I spent a little over two weeks of my responsibility-free days vacationing in northeastern Cambodia and Laos. My company: six fellow Peace Corps Cambodia volunteers.
Get on the bus, you stupid barang!
The 11-hour journey to my travelmate James’ site in eastern Cambodia begins with me almost missing my bus — twice!
I arrive at the bus station early – by a whole three minutes. So why is the driver yelling at me to get on the bus? He’s waiting for me, he says. I’m the last one to board, and we’re leaving. Early? That’s a new one for me — and Cambodia. Nothing here happens on time, let alone early.
I almost miss the bus again when I get off at a rest stop. I’m loitering outside the restaurant, prolonging the time before I have to squeeze back into my seat, when I notice a bus pull out of the parking lot and start honking.
I stand there watching the bus for a few minutes, wondering what clueless nincompoop the bus is waiting for. I know it’s not me, because my bus is still parked in the lot. It’s the bus on the far left side of the lot. No other bus can fit beside it. That’s the detail I recorded in an effort to distinguish the lot’s seven identical white buses.
Since I know the honking bus is not my bus, I’m not concerned when a restaurant employee tells me that the honking bus is my bus. He’s wrong, I tell him. My bus is that other bus, on the left side of the lot. He keeps insisting the honking bus is my bus. I keep arguing my point. I know I’m right.
I concede that I may be wrong when the driver of the honking bus stops honking, jumps off the bus and runs over to me. “Kampong Cham!” he yells, while pointing to the bus. “Kampong Cham!”
Uh oh. Kampong Cham is where I’m going. This guy looks serious, and it is his bus. I don’t argue, but stroll over to the bus and get on, apologizing to the red-faced driver. The bus erupts into laughter. Decoded, the laughter means “Stupid barang.” I laugh too. I’m just glad someone noticed this stupid barang was missing before leaving the rest stop.
I stay close to my bus during the remaining stops, and after a nine-hour ride, arrive in Kampong Cham. I have an hour or so before the next bus to where James lives.
I spend part of this hour marveling at the attire of the girl at the bus stop dressed like it’s winter in Minnesota instead of summer in Cambodia. It’s not only summer, but April, Cambodia’s hottest month of the year. This 20-something girl is wearing a knit cap, sweatshirt, gloves, jeans, and socks tucked into her jelly sandals. Either she has a disease or she lacks confidence in her skin-whitening products.
Hun Sen, Britney Spears and Cambodian Dance Party 2010
James lives in the teacher dorms at his high school. I’m expecting the linen closets of college dorms, but his room is surprisingly big, and his high school is enormous, with a giant dried up football field and an auditorium. (Both are extreme rarities for Cambodian schools.) James’ high school was built by Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, and apparently Hun Sen really likes the school, because his son is buried on the grounds.
Then we learn the song of the day: “Hit Me Baby One More Time.” Yes, that song.. We learn both the words and the meaning of the words to Britney’s first hit. More than a decade after the song’s release, I finally learn that when Britney sings “hit me” she doesn’t mean physically, she means “hit me up” or contact me. Enlightening. After watching the video of Britney dance and sing in her sexed-up Catholic school girl uniform, class is over.
I go to bed early, and am up the next morning in plenty of time for James’ singing class. Yippee! During today’s class, the students review several American pop songs, including classics by the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC, plus new favorites by Taylor Swift and Good Charlotte.
But the music has just begun. Later that day the students and our travelmates Dave and Julie show up to the dorm for Cambodian Dance Party 2010. (I just made up that name.) The students bring the food, James brings the music and we all bring the dance.
Kratie: Dolphins, kids and biking on beaches.
Kratie, in mid-eastern Cambodia, is home of the endangered Irawaddy dolphins — and not much else. After a two-hour bus ride from Memot, it’s an eight-mile bike ride from our guesthouse to the dolphin boat launch. The ride winds along the Mekong River on a road lined by squat mountains and wooden houses.
It costs us $7 apiece to board the small wooden fishing boat. The six of us have a boat to ourselves manned by a Cambodian dolphin hunter. (A visual hunter, not the illegal kill-‘em-with-a-spear hunter.)
Our hunter starts up the boat’s engine to get us out to prime dolphin viewing waters, then cuts the power. We drift. We see other fishing boats filled with tourists, but no dolphins.
The water is calm and beautiful, but we want to see some dolphins! Fortunately, our Flipper noises call the dolphins out of the water and into our field of vision. Unfortunately, these dolphins don’t leap through hoops or turn backflips. We only catch an occasional glimpse of light gray as the dolphins arch gracefully in and out of the water.
Still, even these flashes of gray cause us to squeal and yelp and point to the patch of water where the dolphin recently disappeared. Other quieter yells come from surrounding boats. But apparently not all of the tourists consider the dolphins the river’s most interesting spectacle.
Judging from their stares and open mouths, the Khmer occupants of one of the nearby boats find our non-Khmer human bodies more visually riveting than the river’s famous finned specimens.
The next day, we bike to Koh Trong Island. A small wooden ferry helps us cross the river. The beach where we land is a long, empty strip of golden brown sand bordering genuinely blue water. A spot ripe for tourist development, James points out. Just don’t market biking on this beach. It’s really hard!
A short climb and we’re in the jungly terrain of Koh Trong. Big leafed palms shade wood and straw huts. Families lounge outside these huts, playing cards and chatting, celebrating the first day of Khmer New Year. Monks with a loudspeaker lead a parade of people down the road.
Julie takes a picture of me with a trio of local girls outside a hut. They ask for a pen as payment. I give them a silver pen I received as a wedding favor. Not really a shareable gift, but it’s the only pen I’ve got. Fortunately, the next group of children I photograph doesn’t ask for any payment. They even pay me — in candy.
Rattanakiri: Lakes and waterfalls and water buffalo
We are exhausted after the seven-hour bus ride from Kratie to Ban Lung, Rattanakiri, in northeastern Cambodia, and immediately check into our guesthouse — an ecolodge in the woods. All six of us are in one room — advertised as the family hut. At least we each have our own bed.
The next morning starts with a delicious free breakfast (scrambled eggs, bread, fruit and coffee) and the search for Yeak Loam Lake. (Yeak Loam means volcanic crater) It’s not as close to our ecolodge as maps, brochures and testimonies led us to believe. Maybe we just walked the wrong way. Finally, after bushwhacking up a hill and wandering along dirt and highway roads, we find the muddy- bottomed sucker.
So do a lot of other people. The lake isn’t the secluded spot I am expecting, and there’s a steady stream of motos and cars.
We pay $1 apiece to gain access to the lake, and then find a shady spot on the bank, which is a convenient launch pad for the black rubber inntertubes we rent for $3,000 riel (75 cents) each. The bank is crowded with people celebrating Khmer New Year with beer, rice, meat and card games, but aside from us and a smattering of children, few people are in the water.
The next day we bike to Cha Ong waterfall. Ban Lung boasts about four waterfalls. We bike to the sign pointing the way to each of these falls. According to James, the group’s organizer, one waterfall is the most breathtaking, another the most enjoyable, the others only so-so. We choose the most breathtaking, which is a shorter distance away than the most enjoyable.
We begin biking as a group, but don’t stay that way. I’m riding a tiny Khmer bike, and when I pedal, my knees brush my chin. This makes it impossible to ride up hills, and I soon get left behind.
I then misread a sign and make a wrong turn, which leads me up and down a series of dusty red hills, but nowhere near any waterfalls. I stop a few times to ask locals if I’m going the right way to the waterfall and they say yes, so I keep going. I then realize that I didn’t specify which waterfall. I stop and call James. Thank God for cell phones!
I am exhausted and upset (as I always am when lost), but eventually make it to the right waterfall. Once again I am surprised by how touristy this attraction is. We have to pay admission, and there are lots of motos and cars, and food stands.
The waterfall is a tall and skinny spout of water showering down upon a pile of rocks. Although I’m hot and dusty, I don’t want to bike back hot and muddy, so I don’t shower under the falls like Dave and James. After all, we still have the waterfalls of Laos for bathing.
We take a detour around a lake in town on the way back to our new, more conveniently located guesthouse. In a field near the lake we watch a group of seven men pull a water buffalo out of a sinkhole. The beast kicks its legs in protest to the grasping hands, but is so weak it can barely stand, let alone fight back.
Twenty-three people in a van and a seventeen hour bus ride – The journey to Laos: Part One
The next day we take off for Laos. The journey starts with a three-hour van ride to Stung Treng, Cambodia. In the beginning, only 10 of the van’s 12 available seats filled, but we know there will be more passengers. Casual bets are placed. Twenty is our top estimate. The actual number of passengers who fit into this 12-seater van? Twenty-three. Two in the driver’s seat and one boy in another boy’s lap. Unfortunately no one on the roof.
We spend the next day in Pakse, Laos, trying to figure out how to get to Vientiane and Luang Prabang. We end up taking the morning bus to Vientiane. We had heard the bus would take 10 to 12 hours. Actual time? Seventeen hours.
It’s the local bus, and it’s still the Khmer and Laos new years (they’re at the same time) so the bus stops every five to 10 minutes to let people off and on. We’re packed in like cattle in a slaughterhouse or sardines in a tin. Choose your own overused simile.
We are lucky to have seats. The aisles are crammed with people. These unfortunate aislers are forced to use us seaters as arm, leg and head rests. Luckily, the bus has plenty of ventilation. The doors and windows gape open all 17 hours.
Toward evening, the aisles thin and the remaining aislers get bags of rice for chairs. The bus is also empty enough for a game of travel Scrabble. Yes!
Our bus is supposed to arrive in Vientiane at 7:30 p.m. but with all the stops, we know it will be late. We place bets for our estimated time of arrival. The earliest bet is 7:40 p.m. The latest is 8:30 p.m. Actual arrival time: 12:30 a.m.
When we finally arrive in Vientiane, a local man I’d been talking to offers us a ride to a hotel. Since it’s late and there are few tuk-tuks, we say OK. Of course, he wants money for the ride: $20,000 kip (about $2.50) per person. We haggle the price down, but still pay too much. He is set on taking us to a certain hotel that he says is popular with foreigners. But one glance at the building and the surrounding spots and we know it is too pricey for our budgets.
After lots of walking around and fielding of suggestions from other walkers — including one, perhaps tongue-in-cheek suggestion about sleeping on the streets — we finally find a cheaper place.
Out of Vientiane, into Luang Prabang, on a not-so VIP bus
After waking at 11 a.m., a few of us take a self-guided mini tour of Vientiane. We see an old stupa (That Dam), visit a wat crammed with an assortment of Buddha statues and walk partway to the morning market.
Chinese for dinner. Pork dumplings, stirfried veggies and Beer Lao. I much prefer Lao’s full-bodied national beer to the thin, pale brew of Cambodia’s Angkor or its cheaper brother, Anchor. Still, my preference isn’t passionate enough to justify buying one of the thousands of Beer Lao T-shirts hawked on every street corner.
The Chinese menu contains a few amusing items. One dish is labeled Confusing meat. On the same page is its cohort — a dish that should be labeled Confused meat. Its real name is chicken pork.
The Chinese food is a good start to our all-night bus ride. The bus is labeled VIP and definitely cushier than the local bus from Pakse. But it’s lacking the beds that we’ve seen on passing night buses.
We were told a meal would be served aboard the bus, and that the bus would have bathrooms. Neither is true. To make up for the false promises, the kindly driver stops every hour and a half so people can buy food and piss on the side of the road.
With the help of earplugs, blinders (a night mask), and possible sleeping pills (unlabeled blue pills rattling around in my bottle of assorted medications), I eventually get to sleep. Thankfully, my battery of sleep aids blocks out the constant upchucking that my travelmates endure and heartily mimic for several days following the ride.
Parlez-vous Francais? Luang Prabang: A slice of Europe in the heart of Asia
I wake around 6 a.m. to the bus winding through the mountains of Luang Prabang. We’ve been on the bus 11 hours. The road is bordered on one side by jagged mountain peaks and on the other side by thatched huts, lots of trees and more mist-shrouded mountains. Our double-decker bus squeals around each hairpin turn. Road signs marked with squiggles, half curves and zig zags hinting at the shape of the journey ahead.
The bus arrives in Luang Prabang at 8:19 a.m. A tuk-tuk lets us off in town at Joma, a bakery “Lonely Planet” calls one of Luang Prabang’s best.. I scarf a breakfast burrito and coffee and grab a bran muffin for later.
We easily find a cheap-enough guesthouse. Later, in a children’s library, I read a book about Laos and learn that it is sparsely populated (six million) and largely undeveloped.
For lunch I have stirfry with sauce that tastes like ketchup and a coconut pineapple shake. (The first of countless Luang Prabang fruit shakes.)
Luang Prabang is like a quaint European town in the middle of Asia. According to that book I read, before World War II the Vietnamese filled the town with French-style buildings. The streets are lined with cafes, bakeries, restaurants, spas, boutiques and sandwich, crepe and fruit shake stands. There are also lots of tour-guide shops. The town is filled with tourists, yet maintains a vibrant charm.
A multitude of nature adventures wait just outside the city center. The tour shops sell tickets for jungle treking, ziplines, elephant rides, kayaking, waterfall visits and so on.
That first day in Luang Prabang we meet a married couple who recently finished their two years in Peace Corps serving in Tonga, a smattering of tiny South Pacific islands I had never heard of. The couple was on the tail end of five months of travels.
We spend our few days in Luang Prabang swapping Peace Corps stories. Unfortunately for us Peace Corps Cambodians, the Peace Corps Tonga stories of tsunamis, murder (seriously!) and mayhem easily topped our less riveting tales.
But there’s hope for us lame-taled Peace Corps Cambodians. Seventy three groups of Peace Corps Volunteers have served in Tonga. Only three Peace Corps groups have served in Cambodia. That gives us oodles of time for dark and dastardly stories to unfold.
Photoshopped waterfalls, Asiatic bears and wat climbing
Our second day in Luang Prabang we take a truck — mistakenly called a tuk-tuk — to Kuangsi Waterfall. We travel the 20 - 30 kilometers on a road curling over wooden bridges and wrapping around mountains, past spindly trees and scattered huts with grass and tin roofs. 
The falls are virtually deserted when we arrive in the early morning — and gorgeous. They are a torrent of foamy white water tumbling over several tiers of rocks and greenery into pools that look like they’ve been Photoshopped a clear, light blue.
After lots of pictures, we hike up nearly endless stairs and muddy slopes to level ground and a fork in the road. A sign that points one way reads “Spring water 3 K.” We don’t know what kind of spring water the sign is referring to and don’t want to walk three kilometers to find out.
Once we’ve descended the stairs, part of the group takes off in search of an elusive cave, and the other half (the half I’m in) takes off in search of swimming
Several (natural, non-chlorinated) pools are available for swimming. All are filled with that unbelievable blue shade of water. We splash around a bit, then find a pool with a rope swing. We leave only when the pool is taken over by other tourists, including a trio of boys whose monkey-like ease with the rope swing suggests they are frequent visitors.
On the way back to our ride, we stop at a bear sanctuary. The smallish brown Asiatic bears live behind an electric fence. Even so, I guess life behind an electric fence is better than life turned into meat or bear skins — the likely fate of these bears before their rescue from poachers.
Besides the electric fence, the bears’ new home isn’t bad. Their pen has hammocks, spinning barrels, monkey bars and tetherballs, plus watermelon and bananas to snack on. (For more about these bears, visit Freethebears.org.au.)
That evening, we climb the 328 steps to a wat atop a mountain in the center of town. The wat’s location provides a nice view of the sun setting over town and an assortment of other tourists.
Kayaking with Tom Petty to Whiskey Village
(Caveat): Tom Petty isn’t our tour guide’s real name. It’s Thom Phed, or something similar. He probably got his rock star name from tourists like us.)
The guides have life jackets for us, but not the advertised helmets. I’m glad I’m wearing my bandana. It won’t be the best protection if my head slams into rocks, but it should help with the blazing sun.
It’s two to a kayak except for Superman James who solos. I start out with Diana. After a 10-second tutorial on how to hold a paddle, we push out to sea. Or river, whatever.
The guides soon discover that I don’t know how to paddle. “You don’t know how to paddle,” they tell me. (I maintain that this inability is due to the funkiness of my paddle. Each end of the paddle faces opposite directions.)
Diana is pulled out of my kayak and put in a kayak with Tom Petty. I get the other guide, who doesn’t have a rock star name. My nameless guide sits in the rear of the kayak and does most of the work. Even so, my arm muscles are soon burning with the effort of slicing the paddle through the water.
Luckily we don’t have to paddle continuously. The slow current carries us down many of the river’s stretches. When the river isn’t doing our work, my guide does the work for me. I soon learn that when he says “I paddle,” he’s not inviting me to join him. Decoded, “I paddle” means “Get your damn paddle out of the water so we can actually get somewhere.”
We stop several times along the way, although not at any of the villages the guy at the ticket office said we would explore. Our first stop is thirty minutes in for lunch, eaten on the river’s rocky bank. Lunch for the guides is meaty. Ours is carby: fried rice and baguettes. The guides must have thought we were vegetarians. Or anti-Atkins.
After lunch, we set off again for the cave, and soon arrive at its yawning depths. The two levels of the cave are filled with tourists, and also with Buddhas. Most of the tourists arrive on wooden speedboats.
After the cave, we continue to whiskey village, our final destination and ultimate motivation for all this paddling. My nameless guide says it will take two hours to get to the village, one if we paddle fast. We must paddle really fast, ‘cause we arrive at whiskey village in what seems like even less than an hour.
On the way to the whiskey we see an elephant getting a bath, or more accurately, a dunking. The dunking is done by a small man sitting atop the wrinkled gray beast. This man simply pushes the top of the elephant’s head, and the monstrous mass goes under. The elephant doesn’t seem to mind. After each dunking he simply raises his trunk in the air and sprays lake water.
Three naked children run squealing through the water to our kayaks as we paddle up to the docks of the whiskey village. After acknowledging the hearty welcome, we pull the kayaks aashore and tote them and the paddles up the hill to the van and wait for the whiskey. It comes after a 30-second walk.
The distiller sits outside someone’s house, along with several varieties of the local brew. There’s straight-up, strong clear stuff, sweeter yellow stuff and really sweet, wine-like red stuff. I like the straight-up strong stuff best.
To add to their bite, some of the whiskeys are bottled with poisonous creatures like centipedes, scorpions and snakes. Bear paws, bear penises and other wild animal parts are trapped in bottles of alcohol at a nearby house/business we later visit.
A loom and a few silk goods are also on display in the whiskey village, part of the “weaving and silk making” advertised as part of our tour.
Only 11 hours to Vientiane — try to sleep!
Dinner is Beer Laos, chicken on a stick and sticky rice. Then onto the bus for a restful sleep. Ha. Because of the uncomfortably close quarters, my knees are pressed painfully against the plastic seatback the entire way. The Scandinavian man behind me is assumedly in the same or worse position, because my seat won’t recline.
I give one of my maybe sleeping pills to Lydia and keep the last one as a safety. I don’t need it. I just listen to my iPod and zone in and out of sleep. I awaken during every sharp turn to my head banging against the window or seat back.
We stop at midnight for our free — well, paid-for meal. I am exhausted and not hungry, but buy some cookies anyway, and eating those makes me hungry. I line up for my bowl of noodle soup. Energizing, but I don’t need energy now. We’re only about halfway through our trip and I need to go back to sleep.
We arrive in Vientiane around 6:30 a.m., which makes the bus ride about 11 hours.
10 hours to go in Laos: Time to see those golden stupas and wats
After arriving in Vientiane, we take a tuk-tuk into town and check into a hotel for the day. We have about 10 hours to kill before our night bus to Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital.
I get noodle soup and Lao coffee and then walk a really long way to the golden stupa. (Pha That Luang – Laos’ national symbol.) I stop at important looking wats and monuments on the way, like Patuxai, the Laos independence arch. Laos became independent from France in 1949.
Rows of tour buses are idling outside Patuxai, waiting for the wandering hordes of Asians wearing bright, color-coded T-shirts and nametags.
Taking advantage of the swarms of tourists at Patuxai and Pha That Luang are neon vest wearers with bulky cameras dangling from their necks. They are taking pictures of tourists in front of the famous monuments and then selling the tourists the pictures, produced instantaneously on a handheld printer. I don’t know how much the pictures cost because none of the photographers approach me. Maybe I intimidate them, Lydia later suggests. Maybe. I am a white giant.
The stupa isn’t just a stupa – it’s also a museum. But the museum costs money, and isn’t open when I go. “Lonely Planet”” also gave the museum a bad review. Instead of waiting for the museum’s opening, I walk over to a beautifully ornate golden wat. Unfortunately, my camera battery dies just before I can snap a picture.
Back to Cambodia like a true VIP
Now this is a VIP bus. A bus with beds! And pillows and blankets. Two people to a bed. The bed is a bit short for my long limbs, but it’s a bed. Dinner is served on the bus. (Fried rice, bottled water and candy for dessert.) And there is an actual working bathroom on the bus. Amazing. I don’t need any maybe sleeping pills tonight.
Our bus leaves at 8:30 p.m. and we arrive at the Laos-Cambodian border at about 7 a.m. We then transfer to a couple different vans and, finally, the last bus home. (Or, rather, to Phnom Penh.) The travel time from Vientiane to Phnom Penh is 20-some hours.
After a couple days of Peace Corps conferencing and a measly seven-hour bus ride, it truly is home free. It’s good to be back.
EXTRAS:
Interesting hearings/sights on the way:
* “Oh my Buddha!” A comment from a young Cambodian woman near the Laos
* Three to four inch long mole hair! Seen on a man boarding my bus to Kampong Cham. He could braid or pony that hair! It’s the longest mole hair I’ve seen.
* A truck piled so high with stuff wrapped under striped plastic that the truck is rocking front to back on its wheel axles. On the way back to Phnom Penh , in Cambodia
Some facts about Luang Prabang, Laos
* 700 miles above sea level
* UNESCO World Heritage listed (for a wat or somethin'), which means there is a city-wide ban on buses and trucks.
* 11:30 p.m. curfew
* Luang means great/royal. Prabang means ?
* 1887 - Laos receives French protection from its meddling neighbors
* 1945 – Laos casts off its meddling French rulers and becomes independent.
* American warplanes dropped about 270 million bombs on Laos between 1964 – 1975, during the Indochine (Vietnam)
80 million, or 30 percent of those bombs did not explode.
14 of Laos
87,231 square kilometers of Laos' 236,800 square kilometers are contaminated by UXOs (unexploded ordinance, in this case, bombs.)
About 15 percent of this UXO land has been cleared in the last 12 years.
It costs $2,000 U.S. dollars to clear from each hectacre of land.
It could take more than 100 years to clear all this bombed land.
From 1964 – 2008, 50,000 people fell victim to these bombs. Sixty percent (30,000) of these bomb victims, 40 percent (20,000) were injured. Of the 20,000 of these bomb victims left alive, 13,500 were disabled.
U.S. B-52 bombers could drop100 bombs at a time, and often did so during the 580,000 bombing missions the United States undertook upon Laos.
The United States dropped planeloads of bombs on Laos
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