Adventuring in Laos

Posted by Arda on June 22nd, 2007 filed in Activities, Adventure

By Andrew Bond

There are few roads in Northern Laos. Rivers are the highways; fat muddy-coloured snakes that are the life-blood of the small villages among the endless mountainous landscape. Against this backdrop I came to see how a country only recently opened to tourism has been affected by the influx of visitors.

Although foreigners have now been stomping through Laos for more than ten years, they are mostly adventurers and backpackers. My preliminary planning had revealed few plush resorts or expensive hotels in this, one of the world’s poorest countries. My plan was to travel without a guide book, to prove that there were still places that Fodor’s and Lonely Planet hadn’t entirely opened up yet. Could this be a travel destination where it was relatively easy to escape the tourist trail and get off the beaten track?

Like others had done for centuries previous, I chose to reach Luang Prabang sitting uncomfortably aboard the idle slow boats that ply the mighty Mekhong. But signs of tourism were already ominous. Aboard the boat were an odd mix of foreigners; a drunken, poorly behaved, public school boy from North London, a well-heeled Dutch family with their digital cameras and MP3 players, even a group of bewildered Korean tourists. The local Lao who boarded the boat at frequent nondescript stops were indifferent to our circus of tie dye T-shirts and scruffy packs, clearly they had seen it all before. They munched on sticky rice and dried fish while we helped ourselves to the chilled beer onboard.

Once in Luang Prabang, a hardy looking German couple drew me a map on a napkin while I was passing time in a rather sophisticated-looking new coffee shop. They described the village as an ‘unspoilt mountain paradise’ and ‘difficult to get to’, It sounded perfect!

But the map was no secret. Our bus left only when it was full, which didn’t take long because a taxi-full of grubby backpackers showed up. Every time the bus stopped to let out one passenger it would take on two more as we wound our way north for two hours, following steeply-sided valleys where rice paddies had been carved out of every available space. The road was a relatively new addition, built by the Chinese as part of its great empirical trade tentacles that reached south towards the markets of Thailand. But even they had failed to breach the mountains and this stretch of the road ended at Nong Khiaw. Once again I took to the waterways, this time the Naam Ou – itself quite a beefy river.

To my dismay the army of backpackers were headed in the same direction, and so we all piled into a longboat. Finally, late in the afternoon, we came upon Muang Nong Noi (little sister village), perched high on the banks with a spectacular view of the mountains and river. I had been deceived; the map was nothing more than directions straight out of the Lonely Planet, this village was no secret. A smattering of rustic bamboo guesthouses now hugged the high river banks, commanding the best views while the villages went about business elsewhere.

The bungalows were ramshackle and basic but it wasn’t long before I heard the familiar high drama of a Thai soap opera. The TV, along with a beer fridge were run off a generator imported especially for all their new guests. The narrow longboats we’d arrived on were the only way to reach the village. How you balance a one-tonne fridge on them is a riddle only Asians could possibly solve. So well-oiled was their hospitality that even the English menus were free of mistakes, something Thailand was yet to perfect after 40 years of rampant tourism.

While the backpackers put up their feet with a cold beer, I went looking for the village. There was a single street squeezed onto the limited flat land. The only commercial activity was a series of almost identical stalls hawking cigarettes from four different countries, cheap Chinese batteries and cartons of Pringles. Good grief! Pringles. Here, out in the jungle, was a textbook exercise in global brand awareness. These cartons were everywhere, green, pink, yellow and blue, stacked in perfectly-merchandised pyramids. At 25,000 kip a pop this luxury snack was equivalent to two days’ household food budget. In Muang Nong Noi there was only one flavour of rice and the occasional variation on catfish, but you could have your crisps in four different flavours.

The following morning the backpackers were organising themselves into groups for excursions to the waterfall and tubing down the river while I went looking for an English speaking local. I found a guide who had left makeshift signs on random trees, advertising himself as ‘dirt cheap’. Kids were everywhere, ‘baby boomers’ frolicking in the communal ‘high street’ playground found in every third world suburb. Everyone else ignored me. I was nothing new, hardly a novelty, almost regarded suspiciously. After 300 years of invasion by the Chinese, Thais, Burmese, French and Americans they simply couldn’t raise the friendly smile that their Siamese neighbours were famous for.

I was interested to know how this village had fared during the devastating secret war twenty-five years earlier. Back then nobody took any notice of Laos. It was a side issue to Vietnam, but became the most bombed country in the history of warfare. The infamous Ho Chi Minh arms smuggling trail was barely a hundred kilometres east and during the height of the ‘war’ more than 200 bomber sorties flew over this territory every day. Surely someone must have remembered something. As it turned out, my guide was born two years after the 1975 revolution. His father had been an interpreter for the CIA in Vientiane but this meant he had struggled to find employment under the Communist regime. By teaching his son English, he had bequeathed him an opportunity to move up here and earn a decent living. Only by marrying a local girl was this young man able to remain in the village. He hadn’t even been here long enough to reveal to me the struggling misfortunes of this impoverished village under the Laos People’s Revolutionary Party. In fact he proved useless in answering any of my political or socio-economic enquiries.

We visited the school, which resembled an abandoned stable, and the boarded up two-room hospital. The two ‘police’ officers stationed here blended in so well they didn’t even have uniforms or an office. Disputes were settled by the headman and the police were little more than idle retired informants. Like all the tours before, I was shown to the caves where the village had retreated to during the war. It was the only mention he made of this significant era, and we followed a pleasant 30-minute walk along a stream to discover the damp hiding place where the petrified villagers had sought refuge from the bombs. Back then there were less than 200 of them, and the village itself would’ve been commandeered by the ‘Pathet Laos’ - trying to shoot down the CIA’s infamous Air America.

Now back in their village, the population had grown five fold. They had resourcefully used the numerous bombshell casings for all sorts of functions and, apart from the occasional muffled explosion of unexploded ordnance that a UN team was busy detonating in an adjacent valley, life here continued quietly as if little had happened. I noticed plenty of building going on, healthy buffalo grazing nearby and chickens everywhere. Clearly people where prospering under ‘tourism’. During the day the kids were allowed to watch cartoons on the tourist TVs at the guest houses, life was looking up. Despite living in one of the world’s ten poorest countries these people had never had it so good.

And so the paradise I had come looking for was hardly undiscovered. Perhaps I was a little naïve to expect an exclusive adventure, but the scenery was spectacular none the less, there were no nuisance tuk tuk drivers or internet cafes. I didn’t begrudge Lonely Planet for denying me an exclusive ticket to this ‘paradise’. Undiscovered destinations are maybe just in our imagination, there are perhaps even suburban corners of Bangkok which have never been seen by a tourist. Those that had the temerity to make it this far were at least discreet and undemanding, and the sight of those little kids, learning Thai from TV soapies, made me feel satisfied that someone out there had distributed the map revealing this isolated destination. Laos travel company