Emerging from the Underground at Heathrow, I shouldered a rucksack holding three months’ luggage, walked briskly towards Departures – then registered a novel sensation of lightness and simplicity. Having spent the past fortnight with my daughter Rachel and two granddaughters (Rose aged two, Clodagh newly minted) I had become inured to much more taxing preparations for a three-hour journey. One had to assemble Rose’s buggy, Rose’s football in a large plastic bag, Rose’s potty in another large plastic bag, spare trousers and knickers lest the potty might not be reached in time, Rose’s teddy in his own buggy, a few changes of nappy for Clodagh, baby lotion, baby wipes, cotton wool, rubber pants, Vaseline, Sudocrem, a box of raisins lest hunger might strike, a bottle of milk lest thirst might strike, a loo roll to wipe small noses (permanently in need of wiping during December), stale bread to feed the ducks and geese in Peckham Rye park, waterproofs for everyone … No wonder I felt liberated at Heathrow.

On the Virgin Airways hop to Brussels most of my fellow-travellers were plump EU types wearing expensive suits and abstracted expressions. Brussels airport – unfamiliar to me – seemed even more crowded than Heathrow and the Sabena departure gate for Bangkok was invisible from afar. At the best of times, large airports fluster me. Now I approached a hard-faced Sabena-uniformed woman on duty at one gate and asked for directions. She treated me with breathtaking rudeness, ignoring my question. ‘Get back to your place!’ she snapped. ‘Take your turn like everyone else!’ Never, anywhere, have I been treated with such insolence. And the cabin staff were not much better: unsmiling and ungracious. As the tourist industry expands, and more and more ‘operators’ try to net more and more customers through lowering standards/prices, some airlines tend to process passengers as though they were goods in transit.

The Lao government, most guidebooks explain, has an ambivalent attitude towards tourists – especially backpackers. I can sympathize with its dilemma. Foreigners spend dollars; Laos needs (or has been persuaded that it needs) lots of dollars. However, the damage done globally by mass tourism so appals me that I would willingly – even joyfully – have forgone my Laotian journey had I found the country still closed to tourists, as it was until recently. An extreme attitude, you may (probably will) think. But a thriving tourist industry can rapidly undermine the cultures of hitherto isolated countries.

At 4.15 a.m. local time on 4 December I arrived in Bangkok – but my rucksack did not. I had had a premonition that this would be so, a premonition so strong I mentioned it to Rachel in London. As I was about to lose my cool (easily done after a sensationally turbulent eleven-hour flight) a young Thai woman materialized beside me and said in a soft soothing voice that my luggage was on a KLM flight due to land at 12.30 p.m. Disarmed by this first encounter with Thai charm, I forbore to complain about missing the 6.30 train for Nong Khai which departs from the station opposite the airport; now I would have to take a bus.

In search of a bus timetable I wandered wearily through an air-conditioned vastness, all glossy marble floors and harsh assertive colours and glaring lights. Tall plastic Christmas trees stood in corners, vulgarly loaded with ‘snow’ and simpering fairies and blinking psychedelic Santas. Escalators purred beneath strident signs directing one upwards to Kentucky Fried Chicken, Dunkin’ Donuts, Burger King and the Cyber Café. Between these delights are several bureaux de change, and a glass-walled triangular protuberance called Internet Service, and unalluring souvenir shops and a prayer room for Muslims. Oil-rich tourists are valued and much in evidence, pushing mega-trolleys piled high with electronic goods. It was quite a relief to come upon the John Bull Pub, very authentic with ‘Traditional Ales, Fine Wines & Spirits’ in elegant golden script above a splendidly carved mahogany bar. Here were polished wooden tables, handsome chairs with velvetish green or crimson seats, an agreeably patterned carpet and dim lighting. Glancing at my watch, I did a swift calculation – 11.30 p.m. London time, not an improper hour for a beer.

The only other drinkers were three English businessmen with lap-top computers, mobile phones and an interest in Laos. I tried to eavesdrop but could hear no more than a phrase at a time. The TV, perched on a high shelf, was showing a BBC programme about the late Princess Diana’s campaign against landmines. It soon switched to CNN, which proclaimed that if South Korea rejects IMF advice ‘that will make a dangerous risk for US national security’. Then came many other scraps of sub-literate misinformation. No wonder the Poor World is confused and disempowered – increasingly exposed to CNN propaganda, never allowed to perceive the reality of its own position as victim of the Rich World.

The John Bull’s cheapest pint costs US$4 so frugality restricted my intake. Moving on, I paused by a news-stand to read an item about global warming on the front page of the International Herald Tribune, How much energy is wasted in airports like Bangkok’s, modelled on the American way of life? Another item dealt with the massive ecological damage being done to Jordan by mass tourism.

At the tourist information kiosk the young lady in charge knew nothing about buses to anywhere and spoke minimal English – which surprised me, since millions of English-speakers pass through this airport annually. However, in Thailand the tourist industry has not yet corroded human relations and most people seem well disposed towards foreigners. (Apart from the many notoriously skilful criminals who operate around the airport and elsewhere.) Soon I had been told that a No. 29 bus would take me the twenty miles or so to the Nong Khai bus terminus.

When the bureaux de change opened, my dollars proved to be worth 35 baht each. Some four months previously the Thai ‘Miracle’ had predictably ended in a ‘Crash’. In Thailand, as Benedict Anderson has explained,

So was Laos, and to understand that country’s recent past one must remember this background.

In Nong Khai I was to meet a USAID educational consultant who deplored the misspending of Washington’s largesse. ‘It sure was a miracle era! But the Thai should have known it could not last – used it to prepare for a leaner future. Take a look at this country, never colonized so they can’t blame the imperialists for the mess they’re in. Just a few days before the Crash those World Bank guys were praising Thailand for maintaining a high rate of growth since 1970. All developing countries should follow Thailand’s example – so they said. Bullshit! In ’90 only 28 per cent of kids were getting any kind of secondary education and by the year 2000 70 per cent of the workforce will have had only bad primary schooling. The academic staff at state-owned universities get paid what you’d call pocket money and spend most of their time moonlighting – and who can blame them? Families with money send their kids to Bangkok’s “international” schools [provided originally for the education of expats’ children] – then off they go to universities in Australia, Canada, the States or the UK. The brightest graduates settle abroad – and wouldn’t you! The bunch who return get into money-making and you don’t make money teaching in the state system. When you get to Laos you’ll find it’s getting to be the same way there since the Commies lost their grip – more private schools opening, less funding for the state schools.’

The growth so admired by the World Bank was of course ‘export oriented’, as the jargon has it, and Thailand’s domestic investors operated only within the sheltered sectors of the economy – dodgy banking, speculative real estate deals, the exploitation of natural resources (mainly irresponsible logging) and manic construction. At the time of the Crash, in July 1997, Bangkok’s unoccupied office and housing units numbered a staggering 700,000 – and that is a conservative estimate.

Thailand sided with Japan in the Second World War but since 1947 its dictators (the majority military) have been America’s willing puppets. During the Second Indochina War billions of US dollars were spent on building the network of roads and military bases necessary for the bludgeoning of Indochina by air, land and sea forces. Some 50,000 US servicemen were then stationed in Thailand, a country permanently culturally poisoned by that alliance. It created a newly wealthy and quite numerous Thai middle class, devoted to the American way of life. And the CIA helped to set up a horrifying number of heroin millionaires among the powerful élite who ruled the land. Something similar happened in Laos, on a lesser scale but with more obvious political consequences.

At 8.30 a.m. my body clock suddenly registered the fact that for me this was the middle of the night. In a quiet corner I lay on the cool marble floor and slept soundly until noon. An hour later, reunited with my rucksack, I stepped out into Bangkok’s stifling midday humidity.

A high walkway, bridging the motorway’s non-stop torrent, took me to the bus stop. In comparison with Bangkok, Central London’s air seems Andean-pure; many Thai wear masks: the traffic police, bus and taxi drivers, building site workers, schoolchildren. In 1997 the number of cars on Bangkok’s streets increased daily by 800. And each year, while vehicles wait at traffic lights, petrol to the value of US$500 million is (mis) used. In December 1993 a local paper complained: ‘Our traffic congestion and pollution are the worst in the world – ever. Never in history have people had to live in the conditions we endure each day.’ One wonders – why does anyone (apart from sex deviates) go to Bangkok for a holiday?

Across the road, outside the railway station, pye-dogs foraged between food stalls – some maimed and the majority mangy but none too thin. Beggars blind or crippled crouched in corners. For as far as the eye could see, in both directions, stretched a puzzling phenomenon: pairs of thirty-foot-high concrete pillars, ten yards apart, each sporting a cluster of rusty iron rods. This line of pillars continues for many miles, accompanying the highway and contributing significantly to the ugliness of Bangkok’s outskirts. It is, I learned later, the residue of a failed scheme to construct an overhead railway.

The ramshackle No. 29 bus was overcrowded but a young woman immediately offered me her seat. The conductor wasn’t interested in my baht: perhaps he had no change. Three tallish young soldiers, very slim, stood in the aisle; their trim brown uniforms, crisply laundered, revealed perfectly proportioned bodies. The classic statues seen in Laotian temples and museums are not idealized forms; such well-made bodies are usual in this part of the world.

At 2.30 I bought my ticket for the overnight bus to Nong Khai, departing at 8.40 p.m. All legends and signposts being in Thai, and English-speakers being scarce, it seemed prudent not to explore central Bangkok. Getting lost can be fun but were I to plunge into this city’s maelstrom I might – probably would – miss my bus.

The Northern Bus Terminus, as big as two football pitches, was a diesel-hazy pullulation of people – the norm in Bangkok (population 11 million) I, at first, assumed. Then a friendly young English-speaking woman explained – tomorrow would be the King’s seventieth birthday, a national holiday, providing a long weekend, therefore thousands (millions?) were going home to their towns and villages and every form of transport was overstretched and I was lucky to have got a bus seat … She gave me her card (Financial Consultant) and lent me the Bangkok Post. A quarter-page advertisement fascinated me; it showed the back view of a girl wearing only a pony-tail and proclaimed ‘AMERICAN PLASTIC SURGERY NOW IN BANGKOK! Introducing an American Board Certified Plastic Surgeon with 15 years experience in California. Specializing in Facelifts, Eyelid Surgery, Nasal reshaping, Tumescent Liposuction, Breast enhancement, and a complete skin care line.’ My companion couldn’t tell me what Tumescent Liposuction is, nor has it yet found a place in my dictionary. But there must be someone out there who knows all about it and thinks it’s worth the money.

An urban bus station makes a good observation post. This was not the sort of Asian scene I’m used to: where were the overloaded passengers, the begging children, the shouting competing porters, the hawkers, the cripples, the litter? Everyone carried conventional amounts of luggage in conventional containers, barefooted coolies moved through the crowds in an orderly fashion pushing handcarts of goods to weighing offices, no beggars or cripples were admitted, not so much as a grape pip or a matchstick defiled the ground. From high rafters depended several bilingual (Thai and English) notices warning people about an on-the-spot fine for littering – 2,000 baht. Burger King et al. fed the multitude and a mini-supermarket, facing the concourse, sold most of the things one might find in its twin back home. The many seats and benches were crowded – apart from rows of plastic chairs within a roped-off monks’ enclosure at the base of a towering, glittering shrine dedicated to the King and surrounded by paper flowers and electric ‘candles’. Above the shrine hung a life-size photograph of HM as a young man, wearing the sort of comic opera uniform universally beloved by senior military officers. In mid-afternoon a platoon of novice monks arrived, each carrying only an umbrella; possessing nothing, they travel without luggage. I saw few smokers – mostly coolies – but an alarming number of adults and obviously distressed children were using asthma inhalers.

At 8 p.m., when I began to look for my bus, a man with an antique loudspeaker and a hoarse voice had for hours been making non-stop incomprehensible announcements. Twenty frantic minutes later I was one of thousands unable to find fixed points from which services routinely depart. All around the concourse stood long lines of buses – some lacking destination inscriptions, others inscribed in Thai, all with their poisonous engines running. People stared blankly when I pleaded for information about the Nong Khai bus, showing my ticket. Many looked bewildered while struggling through this human whirlpool yet no one looked stressed, whatever they may have been feeling. And I saw none of the aggressive pushing and yelling that would mark a similar scene in India or some African countries. (Oddly, I was the only foreigner around.) Finally, a diminutive old man with a wizened face grabbed my ticket and dodged away through the throngs, yelling at me to follow. He was so elfin I soon lost sight of him, which did nothing to lower my anxiety level. Then he came weaving back, seized my hand and pulled me through the conflicting currents of bodies to a certain row of buses where, he indicated, Nong Khai passengers should stand, awaiting decisions. Before I had time to thank him, he vanished.

Most of my companions in this non-queue were coughing uncontrollably and mopping watering eyes. Eventually an unmarked coach was designated as the Nong Khai service; fifteen minutes later its door was unlocked and we boarded. Then came another long delay, for a pleasing reason: one passenger was missing and the driver rightly reckoned that people matter more than punctuality.

For two and a half hours we moved at less than walking speed – or did not move. Bangkok’s normal rush-hour traffic averages 6 m.p.h. The city’s many tangles of six-lane highways, on monstrous concrete stilts, looked surreal from a distance under the glare of orange lights – like magnified centipedes in their death throes. For miles the ugliness of the aborted railway accompanied our road, dwarfed by huge hoardings, many of them advertising motor vehicles. Now I could understand why analysts refer to Bangkok as an EMR – Extended Metropolitan Region. Its sprawl covers 1,000 square miles.

Our plush air-conditioned coach provided Thai pop music throughout the night – played rather too loudly but otherwise agreeable enough, the instruments unfamiliar. Three well-behaved toddlers gave the impression of thoroughly enjoying long bus journeys. One, directly across the aisle from me, repeated the final phrase in each sentence uttered by her mother. The young man beside me slept until dawn, unaware of having his head on my shoulder. I merely dozed, on and off; in a sitting position I never can sleep well.

The sun rose redly on a flat brownish landscape. Our straight road – Route 2, now rather cloyingly renamed ‘the Friendship Highway’ – was two-lane by this stage but still dominated by hoardings and very tall concrete electricity poles, their multiple cables bringing power from Laos. The two towns en route, Khon Kaen and Udon Thani, were important American bases during the Second Indochina War; both have many new blocks of flats and office buildings, much more attractively designed than their equivalents in Britain and Ireland. Beyond Udon Thani the hoardings were replaced by an increasing number of trees – low and scrawny, their leaves brown – and hereabouts a few water buffalo grazed on fawn expanses of paddy stubble. We arrived at Nong Khai four hours late, at 9.20 a.m.

I walked to the Meeting Place, a guesthouse recommended in guidebooks as a convenient source of Lao visas. This wooden two-storey Thai dwelling, pleasantly tree-surrounded, was rented in 1991 by Alan Patterson, an Australian who ‘worked in tourism’ for many years before moving to Thailand. He provided a visa form, to be accompanied by one photograph, US$50 for a fifteen-day tourist visa and US$11 to pay his agent’s fee. Next morning, the agent would see me swiftly across the Lao border; without such an escort, I was assured, it took days to grope through the maze of Lao bureaucracy.

In fact this form was less bureaucratic than many I’ve known. Having completed it, I sat under the trees, writing my notes on a trestle table and enjoying the birdsong. Soon my host joined me and was informative. After the US retreat from Vietnam, many rich Vietnamese settled in Nong Khai and one such family built the Meeting Place. In 1980 they moved on to California (easily done as they came from a Catholic pro-US faction) where two generations are now prospering in the medical profession. Alan offered ‘more than a fair price’ for the house but they wouldn’t sell. ‘And weren’t they right!’ exclaimed Alan. ‘Look at the baht now!’ He was making ‘nice amounts’ by importing indigenous Australian palm trees – an unlikely commerce, there being no shortage of palm trees in Thailand. It seems nowadays you can start a fashion for pretty well anything. Sadly, he recalled losing to another Australian a 2 million baht contract for the ‘beautification’ of the Australian-funded Friendship Bridge.

Then Ted arrived, a middle-aged Englishman resident for the past four years in Vientiane, employed as a mechanic by a road-construction company. His young Lao wife went to talk with Alan’s young Thai wife before joining us. She spoke excellent English but seemed curiously subservient to her partner. When I questioned her about life in Laos she looked at him anxiously, as though needing his permission before replying. Then Ted began to condemn the Lao as primitive, ignorant, lazy and stupid. The Thai, he asserted, are ‘a much better sort, more Westernized’. Many of the rich Lao who ran away from the Commies in ’75 and ’76 have recently returned to invest in the new capitalist Laos, ‘but everyone hates them’. (An exaggeration, I later learned.)

This was one of those uncomfortable situations where to stay silent could seem like collusion with the barbarian yet to protest could make things even more painful for the person being insulted. I muttered something about ‘jet lag’ and withdrew.

My large, high-ceilinged room had two wide windows (not mosquito-proof, the netting torn) and two double plank beds with flock mattresses and dirty pillows. As I lay reading and sweating, cockroaches ran to and fro across the other mattress. Downstairs was a communal loo and hot shower – but who would want a hot shower in Nong Khai’s climate?

Alan and Ted were continuing their conversation below my window. ‘The way aid money’s bucketing in now,’ said the Brummie accent, ‘only a fool couldn’t get rich quick in Laos.’

When the worst of the heat had abated I became acquainted with Nong Khai – quite small, very friendly, architecturally still faintly flavoured by a French colonial seepage from across the Mekong. It was galvanized by the building of the Friendship Bridge and the opening up of Laos to tourists and investors. Three brash new hotels defile the riverbank – will two prove to be white elephants? Motor traffic, according to Alan, has increased by 300 per cent in three years, causing masks and asthma inhalers to appear. The shops are full of junk food, replacing the tasty, individually made titbits on offer from roadside stalls before the multinational food industry introduced bloated bright pink ‘potato’ crisps and a plethora of other unnatural comestibles garishly packaged to lure children. Fresh fruit juices and cane juice sold from barrows are now being replaced by you-know-what. And many children’s teeth, as I first noticed in Bangkok and was to continue noticing in urban Laos, are falling out by the age of four, or have been reduced to black stumps. An independent study of the ‘Free Market’s’ impact on nutrition in the Poor World is overdue. But who would fund it?

In a large eating-house with few tables (also the family living-room) I enjoyed, for the equivalent of 50 cents US, a wholesome supper of noodle soup containing slivers of tender chicken leg and chicken liver and bean sprouts and chopped lettuce. Across the room stood an illuminated Buddhist shrine, flanked by a four-foot-high music centre with shelves of tapes underneath and a large TV-cum-video-recorder. Three small daughters sat cross-legged on the floor only a yard from the screen, impassively watching a brutal gangster film. The frequent advertisements seemed even longer than ours: for detergents, shampoos, cars, motorbikes, refrigerators, cameras, processed foods, Nescafé, cosmetics with skin-lightening ingredients – all the ads as clumsy and naïve as Irish television’s in the 1960s. Why do Thai woman imagine they need skin-lighteners? And why has no one told them about the immense damage these do? On my way back to base I visited three video rental shops mainly offering (to judge by the covers) sex and violence.

 

In hot climates the early hours are precious but at dawn I found myself locked into the Meeting Place, where I was the only guest. When released, two hours later, I realized that the Thai are not, despite their climate, early risers. Nong Khai had the air of a town that has just woken up. Outside eating-houses food was being cooked in cauldrons on the footpath (tar barrels the cookers, bamboo the fuel) but as yet only coffee was available.

Later I observed Thai of all ages and both sexes enjoying four-course breakfasts. As follows: large bowls of noodle soup incorporating meat or fish, served with a heaped plate of crisp fresh greens to be torn up and scattered on the soup; two fried eggs drenched in soya sauce and served with several slices of toast; more greens embedded in a savoury jelly (cold bone stock) eaten with fresh red chillis; bread-and-jam sandwiches for pudding, devoured as though nothing had gone before. All this was accompanied by large mugs of coffee and pint glass tankards of a pale yellow liquid (herbal tea) poured over chunky ice and drunk through a straw. Presumably these Thai don’t lunch – how could they?

At ten o’ clock, as part of my ‘deal’ with Alan, a tuk-tuk took me to the border. This three-wheeled vehicle is derived from the motorbike; its brightly painted rear – like a miniature covered truck – has seats along the sides and in Laos one shares with others going in the same direction. The slow six-mile ride allows one time not to appreciate Nong Khai’s most recent ‘developments’. At the bridge, imposing new Customs and Immigration offices are ready to deal with a volume of traffic not yet happening. Instantly my minder appeared, saw me through the relaxed Thai formalities and escorted me on a shuttle minibus across the wide brown Mekong to the Lao border checkpoint. There he told me exactly where to wait: ten yards from the ‘Foreign Passports’ guichet. How would he have reacted had I insisted on standing by his shoulder, observing the details of his negotiation? On the visa issue my guidebook was, I discovered in Vientiane, out of date – though published only a few months previously. The Lao government changes its tourism regulations quite often; had I acted independently my visa would have cost $45 and there would have been no ‘agent’s fee’.