Bangkok to Thanaleng (Laos)

We boarded our train at 8pm, about 30 minutes after a foot massage which at first made me feel like I'd just undergone major surgery, but by the time I reached our platform had me walking on air and looking forward to my cocoon.

Train from Bangkok to Nong Khai. Obviously.

Our train carried us north through the bulk of Thailand to the border with Laos - a 12-hour journey, according to my ticket; but the minute the train left the station an emissary from the restaurant car told us it would be at least 14, and would we like breakfast at our seats at 8am? Although she'd charge us a little more than we'd pay if we walked down to the restaurant, we both thought it would be worth it, and so it was. At 8am she peeked around the curtain and interrupted my scenery viewing to say she would serve breakfast now. She'd set it up at a couple of spare seats at the end of our carriage, and as we ate, another attendant removed our bedding and turned our beds back into seats. Certainly the most efficient attendants we'd had on the journey so far.

We rolled into Nong Khai nearly 3 hours late, but as it was 3 extra hours of daylight to window-gaze by, the tourists weren't complaining, and I assume the locals were used to it as they were quiet too.

The sleeper train waiting to return to Bangkok

At Nong Khai, we officially left Thailand, the exit stamp filling up the last space of the first passport page to be used up by this trip - the Lao visa would complete the second. From the passport booth we were granted access to the end of the main platform, where a short train waited - just two carriages of simple, suburban train seats and slot-down, wood-framed windows. 

Train to Thanaleng on the left, the sleeper from Bangkok
on the right.

It didn't look much like a grown-up, worldly, border-crossing train at all, but that's what it was. It's a great, big, new train, just three years old, that twice daily makes the 3.5km journey across the Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge over the Mekong River, and back. On this Friday morning it was almost empty - perhaps around 20 passengers, mostly foreign, spread out over the carriages. I sat right behind the driver, giving me a good view of the tracks, which ran down the centre of the empty road.

At the other end of the bridge, about 40 cars and trucks waited behind a guardpost for us to pass. Just a couple of minutes later we pulled into Thanaleng Station - there are plans to extend the line further to Vientiane, the capital city, but for now the tracks we've been travelling for nearly 2,200km end in an unceremonious bit of scrub bush. Which I didn't take a photo of. Yes, I was a little exhausted by the journey, and I thought we'd have another chance later on the return trip. But here's the view looking back to Thailand:

Laos immigration was pretty down to earth - despite lots of forms to complete, and a process which is fast becoming rare these days: hand over your photo, passport, forms and money, plonk yourself down on your bags and get your books out, and when a pile of mixed-up passports are shoved back through a separate window, rush over before someone else with the same nationality as you nicks your little maroon identity. Then you just walk out the station into town, like any other city railway station.

Hah, yeah, right.

No, there was once a railway in Laos, a short section of tracks down in the south used by the French to transport lumber between two rivers, but other than that defunct stretch, these three-and-a-half kilometres from Thailand constitute the only railway in Laos and they're still getting the hang of it. Thanaleng sits in the middle of an expanse of carpark, upon which three minivan taxis await the morning influx of passengers. It took 45 minutes and 400 baht to reach the central market.

From there, there being no more railway to carry us onwards, we boarded a plane for Luang Prabang. Same as my last trip, this was a small turbo-prop plane, and we were barely up in the air before we were descending again.

Books and the art of kayaking

On Tuesday, I've booked to go on a two-day trek, spending a night in a Hmong village. On enquiring at the tour office, I find that this has now turned into a one-day trek and kayak due to market forces beyond their control. I'm a little worried about the strength (or lack of it) in my arms, but the guy assures me it's only an hour or so of kayaking, and the river current does most of the work.

Tuesday dawns, and I'm at the tour office bright and early to meet up with the other travellers - a Brit, two Canadians, and three Spanish girls. I'm already wary as the tour company promises a maximum of six on a tour. We set off in the back of a truck, kayaks strapped to the roof. The truck sets us down after 40 minutes at the end of a dusty road - very dusty, as it's the dry cold season season in Laos, though you wouldn't know it from the oppressive heat. From there we walk to a nearby school. I've brought some books in town from Big Brother Mouse, a charity that could have been set up just for me, it's so perfect: they write and publish bilingual children's books which they try to distribute to kids who have sometimes never seen a book before. I've chosen a Lao fairytale, a collection of Aesop's Fables and an English picture dictionary, which all cost me about £3 in total, and now I hand them over to the headmaster, who tells us he's trying to start a library for the use of the whole village. Great! Literacy and a bit of English in one dedicated push.

The trek leads us up over a hill through fields and rubber tree plots, and then down into the luxurious caller where a wide river winds all the way to Luang Prabang. And that's the trek over. Mis-selling? I think so! The kayaks are waiting on the beach; I share with Nicola, a British girl teaching in Thailand. We set off onto the river, which turns out to be so placid and calm that we are in fact doing all the work. We break for lunch half an hour in, but other than that it's three and a half hours of constant paddling. Despite the dull ache in my arms, I find myself enjoying it. We're low on the water looking up at cliffs and mountains and mostly the only sounds are our paddles hitting the water, and the snorts of the water buffalo. As usual there are thousands of butterflies on the shores and a few fishermen beating the water with long sticks to flush the fish into the waiting nets.



There are also lots of semi-submerged bamboo baskets, cleverly disguised with river weed and baited with food. When a fish bites, a trapdoor is released, holding the fish until it can be collected.

Sometimes we pass men panning for gold... The shores are shiny with fools' gold (I assume... unless I made a terrible mistake spending my holiday kayaking instead of collecting my fortune...)

There are rapids to break up the heavy paddling; the first lulls us into a false sense of calm but they get more and more difficult (and proportionately more fun) until we reach one where the Canadians, their centre of gravity slightly askew, Nicola supposes, flip over. From there on, every tumbling stretch of white water plunges them into the wet. Nicola and I, evenly matched in weight, coast over, shrieking with laughter and crying like kids "Again! Again!" We're almost a little jealous of the Canadians cooling off from the heat... until the last one drags them for almost 30 metres, banging them against rocks and leaving them with bruised limbs and small cuts. Luckily it's almost the end though. Nicola and I have visions of easily coasting onto a sandy beach and flinging our oars down in triumph, but we're grounded in the shallow waters and have to climb out and scramble over rocks and pebbles, dragging our kayak behind us.

It's a triumphant ending, nevertheless. Back in town, I fling myself onto my bed for a second and only open my eyes hours later in the dark when my arms ache me awake. That's when I discover the two blisters on the inside of my thumbs from the oars, one open and bleeding. The Laotian Injury List just passed the Balinese one.

The rest of my time I spend walking, endlessly. Luang Prabang is a small town but it's quite easy to while away a few hours without realising in its narrow back streets full of laundry and bougainvillea and boys playing khataw, a kind of mix between football and volleyball.


It's played with a hollow rattan ball, the players seeming to compete with each other for title of most impressive move. Their legs are amazingly strong and they fly through the air executing high kicks. In one game I watched, two players aimed at the net at the same time, grazing each other's thighs and coming perilously close to depriving Laos of future generations. It caused an outburst of raucous laughter among the spectators as the players, pale but smiling, grabbed at their crotches.

Sometimes I see older men playing petanque, the pitch boundary made of bamboo pipes so that the sandy thunk of the boules is often followed by a hollow 'tok!' as they hit the bamboo. I told one man that we play the same game at home in my family and was rewarded with a surprised smile and an invitation to join in their game. As my family knows, I'm no expert, but the two other players were very kind to me and applauded my weak attempts!

My wanderings were punctuated with cups of thick dark coffee in a thousand different cafes where I sat and wrote and watched the streetlife pass by.


It was in one of these cafes in a back street shaded by frangipanis that I met Martin, a German man working as an engineer in China, who spent a few years in the Limpopo valley, and lived in a commune in East Berlin as a university student. He was interested in my childhood in Zimbabwe, as I was in his experiences of communist Germany so we walked and talked together for a while. We crossed yet another rickety bamboo bridge to the opposite bank, paying 20p towards its upkeep to an elderly woman spinning thread in a hut.


On the other side we found the village empty, the occupants presumably enjoying a siesta in the midday heat, so we slipped down a path littered with the bones of old boats to the banks of the Mekong, where a hut, perched directly above the meeting of the Nam Khan and the Mekong, offered fresh coconuts and cold beers.


As we sat there discussing the similar confluence of communism and capitalism across Asia, an old man dressed in his underpants and an open shirt, his wide smile betraying toothless gums, climbed up from where he'd been washing to offer us a boat to the bars on the far bank. But I was flushed from the heat, and tired, so I decided to mimic the villagers and head back to the hostel for a siesta in the hammock. The blisters on my thumbs from holding the oars the previous day had split so I needed to tend to them and my various other injuries as well. I really don't know how I've turned into such a clumsy traveller - no one else I know ever returns from holiays as battered and bruised as I do.

Refreshed, I went at sunset to meet Martin and Nicola for drinks at a bar where the evening's entertainment was a catwalk to showcase traditional clothing from some of the 40-odd Laotian tribes. The variety that has developed in such a small country is amazing - I'm always a little embarrassed when people ask about the traditional clothes of Britain or Zimbabwe - neither show anything near the imagination Asians put into the way they dress.