Discovering the Undiscovered - Hurry, Hurry.
Trip Start
Jan 09, 2009
1
5
44
Trip End
Feb 23, 2009
Luang Prabang, Lao Peoples Dem Rep
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
"I think David knows a lot more about Laos," surmised Mac.
"As I don't have the Lonely Planet, I have done some online research."
Loman did have a copy of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam which he picked up in Kunming, so turned out a more useful source of information than me, once we got to Luang Prabang.
Mohan, because it was a border town, was bright, attractive, clean and cosmetically spruced-up for a Chinese town, at least is the main thoroughfare. We stopped at the departure gate where the first concern was to change Chinese RMB to the Kip. Mac and Cissy went off in search of the nearest bank while I retraced down the street to get a hundred dollar bill changed to smaller denominations at an Agricultural Bank of China branch.
Touts were out selling Kip at less than the official exchange. Mac and Cissy needed time to get their heads round the currency. It wasn't that difficult: 50, 20, 10, 5, 2, 1 thousand, and 5OO bill denominations simplify things. However, we kind of dithered. After some breakfast, one tout impatiently counted the 300,000 or so worth of notes I exchanged from 300 Yuan. Well, this was my first time!
Departure procedure done, we ventured to the Laos border where I and Loman got our visas and headed for the off. "Goodbye China," Mac resounded, although he had to stop and register the car - bureaucracy - which took about 45 minutes not far down the road.
Hitting the main Laos thoroughfare, Route 13, the car headed straight for a combination of rough and stony dirt, potholes and tarmac, a first taste of the rough and ready. For all Mac's attempts at hurrying through a 'new' environment, it took him all day to get to Luang Prabang.
A road suddenly formed a fork to Luang Namtha. I made a flash decision to carry on with the others. Despite the rosy picture about 'having the time of (one's) life' about trekking expeditions read from cosy websites, I now realize it wouldn't have been any more off the beaten track or given me a greater more enjoyable insight into the Laos people than I accumulated. I started reading Paul Theroux's best seller, Dark Star Safari about his travels from the Nile to Cape Town. He also says something similar, scorning Safari expeditions laid on for Westerners. Best to save the dollars.
However, Mac, true to his Chinese-ness, wanted to hurry and hurry, anxious to get off with Cissy, while I wanted to quietly absorb the surroundings, villages, and vistas we were passing through. If your living in concrete and and travel on tarmacadam you don't often get the chance to see wooden shacks and huts with thatched and straw roofs built on poles embedded in the dusty earth which likely turns to mud during the rainy season.
Apart from the dry dust, Laos is very verdant: banana plants, forests and cloaks of trees abound, a bit more ecologically motivated than China and other parts of Asia. Without heavy industry, it doesn't have the GDP to produce much, but the people at first hand looked deprived. This, however, wasn't really the case. Loman, further down the road, assumed it was:
"These people are so poor. They have little aspiration." Is that so? Later, on my own, this, although partly true, was also a false analogy. Later I met and got together with a French woman who also thought otherwise. For starters, the people seemed to languish in the heat with their resident dogs. They didn't look or behave in desperation to be deprived.
Mac's attempts at speeding up things got beneath my skin; I'd like to have taken a few more pics after we skimmed through the first major town of Oudomxay. Because it also provided a convenient dropping off post to travel elsewhere in the country, I shelved another option to do the trekking and carried on through the dust, pothole bangs and crunchy stones.
Mac jumped out on a few occasions to check the front end of his BMW which remained undamaged from the impact. All was well, we carried on. However, his relationship with Cissy, a Chinese muddle - big or small from the outset - was deteriorating by the hour. They ended up verbally at each other's throats. The heated exchanges between them were almost unbearable. Loman, for all his Mandarin expertise, couldn't grasp the content, save the context, due to the intense speed at which they were verbalizing. Any sexual liaisons Mac might have thought he'd get were thrown firmly out of the window by this point.
However, we all experienced our first sinking sun over the Mekong River as we halted - really!! - on a bridge to take some impressive photos and of some spectacular limestone escarpments and a towering mountain.
The entrance to Luang Prabang was a relative anti-climax: low buildings beneath concrete telegraph poles and their strung together wires.
Not surprisingly, the place was quite full. Well, It was the High Season. However, Loman, armed with dogged persistence and with his guidebook, found us somewhere which worked out at about seven to eight dollars a night. Because she understandably wouldn't share a double bed with Mac, shared a two single bed room with me. Taking your shoes off at the foot of the wooden staircase - and putting them on again - was a time consuming damned nuisance. I thought it was only the Japanese that went to such lengths. But it was a nice guesthouse, wooden verandas outside the upstairs rooms looking across to several palm trees, and down from the main road. Sorry I've forgotten the name. Loman got embroiled rapidly in the booking and deposit fees; way ahead of me.
We went out, ordered our first Lao meal - rice and whatever, a portion notably smaller than a Chinese, and tasted our first Lao beer, or is it 'Beer Lao?'
