#35: Guns, Babes & Sticky Rice

Week 35 - Luang Prabang Province, Laos

AS CAPITAL: cities go, Vientiane is pretty hard to beat. It's practically empty (less than a quarter of a million people), full of smiling happy faces, French gardens, good food, roundabouts that nobody here can seem to work out how to use, and the shimmering Mekong slithering around it in endless magnificence. We went out to the temple for herbal saunas and massages, took bikes out to the decrepit circus gifted to Laos by the Russians during the 70's ("Where is hot plate for to put dancing bear, Dmitri?" "We send hot plate to Laos already, Ivan, you son of a whore! Now make bear fight four dogs and a one-legged Chechnyan!") and somehow ended up at a shooting range.

That place was a little scary; they had a delightful selection of live ammunition, mortar rounds and explosives from the Vietnam war and the van outside sported a massive windscreen sticker screaming "KILL THEM ALL!" (we, meanwhile, pulled up on bright pink bicycles with baskets on the front that we had hired from our guesthouse). So we shot off some rounds into a target (Adam wanted to shoot a Colt .45, but the lady at the counter took one look at our skinny white arms and decided that we were far too sissy for anything bigger than a 9mm) while the lady held our hands in the right position - this place was literally in the middle of the city and had no roof, so a little caution was necessary, I guess. We were given the target as a souvenir, and rode off on our pink bicycles as total gangsterz.

From Vientiane we caught a bus over meandering mountain ranges to Vang Vieng, the party capital of Laos and easily the most surreal and ridiculous place I have ever had the mixed fortune to visit. But let's not get ahead of ourselves: first I have to say that Vang Vieng has perhaps the most stunningly beautiful natural setting of any town anywhere in the world. It lazes by a picture perfect river while jagged, monstrous limestone formations covered in thick green forest surround it on all sides. And, before the sun sets, there is a world's worth of things to do there - bicycles rides to little villages, motorbike rides into the nearby mountains, white water rafting, kayaking, all kinds of caving, swimming, rockclimbing, and floating down the river in the inner tube of a tractor tyre.

After the sun sets, however:

Vang Vieng falls in prostrate worship to six gods. Their names are Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Monica, Phoebe and Joey. Friends is not just a TV show on the main street of Vang Vieng. It's a way of life. Imagine, if you will, a row of bars stretching for a couple of hundred metres on either side of a main street. The bars are not large, but there are lots of them, competing for your business. Now imagine that every one of them - every single one - is playing Friends on several large screens. No games of pool, no live bands. Not even any goddamn Seinfeld or Simpsons. Every bar with a different episode of the same show, each night, all night. Welcome to Hell.

It doesn't end there.

Vang Vieng is freezing this time of year, especially at night, but wander down a side street away from the Friends drag and what do we have? Ah, bars full of half-naked eighteen and nineteen year olds dancing drunkenly around campfires in their bikinis, falling over logs and threatening to sue the bar owners, yelling at each other about how 'wicked' the Man U v Hull match was (these wild, beautiful, loud, stupid children being almost inevitably British), and just generally being young and boorish and tour group-y. This side of Vang Vieng reaches its peak on the river, where hundreds each day pick up their inner tubes and begin to float down the river, taking in the peace and tranquility.

Wait, did I just say "peace and tranquility"? Oh. What I meant was "giant motherfucking rave parties on each side of the river with techno music from 1997 blaring into the valleys below, copious amounts of Lao whisky being drunk from plastic buckets, mud baths and waterslides, massive cranes from which these pretty young things fling themselves into the river, and hundreds of other teenagers, just as drunken and horny and undressed as themselves".

And: it still doesn't end there.

Find your way past the Friends brigade and past the teenagers revelling in their Spring Break Girls Gone Wild-athon, and one comes inevitably to The Island in the middle of the river, which every night becomes a giant ship adrift in a sea of cheap opium, cheap magic mushrooms, cheap methamphetamines, cheap marijuana, and expensive beer. Here the people huddle around campfires muttering things to themselves and vaguely asking each other, like, what's the deal with, you know, stuff. We all tried out the mushroom shakes: I held a telepathic conversation with a tree for about an hour, Erin made friends with a skeleton who hid inside the wall and told her to burn things, and Adam composed a song on ukelele for a whale shark inside our room which was later revealed to be a broken air conditioner. Later, after an opium shake, I spent several hours with a stupid grin plastered to my face belting out "We Built This City (On Rock & Roll)" from my manically writhing hammock. It wasn't a pretty sight.

Out from behind the looking glass, we caught a bus over zigzagging hills and cliff-edge villages for six hours north to Luang Prabang, the great temple city of Laos. We had decided to stay only a night or two; Luang Prabang is a beautifully-preserved city ("and it's full of fucking hipsters," as we were told by 19-year old Jarred), but there doesn't seem much to do at first. Give it time though, and the city becomes vital and exciting; it is the top of the loop for most travellers on the Thailand-Laos-Vietnam-Cambodia circuit and thus functions as something of a gathering point - here we met up with people we'd met all over the place, most notably Canadian Ben and Christine from Chiang Mai, who dragged us along with a few more buddies to a sticky rice festival at a nearby Hmong village.

We drank and danced; we danced and drank. And then we were molested. Erin found herself cordoned off by a bunch of teenage Lao boys who rubbed suggestively against her hips as if it was a Year 5 school disco or something: one even tried to trap her with the old wrap-your-scarf-around-her-waist-so-she-can't-get-away trick. Meanwhile, a group of teenage girls dancing with me were getting increasingly close, and one kept pinching and pulling at my shirt. I backed away a little, and all of a sudden she sort of launched her face at my crotch. Which was embarassing.

And now we are finally ready to leave for our final destination in Laos - the jungle city of Luang Nam Tha. We face an eleven-hour bus ride tomorrow (to cover a paltry 200km) over what will invariably be more scenery which is so beautiful it makes me want to cry but which I will never, ever, be able to adequately describe for someone who hasn't been here. So be it. By the time I next write we will be inside the great red monster on our maps. Next week we will be in China.

Hope everyone's well,

Lachie

#34: The Long Goodbye and the Stuffed Penis

Week 34 - Vientiane Prefecture, Laos

1. THE LONG GOODBYE

IT'S TIME. After eight months - thirty-four weeks - we have left Thailand for the very last time. An end to the heat and humidity and crowds and smells of Bangkok; an end to the mountains and beaches and parties and soft breezes of everywhere else. A final end to circling and backtracking; we are aiming ourselves on a straight shot to Tibet, through Luang Prabang, Kunming, Shangri-La, Chengdu, Golmud, a dozen names both mythically familiar and wilfully obscure. We are on the great north road and only poverty or frozen-to-death-ness will stop us.

Our relationship with Thailand has been a turbulent one; she flirts with us, showing us wild jungle and beautiful people and islands that you thought only appeared in dreams. She gives us food heaving with spices and flavour, mountains crisp with cold air, train rides full of light and wind. But Bangkok looms constantly in the background, that ominous vacuum, and she drags us through its smog-filled cesspits and recesses each time we get too close. But I could ask for nothing more of my experience in that country: I was amazed, I was frustrated, I was ecstatic, I was awakened, I was sick with Dengue fever, I was chased by wild elephants, I was thrown off a mechanical bull at a strip club. I shat on the trains, rode rings around the valleys, swam in the lush clearness of the ocean, bathed in the warm breeze as I hitched rides in the back of pickups. And just because I hated Bangkok does not preclude me from having loved it as well - the food and the action, the people and the noise. Thailand was our everything and now it is banished to memory. We do not leave her easily.

Kevin flew in from Singapore to visit us for our last week; there are few better feelings than seeing an old friend after many months adrift. And after some seven years of university the guy's full of sage-like wisdom: we spent most of the week listening with slack-jawed awe to his explanations of everything we thought we knew about the world. What can I say? Dude's a genius. He should change his name to GoogleKev, or, at least, use his brains to con elderly pensioners out of their life savings. He just knows everything about everything.

Together the four of us headed north to the river town of Tha Ton, where we had planned to commandeer a bamboo house-raft complete with a cook and a guide for three days. That turned out to be a little optimistic; we only had the money to jump in a long boat for the day as we floated down the majestic river through rocks and rapids, stopping at temples overgrown by jungle and hill-tribe villages surrounded by water buffalo bathing in the thick mud. Some ninety kilometres downriver we were dropped at a set of hot springs where we bathed in the heat under the incessant buzz of fluorescent pink dragonflies, ignorantly dropping their larvae into the pool where they quickly died and sank to the bottom.

We planned to stay with an Akha tribe in a nearby valley, and attempted to hitch a ride there with a friendly Japanese man who drove by. He drove us for several kilometres to the wrong village, whereupon it was revealed that he was actually a Christian missionary building a church for the heathens. Oh. So, basically, he was a fuckwit, and we wanted no more to do with him. Except: he was our only way out. So we spent a while chatting to the village girls (who spent a while trying in vain to get Adam to hold a chicken; Adam has a weird phobia about those kind of things) and watching with smug grins as a large crucifix brought to the village was thieved by a snotty three-year old and used to dig canals through the mud. And then we asked to be taken back.

We made it there in the end, to the Akha village in the valley, and spent a couple of truly amazing days bathing under ice-cold waterfalls, working up great sweats walking up and down the hills of the tea plantations, trading swear words and bad jokes with the tribespeople in a variety of languages, and just genuinely loving everything about Thailand. And then the comedown: we arrived in Chiang Rai, a blurred dullness of a city, all overcast skies and roaring traffic and glaring light. We had planned to spend a couple of nights there but after about three hours we were aching to leave; the next day we caught a bus back to Chiang Mai.

Which is where things got ugly.

2. CLENCHED ANUS, STUFFED PENIS AND OTHER CULINARY DELIGHTS

SO LET'S: just say that Thailand's public transport system is not terribly forgiving to what we would consider normal bodily functions. Case in point: on a different bus to Chiang Mai (to pick up Kevin from the airport), I had what you could call a rumbling; I did precisely what I'd done for the previous eight months and put it to the back of my mind. An hour later, still without having stopped, it became a little more serious. A lot of clenching went on. Twenty minutes after that I approached the bus driver and, in sheepish, faltering Thai, explained that it would be really, really great if he stopped the bus soon so that I didn't shit all over my seat and the small lady sitting with her groceries beside me.

He looked at me gravely.

"Mmm. Five kilometres," he said.

I sat down with the look of a man who's been told the date of his execution, while the bus driver turned to the Thai women behind him and explained the situation in hoots of laughter while pointing with hands that should really have been on the steering wheel. I stared straight ahead as five kilometres came and then went. The Thai woman turned to me and said, "Ten minutes."

By the time we stopped I was tightening every muscle in my body with so much effort that I couldn't even walk. It was another half hour until the trembling ceased.

So, like I said, not very forgiving. This time, coming back from Chiang Rai to Chiang Mai, I'll spare the buildup. Let me just say that all four of us were suffering from bloated bladders, and that, at one point, Erin turned around in her seat to the sight of me, seated in front of an orange-robed Buddhist monk (I swear, I didn't know he was there), desperately trying to stuff my penis into the neck of a plastic bottle I'd found on the floor of the bus while simultaneously trying to cover up the entire wicked deed with Erin's nicest sweater. Not my proudest moment; it didn't even work. I still had to wait the two hours to the rest stop.

SIDENOTE: I have no idea what I planned to do with the bottle after I'd finished peeing. It didn't even have a lid.

We arrived in Chiang Mai, one way or the other. We spent a couple of lovely days motorbiking around the province as we had on our last visit; we got the cheapest massages we could possibly find and then complained that they weren't very good; we got viciously drunk at a rooftop bar and ended up at a place called Mike's Burgers, where I only remember using my Cheezy Fries (TM) to scrape as much of the disgusting, goopy Cheeze (TM) out of my Cheezy Fries (TM) box as I possibly could and dripping it all over my mouth and shirt in what was possibly an even lower moment than the stuffing-my-penis-in-a-bottle thing.

SECOND SIDENOTE: We also ran into Gerard "Not-Gerard" the Belgian. This time, he was sporting a mysterious foot injury, he invited us to play World of Warcraft with him at 3am (who knew James Bond is actually a fat thirteen-year old with no friends underneath that suit?), and the Thai Boxing Stadium was promoting an upcoming bout with a picture that looked suspiciously like him. Mysteriouser and mysteriouser...

Kev flew back into the bowels of Singapore (and props to him - it was great fun having him out here for a week and we all enjoyed his company immensely); and we loaded ourselves up on beer and antidepressants for the twelve-hour bus ride to Laos.

And now we are here, back in perfect Vientiane, where we cycle the wide boulevardes to the gentle bubbling of conversation erupting from the cafes and spilling out over the streets. We drink wine, we eat fine French food (at $2 a pop), we watch the sunset over the Mekong (again).

Laos is the guy at school that nobody ever says a bad word about; he never dates your ex-girlfriends, he always brings beer to parties, he thinks that your taste in music is excellent and he covers for you in front of your parents without even having to think about it. Laos even does your homework for you when you're feeling sick. Basically, Laos is a total fucking dreamboat.

We love it here, but we've got to be going. Tomorrow we head to Vang Vieng.

Lachie

#33: Don't Happy Be Worry

Week 33 - Mae Hong Son Province, Thailand

THE FESTIVAL: was a jubilant ejaculation of light and sound as hundreds of Thais, Burmese and various hill-tribes converged on the town to show their thanks to the Water Goddess by chucking as much plastic and styrofoam shit into the rivers and lakes as they possibly could. Then they shot off some fireworks, made the sky into a fiery sea of floating lanterns, bought some more plastic stuff, threw the packaging into the lake, and went home.

Job done.

By the way, "Water Goddess"? Um... I didn't know they had one of those in Buddhism. Er. Ahem. Well. Well, they don't, per se, but Thai Buddhism isn't so much "hey, let's study the Buddhist teachings and live our lives by them" as it is, "hey, let's use the most ridiculously superstitious parts of Buddhism, pile it in with some Hinduism, Chinese astrology, numerology and good ol' animism, and see if we can win the lottery with it". Hence: the commitment of most Thais to Buddhism is bringing eggs and flowers to the temple when they've done something wrong, and then putting more eggs and flowers in the dollhouse outside their home to appease the house spirits (every single building in Thailand, from the lowest shack to the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, has such a spirit dollhouse). Up north, the superstitiousness is strongest, and people continue to put scarecrows outside their house to ward off ghosts and make sacrifices to the Rice God.

Digression aside, Mae Hong Son was a perfect little town. The festival was fun and full of colour, and I got to throw my $1 bag of fireworks around like an eight-year old with a year's supply of red cordial coursing through his veins. The air was crisp and cold and excellent for long walks up the terraced walkway scaling the mountain to the temple to watch lanterns being launched into the night sky, and teenage monks clad in their orange robes surreptitiously gambling with their friends behind the cover of trees.

Wheeling motorbikes about the hills the day after, wrapped in beanies and sweaters, was something incredible. The road took us out along narrow ridges and across jagged ledges; we stopped at a cave full of sacred fish who are believed to be vegetarian - Thai families line up to throw them carrots and lettuce. Best of all was the English sign above the cave - "The cave is teeming with a crap species of fish" (presumably they meant "carp"). From there out past small villages full of screaming children to the last village on the map, Ban Rak Thai.

Ban Rak Thai was originally Mae Aw, and was basically a settlement of anti-communist Chinese soldiers arriving into Thailand as refugees after being booted by Burma several decades ago. The change of name (Ban Rak Thai means "The Village That Loves Thais") was probably a publicity stunt to save a bit of face. Nowadays it's the last town on the road before a sketchy dirt track leads out to a 'No Foreigners Allowed' border crossing with Burma. It remains a very Chinese sort of place, and we sat for endless cups of Oolong and Jasmine tea before the encroaching darkness and freezing temperatures sent us rolling back down the map. Past the screaming children, past Shan villages of solemn women in traditional clothes and grim-faced men with large knives strapped to their backs, past national parks of peaceful lakes surrounded by cliffs and forests of pine, back to Mae Hong Son and a warm bed before our morning ride to Pai.

Pai is the kind of town you get in every country - the Byron Bay, the Vang Vieng, the Queenstown - a drawing point for travellers of all kinds, where you trade great parties and food and nightlife in exchange for relentless Americans with bullhorn voices and all kinds of tacky, shitty merchandise being shoved at you from all angles (though the 'Don't Happy, Be Worry' climate-change-awareness t-shirts were a highlight).

Unfortunately, our trip unintentionally co-incided with the cremation of HRH the Princess, who died a year ago and whose body has been on display to the public since. Now, since she was getting cremated, HRM the King decided to declare a dry weekend across the nation. No alcohol. Enforced sobriety. In the town where the nightlife was the only attraction. Balls.

We did what we could. Erin and I enrolled in a cooking school and spent the days whipping up gigantic bowls of green curry, pad thai, kao soi, laab tohu, panang curry and mango sticky rice - Erin with her trademark elegant artistry, me with my hand held with increasingly frustrated force by the lady teaching us in her back kitchen. Adam hired a bicycle and set out to get lost among the rice paddies, finding his way to another ex-communist village and a waterfall in the jungle.

We got by. And by our last night, cracks were appearing in Pai; alcohol was slipping through, to great rejoicing and gnashing of teeth. Wandering the streets late at night, we were adopted by Pom and her sister, who had started a campfire in the middle of a frontyard that didn't belong to them in the middle of town and were busy drinking and cackling around it like wild children. Pom was excellent; she had emerged from a tragic past of dead husbands and divorce to become an awesome force of drunken destruction. She was a fantastic combination of the cool girl from Chasing Amy (her standard greeting was "Hey, fuck you, man") and some sort of Russian transvestite (addressing everyone as "honey" or "dah-link") and just sweated class as she stumbled about the campfire with a whiskey bottle in hand, complaining of how she couldn't see the stars and dreading going to work at her massage parlour the next day.

The night got out of hand. Adam went through a fence and fell five feet onto his back. We somehow ended up attached to a Thai rastafarian who couldn't speak a word of English but whom we knew as The Pixie Child; he passed out onto Erin's lap before disappearing in an explosion of fairy dust. Then an extremely drunken Irishman went to hit Erin on the head with a blue rubber flipflop after an impassioned argument about Catholocism; the thong made it within inches of Erin's forehead before the Irishman slowly and gently teetered over on his side, falling straight to the floor and taking several beer bottles with him. Then a Scotsman yelling at us because we hadn't heard of some religious lady named "Anoon"; eventually we worked out he was saying "a nun". He settled down. At some point, we went home.

And awoke, a couple of hours later, to a cacophony. Behind our bungalow, at the Muay Thai gym, pasty Brits with exaggerated fantasies of themselves as Thai martial arts superstars were throwing each other around the ring and making exaggerated grunting noises while the clanging of flab against metal echoed off our thin bamboo walls. Off in the fields, a symphony of roosters were competing for the title of "Rooster Most Likely to be Violently Strangled by Lachlan". And, just to add a touch of surrealism, a hidden man had set himself up in the reeds by the river with an alto saxophone and was shooting through his particular rendition of the classics with as much volume as he could muster.

It was time to leave Pai.

So. Soon: I will collect my friend Kev from Chiang Mai airport. Then: an adventure.

Lachie.

#32: Whistlestop Tours With the Ambassador's Wife

Week 32 - Mae Hong Son Province, Thailand

AND WHEN: they were only halfway up, they were neither up nor down. Which makes for a nice song, but is not so much fun when you're stuck halfway up the highest mountain in Thailand, with no public bus up the 47km road to the peak. And being laughed at by national parks officials for believing the rumour that such a bus existed. After three hours on tuk-tuks, pickup trucks and motorbikes, it makes one feel pretty dejected. So we stood, and waited for something to happen.

Of course something happened. Something always happens, especially here, high above the humid plains. This particular something was a manic middle-aged Thai woman named Lanna, who proceeded to load us into the back of her ute and charge up the mountain at a furious pace, swinging wildly around corners beyond which postcard-perfect mountain vistas loomed with smug satisfaction.

Lanna was a beautiful, kind person. But she was also mental. She had some kind of connection to Thai embassies; she was keenly fluent in English, French, Thai, Japanese, Mandarin and Cambodian - a fact she showed us (to considerable applause) every time she spotted a suitable tourist sitting about. She had lived in Japan, France and the Cote d'Ivoire. She was travelling with her Japanese friends, showing them the sights; she said that she picked us up "out of love" and spent the whole day talking about our newfound friendship. And at every place we'd stop, she'd watch us wander around the waterfall / summit / visitor centre, and then, with a timing that seemed to have no relationship to whether everyone had finished looking, or whether people were in mid-sentence conversation with her, she would bark, "Okay! Let's go!" and everyone would pile silently into the back of the ute like we were illegal migrant workers being trucked to our next cleaning job.

She left us in much the same dazed confusion in which she'd found us, deserting us on a street corner in town with vague directions to a bus, barking "Okay! Let's go!" to her Japanese friends before blazing away down the dusty road. By the time we knew what was going on, we were on a bus to Mae Sariang, in the far northwest of the country, not two kilometres from the Burmese border.

It had been difficult to leave Chiang Mai, though we'd all been there a fairly long time. The city was a great, vibrant place to spend your nights, and the countryside around was bursting with perfect green valleys filled with mist. The day before we headed to our fate with Lanna, Erin and I hired a bike and went up the slopes of Doi Suthep, the mountain which lurks behind Chiang Mai like a beautiful criminal. Past the temple that crowns the peak of the mountain, where stalls were selling cups of fresh strawberries; past the Winter Palace, where the royal family will soon be in residence. Past all that, over potholed roads, then gravel roads, then dirt roads, then a barely discernible track of mud and rock, to a tiny village clinging to the slope.

Towards the edges of northern Thailand, the populations of all the neighbouring countries begin to bleed together; you start to see villages of Lao and Burmese peoples. On top of that, there are the hill-tribes - the Shan, the Karen, the Lisu, the Hmong, and many others - people of the fourth world, who belong to no nation, without Thai citizenship, wandering from China to Myanmar, Thailand to Laos to Vietnam. The people in this village were Hmong; they were mostly kids, chasing skinny chickens around the spare wooden houses and riding motorbikes about the rough-as-guts dirt tracks that circumnavigated the settlement. We hung out for a while, wandering about the village (noting that here, on a mountain and several hours ride from any settlement of note, was the first Christian church we'd seen outside Bangkok - hill-tribes are one of the very few places in Thailand that missionaries have had any impact). Then back, stopping along the dirt track at a coffee plantation owned by an eccentric Californian who owned several parrots, including a 40-year old macaw as large as a dog. Below, the Hmong women picked coffee beans in their traditional tribal dress, all shy waves and toothless smiles.

In Mae Sariang - a tiny town squeezed elegantly between the mountains and the river - we hired bicycles and rolled aimlessly through villages alive with the sound of country music blasting loud and proud from tinny radios. In the evenings we wrapped ourselves in whatever sweaters and beanies we've been able to gather together - Erin lost her gloves in Chiang Mai and Adam's beanie flew off on the way down Doi Inthanon - and drank whiskey by the river, while (of all things) gangster rap played over the deck and fell into the lapping of the river along the shore.

The mountains are spectacular: it is thrilling to feel cold again, for the first time since - oh, let's see here, August 2007? - and our eyes are blazing, and the blood is pumping thick through our veins, and today we are in Mae Hong Son, by the lake, and it is the Loi Krathong festival, celebrating the Goddess of Water, and there are blazing lanterns flying through the air, and candles floating in the lake, and we have a bag of fireworks for which we paid a dollar and which I am itching to throw at something.

And everything is great, and I hope everything is great with you.

Lachie