I first tried to visit Laos in 1973, but was unable to get a flight from Calcutta due to chaos in Laos as the war drew to a close. In the 50 years since it has gone from an obscure adventure for backpackers to a fairly popular tourist destination, and after our very positive experience with Pandaw on the southern Mekong last year we decided to go the same way on the north Mekong. Having told others how much we liked the Pandaw style we were accompanied this time by Sonja and Gerbrand Van Vliet and Jain and Peter Tait. This was a major responsibility for me as if they didn’t like it I would be the bad guy, but so far I haven’t heard any complaints.
The Laos Pandaw is a river boat built on the hull of a cargo boat, 42m long, with 10 cabins on the lower deck, a large open roofed area plus an enclosed lounge area on the top deck. The first boat owned by the company was an old early 1900’s passenger boat from Burma. There was a fleet of them on the Irrawaddy River and all were scuttled to stop the Japanese getting their hands on them in WW2. This first boat was one that was refloated and refitted, and all Pandaw boats follow the same plan now. The cabins open to the outside so no corridor, everything is teak and brass, and I really like the package. There were 18 passengers and the 6 NZers were the biggest group, plus 4 Belgians from Brussels, 2 English, 2 Canadians and 4 Americans of which a mother and daughter were Trump supporters but conversation could be steered away from that topic and all its associated prejudices. It was a good group with no annoying jerks.
We flew into Vientiane for two nights in a delightful hotel that was beside the Mekong, but the water was a long way off for reasons that will become clear. Before leaving home I had tried to book a half-day tour in the city but a combination of dictatorship bureaucracy and potential scams made it too difficult and I gave up. When we arrived I had a chat with a helpful man at the hotel reception and the next morning 2 tuktuks arrived and took us away to look at the five must-sees, nothing too exciting, and it cost about a quarter of the online prices. The first impression I had was that the traffic was extremely well behaved and quiet. I never heard a horn being used, no one did silly passing, or try and create 3 lanes where two existed. It seemed very un-Asian, but it turns out that being laid back is a feature of the Laos people, and if the crew on the boat were typical another feature is having fun.
My 2007 Lonely Planet book suggests there are 132 different ethnic groups in Laos. They are categorised, firstly, into three groups depending on the altitude they live at, the lowland ones being typical Lao who are Buddhists and the biggest group, as well as presently being in charge. The rest are further differentiated by colour, ethnic origins and beliefs, most of which are essentially animist, and they live apart from each other. Early history seems to be a procession of outsiders invading and taking over with no real nation being formed, until the French arrived and set up what is now the nation of Laos. Recent history is it was used by the North Vietnamese for part of the Ho Chi Min Highway and savagely bombed by the USA because of that, and at the end of that war the Pathet Lao communists took control and still are. It’s a standard communist dictatorship and our guide told me no one would think of suggesting things could be done differently, if you did you would not be seen again for a very long time, if at all.
On our ten-day trip up the river we visted five different villages each of which was of a different ethnic variety. There was a level of discernable difference but also a lot of similarities. If your house is made of bamboo you are poor, wood is village middle class and concrete is at the top end. Our guide referred to each village having a millionaire and that person was rich enough to own a truck and/or tractor or other equipment the rest of the village could hire as well as having the biggest concrete house. Given that 12,000 kip buys you $NZ1 they must be at least a billionaire. The village economies are mostly based on agriculture with patches on the hills being used to grow crops in the rainy season by slash and burn, with tapioca being one of the main crops. Small areas of market gardening were mostly for their own use and there were always plenty of chooks and ducks. We also saw paddy fields to grow the ubiquitous sticky rice that seems to be the main basis of food consumed, with only one village having the good taste to grow jasmine rice. A lot of the labour- intensive work is done with rudimentary tools when it is not hard to see how a little innovation could make life easier. Peter couldn’t understand how people couldn’t see what was possible and it must just be an attachment to doing things the same as always. A good example was in a village that specialised in pottery – the potting wheel was turned by hand, by a woman, when creating a pedal mechanism to do the turning isn’t that tricky. It’s not that these places are completely isolated as there was usually a power supply or solar panels and often TV. Each of the different ethnic groups has its own cultural norms which are are mixture of commonsense and superstitions based on their version of religion. Same as anywhere else. Not marrying someone from your village makes sense but the dos and don’ts for new and full moons were a bit arbitrary. All the ethnic variety means there are 5 different new year celebrations in Laos which is a good excuse to bring out the local version of rice moonshine called laolao. The first time we came across this was in a village where a small group were having a few at lunch time. One guy was insistent we had to join him and I was the closest. He handed over his decidedly grimy glass and I felt obliged to take a sip. I was still healthy the next day.
For me the most interesting visit was to a water buffalo dairy operation set up and run by two western women. They came to Laos to set up a guest house as result of a self-described mid-life life crisis and wanted to provide the guests with local produce. The farmers in the area all had a few water buffalo so they went looking for buffalo milk to make mozzarella cheese. Much to their surprise they found that locals didn’t think they could milk the animals, and that led to a long journey starting with setting up a dairy operation by leasing pregnant buffalo from the farmers, and now includes being the only artificial insemination operation in Laos, running an English teaching school, trying to do the same thing in Cambodia and a heap of other stuff. They now can produce mozzarella and prior to covid were set to have a market in Japan but the plague stopped that. I was impressed by the way the owners are not only creating a business but also positively changing the way local farmers operate. A true win win, not just some well meaning people parachuting gear that eventually isn’t used because it can’t be maintained. One observation the owners made was related to there being no vets they can call on. The 70’s war led to a lot of professional people leaving and then the Pathet Lao dealing to most of the those that remained. This probably helps explain why the country has been slow to innovate and expand economically.
Our river trip started with a five-hour ride in a longtail boat up river to our big boat. Longtail boats are about 40m long and 3.5m wide and kind of like a very stretched dingy with a roof. Ours was set up for transporting tourists and was a fun start to the voyage with several staff from the big boat ready to cook lunch, serve drinks and start spoiling us.This start was necessary because the river is very low and Laos Pandaw can’t sail from Vientiane. This is because China has eleven dams on the Mekong in its territory and therefore controls the flow. Laos is dependent on China in lots of ways and obviously there is little it can do about the water flow. We could clearly see how comparatively low the level was and it provided some excitement along the way when we had to go up rapids and get through some very narrow places. In fact after one incident where the boat stood still momentarily while in some rapids, the captain decided he wasn’t going to risk the next lot, and we spent the last day on the river in another longtail boat to get to the final town. We went through one dam by way of a double lock and passed another one which is being built and will have a lake of about 150kms long. Laos wants to be "the battery for southeast Asia" and given the lack of other economic possibilities I don’t blame them trying to make the most of the Mekong. They plan to have another five dams which will mean the trip that we did will either be a series of locks and lakes or not possible. Being a bit of an economic basketcase Laos cannot afford to pay for this infrastructure so borrows the cost from other countries which get an electricity supply deal for, say, twenty years. It is not clear if Laos actually makes a profit from these deals. A cynical person might think that certain local citizens do well from it all though.
Life on board was extremely pleasant. Our cabin was fine, although Kay wasn’t entirely in love with the very small give in the mattress. As returning customers we got free laundry and for the first time in my travelling life I wasn’t stamping on my shirts in the shower. I have told myself not to get used to someone else doing it. Most days we had a shore excursion and something to do in the afternoon if wanted. Cocktail hour was generally at 6 and it was very easy to fit a couple in, and the roving barman was good at approaching your half empty glass, saying "would you like more?" and pouring it in at the same time. The meals were superb and we ended up with a table of 10 or 12 in an effort to not be a clique of Antipodeans. The staff, 18 in all, were wonderful. Sonja isn’t as mobile as she would like and seemed to have a permanent minder to help her getting up and down hills, and to hold an umbrella over her if it was sunny. One day we were watching elephants in a pool and she nearly escaped by trying to slip down the cliff into the pool, but the attempt failed. They were always good for a laugh and unfailingly helpful.
Our longest stop was 3 nights in the main tourist town of Luang Prabang which is a nice small town now partly overrun with tourists, so it has lots of stuff to keep you busy. There’s temples to look at, monks to feed, more temples, a museum, a hill to climb with a temple on the top, a food market that shows if anything has meat on it, it is edible (including rats), massages, and there is shopping. In these sorts of places Kay picks the items she really needs and my job is to bargain and pay. At the night market we bought three table runners and with each one I found the price could be a little lower. Then I was guided into the flashest shop in town to have another look at an extremely expensive table runner. It was clear it had to end up in Kay’s luggage and even with a meager 10% off it was multiples more expensive than the other three combined. But it is quite nice and the shop keeper looked happy. Next door was a carpet shop with a Kashmiri guy in charge. These men are the best salesmen in the world and I enjoy a chat with them. It turned out we had bought a carpet from his uncle in Siem Reap last year and possibly didn’t pay too much more than an average mug would. When visiting the pottery village we decided to buy just a couple of small approximations of a fish because we haven’t got enough fish stuff at our beach house. The price was 50,000 kip each and I tendered a note with a 1 followed by lots of 0s. This was not accepted so I retired to ask the guide to help, and when I pulled out the note to show him it was a 0 short, which explained what the problem was and I had to send Kay to complete the deal as I don’t like having to publicly admit to stupidity.
The country we passed through was generally bush with a little agriculture on the hills up from the river. The villages were very occasional and the only commercial activity was taking sand for construction and gold panning with a few more industrial gold extraction sites. At the times when the river was the border between Laos and Thailand there was a distinct difference between the two sides and Laos didn’t win in the development stakes. On the last day our longtail ride ended at a Thai town where we crossed the boarder into Thailand without any holdups. The next day we drove up to the Golden Triangle where Myanmar, Thailand and Laos meet. In itself nothing exciting, but there is a strange and big opium museum and, much more interesting, you get a look at a bizarre town over the river in Laos which has a gaudy and large casino building as well as several highrise buildings, all which look like they should be somewhere else. It turns out Laos has given a 99 year lease of 3000 hectares to an extremely dubious Chinese man with a background in gambling from Macau. It is now accepted that this place he has built is a lot more than a gambling centre for Chinese, and deals in drugs, which is no surprise given where it is, employs only Chinese, conducts online scamming on an industrial scale, is a centre for human trafficking and is not doing much for economic development in Laos, which was the reason given for allowing the lease. One might suggest the real reason has resulted in a bunch of Laotion VIPs having nice big bank balances elsewhere. After that bit of education we headed for Chiang Mai and after a night there the flight home.
If you haven’t been to Laos think about having a look. It’s interesting and the people are delightful.
Dennis .