LPDR

A deck expands out over the silent water, supported by thick wooden stilts burrowed into the shore. Its profile is mirrored in every building up and down the road, which is built up at the top of a steep bank. Muddy steps lead down to water that doesn’t seem to move. An occasional ripple laps up the brown slope an inch or two. In the morning’s undisturbed light the water shivers with the wind, and the eddies and still spots stand out like dark tectonic swaths, their stagnant pools interrupting the vibrating shadows on the speckled surface.

Up on the road it is quiet. The crooning of roosters carries up the dirt avenue. A woman perched barefoot on a table strings gutted river fish on a strip of bamboo; the others pulled out of the trap this morning already hang alongside each other in the bright sun. Each time she plucks the sharp blade of plant through the thin pink flesh, the quick fibrous snap can be heard next door. Life here is listless. The thick air carries a near vacuum of sound. In the hazy heat an unfocused tranquility extends through every person. The stasis is contagious.

This is the protozoan-shaped island Don Khon, which lies at the bottom of Si Phan Don, known inter-linguistically as 4000 islands. Here, in the southern toe of Laos, the distended belly of the Mekong opens and softens, the brown water blossoms into a mini-delta with every describable upwelling of land – one island big enough to support a small runway, hundreds of uninhabited spits of dirt and grass that sink below the surface during the rains and everything in between. Trees furry with symbiotic growth dip and drink straight from the river, while islands of bamboo erupt out of the shallow mud like strings of volcanic islands.

The only work that can be seen is the occasional island dweller carrying a bundle of sticks, or maybe a single drooping bamboo pole, plodding through the palm-dappled shade with his load balanced over one shoulder. One man moves a lonely sack of grain, pushing a single-axle garden cart over the dirt troughs in the road. This is the extent of on-land exertion. Only the boats in the river move with a speed resembling urgency.

Twenty graceful feet from stern to prow, shaped from the sleep trunks of the native palms and ribbed down the length with curved strips of wood, these river cars are custom painted in a Technicolor whimsy for each captain. Docked on the bank, a man sits with the sawed off handle-ended-half of a milk jug and bails the night’s accumulation out the bottom of his boat. He sits in the far back to pull the water towards him. This 2-3x daily maintenance exercise is his simple circadian task, one of the few he can claim. Nautical upkeep is important when it’s the only way to get around here.

His craft’s 6-inch, lawnmower powered propeller rests at the end of a five-foot metal pole, revved by turning the handle the same way you would on a motorbike. As he boats chugs upriver, the aggressive petroleum exertion cuts through the soporific stillness.

It isn’t that leaving the hammock is difficult; there is just no reason to. Rural Laos moves at a pace that beyond slow. You want to check for a pulse.

The Laos Peoples Democratic Republic has birthed a popular acronym – LPDR: Lao Please Don’t Rush. I’ve never seen a group of people so content to do simply nothing. I thought Cambodia was a little heavy on the chill-out factor. And before that, the Vietnamese floored me with their capacity for heat-inspired tranquility, even as traffic roared by mere inches away. But Laos seems as though it’s been fossilized.  Now, a day spent doing nothing but reading in a hammock doesn’t feels like a retreat from the constant state of forward-motion travel. Instead it has become just what to do. It isn’t accompanied by a sigh of relief to sink out of the rush around you – it’s a settling into the surrounding glassy mirror. The new normal has become even slower, which I didn’t think possible.

This country is new to me. I’ve only been here a couple of days, but I can already feel a sort of mental breath catching. Instead of trying to record everything, this is a chance to sit and think, to try and collect.

I never did well in an economics class, but from my three-country venture so far there seems to be an exacting correlation between GDP, population and stillness. Vietnam, at the top of the list, is bustling, flexing its new economic muscles for the pride of its 85 million people. Cambodia is on the rebound, still nursing its wounds from Khmer Rouge rule; its 12 million people are quiet and smiley, but still ready to run up a white person trying to sell anything. After Sub-Saharan Africa, Laos is one of the poorest countries on earth, almost entirely rural, with less people in its 91 thousand sq. miles than the population of New York City.  People here don’t care who you are; they aren’t moving to sell you anything. If you want it, you have to come to them.

But sitting still is so much nicer. When no one wants to exert themselves, not much really gets done. Instead of cash, people seek contentment. It’s a tutorial on happiness for people passing through.