Week 35 - Luang Prabang Province, Laos
AS CAPITAL: cities go, Vientiane is pretty hard to beat. It's practically empty (less than a quarter of a million people), full of smiling happy faces, French gardens, good food, roundabouts that nobody here can seem to work out how to use, and the shimmering Mekong slithering around it in endless magnificence. We went out to the temple for herbal saunas and massages, took bikes out to the decrepit circus gifted to Laos by the Russians during the 70's ("Where is hot plate for to put dancing bear, Dmitri?" "We send hot plate to Laos already, Ivan, you son of a whore! Now make bear fight four dogs and a one-legged Chechnyan!") and somehow ended up at a shooting range.
That place was a little scary; they had a delightful selection of live ammunition, mortar rounds and explosives from the Vietnam war and the van outside sported a massive windscreen sticker screaming "KILL THEM ALL!" (we, meanwhile, pulled up on bright pink bicycles with baskets on the front that we had hired from our guesthouse). So we shot off some rounds into a target (Adam wanted to shoot a Colt .45, but the lady at the counter took one look at our skinny white arms and decided that we were far too sissy for anything bigger than a 9mm) while the lady held our hands in the right position - this place was literally in the middle of the city and had no roof, so a little caution was necessary, I guess. We were given the target as a souvenir, and rode off on our pink bicycles as total gangsterz.
From Vientiane we caught a bus over meandering mountain ranges to Vang Vieng, the party capital of Laos and easily the most surreal and ridiculous place I have ever had the mixed fortune to visit. But let's not get ahead of ourselves: first I have to say that Vang Vieng has perhaps the most stunningly beautiful natural setting of any town anywhere in the world. It lazes by a picture perfect river while jagged, monstrous limestone formations covered in thick green forest surround it on all sides. And, before the sun sets, there is a world's worth of things to do there - bicycles rides to little villages, motorbike rides into the nearby mountains, white water rafting, kayaking, all kinds of caving, swimming, rockclimbing, and floating down the river in the inner tube of a tractor tyre.
After the sun sets, however:
Vang Vieng falls in prostrate worship to six gods. Their names are Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Monica, Phoebe and Joey. Friends is not just a TV show on the main street of Vang Vieng. It's a way of life. Imagine, if you will, a row of bars stretching for a couple of hundred metres on either side of a main street. The bars are not large, but there are lots of them, competing for your business. Now imagine that every one of them - every single one - is playing Friends on several large screens. No games of pool, no live bands. Not even any goddamn Seinfeld or Simpsons. Every bar with a different episode of the same show, each night, all night. Welcome to Hell.
It doesn't end there.
Vang Vieng is freezing this time of year, especially at night, but wander down a side street away from the Friends drag and what do we have? Ah, bars full of half-naked eighteen and nineteen year olds dancing drunkenly around campfires in their bikinis, falling over logs and threatening to sue the bar owners, yelling at each other about how 'wicked' the Man U v Hull match was (these wild, beautiful, loud, stupid children being almost inevitably British), and just generally being young and boorish and tour group-y. This side of Vang Vieng reaches its peak on the river, where hundreds each day pick up their inner tubes and begin to float down the river, taking in the peace and tranquility.
Wait, did I just say "peace and tranquility"? Oh. What I meant was "giant motherfucking rave parties on each side of the river with techno music from 1997 blaring into the valleys below, copious amounts of Lao whisky being drunk from plastic buckets, mud baths and waterslides, massive cranes from which these pretty young things fling themselves into the river, and hundreds of other teenagers, just as drunken and horny and undressed as themselves".
And: it still doesn't end there.
Find your way past the Friends brigade and past the teenagers revelling in their Spring Break Girls Gone Wild-athon, and one comes inevitably to The Island in the middle of the river, which every night becomes a giant ship adrift in a sea of cheap opium, cheap magic mushrooms, cheap methamphetamines, cheap marijuana, and expensive beer. Here the people huddle around campfires muttering things to themselves and vaguely asking each other, like, what's the deal with, you know, stuff. We all tried out the mushroom shakes: I held a telepathic conversation with a tree for about an hour, Erin made friends with a skeleton who hid inside the wall and told her to burn things, and Adam composed a song on ukelele for a whale shark inside our room which was later revealed to be a broken air conditioner. Later, after an opium shake, I spent several hours with a stupid grin plastered to my face belting out "We Built This City (On Rock & Roll)" from my manically writhing hammock. It wasn't a pretty sight.
Out from behind the looking glass, we caught a bus over zigzagging hills and cliff-edge villages for six hours north to Luang Prabang, the great temple city of Laos. We had decided to stay only a night or two; Luang Prabang is a beautifully-preserved city ("and it's full of fucking hipsters," as we were told by 19-year old Jarred), but there doesn't seem much to do at first. Give it time though, and the city becomes vital and exciting; it is the top of the loop for most travellers on the Thailand-Laos-Vietnam-Cambodia circuit and thus functions as something of a gathering point - here we met up with people we'd met all over the place, most notably Canadian Ben and Christine from Chiang Mai, who dragged us along with a few more buddies to a sticky rice festival at a nearby Hmong village.
We drank and danced; we danced and drank. And then we were molested. Erin found herself cordoned off by a bunch of teenage Lao boys who rubbed suggestively against her hips as if it was a Year 5 school disco or something: one even tried to trap her with the old wrap-your-scarf-around-her-waist-so-she-can't-get-away trick. Meanwhile, a group of teenage girls dancing with me were getting increasingly close, and one kept pinching and pulling at my shirt. I backed away a little, and all of a sudden she sort of launched her face at my crotch. Which was embarassing.
And now we are finally ready to leave for our final destination in Laos - the jungle city of Luang Nam Tha. We face an eleven-hour bus ride tomorrow (to cover a paltry 200km) over what will invariably be more scenery which is so beautiful it makes me want to cry but which I will never, ever, be able to adequately describe for someone who hasn't been here. So be it. By the time I next write we will be inside the great red monster on our maps. Next week we will be in China.
Hope everyone's well,
Lachie
AS CAPITAL: cities go, Vientiane is pretty hard to beat. It's practically empty (less than a quarter of a million people), full of smiling happy faces, French gardens, good food, roundabouts that nobody here can seem to work out how to use, and the shimmering Mekong slithering around it in endless magnificence. We went out to the temple for herbal saunas and massages, took bikes out to the decrepit circus gifted to Laos by the Russians during the 70's ("Where is hot plate for to put dancing bear, Dmitri?" "We send hot plate to Laos already, Ivan, you son of a whore! Now make bear fight four dogs and a one-legged Chechnyan!") and somehow ended up at a shooting range.
That place was a little scary; they had a delightful selection of live ammunition, mortar rounds and explosives from the Vietnam war and the van outside sported a massive windscreen sticker screaming "KILL THEM ALL!" (we, meanwhile, pulled up on bright pink bicycles with baskets on the front that we had hired from our guesthouse). So we shot off some rounds into a target (Adam wanted to shoot a Colt .45, but the lady at the counter took one look at our skinny white arms and decided that we were far too sissy for anything bigger than a 9mm) while the lady held our hands in the right position - this place was literally in the middle of the city and had no roof, so a little caution was necessary, I guess. We were given the target as a souvenir, and rode off on our pink bicycles as total gangsterz.
From Vientiane we caught a bus over meandering mountain ranges to Vang Vieng, the party capital of Laos and easily the most surreal and ridiculous place I have ever had the mixed fortune to visit. But let's not get ahead of ourselves: first I have to say that Vang Vieng has perhaps the most stunningly beautiful natural setting of any town anywhere in the world. It lazes by a picture perfect river while jagged, monstrous limestone formations covered in thick green forest surround it on all sides. And, before the sun sets, there is a world's worth of things to do there - bicycles rides to little villages, motorbike rides into the nearby mountains, white water rafting, kayaking, all kinds of caving, swimming, rockclimbing, and floating down the river in the inner tube of a tractor tyre.
After the sun sets, however:
Vang Vieng falls in prostrate worship to six gods. Their names are Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Monica, Phoebe and Joey. Friends is not just a TV show on the main street of Vang Vieng. It's a way of life. Imagine, if you will, a row of bars stretching for a couple of hundred metres on either side of a main street. The bars are not large, but there are lots of them, competing for your business. Now imagine that every one of them - every single one - is playing Friends on several large screens. No games of pool, no live bands. Not even any goddamn Seinfeld or Simpsons. Every bar with a different episode of the same show, each night, all night. Welcome to Hell.
It doesn't end there.
Vang Vieng is freezing this time of year, especially at night, but wander down a side street away from the Friends drag and what do we have? Ah, bars full of half-naked eighteen and nineteen year olds dancing drunkenly around campfires in their bikinis, falling over logs and threatening to sue the bar owners, yelling at each other about how 'wicked' the Man U v Hull match was (these wild, beautiful, loud, stupid children being almost inevitably British), and just generally being young and boorish and tour group-y. This side of Vang Vieng reaches its peak on the river, where hundreds each day pick up their inner tubes and begin to float down the river, taking in the peace and tranquility.
Wait, did I just say "peace and tranquility"? Oh. What I meant was "giant motherfucking rave parties on each side of the river with techno music from 1997 blaring into the valleys below, copious amounts of Lao whisky being drunk from plastic buckets, mud baths and waterslides, massive cranes from which these pretty young things fling themselves into the river, and hundreds of other teenagers, just as drunken and horny and undressed as themselves".
And: it still doesn't end there.
Find your way past the Friends brigade and past the teenagers revelling in their Spring Break Girls Gone Wild-athon, and one comes inevitably to The Island in the middle of the river, which every night becomes a giant ship adrift in a sea of cheap opium, cheap magic mushrooms, cheap methamphetamines, cheap marijuana, and expensive beer. Here the people huddle around campfires muttering things to themselves and vaguely asking each other, like, what's the deal with, you know, stuff. We all tried out the mushroom shakes: I held a telepathic conversation with a tree for about an hour, Erin made friends with a skeleton who hid inside the wall and told her to burn things, and Adam composed a song on ukelele for a whale shark inside our room which was later revealed to be a broken air conditioner. Later, after an opium shake, I spent several hours with a stupid grin plastered to my face belting out "We Built This City (On Rock & Roll)" from my manically writhing hammock. It wasn't a pretty sight.
Out from behind the looking glass, we caught a bus over zigzagging hills and cliff-edge villages for six hours north to Luang Prabang, the great temple city of Laos. We had decided to stay only a night or two; Luang Prabang is a beautifully-preserved city ("and it's full of fucking hipsters," as we were told by 19-year old Jarred), but there doesn't seem much to do at first. Give it time though, and the city becomes vital and exciting; it is the top of the loop for most travellers on the Thailand-Laos-Vietnam-Cambodia circuit and thus functions as something of a gathering point - here we met up with people we'd met all over the place, most notably Canadian Ben and Christine from Chiang Mai, who dragged us along with a few more buddies to a sticky rice festival at a nearby Hmong village.
We drank and danced; we danced and drank. And then we were molested. Erin found herself cordoned off by a bunch of teenage Lao boys who rubbed suggestively against her hips as if it was a Year 5 school disco or something: one even tried to trap her with the old wrap-your-scarf-around-her-waist-so-she-can't-get-away trick. Meanwhile, a group of teenage girls dancing with me were getting increasingly close, and one kept pinching and pulling at my shirt. I backed away a little, and all of a sudden she sort of launched her face at my crotch. Which was embarassing.
And now we are finally ready to leave for our final destination in Laos - the jungle city of Luang Nam Tha. We face an eleven-hour bus ride tomorrow (to cover a paltry 200km) over what will invariably be more scenery which is so beautiful it makes me want to cry but which I will never, ever, be able to adequately describe for someone who hasn't been here. So be it. By the time I next write we will be inside the great red monster on our maps. Next week we will be in China.
Hope everyone's well,
Lachie
