We're back in China (Dali in northwestern Yunnan to be precise), and it does feel like we've come home in some ways. We'd been somewhere hot and relaxing for two weeks, then flew back up north to reality and cold weather. That's where the parallels with holidays and work end though: travelling in China is anything but a dreary routine (not that all jobs are that either!), and Laos for me was not so much a relaxing break as a reminder that it's no fun being far from home when you're ill.
One conclusion I've come to since we left England 14 months ago (the meaning of life sadly remains aloof to me) is that travelling is a very subjective business. Of course, different people have different tastes, even when they get on very well and agree on most other things. For example, one Belgian lad we spoke to hated New Zealand so much that he cut short his trip there from three weeks to ten days so that he could spend more time in Australia, whereas if I could only ever return to one of those countries, I'd pick New Zealand. The Dutch couple we were travelling with on and off were very disappointed with Luang Prabang in Laos, which took Faye and me by surprise as we were contemplating spending far longer there than planned. But it's more than that - your own opinion of a country, region or town depends on so many variable and random factors that if, in an identical parallel universe, you visited the place a week earlier or later, you might come away with a completely different view. The weather might be wetter or hotter, you might bump into more or less friendly locals or tourists who recommend more fun or more overpriced activities, you might meet a different tout at the bus station who takes you to a cleaner or dirtier hostel in a nicer or rougher part of town, and so on. And more relevantly to this story, the local food you eat might be more or less contaminated with dastardly, Westerner-hating bacteria. You see, I didn't think that much of Laos. But I'm pretty sure that in the parallel universe where I didn't eat something which turned my guts into a twisting water slide, I came away thinking it was a lovely little country which I would recommend to anyone. In fact Faye, whose stomach must have heroically fought off the infidel invaders as she'd eaten exactly the same as me, has already recommended Laos as a holiday destination to her friends.
Whilst holed up in the bathroom in Luang Prabang, it became clear to me that the main reason I'd been more keen on China than Faye was that I'd stayed pretty healthy throughout our time there, while Faye had not only endured a few days of intimacy with the toilet but also a couple of colds. I felt guilty for having questioned why she wasn't digging the place as much as I thought she should. I now understood. When you get ill far from home, your perspective on everything around you completely changes. What had seemed exotic, exciting and worth investigating suddenly just feels unfamiliar, threatening, and to be completely avoided - especially, in this case, local food and the unusual smells it emits. You long for a sofa, the BBC and something equally pure in its Englishness like Marmite on toast. Even now, back in good old China, my stomach turns at the thought of
lap, a Lao speciality of minced pork with finely chopped spices and spring onions with some salad leaves. And yet the daft thing is that not only could it have been plenty of other things rather than the lap that got me, but I actually thought it was a pretty tasty dish until the morning after. As a result of my illness, I was unwilling to go near any Lao food for the rest of our time there, even though I was eating and processing perfectly normally for the last week.
So if you ever go to China on my strong recommendation so far, don't blame me if you think it's a stinking, noisy, overcrowded dump. You just chose the wrong dimension to go in.
Laos then was a game of two halves for me. I was thoroughly enjoying the heat, the many temples and monks, and the tranquillity of Luang Prabang. Then came the elephant camp experience, which was great fun and also quite a luxurious treat for us backpackers - although I can't say it made me quite as emotional as it did Faye (see her
elephant blog entry). And then my encounter with Laos's finest defence force, and a few days of trips to the loo punctuated by Faye's descriptions of the temples she'd been to.
We then got the bus down to Vang Viang, Laos's very own Benidorm, with beer-fuelled tubing trips down the river and cafes serving up English, American and even Israeli breakfasts and back-to-back episodes of Friends all day. I think we'd have loved it if we'd been fully fit and with a gang of mates, but as it was we felt old. Watching four consecutive episodes of Friends over bacon and eggs has something to be said for it though after two months in Asia, I must confess.
The day we were going to do the tubing the heavens opened. Also we'd heard that the river was so low in places that you had to push yourself along rather than being whisked by the current, as we were there at the end of the dry season. That's our excuse for not doing it anyway Rich and Rach and we're sticking to it. So instead we decided to push on to Vientiane, surely the most low-rise, villagey capital city in the world. There we supped BeerLao by the Mekong (I managed to get back my taste for that particular Lao speciality fairly quickly), mooched around a temple and generally skulked around in the shadows, as it was ridiculously hot. Ah yes, we managed to get a pretty damn accurate steack au poivre for about 5 dollars on the last night. Once again, thank you France! Finally we risked flying Lao Airlines back to Kunming, despite a warning on the Foreign Office website about their questionable safety record. At least we got a flight on Wednesday the 11th rather than waiting for the flight on the Friday...
I must admit we didn't get off the beaten track at all in Laos, although even if we'd been healthy and feeling adventurous enough for the whole trip we'd have struggled. Apart from the main cities, which as mentioned are really barely even towns, there are so few villages, with so little tourist infrastructure, i.e. guesthouses and restaurants, that options are limited. But what really struck us about the places we did see was the number of foreign tourists. Every second face in Luang Prabang and Vientiane was Western, and in Vang Viang it seemed that only the staff in cafes and guesthouses were locals. It made the experience feel less special than China, where in most places we've been you're an oddity often worth staring at. To be fair to Laos, the population is so small that if you take the Westerners there as orange squash diluted by the Lao people as water, you're left with a pretty concentrated, bright orange mix, while in China the same quantity of Westerners diluted by the Chinese would just result in water, with traces of orange detectable under a microscope. If you'll excuse an orange squash analogy.
The other difference between the tourists in China and Laos is that those in Laos often seemed more interested in their own appearance than in the exotic culture around them. I guess that's not surprising - a lot of the Westerners there were 18-21 and single, where the majority of people we've met in China are older and in couples. I know this makes me sound old, but I feel vindicated in our decision before leaving Australia to avoid Southeast Asia in favour of somewhere like China, away from the uni-age backpacker circuit.
And besides, the food here is as great as I was fondly recalling while encamped on the khazi in Luang Prabang. Dinner time!
