Little Corner of the World

After my time in Attapeu I felt I had had my fill of the various small towns in southern Laos. Debi and Matt opted to head up to Salavan and then on to a small village called Tahoy, where rumor had it the tigers were so plentiful it wasn’t safe to go out at night. It sounded fun and if they had seen tigers, I would have regretted my decision, but I’ve come to be pretty wary of anything written in a guidebook so I opted to take the bus straight back to Pakse where I was pretty sure some website revisions would be waiting for me in my inbox.

My hunch was correct and I spent a day and a half in Pakse working on the website I started way back in Vang Vieng. After a trip to the morning market the next day, I caught a truck down to Champasak where I was to wait for Matt and Debi. The chief draw in Champasak is an aging wat that dates from the Angkor period and was apparently the northern most outpost of the Angkor Empire. Aside from the wat, the town of Champasak is yet another very sleepily and very small town along the Mekong, but not an unpleasant place to pass a few days. I briefly toured around the wat, which was nice, and perhaps a bit of warm up for Angkor Wat, but regrettably most of the great artifacts from Wat Phu were at some point carted off and then later returned and now housed in a museum at the base of the wat.

Wat Phu is another UNESCO site and was at the time I was there an active archeological dig. Perhaps at some point the original statues, figures and carvings will be returned to the grounds of the wat, but for the time being there are house in air conditioned comfort and thus the wat itself is rather lacking. Just to once again slag the Lonely Planet Guide to Laos, if, as the book says, this is “one of the highlights” to your visit to Laos, well, I pity you, you have not seen much of Laos. [I have a sneaking suspicion that the authors of the Laos Lonely Planet deliberately build up the more touristy areas and neglect the lesser known parts out of self-interest—they want to keep the good stuff to themselves—which is fine with me since it isn’t that hard to figure everything out once you get here, provided you invest a modicum of effort].

Mainly I spent my time in Champasak sitting of the veranda of my guesthouse reading and writing. The second afternoon, somewhat to my surprise, Debi and Matt wandered up the stairs. I wanted to meet up with them again, but given that we had no real means of communication I wasn’t sure it would happen, but luckily it did. The next day I met an American woman, Christie, and we all caught the bus down to the four thousand Islands to relax for a few days before heading into Cambodia.

It’s difficult to explain but the further south you go in Laos the more relaxed life becomes. Since life in the north is not exactly high stress, by the time we arrived in the four thousand Islands we had to check our pulse periodically to ensure that time was in fact still moving forward. That sounds like a complaint, but it’s not meant to be. Southern Laos is simply, well, the villagers tend to the fields in the morning and evening, or fish or weave and generally the heat of the day is spent lying around trying not to move. There is good reason for that, it’s hot and the air is deathly still most of the time. When the air does move it’s somewhat like the puff of heat that might come from a convention oven when you open the door.

I have long held to a theory that the environment shapes culture and the people who create it. For instance heavy industrial development does not seem to happen in equatorial areas and there’s a good reason for that. Those that think the west is more “advanced” because of their work ethic or that sort of thing, ought to come out here to Laos and see how motivated for work they are at one in the afternoon.

I came to the four thousand islands to avoid everything involving heavy machinery and peacefully wind down my time in Laos. There isn’t much to see nor much to do, which provides some excellent time for lying in hammock and reflecting on the two months I’ve spent here. Just down the Mekong lies a whole new experience—Cambodia—but before I move on I wanted to spend a few days thinking about where I’ve been.

As I’ve written before I had no intention of spending more than a few weeks in Laos, just enough time to see the big sights and then drop back into Thailand with a new visa. As fate or life or what have you often works my plans disappeared in a puff of smoke somewhere on the Mekong that first day in Laos. This compounded with some personal events that I will not mention here compelled me to dig deeper into Laos. For these reasons and many more, too many to list, Laos will always occupy a profoundly vivid spot in my memory. The people of Laos did what I did not think would be possible, they topped the enthusiasm, warmth and friendliness of India (which is in no way meant to diminish the Indians). The landscape is some of the most beautiful I’ve seen in Southeast Asia and I will return here someday, I wouldn’t consider any trip to Southeast Asia complete without a few months in Laos.

Farewell Laos and people of Laos, I look forward to returning one day.