The Luang Prabang bus departs from Kasi ‘some time between 9 and 11’. Awaiting it on the veranda, I was diverted by the contents of a taxi tuk-tuk from Vang Vieng – a group of adolescent American backpackers being led, it seemed, by a middle-aged man. A memorable man: tall, pot-bellied, grey-haired, loudmouthed, with auburn (dyed?) moustaches of such proportions – touching his shirt-front – one doubted their authenticity. Impatient at having to wait indefinitely for the onward bus, he tried to negotiate with three young men about to leave in an antique pick-up van. Its back was loaded with second-hand power tiller engines, lengths of lead piping and two new china lavatory bowls. When the trio refused to convenience him by unloading he became downright rude – then moved restlessly around the veranda, complaining about the delicious Lao coffee (not instant decaffeinated) and reiterating a wish to see a UN vehicle approaching. That would solve his transport problem – or so he assumed, probably correctly. The boys of his party were discussing American football and the girls gossiping about some sex scandal at their high school. A reasonable breakfast bill provoked everyone to haggle with the polite young waitress. At this point a local entrepreneur, scenting dollars, offered transport in his own new minibus. The youngsters looked terrified when an armed soldier – their bodyguard for the journey – hoisted himself on to the vehicle’s roof. No one was sorry to see them go.
Meanwhile the trio had been adjusting their pick-up’s wheels which seemed to have gone out of alignment. I rejoiced when they indicated space for one passenger in the back; 10,000 kip (3,000 more than the bus fare) would ensure me an unimpeded view of the landscape. But as I settled myself comfortably on the rucksack, using a lavatory bowl as arm-rest, it became apparent that there was another problem, this time with the steering wheel …
Twenty minutes later I asked myself, ‘Do you really want to take a famously twisty mountain road in a vehicle with so many frailties?’ The answer was ‘No.’ As I disembarked the trio protested plaintively; to them 10,000 kip was a substantial sum. It took eight men to push the van up the slight slope to Route 13 – where at last it started, after an inauspicious series of coughs and jerks.
At eleven o’clock the bus arrived, rattling, tattered and smelly – a Soviet truck converted to bus-hood by some ingenious black-smith-cum-carpenter. Only from a back corner seat, by the passengers’ doorless entrance, could one see anything of the landscape. Nobody objected when the only falang aboard bagged this seat. At 11.20 two soldiers, complete with rifles, side-arms and daggers, ascended the roof-ladder to recline amidst the baggage. Also on the roof were four cocks in specially designed, loosely woven travelling baskets. At every stop they crowed stridently and were given water. Since cocks abound all over Laos, why – I wondered – take these to Luang Prabang? Later, in some wat compounds, I observed their like displayed for sale: very tall birds with long feathered legs and iridescent plumage. An English-speaking novice monk said they have some religious significance – to do with phi rather than Buddhism.
During our six-hour journey we passed only one town: Xiang Ngeun, fourteen miles from Luang Prabang. The traffic was minimal and outside of the occasional sad roadside settlement of ‘relocated’ people we saw no one. However, bald slopes were visible where the terrain permitted swidden cultivation (mostly it didn’t) and my thwarted trek had made me aware of the many little bans lying hidden behind the mountains.
I have travelled through quite a few celebrated ranges but none – not even the Simiens – looks as improbable as the free-standing mountains beyond Kasi. And yet there was something oddly familiar about these eccentric peaks – some spear-sharp, others knobbly, one summit with twin rounded bumps like gigantic balloons poised above the forested slopes. Then suddenly I remembered. This landscape took me back to my early childhood when I used to mould Plasticine mountains, placing them at some little distance from each other, the heights and widths and formations irregular – a madness of mountains. I recalled my father explaining, in his kindly, earnestly didactic way, that real mountains are not like that: peaks don’t stand isolated on flat land. But he was wrong. Real mountains are like that, in Laos.
At one settlement stop a couple boarded with a newborn infant on Mother’s back and a toddler in Father’s arms. On seeing me by the entrance the toddler freaked out, screaming as though he were being flayed, writhing and kicking in an attempt to escape. This caused considerable amusement – a rather heartless reaction, I thought. His parents looked anxiously embarrassed, imagining that I might take it personally, but to reassure them was not difficult. And by journey’s end the same toddler was playing peekaboo with the falang.
At another of our brief stops, when a few people got off and on (or the driver was put in charge of some load to be collected in Luang Prabang) an argument arose about two bonhams. The conductor reckoned these should go on the roof; their owner – a young woman carrying a beaming baby – thought otherwise. I signalled my support for the owner and the little creatures settled down happily in their basket on my rucksack, nuzzling each other and squeaking; they were too small to squeal. But at the next stop they had to be thrust under a seat – the squeaks becoming indignant – when a bent old woman struggled aboard with a massive load of forest produce: big furry brown pods, bundles of aromatic red leaves, large green berries packed in small wicker containers, long white roots resembling seriously deformed parsnips and sharp thin sticks bearing a bark much valued for dyeing. To accommodate all this merchandise, I put my feet on the metal seat in front of me: there was just enough space to insert them under an iron bar. The woman gave me a grateful, betel-red smile as she squatted on my rucksack; by then the aisle was packed with seatless passengers.
Half an hour later we rounded a hairpin bend and the driver braked so violently that my right foot, caught between the seat and that iron bar, was severely wrenched. Also, my left shin was cut by one of those precious sharp sticks. But at the time I scarcely registered my injuries as we all tried to see what had caused our abrupt stop.
Blocking the road was the trio’s pick-up, its front smashed in and the lavatory bowls shattered by the wayside. One young man lay unconscious with blood seeping through his trousers. Another was half scalped – a stomach-turning sight. The third was holding a hand to his broken jaw to keep it in place. The rusty petrol tanker with which they had collided – perhaps because the steering had failed again – was not much damaged. Its driver and his passengers (five though the cab was small) stood on the verge looking shocked and helpless; none had been injured.
When we disembarked I did register the damage to my foot. Then I saw that our driver was bleeding from the teeth – not surprisingly, as his seat consisted of two up-ended beer crates. The pick-up was manhandled to the verge and we took the injured aboard and two hours later delivered them to Luang Prabang’s provincial hospital, though the bus normally stops a few miles short of the city centre. Naturally I wondered about my own fate, had a well-developed instinct of self-preservation not propelled me out of that pick-up. Possibly – like the lavatory bowls – I would have been all over Route 13.
In 1995 Betty Gosling wrote: ‘Even today, Luang Prabang remains remote, pristine and detached from the modern world …’ Three years later, its outskirts gave a different impression. Looming over the bus ‘terminus’ – a patch of oil-stained wasteland – is a colossal hoarding: WELCOME TO LUANG PRABANG BY BEERLAO! Then comes a sports stadium, opened in 1996, its long high white wall plastered with Marlboro advertisements showing soccer players doing clever things. And nearby is a scattering of opulent villas recently built by local notables, some rumoured to be heroin barons – a plausible rumour, in this region.
The bus deposited me at a roundabout marked by a conspicuous Shell sign. Leaning heavily on my umbrella, I sought lodgings nearby but at the third fully booked guesthouse was advised to look no farther. During the Christmas/New Year season both backpackers and expats on local leave gather in comparatively cool Luang Prabang. However, Mr Somphavan promised a room for the morrow.
Back on the peripheral and utterly unpronounceable Xayacha-kaphatphanpheo Road, I reluctantly paid US$15 for one night in a newish, pretentious hotel, unwelcoming and ill-designed. From my cramped windowless room a plywood door led on to a concrete balcony overlooking a high block of Soviet-style apartments. The WC was W-less and the shower tried to behave like a water cannon. Both bar and restaurant were closed and it took me fifteen minutes to find someone to open the former. Then the receptionist-turned-barman asked how many Beerlao I needed, giggled when I said ‘Four’ and, having provided them, relocked the bar and disappeared for good.
After a shower, I plastered the gash on my shin and soaked the shoe into which it had bled copiously. By then my right foot was painful enough to prevent a food hunt but I knew it wasn’t broken – that pain is unmistakable.
Mr Somphavan’s guesthouse stands at the junction of three rough, dusty laneways shaded by magnolia, flame-of-the-forest, frangipani and palm trees. Close by are two of Luang Prabang’s oldest wats, Manoram and That Luang, and this ban, less than ten minutes’ walk from the ‘city’ centre, feels more rural than urban. As does the rest of Laos’s ancient royal capital – population 16,000.
The guesthouse’s atmosphere is best conveyed by a handwritten request displayed on the balcony door:
NOTICE
To all dear guests please. Who stay in my guests house. At night after 10.00 pm when you would like to talk with your friends. Please speak softly and be quiet because we have some guests that go to bed before. Thank you very much.
As Luang Prabang is Laos’s main tourist attraction (its only one, say some), I paid $3 a night for a corner room; the double bed left no space for table or chair but two big windows allowed a splendid view of the neighbourhood. The communal bathrooms were downstairs and for a few hundred kip the Somphavan daughters washed and ironed clothes, returning them within hours.
On that first day the Foot restricted my sightseeing to nearby wats. In Manoram I met a fluent English-speaker from Vientiane, an elderly Lao Lum who made some interesting comments on the security situation and was in a position to know what he was talking about. Certain regions, he explained, are unsafe because not under government control – so of course my treks were curtailed. Dead or disappeared tourists highlight a government’s lack of control. And the problem, he asserted, was getting worse. Since the door opened, the Hmong bandits and their military allies have become bolder, believing that those ‘friends’ who recruited the Hmong to fight their Secret War are in the process of regaining power.
‘And who,’ I asked, ‘are the bandits’ military allies?’
‘Drug-trafficking army officers,’ replied Mr X. ‘Here is the edge of the so-called Golden Triangle. Plenty of our provincial government officials and army officers are into the heroin trade, like the RLA was in past times – with CIA help. The US State Department accuses our central government of being involved too but they’ve never been able to prove it. I don’t believe it myself. I’ll tell you what I do believe: most “security problems” are to do with gang warfare about controlling that trade. And I can tell you something else – the way you were walking from Kasi, you might have had the bad luck to come to a heroin laboratory. And the people who run them don’t like visitors.’
I was asleep as 1997 became 1998; I never can keep awake for New Year’s Eve jollifications. Next morning, when it seemed that Time was not going to be the Great Healer, I limped to the provincial hospital at 7.15. This run-down colonial complex of one-storey units has many beds, a few nurses, a score of servants and several doctors most of whom tend to concentrate on their private practices. In one corner of the large grassy compound the TB unit was empty though TB is locally rampant. In the paediatric unit most beds were occupied and on the veranda stood many anxious parents carrying small patients too ill – I noticed with foreboding – to cry or fuss. Understandably, people come to this hospital only as a place of last resort.
A young woman doctor – elegant, sympathetic – spoke scraps of English and listened to me attentively. Having examined the swollen and inflamed ankle she wrote a prescription for two kinds of pills and a half-litre bottle of pale pink liquid made in Thailand. All that, and a bandage, cost 5,850 kip – about US$2.25 – in the hospital pharmacy. Then, inexplicably, I was led across the compound to the radiography department. Why an X-ray after treatment had been prescribed? In a dingy outbuilding the radiographer was still asleep on a mat, his blanket over his head. However, the equipment worked better than the Romanian machine which in 1990 X-rayed this same foot and found three broken bones. In another unit a teenage trainee nurse, advised by two older colleagues, clumsily bandaged the Foot. Eventually an older, male doctor arrived bearing two X-ray plates (no charge). All was ‘normal’, he confirmed – but then advised me not to walk for three days and to keep the Foot ‘elevated’.
Back in the guesthouse, I read the tiny print on the bottle’s label; this liquid was guaranteed to cure heartburn and flatulence, afflictions with which I am happily unacquainted. The pills may well have been for a kidney infection or some thyroid dysfunction so I discarded them. During three inactive days I was fortunate to have many congenial fellow-guests – from Argentina, Britain, Canada, Denmark, Ireland, Mexico, Zimbabwe, the USA.
Mr Somphavan’s English also helped. It had been picked up many years ago from an American International Voluntary Service (IVS) worker, a CIA agent who in 1975 suddenly went home. ‘And then,’ said Mr Somphavan sadly, ‘I could use not until 1990 so is much forgotten now.’ The five Somphavan daughters and four sons ranged from twenty-seven to four years. A son and two daughters were already married but three remained at school. Mr Somphavan sighed. ‘So many children are very costly, now outside people have made our government take money from students.’ We soon became friends and my host confided his abhorrence of Communists; he had spent five years in a re-education camp, perhaps because of his close association with that IVS worker.
The Foot caused me to spend a fortnight in Luang Prabang, a week longer than planned. After its three non-curative days of rest and elevation, and one painful day of limping around the town, I realized that trekking was out for the foreseeable future – though not, oddly enough, cycling. New plan: back to Vientiane by boat – renew visa – buy bicycle – make for Xam Nua and adjacent tourist-free zones. Meanwhile I hired a male bicycle, quite a tolerable machine, a gearless, sit-up-and-beg Chinese model with a comfortable hermaphroditic saddle. It was well balanced and surprisingly speedy despite a heavy metal stand and a sturdy carrier capable of bearing at least two sacks of rice. I recognized it as the model most popular in Uganda and Tanzania; later, I had reason to regret not having bought it. The owner fretted about the saddle being much too high though I could see at a glance it was exactly right. Why, in Laos (Land of Ten Thousand Bicycles), does no one ride on a correctly adjusted saddle? It exasperated me to see men, women and children pedalling so inefficiently – legs never fully extended, ankles inflexible, knees often striking the handlebars. As in Vientiane, poor adults often rode expat children’s discarded bikes – something possible only because most Lao are so small.
Even I couldn’t get lost in Luang Prabang, confined as it is on a narrow peninsula between the Mekong and the Nam Khan. Three pot-holed streets run the length of the peninsula and are linked by shady laneways winding between stilted houses. Sadly, the centre is now defaced by a telecommunications mast ten times the height of any other local structure. And, inevitably, this has sired a large brood of satellite dishes. Otherwise, it is evident that Laos’s royal and ancient capital has changed little in the past half-century.
Cycling around was a joy unconfined by traffic lights; even at the main roundabouts at ‘rush hours’ (an absurd concept in the Lao context) it was enough to slow down. The recent completion of Route 13 had not brought about the expected increase in motor traffic; most people still preferred to fly (‘security’!) and commercial vehicles feared hijackers. The traffic was mainly two- or three-wheeled or four-legged. But despite the numbers of casually wandering dogs and cats, I saw no corpses. A cynical expat, to whom I remarked on this, suggested it may be because victims are at once retrieved to go into the soup. Which is a possibility …
I soon realized that one needs a fortnight in Luang Prabang; its dozens of wats demand and deserve considerable concentration. Very often, the beauty is in the detail – quite minute details, easily overlooked and not fully appreciated unless one reads up, on the spot, an explanation of their significance. Also, several wats beckon one back; as with a piece of unfamiliar but appealing music, it seems necessary to repeat the experience.
My aim each morning was to get to the day’s first wat target before the falang hordes arrived. (But I mustn’t exaggerate; even at the height of the holiday season the daily tourist intake was to be measured in scores rather than hundreds.) Always, before sunrise, excited groups gathered to photograph the monks as they processed soundlessly in single file through the dim misty streets, their orange robes seeming to glow. Most falangs positioned themselves intrusively, to get close-up shots of both monks and donors. How would Westerners feel if Japanese tourists behaved thus while Christians were going through the ‘picturesque’ ceremony of receiving Holy Communion? Oddly, there was less ritual than in Vientiane: no chanting of grateful prayers, no obeisances from donors. But there were many more devout young, both sexes wearing ceremonial scarves diagonally across their chests. Back in the wat compounds, the monks breakfasted – rows of novices squatting on koti verandas, their elders inside. Those novices were high-spirited schoolboys, much given to happy horseplay, chaffing and laughter. In few wats was there any sense of a rigid monastic discipline; some monks and novices openly smoked cigarettes and within certain compounds the occasional Beerlao bottle might be glimpsed.
The confluence of the Mekong and the Nam Khan, at the end of the main street, has been a sacred place from time immemorial. Here was one of my favourite wats: the small sim of Pak Khan is exquisite, standing alone in a peaceful garden compound and cared for by the only surviving monk. His pale green coffin case, most beautifully decorated with mythological figures, awaited him on a pedestal near the Lord Buddha. By now he may have occupied it on the way to the cremation ground; he looked very, very old.
The peninsula’s highest point is Phousi Hill, midway between the rivers – conical, conspicuous from afar, the gleaming golden spire of That Chomsi just visible above trees. Phousi is dominant not only topographically but mythologically, spiritually and historically. Long before Buddhism arrived, Thong Kuang, an all-powerful naga (cobra deity), dwelt on this hilltop and the building of That Chomsi in no way diminished his importance. He ruled fifteen other nagas who inhabited grottoes along the riverbanks, controlling the flow of water on which the rice crop depended. As guardians of the kingdom, those nagas were propitiated annually by the King until the 1920s. And, in a special ceremony at the mouth of the Nam Khan, red flowers and a variety of foods were offered to Thong Kuang. Even today, a few survive who know the site of each grotto and the name of its resident naga.
As I ascended Phousi’s 339 steep steps, Luang Prabang lay hidden beneath a grey cloud-ocean and only the muffled crowing of cocks broke the silence. (In midwinter a dense mist resists sun-power until ten-ish – or later – and the locals find the morning air cold.) Seen close up, That Chomsi is in itself disappointing: too obviously recently restored. But the resonances on that spot are unforgettable. Luang Prabang’s rivers and wats and sacred sites, and its patina of myths innumerable, are intimately interconnected in mysterious ways that elude Western comprehension. Yet occasionally, in special places at special times, even a Westerner can fleetingly contact the essence of what has formed the Laotian way of being. Phousi Hill, at sunrise, is one such place.
The nagas represented around every corner in Luang Prabang resemble dragons rather than cobras. They support sim roofs as brackets, decorate the upturned corners of tiered roofs, and are carved and stencilled on interior walls. Five- or seven-headed nagas guard sim entrances. One-headed nagas, fifteen yards long, form the balustrades of flights of stone steps leading to the bigger wats. In Wat Xieng Tong, a barn-like chapel shelters the royal funeral chariot, elaborately carved and gilded, with a prow of five long-necked naga heads. Beneath the fifteen-foot-high canopy lie two royal funeral urns: dodecagonal for the King, octagonal for the Queen. These served as sarcophagi, concealing inner urns which held the bodies before cremation and could be carried like coffins to the pyre. The chariot was last used in 1960 for the state funeral of King Sisavangvong.
Regularly I breakfasted in an eat-drink shop on a corner opposite the Central Market. Mrs Vo, the Lao widow of a Chinese Buddhist, owned this thriving establishment where two ornate shrines, lit from within by tiny electric bulbs, hung high on the back wall and received daily offerings of fruits and flowers. (In the 1930s, when Mrs Vo’s father-in-law migrated, a network of some 4,000 Chinese controlled most of Laos’s commerce.) As the monks appeared, Mrs Vo and her daughter, Mayvong, donned scarves and went forth to donate steaming rice from large silver repoussé bowls – the sort that take a silversmith hundreds of hours to make. Mrs Vo’s only son, a twelve-year-old doing six months at a wat school, then deserted his procession momentarily to collect a thermos of chicken soup, four bread rolls and a basket of sticky rice – all in a plastic bag, placed ready for him on a pavement table. Several other little boys also slipped out of line and made quick purchases: long loaves of hot French bread which they tucked under their robes before hurrying to catch up with their seniors. In theory, monks and novices are solely dependent on alms.
Mayvong spoke some English and I asked if people resented camera flashes going off up and down the streets during their morning ritual. ‘We don’t mind,’ she replied, ‘if it makes them happy to have pictures.’ Perhaps it was obtuse of me to transfer my own sense of disgust to the laid-back Lao – but then, they find it almost impossible to criticize visitors.
The Central Market – square, tin-roofed, concrete, unbeautiful: built in 1991 – is a smaller though still enormous version of Vientiane’s Morning Market. Stalls facing the street sell Thai junk-snacks popular with the friendly toddlers who attend a nearby play-school and whose fond dads cause dental havoc by indulging them every morning. Most mothers are already at work by 8 a.m. and most Lao fathers are what we would call New Men – experts at cleaning infants’ bottoms, feeding them with banana or sticky rice, rocking them to sleep in cradle-hammocks woven of palm or bamboo, bathing, dressing and conversing with toddlers, searching for head lice and entertaining older children. Such details are observable because family life happens al fresco during the dry season.
My favourite meander was along the Mekong’s high, busy embankment. Here, on the steep slope, pairs of young women saw firewood; their husbands (or maybe brothers) then split the four-foot lengths with great difficulty, using mallets and axes. The length and width of each piece is standard; everywhere in Laos a supply is neatly stacked under the home in preparation for the rainy season. Those smallish hardwood tree trunks come across the Mekong from the wooded opposite shore in long home-made cargo boats with flat tin roofs – the roofs also loaded, rather precariously. An important local trade is the gathering and packing in big bales of the bark of a fast-growing tree, exported in vast quantities to Thai paper mills. It was an LPRP ambition to set up paper mills in Laos but the Thai quashed that.
During King Samsenthai’s reign Luang Prabang became a major trading centre – and remained so for centuries. Sitting on the embankment, one can picture the merchants arriving from Tonkin and Dali, from Burma with ceramic and metal wares, from Tibet and China with carpets and textiles. Most transport was by boat, up and down the Mekong and its three nearby navigable tributaries, the Nam Khan, the Nam Ou and the Nam Seuang – which last gave access to the north-east of Vietnam. Around the rivers’ confluences the flat lands yielded a surplus of rice for export and the forests produced an abundance of valuable benzoin – a resin used in perfumes and medicines – and stick-lac, an insect deposit found on flame-of-the-forest trees and much in demand for making dyes and varnishes. Where the terrain allowed, bullock carts were used; during the dry season elephants could be ridden across the Mekong at a few fording points, en route to what is now the Khorat plateau of north-eastern Thailand. (This remained part of the Lao kingdom until 1893 when France and Britain adjusted the border to suit themselves.) When the capital was moved to Vientiane in 1563 Luang Prabang gradually lost its favourable trading position and generations of rivalry led to the territories of Luang Prabang and Vientiane becoming separate kingdoms in 1707.
The embankment’s trees shade many traders’ stalls, a few hut-bars and several open-air eat-drink shops. One kindly woman, concerned about my bandaged foot, always beckoned me to have a glass of herbal tea. During one such respite, two emaciated German males stopped for an afternoon coffee and insisted on eating their own bread – apparently distrusting my friend’s offered selection of grilled banana strips, intestine kebabs and huge fish heads baked in mud. (These, fresh from the river, are delicious; when the mud is removed the scales come with it and the bony bits are so big one has no trouble discarding them.) The older man had a stringy grey pony-tail, his companion was thirtyish with a crew-cut; both were ragged and dirty, suffered from open sores on their faces and looked quite spaced-out. Then, while sitting only ten yards away from me by the edge of the embankment, they began blatantly to fondle each other’s genitals. When my friend turned towards them she almost dropped the coffee glasses. The Lao tolerance of homosexuality had been overstretched; in Laos it is considered ill-bred for even heterosexual couples to so much as hold hands in public, a fact too often forgotten by backpackers.
Those travelling in search of cheap drugs usually look unhealthy and are often morose and short-tempered with each other – not, one feels, people who are much enjoying their ‘exotic experience’. During my stay in Vientiane two falangs were found dead in their beds, having – presumably accidentally – taken heroin overdoses. In both cases their companions had disappeared before the bodies were discovered. Lao heroin tends to be much purer – more lethal – than the mixtures to which junkies may be accustomed at home.
Luang Prabang is quite often appalled by outcasts from the backpacker fraternity. I noticed passers-by looking away from two American girls wearing pelvic-short shorts, strapless bikini tops and copper rings through their noses and navels. Anywhere they would have seemed off-putting; the Lao must have considered them sub-human. It gave me some satisfaction to observe this pair being refused admission to Wat Ho Xiang.
Two English females, with partners who looked like professional hooligans, arrived at the guesthouse while Mr Somphavan and I were sharing a Beerlao. The young women had large erect penises tattooed on their forearms. Mr Somphavan, seeming as though about to vomit, rose and in his dignified way ushered them off the premises. Such specimens, he commented, seemed to justify the government’s previous tourist-exclusion policy. A few hours later he was again upset by three young women – two Israelis and a Swiss – who paid for one night, then went to the spotless, odourless bathrooms and at once reappeared, truculently demanding their money back. They couldn’t stay in a place with squat-overs needing to be flushed from an adjacent tank. Silently Mr Somphavan returned their kip.
The Foot continued to protest if I walked a mere mile, yet it had no objection to pedalling up to forty miles a day. One mini-excursion took me east across an unstable wooden bridge spanning a tributary of the Nam Khan and overlooked by a ridge where the leafless branches of tall magnolia trees bore many cream and yellow blossoms. Below the bridge new vegetable gardens were being created by two cheerful young women and three singing men. The women had hauled sacks of rich, dark soil from somewhere and were spreading it along neat stone terraces – being reinforced by the men, using huge bushes felled nearby and dragged downhill. Beyond the river lay miles and miles of flat land, not very exciting but extremely significant: its fertility made possible the founding and flourishing of the Kingdom of Lan Xang. A badly eroded track led to a friendly little ban where several satellite dishes sprouted amidst simple dwellings. Villagers acquire TV sets on the never-never, Mr Somphavan had told me, paying 70 per cent more than the marked price; to keep up their payments, many suffer deprivations unknown when they lived outside the cash economy. Quite often sets are repossessed after a few months – then resold as new … This ban’s concrete, tin-roofed, undecorated wat supported only three monks.
I could hear the Nam Khan before seeing it. Over this wide stretch it is an impressive torrent, even in the dry season, foaming past protruding boulders; the whirlpools in midstream made me feel quite giddy when I viewed them through my binoculars. On the embankment stood two rickety shacks but there was nobody in sight. I sat for a time by a primitive wooden quay, relishing the solitude and half mesmerized by the racing water. From here countless trees are shipped to Thailand. Some lay beside me, clearly lettered and numbered in white paint, victims of the conservationists’ failure to alter corporate mindsets and proof of the insincerity of the Lao government’s ‘dedication to protecting our environment’.
My brooding on the vileness of logging companies and their accomplices was cut short by a spider emerging from between the tree trunks. Terrorized, I fled.
This region’s spiders are of mythic proportions – black, hairy, long-legged, bloated – undoubtedly sent by the gods to punish erring humans. At sunrise, fields seem to be copiously strewn with pale grey plastic bags: heavy dew on massive webs. When hanging between electricity cables the biggest webs – some three yards long by one yard wide – look like finely spun bundles of silk containing dead leaves and a multitude of insects. Happily these divine punishments are outdoor types and in my mosquito-proofed room I didn’t have to fear any arachnidan invasion. But one evening a monster raced across the guesthouse balcony floor, reducing me to gibbering idiocy; it had to be killed by a gallant young Irishman, in defiance of protests from a young Englishman with Buddhist scruples.
On 8 January Mr Somphavan suggested my cycling south on Route 13 to the site of a jolly Hmong New Year (Khin Tieng) party. By then I had become thoroughly addled by the variety of New Years celebrated in Laos: Buddhist, Lao Lum, animist, Chinese, Western, Hmong. Khin Tieng happens in late December or early January, on the day following the thirtieth day of the Hmong twelfth month.
Previously referred to as the Meo (a Chinese insult meaning ‘barbarian’), the Hmong have become Laos’s best-known minority for an unflattering reason: many served the US as mercenaries during the Second Indochina War (the so-called Vietnam War). About 300,000 Hmong lived in Laos before that conflict. During it at least 30,000 were killed; after it 130,000 fled to the USA and Thailand – where even now some remain in refugee camps. Without Hmong recruits the US, prevented by the 1954 Geneva Conference from openly sending American troops to Laos, could not have fought their Secret War – which caused the Hmong villagers to suffer no less than the Pathet Lao and their supporters.
Archaeologists have established that the Hmong lived beside the Yellow River more than 3,000 years ago and occupied western China before the Han arrived. From their sophisticated legal system anthropologists deduce that in the distant past they belonged to a settled, organized kingdom though for millennia they have been semi-nomadic mountain folk, famous as cultivators of the opium poppy. Throughout much of the nineteenth century they were at war with China’s imperial forces who at intervals slaughtered whole settlements, sparing not even the children. Large groups then migrated south, into Indochina, where they introduced poppy cultivation and have been practising it ever since. They first appeared around Luang Prabang in the 1850s.
A few Hmong have recently become Christians but most remain staunch animists; they also celebrate many of China’s major religious festivals. Their tonal language has eight variations (Lao has six) and each of the three main groups – khao, lai and dam – has its own dialect. An independent, tightly knit community (though geographically dispersed, especially since the war) they are proud of their culture, cherish their own customs and laws and have always been unwilling to integrate into Lao society. They maintain a rigid patrilinear system; the head of the household, who may be responsible for thirty or forty adults, must always be obeyed. No allowances are made for individual considerations which might compromise the well-being of the group. Invariably the householder is the family’s eldest male and property, owned jointly by the extended family, is administered by him. A village’s eldest householder automatically becomes the chief. This hierarchical tradition, and the Hmongs’ courage and enjoyment of a battle, made it easy for the CIA to transform them into a secret army. Their lack of any national identity – in our sense of the word – was also convenient: they could fight as mercenaries without feeling disloyal to what had become (as the Pathet Lao perceived it) the Hmong homeland. Among their fellow-citizens they had never been popular; post-war they are even less so.
At 11 a.m. the Khin Tieng roadside party was in its early stages and as yet rather subdued, apart from the dazzling brilliance of the women’s costumes and head-dresses. This is the matchmaking season and nubile girls spend several months creating their festive attire, vying with one another to produce the year’s most spectacular ensemble. The skirts – no two alike – are dark blue, batik-dyed, with appliquéd multicoloured stripes and cross-stitch designs embroidered on either side of long pleated aprons. From the back of their wide sashes depend panels of splendidly embroidered silk, adorned with clinking coins; overhanging these are smaller panels, gold-fringed. Everyone wears an elaborate collar-piece and exquisitely patterned blouses and jackets. Old French coins, with holes in the middle, are sewn to many of the headdresses – some stovepipe, with gay woollen bobbles swinging at every turn of the wearer, others vaguely like Viking helmets decorated with rows of silver pendants. I wondered why one girl was wearing a Lao sin – a particularly rich one, but seeming incongruously austere and elegant amidst all that flamboyant finery. The Hmong have always been implacably against mixed marriages; but perhaps that – like so much else in their lives – is changing.
Having locked the bicycle to a fence, I sat with a few elders under a thatch-awning beside a trestle table displaying fizzy drinks and home-made snacks. I sensed no resentment of the falang but the distinctive Lao smiles were absent.
On a level, dusty space in front of us, surrounded by forest trees, twenty or so girls and youths stood in two lines, facing each other, some four yards apart. They were silently throwing tennis-sized balls of cotton to the partner opposite – the girls looking aloof, the youths (wearing dreary European garb) looking slightly sheepish. Anyone who drops the ball must pay a forfeit: nowadays a kiss (or more) when couples wander off into the forest after sunset. This ritual game was less restrained fifty years ago; then the forfeit, for both sexes, was to discard a garment on the spot. Some of the older men, watching from the background, wore a modified version of Hmong male attire: baggy black trousers with crimson and gold sashes and black shirts under Western anoraks.
In features, these handsome Hmong differed little – to the falang observer – from the Lao Lum, though some did have a more ‘Han’ look about the nose and eyes (if I may say so without seeming to echo the Duke of Edinburgh’s notorious faux pas). Later, in remote areas, I was to meet other Hmong clans who rather resembled the Khambas of eastern Tibet. This didn’t surprise me. Hmong folklore (passed on orally: the Hmong had no script) recalls a time when the ancestors lived in a land of snow and ice.
More and more young people were arriving, on foot or by Honda. At noon a tuk-tuk delivered a load of beer crates, and seeing me opening a Beerlao the nearby elders began to thaw. I then took out my packet of baby photographs (that indispensable travelling accessory for all grandmothers) and within minutes a dozen smiling women were crowding around to admire the small falangs. As the sun reached its zenith raised umbrellas added to the riot of colour: pink, lime green, blue and white checked, orange and red striped. It was time for the party to descend a steep slope to a cool grove in the forest – followed by the vendors of grilled snacks, steamed rice, noodle soup, bamboo shoots, coconuts, 7-Up and Beerlao. Meanwhile one of my fellow-grannies had been finding me an interpreter – her son, who spoke the sort of English I had by then come to associate with teachers of English. And that indeed was his profession. As we descended the slope he requested, ‘You please call me Mr Joe.’ (He pronounced it ‘Jaw’.) ‘I like to have an English name.’
We sat under a very tall tree, its pale grey bark skin-smooth. Soon an elderly man brought a mini-stool for the falang and asked if I would drink lau-lao? Unwise, I thought, after a Beerlao – with a bicycle ride ahead. Still, it was Khin Tieng – so why not…?
Now there were at least a hundred couples playing ball and a few hundred of their seniors and juniors relaxing or gambolling in the shade. As the forfeits mounted up, some men shouted what were obviously risqué comments and their womenfolk giggled. Groups of children began spontaneously to dance and sing and picnics were laid out on banana fronds. Then my heart sank; two youths were approaching, carrying a music system complete with car battery. Mr Joe beamed. ‘We gets listening for music!’
‘Hmong music?’ I asked, faintly hoping.
Mr Joe wrinkled his nose. ‘Is gooder have new music, with Spice Girls! You meet those girls? They come from your place, I think?’
Firmly I repudiated this slur on Ireland.
What little I had heard of traditional Lao music in Luang Prabang enchanted me – an elderly six-man orchestra. Music, song and dance have always meant a lot to the Lao and in times past every ban had its orchestra. But in 1975 these were outlawed by a government which unreasonably associated music-making with the bad old days, with royalty and privilege and frivolity. However, the Hmong characteristically preserved their own musical tradition as best they could in their fractured post-war world.
The music system had not been squawking for long when it was silenced by the elders: a four-man band had arrived. Mr Joe noted the names of its instruments in my journal; but he wrote in Lao and I forgot to seek a translation. One was lyre-shaped and played like a Jew’s harp; the sounding box of the two-stringed violin was an old oilcan; the bamboo flute was small and keyless; the fourth instrument can best be described as a huge wooden saxophone. These musicians were accompanied by a score of elders blowing large leaves held between the palms of their hands. The result, though undeniably jolly and a vast improvement on, American-Thai pop, was far removed from the complex poignant beauty of Luang Prabang’s orchestra.
‘We have two thinks,’ said Mr Joe. ‘Old people wants old music, young people wants new music. When old people go dead, no more old music!’ His tone was disconcertingly gleeful. Old people were in the way, holding all the power, blocking ‘progress’.
I asked, ‘Is your father here?’
Mr Joe looked towards a group under a nearby tree. ‘See my father there, he is not old, he is getting not to say anything. His father is saying what is everyone to do. I want another think. I want to do things for me.’
Here was the contemporary dilemma of Laos (and many other countries): young people scenting the West’s individualism and yearning for that freedom. But we achieved it gradually, over several generations. Mr Joe wanted something he did not fully understand and was not culturally programmed to handle – an assessment which may be condemned as patronizing. Yet such condemnations are themselves, in a convoluted way, racist; they ignore the value of other cultures and assume that everyone is capable of successfully participating – suddenly, without preparation – in our sort of society. Or, if they are not, they should be actively encouraged to make the required adjustments.
Time was passing swiftly. Rings of courting couples were dancing around a tree selected by the shaman (its girth prodigious) to ensure fecundity during the year ahead – a good rice crop, many healthy offspring of all species. At intervals giant jars of rice-beer had been carried from group to group and of course I couldn’t give offence by declining to imbibe when a jar came our way. Benign elders insisted on refilling my tiny lau-lao glass, their pouring increasingly inaccurate. Had it not been empty they couldn’t have refilled it – but after all this was a special occasion, for me a unique event, never to be repeated.
As the light waned I stood up and wobbled and realized that cycling was out. Mr Joe stood up and also wobbled but gallantly insisted on escorting me back to the road. We tottered up the slope, stumbling over tree roots – the wobbling leading the wobbling – and my companion diagnosed, ‘We are drinked.’ I couldn’t disagree.
Unlocking the bicycle was not easy. ‘It is too much darkness!’ exclaimed Mr Joe tactfully. Then he asked, ‘Why you make it tied to fence?’ The Lao were bewildered to see me attaching my bicycle to something; if they bother to lock their own they leave them freestanding. It shocked people to hear about the level of bicycle theft in Europe; this ill-accorded with their vision of the West as ‘more civilized’. Corruption is not unknown among Laotian government officials and the new entrepreneurial breed but everywhere I encountered honesty. Whenever I overpaid (new 1,000 kip notes often stuck together) someone pursued me down the street – once even to my guesthouse – to return the surplus.
During that seven-mile walk to Luang Prabang the Foot – anaesthetized by alcohol – did not complain. Next morning, however, it was swollen and inflamed and very sore. My head felt much the same. Mr Somphavan observed, ‘I think yesterday you were silly’ He directed one of his daughters to prepare a healing concoction of herbal essences and porcine gall-bladder juice. This foul-tasting mix healed the head, astonishingly quickly, but did nothing for the Foot. It was not a morning to go watting; those spots in front of my eyes would have blurred the fine details – my liver needed a thorough shake-up on a rough road. The painful pressure as I mounted and dismounted felt like the wages of sin; but pedalling remained – almost – pain-free.
On the Pak Mong road I passed two construction sites within six miles of the town centre. Giant bulldozers were levelling the ground for multi-storey hotels; as Luang Prabang is now a UNESCO-protected World Heritage Site, buildings above three storeys are forbidden. The first site was opposite an attractive roadside ban, its house walls of bamboo strips, gold and brown cleverly interwoven. The residents squatted on an embankment, watching this novel monster changing their environment for ever – changing it radically, within a few hours. Some adults looked bemused, others frightened. Small children whimpered and clung to parents. Their older siblings were excited, awestruck – to them such inexplicably omnipotent machines must have seemed like something out of a myth. Later, a private enterprise tour operator told me those villagers would have to be ‘relocated’ because ‘our visitors don’t like to have dirty villages so close’. The second site had been partially landscaped before construction began; flowering shrubs and sapling trees flourished around a sunken garden with sundials and an ornamental fountain in embryo.
Booking space on a downriver boat had proved mysteriously difficult At the bleak, shabby colonial Navigation Office – the only large building on the Mekong embankment – my request was frowned on by a tight-lipped official in a frayed uniform. I would have to fly or take a bus; tourists could not leave Luang Prabang by boat. That greatly puzzled me; boating on the Mekong is one of the backpackers’ delights.
Two days later a badly shaken German youth arrived at the guesthouse. The boat taking him downriver from Pak Beng, and unevenly loaded with cement, had capsized while the captain was struggling to take her through white water. Both his companions – wearing small but heavy knapsacks holding camera equipment and books – were drowned. The captain, the Lao passengers and he himself reached the bank, with difficulty – but all his possessions, apart from a waist-pouch, had been lost. This tragedy had evoked a diktat from Vientiane, forbidding tourists to use boats, and I resigned myself to another Route 13 journey. But then came glad tidings on the grapevine: all was well, tourists could now book their places on a boat scheduled to leave at 8 a.m. on 12 January.
The Lao media never reported that boating accident – or the murders of two Dutch hitch-hikers who camped between Kasi and Luang Prabang, within sight of Route 13, soon afterwards.