Vangvieng

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We are not well-prepared for the ride to Vangvieng. Long, sweaty and bumpy, it’s made no less painful by a guide who lacks not only knowledge but an opinion. He toes the plain vanilla party line, his only flavor showing up with two of his favorite words: Electric City for electricity and Funny for fun, as in, “when it’s dark and slippery inside a cave, it’s very funny.

He drops us for lunch in a restaurant at the picturesque Nam Ngum Reservoir. On the wall is a calendar, featuring Miss Sticky Rice 2006. Quite by chance, I order a fish dish that is delish, though its spiciness was not evident on the menu. Andy’s tom yum soup, described as slightly spicy, almost blows his stack. When we finish lunch, there is sign of neither Nong nor driver. They reappear to tell us that the van needs repair, which will take just five minutes. I know what you’re thinking. But it actually takes only half an hour. We amble off in the unbelievable heat to explore this village of flies, trash and satellite dishes on the edge of the “lake of trees,” so called because it was created by a dam project which drowned a valley and disrupted countless lives. Nong explains that the people are happy, except for one or two, because now Laos is the “battery of Asia,” selling hydro power to Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. Happy people! Benevolent communist government! Lots more fish! Yezzzz. The people were relocated and given new houses but not land, because that would have cost the government too much money. Ah well.  Better battery than battered.

We explore the lake in a lazy longboat, the driver steering with his toes. As we return to shore, he knows precisely when to turn the putt-putt engine off so that we glide in snug against the neighboring boat. A lifetime of practice.

Visually, the town of Vangvieng is a dump set in paradise, culturally abused by wild Westerners de-stressing, like the two women walking down the main street in bikinis. The food at almost every restaurant is middling to terrible. Our accommodation is in a wonderful riverside location and serves as our first opportunity to sleep in a bamboo hut “deluxe.” It’s cleverly constructed in the traditional style yet has the most effective air conditioning we’ve yet encountered. The staff? Not so much. Is this Lao style and are we simply insensitive? Half of the menu items at breakfast are not available.  Nong says the restaurant doesn’t serve dinner and we can believe that perhaps everything is simply unavailable to us, as a dinner menu actually exists. He makes no recommendations, despite being a local boy, so we follow our feet to an unusual concept: seat and back pillows on platforms raised off the ground, with tables attached, all facing a big TV playing DVDs of old “Friends” episodes. Ye gods. The food is pitiful and as we leave, we notice a ring of flies on each glass in the dishrack. Ugh!

               The next morning, we drive north of town to the put-in point and hear the signature call of backpackers: “Woo hoo!” We jump in the kayaks and cruise to the first cave. It’s a long hike in and Nong has one flashlight.  Whoops. He offers us candles. We climb down a precariously slippery ladder, the threat of hot wax keeping us on our toes, and proceed to a fascinating cavern, complete with stalactite, stalagmite and no light. We climb another ladder, then scale a steep mountain to emerge, finally, after the descent, back at the river.  This process was repeated downriver at a “drowned” cave, where we wade through chest-high cold water, again by candle and torch light. Inside, we extinguish everything and stand in complete silent darkness, understanding for a few seconds the role sight and sound play in our reality. This was a fabulous day. But we never knew what was coming – like “the most dangerous part of the river” about which we were told 3 seconds before we capsized.  Happily, my brand new digital SLR camera (enjoying the images?) was in the waterproof bag. “Head right! Head right!” was the last thing we heard. The one who really got his money’s worth was Henry. “You guys suck!” he guffawed from his single kayak. Yeah, poor Henry. “can you imagine how embarrassing it is,” he comments, “go kayaking wearing the same baseball cap as your parents?”

              Tonight we had blessedly clean food at the Organic Café – the only game in town. The best AC so far packed up, along with all the electricity, and the final words from the not-so-ready-for-prime -time manager of the Ban Sabai Bungalows were, “Where’s my key?” Bai Gone.

               We steel ourselves for six hours of the back of Nong’s head and the odd comment like, when we pass a school, “School.”  Or, “There’s no opium grown here anymore. There’s no ganja grown here anymore.”  Yezzzz.  Right. That didn’t seem to be the case this morning, when we watched preparations for the local Rocket Festival. Once a year, right before the rainy season, each of six surrounding villages builds a rocket to shoot over to the mountain range.  This is somehow connected with praying for rain but is also a competition between villages that is accompanied by much Mekong Whiskey drinking.  Among the revelers I notice an old man pull a lump of brown sticky goo from his pocket, wrapped in plastic and, smiling, showing a friend. “This you put in the rocket to make it launch” explains Nong. Of course.

               We climb and climb, traveling the snaky road to Luang Prabang. It is quite an engineering feat and also a dangerous place to be if soldiers are not present along the route to deter the bandits.  Hanging off the side of it, on hillside after hillside, are countless Khmer, Lao and Hmong villages.  They pass in a blur of browns – tan, beige, chocolate, fawn, taupe – all bamboo and wood and dirt.  Trouserless children play in the dirt, wander at the side of the road, sleep in parents’ arms or, most heart-rending, bear their burdens on their backs in the form of bamboo baskets full of blackened wood, collected from hillsides slashed, burned and bare or sprouting tiny corn plants. The basket is carried by way of a strap wrapped around the forehead. The wood is for fuel, for the family or to sell at the side of the road. Scraping a living at the bottom of the totem pole, I muse that it’s just as well they have no perspective about how other kids live, until MY kid reminds me that each village has at least one satellite dish and that the lowliest shack sports a color TV. So of course they know. And do they see our privileged teen breeze by in the air conditioned van? The kids on the river did yesterday. They grabbed a ride on the back of his kayak, calling out in Lao, “Hello young foreigner!”