The Cold Shoulder and the Heat & the Haze or . . . No Accounting for Taste 2

4:30 Sun (No Sunglasses Needed!) - Luang Prabang

So...as I said below, in all our time on the road, we hadn't really heard a bad thing about the country of Laos. Even in conversations with travelers over past years, virtually all of them raved that Laos was a special place. Consequently, as a rare exception, I'd allowed myself to fall into a trap with Laos - the trap of having high expectations. This almost always sets me up for a letdown but it was hard to discount all we'd heard. The one negative we'd come across was in our guide book. They wrote that the spring months in the north of the country could be smokey due to slash and burn agriculture practiced by the ethnic hill tribes. Little did I know.

Spring in SE Asia can be unbearable enough with just the heat.There is no breeze and the humidity gives the air a weight you almost have to push through. Like the Laotians themselves, we had to retreat most days to some internet cafe or under the fan in our room (no air-con) for two or three hours or risk getting decimated by the heat. In the capital, Vientiane, the air had a haze that seemed like smoke or pollution but without any distinguishing smell. As we moved north visibility - and breathing - became more constricted.

Like Walking in a Bowl of Hot Soup - Luang Prabang

Mature trees are rare in Laos so the coutryside has a mostly scrubby appearance. On the bus north out of Vientiane we saw our first blackened hillsides. We had no idea why the hills and valley floors were destroyed they way they were. The land often seemed too steep to farm and everything that was burned seemed to be left fallow. Nonetheless, the local people continued to work up and down the mountainsides with what looks like disdain for anything green. Everything is left white ash, black snags and tan and red earth.

We spent time with one woman from New Zealand who went on a couple day trek near Luang Prabang. She was astonished to walk, at times, along the trail with fire buring on both sides of her. This on days when the temps were just shy of a hundred degrees fahrenheit!

As horrifying as the land is, the air has been transformed into the most irritating and inescapable fallout of the burning. From Vientiane north we were plunged into a haze that burned the eyes and lungs and blotted out the sun. Even at mid-day, on the worst days you can stare directly into its light with naked eyes. One day, at a bus stop in Udomxai, pieces of black and white ash rained down on my lunch - and I was eating under an awning! Every time we'd take a shower, the washcloth turned a turgid gray. Our poor lungs...

What could the people grow that would be worth such destruction? For more than a week, in all the areas that had been burned, we saw nothing planted. Finally, up near the Burmese and Chinese borders, we saw rows of spikey plants along the slopes. A local man who spoke some english told us they were trees. They mature enough for harvest in seven years. As far as we could see, they cut and burn the trees so they can . . . grow trees. Okay...

Springtime In Laos

Whatever, I'm not a farmer and I'm most definitely not in the shoes of a Hmong tribe family man trying to survive. The experience of living in that atmosphere was nothing I'd like to replicate, though. If you're thinking about going to Laos, don't go in spring

Agrarian Apocalypse - Luang Nam Tha

The devastation is grim but it doesn't fully answer the complaint I made about not being able to account for other peoples' taste. The big, suprising negative we encountered had to do with the Laotian people themselves. For a lack of any more charitable way to describe them - they just weren't that nice. I try to live by the credo of not saying anything if you don't have anything nice to say but I've never felt so stumped by such a disconnect between what other people seem to perceive and my own perceptions. Why do other travelers give Laos such an emphatic thumbs-up?

I like to interact with the people in new places - even if they tease or have laughs at my expense or struggle with the language barriers with sign language or whatever. I didn't take off on a travel adventure out of misanthropy. I like to try to connect with people now and then. It's fun to make eye contact and see if you can find any commonality. That that approach didn't work so well for me in Laos. You can walk down the street or trail all day saying "Sabadie" (hello) and get only the most tepid repsonses - very often, none at all. That happened so often that, after a few weeks, I fell into following the Laotian example walking along withdrawn not saying anything to passersby. Even then, they still avert their eyes when they get close and almost never initiate a greeting.

One thing that Laos does offer is a chance to see and experience life at the village level. When you come from the West, you don't get that chance very often; if at all. The odd thing for me is, one of the expectations from village life is friendliness or camaraderie, even if it's only in passing. If you don't have those things, walking through a town of people who don't smile or turn away can make you feel very unwelcome. It's too intimate of a situation to be in without friendliness. At best, it felt like acute disinterest. At worst, it felt like suspicion or even judgement.

OK, fair enough. People are what they are and that's fine by me. My question is why so many other travelers speak so highly about how nice the Laotians are. It's not like I'm traveling alone. Tami came to the same conclusions as I did. One of our German friends who visited in Vientiane said, after only a couple days, that he "missed the smiles" （He's spent quite a bit of time in Thailand right next door to Laos and, I guess, expected the Laotians to be similarly friendly.）I don't know, call me blind for the five weeks we were in the country. All I know is that the people of every country we've visited have their character and that character comes in many shapes and sizes. The Laotians were the first people on this trip to make us feel like they were barely willing to tolerate us visiting their country. Weird.