Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh
Today we are leaving the fun-loving, R&R haven of Bangkok and heading back into the jungle of my youth. No, I did not fight in the Vietnam War, I was just young enough to avoid that nightmare, but not so young that the draft and all that it meant in its life-changing transition did not touch me. While Jim Morrison was telling everyone to “Come on, come on, come on now touch me, Babe,… I am not afraid…”, the world was telling all of us U.S. teenage males the exact opposite. We all feared getting touched by the skeletal hand of the draft and being forced to decideq much younger than anyone should have to whether we were brave enough to be a blindly loyal soldier for our country, brave enough to refuse to be a soldier for our country in an ethically questionable war, or even brave enough to leave our country for Canada to perform the ultimate primordial act of flight versus fight. For me, 1969 – 1973 were years where I knew more about the part of SE Asia that I am heading into now, fifty years later, than I knew about most parts of the world. At the center of that reality was something called the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which was a trail named after the then president of North Vietnam, which ran through much of Laos and allowed the movement of troops and supplies for the Viet Cong in their battles first against the French in the Indochina War and then against the South Vietnamese puppet government supported, supplied and eventually joined by American military troops.
The talking line back home in the U.S. was that we absolutely needed to hold the line in Vietnam least the Chinese communists push their ideology south through North Vietnam and create the dreaded domino effect of having one SE Asian country after another fall prey to their evil ways. What we failed to realize is that people like the Vietnamese and Laotians cared far less about governance ideology than we in America did and what they cared about was survival. And they were very good at surviving in their native environment in ways that all our military technology could not overcome. In many ways, the Ho Chi Minh Trail was the epitome of that distinction because it used the artificial political boundaries imposed by westerners like us in a way that the Vietnamese people failed to comprehend. They were far less governed by artificial national lines than by the practicality thrust upon them by the series of invading white marauders (first the French and then the Americans). It was only logical to use a trail that went outside these artificial boundaries and thereby supposedly keep the white menace at bay (forcing American generals to surreptitiously attack the Ho Chi Minh Trail rather than launch direct assaults against it as logical military imperatives would suggest). It was the sort of grass roots strategy that won the war for thesue stalwart locals defending their lives and lands to the bitter end.
We are flying on Bangkok Air on a little ATR-72 prop jet, going to Luang Prabang, Laos. Luang Prabang is touted as the best tourist spot in Laos. From Google Maps, it looks like the airport is half the acreage of the town, so we are expecting a very rural setting with lots of traditional elements to it. One of those elements includes its positioning somewhat near the Ho Chi Minh Trail. From a documentary we watched; about riding motorcycles down the trail, it is overgrown and not in much use at this time and is really nothing more than an historic artifact, probably one that most locals, who likely lost loved ones 50 years ago, would just as soon forget. Nonetheless, I bet we will seek out a glimpse of the Trail while we are touring the sights of Luang Prabang (no such luck as it is too far away).
To be perfectly honest, until Mike mentioned stopping in Luang Prabang (a place I imagine that he saw on the Kensington SE Asia tour we had been considering), I had never heard of the place. But when I mentioned our trip to our friends Terry and Paula, they said that on their recent 3-month extended tour of the region, the one place they would go back to visit again was Luang Prabang. Now Paula is a wannabe Buddhist who studies the 8-step path to enlightenment, so maybe the aura in Luang Prabang resonates with the meditative set, but that was enough to intrigue us to look forward to this segment of our journey. The last two stops after this of Hanoi and Siem Reep (Angkor Wat) are somewhat more predictable and known (at least in concept), but there is a mystery about Laos that feels like we are heading into Bhutan or some such forbidden land.
I once watched The Painted Veil with Ed Norton and Naomi Watts, about medical missionaries traveling by land into the verdant valleys of Southern China. That is the image of what I’m expecting in Luang Prabang. The view from the air as we landed, looked very much like the land portrayed in that movie. The hotel we are staying at is a small boutique hotel of very high-quality. It has a lovely and simple Asian way about it as it curves around central courtyard with pool. When we checked in, Kim noticed that there was a sunset cruise on the Mekong River available. That’s the same Mekong River that runs south to Ho Chi Minh City (a.k.a. Saigon), so it all seems very much in keeping with my Vietnam War theme. We have arranged to make it a dinner cruise so as long as the mosquitoes don’t get us we should have a very nice introduction to Luang Prabang.
Kim couldn’t get past the lobby without finding a beautiful keepsake souvenir in the form of a multicolored wooden elephant to add to our exotic animals collection. Here in Laos, the local currency is the Kip, on which the exchange rate is officially 20,800 Kip to the dollar, so the cost of the elephant was 6,300,000 Kip, which should’ve been enough to scare her off, but with the math bringing the cost in at a trifling $300, I suspect we will be bringing that elephant home with us. That will make what I believe is nine elephants in our bags.… So far.
I should mention that Bangkok Airways has a strict 20 kg bag limit per person. Needless to say since we started off probably over that amount, we were well over by the time we got to Bangkok. The problem is that we have a short flight on Laos Air in a few days and then a slightly longer flight from Hanoi to Siem Reep on Vietnam Air, and finally another Bangkok Airways flight back to Bangkok at the end of our trip. The smart play would’ve been to find a place to check some of our baggage at the Bangkok airport rather than drag the baggage all the way through Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia but that was too hard to figure out this morning so I just paid the $165 for the first leg of baggage and I’m hoping that Laos Air and Vietnam Air are more liberal than Bangkok Air. Anyway, you look at it, the souvenirs we are gathering are going up in price pound for pound every day.
All I can say is that I’m glad to be in a spiritually enlightened place like Luang Prabang so that I can meditate away all of our bad karma from overindulging our souvenir habit. My question for the universe is whether it’s good or bad karma to be buying souvenirs if they are to give other people next Christmas? In the meantime, I will go in search of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and leave the ho ho ho souvenir activity to Kim.