En Trevlig Resa: juni 2012

Part 1. or The Chinese embassy demands a sacrifice.

After a 18 hour train ride and then a 40 hour bus ride we found ourselves, finally, in Vientiane. Why were we here? What could possibly warrant this trip? It wasn't just one of those inklings of “I need to be moving”, no this was a journey of a very different kind, one known to many a westerner living in Asia as a “Visa run”. My Chinese visa after being renewed the maximum of 2 times was now running out and I needed to get a new one, so off we flew to our closest neighbouring country, Lao.

Oh has it changed! I'll tell you boy, Lao is not the way it used to be. Vientiane is overrun with fallangs, bars, nightclubs, foreign bakeries and all those things one would associate with Thailand. Even the fallangs were different. No more sitting in a shack-esque place by the Mekong, slurping down on a bowl of noodles or a Beer Lao. The area has been turned into something park-like with high fences, and the plan is to build some form of skyscraper-business-district/expensive-maybe-party-official-villas.

One thing always stays the same though. If you want something, make sure you take your time.

An individual unbeknownst to this fact was a German, fellow Chengdu resident, whom we met on the bus, who in response to all the extra things that embassies always want, the time it will take, and everything possible that could upturn a tightly written schedual, turned a very flustered scarlet colour and disappeared somewhere. We did not see him again, though hope that he is doing well and managed to find his way back to China.

But I almost forget one story, this one seemed to set the trip off in a good trajectory. As we passed through the border two of the men in the back of our bus disappeared. The bus left without them, but upon learning of their going missing, turned around, waited for a while and then left again. Where were these poor souls, had they gotten stuck somewhere in the process of immigration?

While sitting at a restaurant, the first rest stop on the Lao side, suddenly from a minivan emerges our lost brethren. Back on the bus we asked them what happened. “Well”, said the one, “that guy dropped his passport and so we couldn't go through immigration and got fined so he had to walk around and since its dangerous I of course couldn't let him go by himself.” At this point we noticed the beads of sweat around the forehead and the red mud covering their shoes and trousers.

“See”, he said, flicking through his passport, “I didn't get any stamp, it's completely empty!”

Indeed it was.

Now a few things may serve to make the picture clearer. First of all, Chinese people are not allowed to leave the country, at least not to Lao, without having already applied for the visa, and presenting it to the Chinese side of the border. Also before arriving Ting had overheard the man behind us repeatedly assuring that a meet-up with someone be held.

Obviously we had not been given the full story. My attempt at recreating what actually transpired would be that these guys had from the start planned to cross the border illegally, and had arranged a meet-up with someone who knew the way across. The bus drivers were surely used to this happening, and a Chinese man living in Thailand, whom we met on our way back up to Kunming, said that it's fairly common, and apparently some even do it because they do business in Lao and can't be bothered getting visas everytime.

During our stay in Vientiane, that amazing woman whom I usually refer to as girlfriend or other sickly sweet appellations , had managed to secure us a couch to sleep on through couchsurfing and we thus rocked up at the home of Tom and his friend Saw (excuse the spelling), who lived in the outskirts of Vientiane and surprisingly close to the Chinese embassy (yes, that was pure luck).

Tom is a Australian journalist for the Chinese news agency Xinhua's branch in Lao. Together with Tom and Saw we got to experience all of what Vientiane has to offer. My personal favourite was probably (quite expectedly) the visit to one of the temples, which houses the pii (pronounced pee) of the whole city of Vientiane. Far from being bodily excrements, a pii is a spirit or ancestor. The Lao people build pii houses, for these and they can help grant a persons wishes. So we heard of one of Tom and Saw's friends who went to a pii medium in her family village who gave her the correct lotto numbers for to weeks in a row granting her sizeable winnings, just recently.

The pii at the temple lived under a rubble of rocks, which looked a lot like the ruin of some previous shrine, upon which two necronmanically looking birds held stay. These apparently were always there. We could not decide as to whether this was due to being wing-clipped and fed or due to some strange attraction to this powerful spirit (to which there ghostly apparitions seemed to hint).

At this temple also lived the cutest gibbon, ever being born to the world of man, well, simians. He liked to play this game where he tries to grab your arm, you dodge out of the way, try to grab his arm and so on and so forth. I must admit that this did occupy me for a long long time, but how could I not, he seemed to enjoy it so much.

Five days in Vientiane, a 6 hour online dissertation peer-review, and so it was finally time to go retrieve my passport and hopefully new Chinese visa. After arriving, collecting a bank form, travelling half way across the city to the only Chinese bank in Vientiane, depositing money, get a receipt and finally arriving back at the embassy in the rain, as I took a step onto the tiled floor of the embassy grounds, my Chinese slippers failed in providing me with traction and I sailed gracefully forward like an ice princess into the metal railings that secure the giant gate, which lopped off the entire nail of the second toe of my left foot, palpitating blood onto the white tiles, in amounts that hopefully looked more copious due to the water and mud, but who can be sure. Clean up as much as possible, go in, smile, get passport, walk the 30 minutes back to the house and then get cleaning the wound.

I wish for it here to be known that I have at least learnt from my previous mistakes and subsequent infections and scars, that in Asia wounds should be disinfected and covered up, so for two three weeks until I developed good enough a crust to withstand the climate I've been dousing my toe in alcohol and wrapping it like a Christmas present.

No matter how much we wish for it, all stays must sooner or later come to an end, and so it was time to move on and forward on our trip.

Before I proceed in delineating the rest of our Lao adventures I wish to write something about a different purpose I had in this trip. It was an attempt at trying some new ways of travelling. First of all inspired by the Buddha's words to the travelling bikkhus, I was intent on attempting to travel with only a monks shoulder bag and something similar to the content described by the Buddha (see picture). The other was to wholly travel without bringing a guidebook of any sorts, but instead take a map, draw a route on it, and then follow it. Though we for some reason never managed to secure a good enough map, we still somehow managed to make it through our adventure in said fashion. But that's enough blabbering, time to proceed in the narrative.

Part 2. or Buses and rivers a strange combination.

From Vientiane we travelled east 3 hours to the small town of Paxan. It was our intention to from here make it up to Phonsavan and those great stone jars, up a road much less traversed than the great north-south thoroughfare. Oversleeping our alarm we managed to stay in Paxan for two days eating and looking at the local temples until we finally managed to get on the early morning bus that travels north to our megalith destination.

Starting out the road did not seem very bad, all too good in my opinion, with its tarmac cutting away through the jungle and beautiful vistas. But all things must come to an end and for the dark asphalt this was in a little village littered with construction vehicles and equipment. There was a bridge in the building but, oh no, not nearly finished enough for a bus to get on. Rather we continued down a dirt road to the river. Here, as anywhere in the world were there is problems, there are also more or less ingenious solutions and people making money. In accordance with such a statement, beside us some men where ferrying motorbikes and their owners across the river on some six bamboo poles tied together into a small raft.

A bus however is a whole other ball game (is that the saying?).

Our driver scratching his head sets off with shorts rolled up to wade across the river. Then back. Then across. Then a little bit sideways. I did not see this, but Ting swears that at the deepest the water went up to his chest. After some time of wading, and talking to some people in a tent on the other side the driver came back and kindly asked all passengers to move their luggage from the compartments underneath and into the bus. When this was finished he opened up the hatch to the engine, dislodged the big hose that goes into the carburettor and turned it around to face into the bus. Then everything became silent. Most passengers standing up in their seats to see the spectacle. It was as if he counted down slowly in his head, then suddenly all for it. I think Ting's words best described what went through the heads of all present: “Oh, shit we're crossing a river”.

To a potential passenger unbeknownst to the fact that the bus was fording a river it might have felt like bumping along any other dirt road, but I could have sworn that there was a fluidity to the rocking of the bus. Either way, it would have been impossible to be unaware of the fact that we were deep in water seeing the spray, splutter and hissing around the engine of water turning into steam and shooting up through the hatch. Ting sat by the window and claims that she could easily have touched the water had she stretched out her hand.

Thus we spluttered and rocked and hissed our way up on the other bank. We had made it. We had made it across the river.

Now everything seemed fine again, with continued beautiful vistas, tribal ladies, small villages and all that good stuff. That is, until we reached the next river.

Oh, lo and behold, this river was even bigger, and deeper. To our side was again a bridge that was not yet finished and in the water the same entrepreneurs, though this time it was long, very slim and shallow boats.

Everybody on board! In two or three loads all the passengers were ferried over, then went all the goods being transported. On the other side arrived after a while the bus going the other way arrived and the same thing ensued until about 2 hours later we were finally ready to set off.

After driving for a whole 15 minutes the driver suddenly stopped in a little village and ran out the bus and down a dirt lane at high speed, leaving the rest of us to loiter at or own will. Time passed, and time passed, and even more time passed. Even some of the Lao people were starting to look a little bit confused. A good 1,5 – 2 hours later he returned pulling up his pants, and running back on to the bus. We have discussed to no avail as to whether it was defecation or fornication that took up so much of our drivers time. All we know is that it was not for the purpose of eating, for another 15 minutes down the road we arrived in the town of Tathom (where, if I went a again I'd probably stay the night), here it was time for a 1,5 hour food break.

At least that was it, there were no more unscheduled strange stops and we rocked onwards through even more of above mentioned beautiful vistas, small villages and tribal-looking women, up through giant red mud mountains through the dusky gloom and finally arrived late at night in Phonsavan.

After staying a night at the bus station guest house we walked into town and ended up finding the same guest house me and the boys stayed at the last time, though this town as well has changed. Though there are still hardly any tourist here compared to the big three (Vientiane, Vang Vieng and Luangprabang), the town has suddenly grown a whole lot of “tourist friendly” restaurants and bars, and opposite the guest house there is now a huge (and I mean giganticly enormously megalithic and other superlatives in regards to size), and an of equal size hotel. Gone are also all the houses with war scrap, such as cluster-bomb fences and the like, though it could be that I didn't look hard enough, and these artefacts seem to have moved into above mentioned bars and restaurants.

As it's monsoon season, i.e. low season, there were no tours or the like to go to the plain of jars. We were however offered to rent motorbikes for a (after being haggled down) not too uncomfortable price.

This was actually a very good way to traverse the area and we went to jar site 1, 2 and 3 (yeah there are more now!).

As knowledge of these amazing and mysterious megaliths should be held by anyone planning to visit Lao and most of the readers will be my close friends and allies to whom they would be familiar, I won't go further into the subject matter here, but rather focus the narrative on the continuation of our journey.

Part 3. or Crossing the river of Mekong – On our way to that distant goal.

After looking at a map of Lao it had been our goal to make our way up to the Golden Triangle and the Lao – Myanmar border (my affection towards Myanmar should be well known by now).

On the way, however, why not stop somewhere, somewhere else random on the map. We decided to travel to Sayabouli “city” in Sayabouli province (and, yes! I did use quotation marks as it can hardly be called a city, just because it's the provincial capital), from there to travel up to the bank of the Mekong, across to Bokeo province and up, up and away.

Arriving at the bus station however we were given the crushing news that we would have to pass through that most ravenous of cities, pulling us into its grip, Luangprabang. We were forced to spend the night here, missed the early morning bus as it left 2 hours ahead of schedule and then finally took the midday bus, making sure to arrive on good time. During our stay in Luangprabang we managed to order raw laap, i.e. the version of the famous meat salad that contains raw meat instead of cooked (please no tapeworms, please no tapeworms), this was purely by mistake and I wouldn't have realised it, were it not for Ting's great observational skills. All I can say is that it wasn't bad, though it had a strange bitterness to it, however this could of course be due to the seasoning.

Finally on the bus, it wasn't a bad ride. Stopping at the Mekong (the best of rivers) and going across, this time on a car ferry. Again with the bridge-to-be-built in the background. Nothing exciting.

On the bus we met a young French girl, working at the elephant centre outside Saiyabouli, who with her friends/colleagues picked us up as we were walking to town and dropped us off in the centre. Saiyabouli was a very low and small place. The only thing hinting at it being the provincial capital were the buildings of different departments and the giant boulevard-esque roads, completely unfitting to the small houses.

In Saiyabouli we mostly just wandered the streets, sat by the calm river and on the second day, when Ting was feeling a bit ill and stayed at home resting, I went to the local monastery and ended up talking to one of the monks for a few hours. He practised English by teaching me the Dharma:

“The Buddha taught, what are the three most important things.

Who is the most important person? The person right in front of you.

What is the most important time? Right now.

What is the most important thing? What you are presently doing.”

From Saiyabouli we ventured further northwards, up to the little town of Hongsa. If Saiyabouli was small, we were now in an even smaller place. Five minutes of walking brought us to extant rice fields, creaking bamboo, and loud, shrieking insects.

It seems as if these two towns at times could get tourists, but at the time, there was no sign of any and a large amount of very excited children and others.

From Hongsa we went in a small song thaew, i.e tuck-tuck-like contraption, again towards the banks of the Mekong (the best of rivers), though on the northern part of Saiyabouli province. On the way we got stuck very deeply in a gully on the side of the road, and the driver flooring the throttle digging us deeper did not help the situation. We were stuck here for a few hours while the driver left on a motorbike and finally came back with one of the large passing trucks and very thick wire. After only two attempts we were free out of the gully, and with about five trucks honking at us to get the f*** out, we were finally on our way again, and arrived in Thasuang which is a few houses by the Mekong and a surprisingly large slope of gravel and mud.

From here a bit of issues in translation occurred and we thought that we were heading on a speed-boat towards Huaxay, however it turned out we were merely heading a bit down the river to a town called Pakbeng, where we had to stay the night to go on the slow-boat the day after.

Arriving in Pakbeng was a strange sight. A very empty town apparently empty of tourists, but with a fallang infrastructure to rival the best. Why were there so many guest houses, bakeries and foreigner friendly restaurants?

We went for a walk out along the one road where the development soon turned more rural and we again saw the shrieking and laughing kids.

Coming back to town we finally realised, why there were so much tourism facilities when in the evening the boats coming from Huaxay (by the Thai border) going towards Luangprabang arrived.

I have not in a long time seen such copious amounts of western tourists pouring out of such small vessels, then gathering in a little platform, similar to sheep being rounded up and funnelled out to the slaughter, though here instead of their lives and souls or tasty meat, their money seemed to be the main attraction for this spectacle. After a while a few of them would start to leave in small groups or alone and after awhile none were left and again the Mekong enveloped the area in its quiet hum.

The next day we were on a boat again slowly traversing its way up that mighty river. Through the journey we had beautiful scenery and the great company of Brian, a man whom we'd met just the day before while watching the tourists. We had seen him throughout the day in Pakbeng acting very suspiciously, bicycling around and stopping to jot down notes and take photographs. I remember thinking he looked like an engineer, which was almost correct. Turns out he makes maps, so in retrospect I guess I wasn't that far off.

After almost a whole day on the boat we arrived in Huaxay just in time for the Thai border, which seemed to be the destination for all our fellow passengers, to have closed, and Brian reiterated that the boat will at times slow down, simply to make it there a little bit later.

Luckily, we had a different destination in mind.

Part 4. or Casinos and Pigs, but where are the rocket launchers?

We spent the night in Huaxay getting given laolao in big doses from some old men by the market, and then in the morning got ready to go up the coast in another tiny saeng thaew, which this time was packed full of feisty old ladies and far to many sacks of coconuts, to Thonpeung. Circumventing the apparent question of why this place needed so many coconuts, I'll instead turn to describing the town. Even just approaching and rocking off the concrete road unto the dirt and gravel, and bumping past the small houses I knew this was going to be good. The place was small and after a bit of searching around it wasn't very hard to find the river, with a quay, an immigration office and a few small noodle places with a nice view and breeze.

“Let's find out how to find the casino and where we go from here to take the boat up the river!”

Asking in a shop owned by Chinese people we were told that “Oh, there's no need to get transport to the casino it's only a twenty minute walk!”.

It would however become apparent that these people had never walked there. The distance is probably closer to an hour, but we decided instead after about 40 minutes or so to hitch a ride with one of Lao's many strange tractor-esque contraptions, this one being the usual tractor engine with long handles and one pair of front wheels attached to what can very kindly be called some form of platform with back wheels.

These people, I think thrilled by the fallang hitch hiking decided that rather than going to their destination 2 minutes down the road, they would take us all the way to the casino.

Suddenly the bumpy dirt road and thatched huts turn into a monstrous avenue with street lights that have swans or geese on them and all sorts of construction, long, wide and empty. Then we saw it. The biggest monstrosity of it all and the object of our fascination, the giant and obscene Kingsromans Casino (yes, that's how it's spelt, don't ask me why), complete with giant golden dome with a crown on it, golden statues of Roman gods and giant paintings, and here are we, puttering up on a make-shift tractor, dusty and ill-dressed. We said goodbye and thank you to our ride and approached like two frightened deer. Inside there's more of the same and then the tables of people gambling. Something we noticed was that most of the people gambling had strange headsets and calculators. When we saw that these headsets were connected to a cord connected to a phone it suddenly dawned on us, of course! These people were gambling for others.

In the casino kip were largely unknown and could not be exchanged into yuan, the currency that chips were bought in. Yuan, baht, HK dollars or US dollars were acceptable currency, however if you are lone fallang in the middle of the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone it seems that you can get the help to exchange some kip and obtain to 5 yuan chips to keep as souvenirs. While waiting for all this to transpire I observed a man buying one pack of Chinese cigarettes for 300 yuan, and talked to the man helping me who explained that his father was Indian and his mother Chinese from Shan-state, Myanmar and that he'd grown up in Thailand. Thus he spoke English, Chinese, Thai, Burmese, and Shan.

Now, from afar this casino in the middle of nowhere might look very fancy, and it will probably be very popular once the casinos very own airport is finished and ready to ferry in the rich Chinese gamblers, but after walking around the Kingsromans the picture started to fade somewhat, literally and figuratively. There were large pictures faded blue by the sun entire, walls in the back that were just concrete, and even the great Roman gods turned out upon closer scrutiny to look incredibly plasticine, on top of this all the chips in the casino say Lam Ton Casino Myanmar. This might be one of the casinos that apparently used to be in Lao and Myanmar but were ordered to shut down after some Chinese officials gambled away all their money and were held hostage until their debts were paid off. This is also one of the reasons that I'm sure the Kingsromans will be a business success, as it fills a vacuum of Chinese gambling needs.

I will quickly stop the narrative to describe something of what the Golden Triangle is and what we had heard about it ever since arriving in Lao.

For a long time the Golden Triangle, which is the area were the three borders of Lao, Thailand and Myanmar meet, has been THE place for drug trade. It started with poppies grown mainly in Myanmar and smuggled across to Lao and especially Thailand, though in recent times methamphetamines have surpassed opium in popularity and is now the biggest business. All these drugs and money have led to very many hands trying to get into the cookie jar, and recently the whole crew of a Chinese warship sent down to “patrol and fight the drug trade” was executed by pirates and/or Thai police. The boat was also found to contain many a box of amphetamine. Now regardless of this find it's of course obvious what their mission was. We had also heard of RPGs (rocket launchers not role playing games) being fired, two shot down black-hawk helicopters, methamphetamine labs, cancelled passenger boats and one of the biggest pirates having been captured recently. Despite this we were thus planning to go all the way up this river to Xiengkok in Luangnamtha province, the question was: How?

Back in Thonpeung still map-less we were trying to find out how to get to the next town/village over or where to find a boat. After very little English and a lot of trying we found out a name from the people at the immigrations office, which was supposed to be a place where we would be able to find a speedboat. Without bus saeng thaews going in the direction, we were told to take the taxi variant saeng thaew, and arrived in Ban Mom, completely different from the name we'd been told (and to where there might be boats).

We went down to the riverside and started asking around. A speedboat driver told us that he'd be willing to take us for 1,500,000 kip / person. As we didn't even have such amounts on us he mentioned that there would be slow boats and as he was going to the quay took us for free as we were trying to walk along the bank there.

Arriving and continually being told to go elsewhere we found ourselves in the end at a floating petrol station below the immigrations office where the boats going both directions seemed to have to stop to get their books signed. Here we waited for about two hours before a small long boat arrived. This is the one!

Upon entering we found a sea of pink filling most of the boat and emitting a rather strange smell. This was a cargo boat and yes it was full of pigs. We, the only passengers were given two plastic chairs to sit by the windows and off we went.

The smell of the pigs, the beautiful scenery, small rural villages, spending most of the time in Burmese waters, eating with the family/crew, what else could one ask for?

Unlike the picture that had been painted for us the river was mostly desolate, a village every once in a while and very rarely some other boat, mainly small Lao cargo ships like ours but also three larger Chinese cargo ships.

As we made our way up the river the mountains surrounding us grew larger, huge polished rocks serrating through surface all around us and even higher up two parallel lines stretched along the rocks, drawn by past water levels. The river would go from calm to areas of intense currents pushing against the boat as if to try us “Are you worthy of climbing against the flow of the mighty Mekong?”. At the worst of these ones the lady and mother of the ship would get sticky rice, hold it in her hands whispering prayers to it the throwing it into the currents and whirlpools. In one of these currents, next to a giant rock the boat seemed to get stuck. About 10 centimetres from the giant rock with a current so strong that it made the boat stand still in the water, despite pushing with all its grunt. As the smoke out the back grew black and thick like the fog at battle of Lützen, the crew and us one by one started joining in in an effort to push the boat forward, taking a sturdy hold of the boat and pushing forward. Back and forth. To clarify, we were all on the boat and basically just rocking ourselves back and forth. If this had any effect I don't know but after what seemed like a long time of struggling suddenly the boat seemed to start moving forward, slowly slowly and with the aft almost in the rock we managed to get forward and through.

After some 6 hours we arrived without a single rocket or even handgun having been fired, but having had a great trip, for as we all know it's not about where you arrive it's about the journey to get there.

In Xiengkok we said good bye to our jolly crew and ventured up the giant slope leading from the river to the village and after asking around found a place to stay.

Next day we explored the village and its surroundings. These turned out to be even smaller and even more rural villages with women in Hmong dress and children screaming “Sabaideeeeee!!!!!!!” over and over at the top of their lungs.

Gazing over at a stupa sticking out of the jungle on the other side of the river in this closed off part of Myanmar we were highly inclined to find someone to take us across and in failing even pondered swimming across. Maybe some other time.

We had made it, we had actually made it to the Golden Triangle and up the Lao-Burmese border on a boat transporting pigs.

From Xiengkok we headed to Muang Sing through Muang Long sitting next to an old Hmong lady, stayed the night and then to Luang Nam Tha which has grown incredibly since we were there last (the same with Muang Sing) and now looked like a mini Luangprabang. As the city looked quite uninspiring and we were already excited for the next trip up to western China we went in the same day over to Boten, and crossed back into China.

So here I sit in Chengdu. I hope you don't mind too much the haste at which this blog post has been written, however I should attempt to focus on getting our apartment emptied and getting ready to head off to western China!