7/29/2019 A Pocket Of Resilience - Southeast Asia Globe
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72 February 2013 SeaGLOBe SeaGLOBe Fe
Text & Photos by Matthew Crompton
From the Ho Chi Minh Trail to the edge of the tourist trail in
northern Laos
TRAVEL
A pocket of resilience
town. Everyday, 6am, airplanes come
Bomb! Bomb! Bomb! Bomb! Bomb!
then 6pm every day, airplanes come
again Bomb! Bomb! Bomb! and
people run back to the cave.
It was partly the geology o this iso-
lated region o northern Laos, with its
dramatic karst-limestone peaks and
caverns, that saved its people during
the CIAs so-called Secret War. The
United States military, attempting
The cave smells o limestone,
wet hard-packed earth and
cold water as we swim through
the darkness. With one hand
held above the water, my ashlight
cuts an LED-white an against the low
ceiling o the cavern. Water drips down,
musical in its echo. As the chamber
opens up, we climb a mud-slick slope
into an expansive hall o crags and sta-
lactites, passages running down like
rabbit warrens deep into the earth rom
its edges, our shadows swallowed by
the deeper darkness like ghosts o a p ast
not quite vanished.
My wie was born here in the cave
in 1968, says Dr Joy Saysananong
back in the riverside hamlet o Muang
Ngoi pronounced Mong Noy and
also known as Muang Ngoi Neua. For
our years, 1968 to 1972, everyone here
living in the cave could not stay in the q
It was partly the geology of this isolated regionof northern
Laos, with its dramatic
karst-limestone peaks and caverns, that saved its peopleduring
the so-called 'Secret War'
LIFE
7/29/2019 A Pocket Of Resilience - Southeast Asia Globe
Magazine
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74 February 2013 SeaGLOBe SeaGLOBe Fe
LIFE
to interdict war supplies travelling along
the Ho Chi Minh Trail into Vietnam,
ew up to 500 sorties a day over the
country, dropping as many as 390,000
tonnes o bombs a year (more than was
dropped on Germany or Japan during
WWII) into one o the poorest nations
in the world.
Today, these very same karst ormations
serve not as a reuge, but as a symbol
o Muang Ngois newound prosperity,
drawing a modest but steady stream o
visitors up the muddy Nam Ou river
rom the nearest road, to enjoy what may
be Laos at its elemental best: a place with
neither cars nor internet nor electricity
save that supplied rom six to ten each
night by generators.
Driting up in a longboat to the river-
bank in the dusty orange late-day light,
Muang Ngoi at frst seems like a kind
o pastoral idyll ducks waddling down
the towns single dirt lane past bamboo
bungalows and gardens lush with
banana and papaya trees and candy-
pink hibiscus. And though reminders
o its violent history are never ar away,
they are oten tempered with a striking
sense o grace.
Such is immediately apparent on the
three-hour walk to the nearby village o
Huay Bo, ollowing a mud path acrossclear streams and through the
emerald
lushness o the rice felds. Along the
path are bomb craters, transormed by
rain and time into fshponds. The rusted
casings o unexploded ordnance stand
repurposed as decorations or village
houses or used as berms or irrigation
ditches. An old man approaches up the
path, his right arm missing at the elbow,
but a smile on his ace.
Asked how the people o Muang Ngoi
bore these depredations so stoically, Dr
Joy merely shrugs. First Japan come
during World War Two. Japan go out,
then France come in. When France go,
the Americans come. He lights a ciga-
rette and exhales, searching or a word.
Is all just, you know, boh pen yang.
That he should use this common Lao
phrase heard a dozen times a day
to express everything rom Youre
welcome to Dont worry about it
to absolve a generations worth o
meaningless brutality, was at the heart
o what made Muang Ngoi special.
While boh pen yang means, Youre
welcome, it also means, more broadly,
It is orgiven, or even, Lie goes on.
It is that spirit part Buddhist or-
bearance and part languid laissez-aire
that permeates everything in Muang
Ngoi. The days when the town served
as a hideout or oreign opium enthu-
siasts are thankully long over, but as
night alls and the towns ew guests
gather at Riverront Bungalows on the
high deck overlooking the Nam Ou, its
easy to see what encourages visitors to
come here: long, lethargic, congenial
evenings and strong cocktails o Lao
whisky, the sky pale lavender and boats
driting quietly on the indigo river
below in the gathering dark.
In the morning, keen to get back
out on the water, we take a longboat
upriver and board a suite o battered
inner tubes, driting the six long kil-
ometres back to town. The muddy,
swirling current o the Nam Ou is
reddish with runo rom the Lao clay
soils and bounded by high walls o
jungly karst, the lush Jurassic stillness
broken only by the ar-o putter o an
outboard motor and snow-white birdsliting in elastic Vs beore
the deep
green o the hills.
Floating slowly through, one sees a
place that could so easily be called a
wilderness, with a beauty more natural
than human, were not the people living
here gracious and open-hearted,
patient and resilient among the fnest
o what being human is. In
beneath the limestone clis
the serpentine river owing sl
toward the easy hospitality o
one is reminded o all the ve
travel: a landscape not only u
but unknown; one which p
compels the visitor to linger
corner o northern Laos seem
that rare place one that h
by turns the trespass o ore
and tourists alike, and yet de
by neither.There are challenges to this
ness. On the our-hour rid
to the market town o Mu
where the road leads onw
Vietnam, there are bridge p
ribbons o macadam creepi
ally south down the Nam
cannon use a guarantee
at last these touch the tow
be, as places always are,
changed. As easy as it is to m
there remains a sense o hopremarkable village can keep
as much in plenty as it has in
it can weather backpackers ju
as bombs; and that when the
the tourists fnally arrive, the
Muang Ngoi will have just a
teach their visitors as they w
learn rom them. q
Lazy days: karst limestone peaks rise above
the main street of Muang Ngoi
No emergency: Dr Joy Saysananong
in his riverfront garden
Plain sailing: a longboat ferries visitors
up the reddish waters of the Nam Ou
river for a spot of tubing
