Day 325 - Following the Mekong

This post should be a Richard Curtis movie; Two Confessions and a Revision. Quick! Call Hugh Grant and find out what he is doing, besides feeling sorry for himself.

A wise corporate warrior once told me; "Best to beg for forgiveness, than ask for permission". It's worked for me so far. So, here goes.

We rented a motorcycle and rode from Vientiane in northern Laos, all the way down to Pakse in the south. Sorry Mum(s). Sorry Dad(s).

That, in case you missed it, was the first confession.

It was quite fun. Not awesome though, due in no small part to two numb arses and the uniform and mostly non-descript landscape along the way. But it was good, clean, Bell family fun though. Me, the missus and our unborn, potential children.

There were highlights. However, before I tell you about them, there is the matter of my second confession.

I'm as homesick as an Australian doing winter in London. I find that I am experiencing everything through a blue-tinged veil of sadness. It's hard to write about the majesty of the lazy Mekong, without wishing I was looking out at the Harbour. It's a challenge to wax lyrical about a bowl of Lao noodles, when all I want is a pizza from Arthur's on Oxford Street. No matter who else I meet, I miss the rag-tag (but highly engaging) bunch of misfits the wife and I are fortunate enough to call friends.

So, whilst Laos is a great country, it's not having quite the impact it should right now. The towns all look the same. I feel like we are slinking from place to place, marking time before something else.

Then again; how about an underground river that travels 7km through a mountain? Would that likely stir me from my fug?

'Ken oath.

Through eyes that yearn for the familiar sights of home, I put the Laos cities of Paksan, Tha Khaek, Savannaket, Pakse (and all the villages in between) into a big box marked 'Meh'. Kong Lor Cave though is a dead-set marvel of natural engineering.

Close your eyes for a second (actually, that's not going to work, is it?). Imagine traveling - on the previously mentioned trailbike - down a 42km road of varying quality. You reach a woodland glade of watery loveliness and scramble over some rocks, to where a boatman is waiting to take you deep inside a gigantic gash in the rock. You don your headlamp, and away you go.

In describing it, my mind is wont to lapse into mythology. Charon, the boatman, taking us into the Underworld. Or perhaps Lord of the Rings, a journey into the kingdom of that ghostly army. Beowulf journeying into the lair of Grendel's mother. It's astounding, mythical, the scale and size of this place.

At times, the passageway can be 100m wide and almost as tall. A dark and cavernous natural cathedral of inky blackness. The river itself is a veritable highway of activity. No sooner has daylight faded and the darkness enveloped you, light appears in the distance and a boat, laden with tobacco from the plantations on the other side of the mountain, passes. Far from just a tourist attraction, this monstrosity is also the quickest way to get around the mountain. By road, the same trip takes around an hour and a half. Via cave, it's about forty minutes or so, allowing for the times when you need to alight the boat to wade with it through shallower waters.

Many places we've visited during the past eleven months have been memorable. But once we'd left, they fell from our minds. Occasionally we'd reminisce, talking about how we'd enjoyed being there. Kong Lor though, I can't get it out of my head. I never knew such a place could exist outside of the world of Tolkien.

Other than the cave, there really isn't too much to report. Kilometres and kilomteres of banana leaf shacks, a very close shave with a snake, many kamikaze cows, the odd road side drink stall and a general sense that Laos is probably the least developed country we've visited.

Which brings me nicely to the retraction. In writing the blog, I've often put forward the view that (western) life has become too complicated. I've suggested that in our give-it-to-me-now world of consumerism, we've lost something that made us more human than we are today.

I'm ready to revise that view. I've seen the other side. I still believe that owning fleets of great beast-cars, multiple televisions and mansion-homes with six bedrooms and equal number of bathrooms may be a little unnecessary. Western society is a drain on the world. If you ignore political and geographical boundaries, what's clear is that other people are going without simply to keep us in the decadent manner to which we've become accustomed.

Now though, I see that there needs to be a median. A point at which technology, progress and all the negative forces that drive modern life become lesser evils. Visiting villages without clean running water or electricity is a big eye-opener. Being served bowls of noodles by ten-year olds made me wish their families could send them to school instead. Visiting a hospital to get some basic antiseptic cream for Rachel's (harmless) spider bite, we were confronted with a bucket full of bloody bandages spilling out onto the floor, and a treatment room looking more oo-er than ER.

It's made me appreciate that progress is important. That the answer to the world's ills isn't as easy as looking to the past. That somewhere between primitivism and the extreme corporate greed that characterises the worst of the western world, there is a right, human balance.

It's important that the Laotian people feel the benefit of some of the massive investment that is now pouring into the country from China and Australia. The country is resource rich and, because of it, will see great development over the next few years. We have visited a country right on the cusp of huge change. We both feel very privileged to be here now, to see the final traces of what Laos and the rest of this region was like long before industrialisation, corporatisation and globalisation. Just before it all gets washed away by an inevitable tsunami of progress.

I still can't shake my craving for a Mrs Macs Pepper Steak Pie though.

For a sample of some of the photos taken on our road trip click here