Bombs, bribes and gold braid
Laos is full of unexpected things when you ride a motorbike through it.
Not just because of the chickens, cows, pigs, dogs, hens, bikes, mopeds, walkers, kids and goats all dashing into the road when they hear you coming. But also because the roads are an interesting mix of gravel, scraped dirt, rocks, mud, superb smooth tarmac, potholes and great big ruts. Challenging on a bike, to put it mildly.
I rode my motorbike across the border from Thailand, heading east through Laos’ brilliant scenery. And, of course, Laos is still an unexpectedly communist country! Statues, flags and men with AK-47s are still plentiful on the roads.
I was riding to Phonsavan. I’d wanted to visit the Plain of Jars there for ages; it’s a UNESCO site and one of the world’s ancient mysteries, like Stonehenge. It has hundreds if not thousands of massive — some are big enough to stand in — stone urns dotted about the scrubby, rolling landscape.
They have been there for at least 2,000 years; utterly astonishing. Local legend says they were made as drinking cups for a race of giants. But as beads and bones have been found inside some, it’s more likely they were burial urns — but it’s still not definite.
The Plain of Jars holds one other lasting memory for me: the utterly horrendous damage caused by US B-52 bombing during the “Secret War” on Laos. Craters the size of houses stitched across from horizon to horizon, many smashing open the ancient stone jars.
Even though the US was not officially at war with the poverty-stricken, almost medieval country, it managed to drop some 1.3 million tons of bombs on supposed insurgents over nine years from 1964, mainly because it could. That’s more bombs than were dropped on all of Europe during WWII.
Even worse, that included about 270 million now-outlawed cluster bomblets; some 30% of those failed to go off, leaving 400,000-or so tons of unexploded devices (UXO) waiting to kill or maim the people that survived the original decade-long holocaust.
Over 20,000 people have been injured by or killed since the bombing ended, and there are still millions of deadly devices left in the ground.
I tried to imagine what it would be like to live with that every day; when I asked a guy in a food hut wearing a Pathet Lao Army helmet about it he laughed and offered me some rice wine. I guess you learn to cope. Another old man said they use cows as minesweepers; let the cows graze where they want to and you soon find out where the live UXO are buried — but you need a good supply of cows.
I rode thoughtfully back to my hotel, the Auberge des Plaines des Jars in Phonsavan as the sun set over the ridges, taking a detour into town to use the only ATM in the area. I fed my card into the machine, tapped $100, and pressed the button. My face lit up as Lao Kip notes came cascading immediately out of the slot, only to light down again very quickly as the flow stopped.
I randomly pressed buttons, but it wasn’t playing. Nothing. Eventually I got my card back, but the ATM still owed me about $80 worth of Lao Kip. Visions of starving and pushing my bike back to the Thai border loomed. Back at the hotel, I told the manager what had happened. “Oh that happens all the time,” he smiled. “Just go to the bank in the morning and they will fix it for you.” I slept badly.
First thing in the morning, I rushed to the bank and explained to the teller what happened. A managerial type with well oiled hair came by, asked me what was up, then smiled reassuringly.
“How much did you ask from the machine?” he asked. I told him $100.
“And how much did you get?” he asked. About $20, I said.
“OK, here is the rest,” he said handing me a wad. “The notes here are so bent and dirty they always jam up in the slot like that. Have a nice day.”
Financially viable, I carried on down the Mekong valley. In places, hordes of kids rushed up to marvel at a bike with more than one cylinder as I rode by. The scenery changed noticeably as I rode south, out of the verdant highland climate into dry and dusty arable flatland, fields full of waving workers harvesting rice and wheat by hand.
Although almost everybody there is dirt poor, living in palm huts, washing at the local pump, getting by on basic foods, Lao people all seem so independently proud. Nobody smiles at you and is nice to you just because you are foreign, like in many other southeast Asian countries. They just treat you as you are, a passerby temporarily intruding on their life. If you make them laugh, they shake your hand. If they don’t take to you, they ignore you. I loved the simple honesty of the Lao people.
Following the Mekong south, the landscape became richer. I did appreciate one aspect of the increasing wealth. The roads were brilliant. No potholes, beautifully surveyed curves (by Chinese engineers, apparently) all tarmacked to billiard-table smoothness. Endless racks of smoked fish lined the sides of the road, buffaloes grunted in rice paddies, and gilded Buddhist temples flashed regularly by behind lines of prayer flags.
That night, I wrote in my diary: “Sticky rice, chicken and ginger. Beer Lao, sun setting over the Mekong, children singing below the balcony. This is what it’s about.” It was. Next morning, I crossed the Mekong to an isolated enclave of Laos, to see the Wat Phou ruins.
You may not have heard of it, but Wat Phou is probably just as fascinating as the more famous Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Here’s a quick description: Built some seven centuries before Angkor, it was a huge, sophisticated, highly organised city stretching several kilometres up and down the Mekong, centred around an impressive Hindu temple at the foot of a holy phallic mountain. And it’s still there.
Although it’s a recognised UNESCO site, some 1500 years old with incredible carvings and temple ruins, there were only two other people there when I visited. I stood and marvelled as the morning mists rose over the ruins and the snaking river below, and later a woman in the museum shop asked me, smiling seductively as I looked out the window at the sacred hilltop lingam, if I was married. It was bizzare.
So was the homestay I stopped at in at the nearest village, Champasak. It featured a self-assembly toilet, glassless windows, auto-adjusting bed (it partially collapsed when you sat on it) and an early morning speaker blaring communist propaganda outside the window at 5am. But the food was brilliant. Mekong fish, still flapping; mango rice fresh from the paddy out the back; and spices from the orchard next door. Bliss.
But time was slipping away and I had to leave wonderful Laos, and head south into Cambodia. I was a bit nervous. I’d heard horror stories of extortionate border fees, dodgy visas, threats of jail and more — especially with a bike.
The blue Mao-suited Lao customs man was very diligent. He demanded all my paperwork. He slowly inspected every piece of paper and photocopy. He held several of them upside down as he nodded in an official way, then stamped me out. He pocketed the $2 fee, smiled, and there I was — facing the Cambodian border guards; too easy.
The Cambodians had much fancier uniforms than the Lao guys. They even had gold braid. They quickly stamped my passport, put my visa application sheet in the official file then took my visa fee. They also took a $5 “visa stamping fee” that went into a separate cash box bursting with notes from almost every country in the world. I’m pretty sure it was official.
No matter, I was in — without a hitch, delay or even a hint of jail time. I didn’t manage to officially import my bike as the customs man was at lunch, but that was a problem that could wait. Next stop Phnom Penh . . .
Click here for more photos.
