Shooting Bunnies: on the road in rural Laos

Shooting Bunnies: on the road in rural Laos
a travelogue by Aaron Paulson

“If you want to go to Vang Vieng from Luang Prabang you must hire a private sedan and driver. That way, you can stop any time you like. To take pictures. Or, shoot bunnies.”

“It’s what we say when we have to use la toilete, the agent continued. “Is very good, n’est pas? Shoot a bunny. Say it with me,” as he shuffled through a crowd of backpackers booking flights to Saigon and Chiang Mai. “Shoot a bunny. Shoot a bunny. You must practice this very important expression.”

What had put thoughts of roadkill into the mind of this grandfatherly Buddhist travel agent? We were two refugees from workaholic Tokyo, two stressed-out teachers come to Laos to relax, take in the temples and monks, drink muddy Lao coffee by the shore of the Mekong River, and sleep through the days in a renovated French colonial mansion.

“The Vietnamese plant rice,” the French said of their former charges in Indochina, “and the Cambodians watch it grow. But the Lao,” they had said, “the Lao listen to it grow.”

We had come to Laos to listen to the rice.

But after four days in Luang Prabang – UN World Heritage site, ancient capital of the Land of a Million Elephants, and the latest discovery on Southeast Asia’s well-trodden backpacker circuit – we had had our fill of gilded wats and colonial mansions decaying with photogenic gentility in the tropic heat. Young monks, daubs of saffron against newly whitewashed boutiques and Internet cafes, paraded barefoot in the dusty streets or chased errant chickens across temple courtyards while fresh garlic roasted in the sun – sniped at from café patios by tourists with massive zoom lenses. Saffron robes hung in the lush jungle around Mount Phou Si, where Buddha’s toe has left a giant-sized print, as monks were temporarily defrocked by visiting girlfriends. Evenings, shaved heads glowed in the sickly aquarium light of Internet cafes along the main street.

Nights, a rooster perched outside our auberge window and greeted the passing hours. Mornings, the air still fresh from the surrounding jungle, houseboat captains and tuk-tuk drivers touted trips upriver to the Pak Ou Caves, or to Kuang Si Falls. Small talk at the tourist cafes revolved around places just been, or next on the itinerary: Myanmar; Bangkok; the Plain of Jars.

Luang Prabang, it seemed, had become another way-station for guesthouse groupies, a place to eat chicken laap and fresh baguette, and chase monks.

It was not a place to listen to rice grow.

“It’s so different now,” Michelle said by way of apology, as we drank French wine and shared a Davidoff cigar under the ceiling fans of the Café L’Elephant. A few years before, when Michelle first visited, LP was still a dead-end in northern Laos. Guerillas and bandits were launching sporadic ambushes against the military and tourists from the tall grass and blind corners of the newly constructed Highway 13. Now, Internet cafes and guesthouses and craft shops and restaurants serving banana pancake and garlic pizza – staples of the backpacker diet in SE Asia – now lined LP’s newly paved tourist circuit. The Hmong crafts market at the base of Phou Si had grown three times its former size. At this time of year – Christmas – we were lucky to find a room near the historic town center.

“So. This is the Third World,” I asked Michelle.
“Well, no. Not really.”
Time to get out of town.

Haze rose off the broad, milk-tea Mekong as a single file of conscripted monks shuffled barefoot past our private deck at the auberge, collecting their morning rice from a trio of grandmothers squatting in the road, and winking at the tourists. An early model Toyota Carina with smoked mirrors and a spoiler on the trunk pulled up and our driver – let’s call him Cam – stepped out in a white silk shirt that blazed among the dusty robes of the monks. A gold watch flashed in the sun.

“This guy doesn’t look like he wants to listen to rice grow.”
“Maybe he’s got a date in Vang Vieng.”

Cam at the wheel, we shot through the waking streets of Luang Prabang, past early morning risers splayed about café patios with fresh baguettes and un tasse de café, and joined a staggered stream of tuk-tuks and army lorries climbing into the highlands.

The Lao Highlands must have been formed by some monster geographer, an abrupt jumble of rounded and corrugated hills and pinnacles covered in bamboo and banana and tall grasses. Highway 13 clings tenaciously to this riotous topography, and Michelle and I clung tenaciously to each other as we climbed quickly from the Mekong River plain, ricocheting past Hmong villages of thatched and woven huts strung out along the roadside.

“Did I mention I get care sick,” said Michelle, squirming on the broken springs of the back seat.

Scenes flashed past our smoked windows: Villagers in embroidered robes splashed color amid villages covered in a fine brown dust, lush green weeds, and fresh scars from road-building cut into the red dirt. Young teens tossed balls in the few roadside clearings. Gaunt elders in pointed hats hauled firewood down vertiginous slopes on narrow footpaths, or squatted in front of rattan huts, smoking newsprint cigarettes and watching fresh-picked grass dry by the roadside.

But it was hard to appreciate these dioramas of pastoral life with a breakfast of fried eggs, baguette, and two cups of Lao coffee sloshing in our bellies.

“Uhm, Cam… we have to shoot a bunny.”

Unfortunately, cam didn’t speak a word of English. Or French. Or Japanese. Apparently, the agent in LP hadn’t given Cam the lesson on shooting bunnies.

We lurched around switchbacks and swerved across lanes to avoid scabby patches of gravel where the highway had been rubbed raw.

“I don’t think he understands.”
“Maybe he doesn’t want to understand.”

Cam skidded to a halt as the back door flew open and a beautiful young foreign woman shot egg and baguette bunnies on the hardpack shoulder, much to the surprise of a middle aged villager who squatted on the plank foundation of a new hut. The villager walked off as Michelle coughed up a few last baby bunnies.

We pulled into the light flow of army trucks grinding uphill before the villager could decide to be amazed or outraged at our intervention in his morning routine.

“What about the bunnies?”
“The pigs ande chickens will clean them up.”

Cam was a rock. Each time we pulled over so Michelle could should a bunny from the back seat of the car, Cam would stand a short way off, staring into the jungle riot of the steep-sided valleys below.

“This is crazy. I’m not going to make it.”
“We have to get Cam on our side. Make him slow down. This is – was – a vacation.”

I offered him American cigarettes. A half-empty bag of Pepsi from a roadside stall. Compliments on the beauty of his country, and his car. Cam met each bribe with a glance at his gold watch.

We squatted amid desiccated buffalo patties while Michelle dry-heaved into the grass. A group of figures appeared around the next bend, marching single file along the slope-side shoulder of the highway. We had left Luang Prabang at 8:30. The sun now was directly overhead. A Christmas sun, but a tropical sun nonetheless, and the shadeless road threw the heat in our face.

“Shouldn’t we be there by now?”
“How much further, Cam? How far to Vang Vieng?”

The road was endless. We had come in to this world with our stomach contents sloshing about in the back seat of a broken-down car, and we would leave it the same way. Whatever reason there had been to this journey was left behind with the bunnies on the endlessly twisting road. There was only motion and hot, moist air.

“That boy has no crotch.”

What had looked at a distance like a group of men in the shimmering heat turned out to be a gaggle of boys in torn pants swinging rusty scythes in their small hands, and much closer to us than they’d first appeared.

A few of the boys talked in low murmurs with Cam, while the rest of the troop closed in a semi-circle around us as we crouched, weak and road-sick, on the shoulder of their highway. Were these a new generation of Hmong guerillas, who still sporadically defy the Communist leadership down south in Vientiane? Or bandits, who preyed on hapless locals and tourists? And, what was Cam talking to them about?

A new Konica Hexar Silver camera – a personal reward for surviving another year in the endless grind of Tokyo commuting – dangled from my neck now like an expensive trinket. The cargo pockets in my pants were stuffed with bundles of Lao kip and Thai baht and American dollars. This spot didn’t seem like the ambush sites our guidebook had warned us about: There were no tall grasses in which to hide from army patrols, and the steep drop off and nearly vertical cliff on either side of the road made a quick escape seem unlikely. But then, our guidebook was three years old, and since then a series of marketplace bombings had rocked complacent Vientiane. What else had changed since Lonely Planet had warned of the dangers of road travel in rural Laos? If the boy with no crotch in his pants wanted a new pair of canvas Gaps with cargo pockets stuffed full of money, there wasn’t much we would be able to do about it.

But these boys were just boys, on their way to work in the poppy or rice fields slashed into the hills, as surprised to find two gassy bags of motion sickness on their commute to work as we were surprised to see them.

These boys didn’t speak French or Japanese, either, but returned our smiles as we climbed back in to the cool Toyota. And then, as Cam roared off, I managed the same two-handed wave that has saved me countless times from a classroom full of bored Japanese middle school students who greet the gaijin in their midst as a new plaything. The boys cheered, and we waved until the car disappeared around the next bend and were alone again on the highway.

Old model Toyotas built for the Japanese market were made for modest speed limits, so the Carina revved in high gear and the speedometer pinged alarmingly as we shot out of the highlands at over 100 kilometers an hour, past limestone castles and towers rising precipitously out of lopsided rice paddies and banana plantations. Thatch huts gave way to brick and wooden houses and granaries on stilts, and cows replaced pigs, until we turned onto a dusty side road, past a dilapidated, open air hospital with a lone water buffalo cropping the yard grass. Past Internet cafes and open-air restaurants offering banana pancakes and garlic pizza and more Lao coffee and video nights on large-screen TVs.

"Do you need to get drunk?" a roadside sandwich board demanded.
Vang Vieng.
"Oh, no!" Michelle moaned.
"What's the matter?"
"It's just like Thailand!"