In which I narrowly evade death by cow…

(Mostly written on March 8th, 2007)

On some level, I’m annoyed at myself for enjoying my time in Vang Vieng. I wanted to come away from that backpacker haven scorning the artificiality of the place. Sadly, I went and spent $15 on an all-day river tour, had a hell of a time, and temporarily crippled my freedom to rage against backpacker culture. Fifteen bucks buy you a lot in rural Laos. I rose at 9AM this morning, foolishly skipped breakfast in favor of a titanic bag of peanut M&Ms, and got sidetracked on the way down the stairs. Vang Vieng looks lovely in early morning, when the haze is muted and the backpackers haven’t yet recovered from the previous night's revelry. My guesthouse balcony furnished some pleasant photos.



Canadians are a plentiful bunch overseas, though less so in Southeast Asia than many other places. My kayaking group included three Canucks, two Americans, one Londoner and a Hungarian, of all things. We sat in the back of a truck - surely the world’s most revered form of transport and drove 15 km north of Vang Vieng, to an appealing gravel bank of the Mae Nam Song, across a bamboo bridge that unnerved us yet stoically withstood several motorbikes, and into an “authentic” Lao tribal village.



Authenticity is difficult to quantify in tourist country, where rural life often molds itself around the lucrative backpacker traffic. Half the time the “village” is a row of stalls selling mass-produced Chinese pottery billed as genuine local handicrafts. I’m not sure how long this particular village has stood, but the modest temple in a hollow in the cliff overlooking the town lent credence. So did the clearly well-worn rice terraces. The obviously newer restaurant, and the rustic but functional pay toilets, suggest more recent renovations to accommodate wandering westerners.



As a side note, I’m sure it amuses locals to no end when foreigners toddle through their villages and compulsively photograph the livestock. On this front, I’m a worse offender than anyone – my Flickr page reveals the extent of my fascination with cows. The ducks, the dogs, the chickens and the monkeys – none escape my lens. But if I stop to think how it would look if I wandered through South Burnaby, taking four hundred photos of sleeping domestic cats, I start to feel a wee bit silly. I’m sure the friendly and accommodating Lao villagers are used to such odd behaviour. Besides, if I have to tolerate their cruelty to monkeys, they can bloody well live with my obsessive documentation of their food animals.





The village was of course just a way point – en route to an impressively deep and dark river cave. I swore that I’d never go into a cave again after seeing “The Descent”, but once again I proved weak of spirit. We seven explored this in the safest and most sophisticated way possible – in swimsuits, lying on our backs in inner tubes, paddling frantically in an attempt to avoid submerging the bare wires of our battery-powered headlamps. The cave itself was prohibitively difficult to photograph, given the dampness, disturbing lack of light, and the certainty that there wasn’t much there to look at anyways.

But it was fascinating in the way that caves always are: in that compelling hint of a little-explored parallel world just out of sight. We drifted and splashed a few hundred metres along a pitch-black underwater stream, perhaps five metres wide and bounded by a inverted half-pipe of bare wet rock. I laboured, almost successfully, to avoid smashing my head into the stone ceiling. Once all light had vanished and we had lost all sense of direction, we simply lingered in the dark for a few minutes, fascinated by the otherness of the place.



Of course, by the time we moved out, my headlamp had failed and I was nearly stranded in the darkness. Everyone’s ass was freezing from being suspended in cave water through the inner tubes. Having enjoyed our time and glad that it was done, we had lunch. The occasion was pleasant but unremarkable, save for an adorable puppy of perhaps 5 months, rolling around at our feet and playfully demanding table scraps. As we headed out a local man picked up the dog in both hands, held him out gently at arms’ length and seemed to weigh him. Dissatisfied, he released the dog, who scampered playfully away. I hope that didn’t mean what I’m almost sure it meant. Speaking of animals, one of the most troubling sights you’ll see in rural Southeast Asia is the casual imprisonment of monkeys for no discernable reason. Usually anchored to a tree by a six foot line, these poor critters live out lives of grotesque boredom. Wild monkeys aren’t playful – they’re greedy, grabby, often vicious creatures who need little provocation to scratch at or steal from human passersby. But they never deserve to live like this, and I’m sure the confinement does little to improve their legendarily sour moods.



Kayaking itself was lovely. I got the lone single-seater kayak (everyone else was doubled up) much to my joy. Our kayaks were of the open-top river variety, ensuring that tiny waves and splashes would ride over the rim of the vessel and deposit several liters of water into the butt-retaining depression, ensuring a permanently soggy rear end for all participants for the duration of our adventure. And yet we had great fun. Central Laos has all the glorious scenery you’d expect of a textbook tropical paradise. Thick lime-green jungle, sheer black cliffs in all directions, and an azure sky so bright that even the omnipresent haze couldn’t fully mute it. The river was broad and slow and calm – far too calm for my tastes, frankly, but the near-torpor freed me to use my camera to my heart’s content without fear of abruptly feeding it to the Mae Nam Song.



The water, at the peak of the dry season, was rarely more than a couple of feet deep, and often much shallower, and we grew accustomed to the grinding shrieks that announced a sudden mid-river kayak beaching. But we made good progress – the river flowed at less than walking speed, so we quickly learned that only our own sweat would propel us the 15 kilometer to Vang Vieng before nightfall. The sights were uniformly utopian but don’t gain much on the repeated retelling: deep green water, broad-leaf palms, grass huts at riverside, occasional fishermen wading at water’s edge. Pictures tell the tale better.





Oh yes, and there were cows! Many herds of feral water buffalo, wading eagerly and devouring mouthfuls of delicious river weed. They regarded us with either suspicion or boredom – not the good-humoured affection that years of cartoons have told me to expect from wild animals. How disappointing. But they sure looked nifty!



For an hour or three we drifted down the river, periodically splashing each other with oars until that grew tiresome. Just as boredom threatened, our course abruptly changed (metaphorically speaking). The Laotian tranquility dissolved into a cacophony of Christina Aguilera tunes, and the riverbanks were abruptly lined by dozen of bamboo platforms bending under hordes of drink-sodden backpackers. Vang Vieng’s principal claim to fame, you see, is the tubing experience: travelers rent an inner-tube for $2 a day, souse themselves up, and float downriver for a few kilometers until bored or dead from drink. Along the way they buy BeerLao from enterprising locals who have set up booze booths mid-river, allowing the floaters to re-beer themselves without ever leaving the slothful comfort of their tubes. BeerLao is an eminently drinkable local lager sold almost exclusively in 660mL bottles – a good indicator of the level of drunkenness that it engenders.



The tubers’ experience is much like ours, except boozier (duh) and a whole lot slower (with only the vaguely feeble Mae Nam Song). We parked our kayaks and clambered up a mud slope to the largest and noisiest of the party platforms, a multi-storey bamboo monstrosity bloated with half-clad westerners and a handful of Laotians. We settled in with beers and Frito-Lays (very incongruous amidst the rural scenery, but whaddya gonna do?) and joined in the foolishness.



The prime attraction at this celebration of Western decadence was a rope swing that launched from a high ladder, at least 15 or 20 metres above the a deep point in the river. Many of the platforms we’d passed had such swings, but ours was the highest and apparently the most popular. Our little group, having carved out a bamboo platform of our own, watched with contempt as wave after wave of alleged daredevil launched from the swing’s platform, and then hung placidly from the rope until they could drop peacefully into the water with barely a ripple. Egged on by my comrades and my own fool sense of competitiveness, I set out to upstage the lot.

I climbed the unnervingly high ladder, grabbed the rope, silenced that nagging voice of wisdom that lurks in the back of my skull, and flung myself from the platform. In accordance with my earlier resolution, I held on only until the rope reached the apex of its swing at the other side, yanked myself up another couple of feet, and let go. The movement of the rope imparted an unforeseen spin and wobble to my plummet, which was dramatically farther and faster than I anticipated, and I hit the quiet water with nothing resembling grace or style. I think I won points for sheer force, though. The water caressed me all the rage and subtlety of a furious mule, and turned my entire upper torso into an angry bruise before continuing up my body and slugging me in the mouth with enough power to make all my teeth bleed. My technique seems unwise in retrospect, but it earned me the grudging respect (or guilty empathy) of my fellow kayakers, whose groans of sympathetic agony I think I heard even while submerged.

By the way, my second attempt, which used the same technique and is better documented below, was considerably more painful.



Having had my fill of self-flagellation, I joined my troupe and we headed downriver once again. The clouds of tubers became increasingly thick, and more than a few of them begged for a tow downriver. I’d be bored too, lying on my ass for five hours in the merciless equatorial sun. But they had beers, which I suggested would make an ample payment for my pulling them down the stream. None obliged. We passed many more lean-tos occupied my soused Westerners in the remaining hour or two of our trip. More importantly, we passed more cows, giving me some fine chances to document more livestock. I’m pretty sure that these cows wanted to eat me (seriously, look at them!), but their general laziness inhibited their murderous aspirations.



The predictably anti-climactic end of our trip came about eight hours after we set out for the day. We pulled up at the riverside in Vang Vieng, about 15km down the river from where we launched. I hauled my kayak ashore, dug out my soggy shoes, and wobbled back to my guesthouse. I had big plans to visit a party I’d heard about from folks at the rope swing, once I’d tended to my naggingly empty stomach and surveyed the day’s injuries.

Instead, and probably to no one’s surprise, I collapsed abruptly in the guest house after wolfing down some sub-par Indian food. Beat to a pulp by the force of my own foolishness, nursing an impressive but unexplained gash on my ribs that I probably acquired on some underwater rocks, and exceedingly satisfied with the day’s exertions, I made a rare concession to common and simply passed out. I’ve decided that any vacation should include new scars, and this one qualifies heartily.

Now I’m off to Luang Prabang, the French jewel of Northern Laos, mainly to gorge myself for a few days. Laos is shaping up to be among my most entertaining trips yet – let’s see what transpires on the infamous road north from Vang Vieng.