Wats, boats and ziplines: just your average week in Laos...

---

Laos: the most bombed country in the world. The forgotten victim of a war misleadingly known in the West as the Vietnam War, but more accurately described as the Indochinese War. Bombed to hell and left there by US forces intent on cutting off Ho Chi Minh and his North Vietnamese communist forces from their supply lines, despite the country being internationally recognised as neutral in the neighbouring conflict. A legacy from which the country has yet to escape, unexploded ordinance still contaminating more than half its land and killing hundreds annually. Yet whose people who could not be more gentle and peaceful, reflecting their strongly-held Buddhist beliefs, and a country that could not be more delightful, from the omnipresent Mekong lining its western borders and dipping inland from time to time, mountains looming over the river in the northwest, impenetrable rainforests hiding their secrets, and fabulously-decorated wats begging to be photographed.

Sabaydee!

Maybe a little hesitantly, shyly, the locals are charmingly warm and welcoming towards the visitor: the passerby in the street, the would-be purchaser already intrigued by the colourful silks and appliqué-ed cottons spread out for sale, or the potential customer entering their guest house, restaurant or bar. Their apparent naivety and the country’s relative lack of development are delightful, a welcome change from nearby Thailand and Malaysia. Will it last, as Laos is overrun by backpackers seeking the new place to be? For now, let’s enjoy it.

Luang Prabang, the former capital, is a World Heritage site. That’s to say, the whole town is a World Heritage site. Wandering around its narrow streets, surprisingly and welcomingly empty of traffic is a pinch-myself experience. Nowhere could really be this charming and picturesque, could it? Built on a long elevated finger of land at the conjunction of the Mekong and one of its tributaries, Nam Khan, the town is caught in a time-warp. Below the white-washed, tile-roofed, two-storey buildings with their traditional dark-wood shutters and balconies, the rivers flow slowly, overlooked by distant green hills and lush forests. Locals fish, gather wood, work in nearby rice fields. The smoke from cooking fires rises as darkness falls. The twenty-first century is a very long way away.

Wats are the order of the day here. The town has thirty or more, yet no two are the same. Wat Saen, across the road from our guesthouse, was my introduction to Lao wats. The corners of its steep red-tiled multiple-layered roof are decorated with naga heads rising up to the skies. A magnificent cross-legged Buddha in embossed gold-on-red dominates one end wall. Delicate gold-on-red stencilled apsaras are frozen mid-dance on the side walls. Even the shutters are beautifully decorated with gold figures in relief. The large complex of Wat Xieng Thong is an oral feast, from its gold-on-red and gold-on-black stencilling to its fabulous mosaic work. The mosaic mirror- and glass-work for which this Wat is particularly well known somehow manages to look, at first blush, deceptively simple - the product of a children’s art class perhaps - while, on closer inspection, the detail is stunning. The main temple’s multiple roofs sweep so low as to give the impression of a lady in long full skirts. Wat That Luang is approached up marble steps, five-headed nagas - mythological water serpents with great magical powers, regarded as the most important and potent symbols in Laos - rearing up to greet the visitor on either side, and its main entrance is in the middle of a glorious painted mural. Roofs are usually supported by gold curlicues and naga heads: initially stunning, your eye then becomes accustomed to, and demands, this richness of detail. Nothing is left undecorated.

Inside, the wats vary as much as externally. The simplicity of the stencilling inside the main temple at Wat Xieng Thong initially distracts attention away from the horror of the religious hellfire-and-damnation scenes depicted. Wat Aham has delicate small painted panels covering its internal walls in a fabulous blaze of colour. The wats’ main “altar” area is usually packed with Buddha figures, only occasionally uniform in style, and dominated by a large, usually seated golden Buddha. Behind main Buddha figure in Wat Choumkhong Sourintharame are tiny alcoves, geometrically laid out, each containing a tiny Buddha. At the back of Wat Visounnarth, its “altar” area already crammed, a crowd of extra Buddha figures is stacked like spare parts in a workshop.

These are working monasteries. Apart from day-to-day religious life, with services, studying and teaching, the monks here undertake practical work to maintain the buildings that form such an attraction. At Wat Xieng Maun, UNESCO is sponsoring a training centre for Lao traditional arts and building crafts. At Wat Chantabouli in Vientiane, the monks were restoring their wat, paintbrushes in hand, newly-carved naga heads waiting their attentions.

Religion dominates life here. At 6.30 am every day, the streets of Luang Prabang, still silent of traffic from the previous night, come alive in the early morning mist with the iridescent orange of the monks’ robes, and the bright white of the supplicants’ sashes. This is Tak Bat, the morning alms-giving ceremony. Monks from each wat walk through the streets collecting handfuls of cooked sticky rice from devotees, the only sound their sandals flapping as the monks progress hurriedly along in single file. It is a Buddhist custom throughout Laos, but, sadly, it has become such a well-known phenomenon in Luang Prabang that it is now seen by visitors as a tourist attraction laid on for their benefit. Although notices describing the ceremony and appropriate codes of conduct have been put up in guesthouses and some of the wats, it seems that some tourists regard compliance with these as optional. Common courtesy seems to abandon some people, once the camera is in their hands. Lenses are shoved into the faces of monks and worshippers, the need to get the perfect shot decimating any pretence at good manners. I was deeply embarrassed of my ilk. Did they not appreciate that these were people, real live human beings, not animals or worse to be treated so rudely? Even standing well back on the opposite side of the road, I felt I was invading a deeply personal, spiritual moment for the devotees as they knelt with their rice awaiting the monks’ bowls. Occasionally there is a glimpse into the person behind the robes - a rare event - a couple of the youngest boy-monks exchanging a few words. Once the monks have passed, the devotees rise and the day can begin in earnest.

Life for the visitor to Luang Prabang is good. As in Cambodia, the legacy of the French is still very much apparent in the quality of the coffee and the variety of pâtisserie on offer. A delightful, if incongruous, wine bar overlooks one of the main streets; l’Elephant, a restaurant that lives up to the grandeur of its name, would not be out of place in Paris or London; open-air bars and restaurants buzz with chatter as dusk falls. In January, the weather is deliciously clear and warm: the rains have not yet come and the country-folk have yet to start back-burning their fields, a process which there is already some attempt to discourage for agricultural-efficiency, conservation and aesthetic reasons. It would be very easy to stay here, only waking up a few months’ hence and realising that time had passed…

But we had things to do and places to be and, reluctantly, let Luang Prabang disappear round a bend in the river as we took the slow boat up the Mekong to Houay Xai. Our journey was approximately sixty kilometres, and was to take two days. The intervening night would be spent at Pak Beng, a township that seems to exist for the sole purpose of catering for overnighting slow-boaters.

As a transport experience, the slow boat takes some beating. A little noisily, it must be said, the boat chunters stoically along the river. For the most part, the Mekong is comfortably wide, allowing us to pass boats going in the other direction and the notoriously dangerous fast boats to overtake us, but the shores are close enough for our passage to generate interest from the fishermen and the villages. At one point on the second day, we stopped at a small village and a quartet of children scrambled aboard with baskets brimming. This was the “inflight meal service”, should anything grab your fancy. That day we did well. A bar - well, a small table - had been set up towards the stern, with seemingly endless hot water for delicious sweet Lao coffee (condensed milk is the secret ingredient, necessary to soften the hairs-on-your-chest-strength local coffee) and a large supply of (relatively) cold drinks. The first day, we had had to make do with what we’d taken on board ourselves, although one of our fellow travellers, a Lao woman, managed to purchase some dried fish from a local when we docked briefly en route.

But taking the slow boat is not without its excitements. Getting to the landing place early is vital. The number of passengers will not correspond to the number of seats available, and the number of seats available will not correspond to the number of cushions provided. A seat is optional, if there’s still a decent-sized corner of floor available, free of luggage, hens, building materials, etc. but a cushion is mandatory. The economically-constructed benches lining the boat like a set of ribs have clearly been built for people whose backsides can perch on an abstemiously-designed pew. All padding gratefully received.

The other essential is good balance. Boarding the vessel is usually effected by crossing a plank precariously perched between the boat’s gunwale and the shore. With a 15kg backpack and a little hand luggage, navigating your way across this is no mean feat. If you’re lucky, a pole will have been balanced between the top of the boat’s awning and the shore to provide a handhold - if someone is holding the pole in place at the boat-end, otherwise relying on this might be a touch interesting... Landing at Pak Beng has an additional wrinkle if the captain hasn’t docked the boat beside either set of concrete steps: a steep slope of sand to scramble up to the road. Again, this is a somewhat sporting challenge with aforementioned luggage at the end of a long day, although there is an apparently unlimited supply of small children on hand to help, many of them smaller than the bags they are bravely struggling to heave up the slope.

By the time we approached Houay Xai, the Mekong had become the border and Thailand was on our left bank. Native of an island kingdom some distance away from mainland Europe, I still find it exciting to see two countries in the same glance. Dining out in Houay Xai has little to recommend it gastronomically, but find a restaurant on the river, and the view across to the reflected lights of Thailand takes some beating.

So why were we heading for this non-event of a border town? The answer is a novel way to explore southeast Asian rain forest.

The Gibbon Experience is not advertised in any of the standard guidebooks on Laos. Its French engineer-mastermind deliberately asked Lonely Planet et al not to mention his much-vaunted project to finance the conservation of 123,000 hectares of rainforest in the northwest of Laos. He pays the Lao government to keep this area, now known as the Bokeo Nature Reserve, free from logging. For an initial investment, we are told, of one euro per hectare, the Reserve now generates as much income every year as a local logging company could do on a one-off basis. Once the infrastructure is fully developed, the intention is to transfer the management of the Reserve and the operation of the Gibbon Experience to the Lao people. For the time being, they are assisted by Western volunteers and paid staff. Home to the rare black gibbon, the forest is a world away from the man-dominated real world. A tiny part of the Reserve is given over to tourism in the form of the hiking-and-ziplining spectacular that is the “Gibbon Experience”. Groups of 6-8 meet at the Experience’s office in Houay Xai, and are then driven a few hours up the road to a village on the edge of the Reserve. From there, they set off into the forest for three days: hiking up often-steep, narrow tracks, the bush on either side dark and gloriously impenetrable, crossing streams by shuffling precariously across simple log-bridges or, if the water is shallow enough, by paddling, and, to cross deep valleys, ziplining over the treetops, the Experience’s main draw.

After only a brief explanation, the full impact of buzzing along wires across and over the forest canopy only hits you midway through your first zipline. Your attention is then immediately distracted from this new-found liberation to the niceties of braking and/or pulling yourself in to the landing platform. With only a few more zips under your belt, you are joyously proficient - or imagine yourself to be - expertly assessing the length of each zipline in advance, the extent to which a fast take-off will be required (can you feel from the vibration along the line whether your predecessor has had to pull himself in?), and the best method for getting up sufficient speed given this particular take-off point. Nothing can really convey the experience. Cameras on video-mode help, but I enjoyed simply going slower to drink it all in, to enjoy the expanse of nature below and around me, even if that did mean a little more work for the biceps on the way in to land.

Both nights are spent in the forest, one at each of two of the tree houses built precariously but robustly more than 150 feet above the forest floor in this part of the Reserve. It’s open plan here, with 24/7 air conditioning. Thick mosquito nets give a degree of privacy between the mattresses. The half-height sides of the tree house are not solid so everyone can lie in bed and watch the forest waking up in the morning, the mist slowly clearing and giving way to the late-appearing sun. Food arrives by zipline - there’s no other way in - and there’s hot water for drinks and snacks on tap. The smarter tree houses ambitiously run to showers, but, equally impressively, all of the tree houses have toilet facilities. Yes, we’re talking really long-drops here! Night falls early, so dinner arrives mid-afternoon, packed in an old-fashioned but effective way in a large tiffin. Each of the day’s three meals has a degree of similarity to it: large quantities of rice and a variety of vegetable dishes. We were in no danger of starving, and the carnivores managed to stave off their cravings until we returned to Houay Xai where they promptly indulged in a fondue-style meat-fest. When night falls in the forest, head torches come on, and, for us, a competitive game of cards preceded bed. The game became so hard-fought that we continued it when we got back to Houay Xai, and only reluctantly came to a halt when our bar shut in compliance with Laos’ paternalistic pre-midnight curfew regulations.

After so much excitement further north, Vientiane would struggle to make much of an impact. From a personal point of view, my thoughts were already moving towards icier regions and preparations for the trip to Antarctica for which I would depart only days after leaving Laos. Geographically, Vientiane cannot compete with the surrounding forests, rivers and mountains of Luang Prabang, and its modernity gives it a colourless, amorphous air, only occasionally interrupted by the colour and glamour of the wats. The weather also did us no favours, the days being cool and overcast. But the pace of life here is pleasantly slow in this most laid-back of Asian capitals. Two very different monuments dominate the city. When seen from a distance, Patuxai is reminiscent of the Arc de Triomphe; only as you approach does its poor-relation status become apparent, built of concrete rather than stone and never finished. Nor does it have any grand purpose; in fact, it’s a bit of a sham. Built with US-donated funds originally intended for post-war reconstruction efforts, it is little more than the grandiose but otherwise meaningless gesture typical of many communist dictatorships. Pha That Luang, on the other hand, is gloriously Lao in design, its gilded stupa now a symbol of the country, and its spacious frangipani-scented grounds, are a welcome breath of air and green and space.

Laos is known as the Jewel of the Mekong and it is a jewel, a fragile, precious jewel squashed in amidst the colour and bustle of southeast Asia. As Thailand becomes more of a package-tour destination, so Laos will get busier with backpackers and independent travellers in their permanent search for somewhere a little different, away from the mainstream. Paradoxically, of course, it is this invasion that is likely to jeopardise the country’s main attractions, its relative lack of development and the charm of its people. I only hope that it does not lose its unique sparkle with the invasion.

---

Photos

the local swimming pool
... and, boy, was it cold?!