Back to Laos

I left Huay Xai with a vague plan to tour parts of Laos I hadn’t seen on my last visit, as well as to become accustomed to the bike. I wanted to visit the northern regions, in particular the cities of Luang Nam Tha, which had access to a national park of the same name, and Phongsali, also known for trekking and hill tribes.

I arrived in Luang Nam Tha before noon, having left Huay Xai at 6:30am. The weather had been nice and cool in the morning, but the mercury was on the rise every minute. The road had been good the whole way and in town I ditched my jacket to parked and find some food.

Luang Nam Tha is a one lane town of empty trekking offices, lousy guesthouses, and deserted restaurants. I walked into a couple of them, but couldn’t find anyone home. I spoke with a British guy was working in the only café that had people in it, and told him of my trip to Laos in 2009. He marveled at what the town must have been like back then, and told him I wanted to come to Luang Nam Tha in 2009, but ran out of time.

“Ah, too bad.” He said. “The owners of this place said there was almost nothing here just two years ago. A dirt road, two trekking outfits, a few guesthouses, a few places to eat, and this café.”

I was floored. It was a well-developed town now, though it seemed to lack sufficient tourists or residents. I looked at the prices for trekking, and they all seemed absurdly high. I recalled that a four night trek would likely run somewhere between $100-$150, but the outfits in Laung Nam Tha were asking for three times that. In all honesty, good luck to them, I should have been there in ’09.

With no reason to hang around, I left the next day for Phongsali. The roads were said to be in great condition the whole way, thanks to Chinese labor and know how. I began to see the ethnically distinct Hmong people at the early morning at markets of the various villages I drove through. I stopped at one such market to eat some noodles and have a look around.

One of the best parts about motorcycle travel is that you often go where others don’t, and I make a point to do just that. I like to pop into people’s lives unexpectedly, to have a soup, to say hello, to fumble around a market place. The people are, understandable, very surprised to see me and act in a way which might produce feelings of awkwardness for some, but one gets used to it. I receive mostly smiles, especially from the children. Parents make an effort to alert young children to the presence of a foreigner. And I make an effort to be a child friendly diplomat, making funny faces and saying hello in their language. 

The whole way to Phongsali a few things bothered me: the smoke, and the visibly hard lives of those in the developing world – most people in the world. The slash and burn agriculture left a constant haze day and night. Only directly above my head were patches of blue sky visible. Tones were muted, vistas were distorted, and everything was cast in a grey pallor. The lack of light and vibrancy matched my mood. I wasn’t depressed, but I felt incredibly bland, and thought I should be more upbeat. I felt grey.

Then I thought about the lives of the people I passed. In the morning, groups of people young and old trudged along the roadside with tools and baskets. During the afternoons, I passed through village after village of people lazing about, dirty, bored, with limited options to do much else. As the day came to an end, I passed people returning from the fields. Some lit up at the sight of me, many didn’t. Laotian people are wonderful, hospitable, happy, and gracious. But they’re human too, and they’ve got rough lives. I felt guilty.

I knew that wasn’t the right response. What good could self-loathing do? It brought me into contemplation about the human experience. How can one person, fortunate enough to have an adventure riding across Asia, ever feel down? How could the local people, forced to make do with what they were born into, often enduring considerable discomfort just to manage, ever feel happy?

I felt compassion, and that felt right. I’m human, and as such I’m bound to feel less that perfectly happy every now and again. What I should never do is turn my back on humanity, woe my misery in private, ignoring the background against which I measure it. They are human too, and were bound to make happy lives for themselves as best they could. I’ve seen it. It’s inspiring. It was four years ago, in fact, that happy Laotians forced me to make a dramatic reassessment of my life. I saw people enduring the unendurable. They were kind to me, they were happy people, they were gods to me. I was glad to be back, I still have so much to learn from them.