On a mission of discovery to one of Asia's last and fast-disappearing "unknowns", our correspondent knocks heads with the strangest beasts of all, his fellow travelers.

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I was having a wonderful time and the whole world was opening up to me because I had no dreams.

Jack Kerouac, "On the Road"

* There seems to be a gap between what people expect when they come to Laos and what they actually find there. Laos has only started blooming as a tourist destination since about 1998, so the travel guide I had (published in the same year) was considerably out of date. Towns that had then had electricity for only a few hours a day now had late-night internet joints. Prices across the board had of course gone up and the currency had lost more than half its value. Many of the maps had changed as villages grew and new roads were laid. And there were many more tourists traveling what has become a clearly defined track through the North.

The track: Start in Vientiane and head north up Route 13. First stop is usually Vang Vieng (though some stop at Ang Nam Ngum along the way). The main draw there is caving and splashing around in the river. And getting stoned. North to Luang Prabang, which is a UNESCO World Heritage city-the whole city-and as such, very prominent in the tourist literature. West by river to Huay Xai and the Thai border, maybe stopping for a day at Pakbeng along the way. Some people do more or less the same trail but in reverse, ending their journey in Vientiane. 

If you stay on the track, which has become pretty easy to travel, you are guaranteed to see many other tourists doing what you’re doing. Some people find this hard to accept. Descriptions like “exotic”, “undiscovered”, and “off the beaten track” often come up in travel writing about Laos, so many are dismayed by the camera-toting legions they find at these places; they are not any different from the people you’d find on Khao San Road (Bangkok) or just about anywhere else on “the trail” in Southeast Asia. 

“Legions” is not the right word. There are not nearly as many tourists in Laos as there are in Thailand, but the number is growing. You can still find plenty of quiet places if you like, yet you can still find nightclubs full of farangs and the action that follows their dollars around. 

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People go to Laos to “discover” the country in one way or another, but for some people there is joy in this discovery only if they can convince themselves it was “undiscovered” before. It’s hard to be a discoverer when they are surrounded by other discoverers who have arrived there from every point on the compass, having blazed trails from every direction leading to the point where they now find themselves. What is left for them to discover?

This is a hopelessly narrow definition of discovery. Discover the country for yourself, and discover a thing or two about yourself along the way. Discover a new way to prepare rice, discover a gecko in your bathroom, discover yourself lying on the floor of a restaurant after a day-long moonshine bender...there are all sorts of discoveries to be made, and the good news is that they will all be Firsts. No one else will have had that same experience before, simply by virtue of no one else being you.

Why is it not enough to simply discover something? Why must we feel we have to be the first? We like to think of ourselves as unique and original individuals (just like everybody else). The truth is we are, but the days of Columbus and Magellan, Lewis and Clark, are gone forever. The world has shrunk, which seems to me to be a good thing--people weren’t just “popping on over” to Southeast Asia when that meant retching for weeks on the pitching deck of a Chinese junk. 

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One of the manifestations of this misguided notion of discovery is the remarkable rudeness of many of the foreign travelers I met in Laos. Those of us who live here in Pusan don’t say hi to every person we meet on the street because there are many of us, both foreigners and Koreans. But in small villages the world over, we tend to say hi to the people we see, especially if they are among the handful of human beings we see at all. People living out on the edges tend to look after each other, and there often a sense of community even among strangers passing through. 

So how is it that I can sit right in the middle of a little village in Laos, and the only other foreigners in town can pass a few feet in front of me on an empty street, avoiding eye contact, pretending I didn’t exist, saying nothing even after I greet them first? They seem to be busy “discovering” Laos, and another discoverer becomes a rival with no place in their fantasy. Maybe they want to go home and tell their friends, who are of course hanging breathlessly over every word of their story, “I was all alone out there.” Or maybe they are trying to believe that themselves. 

At times I felt, ironically, that I was able to “understand” the locals better than I did a lot of the foreigners I met. The Lao people seemed always to lay themselves open, and if they played mind bending games of doublespeak and hidden motives, I confess I missed it entirely. 

The foreigners (read: Westerners) are another story. We are more complex (complicated might be the better word), which is to say, we often don’t know whether we are coming or going, we plague ourselves with questions and searches for meaning, and as a result of all this second-guesswork, we confuse the hell out of each other. It was after all in the East that the maddening question was posed: What is the meaning of a flower?, which only begins to make sense when you throw meaning itself right the hell out the window. 

Any time I greeted a local in Laos, I was greeted in return. A Wave of the Hand--one of the simplest contacts between two human beings. And what does it say? Something like: I exist, you exist, and we are not completely alone in the world. Ugly sociological concepts like “anomie”, “alienation”, and “going postal”, were patented in the West, and stand as twisted monuments to what happens when you push individualism a bit too far.

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I encountered a lot of travelers who believed that the time to visit Laos is now (others would say it was years ago), or in other words, before it is “ruined” by tourism. As Pico Iyer once wrote (Video Night In Kathmandu), there is a veiled conceit in this attitude. They seem to be saying, “It’s alright for Me to be here because I am somehow more entitled to a unique experience than the Ugly Hordes who will swarm in here if the door is not closed and locked behind me." For them, going to a place like Laos and finding other travelers there is a rude shock.

And what, please, does it mean to "ruin" a country? To some minds, all change is ruin, but they are not to be taken seriously. Others regard ruin as the loss of some essential characteristic--a dilution or perversion of local culture to better suit foreign tastes. To be sure, this process is well under way, and it is a worldwide phenomenon. But again, this attitude often reveals another strain of Western arrogance--it seems to say that it is natural and right for the West to deify and worship Progress, evolving itself beyond recognition from one year to the next, while the rest of the world should be hustled off to the taxidermist and preserved as a museum piece for our enjoyment, forever petrified in a state of quaint backwardness.

I bought some hand-woven fabric from a Hmong woman in Northern Laos. It's a lovely piece of work--vibrant colors and rippling patterns on a field of cool lavender--and after careful inspection, I found it to be entirely devoid of Mickey Mouse images, Nike logos, or any other kind of Western iconography. When I handed her the money, she smiled and thanked me. If I had ruined her, she tolerated it with stunning tact and grace.

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Some people think it noble to travel rough. They stay in guesthouses with either a squat toilet or nothing, sleep in sheets crawling with bloodsucking parasites, bathe in cold rivers early in the morning, flirt with malaria, cholera, and the host of foul demons that plague our systems. One of the weirder expressions of this impulse to go hard is the popularity in Southeast Asia of overland truck trips in places where the roads would be more accurately labeled "dry stream beds" just about anywhere else in the world. 

Or, if the roads are good, they opt for ancient buses which are known to have a better-than-average chance of breaking down and stranding them somewhere long enough to be inconvenient, but not long enough to be truly dangerous. Here I remember the Canadian couple I met who told me about their own harrowing breakdown experience, and I was struck by the unabashed glee with which they told the story, as if they couldn't believe their (good) luck. It's a matter of time before we start seeing "I Broke Down in Laos" t-shirts...a point of pride... 

...and if there are pigs and chickens on the bus, so much the better; these add a lot of color to any travel story; "There I was, and the lady next to me has like eight or nine live ducks, bound by the legs and dangling from a stick she has lying across her shoulders. They were shitting all over the place, and one of them was nipping at the hair on my arms for hours..."

For those who think it somehow noble to ride in the back of an open pickup during a monsoon over a road which is not a road, which rises to meet the truck, which in turn rises to repeatedly batter your flesh and bruise your bones for eight, ten, thirteen hours, I have a question: What the hell is wrong with comfort?!? One can interpret the whole of scientific history as the expression of humankind's drive to make life easier. Hot showers make me feel good. Air-conditioned coach buses are nice. Ditto for cold beer.

Okay, I'll admit that it's good to be able to do without these things for a while--and sometimes you just don't have any choice--but if I hear one more jackass tell me "It builds character!" I'll plant some of these goddamn scabies in his bed and then sit back and enjoy watching the spectacle of him becoming a better person. 

Me and some new friends in the dark heart of the tourist track itself, Route 13, somewhere between Vang Vieng and Luang Prabang. The beer we were drinking was warm.

"I didn't come all the way over to Laos to hang out with a bunch of other foreigners..."

Of course not....everyone should at least try to meet the locals--that is a very right and proper impulse--but what often gets lost is that a lot of the foreigners you meet in Laos, or anywhere, came there with a similar sense of adventure, curiosity, and fun. They're not the same types who would be content to lollygag around my local pub at home, getting stinko drunk every day and mouthing the same thoughtless bullshit I've heard a million times before. These people have stories, information...they've been places I haven't and done things I never thought possible. Often they make excellent drinking buddies, and it's a big plus if we speak the same language.

Ever try to have a conversation with the little language section at the back of Lonely Planet? After name, age, nationality, and marital status, you're on your own, unless you want to have a little fun and start screaming "Please call an ambulance! I've vomited several times!" Or you can go to a nightclub and see if "I like it hot and spicy" (from the "Food" section) gets you something a little more interesting than the curry of the day. These "conversations" can be fun, but I get paid to have conversations like that just about every day in Korea; it's frustrating sometimes, especially if that's the only communication I have with someone who has such life-and-death power over me as keys to the only beer cooler in town. 

All this is not to say that I didn't have a good time with the Lao people. I wouldn't say that not having a language in common is preferable, but it is fun sometimes in a very raw and human kind of way. I find myself compelled to focus on the common elements, the smiles, the gestures, the weird faces we all make when we drink alcohol that shucks the enamel off our teeth; these are easy to miss when I let myself get hung up on words. 

And once again I found communication to be greatly aided by alcohol--that great and wobbly bridge over cultural chasms. I did a fair amount of drinking with locals I met along the way and had a good time by any standard. We drank the local moonshine (Lao Lao) and I found it to be a great leveler, in more ways than one. Conversation stops mattering so much when the party goes beyond the point of coherence in even their mother tongues. After that, laughter rules.

True, true. But I'll take Dorothy's word for it and skip Kansas for now.

John Bocksay
bosmosis@yahoo.com