Whiskey in the jar

Phonsavan :: Laos

One part 2000 year old mystery, one part Vietnam-era carpet bombing.

Places: Vientiane, Phonsavan & The Plain of Jars.

Coolest thing I did: Walked between two of the Jars sites along a ride pock-marked with massive bomb craters. It's amazing to see just how much life returns to normal. And how much never will.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The ANZ bank is massive in both Laos and Cambodia. They have ATMs everywhere.

My first night in Vientiane taught me a valuable lesson about splurging after days of cold water and guest houses on a nice hotel room all to yourself - first check if your room happens to share a wall with one of the more lively bars in town. Turns out my sunset view of the Mekong was shared by Bor Pen Nyang on the same floor as me in the next building and they played pretty lose with the 11:30pm curfew for all bars. I kind of needed the sleep after the night bus so I ended up simply sleeping in until lunch time and deciding to not fight it but simply go to the bar the next night and stay there until closing time. An interesting mix of young Laotian kids, backpackers, prosti...sorry, bar girls, and the constantly drunk American men in their late 40s or early 50s that seemed to be everywhere in Vientiane. No "dates" like the older German blokes, they simply seemed to be there to get drunk all day and occasionally utter unintelligible nonsense at anyone close enough. I suspect they're too young to be Vietnam Vets, so I was curious about the story of why there were so many there, but not one of them were in any way conversational, so the mystery remains.

The plus side is before going over I could sit on my own balcony and watch the sun turn red as it sunk below the Thai hills just on the other side of the Mekong River. That's pretty cool.

My sightseeing day of Vientiane started late due to my shared wall with the Bor (which is how I hear South Africans saying "bar" in my head) but that's ok, because there isn't really all that much to see. The nations' most important pagoda is a big gold thing called Pha That Luang, but to be honest after Burma a gold stupa has to be pretty damn awesome to impress me at the moment. The twin Wats (which I think means temple) of Si Saket & Hophakaew have a little bit extra, with the former being home to a surrounding wall covered in niches holding 1000s of ceramic or silver mini-Buddha's and the later being the long term home of the Emerald Buddha that now sits in the Royal Palace in Bangkok.

It seems like when Laos was the big wheel in South East Asia they acquired the town of Chiang Mai (now in Northern Thailand) and along with it the Emerald (really jade) Buddha. It sat in their capital of Luang Prabang for years, until the capital was shifted to Vientiane and it sat nicely in a purpose built Wat in Hophakaew. By then however, Thailand (then called Siam) was the new power in town. The Siamese General Thong Duang (who would later be King of Siam) showed up with his army and sacked Vientiane, took one look at the Emerald Buddha and went "I'm having that". It's been in Bangkok ever since, and is now considered the emblem of Thailand. That's got to hurt a bit if you're from Laos. I'm sure it does.

Far more interesting than the ancient history of course is the recent stuff. A 1km walk out of town takes you to the COPE centre, which has the job of providing Laotians with prosthetic limbs. The reason so many prosthetic limbs are needed is also explained in fairly graphic detail, and like the genocide tour of Phnom Penh it will pull you up a bit. Simply put, for about a decade during the Vietnam war the US air force dropped somewhere north of 2 million tons of bombs over Laos (and to a lesser extent Eastern Cambodia), much of that cluster munitions, which are basically big bombs with hundreds of little bombs inside. Perhaps 25% of these did not detonate on impact, so are still out there somewhere. Farmer, fishermen, all sorts of people have been finding them by accident and losing limbs since. COPE is responsible for finding these people (as many of them in rural areas don't know they can get help) and then fitting and building the limbs and providing physio and training on how to use them. Right at the end is a video of the signing of a UN convention against the further use of cluster munitions, in large part to the far more recent use in the former Yugoslavia in the late 1990s. I was glad to see Australia was one of the first to sign it, and perhaps not surprised neither the US or Russia have.

So in the interests of time I decided to take a Lao Airlines flight from Vientiane to Phonsavan to see the Plain of Jars, mostly to avoid a 12 hour bus ride covering the 250ish km to get here. That tells you something about the state of the roads in Northern Laos. It was a 30 minute flight and mostly clear so you can see out the window at the flat red earth giving way to jungle covered mountains and start to see why it might take 12 hours, as you don't see any paved roads up here. There was a fair bit of cloud over coming in to land and there's nothing like being in a turbo prop in a bumpy landing over mountains on an airline you've only heard of because they made international news last October crashing a plain into the Mekong and killing everyone on board to get the heart started. However we did get a glimpse as the hills and forest end and the plain opens up to the horizon. What you can also make out is bomb craters, even now, making it a bit like the surface of the moon.

The town of Phonsavan is a new creation, with the original village of  almost completely destroyed during the 60s by carpet bombing, and it has to be said without the sheer luck of being located next to the Plain of Jars it wouldn't be worth visiting. It's basically one dusty street with a few tour agencies, guest houses and Pho places, and not much else. Add to the fact it's bitterly cold this time of year it doesn't really lend itself to hanging around just enjoying the ambiance. After lunch and getting myself booked on a tour the Laotians kept telling me where the market was, so I thought I should go to the market. If you've been to any 3rd world market, it's much the same, with non-refrigerated meat the main smell and a mish-mash of stuff made in China for sale. The only really interesting bit was watching two blokes trying to buy a live chicken from a young woman with wicker cages full of them. The two guys seemed to be saying things along the lines of "This isn't the best chicken, but I'll take it of your hands for a discount", and her going "Crap! This is the best chicken you'll find here. I should be charging you double!" and a lot of back and forth, mostly involving the chicken being poked in ways that it didn't seem entirely comfortable with.

So on to the Plain of Jars, which is a mystery wrapped inside a 2000 year old sandstone jar. Basically for reasons no-one can fathom, some people (no-one is sure of who) carved hundreds of big stone jars (the largest is taller than me) and placed them in clusters in this one part of Laos. Of course there was no Laos back then, and without any form of written history of contemporary ruins it's left to total speculation as to what the jars were for. The most popular are funerary urns (what you put the ashes of dead people in) amongst the egg heads, however the Laotians seem to like the idea they were filled with Lao Lao (rice whiskey) and there were some massive parties up here in the hills. Not sure if it's more likely, but it's a much better story.  They're set in the most spectacular locations, even if your guide will spend a lot of time telling you to avoid the edge of the massive bomb craters everywhere.

The local people are mostly from elsewhere in Laos, with most of the originals fleeing overseas as refugees and they've somehow come to peace with the fact they live in a land strewn with unexploded ordinance (UXO to the bomb nerds in the UN). Apparently every now and then cows will simply stray into the wrong spot and (as the guide explained to me) get turned into hamburger. That's kind of seen as a cost of doing business. The wet season sees three months of constant rain, which tend to uncover more buried munitions so each planting season is a new adventure. So what do these people do? They melt the bomb casings down and make cutlery out of them for sale in home kilns. They also made stuff for the tourists, but I was a little concerned if people were going out and looking for scrap from unexploded bombs in order to make me a key chain in the shape of a dove. I don't know if we want to be encouraging that.

While we were in town the Mine Advisory Group were doing a routine inspection of the school for UXOs before the term starts. The mind boggles at how you rationalise that in your mind as a parent. My only thought is living here must be worth it, perhaps the farmland is especially good, or the tourist dollars help otherwise it seems like a terrible compromise, like those people who live on the slopes of volcanoes in Central America.

You look at the fact there was a bombing of Laos on average every 8 minutes for 9 or so years and wonder what mentality allowed that to seem like a good idea, but the consequences are most likely the furthest from the minds of those planning and executing these things. The Vietnam war was going badly for the Americans because the Viet Cong were constantly able to resupply themselves with Chinese weapons and more men via the Ho Chi Minh trail which ran through Eastern Laos and Cambodia, so the obvious military option (if you're a super power who has built the most devastating war machine in human history) is to simply keep bombing it until it stops. It's the same mentality that allowed the CIA to train local minorities inside Laos to fight against it's own Communist forces and to turn a blind eye when those same minorities buy they're weapons and provisions using money made from growing opium poppies. The politicians give you an objective (keep the Communists out of South Vietnam or Laos) and you do whatever you're allowed to under international law to achieve that objective. An Army that wasn't willing to do whatever it took to win wouldn't actually be a very good army. However, when you see the outcomes, you see all the people suffering and then you STILL won't sign treaties banning the use of weapons that would stop it from happening again then the blame goes squarely at the feet of the politicians. At the end of the day, the soldiers follow their orders.

So having diverted myself off track a little bit to see something you'll only see in Laos it's time to start heading back towards Thailand for the final week in time to get back to Bangkok for my flight home. In one short week it all comes to an end for now.

Relaxistan

Vientiane  :: Laos

What do you mean "dolphins"?

Places: Kratie, Si Phan Don & Vientiane.

Coolest thing I did: Kayaked down the Mekong River. Even if we didn't see dolphins that day.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: There was a CIA operative in Laos in the 1960s called Tony Poe who was the alleged inspiration for Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. He used to staple the ears of dead Pathet Lao (communist guerillas) to his status reports to the CIA HQ in Bangkok.

Kratie is not the most attractive town you're ever going to visit, but due to the fact it lies just south of a particular bend on the Mekong River where the largest known pod of fresh water Irrawaddy Dolphins still in existence outside the Indian Subcontinent lives you're likely to stop here. While there is a nice sunset over the river to be watched with beer in hand, unfortunately the only tourist style bar that faces the river has it's view of the sunset blocked by the local Port Authority office, which seems to be permanently closed. Still, it's nice to sit there and watch the local Tuk Tuk drivers play kick about with a wicker ball on the river front instead of going home at the end of the day.

There are apparently somewhere in the order of 70 fresh water dolphins living pretty consistently off the shore of the village of Kampi so you either hire a mountain bike and ride the 16km from Kratie to Kampi or you hire a Tuk Tuk to take you there. Seeing as I found it suspiciously hard to find where the bikes came from (I'd ask a guest house that advertised and they'd look at me funny and say they'd have to call someone) I just gave up and got a Tuk Tuk. It was a nice drive through the long stilted timber houses up the river, with kids invariably waving at you and yelling "Hello!" at the top of their voice, whether they were on a pushbike or rammed between 3 other family members on a motor scooter. The height of the houses and the amount of road washed away tells you just how much water must come through during the wet season.

You get a compulsory boat out to see the dolphins, with a proper ticket office and everything which shares the work around. This sounds like a step up from the dolphin boat mafia that apparently used to hold sway over things in Kampi. Apparently anyone trying to see the dolphins from the shore was fairly heavily intimidated.

So the driver I had seemed pretty good, even though he spoke no English he knew his job. He puttered out to a gap in the small islands peppering the river, tied the boat up to a partially submerged tree and pointed out to the general areas he expected dolphins, then he sat there and chain smoked. Sure enough, in about 5 mins time you started to see random fins lazily rolling out of the water, and not too long after groups of two or three sticking their heads out the water. Unlike the dolphins we're used to, these guys have no "nose" so kind of look like friendly versions of the aliens out of the Alien movies. They seem quite lazy, never really in a hurry to show up, but when they do you get the added benefit of them not being too much of a hurry to dive back under either. The only downer was when some clowns showed up with all this film gear, water proof mikes and the like (Americas, of course) and parked their boat directly in front of ours, in the process scaring the dolphins away and then complaining how they weren't seeing any dolphins today. If I was a bit annoyed, my driver was absolutely livid. You could have weaponised the stares he was giving the Cambodian dude driving their boat. I suspect he might be getting a visit from the dolphin boat mafia at some point.

So you could say I've become quite used to the pointless milling around, picking up of random people and open arguments about who sits where on buses in Cambodia, but the journey I took to cross the boarder in Laos leaves them all in the shade. Leaving for Don Det, 20km across the boarder into Laos at 7am in a minibus designed for about 13 people with 21 souls on board didn't bode well. There's nothing like being  rammed in a row with 4 people that really should seat 3 on roads so bad 150km takes 3 hours to get you in a bit of a mood, but that was all put in perspective when we got to Stung Treng, the last town in Cambodia in order to join the "big bus" and found for the 12 tourists on our minibus they only had 3 seats left. The bloke tried to gamely convince us that maybe we weren't all going to Laos after all, but we weren't to be swayed. So instead one couple just went and took two seats, and the rest of us decided the older lady could have the last one and the rest of us sat on a roadside waiting for something to happen for about an hour and a half. Eventually another minibus full of Cambodians shows up so they ram 8 of us in the two back rows and the other girl being sat in a row with two Cambodian mothers and their combined total of 6 kids. An hour later we're at the border and are introduced to the $2 "stamp" fee that we each have to pay to both sets of border guards. Then we get to past the Laotian side and there's literally nothing. After sitting around in the sun for about an hour someone works out we've got the number of the guest house in Cambodia that some of us booked the tickets at so it's left to me as the only one with roaming to call a few times and convince the guy that it's not somehow our fault we're stuck at the border while he happily keeps hanging up on me. Eventually he agrees to send someone to get 3 of the 9 of us and some blokes shows up in a brand new van. So new in fact it's got no license plates and the dealership sticker still on it. Credit to the Laotian people, he decided bugger what he'd been told, he was going to play backpack Tetris and fit all of us in the van. So after a 4 hour trip that took around 9 hours, we puttered over the river on a longtail boat to the island of Don Det in Si Phan Don - the 4000 islands.

I think if you had to plan to build a backpacker paradise where everyone sits around an semi rural idyll and does not too much then Don Det would probably come to mind. It's basically an island with two sandy paths named Sunrise and Sunset lined with cheap restaurants on bungalows jutting out over the river. The only real activities are hire a bike and ride out to the bigger Don Kohn and see some waterfalls, swim in the unfortunately-murky-brown-at-this-time-of-year waters of the Mekong or take a full day kayak trip down to look at harder to reach water falls and (possibly) dolphins. I did all these things, with the exception of see the dolphins as the pod here is much smaller and aren't as reliably seen. I didn't mind too much because I'd just seen the dolphins in Kratie, but I felt for those who only were getting this one chance to see them. Still, that was probably my favourite day, with a bit of honest exercise and it ending with us paddling back to the beach at the end of town just as the sun was touching the horizon in the blood red way it does in these parts.

The rest of the time in Don Det generally involves lying about in hammocks or moving from meal to meal and generally getting a bit messed up on a horrible rice whiskey/moonshine called Lao Lao that varies in strength and quality from bottle to bottle. It tends to go best with something strong, like ginger ale, but even then the hangovers will give you nose bleeds. If you want to smoke weed then it's pretty freely available, and there's enough places in town that advertise cookies, "smart" shakes, or quite uniquely,  "happy" mashed potatoes. I suspect it's that last part that might be putting the locals in two minds about their tourist money windfall. Don Det is a more laid back version of the once world famous, never ending party that used to happen in a place called Vang Vieng, about 6 hours north of the capital Vientiane. Here the phenomenon of tubing took off, where you take truck tyre tubes up the river and float down through various river side bars with a seemingly endless supply of things that it would be questionable for people who have been drinking heavily and taking a lot of drugs to do, like swings and hastily constructed zip lines. About 2 or 3 backpackers would die a season as a result and the conservative rural community wasn't so hot on people walking around wearing nothing but their swim ware and glowing body paint hopped up on meth. So about the middle of last year the Laotian government stepped in and shut the party down for good.

I thought about that every time I interacted with a fairly unfriendly or unhappy looking local, which was most of the time. There seems to be some Laotians that grudgingly accept the money, or those that came from somewhere else to be part of it, and are generally high or drunk themselves, and I found that a little bit sad. It's a lovely place, and I don't see it going too far wrong due to the fact the crowd is a bit better behaved than some of the party beaches in South East Asia, mostly obeying the 11 o'clock curfew but it must put you in two minds when your kids are growing up around hordes of fairly constantly stoned foreigners, yet the money they pay for bungalows and food is putting those kids through school.

That said, I'd recommend anyone coming through this part of the world they have to stop here before it starts to develop. The 9 of us that shared the horror bus journey were a pretty diverse group of nationalities and ages and kept finding each other for meals (I shared a bungalow with two of them) and all found things to like about the place. It's one that could seriously drag you in for weeks if you let it, seeing as you're paying about $5 a night to sleep and then not quite that again per meal the money wouldn't be much of an issue either.

So reluctantly I left before all the others as soon as the two week-to-go mark hit me and I realised I could be sitting in buses for half the rest of my trip if I didn't get a wriggle on. I spent about 4 hours in the crossroads town of Pakse, which people only tend to end up in on their way to someone else waiting for the 13 hour night bus to Vientiane. It was a strange bus, everyone got a bed instead of a seat, but those beds were designed for stoic, uncomplaining people who are all 5ft tall. During my time in Pakse I took a picture of a cat sleeping in a Buddha statues' lap, and saw a sunset. That was about it.

What I discovered about Vientiane is if you want to get offered a lot of drugs, do what I did:

• Be white
• Only have cold showers for about a week
• Don't shave or wash your hair
• Get roughly zero sleep on the bus
• Prepare for that bus by drinking too much Lao Lao the night before and have a hangover that just would not end
• Be denied checking into the hotel for several hours because you're too early so wander the streets in a daze

By about the third block from the hotel I'd been offered weed, opium, oxycontin, heroin and most often something called ya ba, which is apparently a literal translation into the Thai for madness drug. Apparently the drug lords of the Golden Triangle were worried about the DEA convincing their governments to comply with opium eradication programs and paying the peasants to grow cabbages instead of poppies so they diversified into making industrial quantities of low grade meth amphetamine in the same jungle labs they were refining heroin in and flooding Asia as far down as the Indonesia with it. I suppose this morning I looked like I either needed it, or had taken too much of it.

So my first real day of looking at Vientiane starts tomorrow, but from what I've seen so far the Laotian elite like the same giant black Land Rovers the Cambodian elite are into and both countries have a strange love for outdoor group exercise. This evening on the water front I saw hundreds of people involved in an open air aerobics class which apparently is free to anyone. Like the Cambodians, they all do it in whatever they happen to be wearing, be it jeans or a miniskirt, further adding to the mystery of whether South East Asians actually sweat.