Crescent Moon Over Laos

Who would want to shoot me?

And so begins Mark Boyter’s Crescent Moon Over Laos. It is the search for answers to this and other questions, internal and external, individual and universal, that drives the narrative of this travel memoir of Laos.

It is 1990, and Laos has just re-opened its borders to Western travel after being closed for ten years. With few travelers, fewer maps, no travel infrastructure and no guidebooks, information about Laos runs on second-hand accounts, guesthouse rumor, and the unverifiable promises of the lone visa agent for Laotian travel in Nong Khai, the Thai departure point for Laos and its capital, Vientiane. “Trust me,” he says. Once in Laos, Boyter’s journey takes him from Vientiane south to Pakxe, and then, as the lone traveler heading overland north, to the ancient capital Louangphrabang, where the question “Who would want to shoot me?” becomes fully realized.

As much as Crescent Moon Over Laos is about an external journey, in the best tradition of travel writing, the journey is also internal. Crescent Moon unfolds in the parallel stories of a traveller discovering a country, and a country being discovered by a traveler. Tied together with personal anecdotes, what begins—and ends—as a simple travel memoir of Laos evolves into a discussion of the ethics of travel, of Buddhism; of love and relationships, and of what it means to be human. “We are all,” as singer/song-writer Glenn Chatten says, “the crescent moon.”