An explosive legacy

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We take yet another tuk tuk to the bus station, conveniently located 11km outside Luang Nam Tha, where we hop on a local bus to Pak Mong. Surprisingly, the bus, which looks rather run-down from the outside, is a lot more comfortable than the touristy 'VIP' buses and the minibuses we've been on. You got more leg room, the seats are tolerable and don't lean back, which means you won't be bothered by a person in front of you invading your private space, and there's no annoying tourists on the bus, only us and two solitary backpackers who blend in quite well.

The local hilltribers don't seem to be taking the bus all too often, for after about 20 minutes the first one to throw up is a middle-aged lady, mainly over herself and into the aisle. I withdraw my feet from the oncoming flow of green-red watery vomit that leaves behind a lingering reek of bile and undigested local food. The ticket collector doesn't look too happy, he tells the woman to move to the window seat and puke out when she has to. He moves on to half-heartedly mopping up the floor while the lady just sits there with a stupefied look on her face. A while later an ancient-looking lady in traditional costume, whose skin is so creased with wrinkles that it resembles tree bark, throws up all over her saggy bosom. I pass her a plastic bag for the highly likely event that her little mishap repeats itself, she grabs it nodding faintly in acknowledgement.
It appears that to the inhabitants of the far North in Laos, being sick on the bus is just another manifestation of the hardships in life, and is thus met with the same stoicism that they would react with to a natural disaster or failed crop. Remarkably, there's no moaning and groaning, subsequent spitting or complaining. Only when the old lady pukes again, this time out of the window, and a girl sitting two rows behind her, who had her window open, is hit with the sick, does the poor lass adopt a look of disgust and seem to be quarreling with her fate.

Three hours turn into five turn into seven, and after nine hours we finally arrive in a godforsaken little town called Pak Mong, where we hope to catch an onward bus to Nong Khiaw. The only bus that's parked in the tiny bus station goes to Vientiane, and to our surprise two of the passengers are cunt-face and Barthelonian, both of who seem to be slightly less unhappy to see us than we are to see them.
It take us a while to find the person in charge, a stocky man who, upon spotting us, appears to be trying to come up with the best scheme to take the most money out of us. We ask when the next bus to Nong Khiaw leaves, and he assures us there is none, so we try to ask him about a shared tuk tuk, but of course, he wants us to hire a tuk tuk for ourselves. He types in 100,000 on his calculator, the most important asset of any rat ripping off tourists for a living. I laugh at him and type in 20,000, to which he laughs at me. There are some people waiting, and I ask them 'Nong Khiaw?', but they just smile uneasily and exchange glances with the man. So we take part in the waiting game, I do as the Laotians do and squat, but after two minutes my knees are about to burst, so I get up again. I ask some truck drivers if they go to Nong Khiaw, but I get the same reaction as before, complete and utter non-cooperation. The man in charge just marvels at my attempts, and continues plotting with some members of the tuk tuk-mafia. He comes up once more with the calculator, typing in 90,000 and giving me the 'last price'-sign. I type in 20,000 and repeat his gesture.
Some people actually fill a tuk tuk, and even though I ask some of them 'Nong Khiaw?' and they just shake their head or stare at me, there is no way of really knowing where it goes, since they don't want us on a tuk tuk with other Laotians and consequently wouldn't give us an honest answer anyway.

After an hour or so of futile negotiations and zero progress, we take our bags and walk off, keen to try our luck hitchhiking, but when we see a minibus pull over I run up to ask the driver if he's headed for Nong Khiaw. He says yes, and tells us to wait there until he comes back from the bus station. I curse myself for not asking the price before he drives off, and before my eyes I already see the man at the bus station plotting against us with the driver, setting a price that would get all of them through the next day, and sharing their booty with schadenfreude afterwards. When the driver comes back he says 20,000 each, I ask for 15,000, but he shakes his head, so we don't have any other choice but hop on and pay. At the end of the day...no, I don't care if it's only so-and-so-much in € or $ and if it doesn't even buy you a cup of coffee in Germany, it's still a rip-off and a lot more than the locals would pay, so I feel unfairly treated and taken advantage of, which I don't appreciate anywhere in the world, and quite frankly, it makes me fucking sick.

By the time the driver dumps us at the roadside it's pitch black outside and we have no way of knowing if we're really anywhere near central Nong Khiaw or if there's gonna be the next tuk tuk blackmailing us disoriented tourists into paying an extortionate price for a short trip. We walk along a dusty road and come across a white guy sitting outside a bar, whom we ask if he knows any cheap accomodation around. He doesn't, so we just walk, check out a Chinese-owned hotel, which after closer inspection of the mattresses and the linen looks suspiciously bed bug-infested, so we struggle on, crossing a bridge across the Nam Ou river lined with sharply soaring limestone hills that even look dramatic despite being barely visible. On the other side of the river, there's a bit of hustle and bustle, there are restaurants and guesthouses, and we wonder why the driver didn't drop us off there. We ask some Frenchies at a restaurant whether they know a good, cheap place to stay, but they say that most guesthouses are booked solid, but that we should keep walking and asking.
After enquiring at two or three more places, which are indeed all full, we finally find a spare room in the house of the guesthouse owners, since their bungalows are all full already as well. It's high season, between Christmas and New Year's Eve, so we pay too much for a double mattress on the floor in a room that doesn't have real walls but is just sectioned off by bamboo walls. There is enough space for cheeky people to climb over the wall and nick our stuff, and seeing that the owner is not friendly at all either, we lock everything tightly before going out for dinner.

I'm very happy to find an Indian restaurant to get a break from sticky rice and noodles, and we go all out eating samosas, palak paneer, pooris, chapatis et al., and I take advantage of the local BeerLao price war (all restaurants have big signs with the price in front to lure alcoholic backpackers inside) and have my cheapest one yet at only 7000 kip.

The next day we decide to change guesthouses, since we like to be treated as guests and not as vermin, so we get up early and ask around if any bungalows are free. We find one for the same price as the crappy room in a guesthouse that's managed by a lovely old couple who make sure we have everything we need and are always willing to give us helpful information when asked.
We take a walk to a little cave that's around 2.5km out of town. That particular cave served as a hideout for local troops during the Second Indochina War, and after paying a small charge and successfully warding off the kids who want to serve as our guides, we climb up a dangerously steep and wonky ladder and make our way into the cave, finding there is not that much to see, and realizing how small it is anyway. Still, the surrounding scenery is superb, and there are only a couple of other tourists, which gives the whole experience a very relaxed and pleasant feel.

After a couple of days we head back to Luang Prabang, but only to catch an onward bus to Phonsavan. There is the possibility of doing an Eastern loop, but the bus timetables are too volatile and the roads too bad there for us to follow through with it. There's an unpleasant incident with the bus to LP. When the bus arrives , there are already numerous people on there, and it becomes clear that not everybody can hop on, seeing that there's about ten people waiting for the bus, having bought their tickets already. The people on the bus have just been fetched from a boat and were told they could buy their tickets to LP at the bus station, so when they get out to do that, all the people who were waiting start cramming into the bus. There's a particularly obnoxious Australian family, a white woman with her Asian Australian husband and their two boys. They are the ones who push in the hardest, insisting on and telling everybody around that they bought four tickets and they want four seats, despite the fact that they could easily take their kids on their laps so that other people could get on as well. The woman perfectly embodies that reckless aggressiveness fueled by the monocultural isolation that dims the mind and narrows the view of so many Anglo-Saxon Australians and manifests itself in boisterous transgressions when travelling abroad and confronted with cultures that they don't understand. I feel the hatred welling up in my throat but J. calms me down before I can say something like "Relax, twat, it's your fucking holiday!".

The bus ride turns into one of those kafkaesque experiences that appear to be just waiting for us around the corner anywhere we go in Laos. There's something wrong with the engine, and every 20 minutes or so, the bus has to stop so the on-board lackey can refill the coolant out of a huge water canister. The bus is so crammed and the nozzle sits just diagonally behind the driver under a seat, which means that four people have to exit the bus before the water can be refilled. It quickly becomes this repetitive thing directly out of a stand-up sketch, and I just keep watching the protagonists with a half-desperate amusement that turns more and more into dull stoicism.

Eventually, we arrive at some bus station in LP, where we proceed to do our usual shtick of ignoring the transport mafia ganging up on us and walk out to the road, where we hail a tuk tuk and negotiate the driver down to 5000 per person, an acceptable and fair price for both parties. 15 minutes later, we're in the city, I hand over the money with a smile and a "korp jai lai lai", and the driver receives it in an equal fashion. Then the hassle starts. It's one day before New Year's Eve, we don't have a hotel reservation and the city is crammed with tourists. Every guesthouse we ask has jacked up the prices even further, and everybody seems to be unwilling to haggle, seeing that there are so many tourists around who just pay the first price they're quoted. We end up paying almost double of what we've usually paid for accomodation in Laos, for a room that's not the nicest either.
We sort out our bus tickets to Phonsavan for the next day and head to the Hmong Night Market, where J. goes crazy buying souvenirs, slippers, knick-knacks and trinkets. I buy a canvas bag for 15,000 kip.

The next morning we are picked up by a tuk tuk and dropped off at the minibus station. There are about 12 people headed for Phonsavan, so we are distributed on two different buses. Of course, I pick the one that ends up being the bad bus. The seats and floor haven't been cleaned, and the driver is past middle-aged and also follows the peculiar Laotian fashion of growing long hair out of a mole at the corner of his mouth. Our bus starts earlier, but after a while the other bus overtakes ours just because our driver is uncharacteristically slow. On top of that, it's obvious that he hasn't learned how to properly change gears. He goes up a hill in fourth or fifth gear, and only when the bus starts rattling and bucking does he shift down. He also doesn't realize that when going up a hill, it might be advisable to accelerate a bit more than on a flat road. The result of this is scores of minbuses speeding past us and me wishing I was sitting in one of them.

After three hours, the driver stops in a little, dusty village, says something in Laotian, then looks at us looking at him, and makes an eating gesture by picking up imaginary sticky rice and directing it towards his mouth. We figure out that it's our lunch break, and settle for a small restaurant that is packed with a Japanese tour group. After finishing their meal, all the Japanese get up to line up at the toilets while I bang my head on the table.
We walk back to the bus and see Japanese people all over the streets, taking pictures of anything and anybody without asking. One lady with a humongous telephoto lens on her camera stands on the corner of a street, taking sneaky shots of the villagers on the other side of the street. We hop on the bus and dash ahead at 30km/h.

After the usual eight or nine hours, we arrive in Phonsavan, check into a guesthouse and eat our New Year's Eve dinner (fried rice and noodles with veggies) at a small restaurant. We go to bed at 9pm and welcome the new year snoozing away.
In the morning we head out quite early to have breakfast at the market. We eat some nice fried noodles with herbs and spices, and even manage to tell the lady that we prefer soy sauce to fish sauce. This prompts her to go and buy soy sauce for us, which we drizzle over our noodles gratefully. For dessert we have some sticky coconut cake, extremely yummy and good value.
The downside of the market is that you can buy almost anything there, including endangered species that the vendors buy from local poachers. We see flying foxes, big rats and something that looks like a small bear and reeks of putrefaction. The cut-off horns from slaughtered water buffaloes are lying on the ground, and without really wanting to see it, I catch a glimpse of the bloody-marrowy interior. Time to leave the market...

Phonsavan is the biggest town in Xieng Khuang Province at about 60,000 inhabitants. Between 1964 and 1973, Laos was hit with one of the largest sustained aerial bombardments in history, conducted by the USA, which flew 580,344 missions over Laos and dropped 1.3 million tonnes of bombs at a cost of US$2.2 million a day. Xieng Khuang is the province that was hit the hardest, as the US sought to destroy the Ho Chi Minh-trail that passed through the region; statistically the bombs there fell by the plane-load every eight minutes for nine years, and around 30% of the bombs dropped failed to detonate, leaving the country, and especially this region, littered with unexploded ordnance (UXO). Between 1964 and 2008 there were at least 50,000 casualties from UXO. In 2007 alone there were about 600. Children pick up the shells and play with them, women hit them while digging for root vegetables in the woods, others are killed or maimed gathering them to sell as scrap metal. UXO contamination keeps people poor by preventing them from using land, making it one of the prime factors limiting long-term development in Laos.

The locals in Phonsavan seem to make the most out of this bitter legacy, using decommissioned UXO to decorate houses and foyers or make signs, tables and chairs. The Mines Advisory Group is very active in Xieng Khuang, clearing land of UXO and educating locals about the dangers of it. MAG's Phonsavan office has a very informative exhibition about the history of the bombings and the stories of UXO victims and survivors, complete with disturbing imagery, and regularly shows documentaries about their work and the impact it has on the local population.

The other thing that Phonsavan is famous for is the Plain of Jars, an archaeological landscape with thousands of megalithic jars scattered around the province. The stones appear in clusters in several plains and valley, ranging from a few to several hundred. They have been dated to the Iron Age, which makes them about 2500 years old, and are probably associated with prehistoric burial practices, as human remains, burial goods and ceramics were excavated around the stone jars.
Luckily, most of the main sites have been cleared of UXO, making it a huge hit with both domestic and foreign tourists.

There are only few tourists around at the time of our visit, which is pleasant but problematic in a sense that it becomes hard for us to join a tour to the Plain of Jars. It's the 1st of January, 2010, and everybody seems to be in Luang Prabang. We don't have the money to go on a private tour, so we have to wait for a day to find a small tour group that we can join, making it a lot more easy on our budget. Until then, we keep on unsuccessfully asking 4-5 different tour agencies in town, all staffed with slick youngsters speaking decent English, an absolute rarity in the Lao P.D.R.

The night before the tour starts, there are some people behind our guesthouse shooting remaining firecrackers from New Year's Eve. We are about to sleep when all of a sudden somebody knocks fiercely on our door. Alarmed, we get up and get dressed while the knocking continues. I approach the door and ask "Who is it?", but I don't get a response, I only hear people speaking frantically in Laotian and the knocking resumes. "Who is it? What do you want?" I shout, until finally somebody says "It's the housekeeper", so I open the door and see about 10 people standing there, looking at us suspiciously. There's a Chinese-looking guy, the only one of them to speak English, who asks me "Have you been lighting firecrackers in your room?", to which I repeat "No, it's somebody outside our window, behind the building somewhere." All the other people look at him while he translates for them. When they understand what I said, there's a lot of ooohing and aaaahing and everybody is really embarrassed all of a sudden. They start apologizing elaborately to us in Laotian, and the guy says "We are so sorry to have disturbed you", and we can't help but shrug it off and go back to bed.

In the morning, the tour minibus picks us up early and we are introduced to our driver and tour guide, both Hmong people giving us a truckload of information on the region and the Plain of Jars in excellent English. We arrive at site number 1, where large groups of Laotians are already busy taking pictures, laughing and climbing onto the jars. This I find kind of ironic, as there are posters in many restaurants and tourist locations with some rules on how not to behave in Laos; basically they show dull-looking comic tourists doing drugs, touching monks, making out in public, putting their feet on the table, entering houses with dirty shoes, etc. Now in Phonsavan they have a variety of that poster specifically for the Plain of Jars, on which you see the same tourist couple littering, not sticking to the paths, picking up UXO and climbing on the jars, posing in a silly fashion for pictures.
One Laotian guy finds it hilarious to jump from one jar to the other while his friends and family are laughing and taking pictures, and when moving on to the next site, they leave behind their garbage on the ground or in the jars.

We take our time wandering around the jars, marvelling at the scenery, taking pictures and just enjoying the nice weather. We visit three different sites, all very similar but noteworthy, with a break for lunch and the inevitable stops at a whisky village and a Russian tank. The latter has been largely plundered for scrap metal, with just its skeleton remaining.

Back in town we have another great dinner at the only Indian restaurant in town, stuffing ourselves with samosas, naan and different curries. Always good to get some variety on the table every now and then.
Before heading to our guesthouse for our last night's sleep in Phonsavan, we organize our bus ticket down south. After pondering and debating for a long time with the poor guy from the same tour agency as before, we finally decide on not going via Vientiane, since I'm really not keen on backtracking, and buy two tickets for the direct bus to Paksan, where we want to catch an onward bus to Pakse. In our guidebook, the road from Phonsavan to Paksan appears as a dashed line, and the tour operator tells us it's not a sealed road and not a very comfortable bus ride, but that we'll get there eventually. I'm sure it will be more of an experience than taking the touristy bus via Vientiane. And thus the nightmare begins...

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Comments

[felixgervais]

yarr
I like the Carcass reference (intentional or not), and also just to read your stories, punctuated by your good ol' acid sense of humor. Can't wait to read about your disastrous stay in Saigon! - Felix (in Songkran mode)