See the Nam Ou pix

Joe's photos of the boat ride on the Nam Ou River (previously misidentified by me as the Ou Nam, what can I tell you) say it all. But let me provide some context and a few observations. The amazing photos will appear on the blog soon.

The trip from Nong Khiaw down to where the Nam Ou spills into the Mekong just above Luang Prabang takes about six hours. There's no scheduled service. So you can either put your name on a list and hope some Aussie backpackers interested in the flora and fauna and not in finding new locales in which to hurl undigested beer will show up soon and share the expense of hiring a boat, or you can cough up (block that metaphor!) $140 U.S. and hire a boat and driver on your own. We chose the latter, and it may well have been the best $70 each we ever spent.

We had passed the night comfortably at Nong Khiaw in a place called the Sunset Guest House, overlooking the river and beneath the enormous limestone escarpment that looms over the little port town. This weird tower was just the beginning of the day's geological wonders. We had coffee with the boatman, a serene man of fifty or so, and then he poled us out into the river and turned downstream at 8:35. We had the entire 18-passenger boat---four feet wide and maybe 30 feet long---all to ourselves. Joe's camera was poised.

It was cool and misty when we left. The pea-soup green river was as unperturbed as the boatman. The foliage along the shores was so green it looked like Laos might have been designated as the earth's primary supplier of chlorophyl (sp?). The main road to Northeast Laos ran along the road for a way, and then it veered away and we were in the wilderness.

Around 9:30 the mists around the mountaintops burned off, the sun brightened everything for miles, and we saw it all, one of the topographical wonders of Laos and the world. Some of the mountains were shaped like unexcavated Mayan temples. Others were pure karst, thrusting limestone draped on the less precipitous sides with trees and vines. Others looked like the "fairy chimneys" of Capodoccia, except with flowering-tree corsages. Who knew that poinsettias grew on trees and not just in little plastic pots at K-Mart? One mountain was shaped just like Aya Sophia in Istanbul, minus the minarets. Other mountains in this multi-sectarian geological territory were like enormous Buddhist stupas, and still more were like mossy stones out of Wordsworth from a land of giants. There were saw-toothed mountain groupings. There were mountains that looked like the White Mountains of New Hampshire, except be-jungled, and with villages of communists instead of Republicans at their bases (like Vermont). There were ancient banyan trees crawling with ropey flowering vines and dendritic plants drawing their nourishment from the larger trees. It was dramatic as all get out, and yet when we glimpsed the village life along the wider shores we saw that the landscape was friendly, too. I had the idea that this paradise is what Pennsylvania might have looked like had the God of the Quakers and Mennonites been a nicer guy.

There were rapids along the way, and sometimes the boatman had only a ten-foot channel in the much wider river to rush through. He was good, and if he was relying in part on the boulder spirits for assistance, we never knew it, for he was too busy steering and checking the river ahead for signs of trouble. No flower petals were tossed, though from time to time Joe and I fed the gods an empty banana or tangerine peel. The boat's draft was under a foot, we estimated, and a couple of times we felt light scraping. Some channels had been marked by bamboo poles or clusters of anchored drinking-water bottles. We wondered what had to happen before the Nam Ou was declared no longer navigable until the spring rains came, but luckily we never found out on our own.

People along the shores were villagers whose fishing, herding and agricultural lives were familiar to us by now. But a couple of unusual sights were groupings of people on islands panning for gold. Some of them had rigged up mechanical contraptions for sifting the current as it passed across the river bottom. We also saw some elaborate home-made hydro-electric projects, with propellors in the water churning up juice that ran up wires strung on the usual bamboo poles.

We hit the muddy Mekong at one and were in cozy Luang Prabang by two. That's where we are now, catching up on blogging, photo processing, and laundry until Tuesday, when we fly to Cambodia.