the Waterfall

Today we shared a tuktuk with an Australian couple who had made contact with an educated woman who lives up in the hills. The tuktuk drove along a winding road through steep wooded hillsides, up and down hills until we came to a small village in the middle of the forest. Traditionally the villagers live in houses on stilts. The wooden posts holding up the house stand on stones, to prevent the termites burrowing up through the posts into the rest of the house structure. They use the space under the house to work the cotton, spin and weave. Unfortunately more recent houses have been constructed with concrete and no open space under them. These will not resist termites in the same way as the traditional houses do.

Anyway, we crossed a bridge, over fast flowing pure turquoise water to meet the woman our friends had come to meet. She showed us around her land where she was building houses for dying cotton and silk, houses for teaching local people to weave, planting plants to use as dye and vegetables. Chickens ran around among the builders, tree fellers, earth shovellers and assorted other people.

She accompanied us up river to see a series of waterfalls with clear pools where tourists swung from ropes, flinging themselves into the water. There were tall trees with Latin binomial lables on them to let the tourists know what they were looking at. But all the oldest trees had been felled and sold, to the Vietnamese or to the Chinese, who have been sistematically removing all the old trees from Laos. The whole country is covered in dense vegetation, but most of it is secondary growth. Trees grow incredibly fast, especially teak, which grows in extensive plantations.

Then we were invited to lunch overlooking the river, surrounded by brilliant green leafy plants. We feasted on river fish, sticky rice and a soup of coconut tree kernel.