Fairyland And Its Inhabitants

Early on Sunday morning I packed my bags and left Rivertime for the airport. On the 40-minute drive, Joy told me of his great happiness at entering the army in two months' time. So very different to South Korea where most men would do anything to get out of serving... With Lunar New Year and Valentine's Day falling on the same weekend this year, the streets were awash with red - lanterns for the new year, teddies and roses for the lovers, everything sold together from tiny stalls on the roadside. There was one particularly blessed woman somewhere in Vientiane, whose boyfriend sat in a tuk-tuk in front of our car, red and white balloons billowing out the back and completely obscuring the door. Even the dress code matched the event, with a red t-shirt or dress atop every scooter. I was rather glad to leave the American-style commercialism behind at the airport gates!

I quickly cleared check-in and went through to the waiting lounge, a grid of hard plastic chairs looking out to the runway where a plane was waiting. Not, surely, my plane, for I was flying the national airline on their busiest route, and this was a teensy tiny propellor plane.



With a lovely flower on its tail, yes, but still teensy, nonetheless. I sat and waited, but no other flights were announced and no other plane showed up, and the pilots walked through, pushing the unlocked doors open to the tarmac, and then a sweet lady in her silk uniform told us we could now board. So we all did, walking across the tarmac to get to the 5-step ladder. Which of course I have done before at other small airports. I have, however, never had to duck to get in through an aeroplane door... My window seat was right in the middle, right under the wing, and next to the wheels.


I started to understand why other travellers were wary of flying Lao Airlines, but in the end it was a perfectly pleasant, very short flight over valleys and mountains and bright red dirt roads. As we descended into Luang Prabang, the Mekong stretched and yawned beneath us, curling around the little town, gold temples reflecting the morning sunlight into my eyes. Luang Prabang used to be a distant colonial outpost for French officials who, for one reason or another, never wanted to go home again. In my 40-minute flight I leapt over a month's travelling. It used to take longer to get from Bangkok to Luang Prabang than to go from Bangkok to France by ship! Perhaps as a result of this unimaginable distance, the officials who settled here eventually turned it into a beautiful village in the French style, with shuttered two-storey cottages lining a narrow street, and a boulevard running above the Mekong with space for a cafe table or two.


The town mostly fills the peninsular space between the Mekong and the Nam Khan, a river that joins the Mekong here. On the 15-minute tuk-tuk ride to my hostel, I started to see the chaotic Asian traffic I missed in the Vientiane countryside. There are scooters and tuk-tuks everywhere, although it's still far from the stereotypical Vietnamese streetscene. I was barely at the hostel long enough to dump my bag on my bed, and then I was off to the main street, Th Sisavangvong, named after the king at the time of independence from France. Lovely.

Of course, it has the usual ebullience of Asia, but the allure of the town is in the bougainvillea creeping over the carved wooden balconies, and the open-fronted cafes. Asia shows her motherhood in the street food sellers - I buy a coconut dumpling straight away from a man who says he has 7 children to feed, although at least in the drawing on his cart they all have very smiley faces - the friendliness of the people - the dumpling seller chats to me for 5 minutes then makes me another one because he sees the sticky smile on my face, then tries to refuse to let me pay my 10p - the brightly coloured tuk-tuks everywhere - often with movie scenes painted on the sides.

Of course, because this is the 21st century, all the houses and cottages are now massage spas and restaurants, tour agencies and money changers. This is a town where people feel comfortable leaning over from their table to contribute to your private conversation, as if because we're all tourists we're the same, and should help each other out with tips and warning tales. Every Lao person is seemingly in the tourist industry, from men guiding the tours, to women giving foot massages and selling silks, to the children selling trinkets when they're not at school. At least the kids do go to school - when I tried to fob off one persistent ten-year-old with "maybe tomorrow", she retorted "Tomorrow school, every child learning learning. You buy now."

I did "buy now" in the end...

I retreated to my room for a late afternoon siesta but I'm back at 5:30 for the night market, a sea of silk and silver that shuts down Th Sisavangvong.

I eat street food, which in this fairytale land means a vegetarian baguette and a fruit smoothie, and wander about talking to sellers and deciding what I would buy if I were a millionaire. I pass the boat pier where a rotund man sporting an improbably moustache suggests I might like to take a boat to the other side of the river, "with your boyfriend" he says. I tell him I have no boyfriend. He and a nearby tuk-tuk driver laugh and shake their heads at the shame of being an elderly spinster. "That pity," the boatman says, "but don't worry, for today, I can be boyfriend." I laugh with the two of them, politely decline, and move on.

On Monday I walked down to the Mekong, still bleary-eyed with sleep, which was interrupted repeatedly by the person in the dorm above mine shifting position in his (I presume) sleep. Not a well-soundproofed room - but then, it is almost eighty years old. I've booked a space on a boat down the river so I patiently wait on the benches at the ticket office (a glorified shed under some lovely old trees on the riverbank) until my ticket number is called.


I scramble down the steep steps and wobble my way onto a boat, where before the five other passengers can say hello, I nearly knock myself out on a low beam, adding a bump on the head to an infected scrape on a toe on my list of Laotian injuries. Not as impressive as the Balinese list yet, but it's early days... The boat is a traditional long boat. Low and narrow, both ends sit out of the water. It's steered from the front, though the engine sits towards the back, in front of a living space. Only six passengers are accommodated on each boat; the rest of the area is taken up by the family whose home this is. I could see that being awkward, but I'd luckily been assigned a lovely young couple, the wife nursing a cheerful baby boy, and it felt less like an intrusion than a homestay.

At the other end of the two-hour journey were the Pak Ou caves: the lower one, Tham Ting, a gaping black cavity in the limestone cliff, reached by crude, whitewashed steps.


Our boat driver moored at the far end of a line of boats; we climbed over three other boats to reach a wide bamboo raft which acts as jetty and leads to the foot of the steps where a $2 entrance fee must be paid.

The cave had religious significance for the people living in the valley long before the Lao arrived here from China. The religion changed, the significance remained, and then Buddhism arrived. Inside, the cave rises from the mouth, creating a kind of amphitheatre in which we the visitors become the actors on a stage. The audience, silent, but each with their own unique expression, is thousands upon thousands of Buddha statues. They sit and watch, some in the meditation pose, or Calling for Rain. Some with their hands extended, open-palmed, exhorting listeners to Stop Arguing, a rare pose for a Buddha. A few lack heads or arms or bodies: these have been brought here and left, as if it were a Buddha graveyard for unwanted icons. Many, though, were crafted by royal sculptors for kings.

They sit on rocks and in cracks right up to the ceiling of the cave, gold, bronze, wooden and painted.



I venture up a path on the side of the mountain to the second, higher cave. All the way up there are ragged children who wave tiny, meticulously made bamboo cages. Inside tiny songbirds flutter their wings, waiting for Buddhists to buy them for a dollar and release them, thereby purchasing extra credit in the ladder of good karma. I wonder if you wouldn't gain just as much karma by not buying them, thereby discouraging their capture in the first place. I am taking a photo of the view over the river when a boy thrusts a cage at me and cries "photo!" So I take one, and show it to him. He smiles, but then babbles in Lao and another child translates: "He say, you take photo, you pay him. Only one dollar. You pay." Whoever told me Lao weren't as mercenary as their Asian neighbours had their tongue firmly in their cheek.

On the return journey, our boat pauses at Ban Xang Hai, a village famous for its lao-lao - rice whisky. We get off the boat onto a jetty, 500m of death-defying rickety bamboo poles crossing the exposed Mekong mud. In the village we're invited to try the lao-lao, which tastes like wine laced with vodka, and watch it being fermented, which is very exciting. Like watching grass grow. The pots remind me of the clay containers used for fermenting kimchi in Korea.

The boat trip itself is perhaps the most interesting aspect of an interesting day. There are fishermen in bamboo hats casting fine nets from their low boats, and women cultivating lettuce and cucumbers on the banks. Now and then a village passes into view, connected to the shore by ladders or sometimes mud steps, the grass-roofed huts poking out of thick vegetation.

During the Vietnam War, the US waged a "secret war" in Laos, training Hmong fighters for illegal skirmishes along the Vietnamese border. When the Vietnamese started importing arms along a trail that led through north-eastern Laos (the Ho Chi Minh Trail of legend), America carpet bombed the "neutral" country, increasing support locally for the communists, both Lao and Vietnamese. With the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I can't help feeling the Americans will never learn their lesson. Floating peacefully down the river I watch the thick forest lining the banks and imagine how terrifying it must have been to have had to travel in the 1970s - with the CIA, the Viet Minh and the local communist army, the Pathet Lao all operating in the area, I can't imagine feeling less safe.

That afternoon I spent wandering the peninsula and drinking thick Lao coffee at street stalls. In amongst the hundreds of tourists, ordinary Lao went about their business unobtrusively. I started to see beyond the play put on for tourists. Though I've generally found the people here to be far less friendly and open than down near Vientiane (too much contact with pushy Westerners perhaps?), once I start sitting and smiling at people, I can see their hospitality and willingness to talk resurface.

Everywhere I look, the saffron and yellow robes and shaved heads of the monks brighten the day. They wander the streets, their faded golden bags slung over their shoulders, talking to each other and buying fruit. The novices are as young as 7 or 8, taken to the temples by parents desperate to ensure them education and a daily meal (just one though - the monks eat only at lunchtime, I'm told). Sometimes a truck or tuk-tuk passes, filled to the brim with the orange robes.

The joy of a river

Lunar New Year, and Korea is shutting down. So once again, I'm climbing on a plane and going to have a look at someplace new! Hooray!

From Korea to Vientiane is just 7 hours on a plane. Unfortunately, the Laotian capital isn't on a major route from Seoul, so after a frantic drive to the airport after work on Wednesday and a flight to Bangkok, I get to, once again, spend a night on the obliging Starbucks couch. I have a ten-hour layover and it's bringing back memories of the long night on the way to Bali last year...

Sadly they're building a new shop right next to Starbucks, presumably to avoid inconveniencing day travellers, and I can't block out the screeches and whines of their tools. So after a gruelling night spent moving from chair to chair, trying to find a quiet and comfy place to sleep and eventually giving up, I made it to morning and to my 11:45 flight to Vientiane. It took just over an hour, flying north into the peninsular hinterland, over miles and miles of rice paddies and the odd hill. Coming in to land, it was only at the very last minute that the ground beneath us turned from field to concrete runway. Through tedious customs and visa formalities, a driver waited for me in the heat; he had very little English, so, with a minimum of words, he hustled me into his battered Peugeot and set off through the city streets. The buildings lining the wide avenues reminded me of Madagascar: with faded French colonial pretensions, the shabby beauty of the verandah-lined stilted houses appealed to me straight away.

It wasn't until we reached the outskirts, though, that I realised I was going to fall madly and irrevocably in love with this country. We turned onto a dirt road and drove through tiny villages centred around shops operating from wooden shacks. The houses, set on large plots of land, were all built on stilts, and in the spaces beneath, whole families were gathered, eating lunch, or chatting, or simply sharing a smoke. Goats meandered along the edge of the road, paying no heed to the drivers, who were, if we're honest, simply meandering themselves. Some were meandering so successfully they'd come to a complete stop on the road and were now engaged in talking to stall owners, maybe buying a baguette or two for lunch. It was great. I couldn't have come further from the grey high-rises and farm-quilted valleys of South Korea. And we were only a short drive outside the capital city!

My lodge was on the banks of a river, the Nam Ngum, just a collection of rough huts with verandahs and an outhouse or two.



Steps led down the steep bank right to the water's edge, where, having now run out of land, the owners built a restaurant on the water. The deck enclosed a section of the fast-moving river as a makeshift pool.




Tables and chairs were scattered over several moored rafts under thatch, and at the far end, when I arrived, the kitchen was filled with chattering Lao, all of whom stop at the sight of me and come over with warm smiles to wish me welcome to their country. I settled on the edge of the restaurant, my legs dangling in the cool water, a book in one hand, in the other a bottle of Beer Lao, the best lager I've ever tasted. Can life actually get any better than this? The next few days will tell...

Across the river, a village lies, carved out of the forest. A ferry carries people and scooters back and forth, but I make my way there on a section of the restaurant, which detaches to become a thatched raft.



We land next to some women washing clothes in the river and Joy, my guide, leads me up the steep bank to the village. (Joy is a nickname; it means 'skinny' and he lives up to it.) Although Hmong people are increasingly coming down from their traditional mountainous homes to live and work alongside lowland tribes, this village is entirely Lao. The Lao are strictly Buddhist and a bright gold and green temple occupies prime position. Joy takes me inside. He is Hmong so his knowledge is limited, but the images on the wall bear close resemblance to the ones I saw in India, if a little more graphic; one shows a man, surrounded by a feasting family, his guts graphically spilling from his belly.

We walk to the village school, where around 50 children are taught by a single teacher. When we arrive, a pack of kids waves at me from the verandah, but then the teacher walks up and they all disappear back inside to learn about mountains and valleys (Joy translates for me).



I discover that the students are divided into classes, the teacher moving from room to room, handing out work to be done in her absence.



I don't want to interrupt, so I quietly look in through the windows; the children seem fascinated by me though and so I move on for the teacher's sake.

The afternoon, hot and sticky, begs to be observed from the cool vantage point of a tube on the pool, and I find myself very obliging in this respect.

The next day I ventured to the restaurant next door where I bought a Fanta and sat down under a thatch roof at the top of the riverbank, above pumpkin patches and tomato stakes - an organic vegetable garden which has to be abandoned once a year when the river swells, but which otherwise feeds the restaurant, the attached families, and my lodge.

It wasn't quiet. Mohawked boys drank Beer Lao and laughed in the larger hut next to mine, and Thai pop blared from the loudspeakers. The ferry roared its way across the river beneath. But it was calming in its cheerful simplicity. Families of chickens stalked grubs in the overgrown garden. Whenever I glanced up from my book, my eye was invariably caught by one of the legions of butterflies - sometimes a tiny yellow buttercup butterfly, someimtes a giant blue-black Birdwing, 15cm across its span. A silken cream butterfly, its wingtips brushed with orange paint, veered by to inspect my Fanta but went off in search of more natural sugar. And just down the bank, an abandoned hut, marigolds testing its boundaries, played sunny host to an almost chameleon-like lizard, its skin glowing bright red in the noon light, fading to a muddy green at the tip of its tail. He watched me with as much interest as I showed him, turning his head to stare into the camera lens.

I was talking about India a few days ago with some colleagues going there, and found it strange that my enduring memories are of the myriad cafes Sara and I sat in, not talking, often, but simply writing, reading, watching people. It seems that often the best impressions I get from a place are from doing absolutely nothing! Score!

Sometimes in Bali I got frustrated with the thought that everything was just for show, that the only industry was the tourist one, that even the most genuine-looking restaurant was too pricy for locals. It's different here. When lunchtime comes along, the huts fill up with Lao, chattering, bantering with the owners and eating the same food as I've just ordered.

Like I said earlier. Love at first sight.

Observing the North

Having only two weekends left in Korea has focused my attention somewhat. I've realised how many things I haven't yet done and how little time I have left to do them in. In an effort to reduce the list a bit, Harry and I headed down the road to Odusan Observatory this weekend.



It's terrible that I haven't been before, as it really is just a five minute drive from English Village, past our local shops and love motels, across the highway. It's so close that from the top of the observatory, we can see our Hollywood-style sign beyond the village.

Odusan was built to promote the idea of reunification of the two Koreas, an idea popular in the media and with politicians, but often scoffed at by southerners more concerned with whether the economy would suffer if combined with the poor North. The observatory looks over the confluence of two rivers, gazing towards North Korea.

The main attraction is an observation deck with bright orange binoculars through which it's possible to make out the Propaganda Village on the other side of the river. Unfortunately, the binoculars were too low even for my short frame, so poor Harry really struggled...


The Propaganda Village was built by the North Koreans for the purpose of showing South Koreans what they were missing out on. It boasts high-rise apartment buildings and enormous signs beseeching southerners to cross over to paradise. There used to be loudspeakers blaring propaganda as well, matched by loudspeakers on the southern side, until the governments agreed to remove them all for the sake of sanity. Unfortunately, the government forgot (or was unable) to fill the village with people. The buildings are grey concrete, and the glass-less windows stare blankly over fields and unused schools. North Koreans are apparently brought in every day to work the rice paddies, and at dusk, they're driven back to their real homes. The buildings visible to us on this slightly hazy day included mansions with such glorious names as "The Anti-South Media Propaganda Base", "Kim Il-Sung Historical Monument Hall" and "People's Cultural Assembly Hall". Small figures worked in the fields, burning rubbish and preparing for spring planting. I made out what seemed to be a primary school, but the courtyard was empty of children and the swings lonely.

The river is currently full of ice floating out to sea. A couple of weeks ago it was almost completely frozen over, so it's getting better, but it's still hard to imagine the lives of the people we could see. I recently read a book by a teenager who escaped over the border with China, and his tales of famine and desperation were ringing in my head as I turned my binoculars on the farmers. Without heating or even fuel for a fire, many of the people in North Korea have difficulty in even surviving the winter - returning to my toasty room, I vowed not to complain of the cold again...


The exhibition centre is nicely done. There's no judgement - or at least, there isn't in the small amount of English commentary available. The glass cases full of North Korean products seem to show that life, although permanently stuck in the 1950s, is actually quite similar to the rest of Asia. The little area done up as a regular room might be shows a poor but clean space, with a TV and food on the low table. The only sign that this is not a room in just any third world country is the pictures on the wall: placed high up so that nothing else is above them, the Two Kims gaze benevolently over the scene.

The display cases show an amazing array of North Korean products, like adder liquor, with a perfectly preserved adder reaching up towards the cap. The money is well designed, with all the reverse sides showing heroic citizens, stoically looking to the future in a heroic manner, as befits the heroic members of an outcast society.

It's stunning how many products are produced. Although I knew of the ideal of self-sufficiency (or "juche"), I didn't realise just how self-sufficient the country is. The clothing is a bit dated, the toys are largely military, the packaging has none of the appeal of Western equivalents (and is that such a bad thing?) but it's all there.

Even guitar strings are available to the workers of DPRK, and should they require a little relaxation at the end of the day, there's "revolutionary opera" - oh how I wish I could listen to that...


The Kims are everywhere. Wearing a badge with one or the other's face on it is compulsory for all North Koreans above a certain age, and in Life In Paradise, the teenage author tells of how all the children fought to have the latest editions, which were, naturally, more expensive, and therefore worn only by the wealthiest. The personality cult is fascinating and I can't help but wonder where Mugabe failed in this - he'd certainly love to have the absolute power that Kim Jong-Il has. Even during the famine, North Koreans were expected to, and did, go and offer food at the base of one of the Kims' enormous statues that are built on hills in every city. The food is left to go to waste as an offering on their birthdays and other holidays.

Perhaps one of the saddest points for me was the Hometown Searching Centre. Although this is not necessarily the closest South Koreans can get, it's one of the places that families separated by the war come to burn offerings to ancestors on important days, ancestors who are buried across the border and are inaccessible to their descendants, and to look across the water and wonder about their living relatives who were caught on the other side at the ceasefire. This centre allows South Koreans to search for information about their homes they left so long ago.

Odusan's a fascinating place, full of heartache and suffering, but also of hope, in the walls filled with inter-Korean communication and co-operation. All those people, separated by simple ideology - really, what's the point?