Luang Prabang to Hanoi to London

In order that I don't get accused of being dead again: I'm in Hanoi after a long 29 hours on a bus (nothing that some ambiguous sleeping pills and a good book can't help with), and I'm loving being back in the smelly, noisy milieu. Just been walking round with a big grin on my face, eating a lot of soup, catching up with various people, dodging traffic. I fucking love this city.

I plan to fly to England in a week or so, although nothing's booked yet. I'm looking forward to it I guess, but am also nervous that I won't like it, because everyone shuts themselves inside off the streets, there's less to fascinate me, and there's less soup as well.

The wilds of Northern Laos

From Luang Prabang, I took a bus north to the town of Nong Khiaw. The journey became significantly longer than it needed to be after a broken axle diverted us back to more or less where we’d come from, but eventually we pulled up at a dusty bus stop under towering limestone mountains. The road onwards was blocked by a huge wedding party playing pumping Lao dance music (actually I later learned that it was a baby-naming party), and so we heaved on our backpacks and trudged past the cheers of drunken Lao men and down the road, in search of water.

Nong Khiaw is spread over two sides of the river, and the few backpacker bungalows and restaurants are on the far side, which (incidentally? consequently?) is the prettier side. I found a little wooden bungalow for 30,000 kip ($4), showered off accumulated grime and sweat, and went for a walk away from the town, past rice paddies and wooden huts and buffalo and phenomenally strong old ladies with logs on each shoulder. I was headed for a cave I’d read about, but completely failed to spot the conspicuous English-language sign pointing to it, so it was just a meander down the road and back again, without any real destination. I didn’t mind this, since as we all learn, it’s the journey that matters, not the destination. I went back to the cave today, but freaked myself out by letting myself believe that it was full of demons.

In the evening, I met up with new friends from the bus, since it was one guy’s birthday. Here are some cats:

feed me

The following morning, Saturday, I caught a boat ferry one hour further upstream, to Muang Ngoi. Muang Ngoi is only accessible by boat, has no electricity, no real roads, and only one motorbike, owned by a teenage boy who drives it up and down the 200m ‘high street’ to show off to girls. I feel that Muang Ngoi is what Laos is all about – beautiful, peaceful, isolated, green, with friendly people and abundant lao-lao (homebrewed sticky-rice-whisky). It’s got a nice-sized backpacker community as well, and after a few days here I felt like I knew most people, both locals and foreigners, and almost felt at home.

the high street

some boys cockfighting :(

On my initial exploratory walk, I met a cool Lao guy called Sai, who works as a trekking guide, and it felt right to go on a trek with him. (For the benefit of the two people reading this who know what I’m on about – Sai is like the Lao Pet...) The downside of travelling alone is that it’s more expensive to do activities with only one person. Opposite Sai’s house I spotted three Swedes I’d met the previous night in Nong Khiaw and again on the boat in the morning, and so I asked if they wanted to come trekking. They hadn’t planned to, but thought about it for a bit and decided to come with me. The upside of travelling alone is that it’s really easy to make new friends. We booked a two-day trek with Sai, leaving the next day.

Despite the fact that the generators are turned off at about half nine, Saturday night ended late, fuelled by free lao-lao shots from Sai, and the company of new and only-slightly-less-new friends (and the coincidental re-meeting of a dreadlocked Israeli I’d hung out with in Vientiane). Because I’m a machine, I sprung out of bed at six the next morning with the crowing of the cockerels, and got ready for the trek.

The trek was HARD WORK! I guess I’m less fit than normal at the moment, and the walking was all up and down through the mountains, but we kept up a fast pace. Sai said we were as fast as locals. One long uphill stretch was covered in huge leeches the size of my finger, and so we had to go up so quickly to avoid getting bitten as much as possible. The slimy bastards still got some of my blood. (Back in Muang Ngoi, I drew a picture of a human leech with two bodies stitched together in the middle and two huge gaping mouths full of teeth and blood. I showed it to three blokes I didn’t really know and they didn’t talk to me much after that.)

 

freshly-picked tobacco drying in the sun

swedes are so aryan

We spent the night in a tiny Khmu village. The Khmu are an ethnic minority originally from Cambodia. A few of the adults speak a bit of Lao, but mostly the Khmu people are completely isolated up in the mountains, still living in their traditional ways and without much contact with other influences. I find it very strange to think about how cut-off they are – a difficult 4-hour walk even from Muang Ngoi, which itself seems very far away from anything. I wonder how their concerns differ from ours; like what they worry about whilst we’re worrying about Japan or the global food crisis or the polar bears. If your frame of reference was so much smaller, surely you would think very differently? That’s not to undermine their concerns, of course – often the unmaterialistic ‘simple' life is idealised, but I’d say it’s fucking hard work. I also think that it’d be very frustrating, especially for the young people, that they don’t really have any prospects beyond the village. Anyway, it’s very interesting to go to places like this and see how differently people live their lives in all the corners of the world. The people were very hospitable, and generous with the lao-lao toasts.

village

beds

breakfast

The next day’s walk was almost all downhill, and I frequently felt that I was going to slip and hurtle to my death, but I never did. For much of the way, there was no path, and so we just walked down the riverbed in our trainers. The leeches had a feast.

after one last steep climb – the destination is in sight

We had to get a boat downriver to get back to Muang Ngoi. The boat driver brought tubes so that we could float down, as popularised by Vang Vieng. I almost died tubing and had to be rescued by Sai wearing just Doraemon boxers but that’s a story for another day.

Bombs and jars

 

One of the weirdest places I’ve visited is the Plain of Jars, a windy eight-hour bus ride from Luang Prabang. Scattered in the countryside around the town of Phonsavanh are several dozen sites containing hundreds of huge stone jars. Some of them come up to about knee-height; others are way above my head. I visited the first three sites, each one more rural and harder to reach than the one before. The second one was down a long dirt track, and the third required walking across a field of cattle after another a long dirt track. After 60kms driving on this dirt track (less dirt, more jagged rocks and relentless juddering) it became my arch nemesis and object of many insults, due to the pain it was inflicting on some sensitive areas :(

These jars are about a thousand years old, but no one is really sure what they’re for. The most popular theory is that they were funerary urns, since they’ve found relics of charcoal, bones and teeth inside, and bodies buried around the jars as well. Another theory is that they were used to store rice, and the local legend is that a king had them built to brew Lao Lao whisky after a victory.

I think here a tree has grown through the middle of a jar

not many are carved, but here is a lid/marker that is

I actually found the sites quite eerie, the air full of the sounds of insects chirping and cow bells ringing as I wander around ancient burial grounds. This area of Laos was also one of the most heavily bombed by the US during the war (yeah they were supposed to be fighting the Vietnamese but dropped 90 million bombs here anyway...) and so all around the jars are bomb craters, and signs reminding visitors not to wander off the paths, because there’s still UXO (Unexploded Ordnance) all throughout the country. I'm here to see the jars, but I can’t help my mind focusing on the fact that all around me are fucking live munitions, designed to kill innocent civilians, farmers and children, and still doing so 40 years later . Perhaps I won’t rant on here, not today anyway, but what happened here during the war was excessively, incomprehensibly sick and inhuman.

^{a marker to show where the UXO has been cleared – stay on the white side o_O}

my view as I write this – two bomb casings propped against a fence

Frogs, chai and a golden Buddha

 

Luang Prabang is my new favourite city. It’s chilled-out, beautiful and unspoilt (from the centre of town you can see across the river to jungle and traditional stilt-house villages). There’s loads of things to do (boat trips, waterfalls, night markets, temples, art galleries, cooking classes...) and there’s loads of places to do nothing (I have a new favourite tea&bookshop – many happy hours spent with chai and Milan Kundera on floor cushions). It’s got a modern, fashionable vibe (upmarket shops, bars and restaurants by the river), but it still feels authentically Lao (the shops stock hand-woven Lao silk, and young novice monks wander the streets, collecting alms or riding bicycles). It’s big on eco-tourism (encouraging a considerate approach to the local customs and making sure your money goes to the right causes). The Lao people are friendly and relaxed (which sets it apart from its closest comparison, Hoi An – the Vietnamese are friendly but they’re anything but relaxed) and the Lao food is amazing (like Thai food but with more sticky rice and better coffee). Basically, it’s perfect.

temple on Phou Si

naturally-dyed silk thread

lady weaving

monks’ robes hanging out to dry

I put my shoes on after a rainstorm, but after a minute or two of walking one was uncomfortable so I took it off, and this frog hopped out. he seemed unharmed although understandably shaken. his name is Toad.

what there’s not enough of in my life – waterfalls. this one was multi-tier.

view from the top of the waterfall

my shoes came swimming too because they were very smelly and had had frogs sleeping in them

more sun bears!

bears sharing (fighting over) a hammock

floating petrol station

some naked children

sunset cruise. that’s not me smoking, although her name is laura. I was called rejey to avoid confusion :)

I love this photo so I made it bigger than the others

this boat trip was the best thing ever, it made my heart swell up like I was in a rubbish poem

Vang Vieng (moral high-ground alert)

The next stop on my trip was the town of Vang Vieng, a few hours north of the capital, Vientiane. Vang Vieng has garnered somewhat of a bad reputation for attracting the wrong sort – young people who just want to get pissed, float down the Mekong in a giant inner tube, get more pissed, take some drugs, and then spend the next day monged out watching endless repeats of Friends/Family Guy and eating pizza. Unfortunately I discovered that this reputation is entirely justified, and that the town of Vang Vieng really isn’t a nice place to be.

Obviously I enjoy getting pissed, and tubing could be fun too, but I was put off doing both of these things by the hordes of unattractive wasted Westerners in the uniform of body paint, Vang Vieng vest, and baggy fisherman trousers (for men), hotpants/no trousers at all (for women). They don’t seem to consider the fact that they’re in Laos and so it’s (a) disrespectful, (b) a complete waste of an opportunity in a country that has so much more to offer, and (c) makes them look really silly. The presence of Wankers also has the knock-on effect that none of the locals care about or respect the tourists here. Elsewhere in Laos they are friendly and cheerful, but here they seemed sullen and unhelpful, keen only to rip you off or steal your shit. Also, after about the third episode of Friends I wanted to smash in the TV (and I never liked Family Guy in the first place).

So that’s hardly a glowing recommendation for Vang Vieng. I didn’t like it. But luckily, the rows of restaurant-bar-guesthouse-repeat isn’t all there is to Vang Vieng. It got popular for a reason, and that reason is the stunning scenery that surrounds the town, making it perfect for hiring a motorbike and driving around in awe, and also for adventure sports like rock climbing and caving. So I still had a really good time here, but I wouldn’t go back – because stunning scenery seems to be what Laos does best, and there are plenty of places where I can see it without feeling ashamed to be English.

cows, bicycle, sunset :)

on the way to the cave

in some really cold water, really deep inside a cave! I have watched too many horror films and felt certain that the cave contained zombies, or that the claustrophobia would induce one of my friends to psychopathy. it didn’t.

blue lagoon – very blue

men prepare for rock climbing by getting naked

this rock resembles a penis

going up!!!

coming down!!!

This afternoon I arrived in Luang Prabang and it’s absolutely gorgeous. Outside my bedroom door is a jackfruit tree and the Mekong river. I can see a temple on a hill.

Other news: this summer I will be working in London. Bring on pub gardens, barbecues, beaches and festivals (all these things will involve cider).