Travel vignettes across a continent

By Marc Ethier
Gather Correspondent

Laos
The old ladies crowded around and squatted beside us in the dust, in the shade of a ramshackle barn. The pleasing smell of cooked noodles wafted out of its wide double-doors.

They had questions. Our names: our countries: why were we traveling in northern Laos; why had we come to the village?

And most importantly, why don’t we ever see women with blond hair up here?

That provoked laughs all around. Our group – three men, including myself, and four women – had climbed deep into hill tribe territory north of Luang Prabang, near Meung Kwa, high in the quiet hills on an unplanned visit to Akha and Khmer villages. There was not a blonde among us, and, we had to admit, we hadn’t seen many fair-haired Westerners roaming in these parts.

The people were universally welcoming, if a little confused by our arrival. Here, as the hour slunk toward a steamy noon in a Khmer outpost an hour from the nearest town, we were brought to a shady resting place while food was prepared and questioned.

The contrast between the two villages we’d recently visited was striking. The night before, we’d arrived at Pakha, an Akha village deep in the hills about five hours from Meung Kwa – two hours’ march from the nearest road. The friendly villagers met and welcomed us and our guide, and gladly made room for us to spend the night. They brought out a musical instrument, much like a one-string violin, and of course there was the usual heavy smoking of tobacco from bamboo water pipes and imbibing of moonshine-like rice wine. But the children were sick with rasping coughs and pink eye – everyone was sick, coughing, dirty – and late into the night a child screamed with a mysterious ailment, to the consternation of his mother and village elders, including the shaman. By morning he was silent but we never found out what was wrong.

Pakha lacks clean water: women haul it in muddy plastic bottles up a steep slope, straight uphill, an hour’s journey round trip. There is never enough. There is not enough to grow rice; there is barely enough to grow sugarcane.

The villagers relocated to this spot about twenty years ago, fleeing persecution from Khmers. They do not live in the best place for agriculture, and recent efforts by the Laos government – with the aid of China and the U.S. – has taken away a key crop: poppies. Signs announcing the “Replace of Poppy” program are everywhere, in English and Lao. In Pakha, with no aid, only taxes from the government, they still manage to eke out a tiny rice crop, and some sugarcane, and grass brooms, though clearly to the detriment of the surrounding land.

The Khmer village we hiked into next had a steady supply of clean drinking water, and the difference was marked: healthy, playful children; wide well-swept streets; laughing conversation amid the grass broom-making and rice wine production. We ambled down the main street after a sweaty stomp in the birdless jungle and must have looked a little open-mouthed in our appreciation for the change.

The old women ambled over after a time, all white hair and wrinkled skin, and mischievous eyes twinkling with questions. Foremost among them was the not entirely facetious query about blonde women, which we took to be a remark on the hardiness, the adventurousness, of brunettes.

Disclaimer: My wife Lisa is a brunette. Brunettes are terrific in every way.

Vietnam
It is something to have gone from the quiescence of Laos to the bustle, the frenzy of Hanoi. We flew in during Tet, expecting the worst, only to find that the feverish pace actually marked the slowest period of the year for Vietnam’s capital.

Laos, after decades of turmoil, is a peaceful country now. To wander around its temples of crumbling tile, cracked concrete, broken shingle, faded murals, rotted wood – and unassailable peace and silence – is a very personal experience. To do the same in Vietnam is an experience necessarily altered (for good sometimes, for ill often) by the country’s huge upsurge in tourism, which we were informed had occurred only in the last 10 years.

In Hanoi there are certain “must-sees,” among them Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum, where it is rumored a very lifelike wax replica of the former revolutionary leader is on display for visitors. Don’t suggest this to locals, who insist it’s the real Ho. Dress smartly and expect an interminable queue. You may have fewer shoulders to jostle at the Temple of Literature, though during Tet, as one of the few temples or monuments open, the place was lousy with tour buses, positively brimming with pear-shaped gringos. A visit is worth it: Dedicated to Confucius, it is a sprawling series of courtyards, pools (now empty), pagodas  and gardens. As you move through sanctum after sanctum, you come to an expanse of flagstones edged by potted banzai and palm trees and minor statuary, on each side of which facing off are rows of smiling tortoises, heads polished by many hands. It's good luck to rub the heads, at least during Tet. In the main building you may hear the traditional strummings of a five-piece ensemble; worshippers make offerings and burn incense for the spirits of the temple.

Not as high on the tourist track is Hoa Lo Prison, the famous dungeon where thousands of Vietnamese were interned and tortured, and hundreds executed, by the French during colonial days. Irony: there seem to be more French in Hanoi now, as baguette-munching tourists, than there could have been back in the day as rights-abusing colonizers. Once the Vietnamese kicked them out they turned Hoa Lo into confinement for prisoners of war: the Hanoi Hilton, where hundreds of American pilots, John McCain famously among them, were held here between '64 and '73.

A sign in the prison, now a museum, declares that among the wartime inmates were Douglas “Pete” Peterson, America’s first ambassador to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and “John McCain, now a Senator in the U.S. House of Representatives.”

India
We plunged into the heart of India’s northwestern Thar Desert just a week after arriving on the Subcontinent. We’d barely collected our breath after three days of sightseeing in Delhi before jumping a train to Agra, then on to Jaipur, and finally the end of the line, Jaisalmer, a former trade outpost about 200 kilometers from the Pakistan border. The train goes no farther.

Jaisalmer is a fort town, and many of the city’s 58,000 inhabitants still live inside the fort, built in 1156. Subsidence is a serious problem and travelers are advised to stay outside the fort; in recent years three of its 99 bastions have collapsed.

Walking into Jaisalmer Fort is like walking back in time. A Palace and several ornate Jain temples enliven the deceptively simple design of the fort. Slick paving stones roll upward under wide-arched sandstone gates into the city, the way flanked by peddlers, touts and beggars: bats and pigeons in dark corners overhead: yellow, white and blue: the echo of the day’s trade. All the sounds of doing things the way they’ve been done for centuries. It’s easy to imagine arriving here 500 years ago with a wagonload of goods, or at the head of a diplomatic procession, marveling at the majesty of the architecture. From any one of the bastions a view far to the horizon is possible. Bulls laconically wander the narrow lanes, and camels trussed outside doorways munch thoughtfully, belch discontentedly, and fart noisily.

Many tourists come here to ride the camels, or go on “camel safari.” (Many don’t.) Being atop a camel is like riding a tall, mean horse. With an ungainly gait. Who is constantly trying to buck you, kick you, or scrape you off his back against a thorny desert bush.
 
But deep in the desert, where the scrub and thorn give way to rippled sand dunes near the village of Sam – some 60 kilometers from Pakistan – the sunset views are spectacular, and the ornery camel worth enduring.

Half-day, overnight, three- and four-day safaris are available. You will pay a premium for the experience – in the neighborhood of 850 rupees (about $20, exorbitant!) for a half-day jaunt. But the photos alone will be worth it.

Also you get to play Lawrence of Arabia. So don that turban and head west!

Marc and his wife, Lisa, sold their home outside Washington, D.C., quit their jobs and embarked on a yearlong world trip in September. They have visited Fiji, New Zealand, Australia and Southeast Asia and will continue to India and Europe through September 2007.

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