The capital on the front line

JULY 27, 2008: Vientiane is on the north bank of the Mekong River, opposite Thailand. Photos

That is to say, the capital city of Laos lies right on its own border. A rather bad position, you'd think, from which to resist an invasion of foreign capitalists just across the river.

And invade they do - in swarms. In the central city area of Vientiane it's common to pass 10 or more foreigners without a Lao in sight. And that Lao you do see - he might well be Thai.



More than half of them are of the turtle on 2 legs type, the rest being mainly oldie package tourists, diplomats or aid executives. All of this against a backdrop of gentrified colonial buildings and immaculate new roads and sidewalk paving.

It's fucking insane. When we arrived we tried well over 10 hotels and "guest houses" (in quotes because many of them charge 5-star luxury prices - I'm not kidding, US$150+ a night); the decent ones were 3 to 5 times the amount we'd been paying (and could afford), and all the shitty cheap ones were full.

We ended up in a backpackers that really, richly deserves that world-renowned certification: "urine-soaked hellhole". When you enter, you're told to take off your shoes. Why that is I can't imagine. The pavements outside are clearly cleaner.

A husband and wife couple run it. That means a little girl of about 12 works day and night to try to maintain it in the face of overwhelming backpacker filth, while the husband chills on a couch and the wife plays Super Mario 3. And takes the money. The little girl was working in the afternoon, the evening, the morning and at midday.

Child slave labour aside, our Australian dorm-mate, who was one of those people who just leaves a strange and uncomfortable serial-killer impression when you talk to them, said he'd been living there for 4 months, despite the stench.

We got up early, bought breakfast and staked out one of the shitty hotels nearby, and sprung into action at the first sign of a checking-out.

After six days the most interesting attraction of Vientiane I've found is the enormous Arc de Triomph copy in the centre of town.


The strangest thing about it is its denigration by those who own and maintain it. A sign in the entrance reads:

"At the northeastern end of the LaneXang Ave. arises a huge structure resembling the Arc de Triomphe.

"It is the Patuxay or Victory Gate of Vientiane. Built in 1962 (B.E. 2505),but never complete due to the country's turbulent history. From a closer distance it appears even less impressive, like a monster of concrete.

"Nowadays this place is used as leisure ground for the people of Vientiane and the seventh floor on top of the building serves as an excellent view point over the city."

Oddly, I saw no sign of incompleteness, and I certainly didn't find it unimpressive. From afar it looks basically just like the Arc. Up close its traditional Buddhist styles are even more impressive. The Ankor Wat-style carvings/French arrogance combo works fascinatingly well.





Apparently Vientiane used to be pretty much the center of Laos but Thailand muscled in in the last couple of centuries and took a large chunk to the south of the Mekong. Indochina's history is certainly war-torn and bloody enough to compare with the Balkans, but these people somehow just don't seem to pass on grudges.

The King of bus journeys

We conquered our inertia, this time after only 5 days, took a minibus for the 9-hour ride to Phonsavan on the Plain of ancient Jars (which of course only we could not afford to see). Photos from the King of bus journeys


(Above) it looks like a drinks bar, but they only sells petrol.

After a loose night drinking at a travel agent's, offending a rotten Aussie and becoming, without a doubt, the biggest Lost-it a certain bunch of Irish had ever seen, we left for the capital, Vientiane, 11 hours away, on the "King of Bus".

The Irish I speak of would probably include riding the King of Bus among my lost-it characteristics, as they, along with almost all other foreigners in Laos, ride around on soft/gay/airconditioned "VIP" buses.

The driver of the "King of Bus" - the first and still the only obese Lao I've laid eyes on - had no horn at his disposal, but luckily he did have a very loud engine, which he used as a substitute. This was fine in the small villages along the way, where he would stop, and have the King release loud and stately growls.

Lao roads are often dominated by cows, who for some reason have priority over the roads. They like to nap on the bitumen, sometimes whole herds, and no car would risk hitting one - not even the King. The driver of the King thus found himself in the precarious position of having acceleration as the only means of warning the cattle to get out of his path.

Similarly, in the many small places the King was to speed through without stopping, the driver could warn the local dogs, children, motorcyclists etc. of the King's bearing down on them only by accelerating.

The route was often spectacular beyond words.

Nihilist principles can't be violated...

In flagrant violation of the practicing-Nihilist spirit of this trip, we finally got out and climbed up a mountain on our last day in Oudomxay. Some nice typical Laos tourism photos

About 15 minutes up the mountain we met Thongsy, a Hmong guy, and his lady friend Malee. Thongsy was from a remote mountain village, like most Hmong, and was sent to Oudomxay to go to school. He has brothers and sisters, older and younger, but his family can only afford to send one kid to school (out of how many I forget, but quite a few). He's the lucky one.

Anyway, he was up for a free English lesson, and we were up for some free guidance around the mountains, so off we went together. The first place we were supposed to find was a cave in the middle of a patch of dense jungle. I emphasise 'patch' because most of the hills - the ones near enough to the road - are pretty much deforested. There's a whole lot of second-rate - I suppose you could call it "double canopy" - jungle, with smallish trees, presumably the result of slash and burn. But this little patch was completely overgrown and dripping with water.

Just as we approached the 'patch', we came upon a bunch of workers loading rocks at a small quarry. As we passed by, two early-teen boys with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths hustled us on down the slippery path. Thongsy's translation was "Hurry . . . they make the explosion." So we basically ran into the jungle and hid.


This was more than enough for poor Boxxy, and she baulked at the sight of the so-called path to the cave, which was virtually indistinguishable from its surroundings. So no cave, but hey - tourists on guided tours sometimes go there (I think they use another approach), that means it counts as another backpacker/tourist attraction we've avoided!

Back over the top of the hill, Thogsy took us to another Hmong village, slightly less remote than his home. The people were all toiling in their fields far away, leaving the village deserted except for a man with a baby in a sling. It appears it's the norm for men to stay at home with young kids, but only when there are no siblings to do it.

The road to this place was a goat-width path, and when you get there it's like stepping into Lord of the Rings, or any supposedly bygone era you care to name. There was a real sense that nothing had changed here for millennia.


As such, there was zero visible rubbish, none of the usual corrugated iron or plastic consumer-product wrappers you see in accessible/developing/poor places - with the exception of a dense concentration of discarded small washing powder packets around the well.


No electricity, tractors, motorbikes - pretty nothing mechanical at all, except, perhaps, for a ground-water pump. Many remote Hmong don't bother with modern medicine (after all, what could be less healthy for a sick person than a 3-hour hobble to the nearest road?), but go instead to their traditional witch-doctor dudes. Everything, it seems, happens as it did long before the industrial era, though the witch-doctor thing can obviously lead to tragedy and grief for those in between like Thongsy.

Overall, I don't think the "backwardness" of the Lao countryside is a negative thing. Despite being one of the world's poorest countries in monetary terms, Laos' countryside is peaceful and its towns are clean, with none of the "grinding third-world poverty" in India or the Philippines. It's just life as it was, and will continue to be. There are no shanty towns of peasants filled with the misery of dislocation, no bored youth or unemployed, and i think it's because the peasants are still willing and able to work their land as before.

One slightly ominous sign, however, was the presence on the mountain of fields of young rubber trees. Peasants who plant rubber on their own terms and sell to a local collective will surely benefit, but shady deals between local officials and foreign plantation companies have been reported, which sounds to me like the classic landless peasant-masses recipe.

We were quite possibly the first foreign tourists to stay in Oudomxay for 10 days (everybody else seemed to be just passing through) but after achieving, or rather setting that milestone we felt self-satisfied enough to get the fuck out. So we undertook a day of travel that exceeded the expense the previous 7 days and saw us on a long boat with 3 more foreigners.


Needless to say it was spectacular, etc. etc., full of rapids and fields of sharp rocks sticking up out of the water like the spikes that kill Mario. The skipper, of course, weaved in and out without ever slowing down, except on the most treacherous rapids, at which time the engine slowing down made a very loud grating noise strikingly similar to the noise you would expect to heard as a very sharp rock carved into the boat's hull. The last part of the journey was undertaken in almost pitch darkness. Enough said.

The following day as we were waiting for the truck to the next town, a minivan arrived professing the intention to reach Hoaphan, the farthest-flung (and poorest) province, by that night. I asked if they had seats. The driver said they did. I bought tickets. They didn't have seats. Inside this six cubic metres were 14 squashed-up individuals on 11 chairs. Add us = 16. Of course while there were no seats, there was a very agreeable sack of grain. The journey took 13 hours. In the course of that 13 hours, one person left the vehicle.






Xam Nua is a very picturesque place, and is also the home to what I would call "The Worst (most meaningless and ugliest) Monument Ever Built" (see above). It's also home to weavers of export-quality Lao fabrics (see the strings in the photo above? they're an abacus-style computer disk that contains the information for every row of a very complicated pattern) and copius "Lao lao", a Tua sabu-like petrochemical product (Tua sabu = Timorese palm spirits) purveyed in slum-like markets by old men who proclaim its medicinal powers by curling and then slowly extending their index finger.

But the real attraction is the commie caves of Vieng Xay. The Pathet Lao - the communists, now the government - survived here in their cave-city for a decade under almost constant bombardment by the US. I'm writing this as a travel story and this is getting long, so you're spared the details.

Lame and sad: Us, not Laos:

June 9, Oudomxay, Laos: Probably one of the sadder blog entries written this month. Photos

After entering Laos 11 days ago, the highlight so far has been the re-runs of "24", the 2004 season on satellite TV, which everyone seems to have. "Bauer's hour of power", Boxxy likes to call it. My preference is "Bauer power hour".

Utterly shameful!

Still, we're pretty much in keeping with the spirit of the place, where people apparently can't stand the thought of missing an episode.


The first 3 days of fuck-all were in Luang Namtha, about 60km over the Chinese border, the following 8 here in Oudomxay. In both places the majority of our time's been spent in our rooms at Chinese-run guest houses. The past 8 days, once a day, we've trudged up to one of two restaurant and ordered 2 or 3 of the 4 dishes we order.

Of all the shame being bandied around (or shamelessness – there's always going to be plenty of that when you put transplant small communities of loud-mouthed, money-worshipping low-rent Chinese businessmen into a soft-spoken Buddhist traditional culture they consider "backward"), none of it falls on Laos or its people. Except perhaps on their government for allowing so many tourists in. It's really a wonderful country.




But as i say, it's probably fair to say that we're into the spirit of the place. The pace of life mirrors the geriatric water-buffalo you see plodding through the rice paddy. The country's gorgeous and the people, well, they seem like good Buddhists (aside from all the meat that's on offer). Friendly, and very patient with my terrible, execrable attempts to speak their language.

In return, i've provided them with at least a couple of gold standard moments. I contribute the foolishness and enthusiasm at least – they, perhaps, the joke. One example: I learned very early on, of course, the word for banana – "mak wei". Then a couple of days ago a fruit seller appeared, mostly from gesturing, to be telling me no, in fact "mak wei" meant "fruit". Given people's difficulty understanding me so far, I wasn't going to say no to free advice. So imagine the mirth of the following day's fruit seller, who encounters an apparently insane foreigner, who asks (in Lao, but occasionally accidentally blurting out Chinese words):

[Pointing at bananas] "How much are these bananas?"

[Points at apples] "And how much for these bananas?"

[Picks up pineapple] "And this banana?"

and so on.


However, for a country where children with swollen stomachs play naked on the highway, and where villagers still gather round to watch a bus to town go past, there's an astonishing level of English spoken. Once she'd finished laughing, and I had moved onto struggling to say "please cut up banana [pineapple]" the pineapple lady signaled for me to go next door, a shack where a man with a came out with a baby in a sling across his shoulder and not only translated my request, but explained the Lao to me.

Either Laotians are born linguists, or their education system does something very right as far as English is concerned. Despite 7 years or whatever of compulsory English learning, China's English is terrible in comparison. I suppose it's just that Lao students actually practice speaking and listening while China's students rote-learn for their pointless letter-sequence-writing exercise of a final exam.

Laos has also taken the slow route with its buildings. While Laos is technically a "People's Democratic Republic" (if you get my drift), you wouldn't know from looking at it. The villages, those between L. Namtha and ODX at least, have continued building in their classic geomantic style – thatched houses with woven bamboo-paneling walls, on stilts that are sometimes metres high – very neat and picturesque.

In China i'd become so used to seeing nothing but giant pre-fab filing cabinets that I'd begun to forget what buildings can look like when someone actually considers their appearance. In the two towns we've seen so far, particularly Oudomxay, the majority of the buildings along the main street look French-colonial style, or a kind of French-Lao fusion (a few examples are in the photo album linked at the top). The Oudomxay provincial government's palace, I thought was particularly awesome:


...nevertheless, just across the road, as if purely for contrast's sake lies the very visible hand of China:


As for the towns, they are both provincial capitals yet they're the size of a small country town in the WA outback. You can walk end to end in about 15 minutes, passing free-roaming chickens, the odd goat, and green vegetation bursting through cracks in asphalt. It's what Timor would be like had it been left to its own devices since 1975 (when the Commies won and founded the Lao PDR).

But the real reason we've done so little is, of course, the cash. There are a bunch of trekking tours past waterfalls, caves, staying overnight in villages, yadda yadda, sure it's great, especially judging by the large numbers of foreigners that pass through here and part with their foreign exchange. The Banana Pancake Trail appears to have become a Banana Pancake Web . . . so it's onward to the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Would be awesome to march it, errrrrrrrr [insert Family-Feud shut-down noise]. Not. Gonna. Happen. Ah fuck it, lets just hope the entry price to some of the secret Commie bases isn't too steep. A good sign will be no banana pancakes in shops nearby.

Jinghong and the temple of scorched earth

July 1, Jinghong, Yunnan: China certainly puts on a good face in its closest city to Burma and Laos.Photos

A city of shady palm-lined boulevards, intricately sculpted hedges, beautified buildings and efficient garbage disposal. Basically, it's not China...does this look like China?


All the major branded stores are here, including at least two Converse stores, yet the streets are quiet, peaceful even; salespeople don't even try to sell to you and most shops have no customers at all. It doesn't seem to matter though – unlike some other small cities we've been to I didn't see a single closed-down or vacant shop. It's so laid-back one wonders whether the whole thing might just be a giant set, with the residents paid simply to be there.

There are enough hotels to house various minority groups' entire populations, yet no visible evidence of tourists, probably due to low-season but still, where does the money come from?

Even the white-tile box-buildings are dressed up with fake eaves and fancy gold-painted corners. It actually makes a massive difference, along with the daily heavy rain, which, according to residents, is the reason for the buildings' cleanliness, and the city's in general.

There's none of China's usual hustling and social cannibalism, and strangest of all is the almost-total absence of black Audis.


Jinghong's surrounded by dense primordial rainforest – according to Wiki, the forests of southern Yunnan are special for staying unfrozen through the ice ages. Being in a basin, you can get glimpses of these jungles at the end of Jinghong's mostly-straight roads. So it jarred a bit when we turned a corner and a huge chunk of scorched earth on the mountainside came into view in the distance.


What jarred more was when I got a taxi to the Jinghong Temple, and the driver headed straight for that chunk of scorched earth, which turned out to be a lavish and entirely brand-new high-tech Buddha-worship "supercenter". For a hefty 120RMB entry fee you get to listen to pre-recorded monk chants blaring from loudspeakers, pass by 7-headed, 5-headed- 3-headed and 1-headed concrete dragons guarding the steps to the main temple, and inside you find the Buddha, who is giant indeed, surrounded by several large electric carousel display-units containing hundreds of mini-Buddhas.

The blessed wonders of modern concrete:







Further up the steps, past the "Sri Lanka", "Myanmar", "Laos" and "Thailand" mini-temples, which contain, as yet, no Buddhas, you reach a construction fence, behind which labourers toil on the next addition to the facility, which, I can verify, will have an excellent reinforced concrete skeleton.