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Laos: A Traveller's Kingdom
At Kiwu Khan, a village in the mountains of northern Laos, our arrival was cause for the villagers to stop anything they were doing, and emerge in the open to herald us with greetings and shy smiles. The children closed around us, following us to the house of our host, where they sat watching these strange creatures from another world. Gawking, twittering, whispering, giggling - the children stood transfixed all evening - and I remember thinking, late that night as my vision was swimming, that the children were watching me fall asleep on the wooden floor. Meanwhile, at the far corner of the bare one-roomed lodging, where the only furniture was a low table and a wooden box that served as the spirits' abode (we were instructed to sleep propitiously by facing in the same direction as the spirits), our hosts were stooped over a blackened fire pit, preparing sticky rice, cabbage soup, squirrel stew, and chilli sauce - working under the attentive supervision of our guide.
Sy Thon, our guide, had been an agricultural student in Vientiane when he decided there might be a better future in the new tourist industry. He had moved to Muang Ngoi, a village on the Nam Ou river, opened a guesthouse and a restaurant, which his wife ran, and started guiding trekkers on demand, advertising his treks on a scrawled cardboard paper. That day Thon led us through rainforest so dense that the machete-cleared paths tunnelled through the undergrowth. For ten hours we slogged over muddy trails and across rivers, keeping our spirits high by a tantalising piece of information: we were among the few Westerners the villagers had met this close in the past fifty years.
At the village this immediately became apparent because we weren't equated with money; the villagers had yet to realise they were becoming a tourist sight. None of the children asked us to take their pictures, or pestered us for money or pens, as they do in many other remote native villages in Asia. They kept their distance, sitting in front of us five paces away, twenty of them to the four of us, and when I tried to bridge the arrangement by crawling towards them, they screamed and gasped away, like startled birds. But the villagers had heard of the Western charities who had been visiting mountain villages with supplies of medicine, and we found ourselves presented with a spontaneous parade of medical complaints. Among the most serious cases, a man had accidentally severed his fingers with a machete, and they were gangrenous (we gave him antibiotic cream); and a hobbling 12-year-old had been bitten by a king cobra at the ankle, and her leg was swollen purplish-black up to her knee. Septicaemia, I said to Thon, and she needed urgent hospital attention, but the impassiveness that greeted my prognosis left no doubt that hospital was a prospect too far.
The village, situated in a dent in a mountain, is a haphazard cluster of bamboo houses on stilts, surrounded by a bamboo fence to keep wild animals out and toddlers and pigs in. The twenty-five households largely subsist from what they grow and gather: rice and herbs and vegetables, chicken and pigs, and forest animals hunted by medieval crossbows and equally medieval home-made guns. They also make some money from extra produce and prized forest animals and Lao Lao (rough-cut rice whiskey), earning enough to buy clothes and kitchenware and tools. Few of them ever venture further than what can be reached on foot.
Communities as isolated from money and modernity as these villagers are rare, especially in mainland Southeast Asia, now a tourist-ridden region. Kiwu Khan, to be sure, is only a hundred kilometres from the closest airport in Louang Phabang, but Laos' tenuous infrastructure and impenetrable jungle and thinly-spread population (especially in the north, a scattering of villages dotting the country's mighty rivers, which double as transport arteries), makes the journey from the airport to Kiwu Khan hard and long: it would take three days, involving a four-hour truck ride, a one-hour motorised-canoe journey, and a ten-hour jungle walk. Yet it is exactly such remoteness that is now the country's principal allure. The large swaths of primeval landscapes, the rudimentary tourist infrastructure, the oblivion to Western wealth and influence, the people's curiosity and gratitude - for adventurers, this is the stuff of opportunities, a chance to forge one's original itineraries. For many travellers touring continental Southeast Asia, the adventure begins in Laos.
The reason for the country's seclusion that is so admired today, the result of stunted industrialisation, is largely due to its recent history of self-exile. After bearing the brunt of three cycles of imperial aggression in one generation - by France, the original colonial ruler; Japan, World War II invader; and America, the anti-Communist crusader - Laos retreated deep into its shell in the sixties. The chosen path of withdrawal from the world only ended at the beginning of the nineties when the communist government decided to emulate its neighbour's (Vietnam) policy shift towards the facilitation of private enterprise and the development of a tourist industry. Such isolation has left the country among the world's poorest in monetary terms; but it has also left the country intact and dignified. Eighty percent of the land cover is unmanaged vegetation; fifty percent is forested, twenty-five percent of which is untouched rainforest - this is one of the highest rates of forest cover anywhere. The Lao people - indoctrinated in Communist and Buddhist ideology (Laos' brand of Communism allows, even encourages, Buddhism) - show none of the abasement and servility to Westerners that is so pitiful in other countries in Asia, Thailand especially. (Unlike Thailand, Laos still has the opportunity to build a tourist industry that isn't socially and environmentally destructive, for although visitors are expected to increase dramatically, at present Laos only gets a trickle of the tourist traffic in mainland Southeast Asia - 300,000 annual visitors compared to Thailand's seven million and Vietnam's four million.)
In Kiwu Khan - and, it must be pointed out, this isn't the remotest of villages in Laos - I felt something I had never felt before. The usual behaviour that defines the largely economic relationship between tourist and native, in the Third World especially - the usual fixed roles of the observer and the observed - didn't exist. The villagers were as curious about us as we were about them, and for everyone this was a new experience; it felt something like exploration should be in its profoundest meaning. We were a mutual attraction and feature of interest. Sure, Thon paid the hosts, and he supported them in other ways, such as paying a local man to lead the way during the trek and buying Lao Lao and forest delicacies from the village, but these were all background or spin-off deals. Perhaps the crucial difference between Kiwu Khan and other so-called `primitive' people I had visited in my travels was the absence of contempt and mockery. For, underneath the show of smiles and kindness, both visitors and visited often feel an undercurrent of mutual disdain: the natives feel contemptuous because they have to beg and make a superficial show of their culture and sell their cultural paraphernalia, and the visitors feel disappointment at the natives' persistent begging and at their mockery and at the way they slight their cultural symbols for easy money. At Kiwu Khan, the feeling was, by contrast, one of mutual respect. Their personal interest in us ran deeper than economic exigencies. It was a meeting of equals, and, as their guests, we were unceremoniously hosted in their homes.
© Victor Paul Borg
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