Scott G Trenorden

So I thought it was all a bit tongue-in-cheek; “In Vang Vieng, everyone sits around in open-sided bars, drinking beer and watching re-run after re-run of Friends”.

 

But sure enough, the first thing I am confronted with after doing the walk from the bus station to the town centre is Jennifer Aniston’s squawky voice and, yup, canned laughter.
Bar after bar, playing Friends, Simpsons, Futurama, with tourist after tourist seemingly comatose, not laughing, not moving… Probably still spinning from their mushroom shake.

It’s a wise idea that one; consuming a couple of shakes containing heavily hallucinogenic mushrooms, which take an hour or two to kick in (apparently…), with no idea of how many mushrooms you’re getting in each shake.

 

Intelligent.

 

And so, yes, I avoided doing some Mark Roy-inspired research into the apparently epic drug availability and instead spent my two days in Vang Vieng chatting with Steve, the owner of the Aussie Bar, hanging out with the wonderfully bad influencing Lori and generally just having some down time.

 

Vang Vieng is surrounded by very unique and beautiful mountains which seem to lean to the side. Well, they don’t seem to. They do.

Problem is you can’t really see them very well due to the dense smoke that hangs in the air everywhere – a by-product of the epic use of slash-and-burn ‘farming’ going on around these parts.

 

“I didn’t bother trying to edit out the green-blue sky, to show how heavy the smoke haze is in these parts.

A thick smoke hangs over Vang Vieng and is even worse in Luang Prabang… Horribly worse. As the black and white photos following this one attest to.”

 

And it only got worse when I headed higher into the mountains towards Luang Prabang. Oh did it get worse…

 

 

Smoke on the Mountain…

 

I’m sitting in a café now typing this up and looking out the front doors all I can see is a grey haze.
My eyes sting and I often feel like I have moth balls stuck up my nose due to all the soot in the air.

 

The drive up here was unbelievable. A couple of times we needed to shut the windows of the minivan while we drove past flames flicking across the road. Whole mountain ranges seemed to be on fire. Everywhere you looked was barren; tree-less hills were dotted everywhere.

 

Directly ahead of us was a massive mountain range…

 

 

Slash-and-burn season is in full effect.

 

What would be stunning vistas have been transformed into grey, featureless horizons. Essentially, the local people have absolutely massacred the beauty of this region with their seemingly archaic practices.

 

The barren hills await a soon to come rainy season, when all the nutrients will be washed off the slopes and into the rivers.

 

“Why do they do this??” Daniel asked me.

Why do they do this indeed?

 

I left this one in colour to show the condition of the landscape; hazed, scarred and charred by the burnings.

 

A mountain range rises up through the smoke.

 

If I had known that things would be this uncomfortable up here, I would have thought twice about coming. In fact, I don’t know whether I would have come at all.

 

Tomorrow I will travel over to Nong Khiow, a small village four hours from here. I imagine it will be just as bad there.

I wonder if I should bother to go at all..?

 

The sad thing is, Luang Prabang is an absolutely beautiful little town (well, it’s actually quite big). It’s easily the ‘artiest’ of the towns I’ve seen so far and is wonderfully French; it’s pretty much the town Vientiane wants to be.

The architecture makes this place so quaint and appetizing and the food is sensational.

 

A roadside village; a common sight during the drive up through the hills. The often back onto a several-hundred-metre drop.

 

A tractor lays in wait, amid a charred and graded landscape.

 

 

I would love to experience this town after the rainy season, when the roads are passable but slash-and-burning is not in effect.

 

Perhaps I will return one day and continue north to experience the border regions and local people in their traditional ways.

 

Besides the extreme discomfort of the smoke, this is definitely a town to visit and eventually come back to.