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Published: August 7th 2007
Our minibus from Chiang Mai took us to the border crossing at Chiang Kong in Thailand. This bus journey was the first of many to make us feel very sick due to the winding roads and determined (ie mad) drivers.
Crossing into Laos was quite simple. A quick stamp out of Thailand, followed by a 2 minute ride across the river and a $40 visa and 20 baht 'overtime' fee by the Laos Immigration officials, we had arrived into Huay Xai.
We were introduced to the People's Democratic Republic of Laos by our guide, who called himself 'Mr Information', which we soon learnt that his first name was 'Dis'. This was because Mr Dis-Information tried to scare us into a. changing money only with his tour company (because everyone else will rip us off); b. buy his room for our second night's stay at Pak Beng (because everyone else will rip us off and there will be no rooms left) and c. that he had booked us on the first boat to Pak Beng at 9am the next day (in actual fact the boat left at noon!). We spent the night in Huay Xai as our ticket included accommodation.
Waterfall
near Luang PrabangThe room wasn't too bad, although our toilet and shower had great big holes in the walls so everyone in the main street could view our private bits! Huay Xai introduced us to the magnificent Beer Lao (our best beer after Brahma) for 30p for 640ml! We drank this as a staple drink supplement and anaesthetic for the long a horrendous journeys in Laos. Huay Xai was also home to some really noisy monks who banged drums at 4am until 6am whilst walking to their wat (temple) at the top of a big hill right in front of our room. This, in turn, started the roosters and dogs off! The next day we got the 'slow boat' to Pak Beng, halfway to Luang Prabang. We realised why it was called the slow boat, when 2 hours had elapsed and we still hadn't begun our journey! The boat had very uncomfy wooden seats and took 7 hours to get to Pak Beng but this was a great opportunity to get to know some of the other backpackers especially when the Beer Lao was so cheap and the locals and their behaviour towards us gave us so much to talk about!
The people we met were: Ben and Andrea from Melbourne (in the process of moving to the UK), Ceri and Rachael from Devon, Joe from Perth, John from Sheffield, Eric from Detroit, Horgen from Sweden, Neema from San Fransisco. There were also some other passengers on the boat, a pig in a bag and a rooster tied to the pig in the bag...it was very bizarre!
The boat journey also gave us time to prepare Ben and Andrea for life in the UK, with Ceri, Rachael and ourselves teaching them about chavs (bogins in Australia), telling them about different parts of the UK and what to expect in each place. We gave them the low down on beer drinking, clothes shopping and trips, but mostly we talked about chavs and did our best chav impressions for them...by far Rachael was the most superior with this and could even demonstrate a pregnant chav by pushing her belly out really far! We aren't really sure we helped, we think we scared them a bit but at least they are prepared!
Arriving into Pak Beng at dusk we tried to leave the boat as quickly as possible to
find a room. This was because Mr Dis-Information had told us that there was a shortage of guesthouses and if we didn't find a room we would be sleeping on the boat. As often is the case with tour guides in South East Asia, this was complete bullshit and Donna and Andrea soon found a cosy little guesthouse. Leaving the boat was difficult all together as there was no pier, just a rocky outcrop and hundreds of touts and porters vying for business crowded the boat. Neil got into a panic as he couldn't find our bags, but fortunately he spotted a porter jumping across the tops of the boats with them and entered into a wrestling match with him to get them back!
Pak Beng is a nice frontier town with unexpectedly reasonable prices and very friendly people and it was here we experienced the best legacy of French colonialism, these were of course the baguetts! Baguettes could be bought everywhere for next to nothing. We went to bed quite early here owing to the fact that everywhere shut at 10pm and the generator powering the village switched off at 10:15pm! Pak Beng was also home to huge
bats, as Ben, Andrea and us found out whilst drinking beer on our guesthouse balcony one swooped in over our heads...seriously it pteradactyl sized (although the shadow of the candle might have made it seem bigger?!) The slow boat from Pak Beng to Luang Prabang was only an hour late leaving the next day and after a very long 8 hour journey we pulled into Luang Prabang to be met again by endless numbers of touts and porters. Luang Prabang was not as cheap as we had hoped nor were the people as friendly. We got a clean fan room for $10, the food in Luang Prabang, however, was exceptional...wonderful cakes, coffee, baguettes and Asian food. It really did feel like a small piece of France in Asia.
The gang we had met on the boat were a nice bunch and we decided to stick together so we could get the best prices for everything. Neil managed to get a great value tuck-tuk ride for the 10 of us to the nearby waterfalls. We soon realised why the fare was so cheap when halfway into the 30km journey the back left tyre exploded. These tuk-tuks were obviously not designed
Pig in a bag
...a novel way of cooking pork? for 10 big farang beasts to sit in the back of them! The wheel was quickly replaced with the usual slap-dash South East Asia approach to things (ie tightening the wheel bolts with fingers). On arrival at the waterfalls the tuk-tuk's radiator packed in too...great transport! The waterfalls were a great experience as the water was clean (but cold) and had various places you could dive in, or even swing using a tarzan rope. Theer was also a few bears and a tiger to look at and the locals seemed to be enjoying the water as much as the tourists! By the time we got back to the tuk-tuk, our driver had took the liberty of treating himself tyo several large Beer Lao's. So we paused for an hour to allow him to have an iced coffee and sober up!
Later that day Ceri got chatted up by some trainee Buddhist monks, they were asking her about sex, smoking and drinking...she obliged by telling them what 'easy' meant in the UK, they were fascinated with her insights! The other thing we saw a lot of was the trainee monks in their orange robes in internet cafes, all looking at
You Tube and naughty websites...honestly the young monks of today, no decency! We also decided to have a group massage experience as the lads were hopeful of a naughty one!! The massage place we chose didn't have enough masseurs, so the boys went to one place and the girls went to another and as it turns out, the girls were massaged by young semi-pretty Lao girls and the boys had old hags who chewed tobacco, Neil still swears that his masseur kept spitting next to his head! On leaving Luang Prabang, Neil had again organised a minibus to transport us (now 11 of us) to Vang Vieng, this time Neil very carefully checked that all wheels and tyres were secure and in working order! Again, the journey was harrowing due to the winding roads and a driver eager to get to our destination in record time. Maybe going so fast wasn't such a bad thing as we had read that hi-jacking had, in the past, occured on this road and we were told we were travelling in a convoy of minibuses for safety (whatever that meant!). However, it didn't seem so safe when we were passing men armed with machine
guns at the side of the road and when the minibus in front of us suddenly stopped, we panicked! But when we looked out of the window we saw a motorcyclist covered in blood and his bike was smashed against a bridge. One of our convoy had knocked the man off his bike and we then had to wait for an hour for the police to come and pretend to give a shit!
Arriving into Vang Vieng a little behind schedule, which was becoming typical of our overlanding through Laos (everything runs on mysterious 'Lao time' which we couldn't figure out!), we found a fan room for $4 with a sink that emptied onto your feet. Thjis seems to be a common feature of sanitaryware in this part of the world, where you can finish brushing your teeth and end up with minty fresh feet at the same time! Maybe this is a unique water conservation technique that we should be employing in the West?!
In Vang Vieng we went tubing (the only real thing to do there). This involves throwing yourself onto a huge rubber ring and floating down a river which didn't flow very
fast, stopping occasionally at riverside restaurants and beer vendors. This river was heaven for one of the group we were with...mad Eric from good ol' US of A...he really was mad, swinging and somersaulting off any tarzan swing available and squishing himself into his tube and rolling down a large hill into the river. Crazy! The kids we met on the river were great, they just launched themselves at our rubber rings and started quizzing us on where we were from and what our names were, content to hang onto our rings and float with us. We even had an impromptu disco when 3 Lao girls came floating down the river next to us, playing a Lao version of the song D-I-S-C-O, which we all chorussed to! They seemed to take a shining to Neil, Joe and Ben and shyly giggled when they were asked their names! The waterproof bag we hired however, didn't work at all and our things got soaking wet. This lead to a heated argument with the Vang Vieng Tubing Company who were unsympathetic, uncaring and unfriendly.
The majority of businesses and people in Vang Vieng were highly accomplished at milking tourists for money. The
price fixing was a dead giveaway and this behaviour always puts us off places. Vang Vieng had little character to it and seemed to have a strange 'culture' of TV bars showing Friends and SImpsons at very loud volumes. This must be what backpackers want as without the demand there wouldn't be the supply.
Vang Vieng also has the reputation of being THE place in Laos for marijuana and by the number of Lao's smoking and selling it in the street, it certainly did seem the case. We jheard that some people from our boat found out the hard way that this was illegal and were each fined $500 after being caught smoking it by guys in uniform, calling themselves the police. It was strange how the Lao's openly smoked marijuana right in front of the police station with no fines given!
Talking of smoke...we would like to say that the Lao countryside was stunning (especially as Vang Vieng had limestone karsts) but we didn't see any of it, the whole country seemed to have a permanent smoke of it. We don't think this was due to the pot smoking, more to do with the slash and
burning going on in the country. We think we were just unlucky.
We opted for the 'VIP air con'bus to take us to the capital of Laos, Vientiane. If air con means opening the windows and VIP means being on a bus with Very Ignorant People, then we had hit the jackpot for a mere $3 each! Vientiane isn't much of a capital city, as with the rest of Laos there seems to be a curfew with nightlife stopping and 11-11:30pm. Neil also did a good samaritan, helping an American girl called Lisa who had been knocked off her bike. He cleaned and dressed her wounds and calmed her down after her ordeal! We did get the time to visit a great concert in Vientiane, next to the National Cultural Hall with a Laos band playing rock/rap and a French band playing accordions and violins. We sat on the grass mixing with the young Lao people under the watchful glare of police with AK47's. The guns didn't scare 'Dog Boy' however, a Lao teenager, who without the aid of drugs, relying on mental instability alone, considered himself a dog! He grabbed people's flip flops (or thongs for all the
Aussies out there!) and bags with his teeth and scurried away with them. When just-as-crazy-Eric pretended to be a gorilla to stop dog boy stealing people 'thongs'', he spat on Lisa the poor girl who had been knocked off her bike...charming! Eric managed to scare dog boy enough with gorilla and tickling antics for him to stay away. What joy mixing with locals can bring!
The next day along with Ben and Andrea, we crossed the border to Nong Khai in Thailand to start our 3 day-3 city journey through North Eastern Thailand to Cambodia.
Laos as a country did disappoint us in a big way. We had heard so much from lots of people about the friendliness of the people and how cheap and relaxed it was. In reality Laos had very little to do unless you wanted to smoke, the people were very unfriendly in most parts and it was more expensive than we expected. Actually it is more like indifference to everything and everyone. An example of this was in Luang Prabang, we went to a restaurant/bar called the Lao Lao Garden, we spent 300,000 kip (US$30) in there as a group. The food and
cocktails were really bad quality and the staff were very rude, not even acknowledging us when we left the place!
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saolao
non-member comment
bitter-sweet
it's unfortunate that you had a bad experience, but i really enjoyed reading your travelblog. you described the chaotic trip with great humor. IF you decide to go again, you might not want to use Mr. DIS-Information again. I think he was the cause of your misfortune. by the way, great photos!