Today, I don’t feel like translating the whole post. If you can read french it would be better for you to read this post in french.

80% of Lao people live in villages. Some of these villages, in the North, are only accessable after walking for six hours in the mountain and the jungle… villages where life has been the same for the last 500 years, except for the generator to power tiny lightbulbs, or a teacher who comes from another village to teach the kids how to read, write and count in Lao.

These villages live from what the jungle gives them : they plant rice and rubber trees, eat the rice and sell the rubber to China. Each village has a different culture. In Akha villages for example, the women are topless. And in Lanten villages, they have knee-length skirts and vests made of dark blue cotton fabric they weave themself. And these villages are only two hours away.

The villages in the region can host foreigners who come to trek in the Jungle. It’s a good source of revenue but if the village loses it’s authenticity (agressive selling of souvenirs, begging to strangers, bad behaviour towards hosts…) the Tourism Administration doesn’t allow trekkers to go there anymore.

In an Akha village, there’s the “daughter’s houses”. Outside the village, tiny houses for nubile girls who don’t have a husband. They live in these houses until they are pregnant and have to marry. Young couples can socialize without fear of bringing bad luck on the parent’s homes…

Some villages have schools and a little bit of electricity thanks to development programs financed by the government and foreign NGOs. Some families receive a solar cell, and they repay it a few dollars every month.

Local hosting programs have also brought something to the kids in the village : english. When there’s no school, some tourists can spend some time with the children and speak english, write new words, correct their letters, and maybe, when they grow up, they can be mountain guides… I spent some time with the kids. I had brought with me some coloured pens and some paper, and we drew together. At first they were shy, but after making them participate “what colour is that! show me what you would choose” we had a nice time all together.

And in the end I left the pens and a notebook full of our drawings. I hope they’ll continue drawing and have fun doing it!

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Yeah, I don’t even have a good title for this post. And few pictures I like. I was in Luang Prabang for two or three days, without knowing what I was doing there and where I would go after. So I made some postcards in the meantime and took Lao coffees and read with my feet in the Mekong river.

“Luang Prabang is a very cute city“, that’s what a travel friend told me a while ago. I thought the touristic area really not that cute. Okay, the night market is cute. If you’re looking for stuff for tourists. Then the internet shops and the travel agencies. And this photo gallery where you can only find badly composed portraits, shot too close, and in black & white. And it’s only young laotian girls and women in traditionnal thing. Lao sure has other things to show than this kind of cliché, the girl who looks like she’s wondering when the falang (foreigner, in Lao) will stop hiding his face behint the plastic and glass thing that goes “clic clac”.

But well, the friend was right the city’s cute. Lao people are nice, despite all the tourists rushing about whenever a monk is doing something or going somewhere.

So yeah, I felt my pictures needed a color filter over them. Even if I liked the city. But only the parts without too much tourists.

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Ten or so days ago I was in Vangvieng with
Johanne and Nico, and their friend Marion. We went there after the Julian New Year (or Western New Year?) celebrations in Vientiane.

Vangvieng is well known in the SE Asian party scene. And when I say “party scene” I’m talking about the places where alcool’s cheaper than water, old women try to sell you pot or opium in the streets and bar waiters are in a shroom-induced daze since they woke up at 4PM of the morning. And from what I’ve been told it’s the world capital of tubing.

What’s tubing? You’re on a tupe (you rent that for about $6 an hour), in the river rapids, and there’s a lot of bars on the river where you can stop play in the rope-swings and jump from the improvised platforms and buy a beer or two while you’re at that bar. It sounds good like a good idea when you’re reading about it : lounging in the sun with a cold beverage in the hand, hearing the birds and the water…

Except that the sun is coming down arount 5:30, so you spend your afternoon getting slowly drunk, and then you can’t enjoy the evening because you’re already so pissed from the alcohol and the sun on your head. So what I say is : it’s not worth it. You should go kayaking and then get drunk on Beer Lao with your friends. And avoid the 20 yo little shits from Australia or the UK who are only there to be the drunkest.

The second big occupation in Vangvieng after tubing is being hungover. In the tourist streets, there are countless “lounge” bars where you just go to watch old Friends and Family Guy episodes while trying to remember “what happend in the Smile Bar after the 18th Beer Lao and this swedish guy who was humping the pool table wait was it a girl I remember the long hair man everything was turning and then the thing with the other thing I remember after the happy pizza” and so on. I could do that in Paris. No need to go half the world to drink too much beer and spend the day after watching not so funny american TV shows. And do that again the next evening. While trying to remember “if it was a Happy Pot Pizza or a Happy Shroom Pizza and why I woke up in a ditch with no money and wet pants, and what happened to that brittish girl who fell from the stage while attempting poleless pole dancing. Man, what an awesome night. I can’t wait to be as pissed today as I was then.”

The third biggest occupation is abusing of brain-melting substances that have the surprising power of attracting the 5-0. The fee of the local police if they catch you smoking pot is $500. Of this round sum, a smaller but equally round sum goes to the guy who sold you that pot. They deal and then they rat you out to the Police. Double income, no hassle about dissatisfied customers… And then they tell you “it’s written in your guesthouse that you shouldn’t smoke pot! Drugs is whack! I pitty the fool who doesn’t read the things written in every guesthouse.” and such things. Man, this lao coffee is making me write silly things. Anyways, it creates jobs in the community (growing pot, selling it) and it injects stupid people’s money into the local economy, so I guess it’s ok. Taxing stupid little shits is something that should have been done long ago. If you want to be clever you smoke in your room, you won’t get caught. That’s what a friend of mine was told by the guesthouse manager who then tried to sell pot to her.

But people forgot that Vangvieng is nice. Between the mountains and the rice fields, the river with fishermen early in the morning, or the sunset with all the little villages and the smoke rising from them, looking strangely like the haze on the mountains in the first lights of the morning…

We went to visit a cave with the gang. We went on foot and then we had to continue longer than we expected because it wasn’t the right cave (there’s lots of caves in the mountains) and then it was beautiful everywhere and there was a lagoon with pure blue water and we stripped to bathing suits and had a good old laugh splashing around with the rope swings and a communion with nature. The cave too was nice, with a reclining buddha in an underground chamber lighted by an opening on the roof, and we went to the end of the cave and played with our headlamps and we tried not to fall to our certain death in hidden holes. An afternoon well spent with great people ; the evening beers were rightfully merited. And some lao-lao too, but only one shot at a time for me, my stomach is having troubles with that substance after a fateful night involving rice wine in crazy Kunming, China.

And after Vangvieng, the french riders took their motorcycle to go eastwards, I went to Luang Prabang, a center of post-colonial tourism by the Mekong River.

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A few days ago, january 3rd, was the end of my fourth month of traveling, and so it ended the first third of my trip.

So I guess I just have eight more months to discover the rest of the world! Gotta be fast now!

What did I do in 4 month?

If I look at my map, I have travelled around 22 000 km. I think I must be around 25 000 km because of the roads, they’re not as straight as my estimations.

If you look at the diameter of the globe, (40 000 km), you’ll see I went further than half of it! Not bad for a wine-fed city boy from France!

I travelled between the 58°N (Perm city in Russia, 40 minutes stop in the Transsiberian) and the 10°N (Mekong Delta), and between the 2°E (Paris, start of my trip) and the 121°E (Shanghai). and the highest place I stayed at is Shangri-La (aka Zhongdian) in China, at 3 300 m above sea levels.That’s nice but far away.

I took 4 359 digital pictures since sept. 3rd, and if my camera hadn’t broke down in the middle of China, I’d be around 6 000 images (and around 7 of them actually good). The number of analog pictures I shot won’t be counted. Because I don’t want to imagine the bill when I’ll develop them as I come back next autumn.

I think I slept in about 60 different beds, if I don’t count the sleeper busses and trains because you don’t sleep there. Also, instances of shared beds where I didn’t sleep weren’t included.

I could survive 10 days without the Internet, when I was in Mongolia (after 5 days without the ‘net in the Transsiberian train) and I felt good. But when I was sick of the Dengue in Vietnam I did the opposite, watching tv series all day long, cause that’s kind of what you do when you’re sick of the Dengue in Vietnam.

Microsponsoring-wise, 177 days were financed. That’s about half the days in my year! I sent already more than 65 postcards I drew or painted, but all are not yet arrived. And some people don’t tell me when they don’t receive anything… or when they receive their postcard… Speak up people!

Oh, and speaking of postcards, the postal expenses are about 10% of what I earn in sponsorings from the people I send them to. Send. To. What was the meaning of this sentence? Crap. I think I meant that this one time in Cambodia, I sent 10 postcards and it cost me 15€. 10% of what people gave me. And of course I don’t speak of the “free postcards” and souvenirs I send to cute girls around the world.

I met one person every 3 days. That’s a very precise statistic. And I travelled with people almost 59.3% of the time : (that’s even more precise) a polish santa, a parisian and a belgian CS girls, a radio announcer from Uppsalla, a texan girl who loved to say Nihao to chinese people, a swiss guy on a bike non stop from Istambul to Tibet, a french guy who’s not guilty of my Dengue fever, then a biker couple (with their bike and a friend) with whom I had a lovely new year’s eve on the other side of the world, and a juggler, and a guy who shoots with film. A luddite like me :)

But I’m forgetting lots of them.

Other dumb statistics : 1 is the number of times I asked myself “What the fuck am I doing here?”, and it was in Mongolia, I didn’t have a book to read and no light to read it anyway.

Book. I read about a dozen of them and not only to color the images. Bus traveling takes a lot of pages. Except in public busses and women with loud children coming from the market and road workers and chickens.

Oh and I took about every kind of night train classes in China! Soft Sleeper (not so soft, in closed compartments of 4, and with a greater probability of anyone speaking english), Hard Sleeper (when it’s not two grandmas knitting and bitching about other grandmas it’s 6 beds in an open compartment and people giving you posters of Chinese Red Army tanks) and Hard Seat where you seat and try to sleep, with two chinese people sleeping on you. And an actual soldier from the Chinese Red Army as one of them.

For the busses I rode popously in Vietnam (tourist VIP bus), with a little less luxury in China and really not safely for me and the 26 other people in the pick-up described in an upper paragraph, in Cambodia.

What else? I don’t know. If you have anything to ask me about my trip, feel free to ask me!

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I arrived in Lao by the South, from the North of Cambodia. In the North of Cambodia, nothing interesting happened, because I only stayed one day.

In Lao, I went directly to Si Phan Done, the place they call the 4000 Islands… And the name is well chosen : it’s a place on the Mekong river where there’s lots of islands. And some of them are little paradises you can live in, like Done Det or Done Khone, where I stayed a bit. Life there is smooth and nice, because of the place but also because of the Lao people. I think it’s because they play pétanque…

So I spent my days reading in a hammock, meeting strangers and travellers I knew from other places, biking on rocky paths and eating delicious fish dishes.

But I had to go to Vientiane to meet with Johanne and Nicolas for the New Year, so I said goodbye to the Island, and continued my journey.

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