Today is our first full day on the river. We just stopped a midway point called Pak Beng, where tourists generally overnight as they go downriver from Thailand to Luang Prabang. Our pilot got his river passbook stamped, Janet, Amanda, and my mom went ashore to get lunch foods and see what the town was like, and the three kids skipped shale-rocks out onto the river.
Last night at dusk we pulled over onto a sandy beach and went up into a village to see what language and people group they were. Amanda found out that we were still a full day's journey from her people group, and she engaged one old lady in conversation as night fell around us. It's beautiful listening to the tonal language used here, and the evening was a comfortable cool. And we saw a firefly.
When we set out again for the boat, night had truly fallen around us. The village homes along the road were generally lit by a single lightbulb, and many of the people were tending cooking fires outside in the space between houses, or sitting and smoking and watching us pass. Amanda says that if they had been her people group we would have had many invitations to join the family dinners/campfires. As it was, we had no expectation of any invitation and had food to eat back at the boat.
Back at the boat, though, our pilot was busy exercising hospitality of a wonderful kind. He and his brother had kindled a bonfire on the rocks above our boat, and we were delighted to sit on the banks of the Mekong, in who-knows-where-Laos, enjoying the dancing firelight and without a care.
There's more to tell about that campfire ... something about barking jungle deer ... but I want to tell about another village before I sign off. The evening village where we docked seemed sad (and in fact the conversation that Amanda had with the old lady was about how the government was tearing down their houses to improve the road) and unfriendly, but there was another village yesterday that was really neat. It was our first stop and our first encounter with rural Lao villagers.
The steps up to the village end at the high water mark. Since we're in a low rainfall season now, there is a bit of a hike to get up to the stairs that lead into the village. There is no road to this village--only the river--so the stairway here is essentially the front door.
At the top of the stairs, this is the first set of houses we find:
And this old lady was delighted that I could at least greet her in her language. She chuckled and repeated the words several times. She is splitting bamboo canes.
I was confused as to why some of the buildings were poorly constructed (what I would have expected from a subsistence-level village with limited access to the outside world) while others were well-designed and well-executed post-and-beam structures. It turns out this village had been selected to be a "model village" by the Lao government and that had made it available for some NGOs to help out in years past. We saw the school that a foundation had constructed in 2008, for example. So that's what you're seeing in these next photos:
The picture above is the school and its grounds. The six small houses on the left are dorm rooms for kids from villages too far away, so they stay here.
Our stop on land lasted an hour, and since we hadn't been on the boat for very long before then, there was hardly any sensation of the land moving. Later, after two days on the boat, and when we arrived in Thailand after three days on the boat, then it was different. Every time we were standing still on land, the land seemed to pitch and roll.
In our third day on the Mekong, we were finally among the people who are Amanda's people. We recorded the locations of the villages we saw on both sides of the river, and she is planning to go back downriver from her home to become more acquainted with the area.
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