two as it gradually got lighter. It was, until that time, the hardest hike I’d ever done. Not only because it was dark and steep and constantly uphill, but also because it was so muddy and slippery and many trees had come down in the storm which required climbing over or under. I was rather proud of myself for managing it. At the top of the mountain, the dawn had already come, and we were higher than the clouds. All we could see was clouds in every direction. Suddenly, some clouds shifted we saw the green peaks of another mountain. We stayed for a few hours at the top as the clouds and fog shifted around, revealing different peaks in all directions, until all the clouds were gone and we had an incredible view of the surrounding mountains, valleys, town and river.