Much too late, I discovered that Vientiane was playing host to some sort of ASEAN tourist conference. While the fact hotels were full didn’t bother me, the cheap guesthouses were also full. After running around for an hour of searching, I managed to find a place to crash.
I rented a motorbike and started cruising the city, just exploring. I’d read about potential brothels, but had no real data to back it up. “Somewhere near the night market” was all I could remember.
Quick corruption story for you here: I was looking for a particular restaurant and spotted the right street. It was just inside a one-way street going the other direction. So, I followed a couple of locals riding their bike the wrong way. Being a rather considerate fellow, I rode my bike on the empty street, not the pedestrianated sidewalk.
I pulled up to the restaurant and two guys pulled up right beside me on their bikes. One was dressed in a uniform. He indicated that I should go with him. “Huh?” I asked. He kept gesturing I should go with him. “Sure, why not,” I thought, “I’ve got no plans.”
He and his pal ride their bikes back to his police stand on the corner. He pulls out this big book and starts writing stuff and asks me for my license. He then explained that he has to give me a ticket because I went up a one-way street. “So did everyone else,” I tell him. At that exact instant, as if God smiled upon me and gestured down from on high, at that very moment, four people pulled off the road and drove up the sidewalk on the one-way street. “Bb … Ack … Pp … Look!” I sputtered.
He explained that he can’t charge them because they were driving on the sidewalk, not the street.
His plan, as it came out, was to take my drivers license (fortunately, I didn’t have my passport) and impound it until I pay a fine the next day. “Uhhhh, huhhhh,” I thought. “Officer, I leave in the morning, surely there’s something I can do now. Maybe you can let me off with a warning.”
He thought about this and decided that I could pay a hundred baht fine (since I didn’t seem to have any local currency). I flourished my wallet and made a big show of digging through it. He gestured for me to do so discretely. “Heh, heh, gotcha ya bast’d,” I thought to myself. He wanted me to be discrete, so I picked up his hat that was lying on the bench and showed him how I was putting half the bahts I had (forty of ‘em) into the brim of his hat. He said nothing, so I winked and handed him his hat. He slipped the money out and it made its way into his pocket with a well-practiced motion. I drove off and made it a point of tooting my horn and waving whenever I passed that particular corner.
OK, now back to our regularly scheduled sanuk adventure. The good news about Laos is that sanuking can be had. The bad news is I didn’t find any. I knew a few of the better hotels hosted dance clubs and karaoke joints where freelancers worked, but when I heard the prices they were asking, I decided, much like in Burma, to save my money and get me some Thai honey. So, if you’re looking for juicy stories, come back next week.
OK, here’s an almost sanuk story. I drove past a massage place a few times. It looked a bit upscale and a bit dodgy at the same time, so I figured I might find full service. The downstairs of this place was a bowling alley (of all things)! It had a stereo system playing pop music and a couple of pool tables off to the side. So far, so good. I went up the stairs and did my best to talk to the two fellas working. They didn’t know any English. They showed me two girls who were working. Both were cute, but not exactly good looking, if you know what I mean. I picked the more pleasant looking one.
One of the guys took me into a room with a couple of partitions and gave me a pair of shorts and a robe. I striped down and put these on. My girl came in a few minutes later and proceeded to give me a remarkably good massage. She was having a great time working me over, laughing and carrying on. She never so much as brushed against the little wombat or hint at any hanky panky. She was a very good girl. Damn.
The rest of my trip was quite interesting and full of interesting stories, but I’ll give you the condensed version that you might decide to travel this way as well.
Vientiane is remarkably unremarkable. It has its charm, but don’t spend more than two nights there. Trust me on this. Case in point? Vientiane has Laos’ most sacred pagoda. I went out of my way to track this thing down (OK, it was real easy to find). It’s a big, ugly, gold painted concrete structure that looks as if it was built in the seventies when cement was cheap! No painting, no murals, no tile work, just painted concrete. Boring!
Now, that being said, Vientiane is pretty cool as far as a place for hanging out in, it’s just that there are many more far interesting places.
Vang Vieng, a whistle-stop town north of Vientiane is much more interesting if you like to get stoned and/or gaze at the limestone hills. It’s great for visiting villages, spelunking and river rafting. You’ll be waist deep in pierced, tattooed and dreadlocked backpackers though.
The hills around Vang Vieng from the window of my guesthouse.
The bus ride from Vang Vieng to Luang Prabang is a m a z i n g. You go rolling through the most interesting mountainside and see extraordinarily poor village people living on the edge of the steep slopes.
Luang Prabang is beautiful. A delightful old main street, carefully preserved building and ancient temples everywhere. Every morning, about 6:30, hundreds of saffron robed monks make their way through the streets, begging for food. An astounding site!
Monks collecting alms on Luang Prabang’s main street.
If you go there, you’ll be tempted to visit the much-heralded Pak Ou caves. If you get the opportunity, don’t. They’re only famous for being famous.
Kuang Si waterfall, on the other hand, is magnificent. Don’t miss this one! This, coming from a guy who’s seen way too many waterfalls. This one’s a beaut!
I took a daylong boat ride up the Nam Ou River to visit a village that’s not supposed to be there. Really. They built a bridge down the river and had the whole town of Muang Ngoi up and move to a new location. Since then, folks have gone back and it’s now a backpacker magnet. It’s not terribly interesting, but I did get out for a few hikes to see some small villages.
No cars on Muang Ngoi’s only street; note the bomb casing on the left.
The most interesting part of this area is the number of cluster bomb cases you see everywhere. This thing looks like a cross between an aircraft fuel tank and a bomb, about five feet long. They use them for planters, fence posts, stairs, you name it. I’d read that the US dropped more bombs on Laos during the Vietnam thing then were dropped in all WWII. That’s one ton of explosives for every man, woman and child in Laos. Man, is that an accomplishment, or what?
The down side of the whole trip is, get this, you can buy a boat ticket to get to the village, but you have to rent the whole god damned boat to get back. You have to get together with a bunch of others in order to leave. The bastard boat boys have you over the barrel on this one (long story here, I won’t go into it).
While I was in Muang Ngoi I also tried some opium. You know what? It didn’t do a damn thing for me. An old hand explained the story of opium and marijuana. A few of you may know that a few decades ago marijuana kinda sucked. You had to smoke a lot of it to make it really happen. Years of careful cultivation brought us a very refined product. That was true with opium. The great masters knew their craft, cultivated the most potent poppies and knew how to process them. Today, those experts’ knowledge is lost so we’re left with something more akin to mediocre hash than the stuff from which dreams come.
Back in Luang Prabang I decided to blow the budget and take a big tourist boat upstream to Thailand. It cost something like 150USD but maaaaaan was it worth it. It was big, comfortable and oh-so enjoyable.
My luxury cruiser on the Mekong.
Now, here’s the really weird thing about Laos people, they don’t wave. You can stand on the boat and wave with both hands at the people on the shore and they’ll just stare at you. You give ‘em a big smile, they just stare at you. Weird, huh? As soon as we hit the boarder with Thailand, you could spot the Thais immediately. The left bank, smiles and waves; the right bank, blank stares. Very, very weird.
Overall impression of Laos? Engh. Lots of people told me how much they loved it, but I found that it was sort of like mix of the worse of Thailand and Cambodia without any cheap sex thrown in to make it worth the trip. I suppose I’d have a very different opinion if I’d visited in the rainy season; it’s probably much nicer with vivid greenery. Luang Prabang is certainly worth seeing, but I wouldn’t spend a lot of time traveling elsewhere unless you’re really into trekking. Now, Burma! Burma is the country to see.
Man, it felt really good to be back in Thailand. Almost like coming home. Next stop, Chiang Rai!
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