South East Asia on a Hamstring – February 17

By: Marie Javins

Huay Xai, Laos – February 17, 2000

From Chiang Khong, Thailand, we could hear the national anthem of Laos being distantly played in the early morning. We crossed the Mekong River to the small town of Huay Xai and suddenly we were in Laos.

Laos is a landlocked country. Geographically, its size matches Great Britain. The population of the whole country is about half that of New York City. During the Vietnam War era, Laos had the distinction of being the most bombed country in the history of the world. It lost 10 percent of its population to “brain drain,” upperclass flight from the country to points abroad, in 1975.

At the border I traded in thirty US dollars and got a tremendous brick of Laotian “kip” in return. The appearance was deceiving – each bill was worth 2000 kip, or thirty-seven cents.

We finished up our border formalities and boarded a small barge for a two day trip up the Mekong.

The barge had a giant engine in the back, and reputedly had a small emergency toilet where one could lean over a hole in the floor. None of us actually tried the emergency toilet – we had been lucky to date and hadn’t yet gotten any traveler’s sickness. 13 of us tourists lounged about in the passenger section of the boat, which consisted of two thin, wooden plank benches lining the sides of the boat. The captain, his three-year-old son, and our Laos Travel Service escort, the softspoken Mr. Thong Chiang sat in the front of the boat. The captain’s wife sat in the back with the engine and bailed out occasional buckets of water when the leaky boat demanded it.

We cruised down the river into the hazy morning. Every morning that I’ve been in Southeast Asia has been hazy so far. I think that perhaps it is the norm here, which would explain why mornings are always hazy in war movies about Vietnam.

The Mekong is low at this time of year so there are these giant cliff-like rocks that poke out of the water, creating an obstacle course between the rocks and the corresponding whirlpools. Our captain would allow us to sit on the roof during most of the trip, but when we approached a whirlpool he would order us down. It was quite dangerous to navigate through whirlpools.

A few hours on the river brought us to a remote and tiny Hmong village, seldom visited by outsiders. The Hmong are one of several hilltribes peoples of Laos – they live up in the mountains, but the government has used economic incentives to entice them to come down to the lowlands and quit farming opium.

We had brought salt, melons, oranges, mangosteins, and sunflower seeds for our hosts. The little kids, dressed in the filthy, tattered rags of kids who play in the dirt all day, came down to the river and shyly waved to us. Their moms followed along shortly – women with all of their hair piled onto their foreheads in front-facing buns. We followed the kids and women up to the village of thin huts, and the head man invited us into his hut.

We sat in a semi-circle and all of the kids spilled in the doorway to stare at us. We stared at them, and passed out sunflower seeds. Mr. Thong Chiang gave us a lecture on Laos, but he was so softspoken and sing-songy that I was lulled almost to sleep. The motion sickness drugs I’d taken pre-boat trip didn’t help much either.

We handed our gifts to the head man, saving the sunflower seeds and oranges for the kiddies, and headed back to our boat for the trip to Pak Beng.

Lunch on board the boat was fried rice with vegetables, stored in “pintos.” A pinto is one of those multi-tiered lunchboxes that you’ve probably seen and never used – it’s a group of four bowls, stacked in a vertical row and secured with a metal brace. Wendy had purchased four stacks of four pintos and had ordered them to be filled up at the hotel the night before. She looked up “pin” and “to” in her Laos dictionary and came up with “movable table.”

When the trips ended, Wendy delivered the pintos to a hospital. Families had nothing to bring food in to their loved ones. Word was that the hospital had enough pintos now so Wendy had taken to selling the pintos in the market and delivering the proceeds to the hospital instead.

In the late afternoon, we all made ourselves comfortable, sprawling across the boat and napping. The Captain’s son, when he wanted to go from one end of the boat to another, would walk up to a person and stare at him until he opened his eyes and moved. Then, on to the next person. It was slow going. Wendy explained to us that Laotians think that it’s bad luck to step over a sleeping person.

We arrived in Pak Beng at around 5 and paid some local kids thirty-seven cents a bag to drag our bags up the hill to the guesthouse. The standard of accommodation in Pak Beng is “basic,” meaning that we would only have electricity between 6pm and 10pm and would have squat toilets and small shower hoses that squirt out cold water. I unpacked my sleepsheet, reluctant to sleep on the possibly-dirty sheets.

There were no windows in the bathrooms, so before 6pm, the toilets were totally dark. Normally, this wouldn’t be such a problem, but once the “squat toilet” was added to the mix, it became a real challenge. You have to hold up your clothes at the same time that you are holding your flashlight, possibly in your mouth.

The town itself was a one-dirt-road frontier kind of town. Kids begged us for pens, so we obviously weren’t the first tourists to visit. There was a small vegetable market at one end, and a single tourist shop. It started to rain right after we went out and I was doused with filthy brown water that I had to later scrub out of my clothes. We ate at a small mediocre restaurant (the best in town!) and snacked on various forms of Laos cuisine. Mr. Thong Chiang sang us traditional Laos songs, using his fist as if it were a microphone and being very embarrassed immediately before and after his songs.

Mr. Chiang was so softspoken that all I could usually pick up on was “excuse me, sorry, sorry.” He would proceed to tell us something but his voice would just lull me to sleep.

Wendy was helping a local young man write out a sign in English. The man was trying to attract backpackers to his tourist business – running hilltribe treks. Unfortunately, Laotians must pay huge fees and be licensed to deal with tourists so the trick was in presenting the business without stating that the young man himself was a licensed tour operator. I helped for a while and went to bed, leaving Wendy to stay up and drink lao-lao – the local rice wine – with the locals until 2 in the morning.