Sep 2006

After Nong Khiaw, Antouch, Chris and I caught a couple of (slow and overcrowded) buses to Vang Vieng, south of Luang Prabang. The one big drawcard of Vang Vieng is the tubing. You pay a few dollars to hire the tube, get driven a couple of kilometres upstream of the town, and float down the river on a rubber tyre innertube, admiring the scenery and having the option of stopping for a drink at one of the many, many bars that have sprung up along the river to service thirsty tubers (the floating kind, not the root vegetable). Despite the fact that everyone I'd met in Luang Prabang had been raving about how fun it was, when I got to Vang Vieng I decided to opt out. Being the rainy season, the water was flowing pretty quickly and I could see that it wouldn't take long to do the whole route back to town. And the colour of the Mekong is a turnoff - like strong, milky tea. I didn't particularly want to sit in that water for extended periods of time.

Chris and I went for a walk out of town to an organic farm that I was keen to volunteer at (you pay US$1 a day and get food and accomodation, in return you do 4 hours work on the farm a day). Unfortunately, they weren't taking volunteers during the rainy season. The walk out wasn't completely wasted, though: the organic farm sold us a big hunk of goats cheese (drool ... so damn good). When we got back into town we rustled up a couple of baguettes and a bottle of average French beaujolais (which tasted fab to me - wine is well out of my price range usually so I'd been going without) and spent the afternoon making absolute pigs of ourselves watching the rain from the balcony of our guesthouse. So indulgent.

The most bizarre thing about Vang Vieng: the ubiquity of "Friends" on restaurant/bar TVs. Almost every single restaurant in town has TV's showing "Friends" at full blast. Most of them have their chairs and tables set up so you can't escape from facing the television. And they all show the same season (the first) so you get the same (appalling) episodes over and over. Lack of diversity is an illness in Laos: you get a row of shops, restaurants, bars that are doing and selling exactly the same thing (five tour giuides selling identical tours, a chain of seven shops selling the odd combination of rice and beauty products, eight pork noodle soup stands in a row). One person successfully opens a new business and the next person who comes along decides to mimic them exactly (and steal half their customers) rather than being innovative and attracting a different kind of custom (eg. someone who wants to eats something other than pork noodle soup!). I can only imagine that a few years ago one restaurant started on the "Friends" gimic in Vang Vieng, succeeding in pulling in a few extra customers and then EVERYONE started playing Friends (which they had pirated from the original copy). Luckily, we managed to find the ONLY restaurant in town that did not have a TV, but we couldn't escape completely: you could still occasionally hear the theme music coming from the adjacent bars.

There were only so many meals we could eat at that one restaurant, though, so after 2 nights Chris and I left Vang Vieng and headed south to Thakhek. Thakhek wasn't in our guidebooks, but it had been highly recommended by a woman we met in Nong Khiaw. She loved it for its quiet seclusion, the lack of tourists, and the sleepy relaxed feel to it. Sleepy isn't quite the word for it - dead was more like it. An ugly, industrial, concrete eyesaw. Two out of three shops were vacant with their shutters down, no nice places to sit and relax on the Mekong river, no interesting places to eat, no trees! After one night and one morning there we decided that we'd exhausted all the highlights it had to offer. Perhaps we were being unfair and if we had stayed longer Thakhek's rewards would have become evident, but I seriously doubt it. Thakhek is a hole - avoid it if you can.

So, after 2 buses and nine hours of travelling, I made it to the Chiang Khong ferry crossing and arrived in Laos before my Thai visa expired (yay!). To get from Huay Xai (the town on the Laos side of the border) to Luang Prabang there are two options:

1) the slow boat: 15 hours over two days, with an overnight stay at Pakbeng. By all reports, gorgeous scenery, but the ferries are usually seriously overcrowded and the bare wooden benches soon lose their novelty value.

2) the fast boat: 6 hours straight to Luang Prabang in a speed boat. Certainly faster, but the boats are cramped and really noisy and at least once a week one capsizes (not great when you have all your belongings with you). They issue all passengers with helmets and life jackets but there are still 7 fatalities each year (so I've heard).

Not suprisingly, I went for option number 1: the slow boat. Good choice. Despite all I'd heard, it was really comfortable. Half boat had the expected benches but the other half had awesome coach-style reclining padded seats. I got to the dock early both days and secured one of the really cushy seats, which made it so much easier to chill out, alternating between reading my book and watching kids on the side of the river waving at the boat and showing off doing backflips into the water.

I stayed in Luang Prabang for about a week - like everyone else there, I kept on getting up in the morning and thinking "just one more day, then I'll move on". It has this strange magnetic power that traps you and keeps you there. Very difficult to escape. Like a black hole, but more fun. It's a really pretty town on the river and there's a great nightlife, if you know where to find it. Officially in Laos, all the bars close promptly at eleven-thirty. Unofficially, there seems to be some sort of system (probably involving the exchange of large wads of cash) where a particularly bar can stay open without the cops worrying about it until around 2.30 am when they come and chuck everyone out. When I arrived in Luang Prabang it was the Vietnam Bar, a grimy little bar with character and cheap beer. Although not in any of the guidebooks, somehow everyone know about it and its somewhat flexible opening hours. Get there at 11.28 and the place is deserted; turn up at 11.35 and it is absolutely packed and you're lucky to get a seat. I made heaps of friends there and ran into heaps of old friends, mainly people I first met in Pai in Thailand.

When I wasn't drinking Beer Lao, I actually got out and did some sightseeing, checking out temples and waterfalls around the town. At one of the temples I met a Laos monk who had been studying English for a couple of years and was keen to practice on a native speaker (or at least that's what I thought he was keen for). Over the next couple of days I went to the temple and spent a few hours chatting with him and helping him and some other monks out with their studies, sitting on the floor of a temple in front of a beautiful golden Buddha. On the third day we were chatting in a more secluded corner of one the temples. When I went to say goodbye, he leant in and kissed me (and I mean properly kissed me, not just a peck on the cheek) ... and I kissed him back. And then I thought "what the hell am I doing?" and left. Everything I have read about Buddhist monks has said that any sort of physical contact with women is forbidden - when passing something to a monk, a women is supposed to put it down on a table so the monk can pick it up without any chance of physical contact. I felt like I was corrupting this guy who had been living in a monastery as a novice/monk since he was 8 years old. But I can't really blame myself: he certainly wanted to be corrupted. I think he was having a bit of trouble with the "controlling your passions" part of Buddhism!

In Luang Prabang I met a lovely British guy, Chris, and decided to to travel with him and a Finnish girl, Antouch (who I had originally met in Pai), north to Nong Khiaw. We caught a little boat up the river through absolutely spectacular scenery: the river is lined with towering limestone karsts rising out of verdant forest. Definitely the most beautiful scenery that I saw in Laos.

After seven hours, we reached Nong Khiaw, a tiny one street town on the river. It is surrounded by the same scenery that we saw on the boat, wedged between huge craggy cliffs and forest. It looked all the more amazing in the mornings when the clouds were low over the nountains and mist descended over the river.

The town's only real drawcard, apart from the vistas from the balcony of the bungalows along the river, is a couple of caves a few kilometres away that were used by the locals as a hideout during the American War (Vietnam War). Americans dropped over 2 billion tons of bombs on Laos between 1964 and 1973, up to a third of which failed to explode and still litter the countryside. Around ten thousand people have been maimed or killed by the unexploded ordnance since the war. There wasn't much to see in the caves themselves, except for a couple of bomb craters just outside (now water holes where locals go fishing) as there barely anything left that showed that people had been living there but it gave an impression of the conditions they were subjected to.

While we were walking from the first to the second set of caves, being lead by some kids across a paddy field and along a small stream, squelching and slipping through the mud, we were attacked by leeches. I luckily only got a couple on my feet - Antouch and Chris had at least ten of the little suckers each. We decided to forego the second cave and backtrack to somewhere slightly drier to get them all off (they don't really bother me but Antouch had never experienced leeches before and was not very happy about them). We started on the 4 kilometre walk back to town and was about 10 minutes in when I saw a patch of blood soaking through my trousers, just above my knee. I couldn't feel the leech anywhere, but I knew it must be around somewhere. Then another patch of blood appeared on the back of my knee, and another bloomed on the opposite leg, and another on my thigh. Closer inspection revealed the enormous bloated leech, engorged with my blood, on my upper thigh. It left six bites on me, all of which didn't stop bleeding profusely til hours and hours later. I still have scars on my legs now, over three weeks later.

After dealing with the leech, we had just resumed our walk back into town when we saw a wall of water heading towards us, across the valley and along the road - a tropical downpour. I have never experienced rain like that in my life - it was like being hosed down. I had an umbrella, which kept my head and shoulders dry for a while but after ten minutes it was so saturated that water was dripping through the umbrella so I gave in and got absolutely soaked. It was actually quite fun and by the time we got back to our bungalows we couldn't have been wetter if we had jumped into the river.

number of times I was offered drugs (marijuana, opium) in my first ten minutes in Laos: 3 (I did not partake)

I have to get a whinge out of the way before I start: on arrival in Laos I was so excited by the prospect of new kinds of food to try, good coffee and baguettes (gotta love French colonialism for introducing those to Asia, if for nothing else), Beerlao (the only beer avalaible - luckily it's pretty damn good) and of course the new culture to learn all about. After a month there I am entirely sick of the boring, boring, boring food, terrible guesthouse coffee and bloody bus stations, which I saw more of than anything else. I had been lead to beleive that Laos food was great, fairly similiar to Thai but was hotter and spicier. All lies! I found it incredibly bland. I was constantly amazed that something that looked exactly like curry could have absolutely no flavour except for a hint of watery coconut milk. The standard fare available one you get away from the really touristy areas of Luang Prabang/Vang Vieng/Vientiane was noodle soup, pad thai, fried rice, stir fried veges, veg curry, papaya salad, omelette+baguette. If you're an omnivore you can add deep-fried and/or barbecued meat-on-a-stick to the list, if you dare. Sound good? In theory, yes. In practice, so repetitive and dull. The "veges" was usually cabbage, occasionally spiked with a couple of wedges of tomato or some carrot if you're really lucky. Usually though, just cabbage. Mmmm. And the flavours of all the options - except the baguette, curry and the papaya salad - are exactly the same. So every day was pretty much a rearrangement of the same meals over and over.

Breakfast: baguette now or noodle soup and save omelette+baguette for lunch?
Lunch: papaya salad or baguette (see breakfast).
Dinner: Will I have my cabbage with rice or noodles? Tough choice.
Sleep (invariably dream of food that doesn't involve cabbage).
Repeat above.

Second gripe: busses. I'm thinking of writing a travel guide on "Bus Stations of Laos", I spent so much time waiting around in them. The worst part of hanging around bus stations was the amount of attention you get from the locals. The sight of a couple of foreigners in a bus station was so fascinating to the locals, there was a lot of staring at you and talk about you to their friends. I'm not being paranoid - I can't understand Laos but I know when people say "farang" (foreigner) they're talking about me. Just getting a bowl of soup for lunch was enough to get a crowd of curious Laos people staring and pointing - "oooh, look, the farang eat noodles. Wow!". I even had an old guy on one bus take a photo of me on his phone. So he could show his friends that there was a farang on his bus? Am I that much of a freak?

The country isn't that huge, and the distances between destinations isn't that large, but you're lucky if you get anywhere in under five hours. First there's an hour or so of sitting at the bus station, in order to get every possible passenger before it leaves. Eventually, you pull out of the station and drive around in circles around town for at least 30 min to try and find a few more passengers. By this stage the bus (actually a pickup truck with a roof and a couple of benches) is so packed that you're almost sitting on your neighours lap, your knees interlaced with the person across from you and your feet are resting on a bucket of live fish and a huge bag of chokoes. Eventually you hit the open road, get up to a whopping top speed of 30 km/hr, slowing down as you go past every house, shack and chicken coop just in case someone might want to squeeze into the cubic foot of space that is left on the bus. And every now and then you pull up by the side of the road to be surrounded by vendors brandishing meat-on-a-stick and crickets-on-a-stick which your neighbour will purchase and drop all over you or poke you in the eye with. Or, if you're lucky enough to get a real bus rather than the pickup, you get exactly the same thing with marginally less crowding plus the added joys of Thai pop videos blaring all night without a break. Ugh.

Chris sitting on a corner, waiting for a bus

Right, now that's done, and before you start going "boohoo, poor Kate on holidays, what a hard life", I'll tell you about the fun stuff. I'm going to give you the abridged version of my Laos adventures first, so you don't have to trawl through all my ramblings if you don't want to. Or at least it will help you decide which bits to read and which to skip.

1. Slow boat down the Mekong to Luang Prabang - chilled out watching gorgeous scenery and reading good books

2. Luang Prabang - late nights drinking beer Laos by the Mekong; snogged a Laos monk; met Chris, my travel partner for the rest of the Laos trip

3. Nong Khiaw - stunning scenery, wedged between massive limestone cliffs; attacked by leeches; drenched in sudden tropical storm

4. Vang Vieng - didn't do tubing; found the one restaurant in town that does not show "Friends" on TV; goats cheese and red wine

5. Thakhek - impossibly dull

6. Savannakhet - chilled out and read good books

7. Tadlo (Bolaven plateus) - treked through mud and brambles to try (and fail) to reach waterfall wihout the help of a guide; made a Scrabble set using pebbles and a travel towel; chilled out by the river and read good books

9. Don Det (4000 islands) - chilled out in a hammock and read good books

Sound tough? It really was. You really feel sorry for me now with all my hardships, don't you? eating repetitive food and catching crowded busses - poor me!