My only previous visit to the Laotian border town of Ban Houei Xai was more than 30 year ago. It was a hurriedly arranged helicopter ride provided by the American Embassy in Vientiane to witness a bonfire of opium to show the world how plucky little Laos was eliminating the opium crop of the Golden Triangle. The keen interest shown by my fellow journalists was more to do with how the quality compared with their nightly pipes at Madame Lulu’s rather than the efficacy of this doomed drug eradication programme. Now this scruffy little town is the jumping off point for one of the world’s most magical river journeys to South-east Asia’s least spoilt town 200 miles downstream – the former royal capital of Luang Prabang.
The dawn journey to the river crossing is one of the signature drives in Thailand – skirting the surprisingly undeveloped Mekong river valley while mist amputates the top of the highest mountains. Travellers have to depart from Thailand in what are called long-tail boats – precariously unstable tubular shaped open vessels with small car engines attached to the rear propellor. The journey across the river is also a bit of a time warp as while Thailand has undergone all sorts of economic miracles with its free-fire zone capitalism, Laos is rather cautiously emerging from 30 years of futile state socialism. The arrival in Ban Houei Xai on the Laotian side of the river is charmingly inept with an apologetic speech from our earnest guide that was all the world like a local rendition of the Four Quartets: “Sometime we have time but no time so we go now to make up time”. Then the ancient motorized tricycle van taking us to our boat on a different bend in the river wheezed up the muddy hill before conking out. “Oh sorry sir, mechanical!” But we ultimately jolted down the other side to the departure point, which was monopolized by a makeshift ferry and another boat disgorging its load of Lao beer for the neighbouring Thai market.
The Luang Say, our resting place for the next two days, was a marvel of technical and historical improvisation. In an earlier era, it had been a rice barge but was now transformed into a long low elegant wooden passenger vessel with two incongruous plants proudly on the helm in large terracotta pots. The entire boat was skirted with carved wooden railings with three or four seating zones each with sumptuous planters chairs, cushions, viewing platforms and centrally located tables to rest beverages, binoculars, Scrabble sets and recent published Notting Hill novels. It would be a perfect treat for a dozen or more friends to charter the entire boat. Fortunately our enterprising sons leapt on board and immediately grabbed the best seats at the front.
The Mekong is touted as one of the world’s top 10 rivers, but it is relatively unknown and under-utilized because of its huge fluctuations in volume and a series of rapids and waterfalls which render it impassable down towards the Cambodian border. Its actual source was only finally resolved in 1994, in an arid portion of the eastern Tibetan plateau.
It gains volume and speed as it passes through China and along Burma and Thailand before reaching our point of departure. Here it is relatively frisky, somewhere between 100 and 200 yards wide and the colour of a brooding muddy puddle. Within the completely untouched jungle gorges of northern Laos, it a tableau of frenzied yet discrete activities – whirlpools, eddies, rapids, islets with an occasional display of tree trunks, palms and assorted herbal detritus. This being the height of the rainy, or “Green Season” as travel PRs are desperate to recast it, the central channel is pumping down hundreds of thousands of tonnes of water every few seconds, mainly in a central channel which is up to 80 feet deep. It is also the last home to the Pa Beuk or giant catfish, which can grow to eight feet long and is thought to be the world's largest freshwater fish. One was caught in Houei Sai in the mid-Seventies and was quickly choppered by a friendly American USAID pilot down to Vientiane, where my friend Alan Davidson was the British Ambassador. Being a world expert on fish and fish dishes, he promptly served it at a banquet in the Embassy residence to the entire diplomatic corps. At the end of the meal, the lights were dimmed and a servant entered brandishing the head on a platter, which promptly caused the French ambassador’s wife to faint.
There are only a handful of settlements along the steep banks of the Mekong but they are rarely more than a half dozen bamboo huts with a number of elegant pirogues outside for fishing. The two stops to visit small local settlements on the banks of the river are not too tedious – our few dollars dispersed for fake silver piastre coins or small silk scarves probably boosts their local economy by more than any legal cash crop. But the real joy of this trip is there is no evidence of the Twentieth Century – just the occasional forest clearance by hillltribes from their previous destructive slash and burn agriculture. It is hard to convey the satisfaction of looking out on either side for hours and never seeing any sign of modern man, let alone jet trails, roads or traffic noise. For the first hundred miles of the journey, most of the time the Mekong is enclosed within steepish mist-shrouded mountains several hundred feet tall and usually not more than half a mile from one peak to the other. The putt-putt of the diesel engine and the swirl of the water engenders a bit of lazy reading and then intermittent dozing with no appreciable change in the views since French explorers were first here in the 1860s. (Henri Mahout, one of the greatest, died of malaria in 1861 and is buried just north of Luang Prabang in a beautifully preserved tomb. He rediscovered Angkor the previous year)
A ruder world is apparent when you are occasionally overtaken by ear-piercing short tail boats with oversized engines that actually makes the journey in a single day. The price you pay though is being cramped onto a wooden seat with half a dozen other backpackers wearing crash helmets and earplugs.
The overnight stay could not be more relaxing – it is in a series of wooden and bamboo guest houses strung along with river bank near the town of Pak Beng. It is the first occasion when there is physical evidence of the former war, which made a third of the population refugees while the US dropped more bombs on the territory than fell in all of World War Two. It is not however very though provoking – merely a five hundred pound bomb split in half like a lobster shell and full of flowers.
On the final day as the river widened and steeper limestone cliffs appeared, I looked dead ahead at a tiny sandbank with palm trees on the horizon and misty mountains behind. Suddenly, the whole river stretched to nearly a mile at the junction with the Nam Ou river. This natural amphitheatre, with layers of differing blue mountains at the other end, was the most paradisical setting I have ever seen. There is the added delight that this heavenly vista includes the Ban Pak Ou caves, with their thousands of Buddha images resting only a few feet above the Mekong. Two hours later, still marvelling at the beauty of this final stretch, we stop at the bottom of a wide stone staircase. We have arrived at Luang Prabang, where our mooring doubles as the stairway to Wat Xieng Thong, the grandest temple complex in town. What a place to end the journey – nothing much has changed since my last visit to the annual boat festival in 1974 – palms and temples are still the highest structures while for the moment, its UNESCO World heritage status keeps barbarian builders at bay. Time is running out though – the Chinese are busy building dams on their portion of the Mekong while super highways are planned to end just north of Ban Houei Sai. You have been warned.
A description of Luang Prabang will follow
ENDS
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