Journeys in Laos

Muang Ngoi Neu 

Just as I stopped imagining what I hoped Laos would be like, we stumbled upon this village, only accessible by boat. The guest houses sat high on stilts above the Nam Ou, but there was an aura about the place that had a peace I had not felt so far in any other place in Laos. A very friendly lady showed us our room and her husband spoke French with lots of friendliness and pride. Our room is very basic, electricity runs from around just after dusk to 10:30 at night. There is no fan, but we do have a mosquito net and a cold shower within our room. It is very comfortable, though it takes some getting used to the darkness at night and having no control over it except by using a flashlight.

The lifestyle here is so calm. Children swim naked in the river. Sometimes the men and teenaged boys will chase them around or show off. Women bath in sarongs and a few still wash their cloths in it. Long wooden boats, coloured in blues, some with the occasional sun painted on their sterns, sit along the bank. Children play hide and seek, swimming between them and hiding under their peers. Men carry lumber up the riverbank and under the guesthouse where we eat, a man and his wife carved bamboo into long thin strands, perhaps to make a basket or thatch.

 Away from the bank and into the village, homes are very simple, much simpler that our guesthouses, with thatched roof and a running tap for women to collect water from. Chickens, waddling ducks, cats and dogs are all to be seen, but they are healthy and happy. The Wat … is reached by a quiet clean dirt path overgrown with floors and grass. Butterflies are everywhere and trees ofer the much needed shade and peace. The monks, not used to visitors, grin, the young boys we met outside the temple opened the main door for us to look inside, but not to enter, as they were "studying", though some modern tune seemed to echo from the windows when we were arriving. We looked at the painting of the lives of the Buddha, still trying to figure them out. Around the Wat were some big mounds, perhaps tombs, or wishes, with bits of material flapping from sticks and a stupa like structure in its centre. We saw them near the river bank as well, and wondered what they were.

 The path outside the village leads to other vials much more remote, though we hiked for about an hour and a half, we still could not reach Hau Shen village and decided to turn back, but the views where spectacular. Rice fields, with grazing buffalo, surrounded by lush forest that grew on mountain karst that rose in all directions. A beautiful sight, almost incompressible. 

Though there is a peace, and the people are much friendlier here, there is still the shadow of war that once affected this peaceful village. A big momb, dug up by a local is on display outside our resteraunt. And some bombes, sit next to the menus, they looked like balls of iron, almost tempting to pick up and exam. Even I knew what they were, these were obviously disarmed, but I could see the temptation in picking them up. 

There are still some older people in this village. I wonder what stories they would tell, what they had seen, how they feel. We saw one older woman gathering a bouquet of flowers, she looked like she was at least eighty years old, but she still smiled at us when we said hello. 

I do wonder if the people here would be happy to leave and move to a big city. Who could deny them that freedom? Yet a part of me wishes that they did not have to see other parts of the outside world. A part of me hopes that this village will never have a road running through it to disrupt its peace and innocence. 

So what of Laos now? We have less than a few more weeks left here and I don't know if we have learned more or less about Laos. Have we learned anything about ourselves even? Have we taken away something from these longs months of travel that seem that they have just started, that we have only taken a small step in a long journey. Thinking about the lifestyles of the people here in Dong Koung, it makes me see how different lifestyles are compared to people from Europe and the West. We meet doctors, fruit picking backpackers, students, educators and all with different levels of education and experience, all with jobs, some with careers, prestigious careers and yet when they travel they are just like us. No different estranged to the culture of the place, astonished and vulnerable to the ways of the people. In Dong Koung, presstige or career perhaps holds no meaning. Village life near the river is calm, though we see it as redundant and perhaps unbearable. We are so used to climbing the ladder, advancing towards something bigger than ourselves. What do people here strive for. We see locals napping, children playing under their houses so happy to wave a "Sabaidii" and jump up and down. Men and women, sometimes nowhere to be seen, sometimes on motorbikes or outside 'restaurants' drinking beer Lao, talking, sleeping. Sometimes locals fish or work on baskets, traps and other things. The woman are school teachers, the men own resorts or small businesses run outside their homes. The fields seem untended, though perhaps they are working all morning and we do not see them. Some houses are littered with garbage and I wonder why people don't clean up their lawns. Do they notice it? Dores it not bother them. IN the temples are many young boy novices talking, sleeping, joking around with their fellow novices. Some of the wats even have garbage in them. Some of their homes seem unattended. Their temple complexes are clean and the Buddhas attended to, but what about their own homes? 

The river here runs slowly, like the people. Steady, heavy and slow. Its great expanse offers me peace, especialy when I am reminded of the cities. It is almost separate from all that movement and all those events. It flows regardless of humanity, it flows  from a source far up in the Tibetan plateau, fed by the tributaries of many rivers, many veins that run through Laos and enrich the lives of many people who wash and eat from the river. But it is even greater than that. It is the origin of the earth, the way of nature before the beginning of 'time' as we now it. It exists in itself, it is a presence that has been carved without any human hands. For some reason this thought brings me great comfort, like the moon and stars. Last night Kevin and I looked up at the full moon and let our imaginations shape the clouds within its glow. We saw a cats eye, a dolphin, a great mage, a witch, a castle. We imagined a staircase of clouds leading to a door in the moon. I longed for those fairy tales and those mysteries that we seem to loss an awe for us as we get older.

I don't know if we have found the mysteries of Asia. Sometimes I feel there is no mystery at all, only misery and poverty. Sometimes I am angry when I see people beg or throw garbage in their lawn, or try to get as much money out of us as possible. I feel as if, being 'foreigners', we are prevented from being allowed in. Though at other times, like today, the locals want to talk to us. Kevin and I were riding our bicycles and from exhaustion we went to a place, which probably saw no foreigners at all, and the two men there were so eager to talk to us. Mr. Sai spoke English but the other man, I forgot his name, only spoke Lao. I wondered what they did most of the day, I think the main highlight was to enjoy each others company, to keep each other company. 

Muang Kong, the village we are staying at, has one road full of guest houses, but it still has that feel that it has kept something about itself, it has kept some sort of identity that differentiates the people here from other people in Laos. There is a calm, that I think we may have trouble understanding, but it is calm not bored. Why do we always feel the need to rush? I wish I could learn something of this village lifestyle. This calmness and uneventful life. Not the kind of life where you sit watching TV all day, but of watching the days come and go, chatting with friends, napping on the porch, watching the river and the moon. We have lost the ability to enjoy this calm, perhaps herein lies the unhappiness, we don't know how to enjoy the simplest pleasures of life.

Champasak

 The town near the sacred Wat Phou is peaceful and friendly. Kevin and I felt like celebrities as we constantly waved to the children and adults yelling "Sabaidii". Sometimes, just an easy smile from us would light up their faces and their grins would reach high and bright. Around the town, their are town roads running parallel to each other, one is through town, the other is the main traveling road that is adjacent to the Mekong. Along that side of the Mekong rice fields spread out through trees and beneath the many grazing livestocks. The mountains stand like great shades over the land, and the scared mountain, shaped like a square, reveals itself beautifully. The sky is busy with puffy clouds moving about its deep blue space. Wats are seen regularly and the monks are out and about, mingled with the people, fixing roofs and building on their temple grounds. At dusk we can hear them chanting into the darkening night. Their bronze buddhas, lit by a warm light, glitter out onto the terrace and the surrounding paths. We can see the monks sitting like their buddhas, facing each other, the buddhas garbed with a deep orange sash, like the monks. They sit and meditate, chanting a  deep mantra with deep voices, enriching everything that surrounds their Wat. We watched a sunset on our last night there and listened as the sky changed colours and beamed its final rays over the vast sky. The silhouette of palms and trees. 

Wat Phao

An ancient Kmer temple, even pre Ankor, dating back to a time when people practiced animism. We saw a crocodile and elephants craved in great stones near the cliff . The great stones lay over the surface amist other giant boulders, some with stairs carved into their side. Perhaps they once led up the side of the cliff into a no longer existing cave. We stood amongst the ruins, with no one else about, and tried to imagine what this place would have looked like 1500 years ago. What the people would be like. What magic they believed in. What science, that was then not named, that they knew. Were there many children? Were woman powerful figures and models? Were there monks in their saffron robes? They say that the people practiced an old form of Hinduism that somehow got mixed with Buddhism. That the shrine on the hill below the sacred mountain was a shrine to Shiva, the god of destruction and renewal. One carving is of a spiral, I wonder what it meant to them, was is the continuation of life in the constant cylce of the circle that could spiral out into infinity?

I wonder what the scene would look like to them as they looked over the landscape from above. What did they see? We saw a ruined temple that is still splendid even in its decline. We saw giant man made lakes that symbolized, as the pamphlet suggests, the ocean surrounding the land. In the distance we saw many rice fields and tertiary forest. Were there giant rice fields then too, or was this Wat surrounded by jungle, hidden and kept sacred from the outside world. 

 Time is such a strange thing, though I wonder what time could not touch, what traditions have been passed down through time. Somewhere, somehow, the descendants, whoever they may be, perhaps still know something about this place. Throughout the temple we saw stupas made of leaves and flowers, burned incense sticks and yellow candles left on the alters and in front of sacred carvings. Is this what the people from the long past also did?

The next day Kevin and I visited Tomo Temple. it started with Kevin and I riding our bikes to the ferry. We boarded a boat, which was two boats attached together with plank boards where we could put ourselves and our bikes as well as another motorbike. We crossed the Mekong this way, feeling like settlers exploring new land. We then biked about 15km hoping to find Tomo Temple, a ruined shrine also built around the same time as Wat Phou. After intense heat, and using all our leg power to go up the many little hills, we managed to find the temple. It was deeper into a buggy 'forest', and was evidently less looked after than Wat Phou. Some doorways and windows still intact that looked out onto the Tomo stream. The stones that belong to the temple, or shrine, were covered in green moss and looked aged and porous. It was very quiet and almost haunting.  We read a little article hand painted on a big board that told the history of the temple. Apparently a tablet had been found near by a french explorer that was written in Sanskrit. From the tablet they believed that the temple was constructed for Shivas reincarnated wife. The story says that when Shiva left his wife to become a Bhraman, he told her he would return after a few years, but he never did. A man, i can't remember who and why, told her that her husband had died and so she gave herself up to the fires. When Shiva returned soon after to find out that his wife died, he became sad and depressed. A few years later he met a young woman and recognized her as the reincarnation of his wife. The temple was built in Tomo in honour of her perhaps. 

Now the temple does indeed seem to be forgotten, but by knowing this story perhaps a piece of it still remains. 

That day Kevin and i returned to our hostel  and greatly enjoyed our  dinner and rested our sore bums and cooled our hot bodies. Before we left  Champasak we said goodbye to the Mekong and let the cool air and soft laps of water sooth our minds and bodies. Then we departed on a Sangthaew towards noisy, reckless Pakse to be pestered by desperate Tuk-Tuk drivers wanting to make a few bucks. One thing we have come to learn about Laos is that the people in the country are so friendly and open hearted, but the people in the city are fast and desperate and perhaps overwhelmed with the need and urge to make money.

Kiet Ngong


Our next destination was Kiet Ngong, the famed elephant village. According to the lonely Planet and the information boards at the visitors information centre in Kiet Kgong, the people have had a relation with elephants for years. However what the elephants do is very different, they used to be working elephants, but now that farmers have machines, there main job is to take tourist on little trips atop baskets set upon their giant backs. 

Unfortunately, we had to go back to Pakse to get out some money. When we went back towards Champasak we took a sawngthaew, and got off at Thang Beng towards Kiet Ngong. We stopped in a village just past the same route we had taken with our bicycle just the other day, but here there was no guest house, only the knowledge that our destination was 10 km, so we figured we would walk and catch a tuk-tuk if it passed on the way. To our surprise, someone offered us a ride ad when we asked for money they refused. They were two young men and all seemed very sweet and happy to give us a ride. When we payed the conservation fee and ffered them money they adamently refused. We stopped in front of a restaurant that was also a guesthouse. We seemed to be the only guests, as the owners used two of the three rooms, one for sleeping and the other for storage. Our room was very basic with a decent mosquito net and a bed that was just berable, but they clearly but a lot of heart into making the room nice and we enjoyed our stay.

Our elephant was a girl, she was thirty years old according to our mahout. She was very sweet but also stubborn even with our Mahout who seemed to be quiet gentle with her. We were both happy to see this because in Tat Lo we saw how the Mahouts mistreated their elephants. But in Kiet Ngong the elephants seemed well fed and happy though they did work hard as there were lots of tourists. However this is also a great sign, because it shows that the elephants have work and hence the mahouts can afford to keep them.

Kevin and I got into the basket by climbing up a house on stilts and walking onto the elephant and into the basket. Of course we had to balance as we tried to sit and step onto her. We felt so heavy and a bit guilty as she did all the work, lugging all three of us up the hill to Phu Asa, the sacred mountain. Our mahout, talked to our elephant using a silent sort of yell, some longer and some short. He nugged her behind the ears with his knees to keep her going forward. At one point a little brown dog was following us and stopping when we stopped just a short distance behind the elephant. She did not like the dog, and kept trying to turn around to see it. The dog was very persistent in following us. It set me to thinking how once I read that elephants were scared of bees. How big they are, we were at least ten feet up in the air, and those giants were afraid, like people of little things. How sweat these animals are, so big, but humble. Still, there is an inteliggenc in their eyes that it saddens me sometimes to think that they have to listen to our orders. Our big girl walked up the steady hill, we felt her powerful muscles beneath us, even on the wicker basket, that was most definitely hand made perhaps by the mahout or his wife or someone in the village. At the shades she would stop, despite the mahouts orders, and it took much little shouts and nudges, and sometimes a hit with the little piece of round peace of metal attached to a string that was held by bamboo. The metal was round, it must of stung her but it would not have hurt her. 

Up and up we went thinking of ways people could make a hat for the elephant to keep the  hot sun of her giant head. The trees surrounded the road and grew strong and healthy.  A relief to see, but their beauty made us a bit sad because we felt afraid for this natural beauty that seems to be fading in Laos through deforestation and rapid development and has no mercy on the natural landscape.

 Phu Asa was on a giant rock with moss growing in patches here and there. Surrounding us stood round cylinders of stone, staring about 9 feet high, perhaps 1000 years old as the lonely planet suggests. But this place, in most recent history, was used as a training site for the locals who lived in this area to fight against the fudel lords that were treating them wrongly. A monk, who used a magnificent glass to make fire, was glorified in the eyes of the people in this village. He meditated at the top of this mountain, and when he heard that they were being treated badly, he trained them to fight, teaching them martial arts and other methods of combat. We tried to imagine all these men training, but a part of this memory seems a bit unsettled. Any sort of violence to me brings that feeling of unrest, but they were fighting for their rights. They did win the battle, but when the king found out, he sent a bigger army to 'settle' them. However, people still remember them, for fighting for their own well being and defending themselves.

Before this time in history, I am not sure what the sight was, but there is a footprint of a Buddha, that we then only saw as a lake. I saw pictures of monks near a carved spiral in the stone like we saw in Champasak. The view from the top of the mountain was spectacular, we saw the conserved wetlands in the distance, rice fields and forest. All a light bright green as neon in its fresh new growth, the trees were a deeper green as was their age. We hoped to climb back in order to see the sunrise, but we unfortunately did not wake up in time and it would have been hard to hike up that hill in the dark. 

But my imagination can be in that place. I imagine the sun rising behind that vast space behind the mountain, slowly casting its light on the the row of cylinders, lighting them in rosy colours and the manifesting picture of the landscape changing in colours from dark grey, to pink, to rosy green. All the world below still asleep, except for the monks who sit and greet the sun with their mantras and their deep voices. All there is atop that mountain, is the spirits and energy of the dead, nature, and the sun. Pure life giving sun, its warmth, oblivious, neutral, unaware of the life it allows and allowed. Unaware of the beauties and imaginings and names that people gave it. I would like to imagine it too as a great spirit, a god, awakening the world in its splendour. I would like to fear it and awe in it, not to see it, think about it, even wonder, but just feel and marvel in complete innocence and awe. This place was not a place of science, it was a story, something separate from the modern world and its knowledge. This was a place for the imagination, and for the people of Kiet Ngong. I hoped that it would remain just as it is, and that the people would continue to revere in it. They deserve a place of their own, a place they can identify in and say that it is different and separate from places like the West, or Thailand, China and Vietnam. 

Sometimes I hate those countries and 'my' country, at least their politics and their bully ways. Those 'superpowers' and their roads, the way they cut through Laos and bring with them deforestation and greed. Every place that we have visited near these connecting highways seem to have plundered the towns and turned them into street shops selling car parts and repairing motorcycles All the same, and those big homes, though made to be modern, look ugly on the treeless streets filled with garbage, manholes, dust, cement and traffic. 

We reluctantly went back, and there was our elephant, swimming and resting under the tree and our mahout sleeping atop the basket. We descended down and made our way back. On our way we saw a parade of elephants and tourists going up the way we had come. A mahout, walking and leading his elephant by a string. Our mahout also descended and walked us back. Our elephant seemed pleased and walked much faster. When we got there a few girls brought some sugar cane and bananas. We bought some and fed her.
She took it happily with her trunk. Another, lighter gray elephant came, she seemed much older, and we gave her some too. But she did not take the bananas with her trunk, she opened her mouth instead. So we gave her the bananas by putting them in her mouth, on her giant tongue. It was so much fun. She was so beautiful and sweet. Her eyes showed such intelligence, at that moment I wanted to be a mahout. We kept buying fruits, because we wanted to help feed them because of the huge diet they required and to help the mahout feed her as well. We also had to resist not giving them all the fruit because a group of people had arrived and wanted to feed them too. We met a french man who spoke Vietnamese. He was married to a Vietnamese lady, who was a chef in France.
They had two children, beautiful children, though very spoiled by the looks of it.  The lady spoke very good french, but neither of them could speak English. They had family from laos as well and they bought us beer despite the fact that we ordered it and said we would buy it for them. The Lao family there was also very sweet, and the food delicious.

 We slept early that night, after sunset, but before we walked around the town we saw the mahouts and their elephants leaving to their home to wash them and rest themselves. We looked through the trees and took in the mountains and the quiet that is filled with the music of wind, green rice fields and those jungled mountains we have come to love so much. We even saw a protected wetland, green and home to over 70 species of birds. We saw no hornbills or kingfishers, but knowing that they were there was enough. I longed to hold this place in my heart, and prayed that it never changed, except in the slow natural way of things.

The Eco lodge that showed us this magnificent view from the viewpoint was closed. It seemed that many of the locals that were there were happy and they always smiled.

That night, before bed, after the man at the guesthouse tried to tell us, "I am going to Pase tomorrow" in Laos, we went to our room and watched the fireflies fly up into the twilight sky. It was an illuminated darkness, filled with bioluminescence and speckled stars.

The next day we got a ride with a Lao couple who were heading in our direction. We tried to teach each other Laos and English and felt like grandchildren as we rode in the front of their truck. Many of the locals came to take a look at us when the man stopped to sell some of his goods, or to buy others.