Day 10: Celebrating Death💀 (5/3/19)
If Nong Khiaw was already quite and not too touristy, when the next morning we took a small boat to go to Muang Gnoi, we were surprised by how chill life was there. The whole town was basically a straight line, not bungalows next to the river. It is not very developed yet and you still can interact with locals or with kids that after school go to play to the river. Our first day we just relaxed and chill there.
For dinner, we met a young Swedish guy who met a local woman and moved there 10 years ago. He told us that we should also check the nearby traditional villages. As in one of them, someone had passed away and they were going to hold a celebration.
The next day, Tanguy, Lisa, Ella and I, went hiking to explore the surroundings. After having lunch all together in one of the villages, Lisa and Tanguy went back to Muang Gnoi. Ella and I kept hiking to the village we had been talked about. The locals we’re excited to see us, as we were the only foreigners, and they offered us accommodation for 1$/night. Walking around the small town we met some kids that soon were fighting to call our attention. I spent the whole afternoon playing football with them (barefoot), and they changed my name to ‘hello’, since it was the only English word they knew how to pronounce, and kept repeating it all the time.
After the game, we had a swim at the river, and went back down for dinner, where the adults had already prepared the ‘party’. They offered us some local food (a bit weird) that we couldn’t reject, as the kids kept grabbing it with their hands and feeding it into our mouth🍼 On the other hand, the adults were getting completely wasted with strong rice whiskey and tried to get us drunk too. In the meantime, they played very loud traditional music and engaged in awkward dancing and flirting games.
At midnight we went to our rooms to get some sleep, but that was difficult as the loud music kept playing until the sunrise. The next morning one of the locals offered a lift back to town on his ‘truck’, as we had to run to get back to Muang Gnoi in time if we wanted to catch the only boat that went back to Nong Khiaw.