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.