Setting off on the last leg of the quest with Gregory and Pierre
With the sensations of the morning market still fresh in our minds, and ever growing doubts about staying in Muang Sing troubling us, Gregory and I made a snap decision to catch the next transport east and make our way to Phonsavan and its mysterious Plain of Jars. It was a good decision. It would want to have been. Phonsavan may only be two hundred and fifty kilometers from Muang Sing as the crow flies, but travelling in Laos is more like walking a duck than flying a crow. We were to have three days of travelling to reflect on our decision. Three long days. It would take seven vehicles. Between moving and waiting to move we would be over forty hours on the road. At that rate, about six hilometers an hour, we may as well have walked.
Of course it's not that simple. The roads to Phonsavan are long and windy There's rivers to ford and mountains to skirt. The most direct route is beset by bandits and closed to passenger traffic so we had to go the long way around. Thinking about the distance we had to travel and how much easier it would have been in Europe would do nothing for us but try our patience. Better to do things the Lao way: trust that we would get there eventually and just relax and enjoy the journey.
In the few days it had taken me to get from the Thai border to Muang Sing, I had learned a little bit about how to travel in rural Laos. Most journeys start in the local market and quite early in the morning. Prospective travellers appear at about dawn, announce their preferred destination and then hang about drinking coffee or eating noodle soup until a vehicle appears. There were no timetables as I knew them. Vehicles leave when they are full, very full. Not 'there are nine seats, we have nine passengers, let's go' full, but 'well we can try unloading it all and loading it again but there really is not enough room for you and your pig, madam. So let's tie it onto the front grill, you hang off the back step and we'll go' full. It helps to breath in sharply and hold it while this passenger-packing process is going on. When the bus has been filled, those extra millimeters of breathing space might be all you've got!
Vehicles vary widely in Laos. Many were songthaews, a good natured swift breed I had gotten used to in Thailand. Then there were other crossbreeds: big blue busses (a two tonne truck and a garden shed), river ferries (two canoes and a bamboo bus shelter), river boats (one canoe and a sprinkling of God's grace), and a few rare if decrepit thoroughbreds: a truck which could only go downhill, a car which compensated for bad suspension by going so fast it just skimmed over the potholes, a rare and elegant air-conditioned bus and a couple of nippy motorbikes. Travel in Laos always carries thet element of delightful surprise at discovering what your next steed will be.
Another thing I had begun to learn in my first few days travelling were a few words of the Lao language. I was determined not to be as isolated from the culture as I had felt in Thailand so I carried my phrasebook everywhere and started some grasping efforts at learning Lao. By the time I had met Gregory I had the pleasantries, a few numbers (one, two, three and five) and 'bo pen nyang' Lao's equivalent to 'mai pen rai'. I figured I was doing well. Then I watched in fascination as my polylingual French travelling partner held whole conversations in the market seemingly by shuffling only a dozen or so different syllables, most of them rhyming with 'pie'. I was intrigued as I listened to him trading sounds with the bus drivers. Out of his little treasury of 'pai', 'sai', 'dai', 'kai', and 'bo' he'd select two or three syllables, stick them together end-to-end and hand them over. They'd shuffle them about a bit and hand them back. This trade would go back and forth a few times, often with a little repetition and then Gregory would confidently announce that we had found the right transport to our next destination and that it wasn't going to be a long journey. And all this before I could get my mouth around my phrasebook's translation for 'excuse me, but can you tell me where is the bus to Phonsavan?'
During our first day's journey through Luang Nam Tha and onto Udomxai, I got him to
explain the basis of the 'Lego Lao' as I had come to call it. It was really quite simple.
Armed with a few basic words like 'go', 'where', 'can, 'far', and 'no' he would construct
simple sentences like:
'Go Phonsavan can no?'
...and wait for either of two answers...
'can go' or 'no can go'.
Of course sometimes the person he'd ask was a bit of a chatterbox and would
answer with a jumble of unintelligible Lao saying something like...
'Go Phonsavan? Well, maybe not today. I usually go there on a Tuesday
- my brother in law lives there you see - and he's always around on a Tuesday...'
The best way to handle this seemed to be to prompt with
one of the answers you might expect to get like 'no can go?', and hope to eventually
get your chatty friend to confirm or deny that by saying 'no can go' or 'can go' or
something else simple. There's still a chance that this will not work either as your
chatty friend tells you that 'No, probably not today. It's a long way after all.', in which
case you simply find somebody else to ask.
In general this lego Lao approach worked fairly well and we had quite a few conversations with travellers en route about where they were off to and how far it was and how long it would take. The grammer of Lao makes this lego approach even easier as it's not far from how the language works anyway. The tonal nature of Lao however can sometimes mess things up. After I discovered that the word for far 'kai' and the word for chicken 'kai' differed only in tone, I understood why sometimes my simple questions were not delivering more direct simple answers.
'Good morning', I would say to one of the drivers, 'Phonsavan far no?'
'Good morning', he would cheerily reply and then thinking to himself '(what an odd question, Phonsavan chicken no?)'
'I'm sorry, what are you trying to say to me?' he'd ask.
'Phonsavan far no?' I'd say again with a polite please-play-lego-lao smile on my face and then while he's thinking I'd try another variation
'Phonsavan far how much?'
'Ok' he'd think 'This guy wants to buy a chicken in Phonsavan. It's a day's drive away and he thinks I'll know the price. Let's just smile and ride this one out'
Not getting anywhere fast, I start prompting him for an answer.
'not far? eight hours?' I'd ask politely
'(no chicken, spicy hours?)' he wonders, because phet as well as kai has several tones
'no far?', I ask again, just to keep it simple
'No', he says, though still a little puzzled. 'No chicken, No spice, No spicy chicken in Phonsavan (what a loon! and he's getting on my bus?)'.
Feeling like I've gotten somewhere and delighted with my ability to communicate, I proudly
announce to Gregory that it's not far to Phonsavan, probably under eight hours, but that the driver
dosen't seem to know much about it (what a loon! And we're getting on his bus?)
Despite these occasional misunderstandings and a few speakers who wouldn't play the game, we managed to negotiate food, travel and accomodation for the few days we were on the road. This was especially useful when we were changing cars several times a day and wondering where we would get a room for the night. Not having too many unknowns allowed us to sit back and enjoy the view. Whether we were on a bus, between busses, or waiting for a bus to be repaired, that's what we'd do: sit and watch the view. Morning markets were always fun to watch. None were ever as colourful as Muang Sing's had been, but we would sit anyway dunking a baguette or a bannana fritter into a cup of spicy Lao coffee and watch all the early morning comings and goings. Chance breakdowns in remote villages gave us an opportunity to sit and watch the day-to-day activities without feeling too obtrusive. Most of the time nobody seemed to mind us being there. We hadn't wandered in for a gawk, we weren't taking photographs, and we'd clearly be gone soon. Armed with our Lego Lao we were able to strike up some small conversation and figure out what everyone was up to. When we met up with another Frenchman, Pierre, on our last day we had a third brain to help with the guessing and gesturing. Lots of the things we were seeing were beginning to make some sense. Aside from the fact that the ground in Laos, in the form of dust and grit, was getting much closer to me by pasting itself all over my clothes, the experience of this journey to Phonsavan was getting me much closer to the ground than I had been in Thailand and it felt good. Some people, however, did not look like they wanted to talk to us. Occasionally we got a distructful stare from an old man or woman in a village. We were aware of what foreigners looking much like us had done to this part of Lao thiry or so years ago. The evidence in the form of bomb craters and the remains of spent ordinance was becoming more abundent as we travelled further east and we wondered if our appearance was sparking off some old and unpleasant memories for them.
Even as we were moving, we could watch life going on around us. Like birdwatchers we tried to be the first to spot the costumes of blue and then striped Hmong peoples as we bumped through their villages. As night closed in we watched small groups of villages gather around roadside fires for a chat. Their faces dimly lit by the flames would suddenly come into view under the car's headlights and then vanish again as we sped on. And then there was the life on board. The countless people who got on and off with their colourful, noisy and kicking cargo reminded me of what I had seen on the Mae Sariang road in Thailand. Leaving Vieng Thong for the last long day's drive in an open truck we carried an esteemed and popular singer who had been performing the previous night at a wedding in the town. While we waited to leave, he sat at the back of the truck, a suitable meter or so above the heads of his fans. Girls and boys alike gathered round hoping for a glance, a word or even a touch from their idol. He gazed serenely down on them like a medieval Pope, uttering an occasional word and offering an occasional wave. The odd lucky pilgrim was allowed to stroke his outstretched arm. As soon as we moved off and were out of site of his fans, what they had seen as the heavy-lidded gaze of serene enlightenment turned out to be the heavy-headed squint of a serious hangover. He slouched back over the guardrail and later slid down onto a sack of chilis to sleep the remainder of the journey.
Gregory and I had reasonably comfortable seats along the left side of the truck. Pierre was slightly more comfortable propped up on his foam sleeping mat on the opposite bench. In between us, were a few boxes and sacks of food which served as seats for more passengers and a bed for the wedding singer who was taking up more than his fair share of space. An elderly Hmong woman crouching at Gregory's feet carried a sick-bucket whhich she used frequently. In between bouts of nausea she chewed on mildly narcotic betel bark and munched on a few cookies which Pierre had offered around. The front half of the truck was piled high with sound equipment and speaker assemblies from the wedding and served as a temporary home for a fat and grumpy rodent which the driver had bought along the way. Tethered by a length of string, it didn't have much room to roam, but it scuffled about a bit and grunted occasionally as it explored its new home. On top of the speakers were more bags and more passengers. I counted twenty-six at one point. Among them for a while were a group of young Lao soldiers who had hopped on for a free ride. While they were with us, I kept sharply aware of the line of sight of their weapons, not wanting to be in the way on this bumpy road. Most pointed skywards, a few pointed sideways at the road, at knee level of anyone we passed. The rifle of one dozing soldier lowered itself gradually from the vertical while we bumped along until it pointed square at the head of one of his companions. Not seeming too bothered, the companion let it be for a while before lifting it away from his face only to have it slowly lower again as we went on. This process of reluctant life preserving continued until the dozing soldier finally awoke.
That last truck ride was the longest single journey of the Phonsavan trek. It brought us into town well after dark in time for a very welcome shower and just in time for last orders at the only late opening restaurant in town. Gregory bought the beer. For the second night in a row, my guess at our time of arrival had been better than his and he was graciously paying the penalty, even including Pierre in the game at that late stage as an accidental winner. As we toasted our endurance and success with a large plate of fried noodles and some of the best Beer Lao I had ever tasted, Muang Sing, its market and the goldfish women seemed a long long way behind. Ahead of us lay the Plain of Jars, the goal of our quest. Whether it would be as mysterious as we hoped, or just a plain covered in jars hardly mattered. As with all long quests, half the fun, more than half the fun, was in getting there.