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By Stan Sesser

01/11/2002

The Asian Wall Street Journal

(Copyright (c) 2002, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

For some, holidays aren't about relaxing on a beach or taking in the scenery. They are all about keeping up with the Joneses and beating them tithe latest exotic destination. 
Stan Sesser reports.

LUANG NAMTHA, Laos -- Malaria is endemic around here. Even the most basic medical care is a day or two away. The best hotel in town has electricity only from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. The ride up from the nearest outpost of civilization is a bone-jarring nine hours.

In short, it's the perfect vacation spot. Perfect, because Luang Namtha, in northern Laos near the Chinese border, is beautiful and interesting, but also remote and unknown. An ideal place, then, to brag about in front of envious friends and neighbors, secure in the knowledge that none of them will ever have heard of it, much less been there.

Luang Namtha is one of the rapidly diminishing solutions to a growing problem: how to win the game of travel one-upmanship that so many of us play. Not so long ago, a trip to Angkor Wat, Luang Prabang, Lhasa or even Hanoi would have done the trick. But these days, those places seem to be in everyone's photo album. Tourism officials at Angkor Wat, for example, predict that a million people will visit next year. In 1998 there were only 80,000. It means that those of us entering the travel one-upmanship competition have to look much further afield.

"It used to be Guatemala, then Turkey for a few years, and now it's Antarctica," says Davies Stamm, speaking of the favorite destinations of one-uppers. "Or else they'll ask, `Have you been to the Stans yet?', referring to the countries in Central Asia that end in stan." Mr. Stamm, director of tour operations for American-based Asia Transpacific Journeys, puts together tours for affluent clients who wouldn't be caught dead sightseeing in Bangkok or Hong Kong. "Many are baby boomers whose parents have died," he says. "They've sold their businesses for lots of money, and they're fascinated by strange cultures."

One of Asia Transpacific's frequent clients is Burt Rosenberg, a Chicago lawyer who proudly admits that many of his friends and relatives think he's crazy when he tells them he spent his vacation sleeping in native huts in Irian Jaya instead of five-star hotels in a big city. He says he gets two very different reactions when he talks about places in Vietnam "where no Americans have ever been," or finding grains of sand inadvertently baked into his bread in the Mali desert. "Those who have a sense of adventure a will press you for details. Others will shrug and say, `Well, we're going back to Hawaii next year.'" "My theory," says the 61-year old Mr. Rosenberg, "is while I'm young, I've got to go to places like Mali, Sulawesi and Irian Jaya. When I'm in my 70s, there will be plenty of time to see Fargo, North Dakota."

But Mr. Rosenberg concedes it's getting more difficult to keep ahead of the crowd. "Today people who had always been afraid to leave the United States are visiting Thailand and even Angkor Wat," he says. Which makes Mr. Stamm's job increasingly difficult, as tour buses filled with passengers sporting Bermuda shorts and flowered shirts roar through formerly exotic destinations. It's not easy these days, Mr. Stamm concedes, beating Lonely Planet and the guidebook series' loyal followers to a pristine destination.

"We have good local people everywhere," he says, "and we tell them we've got to know about new and interesting places that open up. Then I go on a familiarization trip."

Recently, Mr. Stamm discovered what he thinks is a winner: Thibaw in the Shan State of Myanmar, a town that he describes as "pretty funky," with beautiful scenery, river trips and hiking through minority villages. Six people have already signed up for Asia Transpacific Journeys' first tour of Thibaw in February 2003, despite the fact that it's priced at $3,700, not including international airfares, and that the guesthouse they'll stay at doesn't have hot water. (It's the best hotel in town -- Mr. Charles Guesthouse -- at $5 a night.)

"Price is not always the most important thing to them," says Mr. Stamm, who has been in the tourism business for 12 years. "We'll stay at the best available hotels, starting at the Pansea in Rangoon. They'll have a Burmese guide for the entire trip, then local guides. And they'll have me, and I'm pretty pricey."

Mr. Stamm's biggest problem is trying to get his clients into rugged, relatively primitive areas while maintaining a semblance of comfort. "We discovered people who take tours want the most comfortable travel possible," he says.

That's exactly what I tried to arrange for my visit to Luang Namtha. I had been tipped off about this little town by an American who spoke highly of the area, with its rivers, mountains and unspoiled hill-tribe villages.

Moreover, because of a United Nations-driven program in the area, the villages may yet remain unspoiled. Treks to villages off the road, for instance, are forbidden without local guides and the adherence to strict rules: no gifts, no litter and no candy for kids.

But getting to Luang Namtha is another story. Most backpackers bound for Luang Namtha start out at Luang Prabang, a picturesque Lao city of ancient temples carved out of the mountains by the Mekong River. They pile onto two benches in the back of pickup trucks crammed with sometimes more than a dozen passengers. A canvas roof stretches over a metal frame, which the passengers grip tightly hour after hour. If they don't, the deep potholes in the road will ensure that their heads crash into the frame. Meanwhile, passing trucks and buses send clouds of dust through the open sides.

Having experienced one too many such journeys, I decided to exercise the perks of my baby-boomer status. It should be simple, I thought, to hire a driver and van in Luang Prabang and take the trip in relative luxury.

But in places like Laos, nothing is simple. It's a country with no population pressures, rivers filled with fish, and such an abundance of fruits and vegetables that they're practically there for the picking. While the result is a land of relaxed and charming people, a wallet filled with hundred-dollar bills will barely attract a glimmer of interest.

I had several false starts. One experienced local tour guide threw out the figures of $200 each way for the travel, and $100 for each day of waiting -- $900 for a trip of just 310 kilometers each way. Although that's serious money in impoverished Laos, the guide rapidly lost interest in the job, and said he wouldn't do it at any price. A second driver agreed to $300 before canceling out at 10 o'clock the night before we were to leave. Only at midnight was I able to find a substitute, for $350.

Nor could I get even a basic idea of what the journey would involve. Three drivers or tour guides claimed to have been to Luang Namtha frequently, and estimated a journey of between six and a half hours and two days.

Six and a half hours was someone's pipe dream. We did it in nine: our van would have been half-demolished had we attempted to do it in less. The road, paved with the help of Chinese aid in the 1960s, quickly deteriorated. Every few hundred meters the concrete degenerated into potholes, rocks and dirt. A van to spread out in seemed like luxury at the start, but soon started to feel like a cement mixer.

But the scenery was five-star: lush green mountains and picture-book hill-tribe villages. At each ethnic Hmong village, a line of brightly costumed young women faced a second line of young men, tossing balls back and forth in a unique girl-meets-boy mating ritual.

The beautiful scenery ended abruptly when we pulled into Luang Namtha -- a destination that, until you start exploring the area, makes you wonder about the merits of playing the travel one-upmanship game. It's an ugly town of modern, Thai-style buildings spread along several kilometers of the main highway. The small, unpaved side streets turn into muck with a small rainstorm. Backpackers crowd into the one restaurant which offers staples like banana pancakes. The 10 foreigners who live here all with connections to nongovernmental organizations. The Internet and 24-hour electricity in the guesthouses have yet to arrive.

I was far from the first baby-boomer to visit. "We still get plenty of scruffy backpackers," says Steven Schipani, who heads a project that is attempting to preserve the hill-tribe village cultures from the influx of tourism. "But now we're getting a higher percentage of middle-aged and older people coming with Lao tour operators. We had an American woman who was over 75 go on an overnight trek, and she was traveling alone."

Luang Namtha shouldn't put much of a dent in a traveler's budget. The guesthouses that line the main street charge between $2 and $5. A much nicer hotel called the Boat Landing, six kilometers away on the Namtha River and designed to blend into the architecture of the nearby villages, prices its most expensive double room at $15 in high season. An overnight trek to a hill-tribe village is $27, including guides, accommodation, two lunches and a dinner. Nevertheless, some baby-boomer visitors have paid thousands of dollars to get here by booking with expensive U.S. adventure travel agencies. But no matter what they end up paying, "people want to go to places that are new and different," says Paul Eshoo, an American who helps train Lao guides for the ecotourism project.

Despite Luang Namtha's shortcomings, the overnight trek was great, an unspoiled vista of mountains and rivers ending up at an isolated bamboo-and-thatch village called Ban Nalan, populated by 33 families of the Khmu ethnic minority. No dance performances, colorful costumes or any other tourist hokum, just a chance to look at the people's lives and share their sparse cuisine of bony fish, green vegetables and sticky rice.

It was almost as interesting as another Lao village I visited several months ago. I had taken a 25-kilometer boat trip up the Mekong River from Luang Prabang to the Pak Ou caves, which are filled with Buddha images. Instead of stopping at the usual two villages along the way to buy textiles and eat lunch, we asked the boatman to take us to a place where tourists never went.

He complied -- so literally that when we walked into the village, children ran away screaming in terror at the sight of foreigners.

This village, however, had one serious flaw: It was only 20 minutes off the beaten track. I didn't even bother telling my friends and neighbors about it. They wouldn't have been impressed.

Send comments to stan.sesser@awsj.com

 The Boat Landing Guest House and Restaurant. All rights reserved.
Revised: April 13, 2009 .