Our Laos visas were fast expiring at this point so we whizzed through Southern Laos, starting with a brief and lovely stop at Champasak, a gorgeous, quiet town next the to World Heritage listed What Phou, a 12th Century Khmer temple complex which is like a little tiny version of Angkor Wat. The ruins themselves are very, very ruined but the Khmers picked a beautiful site on the hillside looking over the river and the atmosphere in the early morning was sublime. An ancient road links Wat Phou with Angkor Wat, and, although you obviously can’t follow anymore, I started to get a proper idea of the scale of the Khmer Empire, which in the 13th Century pretty much conquered mainland South East Asia, and had a capital of one million when London was a little sprat of fifty thousand people.

From Champasak we sailed down the Mekong to Si Phan Don, an odd collection of tiny, tree covered islands in the middle of the river that straddle the Laos and Cambodia borders, two of which are just big enough to hold guest houses and restaurants. These two, Don Det and Don Khone, are linked by the only railway bridge the French ever got round to building in Laos, (thanks for coming, Jean-Pierre) and the fact that they are tiny, sleepy and don’t have reliable electricity means that there is little to do but get stoned.

We didn’t, but nonetheless there was some high drama the night before we left when we stumbled into a very loud makeshift kareoke wedding reception made up of about twenty family members, two confused Austrian guys who were staying at the next door guesthouse and another Austrian who’d been living there (fugitive?) for ten months. Everybody except the Austrian fugitive was falling down drunk and before long James was being hand-fed rice whiskey while I danced with the seventeen year old bride and her inebriated mother; everything was very jolly until the Austrian’s pet monkey made an appearance.

The monkey, named simply ‘monkey’, had been acquired as security for the Austrian because, according to him, locals are scared of monkeys as they never see them (where this one came from I don’t know) – she was little and innocent looking with big brown eyes, but she had a dark side. Ever seen a monkey neck beer? This one would drink it out of a pint glass, or off the table if you let her, providing she wasn’t stuffing fried chicken into her cheeks or flirting with the various males in attendance. Honestly, it was like watching a Manchester university netball player let loose at the rugby boys’ annual dinner. For this reason I was a bit suspicious of her, but the Austrian fugitive brought her over to play with us and she did look really cute, tipsily snuggled into the crook of James’ arm, so I asked for a little cuddle. The minute she was tipped onto my knee she went mental, scratching at my arms in an attempt to get at my eyes and screeching like a gremlin after a bath. Moral: never trust anything, even a primate, that displays netball player tendencies.

 

The first stop was Phonsovan, which we reached from Nong Khiaw in a mere eight hours thanks to a juggernaut of a bus that rattled like a toolbox but was big enough to scare everything else off the road. Phonsovan is a quiet little provincial town that attracts a modest crowd of visitors for two main reasons – old jars and old bombs. We saw lots of both.

The Plain of Jars is a series of archeological sites surrounding Phonsovan that have had boffins scratching their heads for ages. Each site is dotted with hundreds of huge stone jars, but nobody can figure out what they were used for – burial urns, primitive brewing devices and cooking vats are a few of the more sensible theories but, due to the absence of any organic evidence like bones or food, they haven’t even been dated accurately, let alone neatly categorized and explained by a team of smug looking museum geeks. We took a sweaty cycle ride to the largest site, an eerily quiet expanse of grass scattered with about 300 jars, and had a picnic while staring down the hill, trying to imagine what on earth would possess anyone to go to the trouble of building so many massive squat toilets in one area. Perhaps the chillis were hotter in those days. The plain itself was disconcertingly atmospheric and scarred here and there with enormous craters…which brings me on to Phonsovan’s second dubious claim to fame – the bombs.

In 1964, when the United States government escalated the war in Vietnam by ordering covert bombing missions to target Lao and Cambodian territory, the Plain of Jars was a primary strategic target. Between 1964 and 1973 the US air force conducted more than half a million missions over Laos, depositing 200 million tons’ worth of ordinance, one third of which failed to detonate. In consequence, the Plain of Jars and the surrounding countryside – most of which is owned by subsistence farmers – is littered with unexoploded ordinance (UXO), which is estimated to have killed more than 30,000 people since the end of the war in 1973, one third of them children (who often collect scrap war metal for cash).

Apart from the craters, Phonsovan and the surrounds are decorated by countless material reminders of the war – rifle cartridge key rings, missile shell flower boxes, tools bashed out of discarded helmets, even houses are supported by old artillery shells. We visited the local office of the Mines Advisory Group, a Manchester based NGO which undertakes UXO clearance work here, and learned more stats than you would ever care to know about this ongoing legacy. For example: from 1964 to 1973, more ordinance fell on Laos than fell in Europe during the entirety of the second World War. MAG estimates that at current rate of clearance it will take roughly 100 years to make the area safe.

With those stats ringing in our ears we took the (worst) bus (in Asia) from Phonsovan to Sam Neua – only 200km as the crow flies, but it took nearly 9 hours to chug and heave our way through the mountains, averaging a speed of 20km per hour up the steep uphill sections and ramping up to a heady 35km per hour on the rare downhill stretches. The road was a sinuous, narrow tarmac strip just wide enough for two vehicles to pass or overtake, hugging the edge of steep hilltops on one side and shaded by swathes of giant fern and bamboo on the other – gorgeous, and a bit scary.

From there, after a night’s recovery, we took yet another bus to nearby Vieng Xai, a peaceful, sleepy little town with a revolutionary history. The town is surrounded by dozens of deep limestone caves which used to be the secret city of the Pathet Lao, the communist revolutionaries who fought a civil war on the ground against the US backed Royal Lao Army while the US airforce bombarded them from the sky. From the beginning fo the secret war in 1964, Vieng Xai became the epicentre of political and military resitance and, in 1973, was briefly hailed as the capital of the liberated zone until the victorious Pathet Lao (whose politial arm still runs the country today) were able to move into Vientiane. The caves themselves have barely been touched since the Polit Bureau members moved out: they are unbelievably eerie, especially the sealed rooms containing massive Soviet oxygen machines in case of a gas attack, and the more homely touches include a bust of Lenin and a portrait of Che Guevara – essential decor for communists and students the world over. Wandering round the meeting rooms, kitchens, offices and gas chambers while the rain hammered down outside was not an experience I’ll forget in a hurry.

 

• We’re on day 114
• We’ve visited 6 countries so far
• We’ve covered 5,865 miles by air
• We’ve covered 8,514 miles by bus, train and boat
• We’ve covered 456 miles by foot (thanks Voda friends for the Teva’s, they’re going strong)
• We’ve eaten 4,323 miles of noodles

Ok, one of those stats is fictitious, but the other 5 are correct.  We’ve now travelled a total of 14,835 miles.

Our next stop in Laos is Nong Khiaw, a small rural town set on the banks of the Nam Ou river, nestled amongst jungle covered limestone mountains. Our bamboo bungalow faces west offering amazing views of Nong Khiaw’s spectacular sunsets. It’s the end of the dry season here so it’s hot and the river is still low, but now it’s starting to rain some days. We covered the town on foot before hiring a guide for a few days to explore the countryside further.

The night before our trek a storm rolled into the valley and it was still drizzling in the morning – not the best start for two days of walking – but as we sat and ate our hearty Lao breakfast the rain stopped and both the sun and our guide, Touy, suddenly appeared before us. Touy was a hilarious character. I can only liken him to a panda bear – he wore a bamboo hat, his movements were slow and deliberate, he always looked half asleep and his plodding conversation was often accompanied by a sigh.

That morning we trekked through paddy fields where local villagers were hard at work preparing for the coming rainy season by ploughing and planting rice, repairing river banks and building irrigation channels. Around 80% of Laos lives this way – growing rice and rearing livestock to feed their families. We crossed many streams and as we walked through one particularly muddy stretch I looked down to see the familiar wriggling body of a leech. I hopped up onto a bamboo fence and pulled two of the blood sucking buggers off my feet. I told Touy that there were leeches in the stream, the colour drained from his face and he announced “I don’t wike weeches”. You and me both buddy. Fortunately the only other leech we spotted that day was the one that Touy pointed out sucking blood from a buffalo’s “man bits”.

Just before lunch we arrived at a small village which was home to 30 Laos, Hmong and Khamu families. We walked into the centre of the bamboo houses where we were greeted by the the chief, who claimed to be 34 but looked no older than 25 and was wearing the uniform of all respectable Laos village chiefs – Adidas shorts and a tee shirt. We ate lunch in his hut – jackfruit nuts, sticky rice, omelette, chilli paste and fried fern leaves. The enthusiastic chief offered us Lao Lao – the local moonshine made from fermented rice, an offer which for fear of offending we politely accepted. He dashed over to the side of his hut and pulled out a large plastic oil container from which he poured a triple measure of the home brew. I preyed for absolution before downing the shot – 10 seconds passed and my heart was still beating and I was relived to find I could still see.

 

We waved goodbye to the village and headed up into the limestone hills, granting us stunning views of the heart of Laos countryside. Steep hillsides had been cleared and planted with sticky rice and in the distance we saw small huts providing shelter to the farmers from the heat of the sun. We arrived at the next village, Ban Pha Yong, in the late afternoon.

This village was much larger than the first – home to over 140 Hmong and Khamu families, with chickens, dogs and pigs running around, kids playing football and parents returning from the fields. We met a group of men re-working US ordinance from the war into knives, hoes, shovels and other tools in a makeshift forge. At one end of the village was a 15ft high bamboo pole with a basket on the end. Touy explained that when a villager was ill their dog’s hair was placed in the basket to appease the spirits. How pleasant, we thought, the dog helping his sick master by donating a lock of hair. “Yes, that’s right” continued Touy, “before going to hospital they ask the spirits to heal the sick by chopping off their dog’s head and putting it in that basket”. He also went on to tell us that grilled dog and a shot of Lao Lao is a great warmer on a cold winters day. We didn’t dare sneeze or shiver for the rest of the evening.

We slept well following a feast provided by the chief and woke early the following morning – breakfast was noodle soup and beans with steamed rice. It had rained again during the evening and over breakfast Touy mentioned that we would encounter lots of “widges” during the day. After a few minutes of confused conversation it transpired he didn’t mean bridges or ridges…Touy was warning us that the leeches would be out in force as we trekked down to the river. However he told us not to worry as he’d had spoken to the chief and they had a solution. Excellent. I was expecting the chief to return with a tube of leech oil or a herbal equivalent or even some leech-proof gaiters, but he reappeared with a water bottle with a hole cut out, from which jutted a bamboo stick tied to the top of the bottle. The chief and Touy were both grinning as they attached it onto our guide’s rucksack – this little contraption was crafted to please the spirits and keep the leeches away. Thank god it wasn’t big enough for a dogs head.

As we trekked through the boggy countryside we crossed leech infested waters over slippy bamboo bridges. The open fields where the villagers were already hard at work soon gave way to thick forest and, as we reached the tree canopy, we looked onwards to the gloomy path. It was a dark, damp and covered with rotting leaves, a heavenly abode for leeches. We looked down to our feet. There were scores of leeches rearing up their blood thirsty mouths, already searching for our sweet claret. There was only one way out, and that was forward – we ran for it. We sprinted up the slippy muddy path, preying that we wouldn’t fall over and get sucked dry. As I looked ahead all I could see was the distinctive shape of leeches moving into the path, following our vibrations to their next feed. We reached a dry patch and I picked off a couple of leeches and looked over to Touy – his feet were alive with wriggling vampire worms. He reached for his ’spirit’ bottle and pushed a cotton wool pad into the bottom – it was filled with salt water. One by one he blotted all 14 bloody leeches on his feet with the salt – they fell off instantly. The salt was a little insurance policy, should the spirits not yet be awake.

And so went the rest of the day – sprint, de-leech, sprint, de-leech. We arrived at the river bank and hopped into a wooden longboat destined for home. We stopped at an island en-route for a picnic lunch before heading back to our guesthouse for the evening. We had a wonderful couple of days trekking into the heart of Laos, the people we met were kindhearted and the kids were excited to have a falang in their village. We finished off the day (and our guide) with a few cool beers and a Laos card game which Jeannie and I played exceptionally well, despite not understanding any of the rules. Perhaps the spirits were with us after all.

 

Ingredients-wise, Lao food is rather exotic, especially when it comes to proteins: parts of the country are so poor that anything on two, four or eight legs (or wings, or no legs at all) is added to dishes as a protein supplement. Walking round the early morning market yesterday we saw deep fried rats and bats, live lizards and frogs ready to be bought and cooked, blocks of congealed sheep’s blood for flavoring soup, buffalo skin, whole pig heads and huge vats of pa dek – an extremely pungent fish sauce made by rotting down small fish in a barrel with salt and water for about a month. According to our teacher Lei, you are truly Lao if you can dip a green bean into a bowl of pa dek and enjoy the taste…I’m not quite there yet but it tastes fine mixed in other foods.

The cooking lesson focused on slightly less exotic ingredients – pork and chicken mainly – with lots of chilli, garlic, coriander, fresh Asian vegetables and sweet and salty sauces. During the course of the day we went shopping at the local produce market, learnt about Lao culinary traditions and cooked five local specialties that we then got to devour.

All the dishes we made were local to Luang Prabang which is, by a mile, the prettiest and most laid back city (it’s technically a city but it looks and feels like a sedate little town thanks to the minimal traffic) we’ve visited, nestling on a peninsular between the converging point of the Nam Khan and Mekong rivers. It was the home of the Laos royal family until 1976, when they were ousted and sent to live in a cave by the triumphant communists, and it is also an important spiritual site, with 36 Buddhist temples and hundreds of monks who, unlike the royal family, made a come back after the initial communist clamp down on religion in the seventies.

Two days ago we got up at 5am to watch the tradition of tak bat: every morning monks from each temple walk through the streets to receive alms, in the form of rice, biscuits, fruit, vegetables and more rice, from the residents of the city – hundreds of local people, many of them not very well off, get up every morning to donate. It was a lovely bit of human generosity to witness, but it did convince me that I’m not cut out to be a monk – all the good stuff from my pot would have been covertly scoffed by the time I got back to the temple.

We also visited the former royal palace which is now a museum – the most entertaining room was the one containing diplomatic gifts from other countries – talk about reconfirming national stereotypes: the Chinese gift cabinet was full of carved ivory, delicate porcelain bowls and tiger’s teeth. The US had sent a piece of moon rock, a model space rocket and some expensive looking gilt-edged stationary (for the king to write his thank you letter perhaps). The Thai stuff was all gorgeous Siamese silverware and delicate china bowls. The Russians had sent a massive bronze hammer and sickle sculpture and assorted other expensive communist trinkets. And the Australians had sent a boomerang.

We’ve been in Luang Prabang for five days and we could easily stay longer, but we’re heading northeast tomorrow, to the remote regions near the Vietnam border that were most heavily affected by the US’s secret bombing campaigns in the mid-sixties (secret bombing must be a contender for the world’s biggest oxy-moron. Have you ever seen a secret bomb? Not so secret if it lands on your house). Then we’ll gradually head back down south before we decide whether Cambodia or Vietnam is next on the agenda.

In other news, Charlie has returned to Vang Vieng to witness a slightly different kind of cultural milestone (Champions League final) so we are back to a pair.

 

Vientiane was a wonderful introduction to the pace of modern Laos (slow) and to its past influences – it feels more like a provincial French town than a South Asian capital city. Fresh baguettes baking in the morning, tree lined boulevards, snooty colonial architecture…plus you can get steak frites and a biere for less than a fiver.

We hired some bikes that were last serviced during the second world war and sniffed out the handful of temples and monuments that survived successive colonial sackings by the Siamese and the French (ha – I can tut about them knocking temples down but I still eat the cheap steak), and generally spent a lovely couple of days meandering around. We also paid an enlightening visit to the national history museum, which contained some very informative displays and some truly spectacular Communist propaganda.

After three laid back days in the capital we took an over-crowded local bus to the even smaller town of Vang Vieng to meet our friends Laura and Kinloch and have some water based fun in the Mekong.

Vang Vieng is legendary on the gap year backpacker trail thanks to miracle of tubing…I first heard about it about 5 years ago and I thought it was an urban myth: somebody gives you a rubber ring and lets you float down the Mekong with a beer, occasionally pulling you ashore for another beer and possibly some sort of water sporty activity before sending you on your way to the next bar. I thought that could only happen in heaven, but since then quite a few reliable friends an acquaintences have participated, so I knew it was real, but I still didn’t really have the right idea. So here’s what actually happens (stop reading mother):

You pay some money to hire your tube and a tuk tuk driver takes you 5km out of Vang Vieng – you know you’re close before you see the river because you can hear the techno music pumping out of the first bar. You get out of the tuk tuk and an annoying 18 year old from Surrey plies you with whiskey and asks you whether it’s ‘your first time’. You leave your ring at the bar and get a beer, giving you time to pluck up the courage to climb 20 metres into a tree, grab a trapeze, swing out over the river, pick a spot that looks deep enough to drop into and let go. This is without great the greatest way in history to enter shallow water.

Then you grab your ring, float a maximum of 20 metres to the next bar (louder music), and repeat the process (the trapeze becomes a zip wire) with ever so slightly less co-ordination. Them you grab your ring again, float 20 metres again, and repeat again ad infinitum (or at least until you get to the end of the strip), walking away at the end tipsy but largely unscathed.

This is what ordinary people do.

However, yesterday was one of the rare days that sporting history was made by somebody who is far from ordinary: our friend Charlie ‘Tombstone’ Surridge pushed the boundaries of technique and laughed in the face of danger in order to create the ultimate trapeze dismount: I cannot describe the salmon-like grace of her descent into the low waters of the Mekong – her poise, composure and upper body strength reduces me to tears. Watch the video and you’ll understand.

 

*** Quick update ***

Here’s a YouTube video response from Matt, Anna and Samantha: