Kuang Si Waterfall Side-trip with Tiger Trail | Laos
After several days of exploring the UNESCO World Heritage town of Luang Prabang, the lure of the great outdoors took me thirty kilometers south to the village of Long Lao—the home of the Hmong indigenous people of Indochina. Accompanied by three other staff members from Tiger Trail Adventure, our truck set off under the misty fog of the early morning. After an hour of driving through small settlements and along a long stretch of rough road, we reached the trekking jump-off point for Kuang Si Falls under a still gloomy sky.
“Don’t worry, my guess is it won’t rain,” my guide DK told me. After figuring out the numerous times he had undertaken the trek to Kuang Si, I reckoned his weather forecasting was as spot-on as most advanced meteorological gadgets.
As we began our hike, which DK assured me would take only a couple of hours, the thick clouds started to spread apart, revealing patches of blue sky. “See, I told you,” DK told us. We were a group of four consisting of three Tiger Trail Adventure staff members, including DK, and—you guessed it—a fellow Filipino who had been working in Laos for the last three years.
“There are about twenty of us Filipinos working here in Luang Prabang, but there are more in Vientiane, where I was based during my first two years here,” John, a fellow kabayan (countryman), told me.
The Hmong People of Indochina
The first half of the trail consisted of flat terrain bordered on both sides by rice fields, vegetable plantations, and orchards of rubber trees. Along our way, we encountered smiling locals and small children waving from the windows of their wooden houses. On a narrow path leading to the paddies, we met a young woman carrying a woven basket on her back filled with leafy vegetables.
DK asked her if she could pose for a photograph, to which she gamely obliged by beaming a friendly smile. According to her, as translated to me by DK, she was on her way home after gathering some herbs and spicy leaves to be used as ingredients for a buffalo meat dish her mother would be preparing for lunch. She was in a hurry because after their meal, she would have to attend class at her school.
Before she went on her way, she motioned for me to look at her photograph. She then smiled once more after I showed it to her. How I wish I had an Instax camera so I could have given her a printed copy instead.
The Hmong people are an ethnic group found in Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam, Thailand, and Southern China. Settlers in several regions across Indochina for more than 8,000 years, the Hmong people have gone through their ill-fated share of oppression. From the genocide perpetrated by the Qing Dynasty in Southern China during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to being recruited by the CIA to fight against the communists during the First and Second Indochina Wars, the number of Hmong people in Laos has dwindled to just over 500,000.
Lunch and Dip at Gushing Waters of Kuang-Si Waterfalls
We arrived at the uppermost level of the Kuang Si Falls just before lunchtime. We decided to eat our packed lunch in a small picnic area under a canopy of trees. Mine was a decent fried noodle dish topped with shredded meat and vegetables, a boiled egg, and an apple. My companions had fried rice, minced meat, and a boiled egg.
I noticed them sprinkling MSG (monosodium glutamate) on their rice, which made them chow down on their lunch with gusto. “Try it,” DK told me. “No, thanks. I’m good with this,” I told him. It was true; the noodles already burst with flavor; plus, I am not much of a fan of using MSG like iodized salt.
After lunch, we went down a hundred meters to the main tier of the Kuang Si Falls. Towering approximately fifty feet and shaped like the letter A, the cascading waters divide as they stream down into numerous pools continuing to several cascades below. There is a wooden footbridge built fifty meters away where one can get a front-row view of the Kuang Si Falls.
Swimming is not allowed in this area, but you can take a dip in the succeeding cascading pools below. I spent half an hour alternating between taking photographs and staring intently at the waterfall to permanently etch an image of it in my memory. Afterward, we went down two cascades and settled by a larger natural pool.
“Here, you can swim here. Take your time,” DK told me. As my three companions from Tiger Trail Adventure huddled under a tree conversing about work, I wasted no time in taking a swim and dip in the cool turquoise waters of Kuang Si.
Taking a different trekking route on the way back to our truck, we passed by the Tat Kuang Si Bear Rescue Centre. At first glance, I thought it was a zoo that displayed bears in captivity, but DK explained to me that this is a rescue center managed by the NGO organization Free the Bears, and it is home to more than two dozen Asiatic black bears rescued from hunters and illegal animal traders.
The whole side-trip to Kuang Si Falls took almost a day, as we were back in the town center of Luang Prabang before 3:00 PM. With my craving for a great outdoor fix thoroughly satisfied, I headed to a random café along the Nam Khan River to relax my weary legs as I went about the day’s mini-adventure in my head, safely storing it in my memory vault.
