Week 12, Laos
SO SO: so I have finally weaseled my way into the Communist heartland, expecting myself to be surrounded by KGB spies with radioactive briefcases and bad hats and metal teeth and pistols tucked into every crevice in their body. Instead I am surrounded by old Laotian men with no teeth and a water buffalo. I didn't really consider toothlessness to be a central tenet of Communism but then again, dental hygiene does seem a bit of a capitalist conspiracy. I mean, toothpaste, mouthwash and dental floss? Seems a little excessive.
Laos, in general, is little more than a parade of technicolor chickens and fluoro-green rice paddies passing by your window.
But I love it so much. Laos is beautiful in a way that Malaysia never was, Thailand never will be again and Cambodia won't be for much longer. We're in Pakse, which is the most important commercial centre of the entire southern half of the country, which might mean something elsewhere but the entire city consists of a couple of dusty unpaved roads circumnavigating their way around some abandoned shophouses. There's quite literally nothing here, and nothing to do but dangle your feet over the Mekong - which, like everything here, is empty, not a boat to be seen along its monstrous length apart from the sunken tour boats strung like an ominous warning to the unprepared all along the riverbank - clutching an ice-filled glass of Beer Lao and watch the woman across the street barbecue some snakes.
I would've thought that watching someone barbecue a snake would have been sort of therapeutic for Edie and her phobia. It wasn't... She'd been having nightmares of cobras falling on to her while she was sleeping - now those cobras are on fire and want revenge.
We're going to run across a snake here - we ran across a second one in Thailand a few weeks ago, on the motorbike again, but I forgot to mention it - and it's actually stressing me out more than it is Edie because I can imagine that when she does her strange, screaming macarena dance she's going to end up in the river, or rolling down a hillside, or something. 'It's just a lizard!' 'It's just a stick!' - yelling these two lines as quickly as I can get them out my mouth, like a Tourette's sufferer, has saved me several times, even though I'm pretty sure it was probably a snake slithering through the bushes / across the street / under the bathroom door.
So we got to Laos from the north-east of Thailand (the region's called Isan), where we'd come with Harriet and the UN Kidz for a weekend getaway. There were twenty of us in a minivan that Harriet had chartered (they were called Lord Tours, and their motto was 'Take the Lord's Name in Van', or if it wasn't then it should have been). So with twenty of us, visiting a region that doesn't get a whole lot of tourists, it sometimes felt a little bit too Kontiki tour but I had a fantastic time nonetheless. Everybody was ready for a good weekend and spending each night sitting at long tables toasting our successes with whiskey and beer felt pretty special.
We visited an area consisting of hundreds of banyan trees interlinking with each other across a swamp, and a ruined Khmer temple sitting atop an extinct volcano - easily the equal of almost anything at Angkor Wat - and met some brilliant people from all over the provinces. A special mention for Phong: Edie and I had left the group in Nang Rong and set off by rattling, wind-blown train to Ubon Ratchatani, near the Laotian border. By the time the train pulled in it was dark, and we were confronted by a line of tuk-tuk drivers advancing towards us with their sinister laughs and menacing calls of 'You want tuk-tuk? Two hundred baht!'. Enter Phong the hero, who came up to us out of nowhere and showed us the bus station. I liked the guy from the start, a fresh-faced, friendly-looking boy who was studying English to get a job in Ubon. When it turned out the buses were finished for the night he told us he'd guide us into town, but his girlfriend was pregnant so we caught a cab instead.
Here's the rub: when the taxi-driver got to where Phong was going, it wasn't anywhere near town. So Phong hired a motorcycle and drove me all over town to help me look for a cheap hotel and then went back for Edie.
We ran into Phong the next day walking through the city - he was dressed in a skin-tight military uniform. Turns out he flies for the Royal Thai airforce. I hope that kid does well.
Oh fuck! I'm a teacher. Only just, but I'm a teacher. I thought I'd gotten through my last week on internship pretty well but as I walked into the room in which my two supervisors were sitting I knew that something was not right. So they sat and tried to convince me that I'd failed the course and I, very maturely, pointed out that they were idiots times infinity plus one no returns. Eventually it worked and I managed to eke out a pass after an hour and a half of consultations and though I totally disagree with that, I'd rather put an end to a fairly ugly period in my life than appeal for a better grade.
But oh! how much prettier everything seems since the internship has finished, how sweet is the air and how the colours of the world shine. I feel fantastic and free, ready to set off again, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Uzbekistan, wherever. Laos is the tenth country I've set foot in; seven of those countries have been ASEAN countries and I only need Vietnam, Myanmar and Indonesia to 'complete the set' as the UN Kidz put it. Or we could travel through Laos to China, down through Tibet to Nepal and India... 'There is nowhere left to go, except everywhere', wrote Jack Kerouac, and even though including a Kerouac quote in a travel blog is about the most cliched undergrad thing I could possibly do, I'm feeling good and those words are ringing in my head like the booming gongs at the temple down the road.
But first, Laos. We're heading down south to some islands in the Mekong tomorrow, and will probably fall off the map for a few days. Then up to Vientiane and back to Thailand by overnight train to see out our lease, and then onwards. The future is beautiful.
Hope everything's going real good for everyone
Lachie
NEXT WEEK: Rice paddies! Rice paddies! Water buffalo! Rice paddies! Dude with no teeth! Rice paddies! Rice paddies! Chickens! Rice paddies!
No comments:
Post a Comment