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Text: Karin-Marijke Vis
photography: Coen Wubbels
Lost in the Laos jungle
Thirty years after the event, the remains of the dirty nine-year war in Laos and of the Vietnam war are still visible on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Along the dirt tracks, where potholes and bumps can ruin your car, huge bomb craters are overgrown with bamboo and storage huts are built on bombshells. Fascinated by the beauty of the area and the undiscovered villages we inch forward, deeper and deeper into the jungle. We have to get to the other side of the mountain, but is there a road? We get hopelessly lost.
After having spent the night in a coffee plantation in Salavan we head towards Tahoy. We leave the sealed road and follow a laterite road, bumps and potholes come free of charge. Sometimes there is a bridge, sometimes there is no bridge, sometimes there is something that once upon a time resembled a bridge. We take quite a few detours through dry riverbeds, in general not wanting to try our luck on the "bridges".
"Passports", the [drunken] policeman shouts
We face a bridge we don't like, but here a detour through the riverbed isn't an option either. The metal framework of the bridge is all right, but the top layer of planks is missing and the whole structure is askew. Unfortunately, the girders of the framework are so wide apart that, with our narrow tyres, we will fall exactly in between them. The trick is to use the six planks that are lying around and little by little we cross. It is a frightening experience, with people standing around to see how we manage. Between the road and the bridge is a gap of about 30 centimetres and planks break at crucial points. Once across we decide there's no turning back, and just hope there's a road all the way up north to NH 9.
In the evening when we camp near the river we are being disturbed by some men from the village, half of them drunk, including a policeman. He is giving us the most trouble and when we are about to leave a police car shows up from the dusty jungle road. Apparently our presence kept them from their evening rituals and they are furiously walking around and shouting for our passports. One of the officers is also drunk and it's the beginning of a lot of hassle. They make us go back to Tahoy to stay at the government hotel, which is nothing more than a dirty old shack which we don't want to pay 3 dollars for.
In Tahoy we park in front of the hotel and put up the roof-tent, brush our teeth, undress and go to sleep. All of a sudden somebody starts to climb the ladder! This upsets Coen very much and he yells to leave us alone.
"ME... policeman!!!, passports".
"Tomorrow!", Coen answers. But the drunken officer is persistent and will not lose face, so Coen gets down.
"I take yours, you get mine", Coen says, knowing that once they take his passport he won't get it back. One man understands the deal, the other gets more upset. Fortunately, the translator is on our side and tries to explain to the men that we're simply tourists and not some sort of criminals. Since they don't get the passports, they try other things, like "park at the police station, for your safety", "the passports have to be checked by the ministry", "we have to search your car". In the end Coen makes a deal: "come back tomorrow at nine o'clock, you can check the passports and search the whole car". They buy it and we can go to bed.
In the morning we find it hilarious to see that they actually blocked our exit with one of their Chinese jeeps. As if we can disappear with our car!... They want to search the green, suspicious-looking army box on top of the roof, somehow this always fascinates officials. "What is in that box?", they always ask. Coen's standard reply is: "Explosives", and we never have to open it. Now he's honest and says: "Camping gear", so he has to open it. They all watch anxiously how Coen opens the box, and what comes out: our snorkeling gear. "For swimming", Coen explains. Everybody laughs and the search is over. We can go.
The Ho Chi Minh Trail
We continue further north, in search of a road or path that will take us to Sepon. This is far from obvious, some people say it exists, others say it doesn't. We end up driving to Samouac, near the Vietnam border. From there we apparently can go to LaoBao. The road becomes quite bad with very deep, rutted tracks, so most of the time we drive at a slant, with two wheels in a track and the other two in the median strip. It is again a nice route, the villages become even more remote. Often women go bare-breasted, walking around smoking a pipe with a baby suckling a nipple...
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