Revisiting Laos after 45 years, a country barely recognisable – unless you know where to look

Vientiane, Laos, July 1972: one year after arriving to work as a teacher, a young Englishwoman stands on the banks of the Mekong awaiting the ferry to Thailand, and thence by train to Bangkok, then London and home. A crowd of friends and pupils hug and kiss her goodbye. Through her tears she calls out that she’ll be back soon.

It’s taken 45 years, but I’m back. I had applied, aged 21 and armed with a languages degree, to Voluntary Service Overseas, hoping to be sent where I could use my Spanish. So little-known was Laos that when the posting came through, my parents and I pored over a map of South America looking for it.

Soon afterwards a newspaper item described Laos as the new destination for hippies bored with India, a country where young men walked hand in hand garlanded with flowers. My parents raised their eyebrows. I thought it sounded marvellous. Nobody mentioned the war.

The Vietnam War was not supposed to be in Laos at all, and yet it was everywhere. It was in the American airbases, the B-52s overhead, the Royal Lao Army troops on the streets, in Silver City – the US compound where we went for medical treatment and ice cream – in the constant updates from the British embassy on the shifting front line, the growing numbers of our pupils who went home to their villages in the school holidays and never came back, and the CIA station chief (not a very well-kept secret, that) with whom we played badminton.

And yet it seemed absent from the British diplomats’ cocktail parties, and the ambassador’s silver-service dinners, and the hotel discos where we bopped the night away to Santana’s Black Magic Woman with good-looking American Fulbright scholars.

Far from being frightened by finding ourselves in a war zone, my fellow volunteers and I were mostly thrilled. I was 21, and invincible. My letters home airily described picnics with my pupils behind enemy lines and a visit to a Lao Army base, blithely noted that the communist Pathet Lao were reported to be 25 miles (40km) from us, mentioned en passant that we could be evacuated any day. But we survived, came home and got on with life. From time to time I heard the faint echo of my promise to return, but there was always an excuse.

And then I was retired, and a grandmother, and the Chancellor was urging me to spend my pension – and I was out of excuses and on a plane, and stepping out at the smart new Wattay International Airport, Vientiane. In 1972 I had left the Royal Kingdom of Laos; now I entered the communist Lao People’s Democratic Republic, and I had no idea what to expect.

10 of the best ways to savour south-east Asia

First impressions of Vientiane were dispiriting. I remembered fields and red dirt roads, food stalls, wooden buildings, intermittent electricity and the smell of cooking fires. Now we hurtled into the city centre on a traffic-choked highway lined with neon-lit high-rises. From the coach windows I recognised nothing, and when we pulled up, hot and exhausted, at a bland modern hotel, I wanted to cry. I had anticipated change, but where was my Laos?

Next morning, I set out to look for it and there, up Lane Xang Avenue on the left, just as I had left it, was the Lycée de Vientiane, where I taught English to the teenage children of the Lao elite, the building unchanged although the clientele probably had. And there was the Patuxai Monument, officially commemorating independence from France, although in my day it was known as the vertical runway on account of having been built with cement donated by France and intended for the airport.

Then, it was a roundabout with light traffic swirling around its base in clouds of dust (one day I executed a tight turn here on my Honda 70 and skidded off, fracturing my foot); now it sits in a manicured park with fountains and hordes of tourists. The open-air market where we haggled for pineapples and papayas is now a shopping mall, but the glorious That Luang and Wat Si Saket temples are unchanged from my 1971 photos. I was starting to remember a few words of Lao, and to catch the scent of frangipani, and when we set off north by road for Luang Prabang, Laos just got better and better.

Once out of the city, we entered a world of dust-shrouded roadside shacks selling tyres, snacks, plastic chairs, brooms, oranges and sunglasses. Satellite dishes aside, this was the Laos I loved, and when we saw our first water buffalo in a paddy field I was at home. In 1971, the 211 miles (340km) between Vientiane and Luang Prabang, the old royal capital, was Pathet Lao territory.

We VSOs could go only by air, and then only when we could hitch a ride in the back of an American bomber, so now I was seeing for the first time the classic landscape of limestone karsts soaring skywards from forested valleys. Families worked their fields, buffalo grazed, dogs scratched in the shade, women swept their yards, toddlers chased chickens, and chillies dried in baskets on the roofs. The road, mostly Tarmacked, climbed and wound and climbed again. It was achingly beautiful.

Stopping to stretch our legs in a mountain village, we were invited into the primary school. One class broke off from their sums to sing us a Lao song. In return, we gave them The Hokey Cokey, and everyone seemed satisfied by this cultural exchange. It transpired that the state supplies the buildings but no materials or furnishings. What does your school need, we asked the head master. A water pump, he told us, but that costs $250 (￡187). Strolling back to our bus, a simple sum dawned: $250 needed, 25 tourists in the group. For a paltry $10 from each of us, the school could get water – a drop in the poverty ocean, but it felt like a good day.

And then, finally, the jewel in the old Lao crown, Luang Prabang. In 1971, to my pupils and me, the Americans were the friends and Pathet Lao the enemy. So it was salutary, and hardly surprising given the record tonnage of bombs per head of population dropped on Laos by those friends during the so-called secret war, to learn from our guide, Johnny, that 1975, when the communists took over, was “independence from America” year.

Johnny seemed to exemplify the new Laos – educated, optimistic, a self-made man with a young family, he was fascinated by my tales of old Laos. I had taken some old photos, which he pored over. Pausing especially long at one I took during the 1971 That Luang festival in Vientiane, showing the King and Queen preceded by their tiny grandchildren, he pointed at the young Crown Princess walking behind them and, to my astonishment, said: “She’s alive, you know, and lives here in Luang Prabang.”

In 1975, King Sisavang Vatthana was forced to abdicate and was eventually banished, with the immediate royal family, to a jungle “re-education” camp. The King, Queen and Crown Prince are thought to have died of starvation there soon afterwards, although their deaths were not confirmed until the Nineties. But it seems that the Crown Princess, because she was pregnant again and had been a commoner before her marriage, was spared the camps and survived with her youngest son, and today lives openly in a pleasant house in the centre of Luang Prabang.

Her old home, the royal palace, is now the National Museum. I had envisaged it turned into a grim monument to the Communist Party but, as we entered the main hall, I was transported straight back to a warm evening in April 1972, for I had been in here before, and it looked just the same.

We VSOs were invited to Luang Prabang for the King’s new year ball. We flew up in “a precarious crate that Royal Air Lao have borrowed from Air America”, my journal records, and watched from the palace terrace as “thousands of children carrying lanterns wound their way down the Phou Si hill opposite and into the palace. Then the King took his seat and there was dancing and entertainment and feasting until 2am”. Today, cheerfully on display throughout the palace are the royal thrones, the family’s photos, furniture, jewellery, clothes, even their cars.

Perhaps it is hard for my generation to reconcile the communism we think we know from the Cold War with the pragmatic communism of modern Laos. Huge obstacles remain: the country is still shaking off decades of isolation; rampant corruption goes hand in hand with Third World poverty; political opposition is non-existent; human rights are a low priority; unexploded cluster bombs still contaminate a quarter of Lao villages. But China and others are pouring money into roads, railways and hydroelectric projects; the Economist Intelligence Unit put Laos at number two in the world’s fastest-growing economies for 2016; and tourism is booming.

Outwardly, Luang Prabang seems miraculously unchanged from 1971. Its 1995 listing as a World Heritage Site has saved it from the development that so disoriented me in Vientiane, with quiet streets still lined with wooden French-colonial houses, richly decorated temples, boat trips up the Mekong and Khan rivers, dreamy young backpackers thronging the cheap hostels and food stalls in the night market. But now it is also awash with stylish hotels and chic restaurants serving dry martinis and brilliant food, although it may be some months before I can look at sticky rice again.

From Laos we went on to Cambodia, whose modern history is even more appalling than that of Laos. Somehow the people of these astonishing countries have summoned the strength to look forward, and they need our tourist dollars. So go, and soon. Everything you see will enrich you, especially if you get the chance to sing to laughing children. I’d better not leave it another 44 years.

Essentials

Sally Baker travelled with Wendy Wu Tours (0800 902 0888; wendywutours.co.uk), which offers a 17-day Laos and Cambodia Unveiled tour from ￡2,990 per person including international flights, all meals and accommodation, touring with expert guides and visa fees.

For background reading, try any of the delightful Dr Siri Paiboun detective novels by Colin Cotterill, set in Laos in the Seventies.