To get to Laos from northern Thailand, you must take a longtail boat across the great Mekong River, which is in fact fairly modest at that point. When the boat strikes sand you scramble off, pay the border guard $30 and make your way up a concrete ramp into the town of Huay Xai. As border crossings into Communist countries go, it is a complete non-event.
But you need only take a few steps into Laos to sense immediately that more than water separates these two countries. Gone is the gnatlike whiz of a thousand motor scooters, or the grinding of diesel engines–gone, too, their acrid smell. In fact at any given moment there are more dogs in the road than cars. Laos is more drab and much poorer than its tourist-glutted neighbor Thailand, owing in part to years of governance by a rather indolent Communist system. All around there’s an eerie silence, as if everyone in town but the roosters has just fallen asleep.
The other thing you notice is that the few open shops on the brief main street are proudly displaying two things: water and whiskey. The water comes in cheap plastic and is a good reminder that Laos is a place where if it ain’t boiled, you’d better not drink it.
But if you want whiskey, you’ve come to the right place: in these shops you can buy Chinese whiskey, Thai whiskey, a Lao-government brand hopefully named “Lion,” as well as a few other pallid Lao bottlings that show considerably less promise. At the high end, you can choose from more colors of Johnnie Walker than I knew existed. As my wife and I walked by these shops I had the uncomfortable thought that we were passing through something like the country’s Duty Free, and that this would be the only time we’d be able to purchase anything to drink for the duration of our stay.
Happily, that wasn’t the case. The country has a superb national beer, a lager called bia lao that can be purchased almost everywhere. And it has rice in abundance, which has been used to make spirits for centuries. Most villages then, with plenty of rice at their disposal, usually fashion a still as well. Thus instead of a handful of established spirits to choose from, there are essentially thousands of iterations of homemade hooch, known colloquially as lao-lao. I did my very best to try as many as I could.
Perhaps the most unique thing about lao-lao is that there is exactly one way to drink it, with just one bottle, and one tiny teacup. Our first encounter with lao-lao was at a village wedding we happened upon outside Luang Nam Tha in northern Laos. About forty people were quietly celebrating in the shade of two buildings, and we stopped to ask if there was a lunch spot nearby. They insisted we stay. The groom bade us sit with him and took his tiny sake-style teacup, poured himself a small glass of lao-lao, looked at each of us and downed his shot. He then poured out one for me. I thanked him and took my first sip, not knowing what it would taste like, but more or less expecting the worst.
It was not for the squeamish; and yet it was surprisingly good. Lao-lao tastes like most moonshines — fiery and crude, with a powerful kick and a bite in the back that makes you involuntarily waggle your head and say “whew” or “yee-haw,” or whatever will draw air over the heat of alcohol. But along with the burn was a sweet and subtle rice flavor that softened the blow and defiantly warmed me up for another sip.
Like most things, the Lao do their drinking very slowly. The host alone dictates who gets what, and there’s no such thing as nursing a drink. Which is fine. What I found was that the conversations, even bilingual ones, were greatly enhanced by this pacing. Not only this, but the flavors of the lao-lao itself were easier to appreciate for the languid pace by which it was consumed. The experience reminded me of the many bottles of wine I’d enjoyed in the company of friends or family or when I found myself in the right circumstance, bottles that I might have otherwise dismissed at the critic’s table. Context is everything, and it’s good to be reminded of this.
Lao-lao is fairly neutral much the way rice is, and can be seasoned or infused. I tried one flavored with bamboo and one with lemon grass, both of which improved things nicely. But nothing really prepared me for what I saw in Luang Prabang, the idyllic village on the Mekong, an elegant architectural mix of French colonial structures, thatched, stilted dwellings, and elegant riverside parkland, all organized around vast and magnificent Lao Buddhist temple compounds (called Vats).
Luang Prabang is also the seat of culture for northern Laos, which may account for the jugs of special lao-lao that you see below.
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My wife and I were strolling along in a fairly ramshackle market near the river. We walked past this display and stopped to admire it, never dreaming that a jar of liquid stocked with the carcasses of snakes, lizards, geckos and millipedes was meant to be consumed! But just as we were about to tiptoe away, the proprietor approached and suggested, without actually saying it, that we could both benefit from his special brew; it would do wonders for my staying power, evidently.
Well, I could hardly say no to that. I bellied up to the bar and reached for a glass, uttered a toast someone had taught us (but that no one had ever bothered to spell or translate) that phonetically resembles “sukka-pop-khang-haeng,” and downed my Snake Juice.
I entered into what seemed like a bottomless pit of bitterness. In the world of bitter, Snake Juice is another order of magnitude. If bitter was hot, Snake Juice would be a scotch-bonnet. This was bitterness that hurt. It made Fernet Branca taste like a vanilla shake. It was the shotglass equivalent of being short of breath. But I didn’t gag, didn’t get sick, and lived to tell about it. Indeed, when I regained the use of my tongue, I might have been feeling the mildest euphoric effect, though perhaps that was purely somatic. Whether or not it did wonders with my staying power or any other power I’ll leave to your imagination. Context is everything, after all.