Vientiane: an alternative guide

After digging in somewhere for seven months you start to insinuate yourself under its skin. The alien feels familiar even if the impenetrable language doesn’t. (Some) people who glared at me like I had nine noses become hyper-friendly, a seedy guest house room - erroneously described in my guide as “clean” with “helpful staff” - is upgraded to a shared house. I am the only European within a square mile and, while neither fitting in nor being accepted are about to happen, I seem to be vaguely tolerated. I could only summarise living in Sisavath South, Soi 21, as like being famous minus the fringe benefits plus wild dogs raising Cain all night, food unfit for human consumption and residents so insular many simply never leave the village. Racism is overt and surprising for a supposedly tolerant culture.

Squandering the noughties with no focus or motivation managing only to write an unpublished novel, I was jet-propelled to Laos, land of a million elephants and the silent S. My plan was to sidestep the global financial debacle, an enervating stretch of unemployment and seek work where there’s always demand, notably teaching English in Asia.

Such a long break - and a break spent ensconced anew in the plush parental home surrounded by family, close friends and their eight adorable kids - meant that I needed a soft option, or at least not such a harsh one as the venality of central Bangkok or the unmitigated chaos of Hong Kong Island. My choice turned out to become anything but an easy path to tread...

After 250 emailed applications resulting in just 3 responses – all positive but declined for various reasons – I was offered a job at “The School” in Vientiane subject to an interview in person. [Please refer to The Silent S for my opinions on this place of “education”.] Obtaining familial finance to decamp was tougher than if I was dealing with a firm offer but just a fortnight after deciding to take a chance I was inoculated, packed and in Lao PDR via Bangkok. A four week flurry of messages led me to believe it was imperative I arrived before Christmas. Duly did so and was told at interview the start date was mid-January. Fuck you very much.

Lao Please Don’t Rush, the local punning on Lao Peoples’ Democratic Republic, perhaps most succinctly sums up the attitude of the natives. Lao Time is an extremely loose version of punctuality, perhaps leaving home when you’re due to meet someone several kilometres away... Although almost horizontally laid-back, I found myself kicking against this flagrant disregard for timescale and so affixed to my wall a picture of my favourite animal, the inimitable sloth. The first thing I see each morning, it’s a visual reminder, to press a cliché, to go with the flow. “Bopenyang” [no worries] is one of the most commonly employed epithets and, despite many enduring crippling poverty, this laissez-faire attitude is all-pervasive. This word may be spelled in multiple fashions. When bottled water is retailed with the brand name “Two Elephents”, the national symbol, accurate transliteration is obviously not one of Laos’s strong suits. A nearby shop manages “Laundry” in one window but “Luandry” in the other. Eastern Star Bilingual School, a purported centre of excellence held in perplexingly high regard by the Lao, published an advert in the Vientiane Times soliciting new students with “%100” and “100%” together with a handful of further glaring errors in less than fifty words. Their “High educational technology” doesn’t stretch, apparently, to a spell checker. The Lao ceaselessly draw attention to the fact their country is called Lao not Laos; thousands of bumper stickers and T-shirts proudly and contrarily proclaim “Go Laos!”

It’s difficult to describe Vientiane as a city and as a capital it’s absolutely without precedent, at least when compared to the paltry twelve or thirteen others I’ve managed to bowl around. With just three main cross streets, navigation is a rudimentary task. I have incomparably weak directional skills yet was fully oriented within a week and, now mobile with a single speed mountain bike, am expanding my horizons and experience exponentially.

Outrageous contrast would be an apt pair of words to encapsulate the quiddity of this sleepy settlement nestled snugly in a crook of the massive Mekong. A slew of Hummers, the ubiquitous Toyota trucks and all manner of upscale motors jockey for position with ramshackle tuk-tuks and pensioners furiously pedalling BMX’s. With an average annual income of around $500 alongside an import tax of 150% on new vehicles, I can only assume a select few benefit munificently via the royally failed experiment of communism at the cost of the vast bulk or that illegal activities are widespread. A Bentley is the only marque I’ve yet to spy. We must discount the Chrysler facsimile with a fraudulent B on the front yet the back emblazoned with its true badge. Each and every road rule is flaunted almost on general principle. Three or four per motorbike, as elsewhere in SE Asia, is standard practice. Most don’t bother with helmets. The few adults that do are quite content for their miniature offspring to go without, something that baffles me. The female pillion passengers sit atavistically and quaintly sidesaddle. Pedestrian crossings are a waste of white paint, traffic lights seldom obeyed. Almost nobody looks before sharply pulling out and carving you up; when swerving violently kerbside the incorrect indicator is used, worse than using no signal at all. Barely pubescent youths tear up the pavement on powerful scooters while texting and the one-way systems in place are purely notional concepts.

(Since beginning this piece a pimped-up white Bentley was spotted and snapped en route to my new job at Logos Academy, somewhere it’s a joy to work with engaging fellow teachers and almost entirely eager students.)

If forced to nail my colours to a mast it would be that of the libertarian. People here certainly do what they want but forget the important kicker “as long as it doesn’t effect anyone else”. Put crudely, few Lao give a midnight fuck about the consequences of their actions and consideration doesn’t seem to be in their lexicon, as absent as the word “please”. No door is closed when it can be slammed, pavements are completely obstructed by parked cars, stereos brought outside to the annoyance of any near neighbours without hearing problems and parties held, perversely, on Sunday nights. Still, when all most of the villagers of Soi 21 do is lay on the floor drinking beer and playing cards all day neglecting their children and livestock, the day of the week doesn’t come into play. They can manage to rustle up funds for a plasma TV and industrial sound rig yet not a solitary piece of furniture or dog food. They are stuffed fifteen to a unit like the proverbial tinned sardines and the only ones I pity are the helpless kids and animals.

Strange things happen in Laos. Often they’re the very bones of contention that grate at home. I have always despised underfilled bottles or containers with a huge ridge underneath meaning that an optical illusion and gypping is carried out in one. Open any drink here at your peril; the crammed vessel will discharge part of its contents all over your clothing. The flickering neon striplight will finally come good the very instant you leave the darkened bathroom. I am a realist not prone to superstition and will not labour this point as strange things happen everywhere but seem to occur more frequently here…

This morning, after my staple jailhouse workout, I zoomed into the shower: no water. In England this minor inconvenience would have transformed me on a dime into Michael Douglas in “Falling Down” but, chuckling, I took a Tigerhead whore’s wash and cycled to town. When surrounded by downtrodden souls concerned about their next meal and routinely living in undiluted squalor, you rapidly re-prioritise. Bipolar, I’ve never been the most positive individual but each day I witness no less than a dozen events that make me wholly appreciative of how wholly fortunate I am. While never likely to be an optimist, my erstwhile massive pessimistic streak is gradually lessening in size and my resourcefulness growing in inverse proportion through necessity.

The ceaseless cry of “Tuk-tuk”, more a statement than a question, is actually an invitation for anything but a ride in these rickety three-wheelers. I can only liken the cartel of operators to eighties New York crack dealers and if an offer of marijuana is rebuffed all other drugs up to and including heroin are reeled off in a quickfire list. Any idea that opium has been eradicated would be proved untrue within minutes of arriving in central Vientiane. To say there exists an open and open air drug market would be prize-winning understatement. If actually pushed to ferry you anywhere the price demanded means taking a metered cab would be far cheaper (not to mention much more comfortable).

History and Laos’s effective disengagement from the world from 1975, when the communist Pathet Lao forcibly seized power until opening up in the 90’s, mean that the country has been spared most of the more insidious aspects of anodyne Western “culture”. It is, today, still more of a French colonial outpost than a stereotypical Asian city. You will see no Golden Arches, no chain stores and much of the vernacular architecture razed to the ground elsewhere in the name of redevelopment remains intact if decrepit. For now the stucco shop houses, wooden homes and corrugated iron remain even if most of the flora and fauna planted by the French was inanely uprooted. Still, with frangipani and palm trees, monasteries and temples, saffron-robed monks (albeit smoking ,wielding mobile phones and surprisingly surly) mean that Laos remains different through being forgotten and neglected.

Change, though, would be evident and briskly afoot even to a blind man. In the seven months I’ve resided here, a gargantuan shopping mall on the tree-glutted Avenue Lane Xang has bulleted from foundations and bamboo scaffolding to near-completion. A Chinese outfit, D-Mart, has wasted no time whatsoever in banging up a smaller version adjacent to my new language academy. Flooding any building work with imported labour, poor young men dressed in flip-flops and singlets - twinned with an anomalous full-face balacalava – working fourteen hours plus seven days a week means that any construction project is hastily finished (although subpar). If creating an alternative Bangkok is the intent then it will be to the loss of Laos which, to me, is the type of place that nobody really wants to be yet nobody particularly wants to leave. In order to attract more tourists something must be done to remedy the heinous standards of hygiene and filth as, for many, this is an outright deal-breaker. The rapid rise of ecotourism is perhaps one of the more healthy moves forward being made with at least some benefit to the villagers.

Truly unique characters abound from Tou - ostensibly a barber - who spends his waking hours tapping up Westerners for beer money on the (false) promise that his father is the general of the army thus ensuring the donor safe passage to “Toxic Granny” openly selling drugs from her shop on the river road, a premises filled with nothing but cardboard boxes. Feral dogs cause mayhem to the extent that I have tethered a home-made quick release cosh to my bike frame after being chased by a real savage for some considerable distance. The following week the same brute gave chase but an instant dismount brandishing my weapon sent him off again with equal and opposite vim. Unlike most cities, Vientiane is eerily deserted at weekends making it a capital of unparalled tranquility at least two days a week.

Concluding would be an opportune moment to bulldoze a few guide book myths. Any guide, definitively, is just that. It reflects nothing but the opinions of its authors just as what follows are simply my thoughts and musings…

“Any overt display of passion...is taboo. Openly gay behaviour is contrary to local culture...” My own testimony is that seemingly half the male population are gay and stride without rebuke with arms draped loosely around shoulders. Perhaps the need to effectively buy a wife here is responsible for the disproportionate percentage of homosexuals but, if “taboo”, it’s still rife and undisguised.

“...a couple of traffic lights command the dribble of tuk-tuks and bicycles...” Initially, “command” would not be the wisest selection of verb due to the blanket rejection of all laws as outlined above. Secondly, the flow of traffic in 2011 is anything but a “dribble” and includes the above-mentioned rake of sports cars and 4WD’s.

“While bargaining is common it is rare to be fleeced.” Bargaining is definitely common, being ripped off a guarantee if white. You will practically always be overcharged since, in the absence of price tags, each vendor aims to extort the maximum they think you will pay. Some things are absurdly cheap, massages outstanding value and there are a healthy number of clean restaurants offering great fare for silly money. Overall, though, it is not particularly cheap if you crave any Western comforts or want to insulate and elevate yourself from the abject poverty.

“The best place to try Lao food is often from roadside stalls or the markets.” Agreed if you enjoy seeing flies and insects on your produce, fancy a dose of dysentery to go and have either a gas mask or the constitution of Bruce Lee to negotiate the sickening stench of the drains sometimes half-covered by a plank of wood but more often left wide open. Texting on the hoof is inadvisable in these parts. I made the error of using a phone in each hand while entering the road where the US maintain an embassy and almost pitched headlong and defenceless down a cavernous open pit.

The comment which afforded me a roar of hilarity is that “One of the main reasons for the tight controls of tourism on Laos is because of the perceived corrosive effect that badly dressed tourists were having on Lao culture”. While the women are generally impeccably-groomed and usually sport the sarong-type sinh, the males are usually bare chested shit sacks; sometimes they furl their singlet up to the nipples, looking even worse than if butt-naked. This clash demonstrates in microcosm the rampant mysogynism riddling Lao society.

Perhaps the clearest and briefest description of Laos was laid down by a new colleague…”This is a society as near to complete fucking apathy as possible.” People put in long working hours but many are spent asleep and they groom one another lazily like cats beneath the crushing heat. The force of the rain is a disincentive to do anything at all for fully half the year.

In the interest of fairness I should tail off by concurring absolutely with the claim that “This is a land that endures the terrible legacy of being the most bombed country per capita in the world…” despite not being involved in the military conflict between the USA and Vietnam and that “Regardless of their history and poverty, people here radiate a sunny, happy disposition”. For ever annoying chancer there are many more sunny individuals and I maintain now what I have from the day I arrived: Laos is a fantastic place to vacation but, for anyone from a developed country, the drawbacks outweigh the advantages if considering setting up your stall here permanently.

Vientiane is absolutely not a destination for everyone but it offers a genuinely different experience, rare in today’s homogenized global village.