Where I strangely enough, go bowling.
Places: Luang Prabang, Pakbeng, Huay Xai & Chiang Mai.
Coolest thing I did: Swam in the luminescent blue water of the Kuang Si Waterfalls. Lucky you go in off a rope swing because it's so cold you'd probably chicken out if you went in slowly.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: Monks do everything at the temples and monasteries here - I saw three of them repairing a brick wall dressed in full robes. Felt sorry for the one chiselling away and getting brick dust in his eyes. I guess safety goggles count as worldly possessions and are thus banned. But strangely chisels are not.
Laos isn't a country to be tackled with a short amount of time as I discovered again on the 8 hour minibus ride from Phonsavan to Luang Prabang. Thankfully this is much quicker than the 10 hours taken by the normal bus that picks up strangers every 10 to 15 mins. This is mostly due to the fact the minibus drivers think they're rally drivers and there's about 250kms of beautiful mountain road to cross which they tend to try and do at top speed. Thankfully it's asphalt all the way now so unless you get motion sickness (like one poor Chilean girl who threw up pretty much for 8 hours solid) it's a much better way to travel. You pass along forested roads lined with small villages at break neck speed, so taking pictures is pretty much out of the question because you're too busy holding on for your life. While the driver only stopped once for a food and toilet break he did stop twice to buy fresh chicken (and I mean fresh - the women who sold them broke their necks and put them in a plastic bag for him, which he then just put in the back with our luggage).
So where do you start with Luang Prabang? It's pretty much the premier tourist destination of Northern Laos and if you're heading this way you're going to at least pass through it. It's the old Imperial capital situated on a peninsula formed by the confluence of the Mekong and Nam Kahn rivers, which means it's got a palace and a whole load of temples. It's also been developed in such a way that it's kind of like Disneyland for old French People. Even the cheap guest houses are teak floored, you can get very good croissants & there isn't really anything to do in the town except look at Buddha statues. It gives the whole place a very civilized feel, which made me wonder why I was still seeing a lot of 20 year olds wandering around town in the mid afternoon hung over. That mystery would be solved later.
My first day was spent doing what you're supposed to do, getting up early to watch monks get harassed by camera wielding Chinese tourists while the locals are trying to give them alms, going to see the Palace and looking at a lot of temples. There was a King of Laos living here right up until the Communists got rid of him in 1975 so the palace is full of modern King stuff. What I learned is if you're the king, people from other countries give you heaps of stuff. Our offering of a boomerang was a bit soft when placed next to a cabinet of gold and silver Vishnus from India. I also learned the King had a thing for Cadillacs of the 1950s, but then persisted in driving them well into the 1970s. Compared to the Thai King the King of Laos lived a much less Hollywood lifestyle.
I enjoyed my day of going to see the stuff outside town a bit better. I got up at the crack of dawn again to get on a boat to chug up the Mekong to see the Pak Ou Caves. While it's frigid on the water at 8am (you can see mist rising directly off the surface, like smoke) you get to see the layered mountain ranges that you'd expect from a Chinese watercolour as a backdrop to fishermen casting their nets, rice being grown and Oxen grazing away. The Caves themselves are famous for being chock full of Buddhas of all different sizes, and it's pretty cool to have the boat pull up to some stairs that run from the surface of the water and then climb up into the caves. On the way we stopped at a village whose prime manufactured good was home made rice whiskey in a bottle that contains either a scorpion or a snake (or sometimes if you're lucky, both). I'm not sure what magic powers it gives you, but I assume one of them is drunkenness.
The afternoon was spent going to the Kuang Si waterfalls, which involves another hair raising minivan rive through the rice paddies to falls you could only describe as stunning. I'm not sure if it's the sediment that gives the water it's radiant sky blue colour but after the main drop of the falls there's level after level of smaller cascades all turning from white water back to glowing blue. Towards the bottom there is also a tree with a rope swing you can climb up to and use to avoid thinking about how cold the water is before you jump into one of the pools deep enough to swim in. It's cold enough to knock the air out of you as you go under the first time (or in my case, the only time).
There is a night market that pretty much shuts down half the main street so they can sell the same 3 or 4 items over and over again. It's a novelty at first, but when you actually want to get anywhere the fact the stalls are rammed so close together it becomes a bit of a nightmare to get anywhere. I simply don't understand how so many can survive selling those baggy pants with elephants printed on them the gap year crowd seem to fall in love with the second they leave the airport in Bangkok. I'd set up a stall that sold silly looking baggy pants with tigers on them instead. You need product differentiation to move some units.
Due to the fact that the town is basically being run for old French People and not backpackers they've tastefully arranged all the bars behind the hill (whose name is pronounced "pussy" causing no end of amusement) that divides the town and all of them tend to close down even earlier than the 11pm curfew. I'd been sitting around the fire pit at one bar talking to a couple of Austrian guys who decided that we'd eat a Lao BBQ and then go to the bowling alley. This was an object lesson in the kind of information you don't get when you get too old to stay at hostels. A Lao BBQ is basically where they take the middle of your table away, drop a bucket of glowing hot coals into it, put a cone shaped hot plate on top and then give you a stack of meat, vegies and eggs to cook on it. One the bar closed at 11 we went down the end of the bar street and got in a tuk-tuk with another 5 people which formed a convoy going out of town to the bowling alley.
Apparently it's a poorly kept secret the bowling alley laughs at the mandatory curfew and along with actual bowling you can also buy beer or Lao Lao by the bottle. The Austrians wanted to see if we could get buckets (a SE Asia phenomenon where you buy a 1L tub off booze and soft drink per person) but it turns out if we wanted them we'd have to make our own. So we got the way-to-big ice bucket from behind the bar (though they had no ice) and seeing as our choice was warm 7Up or cold Fanta we ended up with a giant bucket of rice whiskey and Fanta. Needless to say the bowling is secondary and I didn't even score 150 and still somehow managed to win. But I'm pretty sure everyone ended up taking the wrong go, often taking their own second shot and then the next persons first. Much fun had by all. It also pretty much wrote off my last day in LP as well.
So in order to get back to Thailand to come home I decided to take the two day slow boat instead of the 18 hour bus ride to the town of Huay Xai which marks the point of the Mekong where you can cross into Thailand. It's a fairly comfortable trip and again while it's very cold in the morning you get to see lots of limestone mountains, rural scenes and things like a barge carrying a truck, which in turn is carrying two elephants. There isn't much to do but read, chat with people, drink beer and watch the world go by, but it's also a decent way to travel and I'm glad I skipped the bus. The town of Pakbeng is the only large settlement about half way, but it's simply a street of guest houses and places for tourists to eat and drink. There are many more people going downriver the other way and you can tell them because they're all almost universally 21 and not one of them has enough clothes because they've just spent 2 weeks in Thailand wearing shorts and thongs. It also means that if you're coming the other way you're the last boat into town (it takes longer upriver) and you're having to beg and borrow for a room to stay in. One guest house owner let me stay in the upstairs room in her own house, and told me I was lucky because she'd had 10 people in her two upstairs rooms the night before. Seeing as she charged me full price anyway I'd say it's not a bad business running a guest house there.
Hauy Xai is another one street town which you feel has just been choked to death by progress. It was for a long time the only place to cross into it's sister town of Chaing Kong on the Thai side and there was a local industry of small ferry boats crossing back and forth, priced entirely by agreement, however last December a nice new road bridge with proper border controls on both ends opened up and you can now pretty much avoid both towns if you don't end up showing up a night like we did. I'm sure they'll find a new industry, it sounds like they always have. During the CIA's secret war in Laos apparently more Laotian heroin passed over the border bound for Bangkok and abroad in Huay Xai than anywhere else along the border. During the Laotian Civil war (pretty much contemporary with the Vietnam War) the CIA was training minority guerilla armies in the north to fight the Pathet Lao Communist guerillas. Most notable of these ethnic groups were the Hmong, many of who had to flee to America after the Communist won, and then helped form the plot of the excellent Clint Eastwood movie Gran Torino. One of the side effects of this was these various ethnic groups were already growing opium to smuggle into China, and later Thailand and ramped up production in order to buy extra weapons for the cause, which the CIA didn't condone but did nothing to stop. Much of that ended up refined in Northern Thailand and then eventually shot into the arms of Vietnam Vets between Bangkok and New York.
Crossing the bridge into Thailand is a pretty stark reminder of just how much poorer Laos is when compared to it's bigger neighbour. Even the rice paddies you drive through on the way from Chiang Rai to Chiang Mai look more organised. When the driver stopped for us to buy food at 7-11 (I avoided the 7 Baht hot dog - about 20c...) and you see how nice the cars are and note the dual carriageway and the banked mountain turns. you realise things have changed since the Thai economy collapsed in 1990s. Which of course was the last time I was in Chiang Mai, and to tell the truth besides the moat at walls around the city (which are more restored than I remember, but my memory of this place seems to be failing me) I don't recognise much of it at all. While it did cater to all tourists on all budgets I remember the backpacker scene being a bit grungy and disorganised. Now you can only describe it as backpacking on an industrial scale. Backpackers and money go in one end and Elephant rides, Hill tribe treks, plates of Green Curry and elephant pants come out the other. The old city walls are now rammed with hostels, guest houses, motor scooter rental agencies and eateries to suit all levels of backpacker budget, there are endless trekking agencies, massage places, tattoo parlours and completely new to me, gyms for training at Thai Boxing in. There seems to be no end of skinny white guys with fresh tattoos walking out of these places looking like they've been comfortably having their arses kicked for a fortnight or so. Luckily there also loads of places to buy "supplements" if you need to bulk up a bit and Pad Thai isn't going to do it for you.
The idea of tourists who have no training learning Thai Kickboxing seems ludicrous to me. One of my most vivid memory of Bangkok in the 1990s was the tuk tuk driver who after not being discouraged by us not wanting to visit a whorehouse or buy any drugs asked if we wanted to see boxing. So we said yes and about 20 minutes later we're in something that can only be described as a big shed full of Thais (and no white people) gambling on two blokes brutally kicking each other in the head. It was the most out there thing I'd ever seen (this was pretty early in my travelling days) but the idea you'd want blokes that can do that sparring with you after a weeks' training seems a bit mad to me. But I guess I'm not their target market.
So this is pretty much the end. All I do now is fly back to Bangkok and get on another plane to Sydney and Real Life, once again.