Email from Laos

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Solo backpacking , 19th July - 31st July, 2006

Hi ho from The Lao People's Democratic Republic! (where's the hell's Laos? Map). One of "the last quiet places on Earth", only a million visitors make it to this landlocked communist state each year. The ex-French colony still feels like a secret and lives up to all the hype you hear on the backpacker trail. Plus, although it's the least visited and poorest country in the region, most who pass through agree it's definitely the 'jewel' of Southeast Asia - it's gorgeous here. Hectic markets, busy streets, chaotic hustle and bustle are just some of the things you won't find in Laos - rather, Lao people are so relaxed they're almost horizontal and their stunning, mountainous country is tranquil, lush and peaceful. The latter, however, is only a recent phenomenon - there were terrorist attacks as recently as 2004 (hence guys wondering around bus stations with AKs), the government has a predictably dodgy human rights record, it was a fully paid-up member of the 'Axis of Evil' until the late nineties, and Laos remains the most heavily bombed country on Earth.

How's that? US bombers returning from missions in Vietnam would lighten the load by offloading all excess and unused bombs over neutral, neighbouring Laos - leaving a grim legacy of millions of UnExploded Ordinance (UXO) and abusing Geneva agreements. For years, America was secretly carpet bombing the hell out of Eastern Laos, dropping over 2 million shells, and - as with Cambodia - even if all the world's bomb disposal teams worked 24/7, it would take 150 years to rid the nation of UXO. Laos has only just opened to tourism and is slowly 'waking up to the world' (though if 'the world' is promising free trade and foreign investment, Laos should probably just hit snooze and go back to sleep.)

Fantastic Laos has been the perfect antidote to Vietnam, which - as you may have detected - was beginning to do my nut in. Still reeling from sunburn (resembling a constipated beetroot in fact) - I readied myself for the full day epic bus journey from Hue in 'Nam to Savannakhet in Laos. The inevitable border crossing fun-and-games ensued with a shady civil servant adding random dollars to the visa fee, but the trip passed more quickly as I talked politics with a cool Nigerian guy who I accidentally inspired to begin a campaign against Shell. Bus journeys can be great if there are other backpackers to compare notes with - I met a couple of Swedish guys and discussed the feasibility of 'The Beach'-style communes, what Buddhist extremism might look like (enforced meditation for all!) and whether a cow can look pretty. I proposed that The Laughing Cow is positively 'sexy' even, with her delightful cheese earrings and winning smile - I haven't lived it down since.

Savannakhet was just lovely - nothing to see really, just a gentle, sleepy border town with Thailand on the Mekong. Full of crumbling French colonial architecture, it was oddly like a ghost town, but inhabited. Like the rest of this fine country, as I was to find out, Savannakhet was oddly quiet, with barely any traffic and completely devoid of hassling touts, pollution, bill boards, high-rises and multi-nationals (bar Pepsi and the usual oil giants). Everyone's so easy-going and genuinely laidback - Laos simply shuts down at 9pm, it goes completely dead everywhere - perhaps because there is a loosely enforced legal curfew at 11pm. Another peculiar law forbids intimate relations with the locals - getting it on with a native girl or marrying without permission can land you a bout in Lao jail! Anyway, I wondered the streets, chatted with some monks (who are all legends and often have great English) and visited the quirky Dinosaur Museum. The exhibits weren't exactly exhilarating, just a small room full of bronto bones, but people visit to experience the enthusiasm of the curators, and my guide was indeed full-of-beans. He hadn't been on a dig in 4 years due to lack of funding, though I doubt he'll see much Kip from the government. Kip being the highly unstable local currency - though Thai Baht and dollars are used in a complicated 3-tier system with the most expensive items being charged for in US. Way too many currencies in my head at the moment, thank goodness for my personally laminated 16-way currency converter (so I'm a geek!).

I got the bus up to the equally sleepy riverside city of Vientiane - you wouldn't believe it was the capital. If you've seen the old film 'Casablanca', you can appreciate the serene atmosphere here (nothing like the real Casablanca, in Morocco, which is a hole). It seems to have got bad press in the Lonely Pillock guidebook, but I liked it so much that I went to the UN Head Office down the road and asked them for a job (to which they replied 'no, who are you? stop coming here, look online'.)

I checked into a cheerfully cheap $1.50 dormitory and chatted with some Czech, French, Israeli and German guys outside - it was like the Eurovision Song Contest, without the singing or contest elements. The next day we rented bikes and headed to Pha That Luang , the holiest and most important site in Laos, it resembles a big golden missile pad. On the way, I sweated myself up to the Military Museum which, in the usual Southeast Asian style, was a collection of preserved local war toys and captured battered foreign tanks and planes - all presented with a typical degree of propaganda. Then again, it did seem Laos was more often the victim, as the various surrounding states invaded over the centuries - not to mention the US, whose codename for Laos 'The Other Theatre', the sinister sods.

Most interesting for me was the Patuxay, a copy of Paris's Arc de Triumph but with 4 arches. It was thrown up in the 60s using concrete donated by the US for an airport and was built a few centimeters taller than the equivalent in Paris, simply to spite the French - two cheeky touches I have a lot of time for! You can climb up to the top and enjoy the view but it becomes rapidly clear up close that the construction work is actually really pants. Fittingly, a sign inside reads "…up close it looks even less impressive, like a concrete monster", though it's obviously more of a poor translation than actual modesty. After whizzing around the local market, I got another bus up to Vang Vieng with the German guy and a Russian Israeli who I imaginatively nicknamed ' Germany' and 'Rusky' respectively.

Vang Vieng - the tourist ghetto of Laos, and a ghetto it is - literally, in some unruly aspects. Like some other select towns in the region, 'happy shakes', 'special pizzas' and 'space cake' are available all over - not a big deal, and I probably wouldn't - but a story two Scots told me later that week gave me the creeps. Monks had come to re-bless a supposedly haunted room at their hostel as, earlier in the month, a guy died after overdosing on opium. He'd never done anything before, but, in one evening, had 3 'happy shakes' and a smoke before returning to his room, leaving his head somewhere in the far reaches of the universe. The next day, the Irish ex-pat hostel owner turned him over and found that he was hemorrhaging from every pore of his body. Running to the hospital, he begged and tried to pay for one of the nurses or doctors to come take a look but none would leave the premises. He called the police, but they took one look, left him and went back downstairs to drink and play pool. The owner had to pay $400 to remove the rotting teenager's body, the whole incident testament to how screwed you are if you get sick in Laos and how lawless and 'wild-west' the country is. Lao Airways for example is amongst the world's crappest airlines - no international authority recognises them and their safety records are 'top secret!'. All the more reason to go overland methinks.

Travel guides warn that an airlift to Bangkok is the only option if you get ill here - and I had a malaria panic myself that week. I'm amongst roughly half of travelers not bothering with anti-malarials, mainly because the strongest stuff failed me in Uganda and I got the disease 10-months after coming home. As I've little faith in them and haven't been getting off the beaten track, I'd become paranoid about contracting it again. Thankfully, I was fine 24-hours later, but we're still talking a mixture of solid, liquid and gas when I go to the toilet. Asian squat toilets don't make such difficulties any more fun - and, yes, sharing this information is like therapy to me.

Back to Vang Vieng, again - the main attraction is 'tubing' - a makeshift, hazardous adventure sport on the Nam Song River, involving gently floating along with the rapids in an old tractor inner tube. Of course, it's claimed a few lives, including one a fortnight ago, mainly because they're impossible to steer and the current is faster right now in the rainy season. This doesn't stop much futile arm/wrist flapping to try and maneuver the things away from whirlpools and rocks. The riverbanks are punctuated with bars and swings, opportunistically set up in huts along the 2-hour route. We explored caves, got sunburnt and Rusky and the German were washed past the exit point and had to be rescued further along. I heroically watched the rescue to ensure it all went swimmingly.

The next day I finished reading The Beach (brilliant, made the film look embarrassing though) and rented a bike to check out some local caves. The area was just beautiful, simply gorgeous - in fact, it's rare you can point to any bit of Laos and call it ugly. Vang Vieng particularly reminded me of Yangshuo in China. Bright green paddy fields stretching back to narrow mountains and rocks, each lightly topped with low, wispy white clouds. Occasionally a wooden hut on stilts or some buffalo working the fields. So idyllic, you just knew snapping away was pointless as no photo would ever capture the perfect stillness and beauty of the place.

On the last night I met up with Uni-bud Ali and we spent a few hours catching up. He'd had an allergic reaction to the rubber tubes and suffered a blow-out on a rented motorbike whilst doing 50km/hr. I introduced him to Rusky, who we had recently banned from addressing locals. She wasn't too fluent in English and too often sounded cringeworthily blunt. In our hotel she yelled how the $3 a night rooms were 'too expensive', prompting the seemingly disillusioned and cynical ex-pat owner to go on a huge, vitriolic rant (we patched things up later). At the Organic Farm Café, after 90 minutes waiting for food (apparently the 'organic' element meant they grew the vegetables on demand) Rusky hollered at the waiter "eh! Where's our food!?" I could go on… We'd have been cross had it not been quite funny!

I took a cramped minibus north to the old capital, Luang Prabang. In Asia, if there are locals around you for any period of time, the inevitable questioning session will kick off - you can almost count down to "where you are from?". It's like traveler turrets - they may wait a minute or two but just can't resist asking, and it's usually followed by grillings about your income, marital status and underwear colour - all designed to try and figure out your place on the social spectrum . I usually also have to pretend to be from London and like football.

After a butt-numbing 7-hours of winding mountain roads, driving through clouds and overtaking on blind corners, I arrived late in the UNESCO protected Luang Prabang, surprisingly not dead (although I was almost blinded after walking into a meat hook and grazing my stupid eyelid). So I've just had a lovely four nights up there, much cooler and the scenery as fantastic as ever. I linked up with a small bunch of other tourists and got a tuk-tuk to a perfect multi-tiered waterfall, the kind you dream of. Went for a bit of a dip and also saw a bear and tiger sanctuary - both housing poached and rescued animals. The bears were ridiculously cute and looked pretty happy, and although I've already been spoilt with tigers after cuddling one in Thailand, I was still in awe of an adult big cat we got to sit next to for half an hour. Perhaps a dumb observation, but it's cool how their mannerisms are exactly the same as domestic cats - the yawning, stretching, licking and washing - it was like he was showing off for us.

Laos has been the highlight, for sure, but the trip was tarnished a couple of days back by a mickey-mouse whitewater rafting outfit. 3 strapping Spanish guys and I paid $30 each, top whack, to the most reputable company in town. They are pretty professional but their rafting tours are seriously cowboy. Our guide forgot helmets, we refused to raft without them - international standards, rocks all over the place etc… - he refused to get them, lying about there being no tuktuks, phones or mobile reception and we had to make do. Turns out he was scared of being punished by the tour company and so wanted to endanger us. No training on land or water, no safety briefing and his minimal instructions were wrong and muggings here had to correct him. The other guys put their faith in me as I'd done it before (which made me feel cool) but the 2 guides were so scared of the first grade 2 rapid (basically just choppy water), that they insisted on walking around the river. Nearly breaking our necks on the wet rocks in the jungle, we refused to go further after he admitted to barely having done it before.

The icing on the cake was that the dry bag failed, breaking my beloved zoomy camera. We spent 4 hours arguing for a refund and compensation for 2 expensive, knackered cameras - and kicking off was easier since the owners were German. As the police wouldn't care, we threatened writing to 6 guidebooks and websites to warn future tourists. A long story, but we got $35 per camera - a fraction of the cost - and a refund. So I'm now camera-less - hence fewer photos this time, but a chance to buy a new one in Honkers. I'd like to say it's been liberating not having the camera lens getting in the way of my experience and all, but really I've just felt gutted whenever I've missed the chance to capture a special moment…

Had a day in Vientiane yesterday to sort out postcards and email - I've just crossed the border to Thailand to await my night train to Bangkok. The marathon bus/train/boat trek to Koh Pang Ngan begins at 7pm. To burn time, some construction workers round the corner have promised to show me how to mix cement after lunch. Looking forward to some lush Thai beach action now, and 2 weeks of doing sod-all but read and sun my translucently white belly.

miss me…
T =o)

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