We arrive by turbo prop from Bangkok, juddering slowly across a corrugated expanse of jungle-encrusted hills with mist floating in the hollows. As we touch down at Luang Prabang’s sleepy airport I remember my father talking about how he had to hold the door of the aircraft shut when he flew across Laos almost 50 years earlier.
In the 1960s my father was one of two people in the world – other than the native people themselves – who spoke the languages of the Yao and Hmong hill tribes. He lived in their villages in Vietnam and later in Laos for months at a time and came home with stories of sleeping snuggled up against the horse in winter to keep warm, trekking in the mountains, keeping an eye out for tigers, and hiding under a table in Saigon with his Vietnamese mistress, Madame Ving. He brought us back bamboo pan pipes and beautiful Yao embroidered fabrics.
I hoped to go to Laos with him but he died before I could, so this is quite a special journey for me. Will it still be possible to get a glimpse of the magical places he knew? Might I even be able to track down Madame Ving? […]
Originally published in The Financial Times in July 2009
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