Laos

Laos is a feast for the eyes and a rest for the ears. Certainly, having spent the last few months in busy Hanoi, Laos is a breath of fresh air, both literally and metaphorically. There is very little traffic and what traffic there is abides by the rules of the road without tooting horns once.

Laos is such a quiet place that some people haven’t heard of it at all and many could not name its capital city. Well, it’s Vientiane and it’s a rather picturesque place with beautiful buildings everywhere.

Laos was occupied by the French in the 19^th Century and that continued until 1953. The French influence continues – road signs (and many others) are in French as well as Lao in the capital and you can get Pain au Chocolat as good as any I’ve had in France.

It was mixed up in the Vietnam War (they call it The American War in these parts) too and, as a result, Laos has the dubious distinction of being the most bombed country, per head of population (about 6 million), in the world. This is because the Vietnamese used the jungles of Laos as a ‘secret’ passageway during the war. Not so secret it seems as the Americans dropped one planeload of bombs every eight minutes, day and night, for nine years. Many of them did not go off and so the country is absolutely littered with unexploded bombs, which makes farming a very dodgy enterprise. There are organisations devoted to clearing these bombs but it will take many more years.

It’s possible to see the main features of Vientiane in a day. There are beautifully-decorated temples everywhere as well as other buildings.

This one was modelled on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

Its lamps use low-energy light bulbs. Laos is moving with the times ...

*****

I then caught a bus to Luang Prabang, about 150 miles north of the capital. It might not be far, but it takes ages to get a bus up all the hills in between.

The Buddhist influence is strong and orange-robed monks are everywhere.

There's a hill in the middle of town and it's well worth the walk up it for the views.

I went to a demonstration of traditional dance. It was fun to watch, but I didn't have a clue what was going on.

*****

I wanted to see a bit of the countryside so I booked on a three-day trek. It was the best thing I could have done – several of my favourite activities squeezed into one trip. OK, so we didn’t eat chocolate spread sandwiches or go climbing, but there were the other things I enjoy.

We started by mountain biking along dirt roads for a few hours. We had to cross a river at one point so the local bike ferry was deployed.

We finished at an Elephant Village, a project devoted to protecting elephants, which are under threat in Laos. Here we had an elephant ride and were given our green lunch box – a banana leaf as a wrapper that contained rice with chicken and veg. Very nice too.

A brief dip at a waterfall followed ...

and then a walk to a village, which was home for the night. We weren’t too far from town but this was a step back in time for us all – there was a generator, which allowed for some houses to have a bit of light and access to Thai TV (a debatable pleasure!) in the evenings, but few trappings of modern life as we know it. Livestock was running everywhere, kids were rolling in the dirt having fun …

Bed was a mat, a thin duvet and a mosquito net in a bamboo hut.

The village rules are displayed for all visitors to see. Judging by some of them (e.g. point 6) they must have had a few unsavoury characters in the past. I wondered how I could leave my prostate outside my room …

Next day we walked over the hills, passing through a couple of villages. If they don’t have access to a road, the villages are really poor. Larger villages have a school but smaller ones certainly don’t, so the children either walk there or don’t go at all.

We stopped for buffalo noodle soup for lunch (rather tasty) and viewed snake & scorpion whiskey. I gave that a miss.

The next day we went kayaking. They use large, unsinkable (and rather cumbersome) plastic kayaks that will bounce down any rapids. It was a lovely paddle through beautiful scenery.

And that was my trip over. Now I’m back in Hanoi and back to work.

*****

There is no bike photo of the month as I didn’t see anything unusual on a bike in Laos.