I know this is the first real entry in pretty much forever, but believe me, it's worth it.
I don't really want to sit in front of this computer at 200 Lao Kip per minute long enough to write about the
entire trip up to this point, but I can say a thing or two about my time in Laos thus far.
Last night we arrived in Phonsavan with the intention of seeing the Plain of Jars. Only after arriving here did I read up on the usual Internet paranoia where I discovered that apparently route 7 between Luang Prabang and Phonsavan (which we took) has a problem with "banditry." It's a good thing I read that after I got here because, of course, there were absolutely no bandits, and the ride from there to here turned out to be one of the most enjoyable 8 hour bus rides I've ever been on. The whole route, which I believe is only about 240 km long in spite of the travel time (no highways in Laos!), was basically one long, steep, windy road through the Phou Luang mountains with some spectacular views.
The jars are Phonsavan's only real "tourist attraction" and thus on our first day here, we were absolutely inundated with offers of "tours" of the jar sites. Note to any potential visitors to the Plain of Jars: The Lonely Planet Laos book is a little ambiguous about how you arrange a tour of the jars. This turns out to be because it is almost
impossible to avoid being signed up for one of these tours. Part of this is because there's a lot of money to be made in giving tours (they wanted $12 per person from us, which, to give you some sense of relative economics, is four times what we're paying per-night for our room at the guest house that offered that tour price), but mostly I think it's because of the large quantity of unexploded ordinance on the plains around Phonsavan. The Lao government discourages people from going to the sites on their own.
Of course, both Alyssa and I loathe being part of a tour group, and so we had to find a way around it, and so we did. With a lot of tenacity (more on Alyssa's part than mine), a little money, and a lot of help from a very friendly
tuk tuk driver with very good English skills (I have been
consistently amazed by the number of Lao people willing to help non-Lao-speakers in this country with minimal financial incentive for doing so), we managed to find ourselves a ride to the village of Ban Xieng Di. Ban Xieng Di is the smaller village beside the best of the three jar sites, it is about 36 km away from Phonsavan over very poorly maintained dirt roads, so chartering a tuk-tuk for the day wasn't really an option. We also managed to coordinate a bus ride back with a bus driver who spoke precisely zero words of English (although we had a good laugh going over the phrasebook in the back of the LP with him while we waited for it to be time for the bus to leave; he learned some English, we learned some Lao—it was great!). Plans are in the works to publish our own simple guide on how to get to the Lat Khai jar site
without joining a tour group.
Going without the tour turned out to be worth it in more ways than I could possibly have imagined. The tour vans all drive directly to the entrance to the jar site, drop off their payload who then walk around for about 90 minutes, eat lunch, drink Lao-lao, and leave. Very good if you've got a short attention span or are on a tight schedule I suppose. We were let off in the town center and got to find our own way to the jar site by walking through the town (our helpful tuk-tuk driver wrote the name of the site in Lao for us in our notebook and we showed it to villagers at every turn in the road). We must have said hello to about a hundred people along the way. The open friendliness of the people of Laos is really pretty humbling. We found the site without a hitch and got to spend the whole day pretty much just poking around in the fields, enjoying the warm, sweet air, climbing at least one tree, and generally doing nothing at all. The tour groups all showed up just as we were sitting down to two nice, big, $0.60 bowls of laap for lunch. In a lot of ways the day was pretty much just perfect.
In short, I really love this place. A lot of things just barely work. Many things don't work at all. But the fundamental thing is that things work well enough for people to get by without actually living in poverty, and people make pretty efficient use of what they have. Do-it-yourself is the way of things. Because people are so poor, and the availability of expensive new parts is highly limited, people are forced to make things last ten times longer than their design lifespan. Most of the car repair shops that I've walked by have whole piles of ancient, disassembled engines floating around, and mechanics make extensive use of welding torches to keep things running. Welding torches are typically only used for two things in car mechanics: Repairing body parts and fashioning new parts out of old ones. I assure you they weren't fixing any body parts.
The net effect, at least as far as the car (or bus, or tuk-tuk) is concerned, is that you get into a car that's so beat up that it looks to be at least 30 years old, has no working instruments, no dashboard electronics of any kind (save the headlamp switch), and its most basic parts, its engine, its brakes, its steering mechanism, pretty much work like new (or some close approximation thereof).
This is actually a lot like Thailand, but in Thailand all of this would be intertwined with the completely different and far wealthier Thai Upper Class, along with their brand new expensive cars and shiny, tall buildings and highways, and a very modern public transportation system. All of the things that make Thailand look like a totally Western country on the surface.
I make the analogy to cars because they're something I feel like I understand pretty well across cultures, but it really feels like this whole country pretty much works that way. Tomorrow we fly on Lao Airlines to Vientiane and then to Bangkok, Thailand. We'll find out what kind of an effect this haphazardry has on air travel.
content