Relaxy-Laos

12 Nov-01 Dec 2002

We arrived in Laos in style. By boat from Thailand, across the Mekong river. We passed customs in a flash. 'Passport', stamp, scribble, 'thanks you'. We collected our first million kip (1,052,870 to be precise) and hopped onto the tuktuk that would take us to the boat with all our  fellow millionaires.

A Camel runs through it:
Even though the cargo boat was very overcrowded, and while the traveling conditions were not optimal - not to mention that dreadful safety- the slow 550bath 2-day trip from Hua Xai to Luang Praban in the North West of Laos was incredibly fun.
We hooked up with a pair of travel junkies (Malcolm The Oz and Gavin the Pom), fought for a half decent place on the dusty haul floor (away from the suffocating fumes of the deafening diesel motor) and started plotting our escape to the open air.

Skillfully ignoring the commands Captain Wannabe, we spent most of our first day on the front deck taking the sun, listening to smooth hip-hop jazz, chatting, enjoying the fantastic scenery of the green Mekong shores, the mountainous landscapes,  and the hill tribe villages while slowly becoming highly addicted to the card game of 'Shithead'.
For the next 5 days, we spread our cards on every flat surface we could find.

After a night's rest in a shabby little village who depended on crap guesthouses and cheap marijuana for its livelihood , we boarded our "cruise ship" and found out that Captain Einstein had closed the tiny door to the front deck with the wicked aim of keeping us locked inside. Not being put back by such challenges, we climbed onto the roof through the ''windows'' of the moving boat, and lingered in the sun on the boiling tin surface. That is, until Captain Dark Vader threatened he would not continue to Luang Praban if we would not go inside. So we picked up our cards and continued our game of Shithead inside.

Luang 'laid back' Praban:

Gavin had already been in Laos. He knew of a great guesthouse, just south of town. We walked there. Struggled with our heavy rucksacks. Found out that the place is being renovated (read: being totally rebuilt). Walked back the whole 15 minutes. Visited 20 guesthouses. All full. Finally found a room at the far north of town at the simple Suankeo 2 Guest House. So we settled in by playing Shithead.

Luang Praban turned out to be a charming colonial town with a relaxed atmosphere, and anyone who's not a grumpy bastard loves the place without always knowing why...

The surroundings are beautiful, the people are laid back, and it is a joy to just walk around and enjoy fresh baguettes and the best coffee in Asia . When we got tired of that, there were high waterfalls under which we could swim, colorful watts, a so-so museum and walks up to Phousy Mountain to enjoy the sunset.
And there was always fresh nem spring rolls and Beerlao.
And  Shithead of course.

Camel in a mini Capital:
Although Vang Vien would have been the logical next destination,  we decided to head directly to the capital Vientiane to experience the That Luang festival on the first day of the new moon of November. The biggest festival in Laos is supposed to be a great opportunity to see thousands of monks receiving alms and gifts of flowers, food, cloths or washing powder.

We were in Vientiane. But we missed it all!

While visiting Wat Si Saet on the eve of the festival, a young monk told us that the alms ceremony would start at around 8am. We got there at 8:45 (after all, we not only needed to rent a motorcycle, but also had to have breakfast!), it had all been finished for 2 hours.

So we climbed back on our motorcycle and drove to the modern but impressive Buddha Park 26km out of town. We then saw the Loa version of the Arc de Triomphe - an unfinished cement structure built in during the war using US-supplied materials actually intended for a runway meant for America to bomb the living shit out of the rest of the country.  We gave the Lao Revolutionary Museum a miss although we later heard that it has a great collection of poorly-lit artifacts, a few (chicken ?) bones in display with the caption "Pre-historic times" and lots of cheep styrofoam models commemorating the people's struggle for a new oppressor which would probably have been great for a few laughs at the ruling party's expense.

Camel with Happy:
Having seen the whole of Vientiane in just two days -and that's allowing for recovery time from our 10-hour bus ride, we headed back north to Vang Vien, supposedly via the Nam Ngum Dam lake and a handicraft market. But the tourist mini-bus tour turned our to be another complete rip-off: we had exactly 6 minutes at the lake to click away, and then rushed to Vang Vien to meet the driver's deadline. Once more, we promised ourselves never to fall into the organized tour crap-euh trap- ever again.

Vang Vien, just 3 hours away from Vientiane, is a touristy hangout that certainly deserves more mention than the miserable one-and-a-half pages allocated to it in the Lonely Planet.

After all, it has a lot to offer to today's average backpacker: You can smoke hash, you can smoke weed, you can smoke opium, you can smoke malaria tablets, you can smoke fertilized water-buffalo dung, hell you can even venture in smoking one of them 2,000kip Laos no filter brown cigarettes! - it's your funeral after all!

For those with principals, a good education or a high sense of morals, there is always "happy" banana shakes, "magic" crepes, Pizza with ham, cheese, oregano and "happy" or the chef's signature appetizer"Marie Jane garlic bread".

No, seriously, we are being a bit unfair to this tiny village which is surrounded by magical sceneries of rivers, rice paddy fields, dirt roads and cute little markets set against a backdrop of tall limestone rocks. Despite its reputation as a drugy-chilled-relaxed backpacker heaven where just-out-of-the-army-Israelis tend to get stuck for the majority of their Lao vacation, Vang Vien is a wonderful place to forget about all the stress that you've accumulated during the past weeks in... well, no-where really!, the whole of Laos is far too laid back, but never mind...you can always imagine virtual stress and use your days in Vang Vien to unwind by eating barbecued bananas, barbecued chicken feet, barbecued snakes, or simply a nice crunchy barbecued skewer of grass hoppers, worms and scorpions.

Vang Vien also has a local market where everything is for sale from squirrels, owls, pig fetuses and bats, along with the "sinhon", a positively weird creature with the head of a small dog and the tail of an armadillo. It lives underground - but you probably would too, if you looked like that!

For the totally insane, VV even offers activities such as trekking, rafting, biking, canoeing, sunset-watching, cave exploring and the highly demanding quest of slowly floating down the river on an inflated truck tube while sipping on a chilled beerlao or an iced coconut..

Being the thrill seekers that you all know, we chose to fill the time between happy shakes by simply doing everything that VV had to offer: Biking to far away caves. Jumping off bridges and trees. Breaking one bike's steering. Failing to repair it with duct tape, branches and tie-raps. Realizing that Chinese are better at using chopsticks that building bicycles when the remaining bike's wheel bent in half under our combined weight. Dragging the 2 wrecks back to the village 20 km further. Canoeing through the small rapids of the river. Crawling, swimming and avoiding huge hairy spiders during an hour-long adventurous cave exploration. Playing with the cutest baby monkey. Disconnecting our brains to jump off a mighty-high cliff and finally, imagining that the 110cc scooter we rented was a full-blow 4x4 vehicle and crossing through mud, rivers and rice fields...

Our newfound best friends for the 4 days in Vang Vien were the super "gezellig" Bob and Kathleen from Belgium who shared all our joys and miseries. And who quickly took on a keen liking to "Shithead" whilst sipping Pastis on the terrace of the Erawan GH (great place to eat/stay, 3-4$/night).

Part 2

Having finishing our fun filled days in Vang Vieng we decided it was time for us to head down south and see a bit more of Laos. We got the bus to Vientiane at dawn, then the night bus to Pakse,almost all the way down south. We had decided to skip most of the south, not only due to lack of time but also because it didn't seem too interesting at the time.
It probably could have been great, but whattodo?
15 hours, 15 pee-breaks and 15 minutes of sleep later, we got into Pakse at 05.15 and went straight to bed. When we emerged a few hours later and went down to reception, who did we run into??......Gavin and Malcom, our fresh-springroll -eating-shithead-playing buddies from Luang Prabang who were just on their way down further south a day
or so ahead of us. We agreed to try to meet on the tiny island of Don Kon in the si-pan-don (4000 islands) area just off Cambodia.
While exploring the extremely sleepy and muddy town of Pakse, the most exciting thing that happened to us was that Chris invited himself to join a group of 8 years old playing the well known game
of "place-your-slipper-behind-someones-back-and-then-have-it-thrown-at-your-head-as-hard-as-possible" which he still remembered well from his childhood.
The next day we did what any respected traveler would do: get out of Pakse!. So we rented a 125cc motorbike, headed up to the coffee plantations on the bolaven plateau and spent a day touring around the countryside, meeting very friendly hill-tribe people in their typical Lao elevated pole-houses and admiring the colorful spring-like blooming nature, particularly beautiful in the hills between Tad Lo and Pakse.
As there was not much else to do in this area, we headed further south the next day to Champasak to visit some Khmer-era ruins. We were already told that these were nothing compared to what we would see in Cambodia but, having plenty of time, we decided to make a short stop... right!. This place is on a sortof island, and it was far from
straight forward to get there and back (pick-up truck, other truck, boat to cross the river by truck...) basically 5 hours to get 35km further... So we ended up spending the night in what was our cutest accommodation so far.
The ruins were indeed "Ruins" with a capital R and a lot of imagination was required to guess what it once was. We were there with a nice group though, which made up for a lot TIP: (if you have been or are ever going to Angkor, do yourself a favour and skip Champasak) . Next morning as all of us were heading down to the four thousand islands, we asked our friendly guesthouse owner about the buses off the island. ''Every half an hour from 06.30am onwards'' he assured us.
And indeed, there was a bus every half an hour but they were so enormously packed with people, animals and merchandise that they did not even bother stop to pick up the 10 ultra-loaded Falangs who were signaling like baboons in heat. One and a half hours later, still standing at the door of the guesthouse, we decided to start walking and see how far we would get. Well not very far as it was too hot and the bags were too heavy. Super-Chris saved the day by stopping a pick up truck (by standing in the middle of the road and clearly showing that he had no intention of moving), and, after long negotiations decided to give us all a lift to the pier.....FOR FREE!!!!! We could not believe it, they did not want any money! That was a certain first in this part of the world.
Of course, everyone after that did want our money, and after spending 4 hours of quality time with 6 chicken, 2 roosters, one small piglet and 80 people on the local mini-bus, we arrived on the tiny tiny island of Don Kon (not to be confused with Don Kong) where we went in anticipated search of Gav and Mal, who, of course were not there!
As there is not much to do on Don Kon (understatement of the century!), we chilled in our hammocks the first day, reading and playing 'shit head', went for a walk the second day, counted our money on the third day, decided we did not have enough left to see the Mecong fresh-water dolphins, so then took the first morning bus to the Cambodian border the last day; only to find Gav and Mal on the pier, also heading towards the Cambodja border to go on a dolphin watching expedition. They had decided, at the last minute, to make one last attempt to get rid of us by hiding on the
neighboring (and smaller, if it is possible!) island of Don Det.
We quickly caught up on all that happened during the 40 minutes pickup ride to the border and said our final goodbyes.
...Well, almost!!!
While Chris was happily chatting to the customs officers at the border post (shabby 1-meter square cabin on a muddy forest path in the middle of nowhere) and trying to find a way of sweet talking them out of making us pay the customary 1$-a-pop bribary-fee, he turned around to find Sil striping down with one hand while hysterically pulling her hair with the other and trying to open her backpack with her teeth....
- ''Where is my passport??, where is my passport??, oh my god, I lost my passport... i can't believe i can't find my passport!!!''
Chris, cool as a dead herring, took hysterical-Sil in his arms, soothed her with sweet words and gentle hugs, and calmly suggested to retrace the last day's events to see where the passport could possibly be.
While Sil was busy finishing to knot the rope with which she planned to harakiri-hang herself, Chris had a rare moment of lucidity (which lasted about 8 hundredth of a second and was never manifested ever since) and said in a composed voice :
- euh... euh... for motorcycle, euh, go to Paksong... hotel in Pakse... Passport as deposit, euh, not returned after...forgot''.

There we were; stuck on the Laos border, 25 km from civilisation, no cars, no trucks, buses or taxis, and of course not a single kip left... Lady luck was with us once again when a car appeared at the border from Cambodia and offered us (after negotiating on the price for 10 minutes) to take us to the town from where we had left in the morning to wait for a bus to Pakse. Malcolm made his good deed of the year by exchanging 5 dollars in kip for us (at a really crappy rate, thanks for taking advantage of the situation mate!), and off we went in the car thinking we would worry about the rest later. During the short drive to Ban Nakasan, we overheard our savior mention several times the word 'Pakse' on the phone, so we innocently asked him what his final destination was. this was answered by a 2-minute long monologue in gibberish-Lao from which we could decyfer only the word ''Pakse''...Our begging mode immediately went into overdrive and we managed to convince him to drive us to Pakse for our last 5 dollars.
We were happy,we were extatic,we were the luckiest people on earth, untill about 10 minutes later when the car was suddenly metamorphosed into a mini Mount Etna, spitting jets of boiling water and clouds of smoke from its hood. Our driver got out and started pouring 3 litres of water in the carburator, and went on repeating this process every 10
to 16 minutes on the 3 hour drive. We were taking water from rivers, ponds, pools, shops and public toilets to try and keep this smoking mobile moving. We eventually emerged victorious and got to Pakse right on time to grab Sil's passport from the hotel, change some cash, race back to the bus terminal and catch the last bus back to Don Det
where Mal and Gav were spending another two days. We figured we might as well join them.
These last two days were spent in a happy daze of card playing (shithead of course), laying in our hammocks, watching some of the most stunning sunsets, eating and talking a whole load of nonsense. After the two days we were out of
money again so decided it was definitely time to bid this absolutely fantastic country goodbye and make our way, once again, to Cambodia.

Conclusion
Once Sil was bitten by the Lao-Lao fly, she was transformed overnight into the only mobile Lao Tourism Board Travel Desk.
''Go to Lao'', ''Lao is beautiful'', ''Lao is great'', ''The people in Lao are smiling, and friendly, and genuine'', ''Lao is so cheep'', ''There is so much to do in Lao'', "The coffee and baguettes are the best in Lao"...
Not a single traveler was spared by her evangelizing speaches (often at the detriment of Vietnam who is, according to her new holly book; expensive, crowded, pushy, dirty, 'touty', too touristy, and full of big buses in which fat Bavarians eat sausages the whole day...).
So far three couples have agreed to change their complete itinerary to visit the promised land, more victims will surely follow.
And rightfully so!
Laos is indeed a gorgeous place with wonderful people, and it is indeed dirt cheep (even we could make it with as little of usd 25 a day for two, all in!!). The North is particularly beautiful, and certainly worth another visit, during which we'll make sure we don't miss the Muan Sing/Muang San areas that are said to be of even greater beauty.
Laos now holds number one place in our favorite countries to-date. Any challenger has gotta be darn good if he wants to decrown the King-of-Chill!