by Jamie Maslin
Further up the road (much was dirt track) the landscape became amazingly lush and verdant, broken only by the occasional isolated village made up of wooden homes on stilts with thatched walls and roofing. At one little hamlet, nearly every dwelling which backed onto the road had dried fish hanging up for sale, swaying gently in the breeze from strings attached to overhead awnings.
“They eat that stuff with saltwater to make a soup,” said Stefan. “It’s not bad. Quite tame compared to some of the food you’ll find here. I once tried something that I thought tasted strange, so asked what it was. And once I heard, I didn’t try it again.”
“What was it?”
“Buffalo shit.”
“Shit?”
“Yes.”
I’d heard of indigenous people from the forests of the far northern hemisphere eating moss from the stomach cavity of a reindeer, so asked if this was what he meant.
“No. It is from the intestine. Proper shit. Apparently with enough sauces and spices it is okay for them. But it’s not okay for me. It’s eaten as a dipping sauce with minced beef.”
“Yuck.”
“Yeah. When it comes to food in Laos, logic gets turned upside down. A lot of the bits of meat we consider the best cuts, Laotians just aren’t interested in. I have a German friend here, a butcher, who makes traditional German sausages, and whenever the locals slaughter a cow they call him up so he can come down and take the fillets and sirloins—all the bits that they don’t want. They want the tits and skin and tail—it’s much more interesting to them. Dog is popular. If you hit one on the road the locals will be out to get it for the pot. Saw some of my neighbors killing cobras to eat the other day, skewered them with sharpened bamboo.”
Stefan explained that his butcher friend was doing a roaring trade supplying steaks to restaurants for foreigners, and had pretty much got the market sewn up; but when the Laos tax office came to visit him they concluded quite the opposite.
“Because the profession ‘butcher’ doesn’t really exist in Laos, when my friend’s Laotian wife filled out the forms registering the business, the officials insisted she put down ‘meatball factory’ instead. So when the tax inspectors came to visit him this was what they were expecting, not a tiny premises with only him working there. They saw him covered in blood and said sympathetically, ‘We will give you a discount.’ In Laos, if people see a farang working manually they assume he’s on very hard times.”
We weren’t long on the road together before the aesthetic splendor of Laos’ mountain scenery began to reveal itself. The sort of peaks you might see depicted on a Taoist scroll jutted near-vertically out of a fertile countryside thick with foliage, above which bright cumulus clouds drifted; sky-borne beacons illuminated by a pure and radiant light.
My destination today was a place called Vang Vieng. I had heard it mentioned several times before in relation to an activity known as “tubing:” renting a tractor inner-tube and floating down the Nam Song River on it, while taking in the backdrop of limestone mountains and stopping off at riverside bars along the way. It sounded fun, but as we approached the town—little more than a few streets of colonial bungalows, wooden homes and low-rise concrete buildings—Stefan ventured that it might not be my kind of place; maybe, he suggested, I should continue on through, keep going with him further north. He wasn’t forthcoming as to why this might be. So on having another look at the mountain scenery, I decided to stick with my original plan. After all, it looked like paradise. Unfortunately, as I was to soon discover, it was a paradise thoroughly defiled.
My initial mistake of deciding to stop here was compounded by a second—taking Stefan’s recommendation of staying at a particular guest house on the outskirts of town, where he dropped me and we said our goodbyes. For had I wandered into the center of Vang Vieng before paying for a night’s accommodation, I would indeed have decided to pass on through the place. What I found almost defied comprehension, at least to my mind. Row upon row of cafés and bars lined the town, where curious-looking creatures sat, young Western “backpackers”—and I use the term very loosely—staring like zombies at television screens playing reruns of three television shows, and three only: Friends, Family Guy and Southpark, but mostly Friends. I don’t mean to say that a couple of establishments were showing these, but absolutely loads of them, one after the other, and playing them back to back. I couldn’t quite get my head around why this might be, nor why the clientèle seemed so content to spend their time in such a culturally rich part of Asia mesmerized by such crap, but then I encountered up close the typical clientèle that came here and everything became apparent.
Making my way past places selling opium tea, magic mushroom pizzas, and marijuana-laced milkshakes, I headed down a side street and happened upon a large group of around fifty Western guys and girls in their early twenties, letting it all hang out in bikinis and shorts, drunk and high out of their minds, stumbling around by an inner-tube hire center, having seemingly completed their afternoon’s “tubing.” One girl displayed a deep cut on her knee that was streaming blood down her leg. Scribbled in body paint and marker pen over nearly all of the tubers’ exposed flesh were imbecilic messages like “I love cock” and “kiss me: I’m wasted.” Several were latched onto each other at the mouth swapping spit, near humping in the street. A girl with “bum bandit” scribbled above her backside started to vomit. Doubling over, she retched across the sidewalk in great heaves, showering her bare feet with sick, while others howled at the top of their voices with inane approval.
God, I hated this place.
I stared on as a detached outsider looking in, as if having arrived at some odd alien universe. But why had they gravitated here, in the middle of rural Laos amid such scenic wonder? And what did the locals, who traditionally cover up their arms and legs, and even refrain from holding hands in public, make of it? I felt embarrassed to be a Westerner. Making my way around the town past endless tacky cafés showing the same television shows as before, an odd uncharacteristic feeling enveloped me. It took a while before I identified it, but then it hit me—I felt lonely for the first time since setting off from Hobart. A firm believer in the adage, “You are never less alone than when alone,” I nearly never feel lonely when I travel, least of all when by myself, but in Vang Vieng, I felt it.
To escape the morons and formulate a plan, I made my way down to the banks of the beautiful Nam Song River, where, after a bit of searching, I found a spot to myself. Sitting on a large smooth, warm rock, I looked out across the quivering interplay of light and dark on the water’s surface to the distant bank lined with towering stands of gently swaying yellow-tinged bamboo, banana trees with their thick sheet-like leaves, and innumerable other foliage that was wholly unidentifiable to me. Several trees had an ever-so-slight hint of autumnal color to them, indicating the imminent demise of perpetual summertime. Beyond loomed a splendid ridge of limestone mountains, a glorious ancient spine that stretched from left to right across a mysterious Garden of Eden landscape. A beer bottle drifted past.
It seemed to sum up the irony of the place and my dilemma here. The scenery held tremendous appeal but the thought of tubing, at least with the sort of crowd I had seen in town, held none. I made up my mind. Come the morning I would hire an inner tube and get on the river while the majority of the town was still in bed, presumably sleeping off the night before. I would drift down with the current, wholly to check out the scenery and then get the hell out of here.
Back in the town I stopped off at an internet café to send a couple of emails, and in the process searched YouTube for “Tubing Vang Vieng.” The videos took forever to load but what I watched confirmed my decision as the right one. In video after video, juvenile numbskulls gleefully celebrated their ignorance and desecration of the river and local culture with alcohol and drug-fueled lecherous maraudings at little shack-like bars along the banks, whose specialty were plastic sand-castle buckets filled with hard liquor. A bit more searching and I discovered photos o
f other puerile marker-pen and body paint messages—actually car spray paint—scrawled onto the bodies of the tubers: “I’ve got aids . . . wanna fuck?” “I make Joseph Fritzl’s basement look like a weekend in Butlins,” “It’s not rape if you yell surprise,” and “I raped Steven Hawking,” which was accompanied by a corresponding message on a girl’s back that read, “I also raped Steven Hawking.”
Opinions online regarding Vang Vieng ranged from those similar to my own, to others who couldn’t get enough of it and defended what had become of the place by saying it brought money into the local economy. Which is basically an argument for destroying any area of outstanding natural beauty so long as it makes a select few people a quick buck.
Once a quiet and tranquil farming village, the seeds of Vang Vieng’s destruction were sown innocently enough in 1998 when a local organic farmer purchased a few inner tubes so that volunteers on his thirty acre mulberry and vegetable gardens could have a cheap and ecological way of seeing the Nam Song River and surrounding area. Its popularity grew, and soon tubing was offered independently of the original farmer, and rickety bamboo bars sprang up along the river from which a liter of “Lao-Lao” (a clear-colored, locally brewed whisky, with a potent alcohol content of 45 percent) could be purchased in plastic buckets for as little as a dollar. Today backpackers outnumber locals in Vang Vieng by as much as fifteen to one, killing the town and in the process many who visit it, with no small number of “tubers” dying on the river. Twenty-seven tubing deaths were recorded at Vang Vieng’s tiny village hospital the year I visited. Since many of the dead are taken straight to Vientiane—and therefore not registered locally—the true figure of fatalities is much higher. Many just get too drunk or high and then simply drown, while others bust their heads open on rocks after leaping from rope swings or pulleys into shallow water, despite signs claiming a safe depth underneath. In one incident an unfortunate girl scraped all the skin off her face on the rocks. There are no lifeguards and the nearest properly equipped English-speaking hospital is back in Thailand at Bangkok. For those who break their bones, a long and painful ride along a bumpy pot-holed road awaits to make it back to the capital.
Come the morning I did as planned, and was the first and only person at the inner-tube hire center when it opened. The grumpy guy running the place tried his best to encourage me to come back around midday when the backpacker crowd would be setting off, but he was onto a no-hoper from the start. Being the only person, he charged me extra for the songthaew taxi to get to the launch area upstream, which was opposite a mighty wall of blue-gray rock that rose almost vertically just beyond the river’s far bank. Despite its angle, much of it was thick with trees and shrubs, clinging tenaciously in cracks and ridges that would have afforded random patches of sediment to gather. The water certainly looked enticing. Shimmering a reflective silvery glass, it created a near-perfect replica of the rock and bankside trees in its surface. A chorus of birdsong greeted me as I made my way down a little path and stepped into the cool, gently flowing river. I laid down my inner-tube, sat back in the middle and let the current do the work.
In no time little bankside bars with rope-swings and ramshackle diving platforms began appearing. “Fuck it get a bucket!” announced a sign dangling out over the water from an establishment called FU BAR—a helpful translation written below: fucked up beyond all recognition. On seeing me, some of the bars’ proprietors turned on thumping dance music that blasted out from giant speakers, shattering the blissful morning solitude in an instant; others attempted to cajole me into patronizing their establishment by pointing to signs for free buckets of Lao-Lao—given away in the knowledge that you’ll almost certainly purchase something more palatable afterwards. I wasn’t interested and just floated on by, and must have looked rather ludicrous to them, drifting past, all by myself, with no intention of partying.
I eventually came across locals trawling with hand-nets in the shallows, probably for shrimp. Three guys ventured further from the bank in the hunt for larger quarry. Two swam with a big billowing net, while the third remained on a little wooden rowing boat, striking the water with an ore, so as to herd whatever it was they were after into the net by way of shockwave. The two in the water both wore face-masks, and ducked down and swam about to check on the location of their prey. I was keen to see if they were successful, but no sooner had my curiosity been piqued and I had floated past. With the exception of the music, it actually turned out to be a delightful jaunt, but the character of the river would change in a few hours’ time. Just before I reached Vang Vieng I passed several water buffalo browsing by the bank and cooling off and drinking in the river; it was a stunning sight but one that reminded me of a photo I had seen online the day before—of a drunk clambering, for his own amusement, on top of a semi submerged water buffalo. I was thankful to have made my way downstream alone.
Dropping off my inner-tube, I grabbed my bag and said “never again” to Vang Vieng. My overriding image of the place: pleasure island from Pinocchio—although to be fair, most of the people I saw in Vang Vieng weren’t turned into donkeys from visiting the place, but rather arrived in such a state.
* * *
The further north I pushed, the more inspiring Laos’ scenery became. Amazing foliage-covered mountains dominated the view, many dotted around their lower slopes with tall elegant reed-like grasses, their fluffy heads glowing luminous white in the midday sun. The road became far more twisted, several sections displaying perilous drops. Villages of wooden homes on stilts came and went, of an increasingly impoverished nature. Beneath the stilts great mounds of firewood and bundled-up dry thatching-grasses lay, the latter used as roofing material for about half the dwellings, while others sheltered under rickety and often rusty metal sheeting. Intricately woven mats comprised many of the walls, interlocking in vertical and horizontal planes, creating a checkered pattern of rectangles. Several villages possessed but a solitary water tap, evident by the groups that gathered around them bathing and washing clothing. Other villages had simple wells where residents lowered little flexible plastic buckets on ropes. Occasionally a pig would scurry about on the dusty space between the wooden houses and the road, more so chickens, ducks, dogs, and geese. Barefoot children joined them playing, others as young as five or six lugged great quantities of firewood, doing so in baskets that sat on their backs like rucksacks but which were slung around their foreheads from straps attached to the basket’s rim. It looked difficult and grueling work. One little girl of no more than four carried her baby sibling in a sling.
I rode in an SUV with a middle-aged Laotian couple. They didn’t speak much English and had introduced themselves with an odd sense of formality: “Mr. and Mrs. Sourisak.” Mr. Sourisak was a military man of some sort, manifest by the I.D. dangling from the rear view mirror. Both he and Mrs. Sourisak were on their way to a wedding party in Luang Prabang, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and my ultimate destination of the day.
Just as it was getting dark we pulled up at a little row of small, self-contained, apartments with huge satellite dishes out the front. Mr. and Mrs. Sourisak were staying here, and suggested I rent one for the night too. I did, paying 80,000 Laotian Kip, about ten USD. No sooner had I dropped my pack inside the room and my new neighbors were escorting me back into the car.
“Wedding party,” stated Mr. Sourisak with a smile.
We arrived at a little house in a residential area of the town and walked through to its backyard, where several tables had been pushed together into a row and covered with wipe-down plastic cloths. Spread out across the tables were multiple lighted candles. Already sitting here, seemingly waiting for our arrival, were about twenty guests. Greetings flowed back and forth and I was introduced around. Since no one really spoke any English, I just smiled and nodded “hello.” Food arrived soon after. Salad was first out and consisted of lettuce, spring onions, chopped mint, and succulent bamboo shoots. Next came steaming bowls of hot soup with noodles wrapped up into little balls, followed b
y strips of unknown chewy meat.
I ate heartily and followed my hosts’ lead, taking a strip of meat and dipping it into a bowl of sauce on the table. But something was off about this sauce. No sooner had taste bud and sauce connected, and my body instinctively wanted to reject it. I smelled some. It was vile. Could this be the buffalo shit dip Stefan had told me about? Pointing to the sauce I tried to educe from the other guests what it was made from. Those nearby began to laugh. Then pointed to their stomachs. It wasn’t proof positive, but it was a strong indication and more than enough to stop me dunking any more meat into it. Luckily the taste was soon wiped away with lots of beer and Lao-Lao whisky, used for multiple celebratory toasts.
With no one proficient enough in English to converse with me, the background chatter sent me into something of a trance, and after several “whiskeys” my thoughts turned to bed. But the night was far from over. Finishing up at the house, we all headed in a big convoy to a packed and vibrant restaurant nearby where a lively band played music of a style I either couldn’t identify or immediately forgot, and more weird and wonderful foods were produced. Much unidentified meat of the ultra-chewy variety came forth, as did several servings of duck’s feet, with a whole plate given to me. Let me repeat that: a whole plate. If you can form a rough impression of sticking the chewy, flappy little foot of a duck in your mouth, and gnawing on it, then, really, you’re already there in understanding how rank an experience it was.
Come the morning, I was invited to the wedding. In all likelihood I had been asked the night before, but with the noise of the restaurant and Mr. and Mrs. Sourisak’s limited English, if I had, then the invitation had gone unnoticed.
“Telephone, five,” said Mr. Sourisak, pointing to his watch as he dropped me on the high street of Luang Prabang’s historic center, so that I could do some sightseeing before the afternoon’s wedding rendezvous.