In Sickness And In Wealth

Kuang Si

Sometimes you visit a place which is so overwhelmingly and surprisingly beautiful that you have to sit still for a while, in wonder, in order to properly take it all in.

And so it was with the stunningly magnificent and unique Kuang Si falls, a place that both Sam and I agreed are, in the current rainy season, the most beautiful falls we’ve ever seen.

So far.

April, Somalie, Otis, Sam, Tondi, Craig and I hired a van one day and headed out to this beautiful place, only about 30 clicks from the centre of Luang Prabang. I’ve been here before, but not during the heights of the monsoon season.

It’s a little busier these days, and that’s even before the tourist season has fully kicked in, but it was so relaxed and beautiful anyway, with visitors managed in a quiet and pretty low key way.

It was a beautiful walk from the carpark to the falls, with amazing rainforest, trees and flowers. There were also butterflies fluttering by all over the shop.

Sam teaching Otis something (again)

On the way we stopped at a bear sanctuary, where an organisation called the Laos Bear Rescue Centre supports 25 sun and moon bears they’ve rescued from poachers and hunters, or found in the forest after their parents were captured.

Believe it or not, but bile from the gall bladders of bears is a highly sought after Chinese medicine (go figure), and bears are illegally captured in the forest in order to harvest it from them. Once captured, they’re operated on to insert catheters into their gallbladders to enable bile removal twice/day, and they're then held in appalling conditions in unbelievably small cages.

They suffer terribly, being unable to even stand up or move around in their tiny cages, and they’re forced to endure incredibly intense physiological and psychological stress, including skin conditions and sores, fur loss, bone deformities, swollen limbs, and dental and breathing problems. They often die after a year or two, of infections related to poor medical procedures or their living conditions, and there’s no vets around to attend to their medical needs.

And that’s before we even discuss the psychological trauma of being removed from their social groupings, forest habitat and food supplies.

Bile harvesting is an incredibly cruel practice, and it’s great that there’s people working to stop it, and actively going out to rescue the bears.

Moon bear in the Rescue Centre.

Sun bear, with a tongue to-die-for, from a poster there.

And then we made it to the magnificent series of waterfalls, Kuang Si. There’s falls all over the place, and the rocks supporting them have been formed by millions of years of calcium accumulation. The calcium is deposited by water flowing through the amazing limestone which makes up the geology here.

Of course, it didn’t take us long to get into the action

The incredible blue colour of the water is due to the high number of calcium carbonate particles collected in the water. As the falls dry out a little at the end of the rainy season, the river becomes even more blue, as there’s less brown sediment being washed down and mixing with the blue water.

Giving peace a chance

Our driver took us to a rice farm (he must know the owner), and we had an amazing meal in a restaurant there that we could’ve just as easily found in Byron Bay.

Somalie’s finger photobombing again. Bitch.

Her finger that is, not her.

Somalie’s not a bitch at all. She’s a cunt. But not a cunt in a bad way. We all decided at the falls that we were gonna join the movement which is repurposing the use of the word cunt as a compliment, rather than an insult.

I mean, it makes total sense. Cunts are bloody awesome, aren’t they?

My friend Maddie put me on to that one.

We strolled around the place, it was beautiful

Soms and Otis laughing at yet another of my hilarious jokes

Shadow sides

Dreaming of becoming the perfect family. They don’t need to dream, they already did it. Bastards.

Ock Pop Tok

No, it’s not the name of some weird bogan pop band, but actually a living cultural centre. Ock pop Tok means East meets West.

Our driver dropped us there, as I’d heard it was interesting.

It wasn’t at all, it was as boring as bat shit.

Nah, only joking, it was amazing.

There are around 50 different ethnic groups living in Laos, spread out around the country. Each has their own individual cultural traditions, languages, and traditional clothing.

The original indigenous people of Laos are called the Khmu, and are classified as a Mon-Khmer people by ethnologists. Around 1200 years ago groups of people widely classified as Tai Kadam people began to arrive in the country, followed by Hmong and other hill tribe groups around 200-300 years ago.

Most of the latter arrivals originated from China, particularly southwestern China.

Ock Pop Tok celebrates the amazing textile culture of many of these groups. It supports individual weavers and sells their work. We watched women weaving incredibly intricate and colourful fabrics by hand, using old looms. They were amazingly skilled, and worked super fast.

The fabrics are all made by hand, of silk or cotton, which is manually spun by the women. Displays demonstrated how the silk is removed from silkworm cocoons, and spun, and how cotton is removed from its plant.

I was flabbergasted at the variety of fabric designs and colours. All of the colours are produced using natural dyes.

Here’s an artful selection:

There was a nice river view from there too.

We tuk-tukked back in this little arty gem

See how a bit of culture makes you so happy?

Or maybe it was the shopping.

Phou Si

One day I wasn’t hot enough, so I decided to climb a hill in the middle of the day.

Phou Si is right in the heart of Luang Prabang, and is a beautiful and gentle place.

But at dusk it’s just nuts, with hoards of tourists lining up at a particular spot to get the perfect snap of the sunsetting city.

A nice view behind me of the Royal wat, as I began to climb.

Phou Si itself, the hill, was apparently dumped there by Hanuman the Monkey God himself, after helping Rama defeat the evil King Whatsisname in the Kingdom of Lanka (Sri Lanka). Oh yeah, it was evil King Ravana. The nasty King had kidnapped the hapless Sita from the forest, where her and her perfect husband Rama had been living the perfect life as the perfect couple in the perfect paradise.

Rama and monkeyish Hanuman joined forces, headed over to Sri Lanka, and routed the King. Unfortunately Sita, even though she was rescued, had potentially been sullied by the King. (Who really knew for sure? And you can’t just take her word for it, can you)? And so, in order to prove that there’d been no ravishing by Ravana, Sita had no option but to jump into a burning funeral pyre. What a gal! The role model all young women should aspire to.

Of course, Sita was unharmed by the flames, as she was still pure (phew!), and so everyone lived happily ever after, with Sita satisfying Rama’s every desire for the rest of their deitic lives, which, apparently, all good women should do (not just deities).

Rama didn’t have to prove anything at all of course.

In a later change to the story, tale tellers invented a second Sita (called Maya Sita). When Ravana came to kidnap Sita, he in fact kidnapped Maya Sita instead, some sort of avatar of Sita. When Maya Sita was rescued and jumped into the funeral pyre, she burned to smithereens, so I guess her and Ravana must’ve had a wow of a time. At that instant the real, definitely unsullied Sita reappeared, all ready and virginal for Rama.

In case you don’t know this story, you can read the Ramayana. It’s probably the most well known Hindu fairytale in the world, and the full version is only about 800 pages long, about a tenth of the size of the next most well known fairytale, the Mahabharata.

Looking back over the greenery, and the beautiful Mekong

The stupa at the top was built in 1804, by King Anourat. Well, his slaves built it.

The view from the top

The view of the people looking at the view from the top. And it wasn't even sunset yet.

Once you get over the other side, it’s even more foresty and peaceful. Sam and I enjoyed going up there another day as well.

More high fives

Remember? Don't fight with your relatives.

Asleep pose

Yep, there’s a Buddha for each day of the week. The Saturday Buddha’s propped up high so he can get a better view of the footy on telly.

Young novices asking if they can please please watch the highlights

This beautiful temple has been built around the rock

Nong Khiaw

And so, before we knew it, April and Somalie had to leave us, as they had some extremely important holidaying to do in Gili Trawangan in Indonesia, before their work holidays ended.

Our time all together had ended the night before with a beautiful feast, partly as a belated celebration of my 60th birthday, and partly as a pre-birthday 30th for Somalie and a pre-50th for Sam. That’s a total of 140 years. Wow.

Just as well Michael wasn’t there yet, we would’ve cracked the double-ton.

With impeccable timing, a dear friend Lani sent me a 60th birthday message just before dinner, stating 60 things she loved about me. What an amazing gift. My friends read them out at dinner, I was so moved, and was stunned that she actually came up with so many. She must’ve pored over superhero comics to get ideas.

I was also really moved by the South African red wine and Korean soju that swilled about our table that night.

And so, with heavy hearts, we shed a few tears, and said goodbye to April and Soms before they headed to the airport.

The rest of us jumped in a van, and headed north for about 4 hours, along the Nam Ou river, up to a beautiful little town called Nong Khiaw.

Views from the road

This small town (well, it’s really just a village), is stunningly set alongside the banks of the river, and is framed by the most amazing sheer limestone karst cliffs and hills.

I was feeling crap, not really because of the previous night’s fiesta-ing, but because I’d caught some sort of bug and hadn’t slept well. As it turns out, I ended up being unwell, off and on, for over a week.

Nong Khiaw bus station entertainment

Once we arrived I stayed in a beautiful place set right on a tributary to the Nam Ou. This is the view from my A-framed dorm balcony:

I went up there and played guitar for awhile, and chatted and sang with German Isabella and Israeli Noga, they were super nice.

Then the rain came in

Another part of the property, on another day

But I was feeling pretty crap, so the next morn I decided to get my own room in a guest house closer to the other guys, as I didn’t want to disturb my fellow dorminatrices by snorting and sniffling through the night.

My new place

Our lunchtime eating place. The local family’s cat attacked this poor snake.

The next couple of days were all about resting for me, trying to knock my bug on the head. The other guys took it pretty easy too, with short walks and climbs, exploring caves, playing card games and doing magic tricks, and generally just winding down from the frenetic, (or phonetic, as Tondi might cutely say) pace of working family life in the West.

It needs to be done.

The village from up the hill a bit

View from the bridge

Michelangelo

After a couple of days of mainly resting I headed back to Luang Prabang on the van to collect Michael, who was flying in from Sydney. Yay! But my van was delayed for hours, as there weren’t enough passengers, and I was feeling crap.

I had to wait for hours in the small shelter they call the Nong Khiaw Bus Station, and eventually I ended up in a rickety old small van that was packed and had no aircon, sitting right on the bumpy backseat. It took forever to get to LP, and was a tough trip, in my condition.

The views were great though.

But nowhere near as great as it felt to finally meet up with Michael.

We haven’t seen each other in about a year, which is quite a long time for us.

Michael and I have known each other since Middle School days, way back in the Middle Ages. We met when we were about 12, but became really close friends later in high school, and especially after school, when we moved in to a whole series of wild share houses right on the beachfront in Henley Beach in Adelaide, back in the days when the district was a place that uni students could actually afford to live in.

I was studying Politics and Psychology at Adelaide Uni, and Michael Drama at Flinders Uni. We had a seriously good time over those years. The parties were memorable. The music loud and timeless. The delicacies illegal. The food a seemingly bottomless wok of scrumptious Thai coconut curry.

Our ever-changing house mates were the riff raff of the neighbourhood, and included a collection of really interesting and diverse multicultural vaga-bongers, vague acquaintances, friends of friends, the occasional ex-school buddy, and even my younger sister Mish, who once bravely went out on a skinny limb and lived with us for a bit, bless her cuddly white woolly socks.

Eventually Michael went to Sydney, and I went to the arms of his younger sister.

Michael and I have caught up regularly ever since, have been on trips all over the Oz bush, including some epic hikes, and we even ventured into South America once, trekking in Patagonia, and exploring the far reaches of the Amazon on a local boat.

And now here we are on Easy Street.

The thing is, when you know someone that long, and when both of you have been supporting each other through major ups and downs in each other’s lives, you build up a bond that’s really unique and unwavering. Michael’s always been there for me, with wisdom and compassion, and I know he always will be. As I’ll be for him.

Plus he occasionally laughs at my jokes.

Not now though. Handsome devil isn’t he? (devil being the operative word)

We took a van right back to Nong Khiaw after only a night in Luang Prabang, to hang with the crew up there.

This is the view from the local lookout in Nong Khiaw. I didn’t go up there this time, I was too sick.

This is a pic from when I went up with Lali, a little while back.

And this is what it looked like when Sam went.

This amazing pic is of Otis parting the grey sea. The rice plants on the right have been flattened by a storm, and won’t return to an upstanding position. Bummer for the harvesters, it’s really tough for them, they’re gonna have to bend their backs bigtime. Plus the rice won't be as good. Sam took the pic.

Beautiful snaps from around the traps.

Michael, in his infinite generosity, kept buying us all meals, and then decided to pay for the most beautiful bungalow on the river for me for a couple of nights, right next to him and Sam, Tondi and Otis. What a guy. I told you my friends were perfect.

My humble palace, the most luxurious pad I’ve had on my whole SEA trip, which is now over 10 months long.

And the view from the balcony

Otis thrashing us at cards again

Various very large local inhabitants, with digital perspective

I don’t remember what we were singing here, at Delilah’s Café.

Michael showing Sam and Otis the amazements of his recent 60th Birthday Beatnik bash down in Wombarra, south of Sydney, which I unfortunately didn’t get to.

Michelangelo and a friend beatniking down there

MK & SG in NK village centre

Smoking Harms Your Born Baby

Michael going deep. You read books like this when you turn 60.

Riverside karaoke

Interminable river traffic

Tad Mook and Muang Ngoi

Besides Otis, Somalie and Michael, every one of us came down with some ailment or other over the course of the few weeks we were together. Strange.

April had a dizzy spell and nearly fainted one night. Craig had a blocked ear for nearly 2 weeks, after being mesmerised by the amazing sensations behind one of the waterfalls at Tat Sae, which led him to stay in there forever. Sam and Tondi both had the non-waterfall splashes on various occasions, bad backs, weakness and tiredness, period fatigue, etc. and then I had this long-winded on again off again coldy fluey thing.

But despite my lingering sickness and lack of energy, I joined the crew on a boat trip upriver one day. Unfortunately Tondi wasn’t well, she missed out. Bummer. We took a guide, Big, (that was his name, I thought he said Pig when he first introduced himself), and headed up the Nam Ou in a beautiful wooden boat.

Otis looking like Frankie just cut his hair

The scenery was spectacular.

After a while we pulled up, and headed off on an hour’s walk, through a small village and  rice fields, to a beautiful waterfall called Tat Mook.

Farmer Mike

Not long now Oti

Otis and I in the bat cave

Craig getting ready to disappear into the waterfall again, and block up the other ear

Eel traps

Small Big teaching us something or other about the place

There were mini almost-rapids in parts

A companion on a steep hike up to some caves

Strange Things

During the war in the 70s, the whole village would hide in these caves, while the bombs rained down relentlessly from above.

Stunning mountain scenery

We found a bar. It was Happy Hour. Michael ordered a martini. Rather than it being half price, they brought him 2. Great strategy. So we had a toast to celebrate our 120th.

The sun was setting as we finally arrived home

Back To The Mekong

Time races sometimes.

Before we knew it, Craig left to go back to Bangkok, and we decided to head back to LP, as Tondi Otis and Michael only had a few days left, before they were due to fly out of Vientiane, all the way back to Oz.

The old barge that crosses the Mekong at LP

Monks by the river

We went to a French bakery called Baneton for brekky pretty much every morning in those last few days. It was divine. Croissants, pains au chocolat, Danish pastries, and good ole baguettes. And great coffee.

This is the wat across the road

Amazing local art and traditional crafts

Quirky art deco and colonial architecture

Tangor, a great place to hang in the evenings, the music was awesome

Otis as happy as a kid in a gelateria

Watercolours. The confluence of the Nam Khan and the Mekong.

Home made charcoal drying out after a rainy night

Metallica

Drying mushies

Dried buffalo skin. I didn’t try it.

Evening glow

Otis successfully playing a card trick on me. Sam taught him some great tricks over the few days we were there. Otis got so good at them that when he headed back to Vientiane on the train he tricked a few Korean tourists, and they were so impressed that they gave him US$10. Go Otis! Successfully deceiving adults at such a young age!

What a bright future he has.

More art deco architecture

Security guard demonstrating how safe it is around here

The Haves And The Haven’ts

Laos is a country of complete contrasts.

It’s a fabulous place to come if you happen to have been born a Westerner, and happen to visit a place like Luang Prabang.

There’s amazing things to do, incredibly good food, and beautiful arts, crafts and clothing to buy. And it’s all dirt cheap. You can have a full body massage, a really good one, for less than $10 Oz. Wherever you go, the locals bend over backwards to give you the best service you can imagine, they’re friendly, humble, really helpful and efficient, and amazingly accommodating.

But being a local here means you’re living completely on the other end of the privilege spectrum.

Laos is one of East Asia’s poorest countries. The economy is reeling. National debt is ballooning out of control, and is now 110% of the country’s GDP - meaning that the country owes more in debt than it produces in a whole year. Worse, the country now pays over 40% of its yearly domestic income simply in debt repayments.

This means the government has little money to spend on services such as education and health. Over the last few years it’s embarked on major infrastructure projects (such as the Lao-China railway, and other transport infrastructure), that has left it in even greater debt, to Chinese companies and the Chinese government.

As a result of this huge debt trap, coupled with problems in the global economy, the Lao currency, the kip, has devalued massively, leading to crippling inflation in the country, because the price of imports has risen drastically, and imports make up over 30% of all sales in the country.

And of course, wages haven’t kept up with inflation. Nowhere near it. So people are much worse off than they’ve been for many years. Many are seriously struggling to make ends meet.

There’s an underbelly of suffering, and of discontent. Young people are losing hope. University graduates can’t find meaningful work, and definitely can’t find any work related to their degrees. Civil servants and other government employees often don’t get paid at all, forcing them to leave their jobs and try to find work elsewhere. Or they work at night, on top of their government job, because they’re committed to their civil service work.

It’s unsustainable.

But any open public resistance to the status quo is dangerous. The media is controlled, and there’s little state tolerance for criticism. It’s widely believed in the country that some activists have been murdered by the government, or agents for the government, although the government, of course, vehemently denies this.

So it’s completely sobering to come here as a tourist. The locals desperately need our cash, so it's good to come. I try to tip well, and spread my money around.

But if you come here as a regular tourist, and stroll through the streets of Luang Prabang doing your thing, you’d probably have no idea that any of this is going on around you.

While we in the West currently complain about prices, interest rates or other economic difficulties in our own countries, where some people are admittedly now really struggling too, we really need to put it in a global perspective.

Us “First World” citizens make up only 15% of the world’s population. We’re the Haves.

And the richest 1% of people in the world now earn twice as much per year as the remaining 99%. They’re the Have Way Way Way Too Muches.

It’s been decades since global wealth has been distributed so brutally unequally. And it’s getting worse year by year, exponentially.

Yep, we’re back to the Roaring Twenties guys. The 2020s. The Great Gatsby days.

The days of absolutely excessive wealth, and of squalid, desperate poverty.

Mandalao Elephant Sanctuary

Getting back to nature, to the natural world, is a soothing balm, in amongst all that real world stress.

One beautiful day, Michael, in his boundless generosity, paid for us both to go to an amazing elephant sanctuary a little way out of Luang Prabang, which had been recommended to us by Sam Tondi and Otis, who’d been a couple of days before.

The sanctuary is situated on the Nam Khan, and was founded by a couple of American conservationists. The project director is a wonderful and experienced Thai man called Prasop Tipprasert, who has worked with elephants for over three decades, and co-founded the Thai Elephant Conservation Centre.

Sam Tondi and Otis met Prasop, and were really taken with him, by his gentle manner, his warmth and humility, and by his huge knowledge of all things elephant.

The property itself is stunning, and is situated on both sides of the river.

Beautiful tropical gardens, pavilions and salas

Stunning butterfly

The view from the balcony across the Nam Khan, where the elephants live

Preparing elephant tucker. We stuffed sliced green bananas with mineral salt, sweet tamarind, and sticky rice. We also fed them green papaya, and bunches of plain green bananas.

Heading across the fast flowing river

Our welcoming party

It was incredible feeding the two elephants we hung out with. Their trunks are amazing, so versatile and functional. They’re basically a nose-arm-hand, and the elephants grabbed the bananas and other food out of our hands very politely with them.

After feeding them we strolled with them and their mahouts into the forest, where they were fed banana tree trunks, which are very juicy, and layered like onions.

Then they were allowed to graze in the forest, and we watched them find whatever they wanted to eat in there, like acacia leaves, and various other tasty shrubs and foliage.

One full size elephant eats around 6% of its own body weight every day, which is between 150-250kg of food every single day. And they’re herbivores, meaning it’s a strictly vegan diet.

As a result, the logistics of supporting the elephants in the sanctuary is complex, and expensive.

All of the elephants here have been removed from other elephant farms, where they were treated poorly, ridden, were forced to work, or had been injured. Those types of tourist elephant ventures are really detrimental to elephant welfare. The elephants are trained using violence, and their handlers are generally untrained, and have no real idea about proper elephant welfare.

Elephants need to eat for 18 hours/day in order to be healthy. Those in tourist farms only have a few hours a day to do this. Their physiological and medical needs are generally unmet. It’s a torturous life for them, and sometimes they react against their handlers, and are further punished.

It was a unique and precious experience for us to spend time with these incredible beasts in the forest. I’ll never forget it.

And neither will the elephants.

They never do.

More Water Falling

It doesn’t matter that it’s coming in to winter in these parts.

It’s still hot.

At this time of year, if there’s been a little water falling from the sky, the evenings are cooler, and you can even walk around and not sweat, if you’re lucky.

Some nights that is.

The days are perfect for swimming, so one day we headed off to Tat Sae again, as no one except me had been there before.

It was totally delicious, as usual.

I think I’ll pass on whatever they all had

Rambo ain’t dead yet

Beauty in all directions

The whole world’s turning grey

A wasp eating a fish

Another day Sam and I visited the Traditional Arts and Ethnology Centre, a museum right in town, dedicated to explaining the various tribal and ethnic groups that make up Laos.

It was super interesting.

The Tai Lao (or Lao) ethnic group account for around 53% of the country’s population. This means that other minority ethnic groups make up nearly half of the total population of the country, including groups like the Hmong and Yao, the Akha and Lahu, and the many Khmu (Indigenous) groups.

In the north of the country, where hopefully I’ll be heading with my bike after the depths of winter, the majority of the population is made up of ethnic tribal groups, making it a particularly special place to travel through. I’m really looking forward to getting in there, even though I know it’s super hilly up there, and it’s gonna be harder cycling than anything I’ve done on this trip so far.

Rather stylish Hmong woman in her finery

It’s Nearly Over

I can’t believe it.

Just as we were getting started, getting used to hanging out with each other, getting right into the groove, all of my friends have suddenly gone off in different directions.

April and Soms headed off to Gili Trawangan, and are now back in Oz. Tondi, Otis and Michael are also back home now. Sam’s staying an extra week in northern Laos, up in Nong Khiaw. Craig’s down in Bangkok.

And I’m heading to Vientiane to spend another night with my other friends Michael and Jenni, before heading down to Bangkok as well.

Yeah, big changes are happening.

I’m leaving Southeast Asia for a bit.

And without my bike, no less.

Black Bewdy and I are officially taking a break.

My long term plan is still to slowly ride to Europe, via northern Laos, northern Vietnam, China, and Central Asia, but I can’t cross all the high passes in Central Asia at this time of year, as the snowy roads are closed, or they’re impassable on a measly slippery bicycle.

So I had the option of hanging around here until the snow thaws a little, which will take months, or going somewhere else. And I'm going somewhere else.

I’ve decided I’m gonna spend the winter in India.

Hare Om!

I haven’t been to the Motherland for a whole 8 years.

I’m planning on exploring some pretty diverse parts of the country, and, luckily for me, more of my friends from Oz are planning on meeting me over there, in the south, in a couple of months.

So I’ve decided to leave my bike in Vientiane, rather than take her with me to the subcontinent, and I’ll collect her when I get back to Laos. I’ll be crisscrossing India so much on buses and trains that it’s not really that practical to have her with me for this next part of my journey.

Plus some of the roads and traffic in the places I wanna go in India are pretty horrendous for cyclists.

And my friends won’t have bikes.

Yeah, in only a few short days I’ll be in the lung-disease capital of the world, Delhi, that amazingly vibrant and diverse crazy city, the political heart of India.

Yes!

Bharat, land of Shiva and Shakti, of Brahma and Vishnu, of billionaires and Untouchables, of devotees and ruthless bandits, a land framed by the great Himalaya, the Bay of Bengal, the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea, and fed by the most sacred of rivers, the Ganga, the Yamuna and the Narmada.

It’s time to rekindle my ambivalent relationship with this great nation, to again witness the most beautiful and the most ugly sides of humanity. And myself.

And the thing is, they’re often right in your face at exactly the same time.

Yeah. It’s time to leave Easy Street for awhile❤️

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