Luang Prabang
There were quite a few tourists amongst the passengers, including a couple of girls from Australia. One wore short pants and a tee shirt while the other had on a skimpy, lacy black dress. They looked like they were on their way to a party. We all disembarked from the trolley buses onto the tarmac and walked across to the waiting Lao Air plane. It was a two-propellor job like the domestic ones in Nepal. The girls gasped and one of them exclaimed nervously “Oh! Look at the plane.”
I don’t mind those old planes. At least it had two engines, in case one failed. All aeroplanes, unless they are brand new, are agglomerations of parts and adjustments and it is their maintenance that is crucial. All the aircraft mechanics seem to do an excellent job, all across the world. Waiting in airports one saw so many planes taking off and landing safely that the risk of flying seemed minute.
The flight was smooth and brief and we were breathing the steamy air of another country, one strange to me. The airport was rudimentary. The architecture was brutalist and utilitarian. The officials put on a tough front as they herded us towards the concrete room where we filled out our arrival forms and took them to a window where some cash and the forms were exchanged for a sticker in our passports giving us a month to explore the country, plus an optional month extra. The girl in the black dress gave everyone a laugh as she returned the calculator she had inadvertantly made off with and the stern officials showed their humanity for a moment.
From the airport I took a cab to the hotel I had booked on a bank of the Nam Khan river. The staff were friendly, spoke a little English, and affected a professional manner as befitted a two-star hotel. The room was adequate, fairly new, but the balcony was a surprise. It overlooked a building site with the river just behind. The view was a mixture of industrial mud and bricks in the foreground and a sublime vista of distant hills past the Nam Khan, which flowed into the Mekong a kilometre or two downstream. Timber buildings surrounded by trees lined the other shore and a golden spire rose above a dense forest.
I had the feeling the staff were wondering what I was doing there. I was obviously not a typical tourist who stays for four days and spends each day taking in as many iconic sights as possible. I was sitting on the balcony smoking, writing on my laptop and venturing out for coffee and food and the occasional temple.
After a couple of days the chief concierge, Mr Bil, spoke to me with a look of grave concern. I was to return to the airport as soon as possible. Apparently my passport hadn’t been stamped in the proper manner. At first I was dumbfounded. I had the sticker, I had paid the fee, waited at the counter, filled out the forms and I was in the country. I casually agreed to accompany Mr Bil to the airport the next morning, which worried him. It seemed to be a serious matter and he reluctantly agreed to put it off until the next day. He would have liked me to go there immediately. There was a bureaucratic irregularity and that was important.
In the morning we drove in his car to Luang Prabang International Airport where the staff made a joke at my expense and gave me a two months visa with an option of another two. The rules had changed overnight, to my benefit, in honour of the thriving tourist industry and the possibility of a quick recovery from the disaster of the lockdowns. Mr Bil was sceptical. He had to speak to the official who had stamped my passport before he was reassured.
On my balcony in the humid mornings I could hear music from a nearby cafe that at first seemed like something I was imagining. It was dreamy, monotonal, languid and perfectly captured the mood of the slowly flowing river. The singing, which used a scale that was strange to me, was sad and wistful. A strong bass propelled it and stringed, plucked instruments played obbligato to the melody. I was entranced. There was something magical about it. There was a flute sound too, but it wasn’t a flute because it played chords at times like an organ. I tried to find out something about it but the language barrier made it difficult.
The Lao temples, when I got around to seeing them, were more ornate than the Thai ones, which is saying something. Almost every surface was decorated and adorned with carvings, paintings and sculpture. There was a lot of gold plating . The shapes of the rooves reflected a Chinese influence. We weren’t far from the border of that great nation and many of the people in northern Lao had ancestors who had migrated from China in past milennia.
It was fascinating to observe the flow of cultures and ethnic groups that had shaped the region. Occasionally I would read up online about the history of various potentates who had contributed to the mix. Some were conquerors, some had changed cultures and others had just enjoyed their wealth until the party was over. Boundaries shifted over time and whole civilisations rose and fell through the centuries. Since the time of Gautam Buddha, two and a half thousand years ago, so many nations and empires had come and gone I couldn’t keep track of them.
Luang Prabang had changed recently with the advent of a fast train from China. There were thousands of tourists pouring across the border and infrastructure was created for them by Chinese companies who were moving in. They stayed in Chinese hotels, travelled on fleets of identical, white Chinese vans which were lined up along the river in the afternoons, congesting the narrow roads, and they behaved like groups of people do: insensitively. This is not a Chinese thing, it is human. I have heard complaints about many nationalities around the world but now I understand that structures create behaviour. Cultures which went through centuries of delicate development can be drastically altered by bureaucratic decisions, natural disasters, economic developments, corrupt governments, wars and many other factors.
In Laos the second language is French, there were few English speakers and I made little contact with the locals. There was a small coffee shop with some very kind, slightly eccentric young women who I later figured were probably radical lesbians or something similar. It says something about Laos that they were very nice people with a spiritual perspective on life. Or maybe they were punk Taoists, I wouldn’t have a clue to be honest. I always left a nice tip there and the day before I left town one of them gifted me a small shoulder bag made locally with a heavily decorated elephant on each side. It became my medicine bag and whenever I see it I remember them.
They had a friend who acted as a guide for me one morning. She took me to a former palace where tourists jostled and struggled through the halls, grunting and gesticulating noisily. Then there was a traditional house with a coffee shop but there was no smoking so I had to stand outside on the ancient street for a while. The neighbours watched me with mild curiosity as they managed their chores.
The women in Luang Prabang usually wore their hair tied into a high bun or pony tail and often wore sinhs: a tight skirt with wide hems patterned with geometrical designs. There was an air of aesthetic awareness that was gradually dissolving in the economic pressure of modernity but was still there, hanging on bravely.
After a month I moved to the notorious tourist town of Vang Vieng. I had booked a hut there in a village slighly out of the way. It was across the Nam Song river, via two bridges which were precariously patched together from wooden planks, sturdy wire and metal sheets. Nails were coming loose and the woodwork was crumbling. There were many holes to step around carefully, especially at night. At the entrance to the first bridge stood two missiles left over from the ‘Secret War’ that raged in Laos in the sixties and seventies. It was a sign of grim, almost macabre humour and solemn remembrance of the brutality that had prevailed upon these simple, innocent people during those terrible times.
The streets in town were dusty and dry, the shops were run down and flimsy and the mood was mercenary. The weary shopkeepers had seen everything. Ganja and some potent drugs were available in certain cafes, they were even on the menu. As in Luang Prabang one message was repeated often: don’t smoke in public, keep it your hotel room. Under those conditions various substances were tolerated.
Laos is a communist country and political discussion is discouraged. There was no public debate that I was aware of. This was a Chinese trait too. People minded their own business. The struggle to survive was all that really mattered and tourist money was a godsend. There was no sign of gratuitous wealth except, perhaps, in the shiny new Chinese cars that were beginning to proliferate.
My village was peaceful enough and I often heard that same music piping out of the simple wooden houses and across the fields. One morning I had the surreal experience of hearing a loud whooshing sound approaching and then seeing a massive hot-air balloon directly above me, almost brushing the rooftops as it gently descended slowly towards an open field. You could see bursts of flame keeping the air hot inside while sightseers in the basket below marvelled at the scenic hills behind the town.
I played guitar on my little balcony at sunset whe it was cooler and despite a bout of diarrhea I enjoyed my stay but soon it was time to go further south to Vientianne, which I had seen described as the most relaxed capital city in the world. I liked the sound of that so I booked an apartment there and a taxi to transport me. I paid for the optional two months extra on my visa and determined to work harder on my book.
Travels to Nepal 