Hi Team,
It’s been a while, eh? Josh and I are sitting in a REALLY slow internet cafe right now trying to both chat with the cool Californians next to us and re-write a really good travelogue that we wrote you all two days ago. We had just about finished when the power flickered, just for a second, but long enough to lose it all. So, we’ll try to make it even better tonight and save early and often.
So, we were trying to write to you about Laos, which we left days ago.
The Lao People’s Democratic Republic is definitely on the up and up. There’s tons of development going on all over– most of which seems to be funded by other countries. For example, the French are paying to pave every single road in downtown Luang Prabang (all 7 of them) all at once. Singapore has graciously ponied up to convert the two hundred year old market into a shopping mall. Russia contributed a couple ambulances, while Japan seems to have donated every single bus in Vientiane. China paid for an impressive fountain that synchronizes the water to pop music. The Australians spiffed up a nice cave full of buddhas. And the Americans proudly proclaim that they are contributing the most towards cleaning up UXO (Unexploded Ordnance– i.e. Mines, bombs, etc.)
Interestingly, the embassy’s sign neglects to mention who dropped all those bombs on Laos in the first place. It was a SECRET war, after all. But not to the Lao people. We saw lots of horrific pictures of the effects of those bombs in the country’s Revolutionary Museum. Pretty gruesome stuff. (It reminded me a lot of the pictures of Iraq that we’ve been able to see on Worldwide CNN– totally different coverage than the US version. People are actually dying.) Anyway, about that museum. They did a nice job depicting Laos’ colonial history. Tons of stuff documenting the successive invasions by the Thais, French, and Americans, as well as the Lao people’s triumphant liberation from all of the above. We also got to see Commie Leader President Kaysone’s briefcase as well as the metal spring he used to exercise with while plotting the revolution against the American Imperialists and their Puppets.
We loved all of that stuff, actually. But it seemed like the anti-American sentiment has been toned down a little. While the anti-French rooms were filled with little blurbs describing every step of the war, the American rooms barely had any captions besides “The American Imperialist leaving.” The Euros who signed the museum’s guestbook were pretty happy with the American bashing, though.
Overall, we loved Laos. It was very mellow and peaceful. We still can’t quite figure out how socialism and capitalism seem to be working hand in hand. But we did enjoy a sign saying, “Good people who love their country have the decency to not litter.” We also enjoyed buying street food wrapped in discarded bureaucratic reports. Seriously, I got one sandwich wrapped in the rate of reforestation between 1990 and 2000. (How it got from the government to the sandwich maker is an imponderable mystery.) Josh also sampled some other curious but delicious Laotian cuisine, like fried stuffed lemongrass. Picture this: a lemongrass, twig about the size of your pinky, stuffed with a half-fistfull of yummy meat. Don’t forget that lemongrass, while flavorful, is too tough to actually chew. Now, imagine the whole thing breaded and deep-fried. Then, try to figure out how to eat it– along with a crunchy side of fried, Mekong river moss. That one looked and tasted a little like Nori, so it was much more familiar to us.
As elsewhere in our travels, the motorcyle seems to be the main means of transportation. We were quite impressed to watch proper Lao ladies steering their bikes with one hand and daintily shading themselves with a parasol in the other. Not being comfortable on motorcycles, we travelled, as usual, by bicycles, boats, planes, and tuk-tuks (imagine a motorcycle front with a four-person cart in the back.) We particularly enjoyed cruising down the Mekong in a slow boat, watching children swimming, women bathing and doing laundry, while the men watered buffalos. In Vientiane, we biked on a great wooden bridge overlooking tons of rice paddies to a little villagey neighborhood. I don’t think many foreigners make it over there because people thought it was great and really funny to see us. Lots and lots of smiles and “Sabaidis” (“Hellos.”)
We were not so loved by the end of our sojourn in Luang Prabang. After returning from a boat trip where we felt a little ripped off, we ran into a bunch of tourists disembarking from the slow boat from Thailand. These guys had been sitting on a boat for two days, travelling about 15 kilometers an hour, and had no idea that Luang Prabang is all of two streets wide and five streets long. The new arrivals were being swarmed by tuk-tuk drivers trying to sell them transportation– that they didn’t really need– to guesthouses two blocks away. We thought we were doing them a great favor by letting them know that they could walk. But afterwards we felt terrible when we realized that we had just fucked with the local economy by depriving a whole mess of people of a good portion of their day’s income. We slunk off to the market and avoided the river area for the rest of our stay in Luang Prabang.
We had a minor moment of panic when the screw in Josh’s prescription sunglasses fell out. Fortunately, he caught the tiny screw, but we were afraid we would lose it if we couldn’t find someone to fix it quickly. We tried the silversmiths because they seemed to have a lot of tools around. No screwdrivers. Then, we went to the computer repair shop. They couldn’t help us, but they thought there was a glasses shop around the corner. When we couldn’t find it and asked the pharmacists for help, they had no idea what we were talking about and laughed embarassedly behind their hands. We were starting to despair when Josh realized who to talk to: the watch-repair man. It didn’t seem like he had ever worked on a pair of glasses before, but he gamely screwed in his loupe and rose to the challenge. The whole experience made way more sense when we couldn’t spot anyone in Laos wearing glasses.
The server here keeps going down, and it’s taken us a zillion tries to get into yahoo, let alone to actually get to the compose page. So, we should probably get going. One last vingnette: as our plane was making its intial descent into Hanoi, we looked out the window and saw the top of a mountain floating through the clouds. We couldn’t see anything else but fluffy, white clouds. It was wild!!
Tomorrow, we’re back to Hanoi, hopefully to see Ho Chi Minh’s well-preserved remains. Then, it’s off to Hoi An and the DMZ before a few days in Saigon.
We hope all of you are well and that it is much less hot where you are. We’ll write soon with our first missive from Vietnam. Please keep us posted on your lives.
xoxoxo Phil and Josh