Crescent Moon Over Laos

“Who would want to shoot me?” Crescent Moon Over Laos starts with a solitary question, and the search for answers to this and other questions both personal and universal defines this journey of discovery. Mark Boyter’s book is a true account travel narrative of an 18-day journey in Laos, just months after the country had been re-opened to Western travel after ten years being closed. For Boyter, after three years living and travelling in Asia, Laos was a setting both familiar and foreign, comforting and disquieting. In this Laos there are few maps, fewer travelers, and many questions. In the world that is Asian travel, Laos is the unknown. That is Laos’ single defining characteristic. Unknown too is the path Boyter’s life will take. About to return to a North America three years removed from familiarity, leaving behind an Asia that has grown into “home”, dancing on the edge of a new love relationship, Laos is the lynch pin that ties these worlds together. Written in journal form, Crescent Moon Over Laos is a voyage of discovery that unfolds in the parallel stories of an emerging soul and a re-emerging country. It is about Laos and it is about a traveler: a novella in non-fiction. The through line of the story, the surface level, follows the simple story of the traveler. But like an elaborate wrought iron fence, the story filigrees off into tangential questions and observations of ethics, of personal place in the world, of self. Of Asia, of Buddhism, of travel. Of love and relationships, both with others and with ourselves. What begins as a travel memoir ends as a discussion of life, of what it means to be human.