A cloud, city market and a walk to Ban Luang Konsouk

One morning when I woke up as usual around 6am, instead of sunrise I saw absolute darkness outside. It looked like somebody built a sick wall over a night behind the hotel window, and I couldn’t see anything through it. I stepped on the balcony of my room and realized that the whole city was inside of a big cloud.

Late morning, the cloud enveloped the neighbor houses.

The quiet streets of the town became completely empty of any sign of life. The outside temperature dropped and visibility failed. In this weather condition local people usually wear what we would call “winter clothes”. Some brave farmers went to collect tea leaves. That was useless because the cloud rested over the city for the next two days and made drying impossible.

Everybody is dressed up in “winter clothes”.

After a couple of days when I was running out of food, I decided to try the city-market for shopping. The city-market is very colorful place, anything could be found here: lots of fruits and vegetables, all kinds of groceries and local snacks. Chinese traders sell also clothing and household items.

The city-market in Phongsali

Sometimes in the city-market women, who come from the mountain villages, sell amazingly beautiful handmade clothes and jewelry. They come rarely because hand making garments take a long time to produce. The quality of their goods is high and sold out very quickly even being comparably expensive; for example, a child’s size skirt embroidered patterns and decorated with coins is worth $ 25.

Local traders

Frankly, most of local snacks were pretty seasoned with salt and spices to my taste, and some I was even afraid to try because of unfamiliar plants as ingredients. Another discovery of the local food, lying on the counter roasted arm of a monkey, impressed me deeply that I could not even photograph it.

This sleeping man is a Chinese trader, Mr. Ghao. Every time I pass by him, he awakes immediately and grabs my hand to shake for a couple of minutes complementing my unusual height.

When I returned to the hotel from the city-market, I suddenly met Michel, a Russian historian from St. Petersburg. In general, Laos is not a common place for Russian tourists, so I was very surprise to see him here. We gladly spent the evening together talking about Russian history and culture. The next day when the sky finally cleared up, and the dawn appeared again in all its glory, Michel and I decided to walk to the village called Ban Luang Konsouk.

A little girl playing in the woods.

Phongsali is surrounded by some small mountain villages, most of them can be reached only by a motorcycle or by walk.

The picturesque road to the north-west from Phongsali, the nearest village is 2.5 miles away.

The trail runs along the hillside, Michel and I followed it gradually enjoying the view. Farmers, who live here, have started harvesting first young tea shoots already. We also met on our way some locals, who harvested firewood in wilderness and returned home with us.

Harvesting first tea

A large tea tree on the way near the water stream

Finally we reached the Ban Luang Konsouk village which was 4.5 miles away from Phongsali.

Ban Luang Konsouk is a quite authentic village, everything here made by hands using only locally available materials.

In this village we faced a problem with communication; no one could speak either Chinese or English. We got hungry but there was no sign of a restaurant or any kind of food market. Even we had Lao money but we could not buy anything. All food the local people could spear with us was very simple: sticky rice with very spicy gravy.

Mike is thinking to purchase a machete for his home collection in St. Petersburg.

Failed in finding anything eatable for us we turned back to the road to Phongsali. It took us about four hours and half for the whole journey, so we did not get much tired from walking only really starved.

The next couple of days Michel spend visiting the furthest villages, about 12.5 miles away from Phongsali. People, who live there, belong to ethnic group called Akka. This time he took a guide with him, who could help to purchase an Akka traditional woman dress for the Saint Petersburg museum exposition.

Unfortunately, Michel could not take a photo of the dress; it was not allowed according to the custom. So here is a photo of a beautiful butterfly which is local too

Wild horses

February 28, 2012
Alexander