Hip Hop Lao and the Wat on the Hill

We flew from Siem Reap to Pakse Laos as much to facilitate the visa process as to avoid the 10 hour bus ride. Pakse is at the cross roads of the main North/ South Laos road and the East /West road that connects Vietnam and Thailand. It is mostly business with lots of new buildings going up. We leave the next day for the 4000 island area to the south where the Mekong branches and reforms.  It is down here where the French set up a port and small gauge train to move resources and ship them down the river.
 Laos has one of the most comprehensive protected biodiversity areas system in the world  that now includes 14% of its area with 20 different parks and including a large elephant habitat.
   We take a 4 hour bus and a  30 minute motorized canoe to Don Kohn and spend an hour searching  for a room and find a duplex bungalow with woven bamboo walls and a family of four next door. It has a small deck that looks our over the Mekong as it slowly flows south and is a favorite playground for the kids, kayakers and water buffalo. We rent bikes and explore the two islands connected by a bridge and browse for a future improved room. Our bikes are big tire one speeds with monkey bars and baskets that seem set up for a suburb in Florida though we are riding over rutted dirt and large gravel roads. Still it is a good way to see what’s what here.
  I am reading Sorcerer’s Apprentice which is mostly a gossipy vent about Amy Wallace’s affair with Carlos Castaneda. I don’t like it a lot but can’t let go and it has put Carlos in his petty tyrant place.
   We have beerlaos on a restaurant deck cantilevered on the edge of the river as the sun sets over the hills. The next day we find somewhat better bikes where we can raise the seats a little higher and head out along the back roads and trails and find the remains of the French dock that looks out over the river to Cambodia and then to an surprising waterfall. Untill then it was an easy going flow that became a white water crashing gorge. We rode to a small beach where one of the motorized canoes would take us out to the border area with Cambodia where the Irawaddy dolphins are making somewhat of a comeback. Our driver managed the boat through rapids and a maize of outcroppings till we arrived in a large calmn area and floated as the sunset watching for the occasional glimpse of the dolphins.
  The next day we headed back to Pakse to catch an overnight sleeper bus to Vientien the Capital of Laos. The VIP bus had double decker double bunks on both sides. Even if they had been twice as wide and 10 inches longer it would have been a bumpy bad sleep. We arrive early and out tuk tuk is packed so I get a seat in front with the driver on the left side out with the side view mirror and beyond the windshield.
  Vienteienne is a modern city with lots of travelers in the old section of town and some great coffee with and evening balcony beer sites as well as a great vegetarian restaurant and a wat with over 10,000 Buddha statues. It is the least glitzy wat yet and was a lone survivor of an early 20th century war with Thailand.  On our last night we pass a conference center where we happen on the beginning of a hip hop inspired dance performance and chose it over dinner. It was a great show with a melding of classical Laos music with hip hop dance and some straight up hip hop happening as well.
    It is a 3 hour bus trip up to Vieng Veng which is mostly famous as a young back packer scene with  loud bars, drunken tubing and restaurants that continually play Friends on TV.  . The landscape of abrupt limestone peaks contains lots of caves. We rented some great mountain bikes and rode the 6 kilometers through a small village, past several small caves and came to our destination hot and grateful for the swimming hole formed from a stream that came from the cave.
 We splurged on a balcony room far from the late night techno pop where we could watch the cows wander back from their day of foraging directed by young kids and as kayakers and motorized canoes moved on the river in front of nearly vertical mountainsides.
   One comforting sign in many restaurants and guesthouse in contrast to no shoes no service is “Please remove shoes before entering” .
  We catch the morning bus to Lauang Prubang which is an 8 hours steep and winding ride north including an hour roadside stop for bus repairs. We are heading into the area of various ethnic tribes including the Hmong. Kennedy authorized the CIA to recruit 11,000 Hmong to fight the Vietnamese. The US later targeted parts of the northeast , where the Ho Chi Minh trail was,  for 4 years of constant bombing, including over 2 million tons of  bombs , 1/3 of which did not explode and remain a constant hazard today. 1/3rd of the people became internal refugees. The communist Pathet Lao eventually took control of the country with little opposition. You have to wonder how things would have played out if the US had avoided the whole Vietnam conflict altogether.
  Luang Prubang is an amazing small city. It is clearly focused on serving the tourist  crowd and does it really well while preserving the historic architecture from its French colonial past. Tourism is 50% of Laos economy and here they have figured out how to attract people from all over the planet and keep them supplied with what they want. It is walk able, clean, historic and within easy access of  natural wonders. We are spending 3 days here, easily our longest stay in one place. We hook up with some Cambodian/Swiss and Australian folks and hire a tuk tuk to take us out to a large waterfall. It is a series of small and tall falls and turquoise pools that make for some great swimming. Also a rescue bear sanctuary.
 At sunset we climb the long and winding stairs up to the Wat on the hill in the center of Luang Prabang to watch the sunset and listen to a Lao woman sing ballads. On the way down we pass a room of chanting monks .
  Claudia is reading Ghost Train to the Eastern Star by Paul Theroux who has written other travel books as well as fiction- “You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people’s privacy-being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders.”