Latest news: I jumped off a cliff today.

Twice. 🙂

Last night I signed up for a kayaking trip down the river, with a tour outfit named Wildside. I’d walked through all of Vangvieng–which takes about fifteen minutes–and decided they were the most interesting/professional outfit in town, and the guidebook said they were excellent.

They were. Our tour guides were hysterically funny–splashing us and everyone else on the river (I got in a few good splashes on them, too 🙂 ), deliberately capsizing themselves every five minutes, and generally living it up on the river. They were also quite good about rescuing us when we capsized, and retrieving our gear–which was a good thing, since I’m very nearly hopeless in a kayak. (Mind you, I’d never stepped into one before, which probably didn’t help. 😉 ) I fell in twice and capsized the kayak once (with some help from my kayak-mate)–fortunately, no ill effects, not even bruises. I may even learn to paddle decently someday…

Anyway, we made a couple of stops along the way…one at a spectacular limestone cave, full of glittery crystals in the stone. There I discovered that, “Don’t worry, we’ll provide a torch for you” can be taken a little too literally…instead of the flashlight i was expecting, I and another woman were both issued tiny candles (!). So I explored that cave partly by candlelight, partly by the little penlight I carry everywhere. It was really cool–I took a bunch of photos, will try to post soon.

Ah, the cliff? You want to know about the cliff. Well, one of the major tourist stops here involves leaping off a suspension bridge, which sounded like fun, so we asked the guides about it…alas, it’s the dry season, so the river was too low for bridge-jumping. (Too bad; I thought the idea of leaping off a bridge in Laos particularly funny.) But, they took us by a little cliff that’s used for the same purpose…”little”, in this case, being about 15-18 feet over the river.

I’ve now discovered two important facts:

(1) 18 feet is just about enough time to think “What the F— am I doing and what kind of idiot was I to get into this??” before you hit the water;

(2) leaping off a cliff is lots of fun. 🙂 I even got a picture the second time…a glorious shot of me leaping over the edge. I did decide to skip the third time, though. Wouldn’t want to push my luck…esp. since I bruised my tailbone the second time, on hitting the water.

Anyway, the kayaking itself was gorgeous, once i figured out how to avoid disaster…thick green bamboo forest on one side, jungle on the other, and lots of naked kids and fisherfolk splashing about in the water. Half the kids were fishing with snorkel masks and tiny spearguns (they looked like rubber-band guns with tiny skewer-sized spears attached)–very cute, especially when one of them tossed the miniature fish he’d speared to us. It was about 3″ long. The other half were splashing about in the water or floating around on bamboo rafts…also very cute.

The women were mostly working with small seine nets, the men were fishing with larger ones. (I’m pleased to report–strictly for journalistic purposes, you understand 😉 –that Lao guys are every bit as cute as Thai laborers. Lots of muscle and very little body fat, definitely fun to watch.)

Probably the best part of the trip was when we rounded a bend to find 300′ green cliffs towering up on one side, with the sun shining down through the mist…gorgeous. I wish I’d had the camera then, although of course it would have drowned four times over if I had.

I’m exhausted enough from today that I declined to go on a trek tomorrow…I’m going to take a quiet day, and maybe spend 2-3 hours floating down the river in an inner tube. The day after tomorrow, maybe I’ll try rock climbing. Or white-water rafting; there’s a group leaving Monday.

Oh, I almost forgot–I got scratched by a monkey today. There was a baby monkey chained up to a tree at one of the rest stops. I went by to see it, as I felt sorry for the poor thing–it promptly ran up my back, tried to eat my hair-scrunchy, and, after being removed by a Japanese tourist, launched itself at my face, scratching me accidentally (I think). Fortunately it didn’t break skin, but I decided to keep my distance after that, despite its cuteness and the total unfairness of chaining it up to a tree. Our guide had a great time playing with it, though.

Tien

Well, I’m in Vangvieng, where Internet access is both unreliable and expensive ($1.80/hour instead of $0.60–but more to the point, connections fail a LOT). Vangvieng is a very small town that exists mainly for adventure trekking–every place in town is either a guesthouse, restaurant, tour operator, or minimart, so it really exists solely for foreign tourists. Most of the tour operators are giving variations on the same theme–so i’m poking around and seeing what looks most interesting.

Some of the tour operators’ descriptions are kind of amusing. The one in my guesthouse has everything timeslotted, including “Now is the time for you to get drunk.” (Just before kayaking home–makes you wonder, doesn’t it?) I took a photo and will try to get it up sometime soon.

Anyway, you were wondering about the rats? On the bus on the way to vangvieng, we stopped by a little village for a toilet break. By the road were a lot of market women selling the usual cooked, skewered meats for travelers to eat along the road. Only they were sort of funny-looking…

…I took a closer look, and realized that the “chicken” skewers weren’t chicken at all. In fact, I wasn’t at all sure what they were. But, looking at the bullet-shaped head and the four little feet attached to either side, I eventually became convinced they were skewered, flattened, barbequed rats.

Then I looked at the other skewers and realized that they weren’t “normal” meats, either. One plate was full of skewered bats–you could see the remnants of the wings, even though they were crowded eight or nine to a skewer (bats aren’t very big, maybe half the size of a domestic lab mouse). One had what looked like flattened whole frogs. (They were all pretty hard to identify, since they were all well-blackened–I mean, when was the last time you tried species identification on an overdone shish kebab?) And one was full of weirdly shaped tiny little bird-things skewered six or seven to a skewer…I found out later that they were chick embryos. (they also had skewered eggs, which I suspect were the same embryos, except less developed.)

I hate to say it, but the rats looked sort of tasty (just like chicken, in fact). However, I regretfully decided not to sample any of them–if they’d been freshly cooked, I probably would have, but they were room temperature (thus possibly bacterially dangerous), and I’m currently fighting off a cold, so didn’t want to tax my immune system with yet more bizarre bugs.

So, sadly, I still have no idea what bat, rat, frog, or chick embryos taste like. I’m hoping to encounter them again after I ditch the cold–or, if I can find some freshly cooked rats, I’ll be in business.

I never knew traveling could be such a culinary experience. From California cuisine to cobra wine to roasted rat…and I had mulberry tea day before yesterday. (It tastes, not surprisingly, very much like dried mulberry leaves. It’s supposed to be good for the stomach, which I hope it is, because it’s really not that tasty.)

yours from vangvieng,

Tien