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"I'm telling you," he said to me as we stood outside the small ice-cream stand near the Phonsavanh Hotel in Pakse. "Cholera is completely out of control down here. A French guy I talked to in Savannakhet said the Pakse hospital was full of dead bodies."

"Did the French guy see the dead bodies?" I asked.

"No, but he talked to a guy who saw the dead bodies."

"And you're sure he didn't just talk to a guy who talked to another guy who saw the dead bodies?"

Ray looked at me with irritation. "Look, I have a sense for this kind of thing. I could tell he was serious."

I decided to drop the big question. "So if you're sure he was telling the truth about dead bodies in the Pakse hospital, what are you doing in Pakse right now?"

"Fuck it, man," Ray said enthusiastically. "This is where the action is."

By this point, I had been in Pakse for 24 hours and I was at my wits' end. I'd been hearing the cholera rumors since coming overland from Vietnam, but I couldn't get any hard facts. Nearly every traveler I'd met had heard there was a cholera epidemic on the Mekong flood plain south of Pakse, but not a single person had gotten this information from an official source. Many travelers were aborting their Laos travel plans and moving on, but others -- like Ray -- were embracing the cholera rumors with vicarious zeal. For these people, the very notion of the epidemic was enough to turn an otherwise normal trip into an adventure.

On the other hand, all the Laotian government offices and agencies in Pakse were categorically denying the existence of cholera. I visited two different government travel agencies in Pakse, and both insisted there was no problem with traveling south along the Mekong. The woman at the local health office laughed at the idea. "There are some people who have diarrhea," she said, "but there is no cholera." Even the officials I phoned at the U.S. Embassy in Vientiane knew nothing of the cholera rumor.

Since there was no hard evidence of an epidemic -- and knowing how travelers tend to exaggerate -- I continued with my plans to head downriver. As I hiked down to the river pier on the morning of my second day in Pakse, I met a Lao man named Kumsing who was working on a rural electrification project in the area. He was uncommonly friendly, and he spoke great English.

"Where are you headed?" he asked me.

"South," I said. "I'm going to visit the 4000 Islands on the Mekong."

Kumsing clicked his tongue. "That's a nice area, but you have to be careful these days. I was there last week, and many of my workers got sick."

"Was it cholera?"

"Yes, cholera. You won't catch it if you're careful. Not all of my workers got sick, just the careless ones."

"How many workers were careless?"

Kumsing did some quick math. "Sixteen. But none of them died."

"But everyone else stayed healthy -- no cholera?"

"Yes, the other two are fine."

"Other two?"

"Yes. Plus I didn't get sick, either!"

Next page | "There is no cholera in Laos"