Laos. Enchante.

We have crossed the border from China, south into Laos. En route we passed through some of the wildest, most remote terrain I have ever encountered.

It was also some of the most beautiful.

Our road wound along river valleys, their thick, muddy waters chocked with debris from the recently-passed moonsons. We skirted steep mountain sides and passed through tiny villages, with small thatched huts sat on stilts, children, chickens and little pigs scattering in our path.

And all along the thick, green jungle shadowed us, lining the route and stretching out across the hills as far as the eye could see.

The road was long, the journey arduous and slow. Our tiny little road bumped up and down, veered left and right and never ever seem to run straight for more than a few metres. No wonder Laos wasn’t accessible by road until about ten years ago.

Finally, after nine hours of bumping up and down we arrived at our Eldorado: Luang Prabang.

An ancient imperial capital of this wondrous country…an enchanting town of golden temples and the exotic mysteries of the east…an outpost of mankind standing at the confluence of the Mekong and the Nam Khan rivers...and all a bit….French.

Upon arrival I was amazed , and rather charmed, to be addressed in French by the elderly Madame of our guesthouse. Enchante.

It didn’t stop there. The town is chokker with battered old French-style buildings, crumbling colonial houses with long thin shutters, rickety balconies, and outside walls whitewashed against the tropical sun.

On the main street, Sisavangvong Road, all kinds of treats await the homeless Parisian, from baguettes and quiche lorraine to tarte aux pommes and milles feuilles. And of course the excellent, thirst-quenching Beer Lao - a French lager if ever there were one.

I half expected Arthur Bostrom’s hapless gendarme/British agent character from ‘Allo ‘Allo to saunter by, waving his nightstick and greeting us, ‘good moaning’.

Across the road from our guesthouse we can hear young children learning French at the French language school; around the corner we had a nice chat with a friendly chap from Clermont-Ferrand who runs one of the town’s numerous bookshops.

My Francophile father would love it, though it did leave me wondering quite why the French went to the trouble of colonising a place which, despite it’s numerous charms, is rather inhospitable.

There must have been good reason to do so, after all the French were only one country in a long line of others to which the Lao people found themselves rather reluctant hosts. The Burmese, the Thais, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, even the Americans have also left their mark on this little nation.

Add into the mix a whole host of different ethnic groups, stir in the rise and fall of an imperial family and add a good measure of communism and Laos comes out with a rather interesting and unique flavour.

The people have certainly changed from those amongst whom we walked yesterday, on the other side of the Chinese border. Not only do they look decidedly different but their character is a refreshing change to the ebullient, noisy Chinese.

Quiet and shy, Lao people seem reticent to accost the numerous wealthy foreigners strolling about their town.

No shopkeepers hassle you here, rather you have to hassle them, waking them from their slumbers as they doze in the afternoon heat.

No rickshaw drivers harangue you mercilessly, instead they crouch in the shadows, perhaps offering a rather halfhearted sales pitch: ‘cheap cheap’.

No crowds, no pushing, no shoving, no spitting.

You can put your elbows away when you leave China and enter Laos, for it’s suddenly very well mannered once more. Smiles, apologies, bowing. Is it all going Japanese again?

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The numbers game

China is an enormous country, sprawling across a fair chunk of the globe, yet it often feels overwhelmingly, stiflingly crowded.

Unlike their Japanese neighbours, crammed in on a relatively small slither of land and yet still fanatically well-behaved and respectful of each others’ privacy, the Chinese have no concept of personal space.

And if you’re unlucky enough to be a ’foreigner’ in this land you will find yourself under constant surveillance from thousands of inquisitive pairs of eyes. Smile, you’re on 24-hour TV.

But whilst you’re an object of attention don’t expect any special privileges, particularly when it comes to travelling around. You’re just another animal fighting in the frenzy for a place at the water trough.

When the bus or train hoves into view, you must resolutely suppress your English sense of justice and fair play, forget any pretence at politeness and never ever attempt to queue. Rather, roll up your sleeves, dive into the maelstrom and bash them out the way with 50 pounds of backpack.

This may seem the very height of rudeness but in China it seems vital for survival as demand outstrips supply.

As we push our way through the throngs crowding outside train stations, bus stations and just about every point in between we frequently find ourselves asking: just how many people live here?

Travelling around China has become for us a bit of a numbers game. In a country of 1.3 billion the population of the average city in this country seems to put their European equivalent in the shade.

20 million in Shanghai…17 million in Beijing…higher!, Brucie, higher!…8 million in Xi’an…10 million in Chengdu…5 million in Chongqing.

Chongqing? A few months ago I’d not even heard of it yet this is a city which, if you extend it to the municipality, numbers some 30 million souls - equivalent to half that of the entire UK.

Like many others cities we passed through Chongqing seems to be further expanding. Above the murky brown waters of the Yangtze the skyline is crowded by cranes constructing high rises for the burgeoning population.

Further up the river, we passed two huge power stations in quick succession, each surrounded by massive heaps of coal. Such is the scale of China’s population growth and economic expansion it is building on average two of these CO2-spewing monsters every week.

Jung Chang, in her extraordinary account of living in Mao’s China, Wild Swans, apportions considerable blame for the population explosion to the Cultural Revolution.

One of the effects of the many barmy policies introduced by the revered Chairman was to loosen birth control, hence increasing the population by 200 million.

Not that subsequent leaders haven’t recognised the need to act. The Chinese government maintains its one child policy has been at least a partial success, claiming it has prevented 400 million births since its introduction in 1979. However, despite this the population is set to creep up yet further.

It all left me wondering: how is china going to cope with population growth on this scale? Where will it find the resources need to sustain this growth? How will the country meet the growing consumer demands of its citizens as economic growth allows more of them to aspire to Western standards of living?

And, for those of us in the West, how will we cope?
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