Laos

I have been sucking at this lately, so my Year of the Rat resolution is as follows: be a better blogger. If it means anything to you, I am constantly chastising myself for not posting more and am often afflicted with a vague sense of dread and self-loathing for shirking my responsibility. It’s like a steady low-grade fever, which I believe is also a symptom of malaria.

Anyway–doings a-transpirin’. I’m using the free wifi in Singapore’s futuristical Changi Airport right now as I wait to catch a flight to Melbourne. I’m going to meet with my editor there before heading to New Zealand to write for this guidebook. I’ll be covering the entire North Island, which includes, among other things: the cities of Auckland and Wellington; geothermal oddities like geysers, exploding mud pools, and volcanic lakes; and an attraction called Sheepworld.

I left Vietnam ten days ago and have been in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and even Indonesia (for a half day) since. It’s been a fantastic, if wallet-destroying, time & I will write about it all in the next post.

Just one other thing to mention for now: it almost passed without my noticing it, but in the midst of all the Tet/Lunar New Year festivities, February 9th marked my own new year–one year since I left New York and started traveling. It’s not even a trip anymore; I don’t know what exactly to call it, but it’s been real interesting.

Suvarnabhumi Airport, Bangkok, 2007

When I’m not walking or riding on my friends’ scooters, I get around Saigon by means of the xe om, the omnipresent and omniannoying-until-you-need-to-use-one scooter-taxis. “Xe,” I am told, means “vehicle” and “om” means “hug”, which is an adorable if entirely misleading depiction of the experience. I’ll be buying a cheap used scooter in the next couple of weeks, so not many more vehicle hugs for me. In the meantime, I took a moment to consider the many means of transport I have used over the last six months (I’m sure I’m forgetting something):

Car; bus; ferry; canoe; rowboat; longboat; slowboat; raft; cable car; bicycle; trishaw; tuk-tuk; sangthiew; cyclo; pick-up; minibus; truck; plane; horsecart; horseback; stagecoach; ox cart; locomotive; elevated train; monorail; subway; motorcycle; scooter; elephant.

Das ist the title of a trashy-looking German novel I saw lying around in a guest house a while back.

Well, I too am alone with the angst here in Bangkok. L. has returned to Germany, and I am temporarily camera-less. (I dropped my Kodak P880 off to get repaired and won’t have it for a week or so–it was functional but the lens was stuck in one position after the big moto crash.)

What to say about L.? It’s hard to describe, and still hard to believe, how intensely our paths collided and converged, how much we experienced together over such a short time. As she wrote to me when she got home, it’s like sharing a secret that neither of us can ever fully explain.

Read the rest of this entry »

 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.

I am on an island called Don Det, in an area of southern Laos called the 4,000 Islands. Today I: swam in the river, rode a bicycle, tried playing kick volleyball, ate grilled fish, swung in a hammock and read a book about Laos history. I’m staying in a small thatched bungalow on stilts over the Mekong. I can see stars here, especially after the electricity on the island goes off after eleven. Tomorrow I’m going to try to spot the elusive Irawaddy dolphins.

And I am back in the land of Internet access. From Phonsavan I traveled 12 hours by bus to Vieng Xai, right on the Vietnamese border. Vieng Xai was intense; it’s a tiny village set among spectacular, cave-filled limestone karsts which housed the entire Pathet Lao leadership and thousands of soldiers during the decade of U.S. bombing missions. There’s literally a cave city of homes and offices and medical facilities, even an enormous amphitheater. From Vieng Xai I’ve just come 18 hours to Vientiane and am on my way to the south of Laos in a couple of days. I’ve uploaded photos from Luang Prabang, with many more from Vieng Xai and Phonsavan ready to go for tomorrow.

I arrived in Phonsavan, Laos this afternoon after a seven-hour bus ride through the mountains. The road from Luang Prabang is composed of approximately 10,000 s-curves in a row, with an occasional hairpin turn, all at breathtaking altitude and with very little or nothing to prevent the bus from plunging over the side of a cliff should the driver sneeze or possibly even blink at the wrong time. I often caught myself wondering with a kind of passionate intensity about things like the general maintenance practices of the Lao bus fleet and the overall well-being of the driver. Was everything okay at home? How’s his health been lately?

I’m here in Phonsavan to visit the Plain of Jars, a group of sites containing thousands of massive stone jars which are the remnants of an ancient and almost entirely mysterious culture. This area of Laos is also still heavily blanketed with unexploded ordnance (UXO in the lingo), the remnants of not-so-ancient aerial bombardment by the U.S.A. The reminders are everywhere; the lobby of my guest house has a display case filled with bomb casings and mortar shells and the like. Plus, I just had a quick beer in a bar named”Craters.”

Reports of tomorrow’s excursion, as well as photos and stories from Luang Prabang and the Mekong in the next day or two.

I just arrived in Luang Prabang, Laos Luang Prabang after a two-day slow boat ride down the Mekong. This was not as romantic as it sounds (if that indeed sounded romantic to you); unfortunately it was more like an episode of Road Rules, Apocalypse Now edition. This after a couple of days of traveling to get to the Laos border so have been constantly on the move. I’m going to stay put in Luang Prabang (a beautiful colonial town) and rest up for a few days and eat many French-inspired baguette sandwiches, about which I shall dutifully report.