Even a hangover can’t dim the enchantment of Luang Prabang. The gauzy tranquillity of the place puts a languid drift into your step and a diaphanous cloak of dreamy carelessness descends on you. The river reflects the gilded curlicues of the temples and the crumbling colonnades of antique French villas. Lush palms line the river bank and the wooden balustrades of the Lao houses are intertwined with scarlet bougainvillaea.
For nearly three decades, communism kept Laos and Luang Prabang in a time warp. The unique Lao-French architecture and ancient temples miraculously survived battles, bombs and bureaucracy — but were in a sad state of decay when the bamboo curtain finally clattered down and glasnost came to this little-known, one-party state.
I had come to Luang Prabang for the food. If Laos had managed to keep its distinctive identity intact outside the homogeneous blanket of globalisation, then surely its cuisine had, too. I was staying at the Vanvisa guest house, a small place owned by Madame Vandara, an entrepreneurial communist who is celebrated for her Lao cookery lessons. Like many Laotians who remained after the revolution, Vandara still proudly believes in the village-socialism of her youth — although now with room for a little profit on the side.
The evening I arrived, Vandara was out of town, so I unwisely spent my first night at her guest house testing the local liquor, lao lao, a home-made rice spirit of unspecific gravity. I awoke with a monstrous hangover.
Dying of thirst, I staggered downstairs in search of water and lurched straight into Vandara, her family and their guests sitting formally at breakfast. They looked at me with horrified expressions. I froze. Then we all burst into laughter. Vandara and I took an immediate liking to one another. We talked food all morning. Warming to my enthusiasm, she suggested we go to market the next morning and then cook a meal together.
Lao lao lesson learnt, I awoke sober the following morning, dressed quickly and walked out into the dawn half-light. I dipped into the backstreets towards the market and found myself in an elegant residential district of winding lanes, coconut groves and duck ponds. I was right in the middle of town but it felt like a village. Dilapidated French stucco villas stood beside Lao-French country houses and traditional bamboo homes in an appealing muddle. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation was just in time to save the old buildings when it made Luang Prabang a World Heritage Site in 1991.
As the darkness lifted, I could see people coming from the hills around with bundles on their heads. A tannoy started up, with tinny music intermingled with the morning news. The market was soon buzzing. It was huge — a pungent, steaming, seething mass.
Women arrived, unfolded a bit of sacking on a trestle table and spread out their goods in symmetrical piles arranged to arrest you in mid-stride: tiny aubergines the size of peas; hollow bamboo stuffed with straw at each end to trap the savoured grubs inside; dishes of curry to be popped into little plastic bags and taken away; tomatoes, whose heady aroma hit you at 10 paces; plucked chickens; steamed rice wrapped in banana-leaf rolls; bowls of live fish, squirming; pyramids of big, pappy apples; hillocks of tiny water shrimp; stacks of rough, home-made cigarettes and cigars; weird and unidentifiable mushrooms; garlic, galangal, lemongrass. And all the produce was exemplary — enough to make even the top French provincial vegetable market look tired and inadequate.
I had arranged to meet Vandara for a guided tour. I spotted her in the butchery area and negotiated my way through, getting splattered by blood as the butcher-women wielded their cleavers with vigour. The tables were divided into types of meat. One trestle was just stomachs and livers, the one next to it a mountain of pigs’ feet; next to that was a table of furry, black lungs slung casually over each other like a pile of coats at a party.
Vandara was selecting a chicken from a row of plucked specimens whose feet were sticking up in the air for inspection. Chickens in Laos run wild and free, and seem to have developed extraordinarily large feet and thunder-thighs as a consequence. “Now,” said Vandara, grabbing a really big pair, “we get the ingredients and I will show you how to make laap.” Laap is the national dish of Laos (essentially it is a salad made from meat or fish, which is cured in lime juice and mixed with chopped mint and coriander, lemongrass, chilli, galangal and roasted rice powder). It is made as a celebratory dish, rather like a family roast on Sunday.
Back in Vandara’s kitchen, we spent the next hour in a whirr of activity — chopping, pounding, searing, steaming and smelling, while I desperately tried to take recipe notes in between. I learnt that the staple is sticky rice, a semi-translucent variety that balls together like bread, followed by wild greens and river fish, wild birds, insects and game. Most of the population live by subsistence farming, so they eat what they find. But wild food, it seemed, was a primary feature of the cuisine even for the wealthy.
“We always buy jungle food,” said Vandara again and again, “much better for you. Natural! Organic! Fish and weed from the river, meat [from animals] that roam free and leaves from the forest. Even in the city, we buy [jungle food]. The taste is better.”
The laap ready, we sat down to eat. Every mouthful was a sensation of different flavours: fiery hot, savoury, salty, tangy with lime juice, refreshed with mint and galangal — and the textures were surprising, too: crunchy with roasted rice and crisp with chopped lemongrass. I scooped it into the edible forest leaves provided beside it.
Over the next few days, Vandara took me to fantastic restaurants and showed me her favourite recipes in her tiny kitchen. My last week was spent at her other guest house in the village below the spectacular, many-layered Kuang Si Falls — a famous local waterfall that cascades into a series of cool, turquoise pools.
Leaving the waterfall after days of feasting wasn’t easy, but I had a plane to catch. Next stop was Done Khone, where my journey was to end. Known as the Tahiti of Laos for its languid charm, it is one of thousands of small islands that rise from the Mekong river at the south-western tip of Laos. It is also famed as home to the extraordinary freshwater dolphins of the Mekong.
I arrived at night in Done Khone, a place with no mains electricity, no telephones, no cars and a view to the river, softened and blurred in a powder-blue haze. The mist rose and fell in huge plumes before dissipating in the morning light to reveal a woman washing clothes on the rocks. Done Khone is celebrated for its flame trees, coconuts and incense — a sublime combination of fruits, flowers and verdure that fills the air with heady perfume.
It was time for dolphin spotting. I had been told to follow the old railway trail to the “dolphin-viewing” village, before the heat of the day, so I began my walk.
The French had built the railway and its bridges to bypass dangerous river rapids and open a reliable trade route between Vietnam, Cambodia and Northern Laos. I found the remains of a locomotive in the undergrowth near Ban Khonetai, then followed what was left of the tracks, past paddy fields, into primary forest. Most of the railway had been spirited away to make fences and footbridges — and those bridges were particularly treacherous.
Several times I had to inch my way along a single precarious, rusting rail on my bottom, then watch as children bicycled over them without a care. After an hour I left the jungle behind me and reached Ban Hang Khone, a sleepy, flower-tumbled village, once an important hub of railway activity.
Here I met Noi, a local guide, hoping for a better chance of spotting a dolphin from his canoe. As we left shore, we both looked doubtfully across the large expanse of caramel-coloured water strewn with stony islets. After a while we moored up by a rocky outcrop and I clambered out. Noi remained in the boat, smoking roll-ups. I sat and waited.
Mekong dolphins look similar to Beluga whales — they have a rounded head with no beak and a flexible neck. They have 76 teeth in their famous smile. Sadly, they are among the world’s most endangered species. Locally, they are called paa khaa. Laotians neither hunt nor eat the dolphins, believing them to be reincarnated ancestors. The villagers say the dolphin population has halved in the past few years. No one knows why. Environmentalists have helped to organise fish conservation zones and a system of cash compensation for fishermen who release dolphins alive if they are netted. Reports suggest, nonetheless, that the dolphins continue to disappear. There might be as few as 10 left in Laos.
“Paa khaa, paa khaa,” Noi hissed, flinging his rollie into the water and pointing to a couple of specks in the distance. There were two, and they were getting closer. Soon they were 15m away and I could make out their fins as they rose from the water. Then they disappeared. Minutes passed. My heart sank. Well, at least I had seen them.
Then, quite suddenly, two metres from our rock, a dolphin poked its head out of the water and looked me in the eye. I fell back in shock. Noi was so excited he almost lost his balance on the boat. The head disappeared, only to re-emerge a few seconds later with the second one. Now both dolphins were giving us the once-over. It was impossible not to anthropomorphise — they looked just like people, two people smiling at me. And they were lavender, not grey like normal dolphins. It was heart-stoppingly wonderful. Then they vanished. — Â