Now for something completely different

Laos

Despite its two walkways, the Friendship Bridge is closed to pedestrians so I had to part with 10 Baht and board a bus to the Laotian side. Here they made me shell out 30 bucks for a 15-day visa and I got another bus to take me the remaining 20km to the capitol city (as usual, the border crossing is miles and miles from any trace of civilization). Most Thais are happy to give the same price to anyone - regardless of their country of origin; in the neighboring devoloping nations however, it is not only a right, but a duty to charge a westerner several times the going rate - regardless of how ragged his jeans might be or many days it's been since he last showered - I was introduced to this when my fare was annouinced to be just about equal to that of the five other passengers combined. The city buses in Vientaine are known as "Jumbos" and can be roughly defined as tuk-tuk minivans.

The Thai and Laotian languages are differentiated by only a few words and the latter's alphabet is just a relaxed, flowing version of the former's. This was convenient as I was instantly proficient without ever having to open a "Teach Yourself Lao" book. They've also managed to steal a great deal of Thai cuisine - this is very fortunate as Laotian food is terrible (yes, this might just be the first time I've come across a food I didn't like) - most meals consist of sticky rice and some sort of meat on a stick (they're not too picky about which meat - I think I saw the entire cast of Bambi served up in one form or another during my stay); there's also minced meat with sticky rice and pickled vegetables with sticky rice.

To the average westerner, $6 hotels, 60 cent internet and $1-5 meals would probably seem pretty chepa, but if you've been scraping by on 100 baht/day for the last 3 months, Vientaine is quite the ritzy destination. At first it seemed I was being overcharged because of my falaang-like appearance, but by stealthily observing transactions between locals, I discovered the awful truth that, from here on out, I would have to pay a hefty 3000 kip (10872 kip/dollar) for a snack rather than 5 baht.

In Laos, there are three commonly used currencies - until recently, the largest denomination of kip was worth about 9 cents, so to avoid making people carting their money around in wheelbarrows, the dollar and baht became unofficial standards for big transactions. This can be advantageous if you're good with numbers - no one can do the conversions (10872/1 and 265/1) in his/her head, so they usually make significant round-off errors - all you have to do is carry around enough small change in every currency to accommodate whatever math is most in your favor.

Vientaine is just slightly larger than Gainesville, but strives to be the hub of commerce and culture you would expect from a capitol city. It has several massive markets where you can buy any souvenir, vegetable, or animal you can possibly imagine (as well as several you probably can't). The restaurant scene offers a wide range of Asian and European cusines - the tourist district focuses its energy on sandwhiches and pizza while in other parts of town it's sometimes possible to find actual Laotian food. It boasts an extensive riverside promenade where scores of vendors set up tables and serve overpriced stir-frys and fruit shakes - I stopped at such a stand to order something called "spicy banana salad" - never attempt to eat this, it is not made for any part of the banana tree that was intended for human consumption.

Getting into town, I took a long walk to the city's gigantic arch which is a blatant rip-off of that found on the Champs d'Elysee; this one however, is lacking the tourist instruction of it's Parisian brother - I went through an unmarked door in the base and climbed 8 flights of stairs without coming across a single sign; the upper floors were filled with independent T-shirt sellers. At the top, a small room afforded views of the entire city - there isn't much to the skyline here, Laos is easily a century behind the rest of the world - skyscrapers, shopping malls, and chain stores simply don't exist (how does a nation survive without a McDonalds??).

The next stop was Phra That Luang; this great big yellow wat charges 2000 kip to Laotions and 5000 to foreigners - most certainly backwards since this edifice is one of the premier symbols of Laos and is of critical significance to its citizens, but the average foreigner would have trouble killing 10 minutes at the place.

In the morning I walked in a random direction and had gotten about 10km south of the city before I realized I wasn't getting much of anywhere. Walking back to the center, I visited most of the town's major wats - many of these charged a 50 cent admission fee but none could stand up against their Thai counterparts. Last on the tourist circiut was the National Museum which featured 1 room on dinosaurs, 1 room on the culture of various tribes, and 6 on how the US royally screwed over their country.

My plan coming into the country was to rent a motorbike and do a massive 2 week circuit. However, after asking every place in town, I found they had some policy against taking the bikes out of the city; I tried returning to the same places and claiming that I wanted to explore the city for 14 days, but they seemed universally skeptical. I went to the bus station and looked up the next scheduled departure - this turned out to be for the town of Dalaat some 2 hours to the north. While I waited, I found a vendor nearby selling silk worm curry, and for only 50 cents with sticky rice, this was the cheapest thing I'd found so far - despite being loaded with huge, grotesque bugs, it was surprisingly tasty.

My guide book's one-line description of Thalaat explained that it featured a market which specialized in forest critters (such as spiny anteaters) for the locals to eat; this seemed reason enough to justify my trip. Unfortunately, I arrived too late in the day and the prime cuts had already been bought up - all that remained were a few crows and waterfowl.

After scouring the small town and confirming that there was absolutely nothing to do, I headed back to the main road and hailed a sangtaew to take me to Vang Vieng. This truck was far beyond capacity, so rather than sitting inside, I had to hang off the outer railing and pull my body in close each time there was oncoming traffic. It was a good 3-hour tricep workout and, at the same time, a very scenic journey through primitive mountain villages and along a picturesque lake.

Vang Viang is the tourist ecocenter of Laos. This is largely due to the incredible cave-filled cliffs that line the river. There are far more guest houses than local residences here and western restaurants outnumber the Laotian ones by a huge margin. There is nothing to do in the town itself, but you can rent a bike to explore nearby caves, and every guesthouse, internet cafe, and lemonade stand in town sells a kayak/caving day-trip for $7 (I know this sounds like a lot of money but it's really only about 300 Baht). At night, all the backpackers fill the restaurants to watch Friends reruns and a horde of banana/chocolate roti sellers line the streets to put their fatty wares on sale for $1/piece.

I signed up for the standard trip and took a reasonably thrilling 4-hour kayak ride down the river. Calm waters were interspersed with low-class rapids and in the interims, the guides showed us techniques for soaking our fellow boaters. At one point we disembarked to hike back through a village to a large water-filled cave - they equipped us with headlamps tied to large batteries hanging around our necks and we jumped in our tubes and followed ropes through the maze of chambers. On the way back to town, we stopped for a zipcord and giant swing.

There was no bus that evening so I was once again stuck in the cultural void. The first tourist bus was at 9 but I decided to get an early start and jumped on the 7AM songtaew - it took about 1.5 hours to go the first 2km and after that, chugged along, completely unloading and reloading in nearly every village; someone once spotted a green bean sale on the side of the road and every passenger instantly jumped out and bought a few kilos (2000 kip/kilo) - they were munching on this for the rest of ride. Around 10, I jumped off and caught the minibus which had already reached us - in another few hours, I was in Luang Prabang.

This central metropolis of 16,000 people has plenty to keep you occupied for an hour or two - there's a museum based in an old palace that is good for freeing you of 5 minutes time and 2 dollars cash, and several mildly interesting wats. In the center, there's a big hill which you can climb up to view the surrounding countryside. There's a huge night market filled with foods and hill tribe crafts, but the highlight was a 50 cent all-you-can-eat vegetarian buffet. I checked all the tours leaving in the coming days but was overwhelmed by the selection of treks, boat-trips and elephant rides and ended up confirming nothing by closing time.

The morning market offered such delicacies as possum, leopard, bats and snakes - you could get an excellent deal if you bought a cut with tire treads. At shortly after the last minute, I ran frantically around to all the tour companies to see if they still had tours for that day and found they had all already left. I eventually settled on renting a bike for a buck and peddling over several mountains towards one of the area's famous waterfalls. I took a wrong turn before I reached the waterfall and by the time I realized my mistake, was too lazy to peddle back; I settled on seeing the grave of some Frenchie, which was a major tourist attraction with signage for miles around but was basically just a gravestone and presumably a dead guy somewhere below. Near the grave, I met a bunch of highschool kids who seemed to be skipping to gamble by way of some card game where you apparently just throw down random cards, yell something incomprehensible, and grab whatever money's on the table. On the way back to down, I came across a silk-weaving village where I met a French geographer who was having his first taste of bamboo worms at a local hut - with the right amount of seasoning, these are really delicious, but probably not so easy to pick up at your local Publix. I was nearly trampled by buffalo who, like most farm animals, have no aversion to cars or motorcycles but are absolutely terrified of peddle bikes.

Advertised throughout town were the "world-famous Pak Ou Caves;" it seemed odd that I'd never heard mention of these outside of Laos, but I decided to grab a half-day tour and check them out. We took a slow boat which bobbed down the river as ludicrously fast speed boats (same wooden frame as slowboats but have bigger engine and everyone wears helmets) caused the waters to erupt around us. The caves were limited to one chamber and were only made slightly interesting by a huge collection of Buddha statuary. On the way back we visited the "Whisky village" where you could buy sticky rice wine or whisky with dead cobras/lizards/scorpions/etc. suspended in the liquid for $1-2 a bottle.

In the afternoon, I hopped on another tour to Tongsi waterfall; it seemed the trail was mostly underwater, so it wasn't terribly easy to get to the upper tiers but the available viewpoints were worthwhile. On the return trip, we visited a village which seemed to contain only children; when we arrived, there were dozens of them running around, laughing and singing without a parent in sight; they enthusiastically greeted us and smiled from ear-to-ear. However, when we turned to leave, their expressions instantly changed and they began urgently pleading for us to give them 1000kip; the whole thing was really disturbing - much more so than the typical low-budget "village of possessed children" horror film.

I had learned earlier in the day that there was a bus scheduled to leave at 5:30 that evening and thus I had no way of reaching in time; fortunately, I accurately surmised that there was no chance that it would take off as planned, and so, when I reached the station at 6:30, the passengers had just begun their 45-minute dinner break - of course they didn't bother to explain this to me, so, though aching for a good meal, I hurriedly grabbed a bunch of bananas and jumped on the bus where I would wait in the dark for the next half hour.

In theory, Laotian night buses are a good idea - the trip to the distant province of Luang Nam-tha is typically about 12 hours long. What you have to consider however, is that this only covers a distance of about 200km - the crumbling, undulating road was not the least bit conducive to sleeping. The rowdy crowd aboard the bus blasted music through the night and the driver honked the horn to the beat. The first food stop was at a village which seemed to have been built solely for this purpose - since everything in the country shuts down before 10, the subsequent stops were just momentary pauses where everyone jumped out and leaned over a bush or squatted on the shoulder as appropriate. Around 5 we stopped at a dark bunch of buildings - there was a fair bit of commotion but everyone just stayed on the bus or shuffled about in the dark outside; I went back and slept for an hour - when I woke up again, I ascertained that the place we had stopped (which, with the coming of day, had become operational) was in fact Luang Nam-tha - despite leaving two hours late, we somehow arrived an hour early.

Like many places in the country, the attractions in the tiny town weren't entirely clear cut; there was a market next to the bus station and a provincial museum down the street but the nearest point of interest after that was in a town called Mung Sing 60km down a winding mountain road.

The best option seemed to be to rent a motorbike, so I went by the town's single rental place - they were asking $12 a day and wanted a $500 deposit with 0 insurance (definitely missing that "no worries" attitude you see in Thailand's). I didn't like the looks of this contract so I went to the bus station to grab a truck up north; I got there with time to spare but the driver rejected me, giving the ridiculous excuse that the songtaew was full - it didn't even have anyone hanging on the back yet. So I returned to the shop and grabbed up the bike.

The road to Mung Sing was well-paved but had its share of twists and turns - there were amazing views along the whole route and plenty of tribespeople and animals running across the road. Once I reached the town there didn't seem to be anything of the slightest interest, so I decided to undertake a lengthy loop that would take me to Xieng Kok at the Thai border and then back along a different road to Nam-tha. I started out on the unpaved, extremely incongruous road and made it all of 5km before getting stopped by the cops; they asked me where I was going, I explained my intentions, and they simply said "That's a stupid idea, but if that is what you must do, I won't stop you"; this seemed an odd response, but since he didn't explicitly mention armed bandits or landslides, I opted to continue.

I decided to support the local villagers by buying gas as I went rather than filling up beforehand in the city; I revised this poly as soon as a woman charged me $1 for half a liter. Traditional villages lined the road and the tribes could be differentiated by their respective culture's dress (and I was sure they just threw on these clothes when the tourists came through!). The poor conditions of the road were furter complicated by myriad buffalo, chickens and children racing across the road.

I was nearly on empty when I read a sign for what I believed to be what my book described as the "bustling river town of XiengKok." Unfortunately there didn't seem to be any sign of civilization beyond a few huts and when I attempted to ask villagers about gas, many just ran and hid in their homes; one odd old man just nodded and laughed at everything I said. I was thinking of flagging down a truck and paying whatever absurd premium they asked to siphon their gas, when someone nearby indicated that the real XiengKok was actually another few kilometers down the road. With my last drops of petrol, I trudged on and found the town's one gas hut.

After eating lunch at a local restaurant/guesthouse/discotecque, I attempted to seek out the road to Hung Xai to the south. I ended up back on the road into town and asked someone for directions; they gestured towards the river, so I headed the way and once again ended up in the same spot. I tried a different tak and asked whether it were possible to ride a bike to Hung Xai; this time they immediately offered up the useful tidbit that it was in fact only possible to go by boat.

So I had to abbreviate my trip and race back towards Luang Namtha. On the way back, I came across a village where everyone was congregated in the middle of the road, and at the center, there were two foreigners; there didn't seem to be any transport in the vicinity so I can only conclude that they transported there from the future. It soon became dark and the task of dodging livestock and people became exponentially harder. After a while, I caught sight of a fast-moving glimmer ahead of me and eventually concluded that it was a motorbike with no lights moving through the night at around 60kph; he was somehow managing to dodge all the things that wandered into his path and so I let him run interference while readying myself to dodge the inevitable crash that was to follow.

In the morning I took a bus 4 hours east to Udom Xai. Here I climbed a hill before picking up a songtaew to Pak Moong and chartering a truck with a bunch of other foreigners to Nong Khiaw.

The bridge in the middle of town here must be one of the more beautiful spots on earth - I'm not really sure why. Otherwise, there's not much going on here; for some reason I ended up sharing a $2 room with 2 other guys in a guesthouse which offered mattresses on the floors of straw huts with electricity until 10 o'clock.

The next morning I sought out the town's market; there's a certain art to this - you must find several people moving in the same general direction and follow this trickle until it converges with other trickles from the other parts of town and ends at a crowded line of huts. Of interest here were pieces of Python about this big around (you can't see me, but I'm making a big ring with both hands!) and several specimens of that rat which a western scientist "discovered" in Laos a few months back.

Along with an Irish girl and German guy, I jogged 3km to a recommended cave. Here there were signs indicating the different rooms used by the Prathet Lao when they were hiding out there some years ago. We returned to the road and found that a ticket collector had arrived - she demanded that we pay for entrance to the 3 caves. Previously unaware of the two other caves, we bought the tickets and returned to see the "Bank Cave" which held a 400m long tunnel into the depths of the earth and featured many signs for the various offices of a bank; I don't really remember the third cave but I'm sure it also had chambers, stalactites, and the usual cave things.

We took a boat up the river to Muang Ngoi Neua which was a village with no cars or power, but around 20 guesthouses. Representatives from all the accomadation options met us at the dock and advertised their respective establishments; the German insisted that other travellers had highly recommended a place called "Bamboo Paradise" - it turned out that this was in another city entirely and we were led to the far side of the village to "Bamboo Family Bungalows." This was, in all likelihood, the worst place in town - there were big gaping holes in the walls and the shower was fed by an empty rain tank - but I felt good about supporting this family who may never have another customer.

The singular attraction of the village was a walk to a cave about half an hour away and at one point or another along the route, we met every other tourist staying in the village. We also came across locals carting around bizarre guns with a handle the size of a starter pistol and a meter-long barrel. The cave was filled with water and by walking some ways into it, I managed to get my passport and plane tickets that much closer to a completely unusable state. A few monks had been crawling through the mud in a nearby cave and when we saw them, were tearing off their robes and thrashing in the river like something out of a "Monks Gone Wild" video.

We then walked another half an hour to a village, following children on their way home from school through a maze of trails in the rice paddies. This village was infinitely remote but still had a guesthouse and bar. We also saw a man who had a pet monkey tied up by his genitals.

Tons of boats left in the early morning to return to the main highway but only one took tourists for an ultra-inflated rate. Back at Nong Khiaw, I took a songtaew to Viang Kham; since this town isn't mentioned in the Lonely Planet, no tourist has ever been here - the children broke into tears as I walked past (now that's authenticity!).

I was told there was no bus until midnight so I attempted to hitchhike; unfortunately, they use a completely different signal here and I was thoroughly unsuccessful; another complication is that there aren't actually any cars in the country - on the main highway, it was more than an hour before the first one passed.

A bus unexpectedly showed up and I hopped on for the six hour ride to Viang Tong. Sitting across from me was a hot Israeli who turned out to have an intinerary virtually identical to mine; my stomach knew just what to do about this, and after 5 minutes conversation, I became violently ill out the back. After that, things started going downhill; when we arrived in a village a few hours later and the whole population assembled to greet us, I spontaneously began puking right in the center of town - and this was not your ordinary vomiting, but a cartoonish hyberbole with bile flying at all angles, soaking my face and clothes, and forming a sizeable orange puddle on the main road - as I walked unsteadily back to the truck, all the children just stared at me with open mouths - they were no doubt forever traumatized.

The ride continued well into the night; until this time I believed that hell would involve being chased around by a little red guy with a pitchfork, but I see that it only be an eternity sitting in this songtaew - there was no way to lean back or lie down, we could only stay upright and bear the terrible topography of the highway. When it was over, the driver dropped us at a guesthouse he just happened to own, and too exhausted to move from that spot, we gave in and payed the 2 bucks for the room.

At 7 the next morning, we grabbed an actual bus and spent another 7 hours going 100km to Sam Neua. At one point, we came across a truck that had gotten stuck in the mud and was blocking half the road; without a word of instruction, all the passengers instinctively got off and walked up the hill so that the driver could better navigate between cliff and accident without unnecessarily endangering lives. A little further down the road, one of the tires blew out and the staff leaped out to repair it using a giant metal rod; when the spare had been fitted, they chucked the old tire over the cliff (there aren't really any concerns about littering here - if there were any more cars the country would really be trashed fast).

Sam Neua was interesting enough but I don't recall what we did if anything; in the morning we caught the daily truck to the border. Shortly after we boarded, several kids with what appeared to be the severed legs of cows and many plastic bags of organs and blood hopped on; there luggage was casually thrown under the seats and immediately began leaking large streams of blood down the bed. The image was complete when a woman jumped aboard holding a live chicken - sporadically over the course of the trip, this thing would start making chicken noises, and, much to the confusion of the other passengers, I would start laughing hysterically.

When we reached the town of Vieng Xai, a 28-year-old Canadian, who was truly the epitome of a clueless falaang, climbed into the back. She had taught English in Taiwan for 2 1/2 years without learning a word of Chinese, and now, finding that there was no western food in this part of Laos, was making a mad dash for the border. She didn't seem to be the fiscally responsible type and had no cash in any currency or even any credit cards; she was fairly certain, however, that any of these villages along a way would be able to change one of her $100 traveller's cheques. Another intriguing aspect of her story that occurred to her about 3km from the border was that her Vietnamese visa would not be valid for another 2 days.

The truck broke down a few times, but we eventually made it to the border; the Israeli had to pony up $10 for overstaying her visa and the guards checked us all for drugs while the Canadian chided them for their lack of thoroughness ("Well if I did have drugs, you aren't going to find them by just skimming through my stuff like that!"). What awaited us on the other side of that bridge? Only time would tell...

The mighty Mekong