The Golden Triangle Chronicles
“Make your destination before nightfall” are wise words to keep in mind when traveling through the Golden Triangle.
The mountain backroads are dangerous enough in daytime with their hairpin turns around precipices that fall away to certain death. Add to that an inky darkness where street lights don’t exist. A darkness that makes a car’s headlights seem like a fading flashlight with batteries running low.
Winding dark roads are manageable on their own. In Thailand, I’ve traversed the mountain roads at night between Pitsanulok, Khon Kaen and Loei countless times with little concern. But Laos is another world. The pavement is often washed out leaving the bare road bed. Potholes can be big enough to swallow your car. Around a bend, the road may be strewn with boulders from a recent landslide. Guard rails-unheard of. In the tightest turns, the roads have a narrow shoulder, if any, often with steep drop-offs.
Add to that, the isolation and lawlessness of the Laotian Golden Triangle region. Cell phone service is spotty at best. Not that it matters much. If you needed help, there’s no one to call. And even if you got through to the police, nobody would come till next morning. At night, you’re on your own traversing the mountains of Laos.
*****
My wife and I had arrived in Luang Prabang after drifting down a swollen, muddy Mekong River for two days starting at Ban Houxai, Laos, just across the river from Chiang Kong, Thailand. It was June, rainy season, and the river was at its mightiest.
Between Ban Houxai and Luang Prabang, the Mekong meanders through pristine, uninterrupted jungle-jungle that reminded me of an episode of Tarzan. It was two days of drifting down the river when toward evening of the second day we arrived at Luang Prabang.
Luang Prabang, the ancient capital of the Kingdom of a Million Elephants. Luang Prabang, the colonial capital of French Indochina, where street vendors still sell French baguettes. Luang Prabang, a UNESCO World Heritage Site because of its many venerable Buddhist temples.
Our lodging for the night was the old family estate of Prince Bounkhong, the last royal sovereign of Luang Prabang. The estate, now a boutique hotel, exuded French Colonial style and elegance.
Over dinner at the hotel, my wife and I finalized plans for why we had come to Luang Prabang. Our ultimate destination were the archeological ruins on the Plain of Jars, located outside the town of Phonsavan.
From the maps I had studied, the easiest way to get to Phonsavan from our home in Lamphun, Thailand was through Luang Prabang. From Luang Prabang to Phonsavan was just a couple hundred kilometers and all the maps showed a major road connecting the two. Simple logistics I thought. It couldn’t take more than a few hours by car.
After dinner, I arranged with the front desk clerk to have a driver ready first thing in the morning to take us to Phonsavan. No problem.
*****
At 9:00 a.m. sharp, a driver and van were waiting for us outside the hotel and we were off to Phonsavan. I asked the driver how long it would take and he took a long time before answering.
“Eight hours”, he responded, seemingly not sure.
“Eight hours! It’s only about 200 kilometers away,” I figured he had misunderstood my question.
The road out of Luang Prabang was narrow but paved. Once we left town the road deteriorated quickly. The pavement was washed out for large sections and what was left of the roadway was badly rutted and bumpy. The van couldn’t go faster than 30 km/h and we averaged no more than 20 km/h. I did a quick calculation and figured at this speed we’d arrive in Phonsavan by late afternoon.
I reminded myself of the old Golden Triangle traveler’s maxim: Make your destination before nightfall. Since nightfall came just after 6 p.m. I figured we’d be fine.
We began climbing into some foothills and were immediately swallowed by a heavy fog which slowed us even more. No matter how slow the driver went, his van was taking a beating from the roadway. About two hours into our road trip, the van’s engine coughed and suddenly died. Luckily, we had come out of the foothills and were on flat land. The driver and I pushed his van off the roadway.
We were near the town of Kasi. I knew the driver’s knowledge of car mechanics was limited by how he tentatively lifted the rear hood and gazed silently at the engine. He suggested we walk ahead to a roadside restaurant about a kilometer away and wait for him there.
*****
We found the restaurant and sat down at a table. The owner came over to take our order. It was at this moment that our luck changed.
My wife is from northern Thailand and she speaks Kam Muang, the northern Thai dialect. It’s her childhood language. The local Lao dialect and my wife’s dialect were similar enough that my wife could converse with the Laotian locals. Soon my wife was explaining to this woman that our van had broken down and we were waiting for it to be repaired.
After an hour, I walked back to van and got the bad news. The van could not be repaired quickly and needed to be towed to a repair garage. The driver offered to call for a ride to take us back to Luang Prabang. I told him no.
Seeing the Plain of Jars had been a dream of mine for years. Ancient megalithic stone jars, standing up to seven feet tall, five feet wide and weighing tons, had been left by a long-forgotten civilization. The jars are one of the great riddles of the Golden Triangle. I was too close to seeing them to give up easily. The Plain of Jars region is also where the Hmong had grown their opium and with the help of the CIA transported it to Vientiane or Saigon for processing into heroin. 1 I would not be easily deterred from seeing the mysterious Plain of Jars.
I walked back to my wife who was chatting away with the owner of the restaurant. I explained to her that our van was dead and I wasn’t sure what to do next.
My wife then explained everything to this woman. Without hesitation, she said her husband would return in an hour or so, and that possibly he could take us to Phonsavan. He had family there and needed money. I looked at my watch and it was getting near noontime.
Her husband Sy returned in an hour and his wife explained our predicament. He had a brother in Phonsavan and mentioned he’d been wanting to see him. I wasted no time closing the deal and made him an offer: $400 in American money to take us to see the Plain of Jars and drive us back to Luang Prabang. I promised another $100 bonus for a successful trip. That was the same deal I had made with our first driver. Sy agreed quickly.
By now, I was openly concerned about arriving well after dark in Phonsavan. My concern was put slightly to rest by the fact that Sy had a late model Toyota pick-up that could traverse bad roads. He was also a local, grew up here, and knew the road to Phonsavan.
By the time we got back on the road it was 3 p.m. There was no way we would make our destination by nightfall.
*****
The road continued to deteriorate with large sections of pavement washed away. A rugged set of mountains loomed up before us as the road narrowed and turned and twisted upward. I noticed ominous, billowy clouds over the mountains. A sure sign in rainy season that a storm was building.
Soon we were high in the mountains. Traffic amounted to seeing a car or truck pass the opposite way once or twice an hour. Occasionally, we drove past a cluster of homes just off the roadway. About every hour, we came to a small village.
As we passed through, I stared at the villagers, their homes, streets, businesses, their way of life. I noticed occasionally, a person in their underwear washing themselves next to the street and rinsing off with a hose. Most homes didn’t have indoor plumbing and this was how you bathed-in public.
Kids ran around the dirt streets laughing and playing. When they saw my White face peering at them from the pick-up truck, they stopped and stared back. I waved, but they only stared back. Evening was beginning to set in and women were preparing dinner over crude barbecues.
We passed through a larger village high in the mountains as the sun began to set. A small group of men were chatting and laughing with a police officer in the middle. I noticed that when he saw Sy’s pick-up approaching, he stopped smiling and stared at us. Sy waived to him. As we drove by, his eyes followed us until we were out of sight.
“I’m happy you’re with me,” Sy said turning to me. My wife translating. “He always stops me and makes me pay money to drive through his village. He saw you and figured he better not stop me with a White guy in my car,” Sy let loose with a laugh.
Higher into the mountains we travelled. Traffic became non-existent.
*****
After several hours of being bounced up and down, breaking hard for huge potholes, tossed around like rag dolls inside the pick-up, I began to question traveling from Luang Prabang to Phonsavan. Most people reached the Plain of Jars from Vientiane. I now knew why.
I watched with growing anxiety as darkness came upon us. And then, right on cue, as the last remnants of light barely illuminated the road ahead, the first drops of rain hit the windshield.
Soon the rain was pounding. The pot holes quickly filled with water and now you had no way of knowing a deep pot hole from a shallow one. My anxiety turned to a subtle fear when fog began to shroud the roadway. The truck’s headlights valiantly tried to pierce the blackness, rain, and now growing fog.
Suddenly, we hit something with such force that I banged my head hard on the roof of the pick-up. Stupid me was not wearing a seatbelt. Sy stopped the pick-up and I could tell he was worried. He got out to inspect if the truck had been damaged. I had a flashlight and got out with him. Turns out we rolled into a large, deep pothole that Sy couldn’t see. Luckily, the tires and wheels were fine, and we hadn’t broken the front axle. We got back in the pick-up and continued onward, now at an even slower pace. Sy and I were soaking wet.
We were now barely creeping along the roadway. Even Sy seemed concerned by the deteriorating conditions. I strained my eyes to see the roadway before us but the fog swallowed everything.
Sy stopped the pick-up. I strained my eyes to see ahead, but couldn’t see why he had stopped. Then I made out the slightest contours of something in the roadway. Sy got out of the truck and I followed.
The headlights of the truck revealed a mud slide had oozed across much of the road. My heart sank. We’d have to turn back with nowhere to spend the night. Sy inspected the slide close up and pointed out that he could squeeze his pick-up truck past the slide on the far edge of the roadway. I shook my head that I had concerns. But Sy was confident he could squeeze by.
I told my wife what was happening and told her to get out of the pick-up. Let Sy maneuver the vehicle past the slide and then we’d follow on foot and get back in. My greatest fear was that Sy had to squeeze his pick-up past the slide using the road’s narrow shoulder. In the pitch blackness, it was impossible to know what was just off the shoulder. Maybe there was flat land next to the shoulder. Or maybe there was a precipice that fell away for five-hundred feet.
We walked in back of Sy’s pick-up as he crept around the slide. Outward from the shoulder, the vehicle’s headlights, even on high beam, revealed only a foggy blackness. A cliff for sure I told myself. No need to scare the wife.
Sy got the pick-up around the slide and back onto the center of the road. We quickly piled back into the vehicle and all three of us breathed a sigh of relief. Onward to Phonsavan.
There was a large truck on this side of the slide, parked on a small turnout, lights and engine off. The driver waved to Sy as we approached. Sy told him there was no way his big truck could squeeze by the slide like he did. The driver told him that his truck was too big to turn around on the narrow road. There was nothing we could do to help the truck driver. He was welcome to ride with us to Phonsavan, but he declined saying he couldn’t leave his truck.
As we continued on, the fog became thicker, the rain one moment a drizzle, the next a downpour. I realized the asphalt was completely gone. We were driving on the original gravel road bed that now was rutted and muddy. Occasionally there were boulders in the road, but compared to the slide, it was easy to navigate around them. At times, we passed small clusters of one-room houses that had no lights on. I figured we were well off the grid up here in the mountains.
By 10 p.m. we were headed down out of the mountains. The winding road seemed to stretch out and the curves more gentle. The fog quickly lifted, but the rain pounded down. The road became paved again and remained so. I could see houses spread out along the road, and they had lights on. We finally had made it to the outskirts of Phonsavan.
Phonsavan was a bigger town than I had thought. The town was quiet as we drove through, except for a few Chinese nightclubs that had Mandarin calligraphy lit up with a rainbow of neon lights. Other than that the town was dead quiet. Sy found our hotel and I offered to get him lodging for the night, but he said he’d rather stay at his brother’s house.
My wife and I were starving. The hotel restaurant had just closed, but the front desk clerk cajoled the cook to make us dinner. He agreed and I slipped him ten dollars.
My wife and I breathed a huge sigh of relief as we waited for dinner. We were spent from being shaken like rag dolls, and the stress and growing fear of worsening road conditions increased our exhaustion. From Luang Prabang to Phonsavan took us 13 hours. But dinner was being served and we had a warm shower and bed waiting for us. We would see the Plain of Jars tomorrow.
*****
The return trip to Luang Prabang was almost uneventful. Although the road was the same, the weather was pleasant and we left early in the morning.
We passed by the mud slide that Sy had snaked his pick-up around. It had been partially cleared so traffic could easily get by. Sure enough, just off the narrow shoulder, the mountain fell steeply away for several hundred feet. I congratulated myself for having good instincts when danger lurks nearby.
Around 3 p.m., we arrived back in Kasi, but traffic on the road to Luang Prabang had come to a complete stand still. Sy and I walked ahead and saw a huge mud slide covered the road. The road wouldn’t be passable until the next day.
Sy knew a hotel in Kasi and took us there. He suggested that tomorrow we take the train back to Luang Prabang. This was the new, controversial rail line built by the Chinese. We did just that. My wife and I celebrated our return to Luang Prabang with French cuisine for dinner and a bottle of French wine.
Over dinner, I told my wife that going to Phonsavan and seeing the Plain of Jars wasn’t a trip, but an adventure. We had rolled the dice and got lucky. We defied a basic rule of the Golden Triangle-Make your destination before nightfall. Our luck held this time and we finally arrived safely in Phonsavan. But I wouldn’t want to roll the dice again.
Footnotes
- See my post: “Vang Pao: The Tragedy of the Hmong