LAOS again and again and again... why you might ask, but only if you are not yet one of the hard core lao lovers. people keep on asking me, why laos, what can you do there? and the answer is more or less – nothing! and that is the beauty of it, there is nothing really to do, at least not in the places i like, but this is why i like them. they are simply laos, not more and not less. there are no things for tourists, and that makes it even better. in short one goes to laos to see asia, and to sit at whatever river and watch the sun go down, and to walk across markets, and trough villages, and to watch local life takes its daily routine, and one spends an incredible amount of time on some form of public transport, be it boat, or bus, or pick-up, or songtheaw.

my main motive for going to laos again was that i wanted to do the south western part, the area to the west of vientiane and then from there up north before they finish building a road there, because once that happens rivertravel become more or less impossible. as it turned out one can only travel by boat till paklai anyway, and after that it is good old road again, or better to say, bad new road!

but first come first, christiane and i met at the airport in bangkok, flew to udon thani, took the minibus to the friendshipbridge and ended up in vientiane at about 9pm. at 10 we had finally found a vacant room in a decent yet affordable guesthouse right around the corner of that dam. so far so good, and the beer and somtam to follow was even better. the next two days saw us trapsing the roads of vientiane, visiting wat sisaket and the market, catching up with othkham for a meal and a beer lao at the mekong, eating the best baguette in laos, and finally making our way early on the third day to the tha souan pier from where we took the slow boat to paklai. now this was the first time when we encountered the new phenomenon of the tourist prices, which did not exist in laos before, and which i frankly find disgusting :(

the boat trip to paklai takes all day, and is absolutely serene, with a soft mellow landscape and slow flowing mekong water, which is all quite different from what you get further north. i enjoyed it greatly, but enjoyed the first beer lao in paklai even more. paklai turned out to be a pretty little town, with a few guest houses and some nice food stalls for the daily foe (noodle soup) and a good restaurant by the river. so we stayed a day longer than we thought and then moved on to xayabouli, which only took a few hours in the songtheaw... easy trip to a very strange town.

xayabouli is the provincial capital and somehow someone had strange ideas about the size of roads and the scale of planning. the result is a town that looks as if it has to grow into its road system, or a village that has a street network of a town. but this aside the place has a fantastic new guest house and some decent food, so what do we complain about... nothing :D

moving on to hong sa proved to be a different kind of story, the road is new, and it is 100% sand, which means a 5 hours journey on the back of a pick up along a steep and windy road consisting of loose sand surface next to 100m drops… nothing for the faint hearted i have to say. the result was two very dusty germans with equally dusty backpacks in hong sa. another wonderful lao town, small, tranquil, with a fantastic guest house, and yummy food.

here we stayed a couple of days walked to the nearby wat si mouang khoun, and the surrounding areas in search of working elephants only to have them walk past us while waiting for a songtheaw one morning. the best and yet silliest excursion was the 2 hour long songtheaw trip to mouang ngoen near the thai border where we came to see wat don sai, a temple of the tai leu style, and i have to say that it was more than worth the 4 hour return trip!

but as time moves on so did we and so we took the pick-up to tha suan at the mekong from where we dared to join three local girls on their 30 min speedboat journey to pak beng. christiane and i had sworn we would never travel in speed boats as they are far to dangerous, but faced with the option of having to wait for 5 hours for the slow boat, or take the speed boat we decided to take the risk. in doing so we discovered that speedboats are much louder from the outside than inside, and that the danger lies in the captain, good captain = safe ride!

pak beng is still pretty much the same as 3 years ago - i even slept in the same guesthouse and even the same room as in 2005 - yet our next stop houay xai i found totally changed, and not for the better. houay xai used to be a tiny little village with dirt roads, but it is now a huge tourist hub full of rip-off people in a style to date unknown to me in laos :(

yet the journey to houay xai proved to be rather entertaining, entertaining in a strange sort of a way. let me explain; even though the section of the mekong is hard core tourist affair, there are still quite a number of locals travelling on this route, which meant of course, and to my pleasure that there was a considerable number of laotians on board. you might wonder why i prefer to travel with laotians, and my answer would be that, on asking you prove that you do not know me very well, and also that it would appear to be the most natural sentiment, for if i wanted to travel with caucatians i would surely visit europe or the new world, but as i find myself in asia, laos to be precise, i am naturaly interested in local people, their language, habits, culture, food and eveything else that makes a local local!

so anyway, back to the story, the boat trip to houay xai. on the boat was a young laotian mother with her little daughter. the baby cried a lot and after a while i gathered from their conversations that the baby had a bad headache. well i say baby, she was maybe 2 years old. the strange thing was that the mother thought that slightly punching the head in rhythmical moves would help, but if you ever had a headache you know that this would be simply hell. eventually i could not watch them anymore, i mean we are talking of hours of torture for the child. so i did something drastic by medical terms and broke a tiny flake of an aspirin, the only choice as i did not carry any paracetamol which is usually better for children, and gave i to the child. five minute later she was asleep and a couple of hours later she woke up and told her mum that the pain was gone. the funny thing was that they were all in awe and wanted to know what i had given the child and even though i told them that it was the same as paracetamol which you can buy anywhere in laos they insisted on copying down the name of my tablets, which might, like christiane and i jokingly remarked on, lead to a total influx in the aspirin sales in laos... hahahahaha this is the materials myths are made of ;)

in houay xai we were looking for a slow boat up north to xiang kok, but were told that there are no more passenger boats to the north, but that there are freight boats that we can get a ride on leaving from a town called ban mom. so of course we decided to take a songtheaw to ban mom and to ask for a boat there. yet on arriving at the totally over dimensional harbour building we were told by a local woman at a stall that there was no boat today and that we should come back at 7am the next morning. on asking about guest houses she was sweet enough to call a girl who brought us to the only guest house in town. by then we had worked out that ban mom might be rich, as a lot of the huge houses demonstrated, yet that is was the most dead and unhappening place on the earth. put it like this, even in the tiniest villages in the poorest areas there is usually some kind of food place and a happening market. ban mom on the other hand had no place to sit down and eat any cooked food, only a shop in which we could buy beer and snacks, and three miserable tables that passed for a morning market. in short the pit of bordom...

early next morning we bought what we could at the so called market and made our way to the boat landing, which was really a tank ship at which the boats fuelled up on their way south or north. the only problem was that no boat came, and when a boat came and i dared in cold sweat to cross the tiny wobbly plank that lead from the shore to the tank boat, and i asked the boat captain in my sparse lao, he told me that he was not going to xiang kok but only to a village half way to there. bummer, what now? that was it, a couple of hours we still had no boat and we still were stuck in ban mom.

we needed to get out of here, so we decided to take one of the slow boats back to houay xai and from there take to much more boring land route to xiang kok, which would have meant not doing a loop and coming back the same way that would take there. no good but no option! when we were comfortably settled on our freight boat awaiting for the huge tanks to fill with diesel a speedboat docked, on asking the captain said he would go back to xiang kok, great, but speedboats cost a forturne, not great. but i realised that the captain was going back empty, and that he obviously lived up there, so i haggled with him for ages and he finally agreed on a very good price, 250000kip for the two of us, hurray. our long wait finally had paid out and we would go, if in a scary speedboat, to the north through some of the allegedly most beautiful stretched of the mekong.

and it was true, the trip was phenomenal, most of the way we had the lush subtropical forests of the bokeo region on our right and the horrible result of deforestation at our left, the burman shore of the river, where nothing but bamboo monoculture void of life and beauty. but the shore line, changing from soft sandy beaches to towering black rocks through which the mekong rushed in dangerous rapids was amazing. often we had to stop and wait for some huge chinese ship to move on, because these boats are not designed for the mekong and they make it impossible for local boats to pass or overtake in safety. to be honest i have no idea why the laotian government lets them cross their boarders in the first place, they totally hinder the local river traffic and take work away from local captains and crews!

in xiang kok we got a room in a lovely long house on stilts next to a little restaurant where we whiled the afternoon away overlooking the mekong, observing local hmong, akka, spiders and cats at work before having our sunset beer and dinner in a local restaurant that turned out to double as a brothel - so much for having a lot of chinese fishermen enter the region :S i have to say that xiang kok is one of my favourite places in laos, for its quiet serenity and its geographical location above the shores of the mekong surrounded by mountains.

the next afternoon we waited for a songtheaw to muang long, further inland. the wait was ended when the driver had found enough passengers which in this case were three fishermen who had just caught and smoked about 200kg of mekong fish. this would be of no concern had our mode of transportation been a real songtheaw, but instead it turned out to be a minibus doing the trip, now try fitting 2 farangs with their huge backpacks, and 3 fishermen with there tools and a humongous basket of freshly smoked fish into a minibus. it is a challange, but laos makes it possible, with the result that christiane and i bought 1 kg, aka 3 large smoked fish because the smell was so wonderful and when we tasted them at night with our pack som, som tam and sticky rice their taste lived up to their smell - simply wonderful.

in muang long we stayed in a wonderful new that sany guesthouse for one night before moving on to muang sing, which turned out to be our dustiest trip ever leaving us coated with a thick layer of dusty grime and a good excuse to cleanse our throats with an early afternoon beer lao. still muang sing had a great guest house with bungalows in a large garden to offer, which we got super cheap because it was virtually empty. and so we had our laundry done and went for walks into the surrounding area and were waylayed by numerous akka women who try to sell everybody their hand made jewellery. the entire area in the north west is akka country, and it was great to see so many people at least partially still dressed in traditional clothing.

our next intended stop was luang namtha, but because the town looked not very great when we arrived at 10 in the morning after a 2 hour bus trip and it was still covered in the customary lao winter early morning fog we decided to move straight on to oudomxai instead. said and done we were squeezed with altogether 16 adults and 4 children into a minibus, that was designed for 12, but we survived the trip and arrived slightly squashed but functioning in oudomxai.

and i have to say that i like the town, even though i do not really know why. walking down the main street we had a look at a couple of guest houses, before deciding to check out the dokboudeng guesthouse that i stayed in before, as i praised it for its quiet location. yet when we turned off the main road into the usual quiet lane we were blasted by lao songs in incredible volume and it turned out that the tent of people and the mountain of speakers where not only placed directly infront of my chosen guesthouse, it was also them celebrating the birth of a child. bingo, jackpot, but the slightly drunken girls were so eager to show us a new room and christiane reckoned that now, at 2pm the guest were so utterly drunk that no doubt they would not last till night, that we took the room but tried to flee the sheebang which was only successful after we both had drunken some beer and christiane had danced with the grandmother of the new born child. yet finally we where, with beer on our breath on the way to the traditional lao sauna, one of the best things about oudomxai.

returing to the guesthouse we found a huge hand sized huntsman on the wall right between our two beds, and despite the fact that i know they are harmless i am unable to sleep a single minute in a room with one of them fast eight legged runners. so while i watched the beast christiane called the girls for help, and they laughed in total amusement when they saw us squealing in panic as they tied to catch it. the result was a dead huntsman, which was not what i had intended, but it could not be helped and at least we dared to sleep. the next day saw us checking out, finding a fully booked minibus to nong khiew, and us returning 30 min later to the same room to the astonishment of the girls. the rest of the day was spend in shopping, walking around town and having more delicious dinner in kanya restaurant.

and the next morning we finally went to nong khiew, which turned out to be a disappointment. of course the village is still superbly situated at the two shores of the nam ou and amidst some beautiful mountains, but the atmosphere and the people have changed. the only good aspect about the total increase in tourism is the fact that the boats along the nam ou to luang prabang run now virtually daily again. so off we went on the wonderfully tranquil nam ou, even though i had seen it in 2005 and preferred it then, it is still a great trip today.

luang prabang on the other hand is even more unpleasantly changed as nong kiew. the guest houses are extortionate and most of the restaurants are unfriendly. even the monk procession has dwindled to a bare minimum due to the constant disrespectful behaviour of so many tourists. everywhere they start with this nonsense of tourist prices, and we had to debate for ages before the ferryman gave us a fair rate when we went with birgit and woody, whom we met on the last boat trip, across the mekong to ban xiang mon where we visited the village wat.

whilst in luang prabang the rain started; rain in the dry season, all day long, welcome to global warming :( when we arrived in phonsavan after a day long bus ride through some of the most spectacular lao mountains it was to learn that there had been hail and rain all day long. the temperature in the plateau of phonsavanne was rock bottom, and i wore every conceivable layer of clothing i could put on my body, but that did not sort out the rain, so i had to buy a plastic rain coat in the market to stay half way dry.

now despite the freezing cold weather the good thing about phonsavanne was that othkham was there, and that he and his friend drove with us to the jar site 1 once the rain subsided a bit. i had seen the jar sites and could have done without them, but christiane had not and our sole purpose of coming here was for her to see them. so dressed in ridiculous layers, sitting on the back of the bikes we managed to go to at least site 1 before the rain started again. the bad thing, apart from the weather was that the owner of the kong koo guest house had shed all decency and had turned into a moneygrabbing alcoholic who rudely accused his guests and, after a 50% price increase from last year, sold the tours now at the top price.

the other downer was our supposedly saving trip to the hot springs in muang kham which turned out to be nothing but rooms with a bathtub full of luke warm water, and all this after a 2h freezing cold journey on the songtheaw and an hour walk to the village. the final blow was that the back road we wanted to take south had been subjected to major landslides due to the rain and that we therefore had to go back most of the way we came in order to move on the vientiane. so another 10h bus trip awaited us, but we were awarded with the warm weather in vientiane. arriving here christiane extended her visa for two days and we went on a shopping spree in all markets of the town, while cherishing our last beer lao and super baguettes before leaving the country.

the rest of the trip was our journey all through the isaan and down to trat and from there to ko chang where we met up with birgit and woody again, and spend a warm few days on the beach before returning to trat. and as trat is still a heaven for excellent food, cheap shopping and the maybe the best massage in thailand, we indulged as much as we could in food, drink, facial, massage, and what not before returning via a bizzare one-night stop in pattaya and a few very late nights with ingo in bkk to our respective homes.