Last day in Louang Prabang, Laos

Chad and I have been in Louang Prabang, Laos for over a week now, as we have really enjoyed the culture, scenery and people here in this little sleepy town.

A highlight of our time here was a kayaking trip down the Nam Ohn, about a one hour drive out of the city. On the way to the river we stopped at two local villages and "exchanged information" (as our tour guide put it) with the locals in the village. One of the villages was a Hmong village that had been relocated from the mountains further south down the hill. Our guide was also from a Hmong village and so he spoke the local dialect of the people there. Our guide was from a hmong family, and his parents had previously been opium farmers. He said that in 2000 Opium was outlawed, leaving many of the hmong without jobs and without a way of life.

We saw them going about their daily jobs such as the blacksmith mending an ax, knife sharpening, paper making, and weaving baskets and bamboo roofing materials. We were invited into the home of the village shaman, who played us a toon on his bamboo instrument. He asked our guide if he would come back to the village and teach the local kids, as they had no school and no education system in place. There is a widespread belief here that education is really the path to a better future, but it's hard to come by in a little village with no teachers and no school supplies. Learning english seems to be the path to a good job in the tourism industry, which is really pumping much needed cash into the economy. The kids in the village followed us around with huge smiles.

After the village visits, we spent the day kaying on some class 2 white water.

Along the way, we heard the sounds of what we thought to be generators along the river. We asked our guide was was going on, and he said that the people were panning for gold. We stopped at one of the operations to get a good look. About every 50 meters, about 25 people sat along the river banks. Wooden boats held 2-3 air compressors that had clear plastic tubing attached, going out into the river. At the other end of the tubes, at the bottom of the river, the plastic tubes were giving air to men who were collecting the dirt on the river bottom. The plastic tube was stuffed into a diving mask so that the men could breathe for 20 minutes or so on the river bottom. They took a simple bag and the mask and air tube, and then used their hands to collect the river rocks. There were several men walking on the bottom of the river at a time collecting the dirt. They would bring it to the surface, and the women used big wooden bowls to swirl the dirt in the river to sort out the big rocks, and eventually find little teeny specks of gold in the bottom. We watched a women doing the panning, and in about 10 minutes she had maybe 20 teeny teeny specks of gold. Amazing! People all along the river were using these home made scuba diving contraptions to collect tiny specks of gold. Considering the alternate forms of employment available (paper making, weaving, farming) the gold operation seems very lucrative indeed. Our guide even joked that he should find a wife in this village, as only the local villagers had rights to pan the river for gold.

Tomorrow, we fly to Chang Mai to meet up again with Shane for the weekend.