Laos Waypoints:

Lao Time:

At 9:00am Tuesday morning I ran headlong into Lao time. Until then everything had gone like clockwork; no missed flights, no lost luggage, no forgotten reservations; everything smooth as silk. Planes, trains and automobiles- all on schedule.

The long-tail boat that carried me across the Mekong that morning passed through an unseen barrier that rendered clocks and schedules irrelevant. After procuring my visa along with the requisite twenty stamps in my passport (visa officer’s name, visa date stamp, passport officer’s name, passport stamp, expiry date, color of shirt tourist is wearing, name of office dog, etc.) I wandered up the street to a non-descript travel office.

In the ten by ten cement cube was a desk, a few plastic chairs, idyllic Mekong sunset posters on the wall and an officious looking guy smoking a cigarette while jabbering on the telephone. I handed him the slip of paper that indicated that I had paid for a bus ticket in Chiang Khong, Thailand, earlier that morning and he nodded at me and waived at a chair and continued jabbering. When he got off the phone I queried him “Bus to Luang Namtha?”, to which he replied “Yes, I get tuk-tuk; you wait” and then disappeared. Fifteen minutes later he returned with a tuk-tuk. By now it was 9:15, and I was told that the bus would leave between 9 and 9:30, and I hadn’t even gotten to the bus station yet. The bus station was five kilometers outside of town, and the tuk-tuk took fifteen minutes to get there. Upon arrival at the bus station, the tuk-tuk driver was surprised to find that the bus that was supposed to leave by 9:30 actually had departed, but he shrugged his shoulders and pointed to another mini-van and took off. I went over to the van and asked the driver when he would leave, and he shrugged and said (in the only English he knew), “When full, go.” Realize that I am using the word “asked” quite liberally here- pantomiming looking at a watch, waiving my arms, etc- the English phrase “When do you leave for Luang Namtha” got me nowhere. So I sat down and waited, and other travelers and locals dribbled in by ones and twos and we eventually left at around 11:00am. Welcome to Laos.

Boat Racing:

As it turned out, the van ride was not too painful. The once long and dusty road had been paved, and the trip only took four hours, which must have been why the guest house owner in Chiang Khong, Thailand, had encouraged me to take the bus rather than follow my original plan of a two day boat trip up the Nam Tha river.

I arrived at the Boat Landing guesthouse on the Nam Tha river near Luang Namtha at around 4:00 pm, and after a shower I was enjoying a beer in the open restaurant next to the river when I noticed that a crowd was forming on the riverbank just upstream. Soon I heard a whistle blowing, and a long canoe appeared around a bend in the river with a coxswain blowing the whistle and thirty or so paddlers furiously stroking down the river. Just above the restaurant the coxswain stopped, and the paddlers relaxed while the rudder man and coxswain turned the boat around. I asked Thone the receptionist what was going on, and he said that the townspeople were practicing for the big boat races on October 27th. The occasion for the races was the end of Buddhist lent- I am not sure what “Buddhist lent” actually means, but the fact that it was ending was a big deal. Soon there were several teams of both men and women practicing, and I decided to walk up the river and get a closer look.

The boats had angled sides and a flat bottom, and were about seventy feet long, three feet wide (in the middle), and could hold up to forty paddlers, a coxswain and a rudder man. The teams would paddle slowly upstream around the bend, and then turn around and paddle downstream in time with the whistle tweets which would gradually become faster and faster until the finish line was crossed. I counted the strokes as a couple of boats passed and came up with a rate of about 100 strokes per minute for the faster boats.

After watching for a bit I decided that I wanted to give it a try, and when the next boat came up to the beach I was at I pantomimed that I wanted to get in. The coxswain smiled and nodded for me to take the place of the first person in the boat, who grinned as he handed me his paddle. I looked around at the paddler behind me as I got in, and he made motions indicating that I should hook my feet under the seat in front of me. As we pushed off from the beach the coxswain blew one long tweet to signal the start of paddling and we all dug in and headed up river, stroking to the rhythmic tweets of the whistle. As I was stroking I looked up and the coxswain gave me a thumbs up, so I figured I must have been doing something right. After about two minutes the tweets stopped and we all relaxed while the boat turned with the current. So much for the warm up- now it was time for the real work to begin. When the boat was facing downstream the coxswain raised his hands, and with a blast of his whistle lowered them and the boat lurched forward as thirty paddles dug in. At first the whistle tweets were not to fast, about one per second, and I was able to keep up. Then the pace increased, with the tweets coming faster and faster as we flew down the river. It was all that I could do to keep up, with my head down and body struggling to keep up with the pace. I was amazed at how fast we were moving. In just a few minutes I began to tire and could not keep up with the stroke rate, and I was almost thrown out of the boat by the surging strokes from the other paddlers. I managed to re-synchronize my strokes for the last few seconds, and finally the coxswain signaled halt with one long tweet. I gasped for breath and turned around to look at the other paddlers who smiled and laughed as I breathed hard. I figured that I acquitted myself well for a 43 year old farang, but I suspected that an invitation to join the team was not forthcoming.

The womens team practicing (view with QuickTime).

The many faces of Laos:

By some estimates there are over 170 different ethnic groups in Laos, many of which live in northern Laos. Some of the different people that I saw around Luang Namtha were from the Khmu, Lanten, Akha, Yao, Tai Dam and Tai Daeng tribes. Many of these ethnic groups still live a traditional lifestyle, although that is changing quite rapidly with the advance of civilization.

A woman selling eggs in the market at Muang Sing.

When the Lao Peoples Democratic Republic government (a communist government styled after Vietnam) was formed in 1975 the Lao people were in the minority, and so they created a simplified ethnic classification system based roughly upon the elevation at which people lived. The low land people were comprised mainly of Lao and Tai ethnicities at about 60 percent of the population, and the middle elevation people and hill tribes were lumped together in the two other groups for the remaining 40 percent. This system has allowed the communist government to maintain a majority and is represented on the 1,000 kip note with three people representing the three official “ethnicities”.

All of the hill people lead an agrarian lifestyle, primarily farming rice. There is usually a vegetable plot or two in each village, and chickens, pigs and sometimes a few cattle and water buffalo are raised for meat. Water buffalo are also used for tilling the flat valley rice paddies, while rice fields on the hillside are tilled by hand. Various fruits and vegetables are also collected from the forest.

Here is a brief synopsis of some of the tribal villages and people that I met; if I have a chance I will update this information when I return home with more in-depth research.

The Akha people are one of the more well known hill tribe peoples. The women display the family wealth by wearing silver coins and amulets on their hats. It is traditional for the parents of a teenage Akha boy to build him a small house just big enough for a bed next to the main house. The Akha boy then chooses a girlfriend to sleep with, and if she becomes pregnant within three to six months they will get married; otherwise the boy will find another girlfriend. I’m thinking the girls get a raw deal out of that situation.

Akha women selling bannanas at the Muang Sing market.

The Lanten people migrated south into Laos from China, and they still use Chinese characters for their written language. They produce paper from bamboo mulch for writing, as well as indigo inks and dyes for their clothing. The marriage tradition of the Lanten was hard for me to believe, but I heard the same story from several different people. Lanten boys and girls must marry a person with the same birthday (although not necessarily the same age). I suppose this rule goes a long way towards preventing inbreeding- when the average village is less than 200 people, chances are pretty slim that there will be an unmarried person of the opposite sex in your village. This tradition leads to “hunting” parties, wherein a group of teenagers from one village will hike to villages near and sometimes far in search of a mate. This also leads to many mixed marriages with other hill tribe ethnicities, which is perfectly acceptable for the Lanten.

The Yao (also known as Mien) are another ethnic group that migrated from China. The traditional cloths worn Yao women consist of a black overcoat with a black turban on the head and a long red boa worn around the neck.

A Yao woman at the Muang Sing market.