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| Start of the trip. (I'm spinning on the drop spindle in this photo...yes, I'm still working on that shawl.) | We wended our way along miles and miles of dirt road, punctuated by the occasional cow... | ...and elephant. (!) | We launched from a beautiful riverbend... |
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| ...watched by hordes of curious villagers. (We were definitely the afternoon's entertainment...I wish we could have sold tickets!) | Here's a village motorboat landing at our launch sites, carrying large bundles of what looks like grass. (I still don't know what it was.) | Rapids on Day One. We had a delightful little seven-person raft, which usually disassembled itself halfway down the rapids. This made the trip much more interesting.... |
...on the first rapids of the day, the raft folded neatly in half and threw everyone into the river. (Sadly, I have no photos of that). Here are the last rapids of the day...amazingly, we stayed in the raft, but it was full to the brim with water by the time we got through. |
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| Eventually, we made camp in an absolutely gorgeous spot... | ...with little inlet streams, surrounded by bamboo forest. | I have about a bazillion more shots of beautiful scenery...Laos is amazing. | All the comforts of home... |
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...but there wasn't enough space for everyone, so I slept here. It wasn't so bad, except that dried caterpillar poo kept dropping off the dried banana leaves and onto my sleeping bag, all night long... |
After we landed, our guides propped a big mossy log up over the stream, and nonchalantly hacked up three chickens with a machete... |
...then roasted them over the fire. (Note the very ingenious bamboo spit...a single length of bamboo split into three parts, "woven" around the chicken, then pegged together at the other end.) |
Sitting around the fire after dinner, passing around the Lao whisky... |
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| ...in the morning, a fisherman turned up with a snake. A 10' reticulated python, that some kids had caught and killed in the jungle right next to our camp... | ...Mick, our trip leader, tried it for breakfast but decided to stick with coffee. | Probably the single silliest photo ever taken, but I couldn't resist... |
...later that morning, one of the guys went off to take a leak, and got caught in an animal trap. The guides were laughing too hard to rescue him... ...I suppose the sight of a hapless tourist in a tourist trap is kind of irresistible... |
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| They decided these rapids were too dangerous, so made us walk around it... | ...which was probably a good idea. Here are the guides coming down in the big raft... |
...and in "my" raft. (Take a close look, and admire the way the seats (big round cushions) pop out under pressure. Charming, isn't it?) I forgot to mention that this raft didn't drain, so we had to stop and bail water with our helmets after every set of rapids. Whee! |
Here's a nice scenic photo of the river, that shows some of the carved river rocks. During the rainy season, the Mekong covers those rocks...running 10-30 feet higher, depending on the area. Because of this, the rapids change all the time, so we stopped and scouted out every rapids before going over. (Wildside does take safety seriously, unlike many tour operators in Laos.) |
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Let's see...fell out twice, capsized once, snake in the jungle, animal traps, giant bruises from hitting the water cooler...yep, definitely a fun trip. :-) |
| Afterwards, we loaded the rafts on top of a motorboat, and took a nice comfortable four-hour ride on top of the boat... | ...finally landing at this beautiful scenic lake... | ...where we carried the raft up to the waiting tuktuk, and drove back to Vangvieng. |
