5: Leaving Laos
1 Apr 2002
Whenever I am about to start a new travelogue, writer’s block sets in. Trying to chuck all of what’s happened into a readable and mildly interesting email is like conserving a fart in a jar. Get the gist? But here goes…
I am presently sitting in Hoi An in Vietnam. The nicest-looking feel-good fishing village with run-down World Heritage French colonial buildings is lumped together on the waterfront and only 5km from a pretty decent beach. But back to Hoi An in two ticks – what have I accomplished since I last wrote?
I find it difficult to answer when I am asked where I will be heading next, because I have adopted the strategy of ‘Fly by the seat of your pants’. This appears to be the winning formula, if you can handle the feeling of being certain of nothing.
The morning I headed to Lao Pako, 1.5 hours out of the capital Vientiane, is the morning I decided to head that way. I’m so very glad I did. Lao Pako is an ecological resort which was apparently founded by a loopy German guy who had several tropical diseases, was an obsessive-compulsive and did not have good relations with the locals. The word on the street is that he died in mysterious circumstances on the resort, at which time substantial amounts of money went missing. Staying at the resort takes on an Agatha Christie feel as guests sift through the evidence to figure out the mystery of this man’s death, which locals refuse to talk about. So go and see if you can break this case wide open…
There are very few people at the resort on the bend of the Nam Ngum river in the middle of the jungle, and maybe a tiny village or two a couple of km’s apart, so when you’re not trying to solve the mystery you are taking nature walks, sitting in a steam bath in a wooden hut amidst some trees up the hill, playing Monopoly or Scrabble, eating, reading in a hammock, floating on inner tubes on the river, talking with locals and travellers alike or being eaten alive by the millions of different species of ants they have there. In my 3 days in Lao Pako I truly achieved the ‘traveller’s loll’, although I will warn other travellers that it is a slightly more expensive ‘loll’ than the rest of Laos as it has no immediate competition – which ultimately is why we like it!
So – as difficult as it was to leave I headed for Vientiane really early, nearly missing my connecting bus to Savannakhet – hence the little red plastic stool teetering on the steps to the door of the bus that I got to sit on for 8 hours! Man, did I feel picked on that day!
But I met some nice Swedes and Germans on the bus who I spent the next few days with in the melting pot of Savannakhet. There is not a whole lot to do there except locate ice-cream vendors and air conditioning, but we managed to scrabble around after finding ourselves the only semi-English-speaking tuk-tuk driver in the whole town. He ended up taking us outside of town to a monastery, pagoda and little sleepy village where the kids were totally enthralled to see us wading through the dust and potholes of their homes.
It took me a few days to recover from all the travel. I decided to head over to Vietnam because I didn’t have enough time to head down south and back up again to catch the 16-hour bus across the border at Lao Bao into Vietnam and on to Hue. I had an empty seat next to me, which was a stroke of rare good luck on local transport but good because the cargo was stacked high throughout the bus and particularly at our feet. Also buses are made for short petite Asians and not lard-arse long-legged farangs (foreigners)!
When I arrived I would say that I had the best tan I am ever likely to have (bar my 22-day no-bathing spell in Sudan) as I was covered head to toe in red dust. The road in to Vietnam via this border is not a road but remnants of a war gone by – just one long pothole. I now know what it is to be the green tennis ball tied to the pole in the back garden – known to many as swingball. Being farangs we were kept to the back whilst locals were shifted forward, thereby missing all the dust that settled so well on our lily whites and missing the bumps we so need to slim up our lard arses.
The border crossing was a very serious affair, not to be scoffed at. In fact, crack a smile and you might not make it across; it’s all very militant and you are kept waiting for the sheer power it seems to give to the men in uniform. When you reach the other side you are bombarded with little women covered head to toe in clothing, even wooly gloves and face masks; they avoid the sun at all costs. As opposed to the leather look we Westerners are trying to achieve, the locals believe that the browner you are the more you look like a poor rice paddy worker who spends their days in the sun with their feet in the water.
Vietnam – Under Construction
Vietnam is light years ahead Laos in terms of infrastructure and especially tourism. They have copped on to the tourism thing and are attempting to milk it for all it’s worth, as I discovered on my DMZ (demilitarised zone) tour outside of Hue.
Everything is package tours, and there’s virtually no way around it. If you do decide on the independent traveller option you are likely to be seriously roughing it at a far higher price and hassle.
The DMZ is where it all ended with the States and they were forced to back out and go on home. There is very little evidence of the carnage that happened, and a typical tour will go something like this: “here is a reconstruction of the last military base of the US Navy and this overgrown piece of scrub covers the runway that once was” – but with in thick Vietnamese accent with lots of pauses and misunderstandings. The itinerary for the tour was “Pile of rocks; frame of church; old bridge; DMZ and Vinh Moc tunnels”, the tunnels being the most interesting of the lot. When entire villages were being annihilated by the Americans, locals built underground tunnels in which they lived for many years – very small and very claustrophobic!
As the title suggests, Vietnam is a country under construction. Everywhere you look, something is being built. Strangely enough you will see more female workers than male on these building sites and roadworks. Likewise in the rice paddies, which are as far as the eye can see dotted with workers bent over in backbreaking positions, wading through water, wearing their wicker-tri’s (of which this name should not be taken seriously as it was invented by a Brummie (Birmingham football thug named Ben). The real name is too forgettable and entirely unpronounceable.
When I reached Vietnam I hooked up with Ben (see above). We met first off on the slowboat from hell, the one from the border of Thailand, Huay Xai, down to Luang Prabang. Since then the whirlwind tour has reached the north of Vietnam. But more to come on that – I’m stinky, tired and hungry for another meal that’s on it’s way out as quickly as on it’s way in.
