Beautiful Laos

The border crossing into Laos from Chiang Kong was one of the most pleasant and simple brushes I’ve had with officialdom in all my travels. A cursory glance and stamping of the passport to leave Thailand, followed by a leisurely 5 minute trip across the slow-moving Mekong in a long-tail boat (powered by a Toyota car engine!). Disembarking on the Laos bank of the river, I found myself wandering up the high street of Huay Xai barely seconds later, passport and visa checks duly completed in desultory fashion. For a communist state, there was a startling lack of red-tape and a total dearth of customs or security measures. I’d soon found myself a cheap hotel room and had bought a ticket for the slow boat to Luang Prabang. All the people I’d spoken to about Laos had recommended this trip to me and I was pretty keen to see what all the fuss was about. However, during my negotiations for the ticket, I’d ascertained that there would be as many as 40-50 people on the boat and I didn’t find the idea overly appealing. Not too long after this I acquired myself a roommate: Jason from San Diego was looking for a cheaper room than my place was offering but he looked normal enough and I offered him to take the second bed in my room – thereby cutting costs for both of us. He took me up on the offer…and the wheels of fate took another turn for the better. We sat down for a ‘get-to-know’ beer and discussed our plans and also got on to the subject of where else we’d been on our travels. Amazingly, Jason had been in a long-tail boat off the shore of Koh Phi Phi when the tsunami had struck. Needless to say, this had been a pretty hair-raising experience for him and his girlfriend, Lisa. Their boat had been quite happily pootling along towards the island when, strangely, they began to see several other boats speeding past them at full throttle. When Jason had turned round to follow the gesticulations of the passengers of one of these boats, he was horrified to see a towering wall of water rushing towards the back of the boat at break-neck speed. The skipper of their vessel – needing no further urging after spotting the impending disaster himself – immediately opened the engine up and, for something like a minute, they raced the inexorable wave to shore. There was no time for any niceties as the beach came up to meet them and the boat didn’t slow down at all before burying its nose into the sand and people scrambled for the relative safety of the beach. Scant seconds later, the wave struck and Jason (of similar build to me, if a little shorter) was picked up like a doll on a wall of foaming brown water and carried for several hundred feet inland. The wave bore him clear of a wooden picket fence, over several large bushes and small trees and unceremoniously dumped him, uninvited, into the hallway of the holiday home of the Crown Princess of Indonesia. Totally unscathed – if a little shaken – he quickly set about trying to find Lisa. I can only imagine how distressing and painful this must have been – particularly given that this wave was the smaller precursor of three or four bigger and more destructive deluges. When we were talking about it, he did not make such a big deal out of this but I could see that it had been a very traumatic experience. Unspoken clues to the psychological impact included his reluctance to talk about the wider devastation of the tsunami. Most telling was his decision to leave Lisa in Thailand as he came to Laos. Quite apart from their strong relationship and their willingness to follow their own independent desires, it was easy to see that Jason had wanted to get away from Thailand and the black memories it had held. Lisa would be joining him again in Luang Prabang or Vientiane in 3 weeks or so and, for the time being, he was an independent traveller. Naturally, I asked him which way he was headed and he told me how he was trying to get a group together to charter a boat north to Luang Nam Tha. This isolated town, close to the Chinese border, had recently started to become popular as a trekking centre and was, apparently, far more untouched than similar trekking destinations in Thailand. The tribes in the surrounding hills had been far less affected by tourism and it sounded like an excellent place to see village life played out in a traditional manner. So far, Jason had enlisted European traveller as a definite for the trip and had a couple of maybes from two Israelis who, it turned out, had been on my bus from Chiang Rai to the border. Jason’s intended travelmate turned out to be a softly-spoken, intelligent retiree from Munich. I immediately warmed to Till and his wry sense of humour and I found myself wishing that I hadn’t been so hasty in booking my ticket to Luang Prabang. I could see myself happily spending some time with these two and began to wonder about the possibility of changing my plans. I’ve said it countless times on my travels (and maybe once or twice in this blog…) that, for me at least, travelling is as much about the companions along the way as the route and destinations reached. Given a choice between a boat crammed with 40 others (heading exactly the same way as everybody else) or a more peaceful journey with these two affable individuals, it didn’t take me long to make up my mind. After a hurried conversation with the old dear in the guesthouse, I had ascertained that I would be able to get a refund for my ticket to Luang Prabang and, suddenly, I was heading off in the opposite direction with two guys I’d just met to a place I’d only just heard of. Excellent! Just as Bangkok had drained me and found me tiring of South East Asia, suddenly Laos was revitalising my energy and rejuvenating my enthusiasm. Our two potential companions from Israel eventually dropped out as they didn’t want to spend the money for the boat trip when the (12hr!!) bus journey was so much cheaper. In the end, Jason, Till and I paid about $50 each for our boat passage up the Nam Tha (Nam means river). I had no hesitation in paying 10 times as much as the bus journey – mainly as I knew 12 hours on a Lao bus was likely to be unmitigated hell for someone my size…but also because I knew our ‘exclusive’ boat trip would be an experience to remember and an all-together more pleasant way of seeing the country go by.
Later that evening we wondered down the high street in search of food. A beautiful sun was setting over the Mekong and we ate a good meal at a restaurant perched over the smooth silent waters as they made their patient way down towards Cambodia, then Vietnam and, finally, the South China Sea.