LAOS: Fresh taste of happiness

I'M AT Riverside Hotel, Ventiane - utmost luxury for $16 a night; Thavisouk Bungalows, Vang Vieng, which was $8 a night for fan-cooled, slightly damp place with an absolutely stunning view of the Nam (river) Song and surrounding cloudy peaks; and Muang Long Riverside, Luang Prabang, next to the Mekong, hot mahogany with its own tiled balcony and a dangerously young owner who shared a beer with us and taught me 'cheers' in Laos - "ylok ylok."

The first thing I noticed about Laos hotels was the explicit and lengthy warning about what you can and can't do in the room. No entertaining guests, cooking on the bed, or lighting your own fire.

The second was a curfew - door shut and lights out at 11.00pm. This, I thought, is not Bangkok.

Ventiane is a small city, the capital of Laos, and BeerLao is brewed here, in a semi-derelict shack 13 kilometres up the motorway. We made it to the brewery at 4pm, in time to hear the hooter go off, see beaming faces carrying discounted crates home for tea. The kind PR woman told us that the tours were well finished, but in any case gave us each a free Beerlao as the security guy sat, spat, and looked us over.

BeerLao is omnipresent, majority-owned by the Government, with a 98% market share. The yellow, green and red banners are just everywhere - they, like seemingly no other business, have paid for countless businesses, guesthouses and restaurants to have an illuminated sign outside, so their monopoly illuminates on every street in every town. Beerlao's current slogan is "Fresh Taste of Happiness", underneath a shining bottle gleaming against fields of yellow wheat. Found out today that most of the villagers in rural Laos - the vast majority of the population - brew their own rice whisky, which costs them next to nothing and slays them at 50% plus. Potent homebrew versus expensive 5% lager....this is what their marketing geezer is up against. He must, though, be a happy man watching all the tourists pay good money to freely advertise his brew on their bright t-shirts. I've paid, oh yes.

So, Ventiane contains a few other sights, none of which we had time for. Priorities.

The bus to Vang Vieng took 7 hours, and cost 25,000 kip ($2.50). Our stop there was really just to break the journey to Luang Prabang, which was another five hours up Route 13. Vang Vieng is billed in the Book as a touristy nightmare with TV bars dancing before the eyes like drunken sirens. In fact, it's a paradise - set in a valley and surrounded by high, beautiful limestone peaks.

We got a hotel outside of the main drag and spent two days of blissful peace there, eating by the river, walking past cows and chickens, through the smoke of heavy pots, and biking to a triangle of caves on a nearby island. Our caving trip was led by a game ten-year-old and really, this sort of thing would be certified and safety-checked in a more developed land - the torches were rubbish and without any prior warning we ended up neck-deep in freezing water and bouncing off dark shards on a 3km walk into a dark, slippery cave. The guide's English was limited to 'this, cave', 'watch your head!' and 'now, you tip guide.' Good fun, entirely unexpected, and worth the bone-steaming rain that soaked us on the way.

3km outside Vang Vieng is an organic farm, with its own cafe in town. They do a cracking mulberryleaf tea there. Sometimes I wonder if travel's softened me up.

From Vang Vieng we got the VIP bus to Luang Prabang. The Laos VIP buses are nothing like the Thai equivalent - they're just local buses with "VIP" crudely stencilled onto the windscreen whose only advantage is a fixed departure time, and whose great disadvantage is that you're travelling solely with other tourists - the VIP is a couple of dollars more than the local bus - so it's not so much fun. The bloody bus broke down on a high mountain pass, hot gearbox shattered on the tarmac, and we had to blag onto the local bus anyway, so it was a bit of a waste of time.

Luang Prabang is probably the most-visited place in Laos - it's a destination, rather than, like Ventiane, a necessity. The place is tiny - roads parallel the Mekong, and all of the signs are written with black ink, in the same font, on wooden signs, like the bars in Siena, or the shops on Regent Street. It's posh, for Laos, dead posh. Unfortunately this also means that it sees a lot of tourists, so parts of it are virtual tourist ghettoes, and the market is pretty overpriced, geared entirely to falang. We spent a few relaxing days, doing little, visited vats (Buddhist temples), the old Royal Palace - I layed out 50 bucks on a book by a German photographer, assigned to cover a Buddhist retreat. Beautiful pictures and a Good Thing.

Now, you have two choices in Luang Prabang - head East, in relative calm, to Phonsovan, to visit the Plain of Jars; or head North, towards Udomxay, to visit God knows what, where the buses are teased by the slightest slope, and rains tear tarmac from the mellow, cow-choked lane that runs for 400km and is the only route through the mountains. It's do or die. We chose the latter.