Off the Grid Travelog -Laos

December 21, 2002-January 4, 2003
Luang Prabang, Vang Vien and Vientiane

We could have hit the dusty trails and muddy water ways into Laos, but decided to treat ourselves to a cheap flight into Luang Prabang instead, cutting our travel time by virtually 24 hours. We had heard some sketchy tales about the overland travel into Laos. Stories of barely water-worthy “speed” boats, painfully slow and tedious bureaucratic processes, complex routes that involved boat-bus-minibus-boat combinations and seedy, over-priced accommodations on the border. The travel agent in Pai assured us that the Lao Aviation plane was no tin can in the sky (despite the fact that Lao Aviation refuses to release its safety records and its pilots fly by sight without instruments), so I swallowed my fear of flying and after two hours of fair flight, we touched down in Laos, climbed down a metal ladder to the tarmac, and within minutes (thanks to our already-secured Laos visas) grabbed our trusty backpacks.

To our delight, we were greeted by name for the first time since we arrived in Southeast Asia. A thin, still-on-the-cusp-of-adolescence man held up a sign with “Mr. Suros” and “Mr. Mark” written in black, block letters and beckoned to us as we entered the small airport lobby. Our gracious host was the son of Mano Guesthouse’s owner and Mr. Mark was none other than Mark, of Mark, Kate, Izzy, Mike, and James, a cadre of British family and friends we met in Pai during our cooking class. They took our second-hand advice about Mano Guesthouse and booked a room there as well, and so it came to pass that the seven of us piled into a nondescript white courtesy van and endured the short, bizarre ride into the heart of Luang Prabang together. A few meters out of the airport parking lot, pavement gave way to dirt and then dirt to potholes the size of craters. Motorbikes and bicycles wove around the van with ease while we plodded a ragged course through plumes of fine, ruddy earth.

Within hours of arriving, I bit the dust. Over the next two weeks, my body took up arms against itself and held me captive with a series of one-two punches. Fever, chills, nausea, headache, runny nose, congestion…my illness mutated from flu to cold to flu and wouldn’t let up. So, I stayed in bed, alternately moaning and crying in self-pity while Tomas shuttled between the pharmacy and the Wats, taking care of me while also trying to keep his sanity.

The town circles Phousi hill, which offers 360-degree views from its temple-adorned top, and sits between the Mekong and Nam Kahn rivers. Lush vegetable gardens flank both rivers along their long curves and bright sunflowers bow their graceful necks in quiet wind dances. While I slept, Tomas watched as wives, mothers, brothers, fathers, and sisters washed their clothes, hair, and bodies in the rivers, and packs of half-naked children shimmied up trees, bouncing on limbs—trampoline wands—hanging over the Nam Kahn.

Luang Prabang houses hundreds of saffron-robed monks, whose favorite activity, it would seem, is patrolling the streets looking for tourists with whom to practice their English. Though the monks would only look at me sideways and never speak to me directly, they loved finding Tomas by himself. The conversation usually went something like this:

Monk: “Hello!”
Tomas: “Hey!”
Monk: “How are you (pronounced YUUUUU)?”
Tomas: “Good, how are you?”
Monk: (ignoring or not understanding the question) “Where you from?”
Tomas: “United States.”
Monk: “America!”
Tomas: “Yes.”
Monk: “Where in America you from?”
Tomas: “San Francisco.”
Monk: “Where are you going?”
Tomas: “Just looking around.”
Monk: “What’s your name?”
Tomas: “Tomas.”

Then, if the monk was odd or the communication lines were completely misfiring, the conversation might make a strange turn.

Monk: “I am thinking too much.”
Tomas: “You are thinking too much?”
Monk: “I am thinking about someone in my future.”
Tomas: “What?”
Monk: *laughs*

Or, if the monk was twelve years old, he would hang out on the top of Phousy hill with his buddy, spinning on a one-time artillery base like it was a merry-go-round, shouting and laughing, “Where are you from? Where are you going?”

With hundreds of monks—from fresh-faced, tag-playing kids to wobbly, wrinkled monks that shuffled gracefully through the Wat courtyards deep in thought—and tens of temples ablaze with golden walls bringing myths to life, it is no wonder that Luang Prabang is a World Heritage site. We saw Wats unlike any we’d seen in Thailand. Mosaics inlaid on temple walls revealed birdlike humans and ghost faces completely new to us. A mother earth statue at one of the Wats, the first female religious image we noticed in Buddhist Southeast Asia, squeezed out water from her long hair into a lily-gilded pond. Even the Buddha images looked different, bearing rounder heads and longer ears.

Unfortunately, as spirit-infused as Luang Prabang was, its good karma failed to break the kung fu grip of sickness and I began to languish as Christmas neared and I showed no signs of improvement. After traveling for almost two months, we were starting to feel the miles. I continuously fantasized about being sick in my own bed. It was time to bring out the big guns. Tomas took a tour of the nicer hotels in Luang Prabang and booked us a room for two nights at the Grand Hotel, otherwise known as Xiengkeo, for Christmas. We got into lush beds with thick mattresses and duvets, ate junky comfort food, and watched one bad HBO movie after another. Even surrounded by all this luxury, we quickly realized just how great the Mano Guesthouse was, not only because the owner was one of the nicest people we’d met and the rooms were a deal at $12 a night, but because the food was the best in Luang Prabang. As part of the Grand reservation, we had to purchase tickets to the Christmas feast, an extremely overpriced buffet with horrendously bad food. To make matters worse, the reservation clerk, when he checked us in, left the guest register wide open on the table in front of us, revealing prices other guests were paying for the same rooms as us—a half to a third of the price. When we asked about it (and a discount), we were told that these other guests booked through travel agents who provided them with the discount. Despite all the comforts, the experience made us homesick for Mano, and we were happy to return on December 27, Tomas’ birthday, to the “grand” room there.

Ten meters long, six meters wide, four meters tall with carved wood walls, ceilings, and furniture, this room was the mother of all rooms. With two huge tables and a long wooden bench, three big wooden chairs, a wooden wardrobe, and two double beds, we still had room to play baseball, using an empty water bottle as a bat, and a ball of string for a ball.

Plied with tea and laden with coconut sticky rice and bananas thanks to Mano’s owner, we finally conceded defeat to my illness and gave up the dream that I would miraculously recover and spring out of bed and onto trails to waterfalls, caves, and other exciting sites. Tomas had seen all he could of Luang Prabang and we both needed a change of scenery, so we booked a mini-bus to Vang Vien, a town in between Luang Prabang and the Laos capital, Vientiane.

Even though Tomas was sandwiched on the hump seat between Twitchy Twitcherson (a.k.a. Smelly Smellerson) and me, the journey to Vang Vien gave us an opportunity to see a great deal of the Lao countryside, and observe snippets of daily life among the people living along the road.

Typically only one house deep, the villages totter between the street and the mountain ledge. Except in large towns or cities, most of the houses we saw in Laos (not unlike Thailand) were fashioned from bamboo or wood and sat atop long stilts. Though the most destitute have walls made of sticks, the average house has braided bamboo walls and sturdy roofs of thatched palm and banana leaves.

Usually only one room, the houses are typically devoid of furniture, with only woven mats to serve as beds. Many houses lack inside kitchens. Families rig up a charcoal “stove” outside and use woks to whip up meals. Because there is no refrigeration, locals gather ingredients daily.

The bathroom—often housed in a separate hut—usually has a dirt or concrete floor with a ceramic (you hope!) squat toilet and two buckets. One bucket is used to flush the toilet and wash afterwards, the other is used to bathe. The process for bathing, as I had to figure out on my own when staying with Thailand’s hilltribes, is as follows: 1. Undress and find somewhere to hang clothes (this can be tricky, and often involves searching for stray bits of wood or bamboo jutting out from the hut’s side). 2. Squat to minimize profile for potential peepers (my paranoia, though quite realistic given the often inch-plus gaps between the sticks making up the hut’s “wall.” An innocent bystander might peep, in such conditions, without meaning to). 3. Soap up as quickly as possible (five seconds is an eternity). 4. Splash shivering body with ice-cold water, rub skin with travel towel (about as big as a hand towel), and slip on clothes. Voila! I’ve gathered that most Laotians, however, don’t strip down to bathe. They wear tube-shaped cotton shifts that allows them to bathe out in the open, in a river or at the water pump, if need be.

No home is complete without a swarm of hens, furry chicks in toe, picking at the earth with their long, scraggly legs and squawking up a storm. Even though there are no chicken pens (and the beasts are left to their own devices as far as grub goes), it seems that the locals know which wanderers belong to them. Either that, or no one really cares about possession—when the time comes, there is always a chicken at one’s feet to carve into dinner.

The children, some as young as a few years old, wander the side of the roads freely, boys with sticks in hand, looking very purposeful, girls carrying back-breaking loads in woven baskets worn like backpacks or suspended from either side of a long stick balanced on the shoulders. Most of the Lao women and girls wear colorfully woven tube skirts they fold over and tuck in at the waist. Often, as we drove by, I saw women grooming each other’s hair, looking for lice or braiding the long locks into thick plaits.

Laundry hangs on everything—on ropes strung across the yard, on bamboo sticks perched between trees and fences, on bushes, on anything that allows circulation of air. Even in Luang Prabang, I came across a pair of shorts and baby shirts spread neatly over some potted plants on the sidewalk to dry.

Once out of the mountains, we sped through valleys bordered by huge limestone mountains. Recently cultivated rice fields stretched between the road and hills on either side and water buffalo ruminated on the beheaded rice stalks.

Still recovering from my illness, I meandered behind Tomas and the cave guide our first day in Vang Vien, determined not to miss out on nature’s wonders. After a few miles of walking, we stopped at the “base camp” hut and had some lunch with the cave fee collectors, who seemed to be good friends with our guide. Not long after we kicked off our shoes and settled onto the porch to eat, an English fellow showed up and began (miraculously) to communicate with the locals using a rudimentary mixture of Laotian and Thai. Soon, so jovial was the atmosphere, our hosts offered us tastes of their lunch, a combination of local grapefruit and hot, hot, hot chilies. It was actually quite tasty. While I declined the buffalo hide dessert, Tomas was soon gnawing on a piece and nodding his feigned pleasure to the group.

After lunch, we climbed a pile of boulders to the entrance of our first cave. With its undulating ridges and glistening puddles, the cave felt and looked like a giant’s mouth. Stale, damp air drifted uncomfortably through my lungs as I struggled to pretend that a humungous limestone mountain wasn’t bearing down upon us (granted at probably a few centimeters every couple of centuries, but I’m no geologist). The giant’s gulper was white and seeping mineral deposits that hung like icicles from its roof. I found the whole experience quite suffocating, and soon made a beeline for the light, literally, at the end of the tunnel. I snoozed on the bamboo bench like a sun-happy lizard while Tomas explored the next cave. So ended my caving career.

When we returned to the guesthouse, Tomas became violently ill, dispelling every ounce of liquid from all his orifices for about twenty-four hours (buffalo skin, anyone??). Still not quite up to speed myself, we made quite a pair for the next few days, trying to will our bodies back to health. After Tomas’ purging subsided, we grabbed a ride to Vientiane, enduring Lao music blasting through the van the entire four hours.

We had planned to leave for Vietnam within a day or two of arriving in Vientiane, but ended up staying for a week, during which we had few adventures. The only incident worth mentioning was our late-night battle with one feisty tick we found attached to Tomas’ privates. And that is too graphic for our gentle readers, so I end here on the eve of our insane trip to Vietnam…

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