Cameron and Meghan's BIG adventure!: To Oudamxai

After our day of hiking we decided we had seen the best of Muang Ngoi Neua and opted to catch a boat the next day heading northward. This boat ride was significantly longer than the one from Nong Khiew, but fortunately we had more room to stretch our legs and it was a comfortable and pretty ride. A nice day off for legs sore from the hike. The boat landed in Muang Khua at around 2pm, giving Meg, Pam and Dave plenty of time to take a walk around the town and explore. I had a bit of nap as I hadn't been sleeping well for a few days. During their walk about the team came across another set of Canadian (Vancouver even) cyclists who had just crossed the border from Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam. We had an early dinner with them, swapped some stories and then called it a night.

The bikes locked and loaded

The riding the next day was really lovely. Fairly gentle hills for most of the day following a small river upstream. The valley we were in was lush and populated with some really friendly villages so when we weren't admiring the scenery we were shouting "sabai dii" to the local children. Nearing the end of the day we left the river and crossed a small hill range which was trying on our legs. After only a few medium sized climbs we descended to the valley of Oudamxai and had easy riding into town.

Always such nice scenery

Oudamxia was an interesting town. It had many hotels which were full, but there were not that many white tourists. It turns out the road North of Oudamxai runs to China and many of the people staying there were either Chinese tourists, of maybe Chinese businessmen involved with a highspeed train line which is being built from China into Vientienne. There isn't that much to attract tourists to the area other than a really interesting looking cave network, a local walking tour and a Laos cooking course. Though the Lonely Planet was dubious of the english spoken by the women teaching the cooking course, we chose that option. The cave was a little too hard to get to and the local walking tour seemed to cover things we had already seen before.

Our first night in Oudamxia we went to check out a chinese restaurant. Rather than order off a menu, we walked into their kitchen area and picked the ingredients for the food we wanted to eat. From there, the cook put things together as he saw fit. Our tofu ended up in a really salty tomato sauce, our chicken-pork (it looked like chicken at first, but then tasted like pork) ended up stir fried with green pepper, and the green beans were fried, deliciously, with garlic and salt. The food on the whole was quite good (partly I think because it diverged from the rice/noodle combinations we had been having so often on the road) and we were impressed by the magic of the improvised dishes. Some of the magic was lost when we ordered some of the same ingredients the next night and they ended up cooked the same way, but I guess it's hard to make up something new every time. This method of meal selection is actually how many of the bike tourists we met who had been to China described their experiences in that country. Pretty cool.

Our cooking course was a great experience. We were picked up in the morning by the cutest Lao grandma whom right away impressed us with her english. She is now retired, but was a french teacher at the local highschool and also had a good grip on our language. Off we trotted to the market to do our shopping...the veggies and fruit were gorgeously displayed but as we headed farther back into the meat section, things became a bit more sketchy...blocks of congealed blood, live frogs on a stick, lots of stomach and intestine, and vats of snake fish (repulsive looking creatures). Very kindly, our cooking instructor realized these stepped a bit too far past the comfort levels of Western tourists and we stuck to plain old beef for our meat dish. We learned to make laap, fried spring rolls, mushroom in banana leaf, and pho in the kitchen of a local restaurant. No fancy stoves and ovens for us, this was the "real deal" with charcoal fires and a couple woks.