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The Puzzle of Phou Khao Khouai
by John Pruitt
While the heat wave continued unabated--it must've been 106 degrees on the Vientiane plain that day--at 9 o'clock on a summer morning I and several other adventurous residents of the Laotian capital began the 3-hour drive to Ban (village) Phou Khao Khouai at 2,200 feet above sea level. Allegedly this had been a secret army-air force installation for as long as anyone could remember, and thus even today there's still a great deal of mystique surrounding all conversations about it. I know Laotians my own age (49) and older who've never been there once in their entire lives--for all intents and purposes it's been off limits to just about everybody since the successful conclusion of Laotian communist revolution in 1975. Even foreign advisers who've done long tours of duty in Laos have never gained access to Phou Khao Khouai (Laotians omit the word ban when talking about it) for as much as five minutes. Therefore, in the minds of many, the mountainous valley that rises 2,200 feet above sea level seems spooked. In fact for approximately half the year it's blanketed by a vast sea of eerie fog and gloomy mist.
I'd been looking at Phou Kong Khao (elevation 4,811 feet and the name means rice basket) rising immediately above Phou Khao Khouai on my assorted maps of Laos for four years as well as from a third-floor porch 20 miles from the site for the last two. Flanked by several peaks towering at least a thousand feet higher, Rice Basket Mountain has forever cast a rambling and meandering shadow on Phou Khao Khouai at its broad and lofty base. Thus the deep pine environs of Phou Khao Khouai seemed to be the perfect place to stash portions of a clandestine army, which, once upon a time, was just about the way the scenario went. The semi-alpine plateau is nearly inaccessible by anything but a jeep and there'll never be more than two ways in.
Once unequivocally past the military checkpoint--how our calculating if smiling Lao host accomplished that critical feat I still don't know--and traveling at a snail's pace, that Sunday's route took us up and up for the better part of an hour, although admittedly we made the return descent in 30 minutes during the mid-afternoon. (The overall climb, incidentally, was vaguely reminiscent of the harrowing hairpin-turn passage which, like a corkscrew, spirals upwards to Ravelo from Italy's Amalfi Drive overlooking the Bay of Naples--but this Oriental version of a civil engineering nightmare is much longer, of course unpaved and without guardrails.) You really need a vehicle with 4-wheel drive and there's still the chance that the intrepid passengers will have to get out and push at least once on the steepest stretch as at least eight of us did!
The sprawling panorama looking directly southwest from a lush promontory at the summit where the road begins to level out is breathtaking--a silver haze shimmered and trembled over the once-familiar but now-indistinct tableland from where our June outing originated. Air conditioning wasn't necessary after that--the crystal clear air at the top is as refreshingly cool as it is extraordinarily clean. (Vientiane, incidentally, is uncommonly dusty, obscuring the distant view of Rice Basket Mountain for at least half the year). Tall stands of pine begin almost immediately and would remind nearly anyone, anywhere, of a heady alpine forest. There's absolute stillness also. Looking like candy cotton, wisps of clouds droop and drift unhurried within a few hundred feet of the alluring terrain. There's an amazing never-never-land quality about the place and I sensed right away that I'd never want to leave, a certainty all the more accentuated when it's 106 degrees on the broad alluvial plain extending all the way to a meandering Mekong which touches 4 other countries besides a far-distant Siam on the blurred horizon.
I had gone to Luang Prabang, the old royal capital, four years before by twisting road and the scenery was indisputably singular, yet on this day I was floored by the magnificence of what I saw--in some ways the grandeur was reminiscent of the Vietnamese central highlands (also spooked by similar attributes of a natural and political sort). In every direction, imagine hills inundating as great swells in an otherwise untroubled ocean. Paint them jade green. Plant them with broad- and narrow-leaf calf-to-knee-high grasses interspersed with demure wild flowers whose delicate blossoms are deep red and vibrant orange. Then stick dark-barked pine trees helter-skelter everywhere--on top of the swells, in the middle, as well as the valleys at the bases--that rise straight up to 50 or 70 feet without as much as a single limb, and then at the top have the extraordinary facility to look like giant bonsai, above which sun and clouds change places. That's the rarefied Phou Khao Khouai. (In reading about Laos--how it got to be the way it is--and little else for no less than two years, not once did I see this enigmatic place mentioned, not even in forgotten guidebooks. But ask a Lao and he'll know, even though he probably hasn't set a bare foot in this intriguing valley himself.)
This Alice-in-Wonderland forest finally opens onto a timeless saucer of a valley at least several miles across and replete with wild-looking uncountable water buffalo with unnaturally dark horns if one can get close enough to scrutinize the clove-hoofed beasts. Non-descript bamboo and thatch houses in single-file line either side of the single-lane laterite road. Most of the occupants (looking about 20) wore camouflaged uniforms and a few toted burnished guns (AK-47s). We didn't raise our cameras here (on orders still tucked out of sight since approaching the armed sentinel at the bottom of the mountain); the children smiled but the solemn young adults mostly stared. Unlike Vientiane on the faint plain below, there were no cars or motorcycles parked next to the assorted buildings, although gasoline was for sale at some astronomical price. The very few houses that sprouted TV antennas obviously powered their sets from portable batteries--there was no central electricity supply. At the end of the ramshackle village--Ban Phou Khao Khouai itself--we abruptly turned left (north) and followed a dirt track past what appeared to be a largely unused army compound on our right. Here the surprisingly still-present American-type utility poles were not-surprisingly missing all their former wires--I wondered what sort of uneasy conversations they used carry. The natives accompanying us said most of the indigenous Pathet Lao troops had left, and that the ones who remained were "only showing the flag" and maintaining the socialist peace.
We returned to the magical inundating forest--although a different one--and finally parked our 3-vehicle caravan and headed for the whisper of water wafting through--uncountable, there were so many--silent trees. The walk lasted about ten minutes but everybody (children included) was generally silent as each of us (native and foreign alike) studied the unusual if not in fact unreal surroundings. Here nature was king and butterflies, seeming as big as an open hand, darted and hovered among those demure red-and-orange blossoms hidden in the high grass almost everywhere. (There's a saying on this side of the Pacific that if monks aren't skinny then the citizenry's reasonably well fed. It's also become my feeling in Asia that butterflies as big as an open hand indicate Nature's still king.) In vain I tried to discern a pattern among the trees, which appeared to rule as kings--other than outward harmony, perhaps the majestic pattern beneath the surface reality was that there wasn't one, that is, ordered disorder--but nonetheless all of us felt overwhelmed by acute sensations of a intoxicating union with this mystical timberland: in microcosm, here we were indubitably surrounded by imponderable processes and cosmic forces, temporally harmonious and soundless.
The tumbling, plunging stream was low--of course the dry season was still in control--but even at that it was surprisingly wide, and boulders, high or higher than a man, with all their sharp (original) Holocene corners obviously rounded from waters higher still, were everywhere, thus posing a challenge to bipedal Homo sapiens to cross. A few day-trippers unhesitantly jumped from broad ledges while others removed shoes and socks and carefully forded the narrowest parts. Eventually all of us got to the other side, where colorful straw mats were promptly spread on enormous flat rocks, soon to be dexterously arranged with a wide assortment of delectable Lao food. Laotians and we few foreigners sat down in groups of a half dozen or more and shared everything with one another--or rather they shared everything with us, the former out-numbered the latter by at least 5 to 1.
It was not only pleasurable but exceedingly refreshing to be treated so well by virtuous Asians in one of the most per capita-impoverished nations on planet Earth. That's when it came to mind that often those poorest in material goods are richest in heart and soul. Of course when the meal was done none of us wanted to abandon our captivating bonsai-canopied perch so close to those celebrated Lao phi (spirits), but after two hours that's exactly what we did. Yet it wasn't particularly hard on the heart because we knew for a fact that our Lao companions would bring us back to Phou Khao Khouai at the mere suggestion of repeating both the jaunt and the banquet. True, the scenery was spectacular, but even more so were the beaming people!
And never mind that when our relatively new Japanese mini-van broke down on the return stretch we switched to an at least 30-year-old museum-reject taxi on the Vientiane side of the Nam Ngum River. Never mind that we had to roll it down a hill to get it started. Never mind that when the door to the glove compartment fell off it was revealed that there wasn't any glove compartment--but there was a refreshing draft coming through it from where the engine should've been. Never mind that we couldn't tell the speed because obviously there hadn't been a needle on the speedometer for at least a decade. Never mind that when the driver anxiously spun the wheel to the left or right (to keep his beat-up no-name taxi on the road), for the most part the purring if lurching auto--with all four valves tapping--wistfully kept going straight!
This was the Lao icing on the always-engrossing Lao cake-of-the-day. Phou Khao Khouai had to have this kind of finale to be proper and complete. Besides, and as I suggested before, it's the people that really make Laos indisputably interesting. For example, every time the glove compartment door fell on my lap--about 60 times in 30 minutes--the driver picked it up and put it back with a unruffled expression (bo pen njang--Laotian for "it doesn't make any difference") as though nothing idiosyncratic had happened. If you live in Laos long enough you'll find yourself developing a similar set of survival habits. In trying to psychoanalyze them, I believe it's why almost every letter I've ever sent anywhere from Laos has been promptly saved. And somewhere out there, lying in the clutch of the lengthening shadow of Phou Khao Khouai (in truth it lies six kilometers south of the village and rises to 3,009 feet), an empty state-of-the-art Nissan with a functioning glove compartment is sitting irrefutably unusable beside a ditch. Score yet another round for Phou (meaning mountain) Khao Khouai (meaning buffalo horn). Just possibly that's why it isn't in the guidebooks yet!