Choose your own adventure.

 I’ve been a little under the weather the past few days; I don’t know whether it’s all the Mekong River water I ingested while swimming, or the monkey bite, or just the air quality in Southeast Asia, which, as I think I mentioned, is lethal. Northern Thailand was declared a disaster area a few weeks ago, and the haze over the region is the worst in 14 years.

(This monkey really did bite me, by the way, but he didn’t break the skin and he only did it because he was scared and he is still my future sidekick.)

Anyway, I find myself back in Bangkok. Wha? The day before yesterday, in Don Det, I changed my mind 3 times within a couple of hours about where I going. First, I wanted to take a bus to Phnom Penh. Then I decided to stay another couple of days in Laos, in a city called Pakse, to recuperate a bit. Then, on the minibus to Pakse, I overheard people talking about the beaches and islands of Thailand and decided to follow my friend L. there for a week or so. (We’re heading down to Koh Phangan on an overnight train later today). I’m starting to feel like the electron in a quantum physics demonstration. But I really do like the idea that instead of choosing among, say, baked, mashed, or french fries, I was choosing which of three countries I wanted to be in.

One thing that didn’t factor into the decision at all was travel time. I can’t believe how accustomed I’ve become to insanely long bus rides–something like 8 or 9 hours is starting to sound short to me.

It’s rare that the reality of travel meets your expectations, especially when those expectations are founded upon some of the most tired and obvious stereotypes. But riding the buses across a poor, developing country like Laos really lived up to everything I imagined. I crossed the Annamite mountain range three times, and in addition to the previously-mentioned blind curves on high mountain passes, we had: flat tires; overheated engines; comical, clown car-like overcrowding, with passengers sitting in the aisle on tiny plastic chairs; frequent stops to deliver mail and run errands; live animals on board; hill-tribe villagers throwing up; impenetrable fog high in the mountains; and oh so much more. It was both funny, and truly scary. At some point during each ride, fear was tangible; it was another presence in my body, limp and white, like ectoplasm from old seance photographs.

What to do in such cases but be a good Buddhist and accept your fate? Traveling makes the balance between volition and chance so much more obvious than it is in everyday life. You choose to get on a bus, or go to Thailand instead of Cambodia and you set a series of events in motion that you soon recognize you have very little control over. It’s like some kind of crazy story with 40 possible endings or something.