A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East. Tiziano Terzani

      On 18 December 1992 I flew from Bangkok to Vientiane. On the twenty-second, on board a small, jolting Chinese-made plane, I arrived in Luang Prabang, the ancient royal capital of Laos.

       CHAPTER THREE On Which Shore Lies Happiness?

      In one of the many fine passages in Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, the prince – soon to become Buddha, the Enlightened One – is sitting on the riverbank. It strikes him that once the measurement of time is waived, the past and the future are ever-present – like the river, which at one and the same moment exists not only where he sees it to be, but also at its source and at its mouth. The water which has yet to pass is tomorrow, but it already exists upstream; and that which has passed is yesterday, but it still exists, elsewhere, downstream.

      Sitting high on the Wat Pusi hill in Luang Prabang in the golden peace of sunset, I looked down at the heart-stirring confluence of the small, impetuous Nam Khan River and the broad, majestic Mekong, and thought of Siddhartha’s vision. It seemed to me that that conjunction and mingling of muddy waters was, like life – mine included – made up of so many streams. It seemed that past, present and future were no longer distinguishable one from another: they were all there, in that relentless flow. Fifty-five years had slipped away like the great river rolling towards the China Sea; the rest of my time on earth was already welling up in the Himalayan slopes, already underway, moving towards me along the same channel, clearly defined and counted to the last hour. If I had had a higher perch than that hill I might have been able to see more of the river, in both directions. And thus could I have seen more past, more future?

      I was alone, and as can happen when one is surrounded by nature, far from any other human presence, the mind slips free of the bonds of logic, and the imagination runs wild. The most absurd thoughts arise at the threshold of consciousness. Yes: perhaps what we call the future has already happened, and only because our view is limited do we fail to see it. Perhaps that is why some people can ‘read’ it as easily as we see the light of a star which has been extinct for centuries. Perhaps the secret lies in breaking away from the dimension of time – time as we normally conceive it, made up of years, hours, seconds.

      Laos was an ideal psychological preparation for my decision not to fly, and thus in a way to place myself outside time. As a country it has for years instinctively chosen to do just that. Without access to the sea, sheltered by impenetrable mountains that isolate it from China and Vietnam, protected by the Mekong which separates it from Thailand without a single bridge to link its two banks, Laos, despite wars, invasions and pressure from its neighbours, has continued in its ancient, detached rhythm of life. Though even there the calendar says one is in the twentieth century, the mind of the Laotian people remains in an epoch all their own, and they have no intention of leaving it.

      In recent years the Thais have built superhighways leading to their bank of the Mekong, and have suggested to the Laotians in a thousand ways that just one bridge would enable them to link up with the Thai road system, giving them direct access to Bangkok and creating a point of easy access for tourists loaded with dollars. The Laotians have remained unconvinced. ‘No, thanks. We don’t need a bridge,’ they have replied every time. ‘We want to carry on living our own way.’

      Sadly, however, that way of life is on the wane. Not because the Lao have suddenly changed their minds, but because in our day a country at the crossroads between modernization cum destruction and an isolation that would preserve its identity has no real choice: others have chosen on its behalf. Businessmen, bankers, experts from international organizations, officials of the UN and half the world’s governments are passionate prophets of ‘development’ at all costs. They believe unanimously in a kind of mission not far removed from that of the American general in Vietnam who, after razing a Vietcong-occupied village to the ground, said proudly: ‘We had to destroy it to save it.’

      The same thing is happening to Laos: in order to save it from underdevelopment, the new missionaries of materialism and economic progress are destroying it. The hardest blow has been dealt by the Australians. With the kindest intentions, their government has built a fine big bridge over the Mekong River. It has cost the Laotians nothing – except their last virginity. With their innate suspicion of everything new and modern, they are already calling it ‘the Bridge of AIDS’.

      At heart the Lao belong to the past, and it is only by the accident of being located in the middle of Indochina that they have been forced to live amidst the violence of the contemporary world. They have paid a very high price for it. To supply the Vietcong guerrillas in South Vietnam, the Hanoi Communists opened through the forests of Laos what became famous as ‘the Ho Chi Minh Trail’; and to close that path, between 1964 and 1973 the Americans ‘secretly’ dropped more bombs on Laos than fell on Germany and the whole of occupied Europe during the Second World War: two million tons of explosive.

      Even now, in peacetime, Laos is prevented by its geographical position from living the life it desires. It is forced to become ‘modern’, to serve as a link between China and Thailand, a corridor between two powerful neighbours obsessed with the idea of progress.

      Still, for the moment, one need only set foot in Laos to feel that there is something uniquely poetic in the air. The days are long and slow, and the people have a tranquil sweetness that is not found elsewhere in Indochina. The French, who well knew the peoples they ruled, used to say: ‘The Vietnamese plant rice, the Khmer stand there and watch, and the Laotians listen to it growing.’

      I set foot in Laos for the first time in the spring of 1972. On a small balcony of the Hotel Constellation in Vientiane a blonde hippie girl was smoking a marijuana joint so strong you could smell it all the way up the stairs. Seeing me approach, she whispered to me, as if to confide a secret formula for understanding all things, ‘Remember, Laos is not a place; it is a state of mind.’

      Indeed, I never forgot it, and twenty years later I wanted to see Laos again before it too became ‘a place’ – a place like all the others, lit by neon, full of plastic and cement. I found a journalistic excuse in two news items: one on the opening of the Ho Chi Minh Trail to tourism, the other on the construction of the great trans-Asian motorway from Singapore to Peking. The Laotian section, after the building of the Mekong bridge, was to run through the old royal capital, Luang Prabang, cutting in two one of the most peaceful and romantic places in Asia, one of the last refuges of the old charm of the Orient.

      I found Luang Prabang as fascinating as I remembered it, huddled in its moist green valley, surrounded by peaks that seem painted by a Chinese brush, dominated by the hill of Wat Pusi from which the temples, built in artful disorder on the strip of land between the Mekong and the Nam Khan, shine with a seemingly eternal splendour.

      At dawn I saw once more the moving spectacle of hundreds of monks as they issued from their monasteries and filed along the cobbled main street to receive offerings of food from the population kneeling on the pavements. Yes, that very street: the one destined to become part of the Asian superhighway. Fortunately, I learned, some old residents had found the courage to oppose the project, and the governor himself had pronounced in favour of an alternative route. Will Luang Prabang be saved, then? Not at all. Another plan, opposed by no one, will transform the present modest landing strip into a large airport capable of receiving jumbo jets full of tourists.

      What an ugly invention is tourism! One of the most baleful of all industries! It has reduced the world to a vast playground, a Disneyland without borders. Soon thousands of these new invaders, soldiers of the empire of consumerism, will land, and with their insatiable cameras and camcorders they will scrape away the last of that natural magic which is still everywhere in this country.

      In Asia, when an old man sees a camera pointed at him, he turns away and tries to hide himself, covering his face. He believes the camera will deprive him of something that is his, something precious which he will never recover. And is he not perhaps right? Is it not through the wear and tear of tens of thousands of snapshots taken by distracted tourists that our churches have lost their sanctity and our monuments their patina of greatness?

      Tibet, to