- The Milo Man
- I knew three things about Laos before I went.
- 1. It is called the land of a million elephants.
- 2. Laos holds the record for being the most bombed country in the history of warfare.
- 3. Some members of the Hmong hilltribe people who live in the mountains of Laos believe that Jesus Christ will come back in a jeep, wearing army combat fatigues.
I must admit, it was the elephants that I was really going for.
- We arrived in Laos in the middle of the rainy season; landing in an airport where you still have to walk across the tarmac from the plane to get to the terminal building. We stayed the first night in the capital of Vientiane, in that same generically seedy hotelroom that I’m sure I‘ve stayed in in every other South East Asian city. It was completely sealed up airtight with it’s one window boarded over like some kind of cell for psychological experimentation. All night the airconditioner made a rattling asthmatic sound that filled my dreams with paranoid delusions about suffocation and earthquakes. In the light of morning it became apparent that my paranoia was not too far from reality after all; the entire building was indeed about to fall down, so we moved hotels, to the ‘Santisouk’ guesthouse, which remained the coolest place in town despite the didgeridoo-playing crusty who moved into the room next door a few days into our stay. It’s a very disconcerting thing when you come from Australia, to wake up to a didgeridoo in Laos.
We spent the first few mornings of our stay in Vientiane drinking exquisite coffee and eating the last remnants of French colonialism in the form of excellent baguettes. Their croissants were a little wanting but I guess it had been a long time since the French were expelled. The afternoons we wiled away in the little cafes that lined the banks of the Mekong River; each one was just a few bamboo poles holding up a shaky little thatched roof, a couple of tables, and a menu that was touchingly consistent in this world of infinite variables; consisting only of green papaya salad, grilled fish and sticky rice.
Finally, appalled by our swelling bellies, we decided to stop being such unashamed slackers and hired two bicycles for the day, and rode around all the backstreets of Vientiane looking into Wats and avoiding rabid dogs. When we took our eyes off the treacherous mud that kept sucking at our bicycle tires with intergalactic force we noticed that along the back streets of Laos almost every house has some other business inside it; they use their loungerooms, which are totally open to the street, as hairdressers or corner stores or cafes; even if they only have two things to sell, like a packet of cigarettes and a bottle of Coke, they hang out all day on a mattress behind the counter waiting for someone to buy something. When you ride past it feels like the whole town is an open space, and a public thing; where chickens wander freely between neighbors, and the only thing that disturbs the peace is the stuck-pig sound of our bicycle chains.
Eventually we had to wind up our backstreet tour and take refuge from a sudden rainy season storm in a nearby Wat. Although the Wat was officially closed, a young Lao guy took pity on us and let us into the temple to see the 12meter high Buddha statue inside. He explained to us that he was an artist now living in Las Vegas, back for a holiday in Laos, and he was spending a few months restoring this Buddha, re-covering it with gold leaf. Politely ignoring the pools of water gathering at our bare feet, he walked us up to the Buddha and found a piece of the goldleaf he had used to show us. It was about an inch by an inch and a half, and you had to apply each leaf individually. It took him a day to cover half a foot of this huge Buddha. Kind of like covering the statue of liberty with postage stamps; but I’m sure he could put all that good karma to use when he got back to Las Vegas.
When the storm had passed, we bid the artist and his gleaming gold Buddha good-bye and wheeled our protesting bikes from the Wat. On the way back to the guesthouse, within earshot of the didgeridoo drone, I managed to run over the only expensive thing I own - my sunglasses - which were quite a pathetic sight, lying horribly mangled in the mud, a mockery of their chic former selves. The sight of it made me wonder if I should maybe be sticking stuff to a huge fat Buddha myself.
Unfortunately though, we only had a two week visa in Laos, so we bid adieu to Vientiane and decided to catch a plane to Luang Phabang, which is the old capital, up in the middle of the mountains. It’s a really sleepy but groovy town surrounded by beautiful mountain vistas and flanked by the Mekong on one side and the Nam Khan river on the other. We spent a week there in a hotel above the town’s only disco. After several nights of indescribably bad pop music we decided a little fresh air and countryside serenity were just what we needed, so we hired a motorbike for the day and rode out of town to the beautiful Kuang Si waterfalls outside Luang Phabang. I must admit it was a little foolhardy of us, traffic being on the other side of the road and insane in Laos anyway, and it being rainy season and all, and the quality of the road calling to mind off-road racing tracks glimpsed on latenight tv, but nevertheless we bravely set out and my partner outdid himself in maneuvering around potholes, landslides and buffalo.
Passing by other bikes, I was amazed at how good the girls in Laos are at riding on the back, it quite put me to shame; they all sit side-saddle really gracefully with their hands in their laps. I guess the bikes here only go up to 50km per hour, so there’s no need to cling on (unless you are fishtailing through the mud, which I soon discovered), but it does kind of take the sexual edge off a motorbike ride when you’re putting along beside some guy dinking his 85 year old grandma and her chickens to the market. You hardly ever see a car in Laos, they have the family Honda Dream instead, and they cram the whole family unit onto the thing; Papa driving, little 2-year old up in front of him, Mama behind jamming the newborn baby in between her and Papa, and sometimes even another one on the back. You don’t need a license to ride a motorbike here either so all the kids cruise around on them driving their grandpas somewhere or other or taking 3 slabs of beer to their friend’s place, it’s incredible what they can fit onto the things.
Despite the mundane place (and pace) of the motorbike in Lao life, we still got a thrill out of the ride and the views and the incredible rice-paddy vistas we passed on the way back from the falls. Inspired by our success, the next day we decided to venture to the Pak Ou caves, which are some 25 km or so from Luang Phabang, and you can only reach them by river. All morning we were followed around town by this big Lao guy in a bright green Milo t-shirt offering us a ride to a little village where we could then get a cheap boat to the caves; and after much haggling we finally relented, mainly because we liked his t-shirt. He drove us to a funky little wooden village where they brew Lao whisky out of rice. Their distillery was a totally suicidal set up; a few drums boiling away with naked flame underneath, so we thought we ought to give them something for their bravery, and bought two bottles of the stuff for $2. (Later, when we got the bottles back to the hotel, we were delighted to discover the whisky was quite delicious, and not unlike vodka. )
- Mr Milo man negotiated our boat for us, and we scrambled into the dilapidated thing which of course broke down halfway there. Fortunately two passing fisherboys in an even dodgier boat bailed us out and took us the rest of the way to the caves. We were so low in the water we were almost a submarine, but we made it there. Lao long-tailed boats are two feet wide and maybe 15 inches deep, really narrow long things with what looks and sounds like a motorbike-engine taped on the end with straight-out exhaust, they are amazing; but they almost always eventually get you to where you are going. The caves themselves were superspecial, big limestone caverns jammed full of every kind of Buddha imaginable; a much more natural place for worship than any church I have ever been. We took lots of photos, attracting much bad karma I’m sure; they’ll probably all come out black. After a while of deep spiritual contemplation and a couple of cans of Coke we scrambled back on board our boat and the fisherboys took us back to Miloman, and Miloman took us back to Luang Phabang.
Having got a taste for the Mekong, we decided to go by river up to a crossing into Northern Thailand called Huay Xai. We learnt that we could either catch a slow boat that took 3 days or a speed boat that took 7 hours. Being chronically indecisive, we settled on a speedboat halfway and the slow boat the rest of the way. We headed off first thing the next day and found ourselves at the front of this garishly painted thing that looked almost the same as the fisherboys boat only a little wider, and the boat man gave us and our companions helmets to wear, which made me instantly (and, as it turned out rightfully) suspicious of what was to come.
When the boat took off it was so fast I felt like an astronaut with my skin g-forcing into the back of my head and my face trying to turn itself inside out. I put on my helmet and it eased the airpressure but it was so heavy I kept headbutting my knees. The engine noise was amazing, like having your head inside a chainsaw. After I got over the shock of this assault on my senses, however, it dawned on me that it was actually very fun, like one of those crazy amusement park rides I’m always too scared to go on. Every ripple in the water made the boat lift and drop, and the river was full of whirlpools that the boat would come smacking down on with bone-cracking force. I had every muscle in my body tense for three hours straight and my teeth gritted and I had the sorest ass in the world from the hard wooden seat and cramp in my legs from being mashed up beside my partner in a seat maybe 1 foot square but the whole experience had such a ludicrous intoxicating effect on me that all my physical discomfort was erased. All along the banks of the river, from what I could see through the wind and spray, were deserted, huge mountains and lush jungle, peppered now and then by tiny riverside villages. Still no elephants so far.
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- When we reached halfway, the riverside village of Pakbeng, my ears were buzzing and I felt quite trippy in the head with the speed we had been doing. We dragged our numb legs onto the docks and talked to an English couple who had just gotten off the slow boat from Luang Phabang. They said it had taken two days to get halfway, commenting ruefully that when they say slowboat here they really do mean slow, just like when they say speedboat they really do mean speed. Finally our visa decided the matter; we didn’t have enough time for the slowboat so we decided to burn our last reserves of adrenaline in another speedboat ride. By the time we got to Huay Xai I felt like I’d been in a blender for 7 hours, but I slept excellently after half a bottle of Lao whisky and some grilled streetstall chicken. Our visa expired the next day, I was bitterly disappointed; two weeks in the land of a million elephants and not so much as one glimpse of a tantalizing trunk between the teak trees. Heavy of heart, we caught a boat over the Mekong and into Northern Thailand.
Immediately it was high-rises and highway and cars and ugly gold jewelry and plastic shit that noone needs. Thoroughly disgusted, we caught a songthaew (basically a ute with two benches in the back for passengers) to a town we heard was interesting up in the Golden Triangle called Chiang Saen. It was a divey little place, nothing golden about it, so we caught another songthaew to Mae Sai, which is the northernmost point in Thailand and the border between Thailand and Burma. Sounds exotic doesn’t it? Well it looks like Wollongong, only covered in mud, with a huge highway right through the middle of a concrete wasteland. The only explanation I could find for such blind and butt-ugly development was that the opium must really have messed with the heads of the Golden Triangle honchos. How else could you explain such an appalling misuse of vast amounts of money and such a pervasive denial of the existence of taste?
We stayed in a guesthouse that was supposed to be really funky but was in fact divey (in the world of budget travel the two are most often synonymous) and staffed by a pack of shifty Burmese chicks, and the next day, still determined to find my elusive elephant, we caught a dilapidated old bus to Chiang Rai. Though we found a good guest house willing to take us to the elephants, it became a test of patience to see whether we could endure the day and night till our trek began. Two older French guys, presumably on their way back from Laos, were staying next-door with their Thai hookers; these girls were something, little flouro green minis and halterneck tops and horrible throaty laughs. They seemed to spend the whole day eating and squirming into the laps of their slimy French men saying "What you want, baby?" and wrapping round their necks like contortionists. They could single-handedly have stopped the fleshtrade in Thailand, they were that horrible.
Eventually though, the day of the trek did arrive, wet and shiney, and we caught another boat upriver into hilltribe country, to this village full of elephants, where we were assigned an elephant called Phousi (pronounced pussy!) which we thought was totally cool, and off we went up into the hills where it felt like noone had been for generations. It was all lush emerald green hills and deep blue mountains and the track we followed was a tiny dribble of path that became a creek halfway through the trip, and on either side of this invisible track there were huge patches of flattened grass where elephants had crashed out for a nap. Pussy was a cool elephant, even though his feet kept sinking down into rainy season mud and he kept stopping every meter or so to munch on some bamboo. It was kind of hard to stay on top of him, his step was like a rolling movement, and when he went downhill it felt like you’d slide right off into the mud, but it was really wild to be so high up off the ground and on such a freaky beast.
It took a few hours to get to the hilltribe village, and the first sound to greet us on arrival was a Gameboy. The old lady who sells bananas to feed to the elephants whipped on her hilltribe gear when she saw us coming and flogged her little embroideries which we of course felt obliged to buy. We fed Pussy a few bunches of bananas, he was real shy about taking them from me, maybe because I’d been teasing him the whole way there about his name; I was surprised he hadn’t chucked me off into the rice-paddies way back.
 - As we wandered through the village, besieged by packs of little girls selling embroidered wristbands, our guide told us villages like these had been receiving trippy hippie tourist trade for years. Hence the ‘authentic’ hilltribe guitar-straps and headbands. Most of them, he said, came to smoke opium with the village head, and more and more remote villages were becoming the destination of ‘guaranteed no tourist’ treks. Me, I was happy with my one day elephant ride, and returned to Chiang Rai with another sore ass.
- I had seen my elephant. I had sat upon it’s back. But, looking at it from Thailand, elephants or no elephants, I was very glad that Laos was the landlocked place it was, in the volatile region it was in, with the kind of government, for all its faults, that kept the horrific development of it’s shameless neighbor firmly outside its borders.
I was also glad that the mountains where the Hmong hilltribe live are so remote a jeep will never make it there, sparing everybody a horrible misunderstanding.
Tasha Sudan- back to features
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