My second placed entry for the Anthology travel writing competition 2025

It’s hard not to sense the old gods while moving through Laos. While Buddhism throws a long shadow, beliefs that predate its arrival are also ubiquitous.  Ancestor worship, animistic beliefs  and deference for the Phi, which translates as spirit, soul and ghost, are widespread, having coexisted for thousands of years. 

The dead feel close at hand in the villages; spirit houses sitting on the seams of properties, and temples bordered with complex individual reliquaries. At night, the pitch-dark forested hills hunkered over Heart of Darkness rivers sound with feral yawps, and stranger utterances giving little clue to their originator.  Eyes glow from foliage, snakes fly at you from the canopy and giant, brooding jacaranda trees weighed down with ferns and epiphytes might as well speak, they exude such sentience.

My partner and I were introduced politely to the country on the border at Huai Xay; baptised by fire-water on a two day slow-boat up the Mekong, and had our souls fully shaken alive cycling into Luang Prabang  during a lighting storm. Like a cinnamon and pepper-scented watercolour on burnt parchment, the view of Phousi hill rising from the mist of the Nam Khan river at dusk made me believe I had stumbled, mouth agape, into the fabled Shangri-La. It transpired that the gods were ahead of me on the road, and as I walked the streets of the peninsula I could feel them peering out from behind the ancient blackened stupas and stone giants. On my last evening in the city, I  sobbed into the rainy night at the wrenching from this enchanted tableau, as the monks’ chants  pervaded the air like burnt smoke.

One could, however, easily draw the conclusion that for all the superstition, the gods have forsaken Laos. It’s hard not to look at the red soil and see blood;  the stripping of the forested interior in the silt-pregnant rivers. Indeed, for all its undeniable beauty, the unpicking of the fabric of the land is well-advanced and is hard to watch such gentle people cutting away the soil they stand on, staggering ever closer to an environmental abyss.

Our arrival in Vientiane  along a cratered red mud road, after the concrete stopped abruptly a few kilometres short of the city, was foreshadowed with warnings of imminent inundation as the rivers reached historic levels. The Mekong, or simply Kong, is never not intimidating. A vast, slickly mobile inland sea that carries the weight of countries in silt, is so clearly alive. No wonder to the ancients it was a  supernatural entity populated with the powerful serpents they called Nagas. Everywhere on the foray from our hotel to the embankment, sandbagging was underway, with lifeboats being readied in a temple enclosure. A wave of nausea passed through me as an army helicopter swung past at twilight, throbbing directly over us before swinging into midstream.

With the water at such a level and the night market entirely submerged, I was disenchanted not to see offerings to the river deities being laid on the levees, in tune with my expectations of metaphysical belief. Instead, crowds ranged along the high promenade  in a mute gathering with an apocalyptic air, gazing at the vast expanse of water moving past in unhurried arrogance.  In Luang Prabang I had seen  banana leaf and marigold tributes offered to the waters for luck and sanctity from the rains, and with this in mind I fingered the treasures stowed in my hip bag from previous travels; a five franc coin from Switzerland and a porous stone from the Adriatic coast.  What do you give the irate river god who has everything? I chose the coin, tossing it into the marbled, taupe water, willing the widening ripples to pass my underwater overtures to the Nagas. Magical thinking begins to become quotidian in a land where everything is wreathed in myth and superstition.

Drumming rain shook me out of a flickering sleep in the early hours, as lightning threw its incandescent rage across the inky sky, backed by thunder that made the walls tremble with a vengeance. Once more I found myself muttering incantations from borrowed religions under breath that I fought to control.

 The following morning, light was weak and diffuse, but I could still see the tarmac of the embankment, with traffic speeding along it. I refreshed the Mekong Commission information page constantly over the next two days, and walked the embankments counting the steps leading to the water as I had seen the locals doing. It was unmistakable; deep silt deposits covering the lower steps told me that the level was dropping and widespread flooding averted. Clearly, my quickly-developing messiah complex narrated, the result of my timely offering to the Nagas.

                And so the story would have ended, if not for the direction of our departure. Had I left Vientiane by aeroplane, I would have done so with my magic realist memoir of saving the Laos capital  from inundation intact. In fact, we cycled into the hinterlands along the Mekong, where a multitude of tributaries empty into the mother river. Here, the lands were gone. House roofs poked from an expanse of water stretching to the distant hills, and people stood disconsolately along the raised embankment highway, considering the devastation. Of course the Nagas had neither heard nor reacted to my naïve offering; I had fallen for the oldest sleight of hand in the book. We cycled on with a grandstand view from the new road, guilt welling up every time a cheerful stranger stopped their clear-up operation to wave and shout a greeting.

I will leave Laos, but  imagine that Laos will not leave me entirely. In a kind of microchimerism, she has become a part of me at cellular level. I have drunk her water, and eaten her soil through the mineral-abundant fruit and rice. Her red dirt is under my fingernails and, if I turn quickly enough, I catch a glimpse of the old gods of the land haunting the crevices of my mind.