Laos – land of a thousand elephants (and frustrating red tape).

Allegedly, although I only saw a few. I did ride one but it was shithouse. Not quite as shit as riding a camel (which results in really sore balls), but it was pretty dull. The rest of Laos, on the other hand, was fantastic. I spent three weeks there recently, the first two with my sister Lara and her boyfriend Eric. Although he’s Scottish I can understand him most of the time, but I’m pretty sure that’s only because he makes an effort to speak slowly to me. He’s very perceptive and picked up pretty quickly that I’m just a simple farm lad. The frustrating red tape refers to the need to fill in a form, hand it in to the authorities and get it approved before you are allowed to shag a local. However, like a good little boy scout, I came prepared and had printed off and partly completed several dozen before I left home. Preparation is the key to success my friends. Despite this odd and somewhat arcane regulation quite a few tuk-tuk drivers did approach me with “Laos lady boom-boom, go now?”. Needless to say I declined their offer, although this was partly because I’d left the forms back at the hotel and was too lazy to get them. It seems that success requires preparation and effort, which does kinda rule me out, lazy sod that I am.

After spending a day in the capital Vientiane, we headed north to a small town called Vang Vieng, which is perched on the banks of the river Xong and surrounded by impressive limestone cliffs. This place is backpacker central – everyone who comes to Laos comes to Vang Vieng and it is crawling with dirty, smelly, nasty types like myself. For some inexplicable reason all the backpackers are more than happy to spend hours in the numerous bars and restaurants watching the never-ending reruns of Friends, The Simpsons and Family Guy. Although it is fairly soulless, the town does have one thing going for it and it is a helluva lotta fun. It’s called tubing and it’s a pretty simple idea really – you drive up the river a bit, hop in a tractor tyre inner tube and then float downstream enjoying the scenery and the pleasantness. However the true genius is the dozen bars along the banks of the river, complete with rope swings, volleyball courts and table tennis tables. Although one particular bar only had one table tennis bat, so when we asked for another they proudly presented us with two brand new table tennis bats . . . but then looked at us blankly when we asked whether they perchance had a table tennis ball as well. Most amusing.

Following the frivolity of Vang Vieng we headed further north to the other place everyone goes to in Laos – Luang Prabang, a beautiful and charming UNESCO World Heritage town. Full of old French colonial buildings, shops, markets, restaurants and cafes it has everything a simple boy from the bush like me needs, including a very nice handicraft market at which I utilised my finely honed haggling skills (thanks Turkey and Egypt). Amusingly, after each sale they’d use the cash I’d just handed over to hit some of their remaining wares whilst saying “Lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky!”. I’m still trying to figure out whether that technique will be effective on chicks as well or not. Perhaps playfully cuffing them with some twenties and fifties and asking “Will I get lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky?” is worth a shot. Discussion on this topic is most welcome.

Whilst we were in Luang Prabang we volunteered at a place called Big Brother Mouse (http://www.bigbrothermouse.com – check out their book parties) which promotes literacy in Laos and publishes books for kids. We spent a morning there helping some local lads practise their English, although some of the things in their workbooks were a little odd. One guy had the following two examples describing active and passive sentences:

Active:
My dog bit the Vietnamese guy.
Passive:
The Vietnamese guy was bitten by my dog.

I asked him whether that meant his dog was good or bad, and he was adamant Rover deserved a pat. I’m not sure if that’s racist or not (answers on a postcard please). They had several books for sale (we bought a few and later donated them to schools in remote villages) including one about a monkey called Bob who went to Bangkok. Among other things, he stumbled across some thieves stealing a famous painting. He threatened to turn them over to the cops, then they threatened to send him to China because they eat monkey brains there. Kids’ books have changed so much since my day. Another book was about animals and had a great entry for mosquitos:

I’ll just suck our your blood,
I’ll be gone pretty quick.
But later you’ll find
That I’ve made you quite sick.

That was inspirational, so I’m gonna try and start up my own Centre For Kids Who Can't Read Good And Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too. I remember seeing a documentary some years ago about a male model and he did something similar, so I figured I could as well. His was really small though, it was barely big enough for ants. Mine’s gonna be at least three times that size.

From Luang Prabang we took a slow boat along the Mekong River for a couple of days, which was one of the more pleasant forms of travel I’ve experienced. Of course it's not so crash hot when you come down with malaria, as happened to a Swiss bloke on the first day. He really should have read that kids’ book about animals.

Eventually we ended up in Luang Nam Tha in the north of Laos (nearish to the Chinese border) with a plan to do a three day jungle trek which hopefully would not involve any elephants. The night before the trek was due to begin we ate at a fancy eco-lodge restaurant, and very sadly one of my tasty morsels of chicken fell on the floor. The very same floor where all the cats, rodents and people tread. The dusty, dirty, grimy, wooden floor. The floor that is not clean enough to eat from. However, as I was so dismayed to see this delicious mouthful potentially go to waste, I picked it up and thought about eating it. Common sense probably would have prevailed in most circumstances . . . but Lara and Eric seemed certain it’d be fine (“Five second rule!”) and sometimes I do like to think of myself as Ol’ Iron Guts (Exhibit A: Egypt, November ‘04). When I was a kid I used to drink unpasteurised milk and think I was tough. Not straight from the cow and still warm mind, I couldn’t quite stomach that. But once the milk had cooled down it was fair game - I was quite prepared to drink it without heating it up again. Man, I did some crazy things when I was a young’un.

Anyway, I ate the chicken that fell on the floor and it was tasty. Very tasty. I was actually quite happy that I hadn’t wasted it. My guts weren’t so thrilled with my decision though. I woke up at two in the morning and instantly knew that for next day or so I’d be playing that intriguing and exhilarating game I refer to as Will I Pass Out, Poo or Spew Next? I won’t go into too much detail, but I can exclusively reveal that by the end of the ordeal poos had won by a landslide. Or should that be mudslide? Regardless, I started the trek the next morning, made it to lunch on the first day and promptly vomited back up the food I had just consumed so we figured it was a good idea to turn around and head back to the nearest town. Which is a real shame, because I later found out that the first night’s camp was full of mosquitos and the second night’s camp was infested with rats. I am very upset I had to spend those evenings watching videos on my iPod and sleeping in a warm, dry, quiet, comfy hotel bed.

The next port of call for me was a town called Nong Khiaw and the journey there was quite a ride. We took a minivan and before we left the driver distributed some plastic bags to all the passengers. I wasn’t quite sure what we were supposed to do with them, although this quickly became apparent after half an hour. The road was more pothole than asphalt and more bends than straights, and when that is combined with a leadfoot driver, the result is half the passengers spewing into these plastic bags. The old lady in front of me decided the spew-into-a-placcie-bag routine wasn’t for her, so she just spat straight onto the floor. The old bloke next to her managed to keep his brekkie down, but he did keep on slagging into a sandwich bag. By the time he alighted he’d produced about 150mL of mucky brown liquid, which he left in a neatly tied bag on the floor of the minivan. Delightful. I’m still not sure which is more unpleasant, spitting directly onto the floor allowing your saliva to meander randomly, or saving it in a little plastic bag for others to deal with later.

The highlight of that trip was crossing Poon River (Eric and I exchanged smirks; Lara was oblivious) which was only outshone by the name of a guesthouse in Nong Khiaw – Many Poon. I would have stayed there but I didn’t think I had enough of those forms. Instead I chose to stay in a wonderful bungalow overlooking the river and spent the afternoon sunning myself in the hammock reading, surrounded by stunning river and mountain scenery.

Lara and Eric had left me to my own devices earlier that day as they planned to move on to Vietnam so I expected to be flying solo for a while, but that evening I bumped into a newly-formed Canadian couple, the female half of which I’d briefly met at KL airport. Together we headed upriver the next day to a lovely small village called Muang Ngoi which is only accessible by boat. We had planned to spend a couple of days chilling out and exploring the area, until someone filled our head with the idea of buying a boat and paddling it down river for a few days. This sounded like a much better proposition, so we did indeed buy ourselves a boat. Fifty bucks it cost, what a bargain. We bought it off a local lad with an unfortunate stutter and he spent the afternoon fixing a few holes and doing some minor repairs whilst we garnered provisions and trip essentials. Yes, that’s right, it had a few holes and wasn’t 100% water tight but we reckoned it was good enough. We woke up bright and early and set off with much glee and fanfare once the pissing rain had subsided. Four hundred metres later we sprung a huge leak, and spent the rest of the morning somehow getting back to the village and trying to find someone to fix it. We outlaid $1 on repairs, which consisted of a tree branch wrapped in rubber. I am not kidding. It worked a treat. After a quick bite to eat we set off again, delayed by only a few hours and with a readjusted target in mind. Things went well; the current was strong, we paddled, we bailed (yes, the boat was still a little bit leaky, but it wasn’t too bad), we negotiated rapids and we floated. We were halfway between Muang Ngoi and our destination Nong Khiaw when we came upon a set of rapids which we knew would be a potential stumbling block, as the slow boat we’d taken the day before had struggled to get through them. We knew the line we needed was on the far left of the river . . . but the boat is actually quite big and unwieldy, and the person responsible for steering (erm . . . me) didn’t really know what he was doing. As a result we ended up about 5 metres to the right of where we should have been, and headed straight for a pile of rocks. We braced, then slammed straight into them, our momentum swinging the boat around and wedging it between two rocks, the rear levered a metre above the water. We teetered for a minute or two, balanced precariously between tipping backwards into potential oblivion or forwards to what seemed comparable safety.

Where the boat ended up was completely out of our control, but fortunately blind luck looked favourably upon us (umm . . . despite being blind), and the boat slowly inched towards relatively calmer water. We managed to scramble clear as the current tugged at the boat, constantly threatening to take us on a journey we didn’t really like the look of. Stood on submerged rocks in the middle of the rapids, our gear on our backs but our boat fucked, we were temporarily safe but had no idea what to do next. It was at this point that a tourist boat came chugging up river – the very same boat we were on the day before. Impeccable timing! We gestured to them that we were a little up shit creek and perhaps if they could spare five minutes and if it wasn’t too much trouble could they possibly rescue us as that would be grand and we would be very appreciative and everyone would be happy and really please . . . oh, your mouths are wide open and you’re taking photos of us in our predicament . . . and you’re not slowing down . . . and now you’re fucking off completely, never to be seen again.

Pricks.

Hmmmm. Now what? Travis wanted to leap into the rapids and take our chances, packs and all. I reckoned that was A Bad Idea and fortunately my point of view prevailed. If you’ve never tried to swim in rapids before, let me tell you it ain’t a whole lotta fun. We decided to try and somehow make it to the other river bank, and the first stop was a tiny island five metres away. Travis and Jamie both managed to scramble and swim to it without incident. While I was contemplating how I was going to get there carrying my two backpacks, three local lads out for a pleasant paddle happened across us, and they very kindly showed us how to pick our way moderately safely through the rapids. Between us we managed to manoeuver the boat to calmer waters, and they reckoned we could patch the boat by using a t-shirt to plug the newly created giant hole. We disagreed, and indicated that they could keep the boat in return for their much appreciated help. Surprise surprise, despite insisting we'd be fine with a mere t-shirt between us and sinking, they didn’t want to go near the thing – it had a bloody great big hole in it. What they were after was money though, and they did agree to give us a lift to Nong Khiaw in their motorboat for a small fee. We tried haggling but trying to bargain with your potential rescuers is not the best idea going around. They were also rather interested in my Sprite (which I gave them) and my chest hair (that stayed with me). One guy was so impressed with my rug that I was tempted to show him my hairy arse as well and see if we could knock a few zeros off the price, but as he is the only person to ever be impressed with my thatch I didn’t want to ruin the moment, for either of us.

Amazingly and fortuitously, despite the predicament we were in, no gear was swept away; no iPods, phones or cameras were damaged; no passports were ruined; no limbs were gashed or broken and no heads were bashed on submerged rocks.

Once safely back in the village, I checked into the same guesthouse and lay in the same hammock, basking in the same sun, reading the same book and listening to kids splash and play in the same river. As the last vestiges of colour slowly ebbed from the dusk sky, I spun up some Beethoven on my iPod and tried to ignore the swarming mozzies. It may not have claimed my iPod or me, but the fucking river had claimed my mosquito repellent.