by Jim Goodman
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| bathing hour at VangVieng, 1994, when people still used the river |
Shedding its notorious image
as Southeast Asia’s prime backpacker partying venue, the once sleepy town of
Vang Vieng, 150 km north of Vientiane, is assuming a new identity. Fancy hotels are going up, sometimes
blocking the view of what was always Vang Vieng’s main attraction—the Namsong
River flowing alongside the town, with a backdrop of picturesque, rugged
limestone hills. These hotels
cater to the new breed of tourists coming to Vang Vieng: Koreans inspired by the Korean reality
TV show Youth over Flowers, which
staged several episodes here in 2014, Chinese, Japanese, Thai and older
Westerners, mainly Australian.
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| rural scenery near Vang Vieng |
Local people may not be too
happy with the transformation of their town into a conglomeration of big
concrete buildings, but they prefer the new clientele. Few regret the passing of the dozen
years or so from the beginning of this century, when hedonistic, culturally
clueless Western youth swarmed into Vang Vieng, outnumbering the residents,
bent on enjoyment, from pleasures on the river to all-night parties with loud
music and lots of alcohol and drugs.
I missed all that, but had an
inkling of what was to come on my last visit in the spring of 2000. The place had quite charmed me several
years earlier and I wanted to relive my initial experience. I knew it had just recently become
popular with the backpacker set, so I expected some changes, like more guesthouses
and restaurants, but nothing so drastic as to spoil my appreciation.
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| Namsong River in 1994 |
The route from Vientiane was
flat all the way, but with numerous stops it took five hours. As soon as I disembarked, several Lao
youths surrounded me, but not for offering accommodations. “Opium? Opium? Opium?” Looking totally uninterested, I
managed to disperse them. But that
was new. The last time I came the
only drug offered me was local rice liquor.
As for a guesthouse, I had a
range of cheap choices: $1 for a
room with a mat on the floor and $2 for one with a mattress on the floor. Shared shower and toilet, of course, so
I opted the mattress. I didn’t
require much comfort. I just
wanted to stroll along the river again.
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| the only resort in town in the 1990s |
That wasn’t possible anymore. Thanks
to the burgeoning tourism business, many of the houses along the river had
turned part of their premises into restaurants and bars and so had constructed
walls around their compounds that extended right down to the riverbank. Some space still existed between the
compounds, but not very much.
Anyway, though I did see a few boats on the river, nobody came to bathe
in the late afternoon. Whether
that was because they had piped water to their houses now or because they
didn’t want to bathe in front of so many tourists I didn’t find out.
Next morning I
took a bus north to a Hmông village, but it was a resettled village right next
to the highway, therefore not very traditional. Not even the older women wore Hmông clothing and so no looms
were active, no hemp thread being prepared. I returned to Vang Vieng for a walk around the town, but nothing
really captured my attention. I left
early next morning. Other than the
drugs and bar scene, and that everything was cheap, I couldn’t understand why
people came here.
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| novices at leisure on the river |
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| silversmith at work |
Several months earlier,
however, something happened to transform Vang Vieng’s scene entirely, and it
was just getting started when I made my last visit. The manager of an organic farm a few kilometers north of the
town bought a bunch of inner tubes so that his workers could enjoy floating
down the Namsong to get back to the town.
Someone got the idea tourists might want to do this and so a lucrative
business was born and the transformation of Vang Vieng began.
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| bridge below the entrance to Jang Cave |
The tubing experience, touted
all over the Internet, soon flooded Vang Vieng with budget travelers. From dozens of visitors a day, the
number within a few years reached thousands. At its peak, around 800 tourists a day rode tubes on the
Namsong River. By the end of the
decade 150,000 backpackers a year came to Vang Vieng. They were not big spenders, but with that many of them they
were a great boost to the local economy.
Local people took advantage of
this influx to set up businesses catering to all the foreigners’
interests. The riverside restaurants
became rock and roll bars and stayed open long past midnight. Besides cheap Lao beer and rice liquor,
they also sold meals laced with opium or psychedelic mushrooms. Some 1500 households formed a
cooperative to handle the tubing business. They even added new adventures on the river by constructing
ziplines across it and huge slides into the water. Unlike the tubing, these were free.
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| cave temple along the river |
So Vang Vieng became the
ultimate Southeast Asian party scene.
Foreigners could enjoy various thrills on the river and in the evening
get as drunk and stoned as they desired and listen and dance to the loud rock
and roll they loved. The townsfolk
benefited enormously from the flow of money, but the business boom had its
downsides, like women in skimpy bikinis in the town, boisterous drunks and the open
consumption of drugs.
Not only were the backpackers
oblivious to the conservative norms of local Lao culture, they were not very
careful indulging themselves.
Around two dozen of them died each year from drug overdoses or river
accidents, like riding down a slide and slamming head first into a
boulder. (The slides soon earned
the nickname ‘death slides.’) Vang
Vieng people stopped all their customary activity on the river—fishing, boat
transport, bathing—because they were convinced, due to all the deaths, the
river was haunted by evil spirits.
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| sculptures adorning a small riverside cave |
Yet since they were making
money from tourism they took no steps to redress the problems. Finally, after Australian newspapers in
2012 featured stories on the Namsong River deaths, the Lao government closed
all the riverside bars, dismantled the ziplines and slides and banned tubing
for a year, after which it resumed, but at a reduced scale and tightly
controlled. Nowadays a few bars
are permitted, but a midnight curfew is in effect as well. The backpacker scene died, but Vang
Vieng’s prior pristine identity could never revive, for the river that was so
much part of the town’s life and culture has lost its role. Post-backpacker deaths, people shun it.
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| chedis containing the ashes of Vang Vieng monks |
Vang Vieng dates
its foundation to 1353, established as a way station between Vientiane and
Luang Phabang. It was never an
important town, though during the Vietnam War the Americans built an airstrip
and base here. After the war Laos
closed its doors to visitors until the end of the 80s, and then only allowed
tourists under certain conditions.
They could travel freely anywhere within Vientiane Prefecture, but
anywhere beyond they had to be part of an organized group of a government
agency or travel with a government minder.
I made a few short trips to
Vientiane in the early 90s, mainly to get a new Thai visa in a fresh
destination that was closer than Penang. I didn’t stay but two or three days each time, exploring the
temples and other sites of the city, as well as a jungle resort a couple hours
outside the city. Eventually,
since it was within the prefecture, I took a trip to Vang Vieng.
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| farmer woman heading home |
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| typical limestone hill near Vang Vieng |
At that time the town had only
two hotels, next to the small central market. Rooms, with toilet and shower, were $4. Other than that, a small resort with
several individual cabins at $12 a night lay on the riverbank south of the
town, near one of the better-known caves.
The hotel room was comfortable enough, but three times a day, including
once in the middle of the night, the ice truck came and dumped blocks of ice
into a grinder across the street that spent half an hour breaking up the blocks
at an incredible noise level.
After two nights of this I moved to the resort.
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| casting a net in the Namsong River |
I was the only foreigner in
town then, but not the first they’d seen.
Folks were friendly, all smiles and children quick to shout
“Bonjour!” Most of the women, even
the young girls, dressed in traditional style, with hair tied in a bun. In the
suburbs I saw several looms at work, with lots of extra heddle sticks used to
create the complex inlaid patterns on the cloth. I also watched people making fishnets and silversmiths
incising intricate designs on bracelets and pendants.
The town has a couple of old Buddhist
temples, originally constructed in the 16th and 17th
centuries. One is just south of
the resort and I watched novices come up to the riverside just below the Jang
Cave to rest on the rocks and swim below them. A wooden bridge crosses the river here and leads to the
staircase for a short climb up to the cave. It has a lagoon inside and enough space alongside that it
was used as a base by local resistance to the renegade Chinese Ho invasion in
the late 19th century.
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| paddling a pirogue on the Namsong |
Other caves, big and small,
abound in the area, some along the river with lagoons inside, others adorned
with religious sculptures or partly turned into a temple. Usually the decorative sculptures were
depictions of Buddha and perhaps kneeling devotees. But they could also include such oddities as a man holding a
huge fish or a parrot-headed creature with a little gremlin that look like they
were statues of beings from another planet.
Temples and caves made
pleasant pauses on my exploration of the environs. The real pleasure, though, was wandering along the river and
into the rural area on the other side. Limestone hills popped up at intervals from a perfectly flat
plain. Some had cliffs that rose
straight up from the ground at a 90-degree angle. Next to this might be a lone stilted house, with its fields
spread out in front of it. As I
kept walking I had a new vista every ten minutes. I had no map, but I couldn’t get lost, for I had the
singular shapes of certain hills to guide me back to the river.
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| water-wheel connected to a rice pounder |
Mornings and especially late
afternoons were the most active times on the river. These were the best hours for fishing. Boats taking people to villages up or
down the river were also busy then and in late afternoon it was bathing
hour. The boats were wooden
pirogues, narrow and of various lengths, long for transport, short for
fishing. A few were outfitted with
outboard motors, but most used paddles or poles to convey themselves along the
waters.
For fishing, they could go in
pairs, with one sitting in the rear paddling and the other standing in the
front to cast the net. Or an
individual would wade out into the shallow river and cast his net. Whether standing in the water or riding
a boat, they then dragged the net some distance and then checked to see if they
caught anything. Others set traps
near the shore and periodically examined them, thrusting any fish caught into a
split bamboo basket they had tied to their belts.
A few water-wheels were in use
along the river then. Large ones, a few meters high, funneled water to
riverside gardens. Smaller ones
operated rice-pounders, a good example of the ingenuity of ‘primitive’
technology. Buffaloes wallowed in
the river for much of the day, in water up to their jaws. (A surprising number of them were pink.)
Children and dogs splashed around
in the shallow parts.
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| buffaloes wallowing in the river |
The most charming time on the
river was the last hours of the day, when people came to bathe, both themselves
and their vehicles. Trucks, buses
and tractor-trailers drove right into the river and their owners used buckets
to douse them with water. Upstream
people of all ages, male and female, bathed in the shallows, the men stripped
down to shorts, the women tying their sarongs just above the breasts, the very
old and very young completely naked.
Women tied their long hair in
a bun to keep it dry while they submerged up to the neck. If a woman intended to wash her hair she
entered the river backwards, sat, lifted her hair and lay on her back in the
water spreading the locks out evenly in the stream so they didn’t get tangled. For an observer, this was the most
charming vignette in the scene.
For the participants, it was
also a social occasion, an opportunity for a leisurely chat with friends and
neighbors. That’s all gone
now. People bathe at home. Nobody goes fishing or playing in the
river. It’s there strictly for
organized and controlled tourist activities. The river is no longer an integral part of the people’s
lives. The Vang Vieng of last
century, gone forever, is just a memory now, but in my own case, one that remains
firmly, fondly and permanently implanted.
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| vanished vignette: girls bathing in the Namsong in the early 90s |
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