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At Hong’s Coffee Shop, I fell into conversation with a thin young woman who was exploring Laos, and quite thoroughly, before returning to her studies at Oxford. She was travelling light, on the back of her male friend’s motorbike. We talked about the oddly beautiful riverboats that carry both cargo and passengers up and down the river. They’re long wooden vessels, barge-like, but with high, square sterns like junks, and are painted Mediterranean blue with red trim.

“I wonder how long it would take to go down to Vientiane on one of them.”

I said I didn’t know, but obviously the downward trip would be much faster than the reverse, particularly now, in the wet season. (Later I checked. The passage from the Mail Boat Pier in Luang Prabang to the Kao Liaw Pier in Vientiane is 430 kilometres and usually takes three days.)

“The thing that puts me off the idea,” she said, “is that part at the back.” She explained that she was referring to the outhouse suspended over the stern. “Mind you, we stayed in a hostel where everybody showered together and the partitions only came up to here.” She indicated a spot midway between breasts and stomach. Anyway, she went on, she would be sticking to the motorbike for this trip. Maybe next time, if there ever were to be a next time.

We talked about Xieng Khuang Province and the Plain of Jars, and she told me about her problem. The motorbike had broken down and she and her partner had to locate a mechanic. “Well, not a mechanic actually. He was more of a tinker. He did things like take four old broken electric fans and, using bits from three of them, made one that worked. He had to rebuild our bike, but of course didn’t have the right parts, so he used, what do you call it? An elbow? Yes, an elbow on the exhaust pipe. This is the result.”

She twisted round in her chair and rolled up the right trouser leg. The newly improvised exhaust system was now sending the exhaust toward her, not away from her, and she had a circular burn on her calf the size of a doll’s head. “You see, I was wearing shorts most of the time, and the bloody machine was roasting my flesh.” It was clear that the fearsome-looking burn hadn’t begun to heal. I urged her to go to a Chinese-run clinic I’d spotted the previous day. She shrugged and said that she and her boyfriend had to be off. They were heading straight up Highway 1. I warned her, calmly, I hoped, about its dangerous reputation. I also mentioned the added danger that the government’s assurances that the problem had been eliminated might not be completely reliable, though I had no knowledge of the situation personally and was simply urging caution.

She laughed. “I have to keep moving, you see. It’s an impulse hunger.”

I wished her a safe trip and a happy life. I thought of her again when I got back to Canada and found the following news story from Hua Phan Province, immediately east of Luang Prabang, near the Vietnam border:

The U.S. State Department has warned Americans of new security threats in Laos after five people were killed in an ambush on a bus in the latest of a series of deadly attacks in the country this year. Lao officials said a bus was ambushed on the road between Xam Neua and Vieng Xai, former headquarters of the communist Pathet Lao rebels during the Vietnam War. Radio Free Asia’s Lao service said the ambush was carried out by ethnic minority people angry with the communist regime.