Nong Khiaw, Laos: village visits, hiking, and waterfalls

leboughton
Mar 8
2 min read

Nong Khiaw was a welcome respite after a day and a half on the Mekong and a 4 hour drive over mostly dirt/bumpy roads. The hotel was lovely, and provided a brilliant sunset view from my balcony (making me feel less guilty about skipping the climb to see the sunset from the nearby hill top)

Got a moderately early start the next day and set out for Nayang Tai, tai lui village about 30 minutes outside town. This is the same tribe we had visited outside of Pu Luong in northern Vietnam. The architecture and weaving traditions of the community were very similar - stilt houses, lots of women weaving in the outdoor rooms below their homes, and great hospitality.

We took a walk around town and were able to get a sense of daily life here. Kids playing, people working together to dry their tobacco, and monks drying their robes on the temple clothesline!

After our walkabout, the women gave us a demo of the weaving process, from cotton boll growing from the plant, through ginning to remove seeds, fluffing, spinning the yarn, dying, and finally weaving it into cloth. Very cool’s to see the end to end process.

Then we joined the family in their stilt home, and had a a Baci ceremony, where a shaman and the village elders blessed us for health, wealth, happiness, and safe travels. This ceremony, derived from Hindu, Buddhist and Animalistic traditions, is performed to celebrate life events or to welcome guests by tying white cotton threads around participants’ wrists to bind the 32 khouane (souls) to the body. The shaman here chanted as we held the threads, sprinkled us with a little holy water, and then he and the elders blessed us each personally while tying the threads on each.

We had a very simple lunch prepared by the family - fried fish, stir fried vegetables, fish soup, and sticky rice - while they played some tunes for us. Stacey, one of our travel mates joined the band.

We departed after lunch for a boat trip upriver to another village - Ban Sopkongn - for a quick walk through on our way through fields and hills to a waterfall. It was a bit challenging, 1.5 hours in the heat and humidity of the afternoon, but the hike was interesting, passing lots of kids and cows along the way and the waterfall was lovely and cooling. I was very happy to have made it!

We spent a little more time in the town on our way back to the river. Saw a man making a large knife from leftover bomb materials using an open flame to heat the metal he was hammering into a knife on an anvil. Also many more cute kids…and a well deserved boat beer on the way back to the hotel.