Highlights of Lao
The most beautiful thing in Lao, an incredible country, is the Mekong River. A close second are the people, what of amazing people. To the north the mountains are sheer and full of life. The people are the same. It’s an embarrassment to me that we bombed the snot out Lao during the Vietnam conflict and they never even knew who or where we were from.
I left Pai, Thailand around the same time as two English, one from Liverpool and the other from Durham, she’s almost Scottish on our way to the Mekong River and into Lao. They took their own path with a quick stop in Chiang Mai and I turned off and went up to Thaton on the Burma border for another short beautiful boat ride down to Chiang Rai. From Chiang Rai I took an early morning van to the Mekong to the east and boarded a small riverboat to the immigration office for a one-month visa. A quick look around town and off back to the Mekong to board a big boat with more than 50 tourists and locals all heading toward Luang Prabang or Maung Pakbang, the halfway river town.
During the rainy season the Mekong swells its banks and the water runs swift with few major rapids. I found my English friends on the boat and made acquaintances from all over the world within the next two-day journey down the Mekong.
I took so many pictures in Lao its hard to pick the best ones but here are some that follow the story line.
Luang Prabang is a little touristy but definitely worth the time spent there. It’s an international melting pot of construction, food, cultures, and people. South East Asia isn’t known for their bread but France is and it shows up in Lao, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Luang Prabang has an ease about it with cafes, art galleries, and local woven fabric shops.
In the heat of the day, people can take a break at La Pistoche, a public pool area with a restaurant and bar. There’s a bowling alley that has quite the reputation with the young tourists where they party well past curfew and then go immediately to their guesthouses. There’s an Australian Sports Bar where people can find out what their favorite teams are doing and have some great food while doing it.
Some of the waterfalls in the area are amazing and refreshing again to get out of the heat if only for an afternoon. The waterfalls are only a short tuk-tuk ride from Luang Prabang and well worth the afternoon.
We took a bus over hairpin turn dirt roads over the mountains with a couple day stop on the Nong Khiaw River for some caving and sight seeing. It is a quaint little river town right on the main road crossing northern Lao through jutting limestone mountains covered in impenetrable jungle and river valleys.
The bus ride from Nong Khiaw was long and relatively uncomfortable but the scenery made up for it even at night in the torrential rain. There were landslides and fallen trees in our path but we managed without too many delays. We stopped one night in a small town and headed it out the next morning for Viengxay.
Viengxay was the communist head quarters for the Lao Peoples Revolutionary Army and Vietnamese communists that were hidden out of sight while the U.S. bombed Vietnam AND Viengxay, Lao, which wasn’t in the war. The caves are an amazing feat of survival and strategically located. Even in the fields the locals would cull their cows and chickens from anything that looked domesticated so the planes flying overhead wouldn’t think there were people living there. A tribute to desire whether right or wrong. We stayed here a few days before going into Vietnam but I came back to Lao twice more and will continue with Lao and get into Vietnam next blog.
Two months later I flew into Vientiane, Lao capital, to visit a high school friend and to get two-two month visas for Thailand. He lives with his beautiful wife and newborn baby and a stack of family support on the banks of the Mekong River. Every night the sun sets to the west over the Mekong and I continued to take pictures of its beauty and of the metropolitan city. Vientiane is growing internationally into a powerhouse of South East Asia complete with massive golf courses and western grocery stores and Beer Lao. I’ll be back.
I flew south to Pakse, which is renovating a large section of its main roads down town and went directly out to 4,000 islands for a couple weeks of writing and exploring. I didn’t have to go far to find a nice place to stay. I do have to go back because I only saw a few islands and I know the deeper I go the more I’m going to like it. Of course ran into a couple from Spain and a couple from England and we had a ball fishing the Mekong and checking out the waterfalls on the Mekong.
The Khone Phapheng Waterfalls stopped the French from turning the Mekong into a major trade route deep into western China. Explorers were convinced it could be done and spent years surveying, dynamiting, searching for a way past the falls. Time, distance, Malaria, Typhoid, jungle, heat, and rock, all warriors of South East Asia, fought against the explorers. Impressive.
4000 Islands is a tranquil place full of village life and fishing, all focused on the Mekong River and the islands. There are no main roads, just motorcycle and ox cart tracks. Life seems easy.
