fireflies and rolling blackouts

on thursday we took a six-hour bus ride to chiang khong, a border town on the mekong river, which determines a long stretch of border between laos and thailand. there is no bridge, just dozens of water taxies, ferries and barges that run back and forth between chiang khong and its lao counterpart, houayxui. the views out over the mekong are spectacular, especially in the morning, before the sun burns off the fog that makes the rows of hilly valleys fade to hazy layers of green-grey into the distance. rooftops are just humble silhouettes along with the jungle palms and vine choked trees.

friday, after we spent a couple hours getting our lao visas , we loaded up onto “slow boats”, which seat maybe 70 but can apparently hold well over a hundred. we were packed in tight. then down the river, chugging along dodging jagged (and so tantalizingly climbable) rocks- the river is probably near its lowest point, as we are nearing the end of the dry season. we stopped a couple times at tiny villages (grass huts, chickens, small fields of crops) so that locals could get on and off, and the village residents could come on board and try to sell food and drinks.

the farengs (toubabs, foreigners) on the slow boat were pretty funny. many were drinking hard, starting early in the morning, loud and boisterous, flirting, playing cards and dice, cheering, playing guitar, taking pictures incessantly, both of the interior and exterior – fishermen, villages, other boats, wild river rocks, sandy beaches, jungle hillsides, and craggy mountainous terrain. i was impressed by how pristine the whole region looks. this far upriver, its not contaminated by industry and city waste, and the developments along the banks probably looked almost the same as they have for centuries.

we stopped to spend the night at a town called pak beng, which had the infrastructure to accommodate a flood of hundreds of farengs every night. the residents of pak beng go to sleep early, shutting down all shops and restaurants by 10pm. the entire town’s (and probably the entire rural region’s) power is cut at 10:30, a frugal feature of the central government’s planned economy. eli and i walked around until midnight, up and down the dead silent dark streets and up a bluff to a hilltop garden. fireflies rivaled the raw rural starlight (no moon) to light our exploration. we were finally stopped trying to get down to the river, and escorted back to our room. i don’t think there was a curfew exactly, but they didn’t want us getting hurt on the steep rocky bluffs without any locals awake to help us.

yesterday, saturday, we got up early and back on the slow boat. things were quiet until a fast boat (a tiny speed boat with about 8 helmeted passengers that makes our 2-day journey in just a few hours) capsized as it passed us. other people in our boat saw it happen – apparently one of the passengers bounced out (crossing our wake perhaps?) and the as the driver slowed to turn around, he went to close to the rocks on the bank and sunk the whole back end. just the nose was left sticking out. everyone made it out ok and began to scale the rocks and haul their soaked bags out of the water. we turned around to help, took the soaked farengs on board, and gave them towels, dry clothes, their own seats and beers. lots of drama, especially when the soaked fast boaters were screaming obscenities at slow boaters for taking pictures.

when we arrived here in luang prabang last night (one of laos’ biggest cities, but still population about 20,000), we hustled up the hill to secure a guest house. after passing up one (we didn’t want to pay the extra for a tv and fridge), we were turned down from literally dozens of others. farengs flooded the city, and bizarrely, it was unable to accommodate us all (even though rural village pak beng was able to). after wandering for hours, we were ready to find an internet cafe, a phone, and start calling guest houses outside the city or in other nearby towns. at that point we were working with a belgian guy named pierre, who was in the same boat as us. farengs were still wandering around with massive hiking backpacks, so we were worried. finally, someone found us and led us to a hidden place in an alley off of the bustling night market, where we paid a premium for one of the last rooms in town ($10 each- today we relocated to a better one that’s about $4 each per night). we felt extremely lucky.

(right as we get settled in our room, the city’s power failed for a few minutes. stupid communism.)

today we explored town, hiking to the top of the hill where an elaborate wat is perched, shopping in the markets, getting a feel for the content and layout of the city. it really is wonderful, much cleaner than thailand, streets and sidewalks wide and not shattered and treacherous as they were everywhere else we’ve been. far less traffic – mostly tuktuks and scooters, cleaner air, everything cheaper, nights perfectly silent (even this city is totally closed down by 11), beautiful untouched wilderness, locals happy and kind to us. communism rules.

well, actually: the communist party has been in power since 1975 (when the states lost the vietnam war, asian communist parties all helped each other take over – in this case, the lao overturned the US puppet monarchy), but like the rest of communist countries at the time, laos became a deformed workers’ state, following the example of stalin’s degenerated workers’ state. laos has an insulated, stagnant bureaucratic single-party state apparatus (instead of, say, a congress of deputies from workers’ councils – real communism). also, following stalin's example, there's enough political repression that the locals, we are told, are too afraid to talk politics. some of the economy is collectivized, but there’s plenty of free enterprise too, especially in the petite-bourgeois merchant class – vendors, restaurant and hotel owners, etc. also, foreign capital is at work here, along with the imf and world bank. so, an extremely compromised deformed workers’ state. the only redeeming qualities would be highly subsidized food and housing for urban poor and rural villagers, non-classed health care and education, state sponsored infrastructure development, low unemployment, and so on. i don’t know to what extent these endeavors are successful, so i will learn and share soon.