In which I muzzle myself, for once…

(Written (partly) at the Erawan restaurant, Vang Vieng, Laos, 9:00 PM, March 8th, 2007)…

Over the years, I’ve incubated a huge rant in which I unleashed all my frustrations with backpacker culture. I finally wrote it out, borrowing liberally from Alex Garland, and yet now the rant sits untouched in my notebook. It won’t make it onto my blog for now. Why not?

Because here in Vang Vieng, the quintessential backpacker town, nearly bereft of local culture and bloated with what wealthy European and American adolescents consider an “authentic” travel experience, I still had an absolute blast. I did so largely by avoiding the backpacker haunts (with one notably entertaining exception), but I still think I should shelve my tirade for now. The real post follows...

Vang Vieng is an unspeakably lovely little town enwombed in sheer karst cliffs and pristine tropical grass forests. The village lies about 170 north of Vientiene, a distance that takes about 4 hours by bus along Laos’ main highway, which is two lanes wide and windier than my worst imaginings. Our driver was more generous with the horn than the brake pedal, but I still had time to watch a chunk of Laos pass by at a somewhat leisurely pass. Small herds of water buffalo cooled themselves in dark streams and foraged in terraced paddies awaiting the planting in May. Freshly burned fields explained the smoke shadowing the entire region; farmers scorch their fields of excess vegetation, briefly nitrogenating the soil at the expense of much of its long-term fertility.

Houses of unpainted concrete or woven bamboo (with an implausible number of satellite dishes) lined almost the whole route, but I rarely got the impression that human habitation stretched more than a few hundred metres back from the road. At all times and in all directions imposing limestone hills, thickly forested and apparently untouched, cordoned off further sprawl.

Laos is thinly populated, six million people in a mountainous country more than four-fifths covered by virgin forest. The same economic and political repression that has mired the populace in poverty has oddly left much of the wilderness unscathed. I have very little idea why this happened in Laos while all her communist brethren suffered immense environmental destruction.

Now that I’m here, I find Vang Vieng to be cute and friendly despite the grotesque backpacker bloat. Virtually every building in the centre of town is a guest house, restaurant, or laundry shop – and usually all three. Dozens of “TV bars” litter the key streets – tiny restaurants, all with identical uninspiring menus, in which a handful of zonked-out westerners chow down on French fries and stare blankly at bootleg reruns of “Friends” or “Family Guy”. You can sit in one bar watching one episode of Friends and hear a half dozen other episodes of the same damn show echoing from the adjacent TV bars. Authentic travel it ain’t.

I’ve avoided the TV bars for now – I watch enough bootleg TV back at my place in Chiang Mai, and don’t need it on vacation. Instead I ate dinner twice at two different restaurants, both equally lackluster and poorly served – neither time did my meal arrive even remotely as ordered. But I’m full, so I’ll call it a marginal victory, and I have a gigantic bag of peanut M&M’s (a great rarity in SE Asia) that I bought at my guest house. Life could be much worse.



Between dinners I took a walk around town as the sun vanished abruptly. In the darkness, at least, there’s very little to see here beyond the aforementioned guesthouses. I did meet quite a few friendly locals, curious cows and apprehensive street dogs. I also encountered a bridge marked on each end by two unexploded American bombs half-buried in the soil. Given that unexploded ordnance (UXOs) continues to kill hundred of Laotians a year, this light-hearted reference was a wee bit discordant.



Sure, Vang Vieng proper might not have much to salve the soul – but I’ve found the remedy to that. Tomorrow I’ll be spending the day out on the Mae Nam Song river – first on a lighthearted caving diversion deep in the mountains to the north, and then kayaking 15 kilometres downriver back to Vang Vieng. If I were to do this whole lovely trip again, I’d reverse my course and head north to south, from Luang Prabang to Vientiane. That way I could kayaking all the way from Vang Vieng down to the capital, a three-day trip amidst glorious scenery. I’m sure it sounds like more fun than it actually is, but hey – still worth a shot. Meanwhile, tomorrow should be a fine time all the same.