Fed up with the weather in North Vietnam, I decided it was time to head for Lao and the promise of sunshine. I didn’t know much a bout Lao so I got a bus straight to capital Vientaine, a roundabout journey that took over twenty-two hours. I had no trouble at the border, but the bus was held up due to overloading, or more likely a shortage of bribes. I spent a few days looking round the city, amazed at how quiet it is compared to the other places I’ve visited in SE Asia.

After this I got the three hour bus to Vang Vieng, but when I tried to check into a guesthouse I found that I had misplaced my passport somewhere. In a bit of a panic I got the next bus straight back to Vientaine, where I recovered the missing passport at the reception of the guesthouse, where to their amusement I checked back in for the night.
After this false start I got to Vang Vieng the next day and found some nice huts close to the river. The town itself is built up around the tourists who go there to party and relax for a few days before moving on. The main attraction being tubing, where you spend a pleasant afternoon floating down the river on an old tire tube stopping at the many riverbank “bars” along the way for a Beerlao or two, only to end up wet, tired, sun burnt and let’s face it a bit drunk. While not tubing, red-eyed tourists head for the many bars playing their favorite episodes of friends around the clock.

After a few days of this a group of us decided it was best to get in some culture before we got stuck. The nearby city of Luang Prabang is the most important place for Buddhists in the country and the main focus of the celebrations for the Lao New Year or Pi Mai, which was due to take place in a week’s time. We took in the sights for a few days, which included the numerous temples and just outside of a town an amazing set of waterfalls perfectly set up for swimming. On the way back from the waterfall some of the local kids were getting into the New Year spirit a little early and drenched us. When night falls the main street turns into a large market where tribes from surrounding villages come to ply their wares and you can get a cheap meal, not to mention beer.

With a few days to spare before Pi Mai I left for the village of Muang Ngoi. Because there are no roads to the village I got the bus as far as Nong Khiaw and then a boat upriver to Muang Ngoi. It’s a beautiful little place with huts over looking out onto the river and across the surrounding mountains. There is no electricity and the generators go off at around ten so it’s a quiet place but I was glad of the early nights, especially with the roosters waking me up at five in the morning. One night I foolishly left a packet of biscuits in my bag, only to find that the next morning a rat (or rats) had gotten peckish and chewed a sizeable hole in the bag. The following morning having failed to clean the bag out properly, I found that it was now completely crawling with ants.

I had read that the boat journey all the way back to Luang Prabang was one the most picturesque in Lao, so when someone suggested it to me I thought why not, what can go wrong. We set off at nine in the morning, twelve of us squatting in a small motor boat along with the skipper and his wife. Everything was going fine and we were taking in the scenery until when going through some shallow water the boat struck a rock, causing water to gush through a gaping hole in the bottom of the boat. A cry of “Nam, lots of it” came from behind me as the skipper struggled to get the boat to the nearest sandbank. Once we were beached everybody pitched in and soon the skipper had patched up the crack with some cut up water bottles and spare plank that was lying around. The boat still had a minor leak but there were plenty of volunteers for bailing duty. A few hours later our confidence was building that we might actually make it after all, when the engine started sputtering and then gave up. The boat was beached once more and the skipper began tinkering with the engine, shaking his head he disappeared into the bushes returning with a length of bamboo in his hand. This was then cut down to size and somehow attached to the engine, and amazingly there were no more problems for the rest of the trip. The journey took a bit longer than usual, but I think would have been a bit boring and nowhere near as much fun if everything had gone as planned.

Once back in Luang Prabang we had no trouble in finding rooms, even though the new year was just a couple of days away. Most of the celebrations seemed to be groups of foreigners going around trying soak other tourists with their oversized water pistols. The day before the main festivities the whole town centre turned into a huge market and the crowds coming from all over the country made it difficult to walk down the streets. Some of us were invited to a large traditional dinner, the main course being a couple of bottomless classes of beer which were swiftly passed around. After dinner everybody set off for an island in the middle of the Mekong, where the locals build stupas in the sand. Most of the tourists I spoke to thought this was just a religious ceremony and stayed away, happy to spend the day in town with their water pistols, but it turned out to be one massive party with people dousing each other in water and flour and drinking until the sun went down.

The day of Pi Mai is based around the parading of a holy relic through the town, accompanied by a hell of a lot of monks, dancers, musicians and recently crowned Miss Pi Mai riding atop an elephant float. It is traditional to wet the feet of the monks as they pass by. Once the parade was over, the customary mass water torture resumes.

When the constant soakings got too wearing I was convinced to take a trip south to Ponsavan to take in the “Plain of Jars”, a pre-historic site covered with giant sandstone jars. It is also famous as one of the worst effected areas in the most bombed country in the world, a place where American bombers apparently just dumped their unwanted shells during the American war. On a dawn run to one of the sites we tread carefully trying to stay on the confusingly marked UXO (Unexploded Ordinance) free path, which seemed to switch from green to red markings every few steps. Our guide all the time giving us nuggets of information, pointing to holes marked “American Bomb Crater”, saying “This is a bomb crater”. Before leaving the site I read on a board that the reason for the jars being there was still unclear, but recent evidence had shown that they could have had something to do with cremation ceremonies.

Once you’ve seen one plain of jars you’ve seen them all, so straight after our short tour we went directly to the bus station, with just about enough time to get some breakfast. From here I took the bus back to Vientaine. During the Pi Mai festivities realized that I would need to extend my one moth visa if I wanted to continue further South in Lao and the cheapest place to do this is the Lao embassy in Vientaine. With everybody’s various visa problems sorted out a group of us got the night bus south to Pakse. We arrived bleary eyed and straight away got a tuk-tuk to station on the other side of town where we got on a local bus heading for Tadlo falls in the Bolaven Plateau, an idyllic country-side location where we relaxed and took in the falls.

Bored with the falls we then got a truck back to Pakse and another truck onto nearby Champasak, an old French town which contains a much older Angkorian temple, Wat Phu Champasak. Where we spent an afternoon looking around what was originally a Hindu complex and then later converted to Buddhist, complete with a footprint of the Buddha himself. With nothing else to see in Champasak, the next morning we left on the first truck we could find that would take us to the main road. From here we got another truck to take us to the southern tip of lao, Si Phan Don (Four thousand Islands). From here we hired a couple of boats to take us on the short journey through the Mekong deltas to the small island Don Khon, which is linked to the island Don Det by a short railway bridge built by the French and the only tracks ever laid in Lao. Besides the famous falls and the irrawaddy dolphins there is not much to do besides relax and gaze out at the Mekong as it drifts by. The weather was hot and sticky and even at night there was no relief and the absence of electricity and fans made it almost unbearable, but with the monsoon approaching it provided some spectacular lightning storms.

By this time most of our visa’s were running out and it was time to make a move, once again we crammed into the back of a truck and went North back to Pakse. Not dwindling too long in this unimpressive town we got a bus the same day to Savannakhet, a pleasant quiet French town on the banks of the Mekong and one of the border crossings into Thailand.