THE LAOS LOST CITY MOTORCYCLE TOUR
Adventures and misadventures on two wheels.
Motorcyclists discover Lost City in Laos.
Words & Photos by Reed Resnikoff
In December, 2001, on an ASIAN MOTORCYCLE ADVENTURE tour we actually discovered a "Lost City" in the jungles of Laos. This article appeared in the ASIAN WALL STREET JOURNAL on May 3, 2002, and was also published in ACTION ASIA Magazine in their July-August 2002 issue.
About the last thing you expect to do on a motorcycle tour is to discover an ancient lost city in the jungles of Laos, but this is exactly what happened. This story of discovery is still unfolding, and the first couple of parts go like this:
I am
the owner-operator of an Asian-based motorcycle touring company called
Asian Motorcycle Adventures, and on the last night of last year’s Laos
Motorcycle Tour, we were lodging in a brand-new guesthouse in the Laotian
provincial capital of Luang Nam Tha. Always on the lookout for new and
interesting things to show my biking participants, I asked the guest
house owner, a man as familiar with this wild and scantly-explored territory
as any, if he had any suggestions? He mentioned a few ho-hum things
nearby, but one recommendation had me popping with excitement, about
an ancient lost city in the jungle, not far from the road on the way
back to Thailand—exactly where we were heading the following day.
“No,” he said, he never visited it, nor does he know
anyone who has, but he was reasonably sure it existed. He gave me the
name of a small village in that general vicinity and suggested stopping
there on the way out. “Perhaps they might know something about
the ancient city.” I also happen to know more than most about Northern
Laos, being one of the first tourists allowed entry in 1994 and I also
have been revisiting Laos consistently ever since. And if I never
heard of such a “lost city”, the odds are pretty high that no one else
has either. This lost city could just turn out to be a major archeological
and a once-in-a-lifetime find.
Indiana Jones-style dreams filled my head that night,
and the following day our biking convoy rode southwestwards on a magnificent
mountain road over an age-old caravan route to the tiny Khamu hill tribe
village of Ban Nom Kham. We asked around if anyone could substantiate
this lost city story. Of course we could not use such a word as “substantiate”,
since these were the most simple of folk, living off the land in a way
unchanged for centuries, and we spoke not a word of their 
native
tongue, a Mon-Khmer branch in the Austro-Asiatic linguistic family.
So my questions ricocheted from English into Thai into Laotian into
Khamu, and their answers bounced back in the reverse order. Much was
certainly lost or misunderstood during this convoluted conversation.
What we were able to “suss” out was that, yes!, there are ancient
ruins nearby called Kou Vieng; that it is deserted; and who built it
is a mystery. No one now alive ever lived in it, or knows why or when
the people who lived in Kou Vieng left.
The
Khamus are animists believing strongly in spirits, and the headman warned
us of a curse befalling those who enter—it supposedly struck one
villager blind—so the locals avoid Kou Vieng totally, not even
to fetch a wayward cow. The Ban Nom Kham headman led us behind
his hut nestled in this beautiful mountain valley. He pointed a crocked
finger at a lonely hillock in the middle of their rice fields and uttered,
“Kou Vieng.”
Completely overgrown in underbrush and covered
with trees, it looked exactly like any one of the million other hillocks
in the area. But now that he pointed it out, yeah, there just could
be a lost city hidden beneath all that shrubbery. On this, our last
day’s riding in Laos, we had no time to actually investigate Kou Vieng
because we had to cross Thailand’s border that afternoon. I filed away
this “lost city” for future investigation and research, its actual location
seared into my brainpan, and vowed to return again soon.
Soon turned out to be nearly a year later. In the interim, I researched
the heck out of: Kou Vieng, ancient cities, ancient temples, historical
kingdoms in Lao, and pored through every guidebook I could lay my hands
on, and came up with zilch. Even the internet proved useless, the undisputed
champion for arcane facts and trivia. No mention anywhere, or anything
even approaching it. The only way I would find out more about Kou Vieng
would be to return and actually visit it myself.
Coincidently, during the intervening summer, a television
production company contacted me, wanting to film one of my tours for
their adventure travel series “Destination Adventure”. “Do I have any
proposals” they queried.
“How would you guys like to actually discover an ancient lost city in
the jungles of Laos, complete with a curse for added drama?”
“Fantastic! Great plot! Lets do it!”
Now the pressure was on—I put my money where
my mouth is, and a potential worldwide television audience would be
witnessing our discovery, or
our folly.
I knew
there had to be something doing at Kou Vieng, sketchily attested to
by the villagers living in its shadow. It surely couldn’t be another
Angkor Wat, for something that grandiose could not stay hidden all this
time. But a search for whatever was on that hillock should make for
an interesting TV segment at the very least.
When the rainy season ended making dirt roads in Laos drivable again, our group of eight: a cameraman and the show’s producer, another motorcycle guide and myself, a mechanic, plus three motorcycle enthusiasts wanting to take home the ultimate holiday souvenir—a starring role in a TV show (no union card needed)—crossed the Mekong River into Huay Xai, Laos for the start of the Laos Lost City Motorcycle Tour.
We spent our first night in the largish town (by Laotian standards)
of Vieng Phoukha—the only place with beds for rent within a 60-kilometer
radius. The following morning we rode east 8 ks. to the Khamu village
sitting besides Kou Vieng. Once there, we successfully induced/indemnified
the headman of Ban Nom Kham plus two other villagers to ignore the curse
and lead the way into the “lost city”.
Slashing and hacking a tunnel through the thick jungle
with machetes, our small band of explorers plus one big video camera
and tripod plodding closely behind, making as much commotion as possible
to scare away any snakes, halted at the base of a steep, five-meter
high embankment covered with weeds, leaf litter, and slippery soil.
We scrambled up, grabbing tree roots and vines for purchase, and at
the top saw a deep and narrow, straight-as-an-arrow trench, with an
identical five-meter high embankment directly opposite. A moat. Definitely
man-made. Bingo! We found it!
Down into the moat we slithered, under and over fallen
trees lying horizontally across the narrow chasm, then back up the opposite
side, and alighted 
on
flattish terrain completely overgrown with trees, thick stands of bamboo
arcing into the canopy, and thorn bushes with every shape and sharpness
of needle. We are probably in the city section proper, I thought. Except
for our own noises, it was deathly quiet and darker than dusk from the
choking foliage.
We continued following our Khamu bushwhackers on a slight
uphill bearing. At a highpoint they stopped and pointed to a mound.
“Chedi”, they said. Then we saw the bricks and could make out the base
of a chedi. (A chedi is a spire in a Buddhist temple complex built
to house a relic of religious importance.) Strewn beneath us on the
forest floor, jutting up from the moist loam, were hundreds of rough-hewn
bricks and brick fragments of a deep, blood-red color. I clambered to
the top of the crumbled mound that had once been the soaring chedi and
in the middle was a deep hole, once hollow but now nearly filled to
the brim with fallen bricks and forest debris. I wondered if the collapse
was due to the centuries elapsed or treasure hunters? A mature strangler
fig tree, roots anchored into the remains of the chedi base, was as
responsible for keeping it intact as for prying it apart. Surrounding
the chedi further out was a low 
wall
of bricks, mostly covered with dirt, but with many parts easily visible
and still in good condition, approximately one meter high, two meters
thick, each wall around 50-meters long. A plaza of some sort.
Adding to this mysterious and creepy aura of a place
so secluded and being violated by trespassers for the first time in
ages, I brushed into a bush next to the chedi, and recoiled when I saw
it churning with tens of thousands of long-legged spiders, each one
stirred into frenzied motion from our shattering of their peace. Higher
up, illuminated by a piercing shaft of light, a huge web capable of
snaring a bird spanned the limbs of a tree. A lone black spider, motionless
in the middle, wide enough to palm a basketball and looking capable
of sucking the air out of it, was oblivious to our presence so close
beneath him.
The headman told us we were the first foreigners
ever to set foot inside Kou Vieng, and after backslaps and high-fives
all around for our successful exploration and excellent footage for
the TV show, we departed Kou Vieng and headed back to our motorcycles
parked in the village. We topped up our tanks from a 42-gallon industrial
drum—the village filling station—and if you believe in curses,
ours began now. This Lost City Tour had been running splendidly, but
suddenly our good fortune turned sour.
It wasn’t petroleum that we pumped into our bikes,
it was diesel, and as good for motorcycles as cement is for a water
pistol. Every one of our bikes fouled their plugs from the oily truck
fuel, and they either would not start or came to a spitting halt soon
thereafter. With our bikes running frightfully, we had the hardest part
of the ride coming up. Problems plagued us all afternoon, culminating
in one rider driving directly into the only deep hole on the
entire 190-kilometer trail, and launching himself and his bike over
the edge of a 200-foot cliff. He jumped off at the last moment and barely
managed to grab onto a log near the road surface. Gregg was clearly
shaken but relatively unhurt, and his bike, luckily, fell only two-meters
down the river valley before snagging on weeds. Dangling upside down
but reachable, it miraculously suffered no damage except to the paint
job. As close a call as possible.
Hours
late from our spell of misfortune, we got caught out riding in the jungle
at night, a very big no-no in anyone’s survival book. We arrived at
the same guesthouse in Luang Namtha where the seed for this grand adventure
originated from in the first place. Now we needed just one further discovery:
how to rid ourselves of the Curse of Kou Vieng.
Words and photos COPYRIGHT of Reed Resnikoff
and Chris Stowers. NO UNAUTHORIZED USE IS PERMITTED. ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED, 2006.
If you would like to go on a Laos motorcycle tour similar
to the one described above, please read about ASIAN MOTORCYCLE ADVENTURES
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