Enchanting SE Asia: Glimpses of Northern Laos in Three-Second Video Clips

The focus of my most recent (November/December 2023) trip to Southeast Asia was to visit Laos (my 8th country visited in the region on my 8th trip to SE Asia) properly, given that my first time in Laos 20 years earlier was limited to about 45 minutes in the border village of Donexao as part of a 'Golden Triangle Day Trip' while in Chiang Mai, Thailand. My solo trip to Laos (this being only my second solo trip abroad, with the first solo journey being three weeks in Japan back in the summer of 1987) also included seven days in Bangkok, with the first day being a 'One Night in Bangkok' layover before flying from Don Mueang International to Luang Prabang International, and the 6 days following my return from Laos being a brothers-in-law reunion involving a fair amount of street food & liquor, plus some group and solo exploring of parts of Bangkok not seen in my prior two visits to the city (including a visit to the Nana Plaza and Soi Cowboy red light districts - which will be recounted in a future blog post).

I spent 13 days in northern Laos, using EXO Travel (formerly Exotissimo Travel & Tours when I first used them for my trip to northern Vietnam in May 2010) to book tour packages (including personal guides, drivers, accommodations and some select meals) for 4 days in Luang Prabang, followed by a 6-day 'Phongsali Loop' tour that include the destinations of Oudomxay, Bountai, Phongsali & Muang Noi, plus guided visits to ethnic minority villages and a two-day cruise down the Nam Ou River, and concluding with 3 additional days of solo time in Luang Prabang with a 1/2-day 'Unseen Luang Prabang' guided tour of the portion of the city located along the far (northern) bank of the Mekong River.

It was my first trip abroad in which I did not bring a digital camera for taking travel photos and video clips, but rather relied on my iPhone XR's camera, which took higher resolution photos and videos with wider aspect ratios than my last digital camera. As a result of the improved video capabilities, I found myself taking more video clips during my stays in northern Laos and Bangkok so as to better capture and convey the local color and vibe of the destinations visited, with the intent of later creating complete videos of each destination to include in this blog, and also post & share on this blog's associated YouTube and Instagram pages. In order to minimize my chances of accidentally dropping my phone onto the ground or overboard into a stream, river or a Bangkok khlong, and also the chance of my phone slipping out of a cargo pants pocket, or losing my phone to a pickpocket or a 'grab and go' thief, I purchased a lanyard with a retaining ring whose anchor slips between the phone and its existing case or protective cover. The lanyard was worn in cross-draw fashion, draped over the left shoulder and angled down across the chest so that it could not be easily yanked off the shoulder by a running thief. Though it made for secure retention, the lanyard spring clip made contact with the metal retaining ring between the iPhone's stereo microphones, unfortunately creating a metallic scuffling sound during video recording with any movement, which was preserved as part of the video clip's ambient sounds.

Once back home, I started to edit together my assorted video clips into complete video for uploading, only to learn that the Windows MovieMaker software on my laptop had become increasingly buggy and unstable, particularly after the upgrade to Windows 10, and was no long support with updates and bug fixes by Microsoft. As a result, I had to spend a little trial and error 'learning curve' time on my phone's Apple iMovie. Additionally, it seemed that the Blogger platform doesn't recognize the iPhone's .heic file format that my phone photos are saved in. As such, I had to view each of my desired Laos photos for incorporation into blog posts in the 'full-screen' mode, which adds wide black borders on the right and left side of the image, then take a screen capture that's saved at a slightly lower resolution in the Blogger-friendly .jpeg file format, then finally painstakingly crop out the side black borders from each photo by carefully swiping a rather clumsy index finger across my phone's sensitive touchscreen to coax the cropping rectangle into its desired position before saving the edited photo, with the 'Cancel' and 'Discard Changes' buttons tapped many times.

After having completed and posted the desired travel videos on my Youtube page, the next project was to create a single feature-length video of my full 13 days in northern Laos. The intent was to incorporate a somewhat reduced number of video clips that would be presented in sequential order from Day 1 through Day 13, with the individual clips varying in length from roughly 4 to 10 seconds. As the video would include clips from in and around Luang Prabang and six other cities/towns, in addition to clips taken in small villages of both the various ethnic minorities and the majority Lao Loum peoples, I figured that captions identifying the different locations by name and/or the particular subject matter featured in the clips would be both appropriate and helpful in providing context to the viewer. In practice, as I reviewed the added sections of the in-process video I began to see how such captions could become a distraction, particularly on the clips with the short 3.7 second durations.

As more clips were added and the in-process video's length had already exceeded 38 minutes, I noticed that in the editing each clip for length and searching out each clip's particular section to include to make it visually and sound-wise more intriguing, evocative or dramatic as it segues between its bracketing clips, it was taking longer and longer for the program to complete the processing of the changes for me to review. Additionally, the longer the video got, the longer it took between editing sessions for all the embedded clips to download from the iCloud, with some of the multiple consecutive segments from a given video never seeming to load (possibly a lack of available phone memory?), requiring me to re-insert the source video ahead of the missing segments for them to re-populate the segments and associated video thumbnails in the timeline. As frustration settled in and made me question if I wanted to continue with the project file in its current state, start over from scratch with a new file, or just forego the project entirely, a memory arose from a trip to Singapore made in 2007 or 2009, and a visit to the city's Asian Civilizations Museum (also referred to as the 'ACM' by locals and expats) that made me rethink my approach to the project.

Walking from the museum's main lobby towards the first gallery, which I recall featured Hindu artifacts from South and Southeast Asia in the form of stone statues of Hindu Deities, small sections of detailed stone wall base reliefs and such, there was a small, L-shaped hall lit by ambient light from a high window, with a wall-mounted projection screen on the short leg of the 'L' just above eye-level. On the screen was a loop of brief video clips revealing scenes of everyday life throughout East, West, South and Southeast Asia, presumably meant to both welcome the visitors and also intrigue and inspire or excite them prior to entering the first gallery. The enchanting montage of video clips included images of busy open marketplaces, crop fields being harvest and rice paddies being planted, a team of camels being lead through arid environs of India, a woman in traditional dress working on a manual weaving loom, an ornate henna tattoo being inked, fishing nets being cast and the like, with no captions or narration provided nor needed, but a soothing, evocative New Age genre-styled instrumental piece accompanying the mesmerizing montage of exotic images, befitting of the mood evoked by the scenes. I stood and watched the video until the sequence of the now-familiar images began to repeat before moving on to enter the first gallery, and looking back regret that I didn't think to take a video clip of the on-screen presentation.

The sudden recall of memories of that ACM visit and its welcoming video presentation thus suggested the way of presenting the wealth of video clips taken in Laos such that would better convey to the viewer that desired 'sense of place' and the feeling of wonderment a traveler experiences when exploring an exotic, far-off destination. Instead of one long video summarizing the full 13-day stay in Laos, I would produce five video with each one dedicated to one destination and surrounding area visited: Luang Prabang, Oudomxay, Bountai, Phongsali, and the village of Muang Ngoi that was an overnight stop on my two-day cruise down the Nam Ou River from Muang Khua to Nong Khiaw. The videos are presented as montages of brief three-second video clip glimpses delivered in a 'flow of consciousness' or 'in the moment' fashion in the sequential order of the visits, (despite my total time in Luang Prabang being broken up by the 6-day 'Phongsali Loop' tour), without neither a background music track nor on-screen captions used (save for each video's opening title slide) to distract from the visuals and ambient audio of each clips. The beginning of each video includes a map of northern Laos followed by a zoomed map that shows the location of the video footage shot in the center of the screen, with the accompanying sonic backdrop being the audio of one of the featured video clips. The videos appear below together with some still photos taken at the the featured locations.

Luang Prabang