Luang Prabang

n a riverside hut, a few minutes by scooter from the old town, a pair of massage tables lie parallel, generously spaced, facing open windows above the Mekong River. The tables are draped in Egyptian cotton and wafts of lemongrass and jasmine wrap the room in gentle servility. Air, cool and delicate, falls from the surrounding hills and across the rice fields through the timber frame, running over the backs of the two bodies lying motionless inside. The Mekong snakes through the jungle effortlessly, as it has for millennia. It’s quiet here.

The masseuses press deeply into the shoulders that lie motionless on the beds. With firmness and precision, they find gnarled muscle fibre. Fingers bury themselves in the backs, searching for a reaction, a pressure point, or something to indicate that the person underneath can feel their presence. The small frames of the masseuses carry loads unbearable for most. Their hands remain anonymous and overlooked, tired just like the city in which they call home. Luang Prabang is like the hands of its masseuses—worn out, calloused, and hypertonic from long, hard years of unknotting itself.

I arrived in the mid-afternoon, coming from Kunming in Yunnan Province, China, along with a few hundred Chinese, Laotians, Thai, and Burmese. The long carriages spilled onto the unshaded platform at Luang Prabang. The journey by rail was, to my disappointment, mostly underground. The industrious Chinese had tunnelled through every mountain and molehill southeast of the Tibetan Plateau. This continued after crossing the border into Laos, where the railway had been developed by the Chinese all the way to Vientiane. After two border crossings—one on the Chinese side at Mohan and another at Boten on the Lao side—we were finally in Laos.

I was happy. We had crossed the serpentine Mekong in the open air—a sight I had prayed to see deep under the mountains of northern Laos. But stepping onto the platform, the first thing that hit me was a wall of humidity, closely followed by the sting of a sun so piercing the skin on the back of my neck curled. A cacophony of birdsong and cicadas erupted from the jungle, as if trying to reclaim the unceded land on which the newly constructed station sat. I began to sweat immediately.

The station is a modern cathedral, with its sweeping arches and lofty batons of smooth timber, heavily air-conditioned, and equipped with an ATM. No inbound passengers are allowed in. Why? Those are the rules. Where is the nearest ATM, then? I asked a languid ticket officer, unimpressed with my phonetic dictation of the letters A-T-M. He lifted his hand and pointed into the jungle without looking up from his paperwork. “Over there.” In the distance, a small stilted shed sat in the middle of what was once a rice paddy, with curtains of foliage hanging from the jungle beyond. The ATM swallowed my card, only to coweringly return it after a kick to its sternum, without any cash.

The city itself is heartbreakingly beautiful. The hum of motor scooters cascades through the streets like the mountain streams line the folds of the surrounding hinterland. Clouds of fog appear and vanish like ghosts above the endless tropical greenery. Strolling through the old part of town, I found a seat in the shade outside an old French café and, despite being in the middle of the jungle, sipped a café au lait and enjoyed a lavishly buttered croissant. The French influence is unmistakable, like a stain on a white shirt—a reminder of the devilish acts of bygone colonialism. Although there is unnerving beauty to the well-preserved French architecture, the town is living through a century-old hangover, recoiling from its colonial occupation and the more recent Vietnam War, in which the American army continuously bombed the Ho Chi Minh Trail and hill stations unnervingly close to here. To my surprise, I heard many a garrulous spat from Americans and French expats and tourists alike. They haunt the streets like the millions of unexploded bombs left in the surrounding hills haunt the unsuspecting farmer or curious child.

As I finished my coffee, a trickle of wide-brimmed tourists perambulated down the main drag with expressionless vacancy, as if the storefronts and food stalls were a washing machine exhibition. These same gazes glossed over the many faceless local children sitting by the roadside, guarding blankets with a few ornamental flowers or overripe bananas. They sat solemn and cross-legged, lining the streets fifty meters apart, easily mistaken for bollards preventing cars from driving on the footpath. Even the tourists here are languid and lethargic—backpackers reaching the end of their shoestring, hungover parents losing sight of their two- and four-year-olds, fatigued Chinese businessmen on a weekender, free from the grip of Big Brother. The common theme: everyone wants a bargain in one of the poorest countries in Southeast Asia.

I wasn’t going to stay here for very long—three days, to be exact. It was a pit stop on my way south from China, and I spent more on the visa to get in than I did in the country. But even in the little time spent here, an angst grew from some bullshit social injustice paradox I was cleaning my ego with. I was adamant that I had some moral high ground, towering above the flood of foreigners. How could a country gripped with the breathless grasp of poverty be infested with such a blind indifference from its visitors? What were they looking at if it wasn’t the limbless boy begging for small change in front of the night market? What grabbed attention if it wasn’t the mother with four infants selling slices of durian roadside? And the expats—how could they live here in a country that was the punching bag for their homelands for the last century? I wanted to see through the façade of gimmicky waterfall tours and Mekong ferry rides and continental accents to feel a connection to a landscape and people that deliver blows to your abdomen with their fiery mystique. But I couldn’t look past the faces of the locals—a fatigue from a relatively newfound relationship with tourists, a pittance of twenty years of open borders. Though I felt anonymous here, the reality of existence in this place began coiling around me.

I wandered aimlessly, my stomach slowly sinking into confusion from the intense heat and the fiery plate of laab I downed over lunch. I found a shady spot in a bar overlooking the Mekong. It was empty and open-air. I sat, lit one of my Chinese cigarettes, and sipped a tall bottle of Beer Lao. The setting sun brimmed a craggy peak in the distance, illuminating the Mekong brilliantly in hues of red and orange. The valley demanded the silence I was desperately seeking. Small fishing boats glided swiftly with a faint crepitation from their muffler-less engines. The view poured itself over me as this magnificent arterial river pours from the Tibetan highlands, thousands of kilometres through Thailand and Cambodia, until it spills into the South China Sea just south of Saigon. I could see the serpent alive and aware—it knows every rift and valley better than I ever will.

The beers began to disappear, and I realized I felt an intense loneliness. I was confused, had barely spoken to anyone in three days, and found a humble bar full of American expats. “Fuck it,” I thought, and walked in.

“If you’re a musician,” an older Yank taunted, “who was the first rock band to have two drummers?”
“The Grateful Dead,” I guessed. I was wrong—apparently, it was the Allman Brothers. But it didn’t matter. I had already lost the interest of the two Americans and the Frenchman who had invited me to their table long before the questions came rolling in. They already knew I was lost, just like them all. The difference was that I was leaving. I began to drink with vigour, a deep thirst for answers.
“Where are you going?” the Frenchman asked.
I told him my plan: from Chengdu to Bangkok by rail, following in the footsteps of the Mekong. I would meet my friend in Bangkok in a few days.
“Skip Bangkok,” the Frenchman said. “The girls are much cheaper in Pattaya. I got my wife there.” I didn’t even flinch at the comment.

I loaded up with one last longneck and a few bottles of water from the small shop across from my hotel and sat on its balcony overlooking the river. I thought about my departure in the morning, but the air was still heavy with the heat of the day, and my head had begun pulsing from all the Beer Lao. Beneath me, small lights flickered in the luminescence of the river’s smooth skin. It calmed me, humbled me, and drew me into a dreamless sleep.

I woke up that morning with sunlight beaming on my pillow. The inescapable heat slithered into my air-conditioned room like the jungle reclaiming the city inside it. A sharp pain began to radiate between my eyes—poison from the fangs that had latched onto me in the last waking hours of the night before, whilst sitting with the serpent itself. I realised I had made a rookie error. I was not immune to the venom of Laos, but I was able to leave. I took my photos and stories as a prize to show my friends at home, but the people still exist there, living a stinging existence in a place that only has answers in the taciturn looks of the cooks, the drivers, the children on the street, and in the hills and valleys that wrap you in a history of beautiful lachrymosity. I left with the snake coiled around me, venom in my veins, and a gaping hole where my prejudices once lay. I took one last look at the river, then closed the windows overlooking the endless rice fields and jungle beyond.