Luang Prabang is a riddle that photographs can solve. It is a town popular with tourists and a World Heritage site, but it rarely feels overrun. It is like a sprawling resort in places, with a commerce given over to foreign comforts, but it is not a colony on the Banana Pancake Trail. Instead, Luang Prabang is tranquil. The Mekong and its bubbling tributary, the Nam Khan, wrap around the historic district and meet at its eastern tip, punctuating time with the river sounds of Southeast Asia – with the hum of motorboats and squeals of swimming children, with the plop of hand nets and sploosh of oars. Bamboo groves and palm trees arch over its riverbanks, and the jungle has not yet been banished by urban sprawl; it covers the town protectively, and looking down from the limestone hills that surround the town, nothing but the golden tips of Buddhist stupas remain visible above the green fecundity of trees.

Luang Prabang is a riddle because it has no single wonder to leave you awestruck, but the town pries its way into your imagination all the same. It has the elegant temples of Southeast Asia, with roofs tiered like loose skin on the arch of a dragon’s back, but in and of themselves, its temples are not especially remarkable. It has novice monks moving between the duties of a carefully structured day, in ochre and saffron robes set off by the browns of teak, brick and rust, but monks are a part of life across the region. Its architecture is a blend of indigenous and French styles, with elements borrowed from Laos’ neighbours, but its mixture of timber and brick, shuttered windows and ornamental eaves can be found throughout old Indochina. Its animals are remarkable, especially its dogs; they are left to take themselves on walks, but stay friendly, greedily chasing after a stroke. There are cats too, with broken tails, and chickens clucking and pecking in vegetable patches on the river banks. Luang Prabang is not wholly urban, nor is it rural: it is a town of distinct parts and mingled pasts that has held onto its soul, and with photographs you can frame the elements of its heritage individually and start to unravel the riddle

Continue reading Luang Prabang: The Elements of Heritage

Luang Prabang: The Elements of Heritage is an Overland travel stories » Old World Wandering original

Claire and I went to Vang Vieng to laze in a grove of Edenic green. It was a picture-perfect fantasy, conjured up by a postcard in Vientiane labelled Blue Lagoon, but we were curious too. Vang Vieng was where drug-addled backpackers bobbed downriver in tyre tubes, and its ugly reality did not come as a surprise when we arrived, or even a disappointment. The town pandered to the depths of hedonism, and its signboards promising cold beer, blaring hip hop and reruns of Family Guy and Friends were like a parody of Western culture, as if the joke was on us. It was laughable and dispiriting by turns, but on the day we rode out to find landlocked Laos’ Blue Lagoon, pedalling mountain bikes over a bamboo toll bridge and along a dusty track, into farmland, we found a reason to return to Vang Vieng.

Rain started pouring down in heavy, languid drops. The track became slippery, forcing us to pedal quickly through deep puddles, spraying mud. It covered us up to our necks in a layer of brown, like the buffaloes around us, wallowing idly in the paddy fields. There were signposts at intervals, pointing to caves with Buddha idols in their depths and a variety of Blue Lagoons; if we hadn’t stopped to play with a litter of puppies, we might have paid 20,000 kip for access to the wrong pool of water.

The puppies’ owner was a Thai man with a small homestead set beside the road, kilometres from the closest settlement. He said he had been a jungle monk at home, but now he was married to a Lao woman, with whom he meditated every evening, in their home of crooked logs without electric light. The couple had chickens and a garden planted with vegetables, basil, lemongrass, bananas and pineapples; the only food they bought was rice. They had placed three tables in the garden and optimistically opened a restaurant, where Claire and I promised to eat on our way back. We did, and the slices of pineapple served with our fried rice were sweet and soft, without a trace of stringy fibre. The Thai man warned us to ignore the signs to other pools, and pointed us in the direction of the postcard’s Blue Lagoon; it was about five kilometres away, he said, past a village and over two more bridges, where we saw children cavorting naked in the clear river water, and wondered why we were cycling further, our arms aching from the dirt road’s constant bumps

Continue reading An Alternative to Tubing in Vang Vieng

An Alternative to Tubing in Vang Vieng is an Overland travel stories » Old World Wandering original

Still the world is wondrous large,—seven seas from marge to marge—
And it holds a vast of various kinds of man;
And the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandhu
And the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.

Here’s my wisdom for your use, as I learned it when the moose
And the reindeer roamed where Paris roars to-night:—
“There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
“And—every—single—one—of—them—is—right!”

Rudyard Kipling, In the Neolithic Age

Peter Jump was withered, hunched and riddled with nervous ticks. When lucid, he claimed to have worked at Abbey Road Studios in its heyday and to have produced the finest records of psychedelic rock. In the same era, he had drunk what he called a 4M cocktail, mixing mescaline, MDMA, methylated spirits and milk in a blender before knocking the whole concoction back, to be found days later, naked and in the grip of a psychosis from which he never completely recovered. Jump muttered to himself in spurts, intoning agreement and disagreement in a garble of difficult-to-hear words. His favourite gesture was the shrug, and he used it in conversations with himself as well as other people, extending his right hand out, with palm open and fingers wide apart, while uttering a nasal “Aaaa”.

I met Jump at the Belsize Tavern, a pub in a fashionable part of North London with a fashionable chef-owner to match. Its pretentions were not entirely equal to its appearance: the Bell was ragged in places, with frayed carpets covering holes in its wooden floor and a trail of dents and stains across the surface of its antique bar. I worked there near the end of my year in London, in 2005, serving drinks to an admirably egalitarian band of celebrities, tabloid journalists, musicians and working people, who would come in for a meal at lunch time, when other customers were just surfacing for the day’s first drink. The Gallaghers stopped in occasionally, as did Kate Moss, Pierce Brosnan and Sean Bean, but it was the regulars that I got to know – and Jump was one of them. He drank gin and tonics without fail, but always took time to ponder his order. If I ever second-guessed him, Jump would call me an importunate young man and make a show of ordering something else. He did not like to be predictable, even if he was.

I didn’t know what importunate meant when Jump first used the word and asked if he had invented it, like he had invented so much else. “Importunate? Im-por-tew-nate, im-porrr-tu-nate, im-por-tuuune?” he replied, cocking his head from side to side to better hear himself sounding out the words. “It means annoyingly, intrusively per-sis-tent. Look it up!”

Jump was the battered product of an English public school. Other than his stint at Abbey Road Studios, he had not had any discernible career and I assumed he was drinking his way slowly and deliberately through a sizeable inheritance, which also paid for his drug habit, a nearby bedsit and the prostitutes from Eastern Europe he occasionally took back to it, in twos and threes. He had a head too big for his reedy frame and pink, fleshy ears, which stuck out sharply from his close-cropped grey hair, like satellite receivers on a stubble-covered hill. When he walked, his head and body moved independently, giving him the appearance of an oversized bobblehead doll, rolling and bouncing down the road. He wore tiny spectacles, which he peered through myopically – or over, with a look of beady clarity, reminding me that he was not as far gone as most people assumed.

Jump also had a grin of pure mischief. It was always the same – neither innocent nor wholly sordid – whether he was propositioning the pub’s manager, who called him granddad, or remembering a night on Primrose Hill, in the company of Jim Morrison. Although he struggled to make conversation, I sometimes joined Jump on the other side of the bar, and watched as he wavered between grinning observations of literature or music and panicked apologies for imagined slights, which made him crumple up into himself as if in physical pain. He was proud, and pretended to have found virtue in his vice, but he was also desperately lonely and – like the Bell’s carpets – did a bad job of hiding his drug-piqued sense of shame.

Jump was an anachronism. He had drunk so deeply of his hippie past that he could not exist fully in his hungover present, and I saw in him an embodiment of the whole movement’s soiled idealism. Like a hero and a fool, he had tried to make it through to the other side – but he had only fallen into the chasm in between, and it was from Jump that I first heard Kipling’s line, when he said one day out of the blue,

The wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Kathmandu

Continue reading Vestiges of the Hippie Trail»

Vestiges of the Hippie Trail is an Overland travel stories » Old World Wandering original

Homer, The Odyssey

At first, the sheer ease of travelling in Southeast Asia came as a pleasant shock. After flying in from Calcutta, Bangkok’s budget hotels seemed exceptionally clean, and were as affordable as their Indian equivalents. We didn’t need to trek halfway across the city to buy bus tickets from dingy ticket offices filled with aggressive queue jumpers; they were sold by agents for the same price. We spent our first month between Bangkok and an idyllic island in the Gulf of Thailand, without any of the familiar hassles and challenges of travel, and when our Thai visas expired, we continued into Laos. My thoughts often turned to India and the twelve months I’d spent travelling there, testing and tormenting myself on long sweaty journeys to vast, polluted cities where a concrete box with a creaky overhead fan was often all I could get for my money. Had all the hassles and challenges been worth it?

The day I arrived in Vang Vieng the answer slapped me in the face. Or, rather, a few dozen pairs of barely-bikinied breasts slapped me in the face, closely pursued by as many pairs of luminous shorts, emblazoned with Vang Vieng, In the Tubing.

Vang Vieng is famous – in Australia. To most eighteen year old backpackers – and like-minded twenty-somethings – Vang Vieng is the highlight of any coming-of-age jaunt around Southeast Asia. To other travellers, it is a small town in northern Laos where people hire rubber tubes and float down the Nam Song River, stopping at ramshackle bars along the riverbank to drink buckets of whiskey and coke, or truly test their endurance with opium-laced cocktails or a bucket of magic mushrooms blended with fruit juice, hoping to god they won’t need to swim. Several travellers die every year, most from drowning or cracking their skulls on a rock. There are several tragic stories of people swimming after runaway tubes, only to disappear in the current – for the sake of a seven dollar deposit. Some float their way to the end of the tubing course in the dark, having lost track of time, and are robbed by groups of teenage locals who pretend to be helping them ashore

Continue reading Land of the Banana Pancake Eaters

Land of the Banana Pancake Eaters is an Overland travel stories » Old World Wandering original

A man I met in Vientiane, who spoke eloquently about the city and how it had changed, initially gave short, guarded answers to my questions. When I promised not to quote him, he opened up, but I couldn’t fit what he said into my portrait of the Chinese people changing Laos without either revealing his identity or allowing faceless, out-of-context accusations to creep into my narrative. I’ve transcribed a part of my conversation with him instead, and published it below. Among other things, it contains some strong criticisms of the path Laos’ government has chosen; they may or may not be well founded, but are at least an indication of what some people in Vientiane think.

How has Vientiane changed in your lifetime?
In the eighties, there were no cars on the road, no restaurants, nothing. It was dead after six o’ clock. You could lie down on the main road.

Wow! It’s changed a lot. Is that all in the last twenty years?
Mostly in the last five years. The tallest building was the government office – seven storeys. Now there are all these high rise buildings under construction.

How do people feel about the changes?
They have mixed feelings.

Do they think that their quality of life has improved?
In what sense? Happiness? How do you measure this

Continue reading Off the Record in Vientiane

Off the Record in Vientiane is an Overland travel stories » Old World Wandering original

Laos is sparsely populated, with roughly six and a half million people scattered across a wet, mountainous north and marshy south. It covers an only slightly smaller area than the United Kingdom, but compared to its closest neighbours – Thailand, which squeezes 68 million people into a slightly larger space, and Vietnam, which packs in almost 78 million – it is all but empty. Even the single Chinese province of Yunnan, on Laos’ northern border, has a population seven times larger than its neighbour’s.

The economic conditions that define China’s push into Africa are not unlike conditions in Laos. It shares a place with African nations on the United Nations’ list of the world’s least developed countries. It has timber and precious metals, but without bought expertise and borrowed capital, it can’t connect mine to market or even dig its copper, gold and tin out of the ground. Its roads have been improved over the last decade – mostly by Chinese and Japanese contractors – but the journey from the capital to Luang Prabang, Laos’ third largest city – which is, as the crow flies, only 218 kilometres away – still takes eleven hours by bus. On the overnight buses that crawl along Laos’ single-lane thoroughfares, conductors hand out plastic bags to collect passengers’ vomit; at corners, the buses inch up to rock walls blasted out of the mountainside, and it can seem as if there is nowhere else to go but forward, gradually but inevitably into the rock face, until at the last moment they swing to the right or left and the potholed asphalt, wedged impossibly between mountain, thicket and the occasional wooden home, continues along its narrow course.

Vientiane is the capital of a country that has been independent for 57 years, but its scruffy shop-houses, open air markets and cafés, with baguettes lined-up in their windows and tables straddling the pavement, still give it the feeling of a slow-moving county town in France. Tax concessions on utility vehicles have encouraged residents to buy long-bodied, four wheel drive bakkies and expats at the Hare and Hound, where Claire and I drank, bemoaned witnessing their first Laotian traffic jam, but Vientiane’s roads remained quiet, especially by Southeast Asia’s frenzied standards. The city’s population is growing slowly: almost 73,000 people moved in between 1995 and 2005, but 14,500 moved away during the same period and there are few signs of the kind of urbanisation that is changing the shape of other parts of Asia. In 2005, when the last census was taken, 92 percent of Laotians were counted in exactly the same district they were in ten years before and only 26 percent lived in urban areas.

In the lead up to the Secret War, which gave Laos the terrible distinction of being most bombed country per capita on earth, the American journalist Stanley Karnow visited the country for Life Magazine. He described an unchanging, peaceful idyll that was being sucked into the Cold War against its will. Laos, he wrote, “is an improbable little landlocked country of affable, gentle, easygoing people who would like nothing better than to be left alone.” Karnow was careful to explain, listing examples of an idealised Laotian backwardness. “Foreigners in Laos may be exasperated by primitive inefficiency and shattering inertia,” he wrote, “but as Crown Prince Savang Vatthana once told an American reporter, no Laotian has ever suffered a nervous breakdown.”

Karnow went on: “Language is a key to behaviour. The most common phrase in the local idiom, delivered with a nod of the head, is bo pen nyan. It means anything from ‘It doesn’t matter’ to ‘Who cares?’”

And on: “In Laos it is downright bad taste to work more than is absolutely necessary. The acquisition of wealth is considered both pointless and sinful. A man cultivates only as much land as he needs to feed everyone in his family, dividing the property into one strip for each member of the household. If a baby is born, he clears an additional strip and works it. If grandmother dies, he promptly abandons the parcel of soil that provided her food.”

He even thought the French had been bewitched by lazy Laos: “The French, when they controlled the country, barely made their presence felt. Most of them were thoroughly delighted by the Laotian way of life. So deeply enamoured with Laos was one French administrator, it is said, that when the Japanese occupied Indochina in 1941 he assembled his 31 Laotian concubines in his bungalow, applied a torch and carried himself and his harem to Nirvana in a blaze of glory.” Continue reading The Chinese of Vientiane»

The Chinese of Vientiane: Part II – A Way of Life is an Overland travel stories » Old World Wandering original

Shanghai is mainland China’s most cosmopolitan and outward looking city. It is – in a line that was used and reused, ad nauseum, ahead of the city’s World Expo last year – China’s window on the world, with a population of well over 200,000 expatriates. There are Japanese and Koreans tucked away in neighbourhoods that they have made their own; in the old concession areas, there are Germans, French and Americans making a life amongst the buildings put up by their pre-1949 forebears. Chilean students mix with Nigerians, Norwegians, Turks and Scots in its dive bars on Friday nights, and there are even a few South Africans, who meet once a month at a pub called The Spot, to drink and complain, about China and home in equal measure, and to help each other find Prestik, Western Cape wines and boerewors, made by a butcher in a suburb on the city’s outskirts. For three years, from 2008 to 2011, Iain and I were two of them.

The Chinese are still not used to all the foreigners they now find living amongst them and, in the course of three years, we found ourselves having exactly the same curious conversation with different locals on a hundred different occasions.
“Which country are you from?” the local would ask. “America? France?”
“No, I’m from South Africa,” I’d reply, forming the words clearly, knowing it wasn’t what they were expecting to hear.
“South America?”
“No – South Africa.”
“South Africa?”
“Yes.”
“Aah…”
A few seconds would pass as he or she processed my response. Sometimes they’d continue by asking which country in South Africa I came from. ‘South’ and ‘southern’ are as distinguishable in Chinese as in English, but the question didn’t surprise me: I have been asked it everywhere from India to Egypt, by the educated and the ignorant. Many people simply don’t know where South Africa is; I have accepted that. The next part of the conversation was more confounding.
“But you’re white! You can’t be South African!” they’d say, frowning at my pale skin.
“Well, I am.”
“But people from Africa are all black!” they’d protest.
“South Africa also has white people,” I’d say. “About ten percent of the population is white.” The more I was faced with this logic, the more I felt like I was having an argument over my own identity. “There are all kinds of people there – lots of different races,” I’d say, but this didn’t satisfy the Chinese, who think of race and nationality as things that are more or less the same. The people of China’s diaspora, whose families might have lived in the US or Canada or the UK for generations, are still Chinese. Iain and I must, as a result, still be European.
“Aah… So your parents must be from England,” the local would continue. “That’s why you’re white!”
“Well, originally my mother is – yes. But lots of white South Africans have Dutch ancestry, including my family. That goes back hundreds of years. We are white South Africans – not Europeans.”
“So you are a British person.”
“No, I’m not. I’m South African.”
“You can’t be – you’re white.�

Continue reading South African in China

South African in China is an Overland travel stories » Old World Wandering original

Part I: New Arrivals

On the banks of the Mekong in Vientiane, there is a Chinese temple that is empty for most of the day. The city’s children use its concrete parking lot to practice BMX and skateboard tricks, popping Ollies and kickflips in torn jeans and t-shirts with obscure English prints – like Your Momma Is My Bitch, on a podgy boy of about twelve. The dragons and roosters on the temple’s roof are coated in waterproof enamel, a layer of primary colour that is strikingly new, because Laos’ temples and monasteries are mostly dilapidated, with paint and mould peeling off their sun-bleached walls. Inside the temple, an electric pump pours water into a stone tank and a polished Buddha presides over the empty room. There is a plastic seat for an attendant beside the shrine, but when I visited even he wasn’t there. His pack of cigarettes, with a photograph on it of orchids bobbing on water in a copper bowl, was the only sign of ordinary life.

Opposite the temple, across the Mekong, is the Thai town of Phan Phrao. Phan Phrao was originally a part of Vientiane, but in 1887, when France drew up the borders of its new protectorate in Southeast Asia, the Mekong was used as a boundary. Vientiane was cut in half. If it had still been Laos’ capital, the French would have been guilty of exactly the sort of brash land grab for which European colonialism is reviled, but in 1887 Vientiane was not the capital of Laos. It had been annexed by Siam in 1779 and in 1827, during a rebellion, it was razed by a Siamese army. The Emerald Buddha was carried off with the spoils. It is now a talisman of the Thai kings, enshrined at the royal Wat Phra Kaew in Bangkok.

At night, smugglers cross the river with products Laos cannot manufacture itself. It is a tempting run. Although Laos is a member of the ASEAN trading bloc, it imposes duties of up to 40 percent on imports from Thailand. The crossing is simple too, a straightforward A to B over unpatrolled water. The Mekong is a few hundred metres wide where it flows past Vientiane, but the water is sluggish and heavy with silt. On the Lao side, a wide sandbar called Don Chan Island halves the distance from riverbank to riverbank. Don Chan is, for the moment, just a strip of mud and scrub, but a joint venture with a Chinese company and 180 million dollars of cheap Chinese loans will soon transform it into an island of wealth, with apartments and offices, a shopping centre, a hotel, an entertainment complex, a medical centre and an international school.

Even my Lonely Planet guidebook, which I normally dismissed as a vapid guide to Southeast Asia’s banana-pancake trail, contained a reference to the Chinese presence in the city. Fifty thousand labourers from China had moved in, it said, as part of a deal between the two countries’ governments. In return, China had built the city’s stadium for the Southeast Asian games, along with the road to it. A waiter at the Mekong View Café told me that the empty temple was built for these 50,000 new arrivals. It might have explained why nobody ever paid their respects to the deity inside: Laos had apparently reneged on the agreement, with the lame excuse that the wrong official had signed the papers. But my waiter had been wrong. Fude Temple was established in 1968, by immigrants from China’s Guangdong province; its parking lot was smooth and its coat of enamel still bright because as part of the redevelopment of the promenade along the Mekong – a project funded by Korea – the old temple had been knocked down and rebuilt

Continue reading The Chinese of Vientiane

The Chinese of Vientiane is an Overland travel stories » Old World Wandering original

Old World Wandering has been nominated for the South African Blog Awards. To win, we need to collect more votes than South Africa’s largest travel magazine, Getaway, which explains the first of the four images below. The other three were inspired by our last few weeks in Hong Kong, where we’ve felt more like jobless vagrants than we normally do.

To vote:

1. Click here
2. Enter your email Address
3. Wait for the confirmation email
4. When it arrives, click on the link in the body to confirm your vote

Thank you

Continue reading No Biltong, No Gucci, No 繁體字

No Biltong, No Gucci, No 繁體字 is an Overland travel stories » Old World Wandering original

The 8pm express to Nong Khai was clattering its way out of Bangkok. Attendants in white uniforms with fat lapels moved through the sleeper cars, making passengers’ beds – snapping sheets, pillow slips and lime green curtains into place with military efficiency, and without the vaguest hint that they’d like a tip. The contrast with Indian trains was stark, but Claire and I were disappointed. Although we had only just embarked, our sleeper car was falling silent.

It was our first Thai train. We had bought beers – two cans of Leo, light by Thai standards at 5% – and curry pies. We had two new books, Bangkok Eight and From the Land of Green Ghosts, our first about Southeast Asia and, without discussing it, we had decided to celebrate this new transportation system, this new magic of A to B overland.

I had resigned myself to disappearing behind my curtain and reading when Claire spied life, past the end of our carriage. It was the dining car, and as we entered it we both cracked wide smiles. The car’s windows were flung open, allowing the full clang-clank, clang-clank of wheels on track to knock through the carriage. Seventies funk was blaring, and the lights of a fluorescent city flooded in. The dining car was like a river boat, floating through a fantasy of urban Asia. It was in the city, but not of it

Continue reading Night Train to Nong Khai

Night Train to Nong Khai is an Overland travel stories » Old World Wandering original