From Off Assignment’s recurring feature devoted to the letters that travel writers pen during their earliest hours in alien lands, Rolf shares a 2000 letter he wrote to his new Belgian girlfriend from Laos.
Toura Incognita
Central Laos has all the makings of travel’s last frontier: An unmapped wilderness, a lost city, and villagers unaccustomed to visitors. What’s at stake when tourists arrive?
Retch-22: Laos in the time of cholera
The official analysis was “diarrhea, with vomiting.” Right.
Apocalypse Not: One Month on the Mekong
In a quixotic attempt to re-create Mark Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi” in Southeast Asia, Rolf invests in a Laotian riverboat and attempts to drive it 800 miles to the Cambodian border.