#67: Laos:
Lazy Days Along the Mekong
6 NOV 2002
Right on the Chinese-Lao Border
I have taken another painful bus journey and am now in Mohan, right on the border with Laos. Customs is 100m down this road. I will spend the night in this dusty cowboy town – a simple border post previously but now a town with yet-to-pave streets has arisen. China has great plans for this town: it will be where the future Singapore-to-Kunming expressway and railway enters China.
I will cross the border when it opens at 8am tomorrow. Altogether, I have travelled 240km today on 3 buses, and that took an amazing 9 hours on winding mountain roads!
I passed a number of non-Dai and non-Han tribal villages, mostly Lahu-Lahu, Yao and Hani ethnic groups. The surrounding area is however largely ethnically Dai, which is related to the Thai and Lao. They wear large straw hats and colourful skirts even while working in the fields. Lots of orange-robbed monks, water buffalos, etc.
Dropping by a Hunan restaurant in Mohan, the owners invited me to join them for dinner when they heard I am Singaporean and that I was recently in Changsha. Another advantage of being a Mandarin speaker. In fact, many of these people in the provinces say that I speak more accurate Mandarin than them, though frankly, my written Chinese is atrocious.
13 NOV 2002
Mohan, Yunnan Province, China. This dusty, cowboy town sits right on the border with Laos – three hotels, a few Sichuan and Hunan restaurants, one cyber caf� and many brothels. It is the latter’s bright red lantern lights that provide the only source of public lighting at night in this godforsaken one-street frontier town. Whatever it is, China has great plans for this town. It will be where the future Singapore-to-Kunming expressway and railway enter China. The whole place looks like a gigantic construction site with multi-lane highways and a huge shopping mall.
I have had a great time in China. It’s easy travelling in China with improving infrastructure and the consumer shopping paradise that it has turned into as a result of its rapid economic growth. The thought of leaving China does draw some apprehension. I have almost forgotten that I have long been travelling through countries where I hardly speak the local tongue. There is something I am happy to miss in China, though, and that is the toilets.
China has the world’s dirtiest and worse designed toilets, in particular, those barrierless pits that have no regard for individual privacy. China has definitely moved from a Third World basket case to become an emerging economic superpower, with state of the art telecommunications systems and transport infrastructure. However, its toilets remain absolutely Fourth World, primitive and filthy. Almost everywhere I have been, including poorer countries, from Peru to Laos, all have cleaner and better designed toilets than China.
Laos is a landlocked country the size of the United Kingdom, with only five million people living in a largely mountainous land in small strips of arable land along the muddy Mekong. The Mekong winds itself lazily from the foothills of the Himalayas through Yunnan, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia reaching its own delta on the Pacific in Vietnamese territory.
Now into my 11th month of travelling and the 99th country, I am nearer my home, Singapore. I am behind schedule. I was supposed to be home by the end of June, September, or October. Yet, I am still a few thousand kilometers from Singapore. I decided to skip the beautiful northern mountains and dash for Luang Prabang instead.
Crossing the border was the easy bit. If public transport in the Middle Kingdom of today is fairly well organised, Laos must be the exact opposite. There are no formal bus schedules on most routes. When they do exist, they are not adhered to. In fact, there are many places in Laos that do not have buses of the kind we are used to. Wooden planks, also known as seats, are set up on pickup trucks.
I got onto a pickup at the Lao border post, and reached yet another dusty road junction called Nateuy, where I waited two hours for a passing bus going to Luang Prabang. A two-hour wait is alright if you know a bus will pass. The problem is, nobody really knows whether or when it will come. Thank goodness it eventually arrived.
Over the next ten hours and three hundred kilometers, we passed through the sparsely populated Laotian countryside. Winding roads and countless bends across the green mountains of the north were mostly covered by deep tropical cloud forest. It was foggy and that added to the mysterious allure of the land. At times, when we were high above the fog-covered hills, protruding peaks looked like island volcanoes floating on an ocean of fog. Or, they could equally resemble nipples of well-rounded breasts peeping from beneath rich white layers of foam in a bathtub.
The spectacular scenery, however, was no compensation for those who were suffering from motion sickness. Indeed, the bus was full of sick people who interrupted its loud Thai pop music with the sweetest outburst of vomit. I just had to turn the other way with a few generous doses of Mentos or Tic-Tac.
As I have noted before that nature is one big restaurant. My fellow Laotian passengers are its best customers in this part of the world. The bus stopped abruptly at many middle-of-nowhere locations where there were stalls selling anything from porcupine, possums, raccoons, civet cats, bats and god-knows-what-animals, all for the pleasure of game meat lovers. I watched with amazement the exotic range of wildlife the Laotians brought to our crowded bus.
After ten hours on a torturous joyride, I finally reached the fabled city of Luang Prabang. I checked into a nice guesthouse along the Mekong, at a sum of 25,000 kips, which at the current exchange rate, equates to two dollars and fifty cents, U.S.
Luang Prabang, World Heritage City, is Laos’ most popular tourist destination. The Lao people, like their ethnic cousins, the Thai people, once inhabited in what is today Yunnan Province, China. The Mongol destruction of the Nanchao Dali Empire led to the southward migration of the Lao-Thai people. It was in Luang Prabang that Fa Ngum, Cambodian warlord, founded the Empire of Lan Xang, the first unified Lao state in history. The empire lasted till the 18th century, when it was divided into three states and all came under Siamese (Thai) control. Today it is a sleepy town popular with backpackers.
This is the place to relax and watch the boats flow past the Mekong. Or take a cruise to Pak-Ou and its Buddha’s hidden in the caves. Or visit some of the sixty plus temples in town, their golden rooftops and incredible carvings. Or have good French croissants and baguettes, with organic Lao coffee. English is the lingua franca of the day. Despite the French colonial heritage, most French tourists are shocked that only elderly Laotians speak French. The young swear by English.
The modest-looking Royal Palace Museum is a gentle reminder of the country’s royal past. The French made the kings of Luang Prabang the king of all Laos. The monarchy was in trouble from the start, its citizens torn between royalists, neutralists (those that are against involvement of any kind in the conflict in neighbouring Vietnam) and communists. All three factions were supposedly headed by royal princes of the kingdom, the communists were nominally headed by Prince Souphanouvong, better known as the “Red Prince”. By the time the Americans were defeated in the Vietnam War, the die was cast for Laos. In late 1975, the monarchy was abolished, and the royal family was thrown into Concentration Camp Number One, where the king, queen and crown prince were starved to death, deliberately.
Farewell to Luang Prabang and another horrendous ten-hour bus ride to Vientiane, capital of Laos. The city and its metropolitan area has a population of 500,000 people, but it doesn’t look like a capital city. Vientiane, the “City of Ten Thousand Elephants,” is a relaxed city. It’s probably like Malaysian towns in the 1950’s and Thailand in the 1970’s, what they called cities at a pre-development stage. Weekday traffic on the streets is less than Changi Village, a most laid-back Singapore suburb, on a weekend. There is no such thing as traffic congestion. Just seventy kilometers from the Presidential Palace, on a narrow strip of land along the Mekong, you find water buffaloes and farmers working on rice crops in what would be prime property in capital cities elsewhere in the world.
I like the food here. Lao cuisine is less spicy and less varied than their closely related Thai cousins. You can also find dim sum and other Southeast Asian Chinese food for very low prices. I prefer the local Chinese dishes which are culturally closer to those in Singapore. And I hear Hokkien, Teochew and other Southeast Asian Chinese dialects spoken among the people. I smell home on the streets of Vientiane, a kind of gentle nostalgia of a world that no longer exists in other Southeast Asian cities.
I didn’t do much – rounds of temples, and had a good herbal sauna and traditional Lao massage at a temple-in-the-woods just south of Vientiane. This was a good re-charging after months of travelling with a bit of indulgence in the local cuisine.
I dropped by the National History Museum. Apart from assorted Buddha statues and Lan Xang relics, there was a fair bit of coverage on Laos’ turbulent post-World War II history. Independence from France was granted in 1953, but the small state was soon drawn into the deadly embrace of regional politics and the Cold War. The Vietnam War and its complicated network of regional alliances destroyed Laos. The North Vietnamese turned Laos into their highway for supplies to their brothers fighting in the south. The Americans bombed Laos relentlessly in an undeclared war against the Laotian nation and its people.
Laos, in those years of conflict, became the most bombed nation in the world. Dropped in the name of freedom and democracy, the bombs not only killed thousands of Laotians but destroyed what pathetic little infrastructure the nation had. No wonder Laos has remained one of the poorest countries in the world today. The silly communist rulers squandered time and fortune in their period of misrule following their victory in 1975. It is also a fact that teams are still de-mining the country twenty-seven years after the end of the war. Laos has since joined ASEAN and embraced free market policies.
How do you integrate the economies of Singapore and Laos with a differential of over two hundred times? That makes the integration of Central and Eastern Europelook look like an afternoon tea party.
As I watched the U.N. debates on Iraq and various propaganda announcements from the Oval Office, I was reminded of similar speeches about communist terrorism and imperialism, and how the Gulf of Tokin incident should inspire all freedom-loving peoples from supporting the war in Vietnam. My sympathies go to the citizens of Baghdad and Gaza City, Nicaragua, Panama, Laos – the same message echoes again and again.