Trip to Laos and Cambodia

In Vientiane, Laos--the capital city.

A village outside the bus window during our 11 hour 15 minute ride from Vientiane to Luang Prabang. The average speed was 25 miles per hour on a road with nearly no straight sections but beautiful scenery.

Ted swinging on a rope at waterfalls outside Luang Prabang, Laos.

One our our highlights on the spring break trip was riding elephants. They have been rescued from the logging industry and are cared for at an eco-tourism place that caters to people like us that want to care for the elephants by giving them a little exercise time. In the 1850s there were an estimated 10,000 elephants used for work. Today there are only 1,500 left in Laos.

My cousins Karla and Ian came for a visit in Hanoi then we met them again in Laos for a few days.

The Mekong River as is flows past Luang Prabang.

The famous Angkor Wat in Cambodia. This is just one of MANY ruins and temples built about 1,000 years ago. We explored for three days. The scale of the temples and the area they occupy is mind-boggling. We were baffled by how they moved all the stones to built these things. They must have used elephants but still. Pictures don't capture it. One must see it in person and walk around and climb up and check it all out. Really impressive.

Lisa in Phnom Penh, Cambodia--the capital city of 2 million people.

I bought a bag of fried grasshoppers to eat for 25 cents. They were good.

Deciding what insects to buy.

Snake Village-some graphic descriptions!!

Yesterday, I took 6 students and one other teacher to Snake Village with my friend Huy. He is from Snake Village and has been asking me for months now to come for a visit and to eat some snakes. Lisa chose not to go and instead went with one student to Silk Village. This is a rather strange custom in this part of the country, but the students were really excited to go, so we made it happen.

After an hour long packed bus ride, the first stop was at Huy's sister's house. Huy (in black shirt) and his sister on the right. He thought we would kick off our day with a little sip of "snake wine." Ingredients: rice vodka/"wine" and two dead and gutted cobras. They just sit in the liquid for at least three months and then you can start drinking it. We passed around a half a cup of the stuff and each has a sip. It tastes like vodka at first, then there is a strange, musky, musty aftertaste. Supposed to be "good for health." I am not sure how drinking alcohol with dead reptiles in it is good for health, but it was good for the curious anyway.

Huy pouring the snake wine at 10:30 am.

Yummy!

Next stop on our tour was to visit "Snake Man." He is an old man between 70 and 80 years old who has been catching snakes all his life. When we got there, he grabbed a green bag, pulled out a white fine mesh bag, then let out a cobra! His daughter came around and yelled at him to put it away. She doesn't want him doing this anymore. Too dangerous. Ya think?

Then on to the restaurant for lunch. This is the restaurant owner choosing our 3 snakes that we would eat. He keeps all his snakes in these little cages, pulls them out and plays with them in front of us for a while. Definitely one of the coolest/strangest/most dangerous things I have seen.

We ate this snake about 45 minutes after I took this picture.

This is where the action happens. I don't have many still photos of this as my camera was on video mode. Here is the basic drill that we saw: He started with the cobra, took it out of the bag and put it on the red fabric, pinned its head to the floor and to be sure he wouldn't be bitten, he took scissors and cut off the upper jaw and fangs. (OK, I am not making this up!) Then he sort of stretched the upper part of the snake to find the heart, took the scissors, cut into the skin, found the heart, snipped it out (still beating) into a shot glass on the metal tray on the blue table. Then he held the opening he just made in the snake over the metal funnel and let the bright red blood drip into the funnel and into a small bottle of rice wine. Then he felt along the snake for the other organs, found the gallbladder and again cut into the snake, pulled out the gall bladder and cut it out, and punctured it into another, larger bottle of rice wine. The other two snakes were killed/stunned by swinging and hitting their heads on the chrome water tank in the corner, then the same procedure was followed with the heart removal and gallbladder removal. Heart into the shot glass, bile and gallbladder into another.

During the 2nd snake, just before he was going to cut out its heart, his cell phone rang and he answered it.

Amy, the math teacher, and the two boy students about to shoot their rice wine with snake heart. I was supposed to swallow the snake heart because it is something only males are supposed to do, but Amy really really wanted to, so I let her drink mine.

Next, it was a shot of cobra blood mixed with rice wine for everybody.

The green one is the bile/rice wine.

Grilled snake, this was really good.

Sauteed cobra, pretty good.

Fried snake skin, tasty with hot sauce dipping!

Our group having a civilized 10 course lunch of snake meat. Included, but not pictured closely was snake soup, rice with snake fat, and rice porridge with "snake water."

My pieces after eating the meat of the ribs.

The strange thing was the night before we all went to a fancy art gallery for a fundraiser portrait painting evening to raise money for Japan. And the night after our return from Snake Village we all went downtown to watch the play My Fair Lady. One of our students was the stage manager.

I have a few videos, but they are kind of long and will only try to post one. So I thought it would be fun to have some reader participation! Plus, we get to see who is actually reading these posts. Come on, Christiana Carmichael, you are going to want to see one of these!! Which ever one gets the most interest from comments posted from readers will be the winner and I will put it on the blog the week of April 18th. So get your vote in!

Here are the choices: Choice #1 26 seconds long, Snake Man playing with cobra and getting in trouble by his daughter.

Choice #2 1:13 long, cobra on the floor with its hood open

Choice #3 50 seconds long, Huy playing with 6 foot long snake and almost bitten and restaurant owner playing with cobra, holding it with its head in that classic "cobra" look.

Choice #4 2:36 long, killing two snakes, pulling out heart, blood, gallbladder etc.

Choice #5 1:23 long, close up of heart/bile procedure with student commentary

Earthquake

Two days ago, there was a 7.0 earthquake on the border of northern Thailand, Laos and Burma. That part of the world there are few people, so I have read that only one person was killed. We were watching TV in our apartment at night when it happened and we both felt the building swaying back and forth. Really scary being 16 floors up in a concrete building! So we grabbed our passports, cash and the laptop and we ran down 16 flights of stairs and outside. Luckily our fears were validated as there were hundreds of people outside standing in the street looking up at their respective apartment buildings. We waited out there for 20 minutes or so and then went back in and upstairs. We hope that was it for a while.

Mai Cho Village

Ancient and modern technology in one picture. The man in the back is plowing his rice field with a water buffalo, TV via satellite.

The drive to the village was up and over the mountains.

Lush and green with clean air, the opposite of Hanoi.

Our beds inside the stilt houses.

We slept in these houses and ate our meals under them.

Lisa, rain and rice.

This is an elementary school we visited. They have a nice courtyard and awesome view!

Cuc Phuong National Park!

At our visit to Cuc Phuong National Park, the first national park inn Vietnam-1962. We visited the Endangered Primate Rescue Center where they help rehabilitate primates that have been caught from poachers or in the illegal animal trade. Many of these primates go to China for "medicine" or meat. We saw langurs and gibbons. The langurs have long tails they use for balance as they walk along branches and the gibbons have no tails but long arms which they use to swing between branches. The sound of the gibbons in the morning is incredibly strange and hard to believe it comes from mammals. One starts and then others join in. Hopefully the video below will show this.


A Langur

A different type of langur

Our group in front of a huge tree. I am realizing how hard it is to take photos in a rain forest. It is dark and photos just don't capture the scale of things, or the sounds.

This was one of our favorite trees we saw in the park. Well over 200 feet tall sticking up above the rest. The video below of Lisa's sunglasses falling off gives you a look at it.

One of the highlights of our visit and possibly of our whole time in Vietnam was a 10 mile hike through primary tropical rain forest. This is the type of forest that has never been cut down so it has been here really since the beginning. Several thousand years for sure. Some of the trees are just enormously wide and tall! During our hike, it rained for most of it, several people got land leeches and we were all pretty muddy by the end of it. The park sits on limestone and so in the forest there are beautiful, jagged rocks and the occassional sinkhole. One right next to the trail with an opening about 10 feet across and dropping down over 80 feet we estimated. Really cool!

Hard to tell in this picture, but the base of this tree is about 25 feet wide.

A view towards the end of the hike.

Almost finished. Just a slide down this muddy slope to the village below where we spent the night in a stilt house under mosquito nets with think blankets. It was proabably in the 40s at night.

Gibbons swinging.




Gibbons calling.