Forget Nepal
25 - 27 Jan, Ian
Just after I'd posted my last blog we found out
that we can't go to Nepal: our tour operator, lacking any gumption, emailed us
to say that in the light of the latest advice from the FCO about violence in the
run-up to elections next month all non-essential travel is to be avoided. I
don't know anyone who thinks that there's the slightest real danger - the
Maoists may have killed 12,000 of their own compatriots in government but they
have no interest in foreigners. But now that the advice is out if we ignore it
neither the tour operator nor we would be in great standing with our insurers if
we needed any help.
As some of you know, we'd anticipated this possibility months ago and had already given idle consideration to what we might do instead. Cambodia was high on the list: it's been commended to us by a number of people and it will make a great trip for the future; but right now we want something more, well, Nepal-like. China is another destination that I'd thought we might make for if we needed an alternative. Or we could choose somewhere nearer to or in the Himalaya: Bhutan, northern India, Pakistan, Ladakh, Tibet. We also considered places that were nearer to Switzerland on our route West: Kazakhstan or Syria (a place I mean to get to), Cyprus (where we have friends) or Venice perhaps. My immediate reaction when we heard the news was excitement that we had so many choices, though I soon realised that none of them appealed quite as much as Nepal, where we had a great itinerary worked out. Paula was more concerned about the potential difficulties of getting visas, organising flights and the other practical issues.
By Thursday morning we had narrowed our choices down to two: a trip to Bhutan with the operator that had arranged much of our Nepal trip, or a circuit of China (Beijing and the Great Wall, Shang Hai, maybe Yunnan province, maybe Hong Kong) on our own. China would have been cheaper. In the end though, after some negotiation with the operator we settled on Bhutan. I had wanted to go there when we drew up our original Round The World country list a long time ago but thought it might be too hard to arrange. Now we had the perfect opportunity, and we feel more excited about it than any of the other destinations.
Meanwhile, Zoe and I visited the old royal palace here in Luang Prabang with Mike and a local guide. As I wrote last time, the royal family all fled when the Communists came to power in 1975. The drawing rooms were opulent but the private rooms of the royal family - bedrooms and a little reading room, not much else - were pleasingly spartan. There was also a room lined with glass display cabinets, each of which housed gifts to Laos from other countries. Many of these were very beautiful - carved ivory from China, elegant ceramics from Japan. In contrast, the USA had donated a little plastic model of a lunar module and three tiny grubby moon rocks. There was nothing from the UK.
The next day, still very uncertain about where we were heading to after Laos, we took a trip out of town. It was exactly what we needed to take our minds off the trip mayhem. Driving along yet another rough gravel track through the most spectacular countryside, we passed a westerner on a unicycle. Shortly followed by another. And then another. In all we passed at least a couple of dozen of them. It was truly bizarre. Though not all as athletic as you might expect given the hilliness of the terrain and the fact that the bikes have no gearing, they all wore lycra bike apparel. They cycled quickly but often with wide lateral arm movements in slow-mo, giving a very weird mismatch in pace. There was a video exhibit at Tate Modern a couple of years ago in which a guy who looked like Moby danced naked - you'd guess from watching him that he was listening to dance music but the music that was played over in the exhibit was elegiac; the unicyclists created the same effect.
We left the van and continued walking along the road, which wound through teak plantations whose trunks were still young and slender. The government, seeing the potential income from teak, encouraged farmers to grow it. The upshot has been that they've planted over many rice paddies that offer immediate subsistence - Laos now has to import rice - with a commodity that could take a couple of decades to generate any income. The leaves of the teak trees range from saucer to dinner plate size and they make a surprisingly loud noise as they fall in the woods. Bamboo grows between the teak and adds an ominous creaking in the wind. But most of the terrain is much more open, with the remaining paddies spreading out over a wide landscape broken with the occasional stand of papaya trees.
We came to a village of bamboo, wood and thatch houses; it was a large settlement, being home to around a hundred families. We cut through off the track into the centre of the village where Mike sought out a young boy whom one of his colleagues - an ex doctor - had sent to the hospital for treatment for a cleft lip. We soon found someone who could fetch the boy and sat down by one of the houses to await him. A woman brought us a jug of orange water that had been drawn from the Meking, which ran alongside the village, and boiled to render it fit for drinking. We had to wait some while and as we sat quite a crowd gathered round, mainly of women and girls. Zoe and Heidi in particular are a fascination to them - everyone says how beautiful they are and the older women love to touch them, as though they're a rarity that can bring luck. Most of the men were out working; one sat nearby mending his nets.
The boy eventually came and Mike had a chat to him, surrounded by a throng of locals. He seemed to be doing well. As we continued our walk several of the children followed, dropping away only as we left the environs of the village. Tracking an irrigation channel, our path was gentle, picturesque and quiet. One young guy passed by with a huge length of bamboo balanced on his shoulder. We met a few women, always walking in pairs, each with a pair of baskets hanging at either end of a pole, which was also balanced on the shoulder. One woman was carrying buffalo meat (and many water buffalo ambled across our path); another carried bags of fish paste. Most of them wore the shallow conical bamboo hats sported by cartoon Chinamen.
Our walk lasted no more than a couple of hours and after wading across a creek we were met again by our van and taken up to another village close to a popular waterfall. On the short hike up we came to an enclosure housing a few Asiatic bears and another housing a single tiger. They had all been confiscated from local poachers. The tiger was, as you know it would be, sleek and wonderful and should never have been caged. The bears were a little absurd - when they stood on their hind legs they looked for all the world like people in costumes.
We've been to several falls this month and none have been more attractive. There were several pools for swimming and the water was an unreal aquamarine. We spent a couple more hours here during which we had lunch and the girls went swimming. (I'm still cautious about the dressing on my leg and it wasn't quite warm enough for Paula to get in.) The unicyclists were all gathered here, too. I wondered where they were from, and I'd have guessed at Germany or Belgium. When we left and were heading back to Luang Prabang I got the van to stop so that I could watch and photograph people gathering rice in one of the paddy fields. As I stood there a couple of the unicyclists came past and I shouted to ask one girl where she was from - "California!" she replied, "But not all of us are." I don't know whether this implied that the others were from different countries or different states of the USA.
We had our last evening at the unsatisfactory hotel. Paula and, to some extent, Zoe have not felt well there and on this final night Paula was awake for some hours with breathing problems. There were no windows in the rooms, only shutters that led out onto a shared balcony and these were closed at night from the outside. There was thus no circulation of air in the room and Paula found that within the hotel all of the doors were bolted, apparently from the outside. Getting a little freaked, Paula came into the other room, where on this occasion I was sleeping with Heidi (we swap around from time to time since the girls like being in the same room as one of us). To get to some air I forced open the shutters to the balcony to find one of the night staff camped on the floor under a mosquito net. Mike told us the next morning that this is common in South East Asia: in one hotel in Cambodia three of the staff sleep in the reception area, one of them on a shelf. You'd think that they might let them use the empty rooms, for there were some.
In the morning we transferred to the hotel that we chose for ourselves - the Villa Santi - which is much classier. As soon as we walked into the lobby we could tell that we were in a different world. For a start, we had rumbled where all the Americans stay. Westerners parade along the main street in Luang Prabang but they're predominantly Europeans. There are so many of us that it seems like a Hollywood version of Asia, in which each of the significant characters is a Westerner with the locals taking only the non-speaking roles to add decorative background colour. The Lao guide who took us round the wats here reports that tourists are a very new phenomenon, and he hopes for our numbers to increase, if only because it provides an incentive to his compatriots to preserve their heritage. And it's also true, I suppose, that as you move away from the main drag the Westerners quickly diffuse - by the time you've travelled out into the surrounding countryside you reach places that seem untouched by us and where we're still a curiousity.
But not in the Villa Santi, which is probably the most culturally insulated venue in Laos, and where everything is priced in US dollars. The first Americans I heard as we checked in were standing by their smart luggage and braying for all to hear about which of Vietnam or Thailand is "better" (I can't remember, I'm afraid). It struck me as a paradox that the US, which is more than anywhere else a country of immigrants, should seem so gauche and insensitive regarding other cultures. Especially since I've just finished Fisk's book The Great War for Civilisation, which details the atrocious and unforgivable behaviour of Bush's USA - undoubtedly the world's most dangerous rogue terrorist state, with competition for the accolade only really coming from Israel, and Blair's UK revealed as a pathetic accomplice. How to explain that Americans, who as individuals must know so much about the world, collectively seem to understand so little? Perhaps it's because to be American is to be amongst people who have chosen to leave other countries because of their shortcomings and to find sanctuary in the best of all places. For in many ways the USA is like a literal heaven, especially if your god is entertainment. Most citizens in the US have a high degree of personal freedom, and the economy is far and away the most successful the world has ever seen. And every first generation immigrant arrived there full of dissatisfaction with what they left and hope for the future in the New World. So maybe this, together with the remaining legacy of the founding fathers, can, in some, generate a sense of the USA being morally better than everywhere else. And their news media certainly don't help, any more than the BBC do in the UK. I'd love to hear what American Muslims think about it all.
I have to be careful how I write about the US, and you have to be careful how you read me. Previously I wrote that if you didn't know individual Americans you might hate them all. Part of what I meant by this was that when you do speak to actual Americans, especially when they're not from the "red state' heartland, they are, on average, at least as informed and intelligent as people in any other nation. You have to see past Bush, Rumsfeld and the other war-criminals in government, and the national parody guys like those in the Villa Santi lobby.
I once more urge anyone with reading time to get the Fisk book. It's a long read - over 1200 pages - and even with much more free time than most people it's taken me a month to get through it. It's also pretty gruelling at times. Of all the books that I've read since I've been away it isn't the one I'll rush to re-read first (that's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay) but it may be the most life-changing. Next, I'm moving onto another Agatha Christie - The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - from kinder times when people only killed in small numbers. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch would be a good follow-on to Fisk: I'd re-read it if I could get it, but I can't. However, the totally perfect Fisk follow-on would be Checkpoint by Nicholson Baker, which is also widely unavailable here.
Yesterday we said good-bye to Mike. We enjoyed being with him, and hearing his Geordie Lite accent. The tour operator he works for is Gecko, and appropriately we found a dead one in our bags when we arrived here at the Villa Santi. We also found that our room featured a large picture showing essentially the same motif as I've used for the Laos blogs. We ate here at the hotel last night and in a generally bland meal I had my first genuinely hot dish since we've been in Asia. It was a spicy green papaya salad whose customary chilli tang was enhanced with the piquant fish or shrimp paste that we'd seen the ladies carrying the day before.
We've also had an Indian meal this week, and I think it's the first Indian food that I've had since we left England. It was perfectly decent but having it for the first time after such a long period I realised that much as I like the tastes the Thai and Lao food suits me better - it's healthier and sits less heavily in my stomach.
Finally, I have to qualify the blog title: even while we're very keen on our re-planned month in Bhutan, we do still hope to go to Nepal one day. And for anyone interested I've added a link to some snaps of our time in Thailand onto our homepage.
As some of you know, we'd anticipated this possibility months ago and had already given idle consideration to what we might do instead. Cambodia was high on the list: it's been commended to us by a number of people and it will make a great trip for the future; but right now we want something more, well, Nepal-like. China is another destination that I'd thought we might make for if we needed an alternative. Or we could choose somewhere nearer to or in the Himalaya: Bhutan, northern India, Pakistan, Ladakh, Tibet. We also considered places that were nearer to Switzerland on our route West: Kazakhstan or Syria (a place I mean to get to), Cyprus (where we have friends) or Venice perhaps. My immediate reaction when we heard the news was excitement that we had so many choices, though I soon realised that none of them appealed quite as much as Nepal, where we had a great itinerary worked out. Paula was more concerned about the potential difficulties of getting visas, organising flights and the other practical issues.
By Thursday morning we had narrowed our choices down to two: a trip to Bhutan with the operator that had arranged much of our Nepal trip, or a circuit of China (Beijing and the Great Wall, Shang Hai, maybe Yunnan province, maybe Hong Kong) on our own. China would have been cheaper. In the end though, after some negotiation with the operator we settled on Bhutan. I had wanted to go there when we drew up our original Round The World country list a long time ago but thought it might be too hard to arrange. Now we had the perfect opportunity, and we feel more excited about it than any of the other destinations.
Meanwhile, Zoe and I visited the old royal palace here in Luang Prabang with Mike and a local guide. As I wrote last time, the royal family all fled when the Communists came to power in 1975. The drawing rooms were opulent but the private rooms of the royal family - bedrooms and a little reading room, not much else - were pleasingly spartan. There was also a room lined with glass display cabinets, each of which housed gifts to Laos from other countries. Many of these were very beautiful - carved ivory from China, elegant ceramics from Japan. In contrast, the USA had donated a little plastic model of a lunar module and three tiny grubby moon rocks. There was nothing from the UK.
The next day, still very uncertain about where we were heading to after Laos, we took a trip out of town. It was exactly what we needed to take our minds off the trip mayhem. Driving along yet another rough gravel track through the most spectacular countryside, we passed a westerner on a unicycle. Shortly followed by another. And then another. In all we passed at least a couple of dozen of them. It was truly bizarre. Though not all as athletic as you might expect given the hilliness of the terrain and the fact that the bikes have no gearing, they all wore lycra bike apparel. They cycled quickly but often with wide lateral arm movements in slow-mo, giving a very weird mismatch in pace. There was a video exhibit at Tate Modern a couple of years ago in which a guy who looked like Moby danced naked - you'd guess from watching him that he was listening to dance music but the music that was played over in the exhibit was elegiac; the unicyclists created the same effect.
We left the van and continued walking along the road, which wound through teak plantations whose trunks were still young and slender. The government, seeing the potential income from teak, encouraged farmers to grow it. The upshot has been that they've planted over many rice paddies that offer immediate subsistence - Laos now has to import rice - with a commodity that could take a couple of decades to generate any income. The leaves of the teak trees range from saucer to dinner plate size and they make a surprisingly loud noise as they fall in the woods. Bamboo grows between the teak and adds an ominous creaking in the wind. But most of the terrain is much more open, with the remaining paddies spreading out over a wide landscape broken with the occasional stand of papaya trees.
We came to a village of bamboo, wood and thatch houses; it was a large settlement, being home to around a hundred families. We cut through off the track into the centre of the village where Mike sought out a young boy whom one of his colleagues - an ex doctor - had sent to the hospital for treatment for a cleft lip. We soon found someone who could fetch the boy and sat down by one of the houses to await him. A woman brought us a jug of orange water that had been drawn from the Meking, which ran alongside the village, and boiled to render it fit for drinking. We had to wait some while and as we sat quite a crowd gathered round, mainly of women and girls. Zoe and Heidi in particular are a fascination to them - everyone says how beautiful they are and the older women love to touch them, as though they're a rarity that can bring luck. Most of the men were out working; one sat nearby mending his nets.
The boy eventually came and Mike had a chat to him, surrounded by a throng of locals. He seemed to be doing well. As we continued our walk several of the children followed, dropping away only as we left the environs of the village. Tracking an irrigation channel, our path was gentle, picturesque and quiet. One young guy passed by with a huge length of bamboo balanced on his shoulder. We met a few women, always walking in pairs, each with a pair of baskets hanging at either end of a pole, which was also balanced on the shoulder. One woman was carrying buffalo meat (and many water buffalo ambled across our path); another carried bags of fish paste. Most of them wore the shallow conical bamboo hats sported by cartoon Chinamen.
Our walk lasted no more than a couple of hours and after wading across a creek we were met again by our van and taken up to another village close to a popular waterfall. On the short hike up we came to an enclosure housing a few Asiatic bears and another housing a single tiger. They had all been confiscated from local poachers. The tiger was, as you know it would be, sleek and wonderful and should never have been caged. The bears were a little absurd - when they stood on their hind legs they looked for all the world like people in costumes.
We've been to several falls this month and none have been more attractive. There were several pools for swimming and the water was an unreal aquamarine. We spent a couple more hours here during which we had lunch and the girls went swimming. (I'm still cautious about the dressing on my leg and it wasn't quite warm enough for Paula to get in.) The unicyclists were all gathered here, too. I wondered where they were from, and I'd have guessed at Germany or Belgium. When we left and were heading back to Luang Prabang I got the van to stop so that I could watch and photograph people gathering rice in one of the paddy fields. As I stood there a couple of the unicyclists came past and I shouted to ask one girl where she was from - "California!" she replied, "But not all of us are." I don't know whether this implied that the others were from different countries or different states of the USA.
We had our last evening at the unsatisfactory hotel. Paula and, to some extent, Zoe have not felt well there and on this final night Paula was awake for some hours with breathing problems. There were no windows in the rooms, only shutters that led out onto a shared balcony and these were closed at night from the outside. There was thus no circulation of air in the room and Paula found that within the hotel all of the doors were bolted, apparently from the outside. Getting a little freaked, Paula came into the other room, where on this occasion I was sleeping with Heidi (we swap around from time to time since the girls like being in the same room as one of us). To get to some air I forced open the shutters to the balcony to find one of the night staff camped on the floor under a mosquito net. Mike told us the next morning that this is common in South East Asia: in one hotel in Cambodia three of the staff sleep in the reception area, one of them on a shelf. You'd think that they might let them use the empty rooms, for there were some.
In the morning we transferred to the hotel that we chose for ourselves - the Villa Santi - which is much classier. As soon as we walked into the lobby we could tell that we were in a different world. For a start, we had rumbled where all the Americans stay. Westerners parade along the main street in Luang Prabang but they're predominantly Europeans. There are so many of us that it seems like a Hollywood version of Asia, in which each of the significant characters is a Westerner with the locals taking only the non-speaking roles to add decorative background colour. The Lao guide who took us round the wats here reports that tourists are a very new phenomenon, and he hopes for our numbers to increase, if only because it provides an incentive to his compatriots to preserve their heritage. And it's also true, I suppose, that as you move away from the main drag the Westerners quickly diffuse - by the time you've travelled out into the surrounding countryside you reach places that seem untouched by us and where we're still a curiousity.
But not in the Villa Santi, which is probably the most culturally insulated venue in Laos, and where everything is priced in US dollars. The first Americans I heard as we checked in were standing by their smart luggage and braying for all to hear about which of Vietnam or Thailand is "better" (I can't remember, I'm afraid). It struck me as a paradox that the US, which is more than anywhere else a country of immigrants, should seem so gauche and insensitive regarding other cultures. Especially since I've just finished Fisk's book The Great War for Civilisation, which details the atrocious and unforgivable behaviour of Bush's USA - undoubtedly the world's most dangerous rogue terrorist state, with competition for the accolade only really coming from Israel, and Blair's UK revealed as a pathetic accomplice. How to explain that Americans, who as individuals must know so much about the world, collectively seem to understand so little? Perhaps it's because to be American is to be amongst people who have chosen to leave other countries because of their shortcomings and to find sanctuary in the best of all places. For in many ways the USA is like a literal heaven, especially if your god is entertainment. Most citizens in the US have a high degree of personal freedom, and the economy is far and away the most successful the world has ever seen. And every first generation immigrant arrived there full of dissatisfaction with what they left and hope for the future in the New World. So maybe this, together with the remaining legacy of the founding fathers, can, in some, generate a sense of the USA being morally better than everywhere else. And their news media certainly don't help, any more than the BBC do in the UK. I'd love to hear what American Muslims think about it all.
I have to be careful how I write about the US, and you have to be careful how you read me. Previously I wrote that if you didn't know individual Americans you might hate them all. Part of what I meant by this was that when you do speak to actual Americans, especially when they're not from the "red state' heartland, they are, on average, at least as informed and intelligent as people in any other nation. You have to see past Bush, Rumsfeld and the other war-criminals in government, and the national parody guys like those in the Villa Santi lobby.
I once more urge anyone with reading time to get the Fisk book. It's a long read - over 1200 pages - and even with much more free time than most people it's taken me a month to get through it. It's also pretty gruelling at times. Of all the books that I've read since I've been away it isn't the one I'll rush to re-read first (that's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay) but it may be the most life-changing. Next, I'm moving onto another Agatha Christie - The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - from kinder times when people only killed in small numbers. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch would be a good follow-on to Fisk: I'd re-read it if I could get it, but I can't. However, the totally perfect Fisk follow-on would be Checkpoint by Nicholson Baker, which is also widely unavailable here.
Yesterday we said good-bye to Mike. We enjoyed being with him, and hearing his Geordie Lite accent. The tour operator he works for is Gecko, and appropriately we found a dead one in our bags when we arrived here at the Villa Santi. We also found that our room featured a large picture showing essentially the same motif as I've used for the Laos blogs. We ate here at the hotel last night and in a generally bland meal I had my first genuinely hot dish since we've been in Asia. It was a spicy green papaya salad whose customary chilli tang was enhanced with the piquant fish or shrimp paste that we'd seen the ladies carrying the day before.
We've also had an Indian meal this week, and I think it's the first Indian food that I've had since we left England. It was perfectly decent but having it for the first time after such a long period I realised that much as I like the tastes the Thai and Lao food suits me better - it's healthier and sits less heavily in my stomach.
Finally, I have to qualify the blog title: even while we're very keen on our re-planned month in Bhutan, we do still hope to go to Nepal one day. And for anyone interested I've added a link to some snaps of our time in Thailand onto our homepage.
Posted: Fri - January 27, 2006 at 06:21 PM
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Published On: Jan 28, 2006 10:22 PM
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Published On: Jan 28, 2006 10:22 PM