Back to the Sixties in chilled out Laos

Unlike some places I’ve longed to visit, Luang Prabang doesn’t disappoint. It is full of hippies and backpackers who are healthy, environmentally minded and many of them look like 1960s flower children, in beads, bells and kaftans.

The houses, set back from the roads and little lanes behind wooden fences, are brightly painted, their gardens full of frangipani, hibiscus and jasmine. On the main street there are airy cafés with wooden shutters. Of more than 100 temples, 33 are under Unesco’s protection: I particularly liked the tiny Wat Pa Huak, which has orange walls covered with stunning murals depicting exotica such as white tigers and the famous Wat Xieng Thong, a bling fantasia of all things golden.

Looking down on the other temples is Wat Chom Si, which perches on a rocky outcrop next to the main street. Outside, women sell birds in tiny pink-dyed bamboo birdcages — release a bird and your wish will come true.

Lao culture is dominated by the life of the temples. The young monks are ubiquitous on the streets. We saw a group of nine, squashed in the back of a pick-up truck, en route to a rural village to make a blessing. Traditionally, young men would enter the monasteries for a few years between the ages of 12 and 19; some would stay, but most would remain for three to four years. For the poor, it was their chance of an education; for the rich, it ensured them a son who could pray for their place in paradise on their deaths.

Even today, members of the Communist Government send their children for a stint in a monastery; though the time has been cut down to a few days. Religious beliefs are so strongly held that no one quite has the nerve to cast them out entirely.

Laotian people, whatever their age, are some of the loveliest I have encountered, thanks to a combination of Buddhism in the Theravada tradition and a peculiarly laid-back Lao brand of communism (the country became communist in 1975 and now operates under jintanakan mai, or “new thinking”, its version of perestroika).

One result is that, even on the morning in August 1975 that the Pathet Lao took power and declared Laos a communist country, the 300 or so monks of Luang Prabang took their dawn walk down the main streets collecting alms.

Our guide, Don, who was a monk for four years, had bought three woven bamboo pots, known as a tip khao, full of hot, sticky rice and we sat on mats on the pavement, rolling the rice into balls and dropping it into the metal containers held by the monks as they streamed by. It is fast, finger-burning work, and if you fail to keep up, you soon find that a stern look is evidently not considered outside the monkish calling. They live on whatever they collect and anything left over is distributed to the poor.

It’s a cliché, but time does seem to stop. We walked slowly along the streets and alleyways that run down to the Mekong, drank wonderful coffee and croissants (culture left over from the French), had our feet massaged in the front room of someone’s house, sitting on lounging chairs while the rest of the house carried on around us (watching TV, cooking, talking energetically into their mobile phones), climbed the 328 steps to watch the sunset from Mount Phousi and went upriver in a fish-tailed longboat to the Pak Ou caves, where thousands of Buddhas nestle on the naturally created limestone shelves, put there to discourage the previous custom of animal sacrifice. Some are intricate, immaculately carved, big and grand. Others are lopsided, as small as a chess piece, or a thimble, and squiffy-eyed, as if they have availed themselves of too much of the local rice whisky.

The Mekong is the vital artery of this landlocked country: 80 per cent of the six million people subsistence-farm near its banks. The river rises in the Chinese Himalayas and in recent years the Chinese have built five hydroelectric dams, which are starting to alter the Mekong’s ebbs and flows, dropping the water level so that, in some places, boats cannot be used in the dry season. It is a cause, our guide told us, of much anxiety.

The scenery is entrancing — the wide tannin river contrasting with green vegetation; tropical hardwood trees, ebony, teak and rosewood, line the banks; slopes of rice, corn, hops, peanuts and bamboo; pointed mountains wreathed in mist in the distance. And there are so few people, just the occasional group of naked brown-skinned boys leaping into the water, fishermen in a canoe and women doing the washing. If we had continued north we would have reached Thailand.

We explored every inch of the daily night market that sets up along the main street as the sun start to go down. Laos, squeezed between the booming economies of China and Thailand, imports everything from toothpaste and washing powder (Thailand) to motorbikes and mobile phones (China). What’s left to the Laotians is their crafts, drawn from the traditions of the 46 or so ethnic groups that make up the country.

In the night market, the women sit on colourful blankets displaying handmade silks, baskets, scarves, carpets: most embroidered in fine stitching with patterns taken from Buddhism and the more ancient animistic traditions of the countryside. And all ludicrously, almost embarrassingly, cheap.

One of the wonderful things about the town is that there is nothing Western, apart from the odd (useful) ATM that dispenses only local currency. There is no McDonald’s, no KFC, no Novotel, no Americana: and we realised just how far you have to go these days to be able to say that. The food market, which opens at dawn, snakes along a narrow street. It is eyewateringly strange: buffalo lungs for grilling, vats of live snails, fluffy worm cocoons for frying, tadpoles to add to stews, Indian trumpet flowers to steam with pork, rows of whisky bottles with open-mouthed baby cobras curled inside, a couple of huge skinned rats (complete with tails), sour pork in slices. Farther on, we saw live catfish with their tentacles waving desperately, more small birds to release for good luck, pig skin, morning glory flowers, river weed, Mekong fish with fearsome teeth, squirrels complete with tails, Mekong crabs and every vegetable you have ever heard of crammed in between mini-mountains of chillies and limes, which feature in every one of the unbelievably tasty dishes we ate. At times the rich, strange smell made me feel a little queasy, but it was an astonishing experience, like entering a rowdy food museum.

Cars are a comparatively rare sight; bicycles and water buffalo, in contrast, are everywhere. Scooters are the transport of choice for the well-off, a brightly patterned umbrella nonchalantly held in one hand when the sun is hot or the rain is falling.

Laos is South-East Asia’s Shangri-La, offering a landscape and people seemingly untouched by the West, which, considering the brutality they have suffered, is astonishing. But as we were taxiing down the runway to depart we could see the bulldozers shovelling soil in preparation for a new, much longer, runway — one that will permit A300s to touch down in the valley. It will be ready in four years time. Get your trip in before then.

Need to know

Rosie Boycott was a guest of the Ultimate Travel Company (020-7386 4646, theultimatetravelcompany.co.uk), which can arrange seven nights in Luang Prabang from £2,050pp, or an eight-day stay that begins on the Mekong from £2,045pp. Most meals are included, as is private guided sightseeing in Luang Prabang. The price also includes Thai Airways flights from Heathrow via Bangkok and private transfers.

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