That complete rest aboard No. 127 had done nothing for the Foot. By 2.45 p.m. I was in the Australian Embassy clinic, Vientiane’s only source of reliable medical advice. (Falangs needing hospital care go to Thailand.) An amiable and confidence-inspiring doctor diagnosed torn ligaments and prescribed a ten-day course of anti-inflammatory pills (cost US$55: no kip accepted). The bad news was that torn ligaments take a few months to heal. The good news was that they don’t need cosseting. Said the doctor, ‘How much you use it depends on how much pain you can handle. But don’t try to walk normally. Limp along, putting most pressure on the heel.’
Next stop, a bicycle shop. I desired a clone of the Luang Prabang Chinese model but only Thai models were available: either a mountain bike (twelve gears, $55) or an old-fashioned roadster (no gears, $40). I chose the latter, having learned in South Africa that a cheap mountain bike brings with it a bundle of troubles. Not much, I reckoned, could go wrong with a basic roadster. (Silly me – the Hare model is designed for use in and around the towns of the level Mekong valley. It is not designed to operate in mountainous areas where roads are indistinguishable from dried-up riverbeds.) I liked the trademark, a beaming hare depicted on the capacious plastic front basket and behind the strong carrier. Adjustable foot-rests were provided for the passenger. A metal stand added considerably to the weight but couldn’t be removed. Nor could an ominously soft saddle be changed; just looking at it made my bottom feel sore – and it was covered with a lamentable flowery pattern. (This was my first ever female bicycle, destined to be presented to a Lao woman friend.) The handlebar grips, of hard plastic and roughly grooved, generated spectacularly calloused palms. On all but the smoothest roads the chain-guard rattled loudly. No repair kit or tools were available; it seems cyclists are expected to be always within reach of a mechanic. My request for a preliminary oiling caused consternation. The Lao love to please and two young men turned that shop inside out: but oil there was none. Then the dealer himself arrived, considered the problem and hurried away to borrow an empty motor-oil container from a tuk-tuk driver. Picking a frangipani leaf from the gutter, he used it as a funnel, drained the container – and so Hare had her baptism of oil. Next day, visiting the Morning Market to buy warm trousers and a jacket (Houaphanh Province is high and cold) I found that 3-in-One is among the few commodities not imported.
Within twenty-four hours, yet another of my plans had been vetoed. It would not be possible to cycle north from Pak Xan; that dirt road leads through a Special Zone, controlled by the army since 1994 and closed to foreigners, apart from NGO staff working in the area. Tourists have to fly to Xam Nua. Happily, Lao Air regards bicycles as normal items of luggage.
In the Lao Air city-centre office uncertainty prevailed. Yes, I could book a seat for 19 January – US$70, again no kip accepted. However, winter flights to Xam Nua depend on the cloud cover. If today’s service can’t operate, tomorrow’s passengers must wait until the day after tomorrow – did I understand? I did. All the squiggles on my ticket were of course indecipherable but the woman clerk showed me a timetable: check in at 10.00 for an 11.10 departure.
For some reason that information felt unreliable, despite the timetable – I don’t know why. As strong hunches are best acted upon I decided to be at the airport by seven o’clock.
The lack of panniers (unknown in Vientiane) meant travelling even lighter than usual. A little knapsack on the carrier held fleabag, space blanket, books, torch, a few spare garments. The front basket – flexible and quite frail – held water bottle, maps, mini-towel, sponge bag and nuts. Everything else was left behind.
On the level tarred road to Wattay International Airport Hare moved fast and smoothly and I foresaw a good relationship. The runway was being extended and a few cranes stood around: the biggest models, far taller than any building in Vientiane. They had been standing around for months, awaiting the arrival of whatever they were supposed to be lifting. The small airport buildings, drably utilitarian, seemed much preferable to the Rich World’s equivalents. But rumour had it that Singaporean ‘aid’ was soon to be invested in Wattay’s ‘development’. Why? An airport waiting area only needs check-in desks, chairs and lavatories. Wattay also had a grubby little restaurant serving breakfast (noodle soup) at dawn.
When I asked where Hare should check in, an elderly uniformed man viewed her with alarm. He led me to the passengers’ exit and pointed to an antique Antonov fifteen-seater with one tiny door – Hare wouldn’t fit.
The next hour was fraught. Numerous officials became involved. No one spoke English or French. Everyone wanted to help. We all became eloquent sign-linguists. Would Hare, if taken to bits, fit? That depended on how much luggage the others had. Already, at 8.15, the others were gathering, checking in; my hunch had been correct. All were Lao and, incredibly, two women spoke fluent English. These AusAID-sponsored teacher-trainers – about to run a five-day workshop for thirty of Houaphanh’s English teachers – had very little luggage. Hare, dismantled, would fit! Men appeared out of nowhere to do the job – one active, seven advising. Who, I wondered fleetingly, would remantle poor Hare? But that problem lay two hours ahead.
My new friends – Anna and Lulu – were chatty and informative. There must be some little emergency: usually a Chinese Y-12 rather than an Antonov served Xam Nua. Our Antonov was now semi-retired; in times past the Soviets had sold it to the Vietnamese who eventually sold it to Laos, cut price, as part of a ‘Helping Little Brother’ scheme. As we crossed the tarmac I blenched. The area around the propellers looked as though it had recently caught fire; in Xam Nua I discovered that it had indeed done so. The tyres were almost flat. One teacher cheerfully surmised that our pilot looked so young because he was ‘gaining experience’, collecting flying hours on domestic routes to qualify for his international licence. Her friend disputed this; domestic routes being radarless, he would be gaining the wrong sort of experience – how to navigate visually.
At 9.20 we took off and almost immediately the young woman beside me vomited on to my knapsack, then was overcome by embarrassment. The cramped seating might have been designed for primary school children. Peering through my minuscule window I glimpsed profound forested valleys but within moments all was hidden – or almost all. Sharp peaks rising above the shifting vapour recalled the Mekong’s rocky islets. In December 1993 a Y-12 collided with a cloud-wrapped summit and there were no survivors.
That seemed a long hour and a quarter. With only five minutes to go the cloud cover was left behind – its edges like roughly torn cotton wool – and then we were over a narrow valley. Beside the new (1996) concrete landing strip grazed four ponies and many buffaloes. A small group awaited us outside a two-roomed building flying the hammer-and-sickle and still smelling of fresh paint. Immediately my friends’ host, a young man from the Education Department, loaded Hare into a pick-up and volunteered to remantle her with his Honda tools.
During that ten-minute drive Anna and Lulu worried about suitable accommodation for the falang. ‘This is a primitive place,’ said Anna. ‘It is our poorest province, tourists don’t come, there is no nice hotel.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘That’s why I’m here.’
‘But you must take care,’ warned Lulu. ‘These can be strange people, they are not like us. Don’t be curious. When men stop you going in certain directions, don’t ask why.’
I remarked regretfully that non-Lao-speakers can’t be curious.
The Education Department was a rickety two-storey wooden building near the base of a deforested mountain overlooking the Nam Xam and the town centre. At some little distance sat a score of English teachers (all men) none of whom could speak any English. At 11 a.m. they were a merry lot, their trestle table crowded with Beerlao bottles and shaded by a USAF parachute – that durable and popular awning. Anxiously I watched while Hare was being put together again. Then at 11.15 I bounced and rattled over a rough track towards an ugly new bridge spanning the Nam Xam.
Lulu was right – ‘They are not like us.’ In the ‘capital’ of Houaphanh one is at once aware of being in a region temperamentally quite separate from the Vientiane and Luang Prabang provinces. And the town of Luang Prabang, only a thirty-minute flight away, might be in another country.
Vietnam encloses Houaphanh to the north, east and south-east; Xam Nua is much closer, in every sense, to Hanoi than to Vientiane. Twenty-two ethnic groups contribute to the province’s population of about 250,000 (in 1995) and 50,000 or so live in Xam Nua. This figure surprised me; the place feels like a large village rather than a small city.
The details of Houaphanh’s history are sparse; warfare has destroyed what few documents there were. But we do know that during the past 500 years this region’s status changed repeatedly. After the disintegration of the Lan Xang kingdom in the fifteenth century it came under Luang Prabang’s suzerainty for only two years (1891–3). Sometimes it was an independent Thai Neua kingdom, sometimes it formed part of Ai Lao, an Annamese tributary state. In the 1880s it was known as Chao Thai Neua and briefly ‘protected’ by Siam (Thailand). Even in colonial times the Thai Neua muang chiefs retained considerable autonomy and by the end of the First Indochina War (France versus the Vietminh) few traces remained of the colonizers.
In April 1953 General Giap’s Vietminh forces invaded the provinces of Houaphanh and Phongsali (to the north of Houaphanh) and Prince Souphanouvong (the ‘Red Prince’, later President of Laos) formally established his ‘Resistance Government’ in Xam Nua. The Vietminh forces soon withdrew leaving Laos divided, both politically and administratively, into two ‘states’. The ‘liberated zone’, covering much of the north-east, was governed de facto by the Pathet Lao with Vietnamese support. The rest of the country remained under the control, ostensibly, of the Royal Lao Government – already an American puppet. Houaphanh was then known as ‘the Revolutionary Province’ and something of that flavour lingers.
The Secret War in Laos, covertly organized by the CIA and fought on the ground by their Hmong and Thai pawns, was essential – argued the US – to ‘protect democracy’. Yet the Americans freaked out in May 1958 when a genuinely democratic election encompassing the whole of the country (the first in post-colonial Laos) sent thirteen pro-Pathet Lao deputies to the fifty-nine-seat Assembly. On 30 June they stopped all economic aid to Laos and by October they had demolished the all-party coalition government and replaced it with a regime of their own choosing.
For Laos, that marked the beginning of the Second Indochina War. The Pathet Lao, finding themselves excluded from a fair share of political power – a share honestly won through a democratic poll – again picked up their guns and spent the next fifteen years fighting their ‘war of liberation’ (now inextricably interwoven with the Vietcong’s struggle) against what Marxists rightly described as ‘American imperialism’. Meanwhile, most Americans were kept in ignorance of this war. It had to be secret for several reasons; one was the likely reaction of American taxpayers/voters had they discovered that it was costing them about $2 million per day (the Pentagon’s calculation) to achieve the saturation bombing of a small, wanting-to-be-neutral country called Laos. Professor Timothy Castle, of the USAF Academy, comments:
A purely Lao solution to the kingdom’s political problems would have been achieved with ample compromise and minimal bloodshed. The carnage visited upon Laos was the result of Ho Chi Minh’s military and political struggle to reunite Vietnam and the United States’ concomitant effort to halt the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia.
The US officials’ infinite capacity for self-deception and hypocrisy is only equalled by their naïvety. Why, they wondered, was the Royal Lao Army so ineffective, despite the billions of dollars lavished on it over the years? The Pentagon’s Programs Evaluation Office noted: ‘Leadership and morale in the Royal Lao Army is extremely poor.’ A National Security Council official reported: ‘We discovered the Laotians were not Turks, they would not stand up and fight.’ In 1970 William H. Sullivan, the US Ambassador who for the previous five years had been running the Secret War from the American Embassy in Vientiane, confirmed that ‘The Lao are not fighters.’ Another US Ambassador, Leonard Unger, described the Royal Lao Army as ‘inept and uninspired’. But why should the ordinary conscript have felt inspired to play the Americans’ game by shooting and bombing his compatriots? As for the senior Royal Lao Army officers, they were amazed and delighted by the ease with which they could get their hands on millions of US dollars – simply by making loud anti-Communist noises. Indignantly Professor Castle comments: ‘The Lao military had been content to sit out the war and allow the Americans to pay the Hmong and Thais to defend the kingdom.’
During the Second Indochina War Xam Nua – twenty miles as the B-52 flies from Vietnam – was obliterated by American bombs. Now it is a formless, unlovely town rebuilt in a rough and ready way by the Vietnamese. Between 1976 and 1985 Vietnam gave Laos US$146.7 million for the reconstruction of towns, the repair of 200 miles of roads, the funding of 900 ‘specialists’ and the expenses of half the 10,000 Lao who annually went abroad to study. Less than 50 per cent of this aid had to be repaid; the rest was interest-free.
Xam Nua’s one street runs level for half a mile along the narrow valley of the Nam Xam. It consists of a tarred strip down the middle, with wide dusty laneways on either side, and is used chiefly by cyclists, pedestrians, wandering buffaloes, playing children and pecking poultry; these rarely have occasion to make way for a vehicle. The town’s ramshackle dreariness is more than compensated for by this lack of traffic and by its setting; on every side rise superb mountains, variously shaped.
Seeing no guesthouse, I approached the two-storey hotel, so jerry-built it looked older than its twenty-three years. Formerly government owned, now ‘privatized’, its courtyard was strewn with empty beer crates. In the forecourt a high, clumsily built stupa seemed out of place. There was no one around. Noticing a broken window in a separate, one-storey restaurant-cum-dance-hall I peered in and saw sheets of the hardboard ceiling hanging loose. At that stage a young woman appeared, stared at me incredulously, then ran away giggling. As I returned to the street a young man arrived. He conveyed that the hotel was booked out (all those teachers?), then pointed me towards an unmarked guesthouse not far from the bridge.
There I was welcomed, with some astonishment, by the owners, a middle-aged Vietnamese couple. Their establishment was shop-house-style, the two ground-floor rooms entered directly from the street; both ceilings were supported by concrete pillars, both bumpy concrete floors were permanently dusty though frequently swept with a grass broom. In the restaurant five metal camp tables were surrounded by plastic garden chairs; a garish Chinese curtain – puce cabbage roses with lime green leaves on a canary yellow background – could be used to partition this space. A few shelves at the back displayed Beerlao, Sprite, Coca-Cola, Lao whisky, mini-cartons of ersatz fruit juices, packets of too-sweet fairy cakes, tinned fish, Nestlé condensed milk, toothbrushes and toilet soap. The adjacent communal sitting-room was furnished with a TV set, a low table, a few chairs and a seven-foot-tall stuffed Asiatic black bear, standing in one corner. Mr Nguyen’s father had shot him a long time ago. Here Hare was stabled at the foot of the concrete stairs leading to the bedrooms. My windowless room was filled by an unclean but mosquito-netted double bed. Behind the restaurant were two filthy squat-over loos.
In the kitchen area at the back – twelve feet square, bamboo-roofed, without walls, the floor of packed earth – meals were cooked on a charcoal grill and an open wood fire. Lau-lao was served free to residents, a hospitable gesture which must have considerably reduced Beerlao sales.
During my six days in and around Xam Nua I saw no other falang, apart from the German leader of a bomb-disposal team and a Filipino road engineer – a fellow guest.
In winter a strong cool wind tempers the noon sun and a two-hour limp revealed that there is much more to Xam Nua than its main street. Between the street and the Nam Xam lies a bustling area of laneways lined with traders’ stalls. Downstream is a pleasant semi-rural residential area of small two-storey Western-style homes interspersed with the traditional dwellings of tribal groups – unstilted. There are no opulent villas or mansions such as one sees around Vientiane and Luang Prabang; Houaphanh is far from the source of NEM-generated wealth. As usual the riverbank was the scene of much activity; people bathing and hair-washing women, washing clothes, dishes and vegetables, boys fishing, little girls swimming or just happily splashing around.
Xam Nua is an important military base and in one day I saw more soldiers – unarmed, often riding rusty bicycles – than in all the rest of my time in Laos. An enormous new army barracks stands on a high hill far from the centre, beyond an expanse of paddy-fields. No civilians were allowed near it; a bamboo pole, painted red and blue, blocked a raw red track, bulldozed out of the slope.
Despite forewarnings about Houaphanh’s reputation – ‘Laos’s most beautiful but least friendly province’ – I was slightly taken aback, on that first day, by some of the locals’ reactions. Often my greetings evoked only hard, suspicious stares – or were ignored. A minority showed the friendliness I had come to regard as ‘normal’ in Laos but overall the atmosphere could not be described as welcoming. During the Secret War the Houaphanh people endured privations and bereavements beyond reckoning and were conditioned by the Pathet Lao to believe their sacrifices would be rewarded when a socialist government came to power. Do they now feel betrayed by that government’s surrender to international capitalism – of which rich tourists are representatives? (In Lao terms, any tourist has to be rich.) The yellow hammer and sickle on a red background, the flag of international Communism, was flying high from the police station, the provincial government offices, the new telecommunications centre, the grotty hotel. And daily at sunrise a rasping, hectoring loudspeaker voice delivered to the town the sort of Party exhortations rarely heard elsewhere.
My limp-about ended in a friendly little restaurant near the bridge where a Beerlao cost double Vientiane’s price, for the obvious reason. Here a ground-shaking explosion, close enough to be deafening, interrupted my diary-writing. I looked around in wild surmise. No one else seemed to have noticed the noise, which made me wonder if I had suddenly become prey to hallucinations. But when two more explosions followed, at ten-minute intervals, realization dawned: a bomb-disposal team was at work.
That evening, an English-speaker explained. New water pipes were being laid just beyond the bridge, beside the periphery wall of Xam Nua’s high school, and a bomb had been uncovered. When the German-led team were summoned they found the playground stuffed with unexploded ordnance (UXO), not far below the surface – to Xam Nua residents, a commonplace event. Some of the replacement houses hurriedly built by the Vietnamese have UXO beneath them and anyone who chances to use a hammer in the vicinity of a bomb is doomed. For many Lao, the Secret War is not yet over.
My English-speaking informant was a fellow-guest, a senior government minister whose duties required him occasionally to spend a week in Xam Nua. His fluent English and evasiveness about his past piqued my curiosity but I curbed it and we became good friends. Mr Pheuiphanh was the very antithesis of the Poor World government minister stereotype: one couldn’t imagine him lusting for the Mercedes, the mansion, the corporate kick-backs. A serene gentleman, he was perfectly happy in our no-star (even minus-star) accommodation.
Juan, the Filipino road engineer, was on recce in the area, a five-day assignment. Although he had then been living in Laos for two years he ‘didn’t trust the food’ and always brought his own with him – and his own water, in two gigantic bucket-thermoses. This I took as proof of the deleterious influence of America in the Philippines.
The guesthouse provided no breakfast, only a thermos of boiling water. While brewing my mug of tea next morning I watched Juan unpacking his hamper. Out came a sliced white pan loaf, wafers of shiny, orange-coloured processed cheese, a jar of Nescafé, a box of Nestlé Coffeemate sachets, a tub of Singaporean jam, a carton of butter substitute allegedly good for the health but certainly containing some menacing mixture of chemicals to create that buttery illusion. I commented on the food industry’s over-packaging – another billion-dollar scam. Each of the ten cheese wafers was separately sealed in a triple plastic envelope and contained in a transparent box almost needing a hacksaw to break it open. Juan saw such precautions as ‘absolutely essential for hygiene in this dusty country’. I retorted that all market foods are exposed to maximum amounts of dust – especially in windy places like Xam Nua – yet everybody survives. ‘They don’t,’ Juan asserted grimly. ‘Gastric infections kill millions.’
Then Mrs Nguyen entered from the street carrying greens and bananas in one hand and in the other a fat, dark grey, coarse-coated animal about eighteen inches long hanging from a vine snare around the neck. Desperately it struggled, its four paws with strong claws kicking the air. It had a blunt nose, small ears, a shortish tail, rodent teeth. ‘Jesus!’ exclaimed Juan. ‘It’s the biggest rat ever!’
‘Its nose is the wrong shape,’ said I. ‘It’s more like a giant guinea-pig.’
As we debated the anatomical structures of rats and guinea-pigs our hostess stood there smiling down at the wretched creature. Finally I said, ‘Well, whatever its identity we certainly know its destiny – it’s our supper.’
Juan, despite his long residence in Laos, looked disbelieving – then appalled. Pushing aside his breakfast he pointed and asked, ‘Food? Taeng kin?’ (To cook.)
Mrs Nguyen beamed and nodded proudly. Mr Pheuiphanh and his two junior colleagues had invited me to dine with them that evening so Mrs Nguyen went early to the market and made a big effort to secure something special. The creature was in fact a bamboo rat, a choice delicacy. Evidently the rat-as-food concept made Juan extra squeamish; that morning he couldn’t face the loo and borrowed a Honda to visit a field. Later I looked into the kitchen and saw our supper crouching in a corner, tied to a table leg. When approached he made a pathetic frantic defensive sound – a hissing snarl – and showed all his teeth.
After breakfast Mr Thongsa failed to meet me at the guesthouse. An unusually tall and unusually dim-witted young man, he had introduced himself the day before as Houaphanh’s assistant tourist officer. I needed a permit from his boss; he had promised to lead me to the office next morning.
At 8.30 I walked to the enormous, oblong provincial administration building opposite the bridge. On the steps Mr Thongsa appeared and conducted me to a small bare room lacking all the usual posters, brochures, postcards, wall maps. The boss spoke neither English nor French and was not very interested in Xam Nua’s sole tourist. He greeted me with a vague smile, shook hands, signed and stamped a sheet of paper (my permit), locked the 1,000 kip fee in a little tin money-box and took himself off to a meeting. (‘What about?’ I wondered.) Mr Thongsa then filled in the long document which allowed me to spend a week in Houaphanh. Next, he said, I must register with the police and show them my permit. I protested that I had already registered with the police at the airport and produced a chit to prove it. But Mr Thongsa insisted that they must register my permit – a chit giving no details of the tourist officer’s permit was not a good chit …
Off I went, around the nearest corner and up a slight slope. The dilapidated three-storey police barracks was on an expanse of stony wasteland where numerous policemen stood around laughing and chatting. One strolled away to seek the relevant officer and came back ten minutes later with a smiling young colleague who led me through four long, high, dingy corridors to a cubicle-sized office. There a huge ledger was taken from the top of a tall cupboard, thoroughly dusted, then solemnly opened – as though it were some sacred religious text. But this squat, broad-faced youth was not at all sure what my passport signified and what he was supposed to be doing with it. He studied, intently, the numerous chits I had by then collected and seemed puzzled by the tourist officer’s permit. I looked on sympathetically. Why was he expected to cope with a passport in an unknown script? But perhaps he wasn’t, perhaps this nonsense was all the fault of the dim-witted Mr Thongsa. When he suggested my filling in the ledger I reflected that few bureaucratic rituals are connected to the real world and amused myself by inserting fantasy details in each column. The young man then asked for a touchingly modest 100 kip tip – a few cents. I gave him 1,000 kip but afterwards felt guilty; the government had recently launched a campaign against the custom of police demanding ‘fees’ from tourists. In certain remote areas, where falangs felt vulnerable, some senior officers extorted considerable sums.
That morning the high school playground was being marked off in squares with white tape. Then three Lao men began to wield their long bomb-detectors; they wore helmets and face shields like riot police but were otherwise unprotected. If UXO goes off by accident it rips through any protective gear so far invented. Bomb disposal is slow work and there was talk of the children’s midwinter holiday having to be prolonged.
A mile or so downstream from the motor bridge the Nam Xam narrows to flow through a mini-gorge formed by sheer cliffs bearing an astonishing variety of grasses, bushes, small trees. From here the bulky mountain on the far bank – a Hmong ‘suburb’ – is reached via a long chain and plank suspension footbridge swaying high above the winter-shallow river. A steep path leads up to a level track, linking several newish settlements. All seem quite impoverished, the shacks crudely built of various combinations of wood, stone, mud, brick, concrete blocks, iron sheeting. Here I felt like an intruder on some private estate. A few women and children smiled tentatively; most of the younger men stared sullenly; their elders – who wore Hmong garb – were polite in a distant way. However, I intuited that had I been able to explain myself, to sit and talk and relax with these people, all would have made me welcome. The Hmong have reason enough to distrust inexplicable falangs.
Several small, sturdy ponies were tethered beside houses or grazing on nearby slopes. Always ponies have been indispensable to the Hmong: without them their opium harvests could not be transported to faraway collection points. How much opium do they still grow? This is a question one does not ask in Laos. In theory the opium poppy, traditionally the Hmongs’ only cash crop, is outlawed. But how can they be persuaded that poppy growing is now – suddenly – bad/wrong/illegal when for generations the French colonial authorities, and then the CIA, encouraged them to produce more and more opium? Soon after the French grabbed Indochina, the opium tax became their main source of revenue. At the beginning of the Second World War they launched a major campaign to boost Hmong opium production. The annual poll tax was raised from three to eight silver piastres, a sum most Hmong could not possibly save in a year – so they were given the alternative of paying three kilos of raw opium. By 1944 Laos’s harvest had risen to about forty tons a year and the administration’s opium revenue had increased by 70 per cent since 1939. Subsequently, international pressure forced the French to abandon this source of revenue. However, during the first Indochina War France’s approximate equivalent to the CIA (the Service de Documentation Extérieure et du Contre-Espionage – SDECE) ran an underground opium monopoly known as Operation X. This involved close co-operation between the French military and the Binh Xuyen, an infamous Saigon criminal organization – that name rings discordant bells for anyone old enough to remember the Second Indochina War. When opium and heroin trading came to play a crucial part in the CIA’s Secret War they learned eagerly from their detested rivals, the SDECE. By then the grievously exploited Hmong had been changed from subsistence rice farmers, who as a sideline had produced an annual kilo of opium per family, to cash-crop opium farmers. Now their way of life was linked to Saigon’s opium dens – and, as the Second Indochina War dragged on, to the GIS’ increasing demand for heroin. General Ouane Rattikone, former C.-in-C. of the RLA (an army entirely financed by the US government), owned a large heroin laboratory near Ban Houei Sai and another near Vientiane. At the CIA’s Long Tien headquarters General Vang Pao, commander of the Secret Army, had his own lab. At Nam Keung, Major Chao La, commander of the CIA’s Yao mercenaries, ‘protected’ another lab. And so on … Soon the Hmong, living on high mountain tops, dependent on swidden cultivation, could no longer grow enough rice to feed themselves. Too many men had been recruited, of whom at least 30,000 never came home, and boys of thirteen and fourteen were also sent into action to replace their dead or maimed seniors. At that stage the CIA, as part payment to the mercenary leaders, used their own airline – Air America – to fly free rice to the villages and take raw opium to the heroin labs. Certain districts in Houaphanh province, being both fertile and cool, were among the most productive.
On my way back to the town, I could faintly hear a man with a megaphone warning people to move 200 metres away from the playground, far below me. Then the explosions began and a dark cloud rose high. There were eleven in all, between 3.10 and 4.50; that was the day’s harvest. During pauses, traffic was allowed to pass the school – perhaps three mopeds and an army jeep going one way, four cyclists and three buffaloes going the other way. Xam Nua is not prone to traffic chaos. By 4.30 I was on the scene, standing near the playground gate with a group of fascinated small boys. Under the German’s supervision, the last two bombs were being prepared for detonation. Then the megaphone man sent us scuttling away. The barrier at the far side of the bridge was a length of pink nylon string tied to a pink bicycle (the colour scheme presumably coincidental) parked at one side of the road: at the other side stood a young man with a foot on his end of the string. What you might call a symbolic barrier … The black smoke ascending into a very blue sky smelt acrid. Then the casings and fragments were carried away by the team, presumably to be sold as scrap metal or otherwise put to good use. One wonders what lies under the school building.
At 6.30 the guesthouse generator was switched on and the bamboo rat served up – stewed and so strongly spiced that I cannot pronounce on its flavour. The texture recalled guinea-pig meat – an Andean delicacy – and those big bush rats so much relished in parts of Africa. Accompanying it were sticky rice, parboiled forest leaves still chewy and slightly sour, delicious beans from a forest tree – small, crisply fried, almond-flavoured – and a sauce based on deer’s blood. Next came fish and lemongrass soup, the chunks of white flesh tasty but treacherously bony. To aid digestion, Mr Pheuiphanh produced a throat-searing liqueur distilled from a forest fruit known as ‘monkeys’ potatoes’. The best liqueur, he explained, is made from bile, preferably a bear’s. But that is now very rare and extremely expensive; in Hong Kong, a few years ago, a Chinese merchant paid US$50,000 for the liver and gall bladder of an Asiatic black bear. ‘Now we are protecting many species,’ Mr Pheuiphanh added reassuringly. ‘Though in this province, where people are so poor, we can’t be too strict. And there’s another problem: most of us prefer the taste of hunted animals. I would always choose wild pig, wild dog, deer, jungle fowl, instead of farmers’ animals and birds.’
Next morning, as I arrived early in the market to breakfast at a noodle stall, a hunter was selling his quarry, – a small dainty deer with a richly chestnut coat, all glossy. It was quickly dismembered and soon every bit had been bought; the pretty little hooves were sold in pairs. Then a youth appeared with four squirrels – fawn backs, white bellies, russet tails. One had to walk carefully between the long rows of butchers’ stalls where the ground was slippy with blood and guts, and the air rent with the shrieks and squawks of dying pigs and poultry. I paused to watch one elderly woman preparing her stock of a special Lao delicacy: buffalo hide with the hairs still attached, sold in thin eighteen-inch strips. She was using a pointed stick to hold the hide in place and chopping with a heavy sharp knife; buffaloes are thick-skinned creatures and having completed her task she looked exhausted. As usual, the traders were women, many wearing tribal costumes – Hmong, Phu Noi, Thai Khao, Thai Daeng, Thai Neua. Perhaps their presence accounted for the market atmosphere’s being so friendly.
Afterwards I cycled to Wat Phonxay (‘Victory’) at the eastern edge of the town. Its site is very beautiful, on a high bluff overlooking a wide tributary that joins the Nam Xam where it leaves its mini-gorge. To one side stands a grove of giant bamboo and beyond is a ban of stilted houses – yet another of Xam Nua’s suburbs.
Before the bombings there were three other wats in Xam Nua, of which only fragments remain. Wat Phonxay, begun in 1958 and completed in 1968, was completely destroyed in 1969. Within weeks of the ceasefire in 1973 the local people resolved to rebuild it but by then their resources were drastically depleted and it remained unfinished until 1987. Near the entrance hangs a picture of its predecessor as a foundation, Wat Inpheng, a sim in the distinctive Xieng Khouang style, built in 1770 and twice the size of Wat Phonxay with magnificently carved doors and windows. Its famous gigantic statue of the Buddha was bombed to fragments.
This new wat looks neglected and supports only seven monks and novices. An ancient (1565) bronze statue of the Buddha stands under a scarlet silk canopy not enhanced by Christmas decoration baubles depending from the fringe. The unimpressive murals illustrate an uneasy phase in the Buddhist/Pathet Lao relationship. It tantalized me to be unable to read the script on each panel and the long (re-education?) lectures below two large murals flanking the main door. Some panels depict horrific scenes from the eight Buddhist hells: naked men and women being hanged, throttled, drowned, disembowelled, sawn in two, torn asunder by packs of giant hounds, flung into vast cauldrons surrounded by flames or thrown off cliff-tops to feed waiting tigers, having molten metal poured down their throats through funnels, having their eyes and brains pecked at by man-sized vultures and their abdomens torn apart and intestines dragged out … Many Westerners, coming East to seek the calming influence of the Lord Buddha, must get quite a jolt when they first encounter those hells. Also, in a wat for supposedly celibate monks it was odd to find naked women obviously modelled on Thailand’s almost-naked calendar women. During the 1860s Garnier noted that monastic incelibacy, which carried the death penalty in Cambodia, was tolerated in Laos. Maybe it still is.
Throughout the Secret War the Pathet Lao were greatly strengthened by the Sangha’s (Buddhist ‘Establishment’s’) support. Religious leaders saw the American presence in Laos as spiritually corrupting and culturally destructive and all attempts to coax the monks into an anti-Communist alliance were spurned. Much more to their taste was the Pathet Lao’s austere Marxism – which they didn’t really understand but it seemed preferable to the Americanization of Laos and many young monks left their wats to fight.
Alas! when the LPRP came to power in 1975 the Sangha’s support was ill-rewarded. Then the Buddhist and Marxist ideologies were perceived as incompatible and the Sangha was replaced by the Lao United Buddhist Association, its members handpicked by the Party. The enormous ceremonial fans used for centuries by the senior clergy were smashed in public, people were forbidden to gain merit by giving alms and maintaining the wats, the monks were ordered to grow food and breed animals – activities that broke their monastic vows – and the teaching of Buddhism in primary schools was outlawed. Only those who studied Marxist-Leninist philosophy and agreed to interweave it with Buddhist doctrines were allowed to continue teaching. When these compromises had been accepted, Buddhism was officially recognized – as in Tibet in the 1980s. (The worship of phi and other manifestations of animism were banned, in theory, but no one made much effort to enforce that ban.) Many monks either migrated to Thailand or returned to secular life; their numbers fell from about 20,000 in 1975 to fewer than 1,700 in 1979. However, the government had reckoned without the inimitable Laotian talent for passive resistance. In their quiet way the people made it plain that they would not co-operate in this downgrading and dilution of Buddhism, just as they would not co-operate to make collective farming possible. And on both these fundamental issues, affecting the spiritual and physical welfare of the ordinary Lao, the government speedily climbed down – thus proving its members to be true disciples of Ho Chi Minh. By the end of 1976 everyone was free again to give alms and the government had decided to present the Sangha with a daily rice ration. There are now some 17,000 monks and Party officials and their wives are often seen at Buddhist ceremonies, seeming as devout as anyone else.
From Wat Phonxay I rattled downhill through the stilted ban (its stilts all concrete), forded the shallow tributary and cycled for two hours along a dirt track running north-east across paddy-fields. On both sides, a few tiny bans lay at the base of low, rounded mountains – the foot-hills of a distant jagged range. The cold morning mist had dispersed, the sun shone pleasantly hot, the tributary by the track gleamed golden brown, matching the stubble on which buffaloes grazed – rather bony buffaloes as at the end of January not much stubble remained. The traffic was all two-wheeled, cyclists bringing loads of forest produce – including several pheasants and squirrels – to the market. One young woman had to wheel her bicycle; a large pig, its throat neatly slit, was tied to the carrier. Everyone looked more dark skinned, blunt featured and stockier than the Lao Lum. And everyone seemed taken aback by the falang cyclist, probably an unprecedented phenomenon on that track.
In the first wayside ban, some fifteen miles from Xam Nua, I was advised (not ordered) to turn back. Here the unstilted houses were built of wood – including shingled roofs – and the women wore spectacular piled-up turbans and loose trousers. The courteous elder who stopped me was clad in patched jeans, a frayed combat jacket and a long woollen scarf wrapped around his head. He seemed to be a man of the world, able to take falangs in his stride – very likely a Secret War veteran. He made a drinking gesture and invited me into his three-roomed dwelling, the living-room neat and clean, its furniture minimalist, its only decoration a large faded poster showing Ho Chi Minh and Prince Souphanouvong shaking hands. The liquid refreshment came from a bulbous earthenware jar and was indefinable: bland and slightly sweet and certainly not alcoholic so I gratefully accepted three cupfuls. Then, on the way back, I felt odd and wobbly and suddenly life seemed hilariously funny and I was giggling because I was wobbling. In due course Mr Pheuiphanh explained: that jar had contained marijuana ‘tea’, locally regarded as ‘energizing’. He agreed with me that in fact it diminishes energy, both physical and mental.
We had chanced to meet, when I got back to Xam Nua, in the little eat-drink shop near the bridge. It was then 3.15 and Mr Pheuiphanh was relaxing with his two junior colleagues after the day’s work – which had entailed an official luncheon party, starting at noon, in his department’s local office. I liked the Lao attitude to work; government employees of all ranks eschew stress. Mr Pheuiphanh disapproved of my plan to cycle to Vieng Xai next day; he had come to suspect me of a tendency to stray from the beaten track. Uneasily he said, ‘You can’t feel free in Houaphanh – too much UXO.’ He paused, then added, ‘Be careful with those binoculars, don’t be seen looking at fields. People might think you were interested in other things, not birds. And don’t bother taking pictures of landscapes. People might think you had on of those special cameras.’
Houaphanh’s main ‘tourist attraction’ is Vieng Xai, twenty miles north-east of Xam Nua – a place of pilgrimage for those who admire the Pathet Lao’s courage, ingenuity, endurance and determination during the Secret War. There they set up their headquarters in an extraordinary complex of bomb-proof caves in the karst mountains surrounding the little town. Without that natural resource, they could not possibly have withstood so many years of saturation bombing. The USAF put everything they had into pinpointing the Pathet Lao positions, deployed all their most sophisticated equipment, used their most skilled and bravest airmen. Those were volunteers disguised as civilians because of this being a covert operation: in CIA-speak a ‘non-attributable war’. One volunteer – Timothy Castle, quoted above – recently recalled: ‘Around the airfield at Nakhon Phanom [in Thailand] we were concerned with safe and successful flying, not foreign policy issues. As a twenty-year-old airman I neither knew nor cared about the geostrategic dynamics that had pulled Laos into such a cataclysmic war.’
I left for Vieng Xai soon after sunrise (which was meteorologically silly of me), planning to spend a few days in that area before returning to Xam Nua on my way north. Opposite the guesthouse, on an open space, the day’s transport was being organized: a few taxi pick-ups and several Soviet trucks – looking way past their stop-drive-by date – with luggage piled on the roof and passengers packed inside, standing. No buses make it to Xam Nua, not even the sort that damaged the Foot.
That morning was exceptionally cold and misty and soon I passed two old Hmong women crouching on the verge, thawing their hands over a fire; on the ground beside them four bamboo rats, tied together, were struggling to be free. Then three small boys came cycling towards me, each with a kicking bamboo rat hanging from his handlebars – the Lao equivalent of our trucking live animals across Europe.
This tarred road is surprisingly good; the large broken patches might irritate a motorist but rarely slow a cyclist. During the first hour five passenger trucks overtook me, travelling towards Vietnam in convoy with daring young men clinging to their roofs. Questions were shouted at me in a tone not friendly. After that I met only a few Hondas.
Leaving the valley of the Nam Xam, the road climbs gradually through uncultivated mountains – sometimes briefly descending into grassy clefts, then up again, the mist all the time getting thicker. A very steep gradient – Hare had to be pushed – took me on to a long plateau where suddenly the wildness of uninhabited mountains was exchanged for an orderly landscape of hedged fields. Here cattle in poorish condition grazed on coarse grass and I counted four herds of eight or ten ponies, a few with white saddle-sore scars but all plump – they must get supplementary feeding. Near the Hmong village of Naliou I met three little boys wheeling two bicycles; all four tyres were flat. They stopped me with a polite greeting, then shyly pointed to Hare’s pump and looked hopeful. Watching them use it, I thought – not for the first time – that on the technological level the average Laotian IQ is even less impressive than my own.
Naliou’s one-storey thatched dwellings line the road on both sides. Its school’s concrete walls were falling to bits and there was no shop, not even the tiniest store selling shampoo and Sprite. The visible residents were far outnumbered by noisy pigs and bonhams.
Here fog reduced visibility to about fifty yards and a dramatic pass took me by surprise; someone – presumably the French – had blasted a gap in a mountain wall to allow the road through. Then came a descent of four or five miles on the worst stretch of road – flood-torn. Having already made the disquieting discovery that Hare’s brakes were unreliable in wet weather, it seemed prudent to walk most of the way down.
Emerging from the cloud, I saw before me a wide, flat, winter-brown valley containing the big rebuilt Hmong village of Hua Khang – by Houaphanh standards almost a town. Here a conspicuous wayside board bears an unusual bilingual legend. The English version says: NOTICE. THE HOUAPHANH GOVERNMENT, THE GOVERNMENT BOARDING SCHOOL FOR THE HOUAPHANH ETHNIC MINORITY. Several long, narrow, bamboo-walled, tin-roofed huts constitute the school buildings. This institution, so utterly un-Lao, worried me. It recalled Australia’s forced integration programmes for the Aboriginals – children ruthlessly taken from their parents to be re-conditioned and ‘civilized’ by the state. The present Lao government is not, I am assured, attempting anything so drastic. However, it is intent on changing the mountain tribes’ distinctive semi-autonomous way of life, allegedly to save the forests from swidden cultivators while creating a united ‘modern’ nation.
Beyond Hua Khang the road switchbacked to a junction with a small faded signpost in Lao; evidently no efforts were being made to put Houaphanh on the tourist map by ‘selling’ Vieng Xai. When I turned right the surface at once deteriorated without becoming bad enough to slow a weaving cyclist. Hereabouts were serious-looking little boys carrying slings and bows and arrows: not toys but hunting weapons. It was ironic to see Vieng Xai children wearing Thai-made anoraks with ‘USA Army’ emblazoned on the back. But of course no local has the least idea what these hieroglyphs mean.
Now the road was winding between sheer limestone mountains, most free-standing, with yawning cave entrances – some at ground level, others high up, half hidden by bushy vegetation. During the ‘non-attributable war’ all these caves were occupied by local peasants who had to cultivate under cover of darkness; they described this as ‘living like an owl during the day and a fox during the night’. Every year airpower – T-28 fighters from Long Tieng, F-4s and 105s from Udorn, B-52 bombers from Uttaphao–destroyed much of that hard-won rice harvest. And these unfortified caves provided limited protection; the Americans soon perfected the art of killing cave dwellers with phosphorus rockets and napalm. The casualties went uncounted. This was what Timothy Castle would then have thought of as ‘successful flying’.
Pedalling slowly through two roadside hamlets, I noticed many ordnance leftovers made into fences, incorporated into dwellings, used as flowerbeds and herb-beds and pig troughs. I wanted to find the famous ‘garage-cave’ which had ample space for the parking of 120 military trucks. But despite Mr Pheuiphanh’s coaching my pronunciation baffled the locals and without guidance it would have been unwise to leave the road. In another famous nearby cave, at Hanglong, were stored as many of the Lord Buddha’s statues as could be rescued – including Wat Phonxay’s bronze Buddha of Pra Ong Tu. Ninety-five caves ‘of historical significance’ have been listed, including a cave school for the children of government officials and a hospital complex some ten miles from Vieng Xai.
Approaching from Xam Nua, a ridge conceals the town and at first I mistook a long roadside ban for the Pathet Lao ‘capital’. Then a weatherbeaten triumphal arch, decorated with hammers and sickles, came into view at a junction. Passing under it, I followed a rutted road to the ridgetop and was overlooking Vieng Xai, set amidst level paddyfields from which, in Tom Butcher’s words, ‘startling conical limestone outcrops erupt out of the ground like pieces on a chessboard’. This must be Laos’s oddest settlement, neither a town nor a village but with vestiges of urban pretensions. When at last the bombing stopped, in 1973, the Pathet Lao hastily built it – with Vietnamese help – as the capital of the liberated zone. Three years later all zones had been liberated and the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party was governing the whole country from Vientiane. Vieng Xai – no bigger than Hua Khang – then assumed village status. Gradually its imposing public buildings mouldered away, its tarred streets (all three of them) crumbled and its power lines ceased to convey electricity. By now the overall effect is visually dismal but Vieng Xai’s human content – cheerful, friendly, helpful – more than makes up for that.
The public are admitted to the five main caves, the residences and offices of the Pathet Lao leadership from 1963. These are named after the original Politburo: Souphanouvong, Kaysone, Phonsavan, Phomvihane and Phoumi. During the two years of hard work that went into preparing this spelean accommodation several wooden coffins – elaborate, massive, ancient – were incidentally excavated and dumped with the rest of the rubble. No one had time to take a scholarly interest in mysterious relics and local folklore yields no clue to the identity of these VIPs.
In front of Prince Souphanouvong’s cave an ugly damp-blackened wall of concrete trelliswork surrounds a garden planted all over with a low shrub, its leaves wine red. Here stands the two-storey wooden house built by the Prince in 1973 and now apparently abandoned. A nearby shack is the caretaker’s office where a generator belches choking fumes and shakes so violently that the whole little building vibrates. Beside the long flight of steps leading up to the cave entrance a fading pink stupa marks the grave of the Prince’s son; he was aged twenty-eight when Hmong infiltrators captured him a few miles away and beat him to death.
As I arrived an official Vietnamese delegation (all wearing name badges) was leaving and the pleasant young caretaker hesitated, looking worried – to whom should he now give preference? When the friendly Vietnamese had urged him to attend to the falang he again switched on the generator, then pointed out a huge bomb crater and the casing of the 500-pound bomb involved. There were many loose chunks of mountain lying around the entrances to all the caves – not normal rock-falls but gigantic masses of limestone detached from the slope above as time and again the B-52s attacked.
Truly these caves are astounding – and very moving. (In David and Goliath situations, most of us have a built-in prejudice.) They are astounding both geologically and, as it were, architecturally. I marvelled at the enormous grottoes partitioned and ceilinged with planks. Baths and stoves were hewn out of the rock; garages for the Politburo’s vehicles were contrived at the base of the karst; a vast cavern was converted to a theatre – its stage a smooth slab of limestone where audiences of 400 and 500 regularly gathered. Also there were hospital units, assembly halls for political education and adult literacy classes, recreation rooms. My guide was particularly proud of the emergency rooms, completely sealed concrete bunkers able to shelter twenty people in the event of a gas attack and equipped with Soviet-donated hand-cranked oxygen pumps. (The young man’s expression revealed his pride: he spoke no English.)
Outside one cave, within a few yards of the entrance, are three enormous craters, their rims almost touching. A concrete wall, some fourteen feet by six, shields this entrance. All these caves were heavily fortified with Vietnamese technical assistance. The Pathet Lao’s skills did not match their courage: most of the rank and file were peasants unacquainted with modern construction methods.
The weather seemed apt: all day a low, dove-grey sky – no wind – the air absolutely still, the silence unbroken. At the end of our tour, when the young man had gone home, I remained amidst the caves for a couple of hours, taking care not to step off the pathways. The strangeness of Vieng Xai’s atmosphere is, I felt, only partly owing to this region’s pivotal significance during the Secret War. Those bizarre karst formations rearing up close on every side contribute to it and one is aware of the caves having much older layers of significance – as indeed is proved by the finding of so many mighty coffins.
Back in the village, it felt like Beerlao time. When I sat at a trestle table in a bamboo shack a beautiful young woman welcomed me warmly. Her one-year-old son had a broken arm but was being stoical about it – if not about the arrival of the falang. However, he soon relaxed and when shown a photograph of my granddaughters kissed it passionately. Then Granny appeared, conveyed that Vieng Xai’s Government No. 1 Hotel was closed and suggested I lodge with the Germans. The bomb-disposal team had its Houaphanh headquarters on the ridgetop dominating the valley. As I departed the little fellow blew me a shower of kisses.
The headquarters used to be Government No. 2 Hotel, a French colonial edifice, its yellow paint flaking. It had a wide veranda and handsome wrought-iron balconies outside the long rows of first-floor windows. Fifty yards away stood a colossal disused hangar-like shed; its doors were half off their hinges and lakelets of rainwater on the floor deterred me from camping there. Two German flags on high poles flanked the gateway; the Laotian flag flew in the background on a much lower pole. The open halldoor led into a vast foyer, empty but for a statistics blackboard: 3,000-plus bombs had so far been dealt with in the Vieng Xai district. To the right, in an unfurnished high-ceilinged room, many of these were on display. When loud rappings on other doors brought no reply I ventured up the grandly sweeping stone staircase to a wide corridor. Through an open doorway a middle-aged German, obese and rubicund, could be seen filling in forms at a rickety desk. Scowling at me, he shouted for an English-speaking colleague, who emerged from another big bare room. This was the supervisor I had seen at work in Xam Nua: tall, lean, narrow faced, with a thin downturned mouth and close-set pale blue eyes. (He reminded me of a certain sort – not the nicest sort – of Afrikaner.) When I sought permission to sleep on the veranda, explaining that I had my own bedding and food, he asked why I had not gone to the Government No. 1 Hotel. ‘It’s not very good,’ he added almost sadistically, ‘but you can sleep there if you’re willing to pay.’ The implication that I might be trying to cadge free lodgings made me wince; always I am reluctant to impose on unknown expats and this experience reinforced my inhibition.
Speeding downhill through the fading light, I wondered if No. 1 really was open. Then I realized that I had already passed it and assumed it to be another derelict residence; nothing indicated its function. In spacious grounds, encircled by towering Norfolk Island pines and bluegums, it was the Houaphanh Hilton during Vieng Xai’s brief years of glory when foreign dignitaries and other distinguished visitors came to confer with the Pathet Lao. Since then, the veranda’s concrete pillars have half collapsed in what seemed to me quite a dangerous way. The restaurant with seating for a hundred was locked but through the door’s glass panel I could see chairs upside down on tables. No water was available in a large communal bathroom with many hand-basins and squat-overs. I shouted and rattled door handles to no effect. Perhaps Granny was right and the German wrong? I wandered up an outside staircase and along a balcony – the boards rotting. Only when I turned on my torch to descend did someone notice me and shout from a house on stilts behind the trees.
A woman carrying a kerosene lamp, followed by two teenage girls, came to greet me shyly, looking bewildered. They were not sure if I could stay … Having disappeared for ten minutes they returned with an elderly man who shook hands and closely considered me before saying, ‘OK, OK!’ Then everyone disappeared for fifteen minutes, leaving me sitting on the edge of the veranda gazing up at the dimly visible crags above Kamtai’s cave, only fifty yards from the hotel.
When the generator began to hum my host led me to a memorable room of lofty proportions where the three single beds had crimson silk counterpanes; ludicrous pink beribboned satin hearts, stuffed with some aromatic herb, adorned the pillow covers. Most of the plaster had fallen from the hospital-green walls, exposing ill-made concrete blocks, the light fitting hung loose and the door lock was malfunctioning. On a splendidly carved table stood a plastic tray bearing a two-litre thermos of boiling water, a bowl of refreshing herbal tea leaves and three delicate porcelain cups and saucers. When I asked, not very hopefully, about an evening meal my host instantly produced from his jacket pocket two of those little packets of dried noodles which swell in boiling water – 500 kip for both. A soup plate, a spoon and chopsticks were soon after provided. Each packet contained a sachet of some horrible synthetic flavouring but I was hungry enough to enjoy that supper; remarkably, there were no eat-drink shops in Vieng Xai. (However, large bundles of freshly made noodles were on sale at every food stall – so why import instant noodles to the Houaphanh outback?)
Mr Pheuiphanh had told me about the Nam Xam National Biodiversity Conservation Area (NBCA), some 380 square miles of forested hills between Vieng Xai and Xam Tai, so designated in 1993 because of its exceptional population of endangered species: tigers, Malayan sun bears, Asiatic black bears, elephants, gaur, banteng, clouded leopards and a variety of gibbons. From Vieng Xai this area is accessible on a cycleable track – or at least a track along which it is possible to push a bicycle.
I rose at dawn, trying not to feel too excited, reminding myself that another frustration was quite likely. In Vientiane I had heard a rumour that at least one Houaphanh re-education camp remains open somewhere near Xam Tai; if true, that could mean a roadblock.
Only one track goes south-east out of Vieng Xai’s valley, climbing gently into conventional mountains, swidden-scarred in small patches near the summits. On this cold misty morning I met no one over the few miles to a banlet where, according to the map, my track turned right. It alarmed me to see a huge empty loggers’ truck – bigger than any of the dwellings – parked in the middle of the ban, with no number plate. When I paused to scrutinize it an old man, very small and wrinkled and worried looking, rushed towards me. His sign-language message was that I should (a) move away from the truck and (b) return to Vieng Xai. Had I not already identified my track I might have taken his advice but that track was irresistible, leading directly into primary forest. I tried, unsuccessfully, to soothe him before continuing. Casual visitors can’t realistically expect to see endangered species yet merely to be in an area where such sightings were remotely possible exhilarated me and I was equipped to spend a few days in the forest; even during the dry season these mountains have running streams.
Soon my exhilaration had evaporated; that track was sinister – too wide and well engineered, not a peasants’ track. An hour later a sound stopped me, distant but unmistakable – the whining snarl of chain-saws. After that I was not surprised to be challenged, on the next mountain, by a middle-aged Hmong wearing blue dungarees and wielding a sub-machine-gun. His message, that I should return to where I came from, was not disregarded. Mr Pheuiphanh admitted next day that Vietnamese cedar loggers simply ignore the NBCA designation. And recruiting local protectors is easy.
Back in Vieng Xai, I consulted the map and decided to see how far I could get on the road to Nam Maew, the Vietnamese border ban only thirty-five miles away.
Beyond the archway junction an earth track, quite well maintained, ran through a narrow valley – paddy on the left, maize on the right – with an enticing mountain wall at the valley’s end. Here I saw another UXO disposal team, waving their magic wands over sloping paddyfields where five days previously a ‘bombi’ had killed two young women and a toddler – none of them born when those cluster-bombs were dropped. The black scar of that tragedy stood out on the golden-brown stubble. Then one of the team noticed the falang and shouted and came running towards me. I could not continue: this area was temporarily forbidden to falangs. To prove his point he bent down and picked up a fallen wayside sign – trilingual: Lao, German, English. To me it said STOP! DANGER WIT EXPLOZONS!
Every day in Laos, as in many other countries, people are being killed or maimed by the leftovers of wars which had to be fought (we were told) to defend democracy and human rights and protect the world from the horrors of Communist domination. Yet now, when the Soviet threat to US global hegemony is no more, the Americans are ingratiating themselves with the Chinese – still in theory Communist and continuing relentlessly to repress the Tibetans, among others. But with a market like China’s opening up none of that matters. Democracy and human rights – forget them!
Houaphanh, it has to be admitted, is an unsoothing province – what with its UXO, opium fields, illegal loggers and re-education camps. Those last may no longer exist: who knows? If they do still exist, it is likely their inhabitants are few. In 1995 Amnesty International drew attention to three Lao ‘prisoners of conscience’ recently sentenced to fourteen years in a Houaphanh re-education camp for peacefully arguing in favour of a multi-party political system. Unfortunately Amnesty International’s investigations are not always thorough so this presentation of the case may or may not be accurate; it sounds like less than the full story.
After the Pathet Lao take-over, 40,000 people – it is said – were sent to re-education camps and 30,000 jailed for ‘political offences’. Originally that was reported in the New York Times (11 November 1976, 3 May 1977); then those figures became accepted and are now quoted in some guidebooks, including the Lonely Planet and Laos Handbook. However, the historian Martin Stuart-Fox, a Lao specialist, gives ‘less than 1500’ as the number held in the five camps in the Vieng Xai area, with a similar number held in southern camps – all these being senior army and police officers. Dr Stuart-Fox estimates that probably ten times that number – lower-ranking officers and civilians – were held for a few years, giving a figure of around 30,000 during 1976 and 1977. The inflated figure must be regarded as part of the Americans’ vigorous post-war smear campaign. Their ‘yellow rain’ smear is still doing damage though the accusation that the LPRP government was using chemical agents against ‘dissident’ Hmong eventually had to be withdrawn, the State Department admitting it lacked any supporting evidence.
During the early 1980s most internees were released – ‘it is said’ – but these did not include King Savangvatthana, Queen Khamphuy and Crown Prince Vongsavang, who all died in captivity in Vieng Xai, in what is now the Germans’ headquarters. (If suitably furnished, that building could well replace the Luang Prabang palace.)
The royal family were victims, indirectly, of Thailand’s 1976 military coup which inspired more manic machinations on the CIA’s part. In December 1975 the King had abdicated with great dignity, voluntarily presenting to the state the royal lands and palace at Luang Prabang. Immediately he was appointed ‘Counsellor to the President’ (Prince Souphanouvong) and Prince Souvanna Phouma was appointed ‘Counsellor to the Government’ and the Crown Prince Vongsavang was appointed a member of the Supreme People’s Assembly. (‘No guillotines please, we’re Lao!’) But then came the military coup in Bangkok, leading to a CIA-backed alliance between the Thai military, the Hmong retired mercenaries and the many rightwing Lao then living in Thailand. Their aim: to restore the Royalist regime. Fearing that the ex-King would be seized and used by the conspirators, the government hastily banished him and all his family to Vieng Xai’s ‘Seminar’ camp. This specialized in brainwashing but applied only a token amount to a royal family who had been co-operating amiably with their new Republican rulers.
There is some confusion about the dates of the royal deaths. According to P. Delorme, writing in Historia 497 (May 1988), the King and Crown Prince both died in 1978 and the Queen in December 1981. However, the 1997 edition of the Laos Handbook reports: ‘In December 1989 Kaysone Phomvihane admitted in Paris, for the first time, that the King had died of malaria in 1984 and that the Queen had also died “Of natural causes” – no mention was made of Vonsavang. The Lao people have still to be officially informed of his demise.’
Not much is known about what went on in Laos between 1975 and 1985. All Western media were excluded and the country was almost completely cut off from the non-Communist world. The US Congress refused aid to the new Republic until 1995 – having between ’68 and ’73 given an average of US$74.4 million per annum to its prodigiously corrupt Royalist allies. Less lavish Soviet funding then flowed in and for twelve years Russian technical advisers replaced American ‘aid’ workers. Even now, despite ‘liberalization’, the government maintains that how it chooses to run its domestic political machine is nobody else’s business. This partly explains why I hesitated to talk politics, to ask potentially embarrassing questions. The Lao have their own way of dealing with things, away so unlike ours one senses their diffidence about attempting to explain themselves to outsiders. Also, I was aware of people not feeling at liberty openly to discuss the Party’s policies or methods. There is no free press or freedom of assembly or freedom to advocate an opposition political party. Nor, it should be emphasized, is there any popular longing for those buttresses of democracy – the first of which is now being rapidly demolished throughout the Rich World. The Party may have unjustly maltreated thousands in re-education camps but it has given the majority what they most longed for: peace and stability.
Towards sunset I returned to the Houaphanh Hilton where two fellow-guests invited me to sup with them; they had ordered whatever forest-derived meat and two veg might be available. Mr Phanivong, a fifty-ish middle-grade government official, had done three years’ ‘re-education’ in a camp nearby and was visiting from Vientiane because he liked to keep in touch with friends made locally. His wife, a returnee from Australia many years his junior, interpreted for us. As usual I asked few questions – and those tentative. However, Mr Phanivong was more communicative than most Lao, within the limits imposed by his job. Sometimes I suspected that his reflections and opinions were being elaborated on by our independent-minded translator who had left Laos as a small child.
Life had been tough enough in his camp, Mr Phanivong admitted. Some older people succumbed to the poor diet and lack of medical care. But it was a learning camp rather than a punishment camp; in the latter the workload was heavier and the death rate higher. The LPRP shouldn’t be criticized for punishing those who were not simply puppets but crafty exploiters of the Americans’ paranoia, cynically indifferent to the devastation being inflicted on their compatriots in the liberated zones.
Mr Phanivong corrected my impression of a government quickly rounding up ‘reactionary elements’ who had failed to escape over the Mekong. Most of those implacably opposed to the new regime or who, as major criminals, had every reason to fear retribution, fled en masse in 1974–5 and were seen as a good riddance. Others gradually seeped away during the next year or so, finding the government’s rigid totalitarianism intolerable and being unable to foresee that it would soon become more flexible – more ‘Lao’.
Many ordinary folk, like Mr Phanivong and his family and friends, had belonged to the Royalist faction simply because they were born into it. As a reward for backing the US they had gained only to a limited extent, not being placed to have access to big bucks. Such people – most of the educated middle class – were willing to offer their services to a new government badly in need of trained public servants. The LPRP was rightly seen as much less corrupt than the RLG and more concerned about the peasants’ welfare. Countless civil servants and police and army officers showed their willingness to co-operate with it by voluntarily travelling to Xam Nua’s political re-education centres – known as samana – when ordered to do so in June ’75. (Re-education was not considered necessary for women.) The show trial in absentia of thirty-one Royalist generals and political leaders had given the false impression that only the top layer would be punished. (Twenty-five were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment, the rest condemned to death.)
The samana volunteers assumed these courses would take them away from home and family for a month at most and were shattered when their confinement lasted for at least a year – sometimes a few years. However, the majority – including Mr Phanivong – responded positively to re-education and eventually re-entered government service. It had been necessary, in his view, to learn not only about the LPRP’s ‘Eighteen Points’ programme but about US imperialism, to understand why the Royalists had been so easily bribed into serving a cause that meant nothing to them. Surprisingly, his teachers also obliquely conveyed that the Pathet Lao itself had been coerced by the Vietcong in the ’50s, when it became clear that Laos’s leaders would never be allowed to arrive at their own sort of reconciliatory compromise.
When I mentioned NEM Mrs Phanivong’s face lit up. That was the way forward, Laos had been waiting too long for development! Had there been no NEM, she would have stayed in Australia. The French colonists were only interested in Vietnam, to them Laos was just buffer territory. They didn’t bother educating even enough Lao to help them run the place. Vietnamese were brought in, same as the British imported Indians to Burma. Mr Phanivong said nothing about NEM; I intuited his enthusiasm was less than his wife’s. She of course had never attended classes on American imperialism and international capitalism.
Supper was one course: stewed squirrel and watercress with our sticky rice.
By noon next day I was back in Xam Nua, seeking a bicycle mechanic to overhaul Hare’s increasingly unreliable brakes. The young man who spent half an hour on the job, with excellent results, looked shocked and hurt when kip were offered.
At the guesthouse Mr Pheuiphanh and his colleagues were enjoying their two-hour lunch break. I invited them to be my guests for my last supper in Xam Nua but Mr Pheuiphanh wouldn’t hear of this. I must be his guest – he’d already ordered grilled jungle fowl for four. He seemed gratified by my reactions to Vieng Xai but the two younger men, Mr Un and Mr Phraxnyavong, looked puzzled. Although they had grown up on a diet of Party ideology, they had no personal memories of the Secret War. When they were in their teens NEM’s influence became apparent and they welcomed it. For them Vieng Xai was not a place of pilgrimage. They didn’t want to think about the past, they were focused on an illusory future that had to be good because of foreign investment and aid and all those experts and consultants coming in to help Laos. Irish people know about the awful consequences of concentrating on the past, keeping sores open, nourishing ancestral grievances. But in Laos too many are making the reverse mistake, failing to understand what the Pathet Lao struggle was all about and accepting as inevitable their country’s again becoming a pawn in a very nasty game – this one economic.
I needed to buy a camera in Xam Nua, having been stupid enough to jam the mechanism by trying to remove a film before it had rewound itself. Mr Pheuiphanh opined that for this momentous purchase an interpreter was essential: Mr Un should accompany me to the large covered market between guesthouse and riverbank.
This is the only dry goods market within a radius of 100 miles but here are no crowds of eager shoppers, as in Vientiane and Luang Prabang. The traders look pleasantly surprised when a potential purchaser of anything comes on the scene and the local demand for cameras is limited; Mr Un had to employ detective skills to track down two in a drapery stall. Outside it sat a young woman and her small daughter, absorbed in a card game. Both these Japanese cameras (US$100 and US$150 respectively) were thickly covered in fine dust, having been displayed on top of their boxes. When I rejected them for this reason they were thoroughly wiped with a damp rag, then hopefully re-offered. I pointed out that one had been dropped – a corner was severely dented – but this damage was laughingly dismissed as unimportant. Finally Mr Un found an elderly woman trader just back from a trip to Yunnan and offering a $24 dust-free Chinese camera. It proved not quite up to Pentax standards but served its purpose.
During supper I casually asked Mr Pheuiphanh how many pupils study at the Hua Khang ethnic minority boarding school but he didn’t want to talk about it. As an English-speaker with connections abroad, he may have been sensitive to outside criticisms of the ‘integration’ policy. And perhaps those criticisms, in which I join, are essentially unfair. The government’s ambition to unite Laos’s disparate tribes, eliminate ‘primitive superstitions’ and bring the benefits of modernization to all simply replicates the attitudes, not so long ago, of missionaries and the more benevolent colonial officials. Even now, in the Rich World, a belief that minorities should be allowed to preserve their own cultures is not general – and is scorned if those cultures get in the way of commercial activities.
In Xam Nua my cycling to and from Vieng Xai (twenty miles each way!) was regarded as a fabulous feat, comparable to the achievements of mythological heroes. Most Laotian roads/tracks discourage the notion of long-distance cycling, despite the bicycle’s popularity amongst townspeople. As for cycling 150 miles to Phonsavanh – the next town – everyone flatly asserted that that could not be done. In a sense, they were right.