Inching east on Route 1

---

From Nong Khiaw, it was necessary to take another songthaew to Viang Kham, just a couple of hours away. A few ducks in wicker baskets were carried on top of the vehicle and the number of feathers that drifted past during the journey made me fear they might arrive bald. There were 3 other foreigners present. Two were a Swiss guy and a French woman, who I shall call the League of Extraordinarily Miserable Europeans (LoEME for short), as they were travelling together but seemed to derive no pleasure from anything, least of all each other's company. The third person I shall call LA Woman, for various reasons including factual accuracy as regards gender and city of origin. With so few transport options in this region, the 4 of us inevitably ended up seeing a lot of each other.

Viang Kham was yet another Laos river town with dusty streets and wooden/bamboo buildings. There we discovered that the next town along, Viang Thong, could be reached by either songthaew or a night bus (originating in Vientiane) that would be coming through some time betwen 11PM and 2AM this evening. Unfortunately the songthaew would only run if there were enough people to make it worthwhile (which turned out to be 8). Since all 4 of us wanted to go, this meant we'd either have to pay double the normal rate or find some other passengers. We tried to persuade the driver to find more people but he showed no interest in doing so. He knew that we had the fallback option of the night bus, so it was a surprise - and perhaps an indication that in Laos people won't necessarily bust a gut just to make some money - when he disappeared.

The LoEME decided to take a room in a guesthouse to pass the day whereas LA Woman and I voted for a tour of the town instead. During this time, I discovered amongst other things that she worked in Hollywood and even had an entry in IMDB, which was perhaps not surprising given her appearance indicated she must be a distant relative of Denise Richards. She'd packed in her job to travel for a few months, and was then intending attempting to find work in New Zealand, a country she'd never visited but which she now possessed a 1 year working visa for. I was intrigued.

Viang Kham did not appear to see many foreigners, so curious looks and sabai dees (hello in Lao) were frequent. We were accosted by Mr Phoumi, owner of the Riverside Guesthouse, who insisted on chatting with us for a while and said we should return to his place for dinner, when he would tell us some stories. This we duly did after our tour of Viang Kham was over, plodding back along the dark main street with the moon the only light source apart from flickering candles glimpsed through open doorways. Electricity is clearly not a 24 hour phenomenon here.

Mr Phoumi's stories concerned famous places in Laos. One of them was about Mount Phou Si in Louang Phabang - apparently it's not a hill but a stupa, created in mythological times by a hero who killed a giant and then scraped earth over the body to form a stupa. Unfortunately the spirit of the dead giant was able to periodically escape from a hole in the stupa and spread death and destruction in Louang Phabang, so the Buddha was specially requested to translocate over from India and sort out the problem. This he did by blocking the hole with a rock and stamping it in place with his foot - hence the Buddha's footprint that you can see now.

Another more recent story concerned the Kouang Si waterfall near Louang Phabang. The local tourist authorities decided to build a small zoo to house a tiger cub near the falls, in order to bring in more tourists. Unfortunately they didn't realise that the guardians of the falls - a herd of ghost deer - would be scared away by the cub, with the result that a landslide subsequently robbed the area of much of its previous charm.

We had to leave just before 11PM, as we needed to return to where the night bus would stop. Fortunately we only had to wait 1.5 hours for it. It was almost full, and I was amused by the contrast between the inquisitive stares of the locals on it and the unfriendly glares of the couple of foreigners already on board. It looked as though I might have to stand, but then a young boy was summarily evicted from his seat and, after clambering over a mountain of rice sacks and backpacks, I had somewhere to park my butt. My neighbour had dragon breath, the woman in front kept chundering out of the window, there were occasional bursts of loud music and the odd bout of smoking, and the road was rough and winding, but those were small concerns compared with the sense of moving on again.

The view out of the side windows was ghostly, with the mist in the valleys an eerie white. In one village, a group of cows refused to get out of the way of the bus and ran in front for what must have been a couple of kilometres, the driver sounding the horn the entire time. From my position near the back, all I could see were the shadows cast by the beasts in the bus's headlights, a phantom herd projected on the village buildings' walls.

At about 5AM, with my MP3 player keeping my ears warm, LA Woman came down the bus to say she'd seen a sign saying Viang Thong. Sure enough, the bus stopped seconds later and we were offloaded into the pre-dawn chill of another Laos river town.

There appeared to be 2 guesthouses, both of which were open (i.e. you could wander into the rooms), neither of which had any employees awake. The LoEME plonked themselves down on the verandah in one place, so LA Woman and I decamped to the other, where we found comfortable chairs and a sofa in the reception, which looked inviting enough for a short nap.

Just over an hour later, one of the bedroom doors opened and another foreigner emerged. He kindly mentioned that the owner lived in a separate building out the back. My first encounter with the owner wasn't auspicious as he was clad only in a T-shirt, apparently fresh from washing his genitals, but he showed us the available rooms and we gratefully grabbed a few hours' sleep.

Whereas Viang Kham had gradually revealed its charms over the course of 12 hours, a day in Viang Thong was a day too many. Food options were limited, even for carnivorous me - for vegetarian LA Woman, it was essentially a starvation diet. A noodle soup contained possibly the least appetising piece of stomach lining ever seen (which is saying something), an alien ring of green fronds and latent menace. The hot springs were a sulphurous trickle without even somewhere to bathe. Unfortunately, with our options to get out limited to catching the next night bus (i.e. 5AM, +/- 2 hours) or a daily songthaew (7AM), a day in Viang Thong was inevitable.

The final excitement of Viang Thong was an encounter in the evening with the local police. We were sitting in the common area outside of the bedrooms when the owner and 2 other men came in. One said "You speak Lao?", "No", "Thai?", "No", "Passport please". There was nothing to indicate either of the men were police, with the force budget apparently not running to either uniforms or ID cards, so I was reluctant to simply hand over my passport to anyone who asked for it. However the owner said "Tamluat" which the RG helpfully informed me meant "Police", so I complied with the request.

The man leafed through every page of the document with what seemed to be curiosity rather than any particular intent. I half-thought he was going to ask me for a hotel recommendation for the Bahamas. LA Woman's was subjected to the same scrutiny, then they thanked us and were gone.

We immediately sought out the LoEME to see if they had also been visited. They had, and the Swiss guy - who seems to have been to Laos several times and knows some of the language - explained that by law the police are supposed to check every day that the guesthouse register matches the guests actually in the guesthouse. Not that there seemed to be much of a comparison going on between the register and my passport, not to mention this is the first time I've been checked in 2 weeks, but this seemed plausible. He also said that, outside of large towns, there's a 9:30PM curfew for foreigners after which you're liable to find the police escorting you back to your guesthouse.

The one consolation of having to spend 24 hours in Viang Thong was that I knew that the following day should see me in Xam Nua, which would be base camp for a visit to Viang Xai, my most easterly point in Laos.

---

Photos

Strange cargo
Submachine gun, 2 rocket-propelled grenades, and a couple of daisy cutter rice bags