Socialist Realist statues

There are some glorious examples of Socialist Realist statues in Laos. Aficionados of these communist commemorations should not miss the superb montage at Muang Phin in Savannakhet province. Two golden statues of a Vietnamese and Lao soldier stand united against a backdrop of carved relief showing the fighting during the Second Indochina War. An elephant in battle is depicted too. Muang Phin lies close to the Ho Chi Minh Trail and a downed US helicopter lies next to the statue.

Xam Neua’s main roundabout is also dominated by a Socialist Realist collage of battle and at Vieng Xai in remote Hua Phan province, site of the secret communist city of Pathet Lao during the Second Indochina War, three golden statues of a soldier, farmer and worker are mounted on a pedestal. The worker has his foot pressed onto a golden bomb, inscribed with the words ‘USA’.

Sorrowful Savannakhet songthaew journey

The mobile clothes’ shop came to a halt. It was a songthaew lined with clothes’ rails that was moving from village to village to sell to the locals. Our songthaew pulled in just after it to pick up a woman with a baby. The young mother’s smile revealed betel-nut stained teeth; the nine month old child was dressed in a royal-blue eskimo hood. The mother had just been to visit a shaman, some 50 km from her home. She explained that she had visited the shaman because the baby kept crying at night. The shaman requested 50,000 kip up front (a small fortune for a local) and then a donation of a shawl and sinh (woman’s skirt); after that she would just have to pay the bus fare for the visits. The shaman had offered to take care of the child until it was older but the mother could not agree to this but did agree to make regular visits to the shaman. The mother was worried, she said. This was her eighth child; the other seven had died. Many of them had died at several months old; but two of them, young teenagers, had died in a hospital in Thailand of insect-related disease.
The mother explained that she used to have farmland but her husband had to sell it so they had no rice for eating that season. They were just growing vegetables and bamboo shoots. I gave her my bag of sun-dried buffalo meat as she stepped down from the songthaew.

Capital of snooze

Vientiane is probably the most chilled out capital city in the world. It’s also small like a provincial town. Each part of the city is quaintly called a village and there’s barely a traffic light in sight. You can walk the length of the historic core in about 15 minutes. Most buildings are low-slung and streets are interspersed with wats giving it a cosy, small-town atmosphere. It also boasts, curiously, a large number of Italian restaurants and dozens of local clothes shops in a small radius; its largest ‘department store’ only has two floors. Tuk tuk taxi guys are underemployed and snooze over long lunch hours on hammocks in their vehicles, appointment times shift, traffic police sway in boredom, and lights go out across the city before 11pm. No all night dancing here...

Sundowners on the Mekong

Just before dusk, locals, expats and travellers wander down to the Mekong river bank in Laos’ capital to sup a Beer Lao and munch on freshly cooked food while watching the sunset. Plastic stools and tables are rolled out, small fires start burning, and huge shrimp squirm in metal bowls, ready for barbecue. This evening rite of passage is a great way to wind down. You can watch the vendors at work, take in the Thai skyline on the opposite bank and watch fisherman in the dying light in the shallows. The sky bleeds a fabulous shade of orange for quite some time before the darkness approaches. This sunset pastime, however, may not last long as a huge project to redesign the river front is underway. Land is being reclaimed, a road is to be built, gardens planted and permanent restaurant sites already ejected as the bulldozers set to work. Get there while you can still sit at these makeshift stalls on the river bank.

Trekking and caving around Vang Vieng

Yapping puppies greeted us at the Hmong village of Ban Pa Thao, north of Vang Vieng. Just 10 years ago these Hmong villagers lived in the nearby mountains but having eaten all the wildlife they were forced to come down to the river basin, our guide said. Also, post-1975 the government has awarded them land and the village was a mix of bamboo homes and concrete houses. Towering limestone mountains sheltered the village and line the entire Vang Vieng valley cut through by the Nam Song river.
We wandered past a canal smothered in red dragonflies where two boys were fishing. Sporting snorkelling masks they were pushing their faces through the river while holding handmade harpoons; the occasional stab produced a tiny wriggling silver fish that was placed in a small basket attached to one of the boys’ belts.
After a carbohydrate lunch at the restaurant at Tham Nam (water cave), we plunged into tractor tubes (and the icy cold water) and pulled ourselves using a rope under the low ledge that heralded the entrance to the cavern. The low-slung cave eventually opened out a little into what felt like a giant sluice. Blacker than the darkest night we switched on our lamps and pulled ourselves along the rope, spinning occasionally, as the current washed against our tubes. Tiny drips of water splattered on our heads and millions of miniscule flies dived at the lamps. As we travelled further in, giant, clumsy stalactites came into flashlight view. Then we hit a mound of pebbles, got out to walk and as we sunk back into the tubes to continue our journey I realised the rope had gone.
‘Now we swim with no rope,’ said the guide. Errr... this is the bit when we disappear forever, I thought.
‘You do know the way back, right?’ I enquired as I noted that there was not just one tunnel but one leading off to the left and then to the right and perhaps even a few more left and right tunnel turns as well.
It was inky black, the air was humid, the flies were kamikaze, the dripping intensified and the water felt syrupy. Powerful arm muscles were needed to paddle against the flow into the bowels of this cave. I refrained from asking how far we could get on our muscle power as I wondered about ever seeing natural light again.
The return paddle was much easier as we weren’t fighting the river current. We flowed back and happily blinked our way back into the daylight.

Kayaking the Nam Song River

The elephant cave is so-called because of the stalagmite that looks like a small pachyderm that stands on a ledge in a cave. Two kiwis were lost in this cave for two days; they walked in without a guide and locals thought they were lost forever. At the cave entrance is a bell fashioned from a missile head.

Nearby, is the starting point for a kayaking trip down the Nam Song river back to Vang Vieng, Laos’ adventure and drinking capital. I stepped into the kayak, lost my balance and immediately fell in; giggles all round from the Lao and other tourists. I was soaked to start with so didn’t need to worry about the upcoming rapids, I thought. Eighteen kilometres on the Nam Song back to Vang Vieng and a Beer Lao - no sweat.

The Nam Song outside of the rainy season is a pretty welcoming river. The rapids were enjoyable, not in the least bit challenging, but the kayaking was hard work as the river was sluggish. The sun was intense but as the afternoon wore on, the line of jagged karst mountains blotted out the sun. The intense green of the river banks and trees drinking at the river’s edge gave way to a monochrome view as shade was cast over the valley. This made the kayaking easier and we could slow a little and watch the locals cast for fish in the shallows.

Around four kilometres north of Vang Vieng, the peace is shattered by the start of the tubing run. Almost everyone that comes to Vang Vieng floats down the river in a giant tractor inner tube while drinking and swinging on huge ropes from the river bars that line the routes. Suddenly, the verdant peace of the valley was transformed into the Costa del Nam Song as tourists danced on bamboo platforms and glugged booze for this rite of passage. If you hadn’t heard of tubing the Nam Song you would have thought you’d unwittingly ordered a ‘happy’ pizza on coming across this river orgy. Gliding past the tubers we swapped ‘sabaidees’ and then tried to avoid being jumped on by tourists hurling themselves across the water on the flying fox swings.

Dusk in Luang Prabang

Luang Prabang is a bijou city of golden temples, terracotta rooves, chic cafes and winsome French colonial architecture. Dusk is a good time to wander as the pink sun sinks slowly into the Mekong River. At Wat Xieng Thong, the most exquisitely decorated of the city’s temples, monks chant while seated on the floor as the last of the visitors eye the vibrant mosaics. Children use the low-slung iron fence around a relic chamber as a goal post in an impromptu game of footie, meanwhile, up the road, a wat courtyard has been converted into a badminton court and the shuttlecock flies back and forth in front of the gilded eaves of the wat; it’s a mesmerising sight. As the light fades, the back streets are lit by the latest manmade craze. Fancy, bendy, chrome-and-colour skateboards sport wheels that illuminate on the move and all over town pre-teen boys show off their balancing act while trying to avoid tourists, dogs and motorbikes. Looking down on them are visitors who have crowded onto their guesthouse balconies or inched slowly into a chair for a Beer Lao at the many riverside cafes.
In the back streets, old Lao women sit under door frames peeling vegetables for dinner. In other homes, small cauldrons are already burning outside homes as young mothers scoop up playing toddlers. At the tip of the peninsula, the silence is broken as tuk-tuk drivers screech around the bend at a three-wheel angle ruffling the bougainvillea as they conquer their racetrack urges.

Land of a million butterflies

Behind Muang Ngoi Neua a narrow path leads out through the morning market into paradise found. In the early morning, cloud rose off the forested lumpy limestone karst. Past a cave, sheltering knee-deep water, the scene unfolded into an exquisite landscape where nature towered over man’s perfect handiwork. Soaring limestone peaks, carpeted in forest, encircled fulsome fields of rice ready for harvest. After fording a stream, we entered the paddies walking along the bunds listening to the trickling sound of irrigation. The rice sheaves were shoulder high and just the rooves of wooden huts were visible above the canopy. Butterflies abounded — lemon yellow, turquoise blue and black, and burnt orange splashed colour around the paddy green.
At the village of Buan Hay Bor, two hours from town, a hanging stuffed civet cat greeted us, its meat long since swallowed. This Lao Lum village of 350 families also had 10 Khmu families living at its edge. We stopped for refreshments while watching chickens tumble down ladders.
Walking back through the paddies to the village of Ba Na, my guide tells me that monkeys used to live on the karst ridges. Where are they now, I asked. They’ve all been eaten, he explained.
Indeed, at the small restaurant at Ba Na, the huge curled claws of an eagle swung from the rafters.

Sunset beauty spot

Just before reaching the riverside village of Muang Ngoi Neua on the downstream boat journey, a monstrous slab of narrow rock, the limestone equivalent of the NYC Flatiron building comes into view. It heralds the arrival of some of the most beautiful landscape in Laos. Muang Ngoi Neua clings to a high ledge on a broad curve on the Nam Our river.

Boats pull in at a set of steep concrete steps that lead up from the river bank to the first set of bungalows. On the steps, local women wash clothes and then wade in, clad in sirongs, to bathe. At the top of the slope, tourists swing in hammocks or slurp on fruit shakes from bamboo balconies.

Behind the first scattered row of bamboo huts and restaurants is the main street that sprouts pebbles and grass. Dogs, chickens, geese and toddlers squawk and screech as locals and tourists mingle and meander up and down. Next to a tourist hang out, a local woman boils her rice wine on an open fire; in the next shop, a Lao seamstress fidgets at a sewing machine making fishermen’s trousers for the tourist who has run out of clothes.

At the end of the day, the mountains that enclose Muang Ngoi Neua, swallow the sun earlier than elsewhere so the sunset drink starts early. From 4pm, tourists gather at the best riverside bars to drink Beer Lao and snap the rose glow that seeps across the river and the limestone facades.

Boating the Nam Ou, Northern Laos

Not many travellers boat all the way down from Hat Xa, near Phongsali to Laos’ former Royal capital, Luang Prabang, as it’s a three day journey, but I decided to opt for the river over the road for a glimpse into riverine life.

In the early morning, cloud was glued to the hilltops; the sun didn’t burn through for several hours. Almost immediately after leaving Hat Xa, mini rapids in the sludge-green river buffeted our long boat. Out of the rapids, the river was a glassy stillness and when the motor cut, birds could be heard in the bamboo thatch. Lining the route were other long boats tethered on sandbanks sheltered by clutches of bamboo trunks leaning over the water.

Small, ragged sandy islands carpeted in clumps of scrappy bush moulded by the flow of the river blocked the boat’s path frequently. The boat driver would sway this way and that as islands normally indicated rapids and he searched for the best route through. The boat’s nose would tip down as we gravitated towards the eddies and the engine would grind and gnaw as we upped the speed to navigate the torrents. Slapping against the swirls, we would occasionally be sprayed and the boat would fill with giggles.

We passed lapwings, buffalo gingerly making their way along thin wedges of sandbanks, dozens of fishing net poles and rice huts perched on impossibly steep slopes.

At Houm village, of Tai Lue, Lao and Phu Noi ethnic minority, where we stopped for a visit, a local woman smoked a fat stub of cigarette as we watched cotton yarn being collected.

Muang Khua, the first major stop on the river, is a collection of higgledy piggledy shacks and bamboo landings piled up on one side overlooking the pull-ferry facing the road to Vietnam.

Time for a Beer Lao watching the river traffic which was what everyone else in town was doing!

Double, double boil and trouble

Phongsali is at the pinnacle of Laos; not many travellers get much further north into the tip of the country than this. It’s a slow-moving backwater that’s about to be demoted even further as the provincial capital gets moved to Boun Neua, 1.5 hours away, where the nearest airport is and where the governor wants to move it.

It’s the kind of place that seems resigned to its fate. Big government cars prowl the streets as do the UN office against drugs vehicles manoeuvering between the odd motorbike and songthaew. Projects for the ‘replacement of poppy’ can be seen alongside the bumpy tracks. Opium production was a major source of income in the area, home to 28 ethnic minorities. Bizarrely, the tourism office displays a picture of a backpacker sniffing a pink poppy as if it was part of one of its tours.

I spent a long time in the tourist office while a French group who’d just about made it from Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam (they said the Lao were building the road in front of them as they moved) wanted to get a ride to Udomxai. By the time I was done, a guy from the tourist office and a local policewoman dressed in a green shirt, decorated with Communist badges, stiff epaulettes, an enormous name badge and a matching official green sinh, wanted to come out on a day trip.

We bumped along a track to the village of Ban Khounsok Noi. The track clung to the edge of what seemed like a precipice. The mountains of Phongsali fell away beneath us and the spread of green hills and huts undulated across the horizon.

Ban Khounsok Noi is known for its production of lao lao (rice wine). I asked Tae why the policewoman had left her post for the morning. She wanted to buy rice wine, he told me. So... the policewoman who was on the job fancied a trip to buy genuine fresh-from-the-boiling-pot rice wine while she could get a lift.

At Ban Khounsok Noi, a rickety cluster of homes, we found an old man manufacturing the lethal liquid. Except, today he was making corn whiskey and not rice wine. The Lao in my company were a bit unsure about this unexpected turn of events and eyed the green liquid in the jars with turned up noses. But after chat and watching the man cool the cauldron by tipping out the boiling water and soaking the top with cold, they asked for a taste. The liquid was green as it was poured through leaves after funnelling out of the cauldron. I was passed a tiny glass; the corn whiskey burnt my throat half a metre before it reached my mouth. I could feel it stripping my throat lining as I necked it down. The Lao were laughing now; the policewoman put in her order as did Tae. One litre cost 15,000 kip, just over one pound. It would be the best party gift — one snifter and you’d be under the cauldron in a drunken daze!

Village life in the Laos lane

Nayang village in Northern Laos, surrounded by glistening green crops, looked like a stage set in a BBC medieval drama. Rice wine boiled on a cauldron as it was funnelled into a line of waiting bottles. At up to 70 per cent alcohol it’s a lethal concoction, drunk readily, and known as lao lao. Under a large stilted house a three-month-old baby swung in a bamboo cradle, hitched to the raised floor of the house, while her grandmother heaved-ho at the loom. Bicycle wheels stripped of their tyre, had been converted into spinning wheels and an upturned bomb used to sharpen knives. All around the clickety-clack of the looms drowned out the roosters as pattern upon pattern evolved on the freshly-made textiles. Barefooted women sat around coiling the cotton on to tiny bamboo yarn sticks.

In the neighbouring house, while chickens stole sneaky pecks at drying scarlet chillies, another Tai Lue woman thrashed at giant cotton balls to thin out the cloudy fluff before it would be sent for spinning. Mid-morning the children were in school so the only movement in this small village were piglets on marathon runs.

There are hundreds of villages like this across northern Laos. Many are strung out along the roadside where Hmong and Tai Dam ethnic minorities live. Incredibly they all have electricity but their lifestyle is simple and as far removed from urban graft and grime as you can imagine.

The communist caves at Vieng Xai

Vieng Xai is at the end of the world or, at least, the end of the world in Laos. In the far northeast, close to the Vietnamese border, a series of bush-bound limestone clumps stud the landscape. Many of these forested mounds hid a government leader for almost 10 years. Between 1964-1973, the Pathet Lao ran its operations from these caves to escape American bombing. Some 20,000 local people also became subterranean souls. Their troglodytic existence meant that rice was grown at night in the surrounding fields, cars were parked in Flintstone-like garages and work was conducted by candlelight.

The communist caves at Vieng Xai are surreal. Leading to cave entrances are a vivid purple-veined plant called homedeng, planted to symbolise the blood of the Laos people.

Each Pathet Lao leader’s cave contains a concrete bunker fronted by a huge blue metal door. A solitary bed frame, lamp and Russian oxygen machine remain inside. The 1968 life-giving funnels were installed to be used in the event of a nuclear attack; none, of course, were ever switched on. The cave rooms are marked as bedrooms, kitchens or offices. In one cave, 2000 soldiers lived; in another, a stage for theatre and circuses was erected; and in another an emergency bedroom for important meetings. In Secretary-General Kaysone Phomvihane’s cave we were told, he had even played ping pong.

From the command look out post in the cave of Sisavath Keobounphanh, the guide explained to us that anti-aircraft artillery were positioned on hill tops to spot incoming bombers. It was easy to see how the soldiers manning the anti-aircraft machinery would have been able to see approaching American planes across the low-slung mounds in the valley.

Trip to Tham Phiu

Lasikeo Phommasone was a child-soldier in November 1968. Welling up with tears he told me he was 15 when an American T-28 fighter plane released its bomb at the entrance to the Tham Phiu cave. The bomb travelled the length of the cave before exploding and killing all 374 people inside. Lasikeo had delivered food to the villagers inside the cave just five minutes beforehand. He was below the cave mouth when the bomb torpedoed through. He turned around and went to get his horse to go to the village to get help. Lasikeo stood in front of the memorial statue, a soldier carrying the limp body of a woman, and says he has not, until now, felt emotionally able to return but his sons wanted to come from Vientiane and so they all came along as a family. The Americans, determined to halt the spread of the Red march, bombed parts of Laos to oblivion. General Curtis Le May said that he had indeed wanted to bomb the Communists ‘back into the stone age’. More bombs were dropped on Laos than in the entire Second World War. Driving through Xieng Khuang province where much of the bombing raids took place is a passport into a world littered with weapons of mass destruction. Strung around houses are fences bollarded with bombs, herbs sprout from cluster bomb cases, cluster bomb stilts support store rooms and mills. In one Hmong village, bomb cases were piled up in the back yard like they were just a pile of old garden pots waiting to be reused. One roadside house has painted the bomb tips in yellow and uses them to surround his garden table as well as prop up his fence. A note in Lao written on a mortar bomb says they are for sale - apparently an offence in Lao law.

Drinking at the Plain of Jars

Legend has it that the hundreds of huge stone jars scattered across the Plain of Jars in remote Northeast Laos are the wreckage of an almighty piss-up of giants. The scattering of upright and toppled jars looks like the discarded beer cans of drunken revelry. It’s a good story but archaeologists, who are by no means sure of the whys and wherefores, believe they’re funeral urns. This makes more sense in the context of their setting; their resting places are all in peaceful surrounds. Despite what the guidebooks say, Site 2 is the most beautiful, with a 360 degree view of rice paddies and tumbling hills. At Site 2 a tree has grown through the base of the jar splitting it four ways. Throughout the sites the Mines Advisory Group has laid marker bricks; you’re not allowed to wander outside of these zones. I have never been so fixated on a pair of bricks in all my life.

After a day contemplating the legend of the imbibing giants, Tae, my guide, offered to take me to a local disco. It was a Hmong hang out. The crooners crooned, there was some very restrained Laos dancing which involved twisting my wrists, followed by a frustrated Kevin Bacon Footloose routine. I was happy to shake a leg or two after being so feet focussed on ground tainted by so much unexploded ordnance.

As the night wore on, Tae’s friends thought it a good idea to pour wine into the Beer Lao. Beer Lao is a fine drink. I asked them why they wanted to taint the sacred national drink by polluting it with vino; some people like the sweet taste, they told me. It was nothing short of a blasphemous transubstantiation of the gold nectar into cough mixture.

Bomb decor

I snapped the bean in two and shoved it into the shrimp paste and curled a bundle of sticky rice and stuck it into the rattan paste. It had a faintly peanutty tang and I continued to roll rice balls as well as slurp at the feu soup using chopsticks and a lightweight metal spoon made from aluminium scrap from Indochinese war planes.

I was on my way to Phonsavanh, capital of Xieng Khuang Province. Here, the guesthouses are garlanded with cluster bombs and mortars and belts of bullets are hung like jewellery from hut windows; cluster bomb cases have been turned into flower beds. It’s as if the tangible fall out of war has become the chic decor de jour in this region.

This remote northeastern area of Laos happens to be the most bombed area of the planet. Yes, this is the area that the American forces tried to bomb to oblivion to stop the advances of Communism in Southeast Asia. During the Second Indochina War some 260 million submunitions were dropped in this area - only 97 million submunitions exploded over Vietnam and 50 million over Iraq until 2006.

But the unexploded ordnance (UXO) trails a deadly legacy. Some 250 people die every year in Laos as they accidentally or deliberately (in their attempt to sell scrap metal) shunt a bombie. Limbs are torn off and eyes are blinded. The Mines Advisory Group, a UK charity, does sterling work throughout the region and has even trained three all-female search-and-detonate teams (www.maginternational.org).