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Houay Xai also marks the start of the lower Mekong, and serves as a rough midway point between the river's mostly inaccessible Chinese course (which begins with snow-fed headwaters 15,000 feet up in the Tibetan Plateau), and its more well-known Indochina passage, which culminates in the famous Vietnamese Delta. Since the Mekong is navigable for less than 100 miles north of Laos, Houay Xai was a logical starting point for my adventure.

My first intentional act in the Lao People's Democratic Republic was to climb the hill in the center of Houay Xai and visit Chomekaou Manirath temple, which with its water-stained walls and painted cement dragon sculptures looks like something out of a neglected 1950s-era amusement park. I'd hoped to catch a good view of the sun setting over the Mekong from the main hall of the temple, but I was instead distracted by the hall itself, which was covered with cartoonish, colorfully entertaining paintings featuring sex and violence. In one frame of the mural, a handsome young prince fends off a pack of armed attackers with his bare hands. In another frame, the prince appears to be dry-humping a beautiful young lass on the verandah of his palace. In yet another frame, the prince lounges blissfully in a bedroom full of topless female attendants, all of whom sport dreamy smiles and breasts as big as muskmelons.

Inspired, I wandered off to try to find someone to explain to me the significance of the murals. In the courtyard, a knot of saffron-robed teenage monks mixed concrete in a small metal cauldron, laughing unmonkishly and slugging each other jestfully when the gravelly gray brew accidentally spilled onto the ground. A caged monkey stared at me from his perch in a courtyard corner, then -- when I stared back for too long -- haughtily flopped a plastic pail over his head. Black butterflies fluttered about aimlessly. I returned to the main hall to find a young Lao couple showing the mural to their small baby. Encouraged, I pointed to the frame featuring the muskmelon-breasted women.

"What is this?" I asked them hopefully. "Who are all these people?"

The young wife just laughed and handed me her tiny son, who gurgled happily and slapped at my face as we watched the sun slide down over the Mekong.

I never found out the meaning of the murals, but it didn't really matter anymore.

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Laos has its own historical version of Gandhi, named Kommadan, who led peaceful protests against French rule in the early part of this century. Unlike Gandhi, Kommadan was also known to assassinate people. Lao history and mythology is full of such ironies and surprises.

I learned about the Lao Gandhi on the morning of my second day in Houay Xai, from a young schoolteacher named Xouliphone, whom I'd originally befriended in the hope that he would help me find a passage on the freight boat downriver. Xouliphone did indeed find me a freight boat, but not before spending three hours aimlessly showing me around town and chatting me up. Lao people, I discovered, are rarely in a hurry to do anything.

"Houay Xai Upper Secondary School has 698 students," Xouliphone told me as we walked along the school's parking lot, which was packed with nearly identical purple and red Flamingo Sportcycles; "294 of them are girls."

"Wow," I replied politely.

"Houay Xai Upper Secondary School has 22 teachers," he said. "Nine are women. And we have four typewriters."

"Interesting," I said.

But none of this was really all that interesting until Xouliphone told me about the Gandhi who assassinated people.

Like so many people from Lao lore (including Sikhot, the Lao Achilles -- whose Achilles heel was in fact his anus, because he met his doom when an assassin hid out in his pit latrine), Kommadan is a quirky, tragic figure. Kommadan -- who actually was not an ethnic Lao, but a hill tribesman from the southern mountains of Laos -- started his resistance to French rule with a series of assassinations and armed raids on southern villages in 1905. Kommadan's major bone of contention was the colonial French policy of forced taxation, forced labor and forced resettlement.

When Kommadan's armed raids met with indecisive results, he changed strategies and launched a peaceful letter-writing campaign in 1908, imploring the French to give his people a voice in the political process. Kommadan's letters eventually resulted in an official meeting with Jean-Jacques Dauplay, the local French commissioner, late in 1910. Had Kommadan been keeping up on his recent history, he never would have agreed to meet with Dauplay: One year earlier, the same French official had invited a Lao rebel chief named Bac Mu to his house under the pretense of viewing photographs; once inside, Bac Mu was summarily bayoneted to death.

Kommadan encountered a near rerun of this diplomatic strategy in 1910, when -- 10 minutes into their negotiations -- the French commissioner nonchalantly picked up his Browning rifle and began to pump the Lao Gandhi full of bullets. Kommadan barely escaped with his life, and, when his wounds had healed, returned to the business of armed raids and assassinations. Kommadan lived like a Pancho Villa-style outlaw for the next 25 years, hiding out in the mountains and stirring up anti-colonial, anti-taxation sentiment. In 1926, he resumed his letter-writing campaign, this time calling for a written statute of what today would be termed minority rights. His letters addressed reconciliation and diplomacy, but for some reason he couldn't break his habit of assassinating people. He was finally hunted down and killed by Vietnamese mercenaries in 1936.

Next page | Taking in sights that hadn't changed for 133 years