Week 13, Laos
WELL NOW: we've just arrived back in Bangkok and it seems to be that Edie has come down with dengue fever. Or maybe not. She seems to think I'm being a hypochondriac on her behalf, but it's more to do with the fact that I desperately want to be able to say 'Yeah, I knew someone with dengue fever' like it's no big deal. How cool would that be? In any event she's been fairly feverish and delirious for a couple of days but it's on the wane now.
We never got to Vientiane. We spent a week of pleasant days swinging in low-slung hammocks on Don Dett, an island in the Mekong, a Lost Valley of the Middle Aged Hippies where there are no recognized laws except the International Convention on Passing the Joint to the Left-Hand Side. (The follow-up to that law, the Treaty of 'Whomsoever Mentions Kit-Kats When We're Mashed Has To Go Down to the Service Station and Buy One For Everybody', doesn't really apply since there are no service stations, roads, electricity or, for that matter, Kit-Kats on Don Dett).
But let's backtrack. From Pakse we hopped a ride in the back of a flat-bed truck with about twenty-five Laotians, a couple of babies, a chicken, and two dead Mekong bass, and trundled off down south toward the Cambodian border. This was fine and dandy for a fairly long time, because Laos is spoilt for beautiful things to look at, gorgeous mountains in the distance and the rice paddies in the foreground. Plus, there are plenty of monkeys chained by the neck and hyperactive squirrels kept in tiny cages, which, though cruel and monstrous and all that, do provide some 'Check that out' value after four hours cramped on the back of a grumpy old beast of a truck.
Then, the roads ran out. When Laotians do dirt roads, they don't do them half-arsed. We spent the last hour and a half of the trip choking inside a thick dust cloud that swarmed over the truck and didn't leave. The babies were covered up as best as could be managed, and everybody else choked. When we got there we had - no joke - half an inch of bright red dust covering every surface of our bodies, and feeling like we'd smoked seven packs of unfiltered cigarettes end to end.
At the pier, on the banks of the river, we met German Mark, who owned a bungalow on the island. "Doo yoo wahnt to stae?" he asked (the guy sounded a dead ringer for Governor Schwarzenegger - honestly, every ten minutes we were there I expected to hear him yell "GET TO THE CHOPPER!" or "IT'S NOT A TUMOR!" with all the sincerity and persuasiveness of the great Austrian himself). We did want to stay, and he loaded us into his motorized canoe and off we shot into the Mekong.
Oh, Don Dett! Where there are no roads, just small dirt tracks, wide enough for an occasional moped but mostly only for feet, bicycles and water buffalo. Where everybody grows their own vegetables in patches that dot the island, and build fish farms full of catfish and Mekong bass. Where you get served delicious Lao coffee and baguettes every morning and beautiful stuff like laap for dinner. Where everybody goes swimming in the river (thoughts going through my head as I swam in the Mekong: OH MY GOD I'M SWIMMING IN THE MEKONG) and spends the rest of the day spacing out in hammocks, doing a whole lot of not much, until the last light of the day slithers away on the back of the Mekong, carried off to Cambodia and the Delta.
We had our fair share of hammock-lying but the days were pleasant so we took our bicycles over the old French-built (and Japanese-destroyed) railway bridge, the only railway ever built in the country, meant to connect Vietnam to China. It took us over to the island of Don Khon, and we pedalled around til we reached the western rim, where the normally peaceful Mekong erupts into a frothing fury, with waterfall competing with waterfall and rapids roaring past - it's quite a scene. Down a bit further south, a place we didn't get to, what with all the hammocks and beer, the Mekong drops over the border into Cambodia in a waterfall 14km wide. 14 kilometres! The world is insane.
A few people were saying that Don Dett's on the slow road to becoming a tourist ghetto, but I don't really think so. A few of the old crusty types told us that the island had been promised electricity and running water ten years ago - five buildings at the north of the island finally got power last year but that's as far as it's come. German Mark still has to go to the mainland to buy fuel to run his generator for a couple of hours each night so that he can listen to bad techno music and watch the occasional ultra-violent movie about men in trenchcoats (he is so German). There are a few bungalows now, but nothing that really affects how things are done on the island. I meant what I said about middle-aged hippies, though - one place we went to, perched above a particularly fast stretch of the river, has a long rope that you grab onto and jump off the balcony, into the river. The guy who owns it - a British dropout in his 50's - has built a long stick with a claw at one end with the express purpose of lowering joints to the people on the rope so that they could have a smoke while lying in the current and gripping feverishly at their lifeline. I say again: the world is insane.
We packed up and came home as Edie started to look more and more unwell, but she recovered well enough to go out for her birthday yesterday - we scattered around Bangkok with Aaron, met a girl named German Alice and took her out to our favourite bars for buckets of Mekong whiskey mixed with Red Bull and coke. It was a good party but today I feel like I've been kicked in the balls by a team of vikings and it's probably time for me to go lie down awhile.
Hope everyone's well.
Lachie
NEXT WEEK: Choose a job! Choose something to do on the weekend! Choose life!
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