Where are Tinus and Barrie?

As you can no doubt tell from the title, the long period of travel combined with a bout of the flu has reduced my sophistication to that of a 11-year old pubescent boy. So if this post seems slightly unhinged and incoherent, I’ll just blame it on that. I’m writing from Hanoi [ed. note: and finished it in Dublin], where we’ve been for over a week, trying to piece together our experience in Laos.

Me and Laos got off to a rough start: when we arrived in Don Khone, one of the ‘4,000 Islands’ in the South of the country, I was overcome with sadness. There were hardly any other tourists around, which gave the small island an eerie and desolate feeling. The locals were very quiet and shy and not that easy to connect with, so very different from the more outgoing and better English-speaking Cambodians we were used to.  When we went to Pakse a few days later, that feeling did not really change that much. We did make a great trip to the old Khmer temple Wat Phu, which dates from the Ankor period and that is close to what the locals call ‘Penis Mountain’. Sure, with a little imagination, that seems like a valid nickname, right?

Wat Phu and penis mountain. Oh behave!

To conclude this first immature part of this post, I though the trip to Wat Phu (which itself was wonderful) was especially apt, since I had a particularly upset bowel system that day.

Aaaannnyyyway, however unhappy I was during the first week in Laos, in the end it really did change. As soon as we got to the capital Vientiane, I started feeling better, and the more north we went, the more approachable and open the Lao were. Plus we met some fantastic fellow travellers along the way, notably someone I knew via work whom we ran into to our great surprise in the middle of a street in Vientiane, two feisty Portugese girls, and another adorable French couple, E. and R. Plus, we stayed in two of our favourite places during the last leg of our trip in Vang Vieng and Luang Prabang. Vang Vieng was until last year THE backpacker’s haven for douchebags that got totally wasted and shitfaced on “happy” shakes and pizzas (spiked with pot or meth or even worse) and booze, and then proceeded to float down the river in tubes. This lead to 50 (!) tourists dying in the last two years alone, so last year the government cracked down on this hot mess of terribleness and closed the bars and banned the drugs. Now, Vang Vieng is back to being the paradise on earth it actually is, with its beautiful mountains and lush vegetation. Some silly backpackers still come here for the full Vang Vieng experience, but all they can now do that they could also do before the ban on drugs is float down the river in a tube and watch reruns of Friends. What a great way to spend your time!

The view in Vang Vieng from the lovely Maylyn guesthouse.

All in all, we in the end did fully appreciate Laos, and its interesting blend of communism and Theravada Buddhism, a type of Buddhism in which karma and next lives play a big role. This means people don’t get that worked up about things, because hey, you get another shot anyway! And since there’s only one political party in Laos – others aren’t allowed anyway – there’s nothing much to be done about the way the government is run either. Although the country felt distinctly more Buddhist than communist, one of my favourite things was watching the 30-minute English version of the news, with its overly enthusiastic news reader. Without exception, he’d introduce a segment along the lines of: “Today, in Vientiane province, a new school has been opened!! This is very good for the education and development of the people of Laos!!!” This is then typically followed by some men in suits signing documents, shaking hands, 10 minutes of a speech of one of the men, and then finally me falling asleep because it’s so boring.

The other thing besides politics that people don’t get that passionate about in Laos is driving a hard bargain. In Cambodia, a little back-and-forth haggling is needed to get a good price at a market, but the Lao take a simpler approach. At one night market, I saw a magnet I’d like to get for my colleagues, and decided that 10,000 kip (0.5 Euro) should be enough. The bargaining procedure was as follows. Me: “How much for that magnet?” Sales woman: “15,000 kip.” Me: “How about 10,000?” Sales woman: “Ok!”

Since we really enjoyed the massages we got in Cambodia, we decided to try our hand at some in Laos as well. We were warned by our French friends E. and R. that the Lao massages they got “probably looked more like a fight”, since the Lao take great pleasure in ripping your joints and muscles in opposite directions. I vividly remembered this happening to me in Thailand and being bent in directions that in other circumstances would be called ‘torture’. This is why we opted to go for the oil massage, which was supposed to be more like a traditional Swedish massage. The first one we got in Vientiane was indeed very good, relaxing and not at all painful, but our luck changed in Luang Prabang. Although plenty of oil was indeed applied, these experienced masseuses still managed to poke their thumbs deeply into our tissue. I was most impressed by the ability of the girl giving me a massage to sit on my shin bones with both knees and at the same time push the flesh away from it. The icing on the cake was her giggling once she reached my feet; I guess she just could not believe a woman would actually have big-ass feet like mine, and no doubt she thought I might have been a man at an earlier stage in my life. The next two days I just walked around battered and bruised, nursing the blue bumps slowly making their presence known on my poor shins.

And all this twaddle brings us to les observations traditionelles:

• Sticky rice abounds. The Lao (or more specifically mostly the lowland Lao, the largest ethnic group in the country) LOVE their sticky rice and refer to themselves as “the sticky rice people”. And I again love them for it, being a carb-crazed, glutenous-loving gal. It’s really addictive to take a little pluck of rice between your fingers, roll those little balls of sticky bliss and dip them in a curry or sauce. Also, many will be pleased to know that Barrie and I did a Lao cooking course, and can whip up some pretty good dishes!
• Hotmail addresses rule Laos. In pretty much all public ads, the email contact details included a Hotmail address. “Appartment for rent in central Vientiane. 50m2. Interested? Email stickyrice83@hotmail.com.” Now, don’t get me wrong, some of my best friends still have Hotmail addresses (see what I did there), but it’s surprising to see Microsoft still beating Google’s ass real good in this part of the planet.
• The Lao song is ubiquitous. Every – and I really mean every – place we went to had the same music playing somewhere in the distance; a very specific slap bass. ‘Taaa – taa – taa -taa – Ta – ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-taaa; Taaa – taa – taa -taa – Ta – ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-taaa;Taaa – taa – taa -taa – Ta – ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-taaa’. Ok, maybe it doesn’t really come across in written form, but it was a first for me to be in a country with its own soundtrack.
• Syllables are sexy! Correct spelling is not regarded as a virtue in Laos, but they love pointing out the syllables in words. Why write them glued to each other, when you can also separate them so they can bast in their individual glory? Some examples: Guest house (or gest house; gust house; geust house), la goon and my favourite, cock tail. Well, sure, I’ll have sip of that!
• You cannot and will not refuse Lao hospitality. Barrie and I had a nice routine in Luang Prabang where we’d go to the night market to get a sandwich for dinner, which we then took to eat at the most excellent L’Etranger bookstore to watch a movie (they show one every night!). The wonderful – and gorgeous – woman selling the sandwiches certainly picked up on the fact that we came round an awful lot, and quickly started to recognise us. We’d pass her during the day and she’d wave and say “see you tonight!”, and indeed we did. After three days, she offered us a fruit shake for free. We politely refused, since we figured out that they contain about as many calories as a generous piece of pie. However, she was having none of it, and she just proceeded to make “a shake” despite our protests. This in fact resulted in us getting 2.5 shakes, filled to the brim with more fruit and sweet condensed milk than we’d ever seen before. The next day, we visited her again, and gave her a little wooden shoe key chain, which she absolutely loved. On our last day, I went to see her to say goodbye and thank her for the lovely food and drinks. Of course, I couldn’t refuse another sinful yet delicious shake, and luckily enough she was happy to let me take a picture of her and her little girl.

Maybe I’ll get to Vietnam and Ireland at some point, but since we’re heading back home in two days, I suppose it won’t happen very soon. In any case, thanks for reading all my stuff so far, for those who actually made it through all or most of the posts. Now, time to celebrate my birthday and last two days of this amazing trip!

I told you the Lao are pretty laid-back

Wat Xieng Thong – Luang Prabang

Yes, those are stairs.

Water buffalo derpiness.

Monks playing ‘pop the balloon’

Our lovely sandwich lady!

Anticipation

A very literal name for a restaurant.

The fruits of our cooking-class labour

Buddha cave close to Vang Vieng.

Luang Prabang night market

Making new friends.

Cook-meister Barrie.

Bowling!

Basically, don’t be a douchebag.

Nice handlebar moustache!

Laos is the most bombed country in the world. As of 2008, Laos is the most heavily bombed country, per capita, in the world. An average of one B-52 bomb-load was dropped on Laos every eight minutes, 24-hours-a-day, between 1964 and 1973. Many bombs have taken the life or limbs of the Lao, and this number increases each day, when people find them in the woods and try to take unexploded ordnance with them to sell for money.

NIght market buffet

…and finally, the view from Phu Si hill, Luang Prabang