I still remember the first time I saw Vang Vieng, in Laos. It was many years ago, before the Chinese began pouring money in (such is the scale of Chinese investment, Laos already has high-speed rail). I was driving one of the very few rentable 4x4s in the country, picked up in the sleepy capital of Vientiane. I was on the main road connecting south and north Laos.
When I say main road, I mean a road that sometimes narrowed to a single track, and that single track was commonly blocked by hens, dogs, playing children, and soldiers sleeping on the roofs of their cars under posters carrying the hammer and sickle (Laos was, and still is, theoretically communist).
The combination of poverty, rural remoteness, quasi-communism, and squawking fowl blocking the most important arterial road, did not therefore prepare me for Vang Vieng. It was like descending to the hallucinatory, shimmering jewel box of Las Vegas from the twilit deserts of Nevada; it was like that drug-soaked scene in Apocalypse Now when the river-boat arrives at the Playboy Bunny party.
I turned a corner at twilight, scattering yet more chickens – and discovered a gaudy, noisy, surreally lurid backpacker town, plonked by a river in the middle of magnificent karstic scenery; and not only that, a backpacker town where, clearly, anything was doable, drink-able, smoke-able, inject-able, buy-able, available. It was the Wild West meets Alex Garland’s The Beach set in a famous Chinese landscape painting, with peasants punting barges downriver even as the all-night whisky bars cranked out Motorhead, American rap and very early K-pop.
This, of course, is the town where, as of the time of writing, six westerners have died drinking ‘tainted alcohol’. As someone who has been to Vang Vieng more than once, I cannot say I am surprised by this tragedy. Saddened, but not surprised.
To understand why a bunch of partying young westerners can end up taking risks, even dying, in a small town in the middle of a country that few western people know and even fewer people can pronounce, you need to understand how backpacker towns arise, their sketchy sociocultural DNA, why they are quite often like Vang Vieng.
Sometime in the hippy mists of the 60s, young people in Europe and America, variously seeking God, no god, freedom, meaning and sunshine – along with cheap food, booze, and drugs – began making the overland Asian trip from Europe. They passed through Iran and Afghanistan (it seems astonishing now), many discovered India and Nepal, the boldest made it to Thailand.
They travelled on pennies, they backpacked and hitchhiked, they took rickety buses. And everywhere they went they established settlements where they would crowd together (oddly like early settlers of the American West). Generally, they chose picturesque villages, and coastal hamlets – or slightly down at heel inner-city burbs of big, welcoming cities.
Then the Iranian Revolution came along, and the overland route closed down. But at the same time the ‘Lonely Planet’ generation was arising, touting Tony Wheeler’s pivotal guidebook, ‘Across Asia on the Cheap’ (1973), and thus the concept of ‘the Third World’, especially Asia, as the ideal backpacker destination, lived on. Indeed, it thrived.
I lived in a backpacker burb in the 1980s, in the Khaosan Road in Bangkok. It’s hard to believe now – when Khaosan Road has been commodified and Disneyfied – but back then Khaosan Road was genuinely wild. Drugs, for instance, were ubiquitous. I actually stayed in a hotel on the Khaosan Road that offered heroin on room service; I made full use of this facility. Unsurprisingly, people sometimes died in those notorious rooms: according to legend their overdosed corpses were left in the street to be quietly collected at night, so the profitable room-and-smack-selling (with a slice of money for the local cops) could continue unabated.
No one can be sure, but Vang Vieng – as a backpacker town – surely had its genesis in the same manner as Khaosan and all the rest. One day an audacious Brit, Dane, Aussie, Norwegian turned up in a drowsy village. He looked at the beautiful scenery, the lovely sunshine, the cheap curries, the fun to be had tubing drunkenly down the Nam Song river (big business in Vang Vieng). He chatted with the agreeable villagers, then he rented a room. Then he told his friends, who told their friends. Within a year there were shacks selling banana pancakes, within two years locals from all over were flocking, attracted by the business, within three years someone put some weed on a pizza and sold that.
In recent years I’ve been wondering if backpacker towns might die out. They are often unpopular, especially with more disapproving governments. The Laos government has often threatened, even attempted, to close down Vang Vieng, as a corrupting influence on the locals. After this horrible tragedy, perhaps they will succeed.
However, I seriously doubt if this is the death knell for the entire concept. Because, in the last year alone I’ve come across three backpacker towns hitherto entirely unknown to me, and barely on Google Maps. Namely, Palomino on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, General Luna on Siargao Island in the Philippines, and Koh Toch on Koh Rong Island in Cambodia. Despite being so geographically disparate, they all share that same cultural mix of dope pizzas and music-on-the-beach, and that sense of languid hedonism that only arises when young people seek out sun, sex, risk, and fun, in truly ‘exotic’, faintly lawless settings – and where locals are happy to make nice money in providing the same.
Given that these are timeless human needs and traits, and given that backpacker towns at their best are an absolute blast, despite the occasional and horrific tragedy, I suspect they will be with us for decades to come. Indeed, right now there is probably a guitar-toting German or Canadian student, walking into a sleepy, pretty Indonesian village, and thinking: hmmm.