Laos PDR – People’s Democratic Republic or Please Don’t Rush?

Fun Fact: Laos is one of five remaining communist countries left in the world. 

Border Crossing Confusion

We arrived on the shores of Laos early on one of the first boats.  The Laos border crossing station consists of two small windows with 3 people working inside.  When we went to pay for our visas I handed $70 for my visa which was $67.  Here’s where things get complicated/hilarious.  The government official (who keep in mind does this every day, all day long) looks at my $70, at the $67 price of my visa and stares again blankly at my $70 for another 5 seconds.  5 seconds doesn’t sound like a lot, but five seconds of silent staring is actually a long time, try it.  Anyways, after obviously making no progress whatsoever, the official reaches for his calculator and punches in 67-70=-3.  I was afraid he was going to be confused by the negative 3 but he handed me my change and I am now eternally grateful to my public school education for teaching me basic arithmetic. 

Rocky Road

Because Laos lacks adequate infrastructure like roads, railways and bridges we were left few options of getting to Luang Prabang after we lost our river option.  After some thought we decided to go by minivan (because public busses were intimidating and a private minivan was not much more).  It turned out to be a 12 hour ride on virtually nonexistent roads.  By nonexistent, I mean we could see tractors ahead of us clearing rocks and smoothing out roads as we went.  I have never been on a bumpier ride.  I’m sure that our ticket money simply goes to repairing popped tired and replacing shocks.

Along the way we also saw 3 kids riding a water buffalo, people sleeping under trucks and a UK couple in our minivan lost their passports.  The strange thing was that they were both carrying their passports separately and somehow managed still to lose them both.  Not sure how things worked out for them, but I wished them the best of luck, really, it’s one thing to lose your passports, it’s another to lose it while in Laos.  Our driver said very little and would stop at random unpredictable times.  One time he just turned off the side of the road in the darkness, opened the door and said “pee”.  The last hour before we arrived at our destination, the driver suddenly decided to start blast Lao music.  It wasn’t bad, but I’m glad we only had an hour more.  Besides the strange and neck jarring ride we did really get to know two separate travelers who both happened to be from Finland.  They would henceforth be known as the “Finnish Team” and we would travel with them all throughout Laos together. 

Niklas:

Taina:

Upon arrival in Luang Prabang we immediately hit the road and had to try to find an open hostel.  The only place that we found with two open rooms for the four of us (Baptiste, the Finnish Team and me) was at a place called “Phousi Guesthouse”.  If you’re wondering how to pronounce that… just sound it out.  Yes, it sounds like that.  In the morning when we checked out, we talked to the old lady working at the hostel who started to say, “This is not the only poo-sey, we have another one across town.  That one is my poo-sey Guesthouse.  Also you should go see poo-sey mountain…”  This was when we first realized how to actually pronounce the guesthouse we just spent the night in.  At this point we were just looking at each other and trying our hardest not to crack up in her face.  Taina turned around and burst out laughing silently to herself.  Nick and I just stood looking at her in disbelief at the unfortunate sound of her hostel and the major attraction in town.  

Choice Shot: Napping Kitty

Panorama from Phousi Wat

Other Luang Prabang Temples

Waterfall?  Waterfall?

The main attraction really was quite impressive.  The waterfall includes a wildlife preservation exhibit of gorillas and a series of waterfalls stepping up into the mountains with each more impressive and more beautiful than the last.  The first one was a huge beautiful shallow pool of crisp blue water that sparkled in the sunlight.  To top it off, it came complete with a huge branch that leaned out over the water and a rope to swing off of.  We took turns and Baptiste and I both did multiple swings off the branch.  We also jumped off the waterfall which would be technically our 3^rd waterfall jump of the trip.  The next would each be different and the top was a grand finale waterfall that was 80-100 feet tall.

Night Markets & Utopia

All throughout the streets, all the tuk-tuk drivers all scream one thing, “Waterfall?  Waterfall?!”  and at night they scream “Bowling?  Bowling?!”  The reason they yell “bowling” is because most everything closes at night around 10 PM except for a bowling alley on the outskirts of the city where all the night-owls spend their nights until about 3 AM when they close.  From 8-10 there is a lively street market with crazy souvenirs.  Baptiste tried alcohol with preserved scorpions and snakes in it and I bought an awesome ball lamp that is currently hanging in my room in Fukuoka.  We were recommended by a passing traveler to try a riverside restaurant called Utopia that is decorated with reused old bombshell casings, where all the tables are low to the ground, the seats are just cushions and most people eat leaning up while mostly laying down, and has everything from foosball to a full sized volleyball court for anybody who feels like jumping around after a big meal.

The Lao Wedding

 The night that we intended to see this famed bowling alley for ourselves we had a late dinner.  As usual everything closed (even all the bars and restaurants, I believe it is in accordance with communistic Lao government rules) but we heard one place with very load music near our hostel.  We decided to check it and found there was a large party going on inside a local schoolyard with many banquet tables, decorations and a DJ with large speakers in the center.  We poked our heads inside and were immediately greeted by a man with a wide smile, a leathery wrinkled face and dressed in a blazer that was slightly too big for his frame.  He asked no questions,  simply saying “come in come in!” and pulled out four chairs for us.  We sat down confused and unsure what we had just walked into.  He explained it was a wedding and that we were more than welcome to join.  He then poured us each a beer and toasted to the bride and groom.  The rest of the night was one of the most random, unexpected and easiest immersions into a culture I’ve ever had the privilege to experience.  We danced with the locals, imitating their motions while they mimicked ours.  We drank beer together and found two other foreigners who had wandered in and found them in the same position as us.  There is truly no hospitality like Lao hospitality.  

 

I Swear We're Not Drunk, We Just Really Look Like It

The Best Sandwich Ever – Lao Style Sandwich

This actually may not be the best sandwich ever, but it was so good, we actually got it from the street the first day and went back the morning we were leaving just to get another one.  The mother-like lady who we got to know making our sandwiches was actually having her birthday the second day we went back and we had a drink with her in the middle of the day.  When I first asked her what a Lao Style Sandwich was after questionably looking at her menu, she just said “get it”.  I would not regret it.  The sandwich is filled with virtually everything she had: pork sung, egg strips, chicken strips, tofu, lettuce, onions, tomatoes, all topped off with a tangy sweet pepper sauce in a soft fresh baguette.  Cost: $2 from a food stand off the street.  Oh yeah, one more thing, Lao Iced Coffee is AMAZING.

The Scary Smoothie

We also got fruit smoothies from this lady who had cubes of precut fruit in plastic cup containers.  Baptiste picked one and she asked which one he wanted.  He again pointed to the cup and she looked at it for a second, then picked it up, threw it in the garbage and said, “you don’t want that one” and picked him another one.  I also drank one of these smoothies except he told me this story when I was mostly done with mine.  It was a very scary smoothie to drink afterwards.

Traditional Laos Town + Amazing Scenery + Cabo San Lucas Drinking = Vang Vieng

There is many things you can say about Vang Vieng.  But the best adjective for Vang Vieng is simply, bizarre.  Nothing about this town makes any sense.  By that I mean, it is almost literally smack dab in the middle of Laos, arguably the least well known and remote Southeast Asian country, easily the most difficult to reach, and it is absolutely filled with drunk foreigners every single day.  So many foreigners here love it that many stay much longer than they plan.  Some have gone as far as to decide to stay indefinitely.  Many bars employ foreign girls who work in Vang Vieng to earn enough money to sustain and perpetuate an endless party lifestyle.  A whole town built along the river is reliant on a tourist industry that has nothing to do with the surrounding scenery.  Everything about the town feels a little off.  First off, all the buildings are wrong.  Proportionally they make no sense, the ceiling heights are too high, huge 40 foot Corinthian columns support nothing on facades that are narrower than they are tall, our hostel was so new it had plastic still wrapped on the handles of the furniture, stairs had a huge rise to run scale problem, and sometimes the stairs would simply end at the bottom of the staircase with a small 2” step after a series of 8” tall steps.   Okay architecture schpiel over.  Many restaurants and cafes would have a whole line of TV’s playing nothing but reruns of Friends or Family Guy constantly.  Pancake/crepe/sandwich stands lined the streets only at night to provide wandering drunk foreigners with cheap fried drunk food.  The favorite past time in Vang Vieng is an activity dubbed as “tubing” where you start at an arbitrary beginning point on the river upstream and float downwards from bar to bar which line the river getting drunk all day until you reach the end.  These bars are often little more than small wooden shacks and platforms built jutting out over the river but all of them are also equipped with either a giant rope swing that extends from a huge precarious ladder or a zip line which connects one bar to another.  These swings are no joke, people get hurt, seriously hurt on these things.  They are often 40-50 ft in the air and the river is sometimes filled with rocks in certain places and/or is just shallow.  It is also very contaminated (I’ve heard horrific stories of aweful infections incurred from swimming with open wounds).  I had no cuts but opted out of swimming in it nevertheless.  Combine this kind of environment with hundreds of completely inebriated foreigners every day and you get inevitable injuries.  

Caving

There are a few things to see in Vang Vieng that don’t have to do with partying.  One of those is caving.  It’s not exactly spelunking but there is definitely a sense of adventure in caving.  Some caves are easy to find, shallow and can be explored in a few minutes.  Others are so obscure it takes a local guide to show the way through the thick wilderness to find.  Inside, these caves are huge endless tunnels of pitch dark varying alien terrain that can take hours of walking without ever seeing a single source of light or hint of an exit.  The best cave we explored was one called the “water cave”.  You sit in a rubber inner tube, strap on a water proof headlight and battery, wade into the freezing cold water and start paddling.  There is a line of rope that you pull hand over hand to get inside the cave but it ends about 30 feet inside and afterwards the only possible form of propulsion is your own two hands.  Paddling down inside the water cave is definitely eerie and resembles something like being swallowed and falling down the esophagus of some enormous monster.  At some point, our local guide who was a boy no more than 13 years old told us “same same, but different”.  This is a classic Laos phrase which means everything is about the same or isn’t all that different.  Laotians say it all the time and you’ll find many t-shirts that say the same thing implying it’s a nationally recognized phrase.  Personally, I love the phrase, it’s fun, casual and carefree which perfectly describes the Lao lifestyle.  

Bridge to Nowhere

Scootering

One of the best things to do in Laos is to rent a scooter and just head for the hills.  There is one main road, Route 13 that connects Luang Prabang, Vang Vieng and Vientiane, three of Laos’s major cities together that winds and weaves through huge jagged razor mountain peaks.  This time renting bikes, we went even more adventurous than the last and went with the manual bike which was a little scary but was not all that different than an automatic, was both cheaper and a more interesting challenge.   Generally scootering is fun and safe, except on the day we went to the water cave we decided to ride out very far from the city even after caving.  We reached a point where the sun began to set and night began to fall.  We raced home as fast as we could but were pretty much riding in the dead of night by the time we got back.  To make matters worse, my helmet had no visor and the only way to keep the hundreds of bugs which were smacking into my eyes and face was with my sunglasses.  I never again want to have to choose between shielding my eyes from exploding insects or seeing the road.  Anyways, I successfully used them as long as possible before it was impossible and then just squinted till we got back.  My biggest problem was actually dodging the giant water buffalo that would cross the roads without looking or caring about oncoming traffic.  They are big but surprisingly scary and difficult to dodge.  Another guy we met at the water cave basically did what we did but came out a little later than us.  We saw him the next day with messy cuts and scrapes from falling off his scooter.  We were blessed to have gotten back safely.  But look at these awesome panoramas, totally worth it:

Tubing

On the first day we went to see what this whole big party was for ourselves and we headed out around 1 PM and was told that we were late.  The party starts at 10 AM.  Everyone STARTS drinking at 10 AM and is pretty much drunk all day long!  We rode from the town center to the starting point with 2 girls and one guy who were in perfectly good health.  The following day we would see the man hobbling and one of the girls in crutches.  In Vang Vieng, it is literally cheaper to get drunk all day long than it is to do almost anything else.  The bars give away free shots for no reason and alcohol is sold not in cups, shot glasses or bottles but in buckets.  BUCKETS!  And if you want it stronger (usually a cocktail mix) all you do is ask.  With that said, I will also say that I didn’t drink very much.  I drank enough where my face was as red as the headband I was wearing and I even had some stuff with snake in it. But I am not a big drinker and somehow I knew that Baptiste and Nick might need my help today.  Around 7 PM the party died near the river and people are shipped off in small groups by tuk-tuk back to the city center.  Both Baptiste and Nick were both inconsolably drunk.  I got them into a tuk-tuk, Baptiste lit a cigarette and unknowingly (or maybe knowingly) burned my leg.  Then we exit the tuk-tuk and they both immediately run in opposite directions.  I first grab Nick as he tries to kick a passing tuk-tuk.  I then turn around and realize I’ve lost Baptiste.  I find him a few buildings down leaning up and stumbling from wall to wall.  He has all sorts of blue marker writing all over his body and leaves trails all over every wall he is up against.  (He would later use the blue marks on the white walls to retrace his steps and try to regain his lost memory when he is sober).  He then throws up in the street, I take him upstairs and he throws up again for about an hour or two off a balcony as I just try to keep him from falling off.  Nick is thankfully in his room with Taina and he is also very drunk.  By the morning, I’ve accumulated plenty of incriminating photographs and hilarious videos of both of them and everybody is safe and sound.    

The Swedish in Lao Jail

We met a guy while crossing a bridge who told us that he had just gotten out of jail that day.  He was apparently caught by local police smoking weed which is both illegal and readily available in Vang Vieng.  The police know this and use it as a chance to make themselves some extra money.  He told us that he met two Laotians in the prison who had been there for 3 months because they couldn’t afford the bail and might never ever be able to afford it.  He also apparently spent 4 million kips or about $460 USD to get out, which is a surprisingly small amount in my mind because they could have also just as easily kept him in jail for life (but I guess that means they wouldn’t get $460).  This guy obviously didn’t learn his lesson because even as he was telling us his story, he was still very stoned.  So in spite of all the riverside bars, cheap alcohol, night clubs and good food, Vang Vieng is a pretty scary place.  We left the next day.

The Public Bus

We had an extra day and decided to leave because we’d heard enough horror stories about the place and we got a good enough taste of it to understood what it was about.  We had an extra day however and saw that there was a large reservoir between Vang Vieng and Vientiane.  So we decided to take a chance and venture out a bit off the beaten path.  We took a local bus which is a noteworthy experience in and of itself.  The bus has no air conditioning except for a few rotating fans stuck on the ceiling, a man stands hanging outside the door to get more people to ride, when someone boards with a large bag, his job is to hoist it above the bus and onto the rooftop and tie it down.  As the bus fills up, people start to place their bags of rice in the isle way of the bus and they sit on it like a makeshift seat.  The whole time, the bus is making stops all the time which makes what should otherwise only be a 2-3 hour trip about 4 hours long.     We make it to Nam Ngum Reservoir where we say goodbye to our friend Nick and from where we depart to the Vientiane Airport for our flight to Cambodia.  Vientiane International Airport is the international airport for the capitol of Laos, Vientiane.  But just to reinforce the size of the country and the immense flow of traffic through Laos, the day we flew to Cambodia there were a total of 4 flights, including ours.

 Laos Public Bus

Rice Hats

Nam Ngum Sunrise

Dam Panorama

Lao Airlines Fail

In my many times flying, I’ve never used a plane with propellers instead of jet engines.  This wasn’t so bad except that when it first started to power up, the engine just sputtered out and stopped.  We were then told to exit the plane and go back to the terminal.  Luckily they got us another (working) plane 20 minutes later and we were off.

Back to Laos

In general the most amazing thing about Laos is the people.  They are some of the most genuine people you will ever meet; they want nothing more from you than to share a drink with you, to find out more about you and to share a part of their culture.  It also helped we made such great friends and connected with other amazing world travelers.  Laos is still relatively untainted by tourism, but places like Vang Vieng give a very strong hint to what will soon happen to Laos.  Laos is not yet like its nearby neighbors and still operates on its own pace which is why the more accepted acronym for Laos PDR is still “please don’t rush”.  I only hope that it will remain purely Laos for as long as possible.  

Atop Phousi Wat

 
Hiking up Phousi Wat