- Dusty.
Also you could go with Rural. Or Cliffy.
I can’t believe I’ve been here twenty days now, without writing. It just all piled up on me, and the days kept rolling by in a red-brown dirt-blown haze, and it just never happened. I guess the country itself hasn’t excited to me the sorts of extremes that lend themselves to narration. That’s certainly the case.
It’s lovely here, but underdeveloped in the sort of way that lets the place just tick by outside the bus, without sneaking under my skin and making me tingle, or even itch.
It is, however, the most intense landscape I think I’ve ever seen. Limestone, maaaan. What a trip! It’s pretty surreal, all sky-high cliffs and carving rivers and stalactites dangling from the walls. THAT’S pretty neat. Also helpfully full of caves to go live in when the U.S. bombs the hell out of you for no good reason except that you might be supplying your neighboring ‘Nam with, like, stuff. Can’t have that, now can we?! Pfft. Poor Laos. There are, like, giant bombs all over the place, they use them as decor and lanterns in bars. They all say Made in USA. It’s kind of impossible to keep thinking of us as the good guys in these places.
So Vientiane was first – the teensiest capital city I have ever seen. It’s like… Abbotsford. Basically. It’s lovely, and we liked it there, and we ate a lot of really good soup by the riverside. But there wasn’t really much to see – just the silliest little museum EVAR, and a half-finished Arch monument with an official sign on it letting you know that they agree that it’s sort of a giant concrete eyesore. The museum had many large dioramas that looked like they were made by sixth graders with plaster and finger paint. I kept expecting somebody to come out and pour baking soda and vinegar into one of them to “make the volcano erupt” Also a lot of guns. “These were the guns used by the Hero _____ ______ to Fight The Imperialist Invaders”. and “These were the guns used by the Imperialist Invaders against the peaceful citizens of ____ ____.” That was pretty much it.
Then Vang Vieng – which was actually sort of awesome, even though it’s COMPLETELY been taken over by college boys in Beer Lao wife-beaters and bikini girls ignoring the big signs everywhere telling you that it’s culturally innapropriate in the extreme to walk around in your bikini. It’s a few dusty streets full of bars playing Family Guy and Friends on repeat, 24 hours a day, shops selling bathing suits and dry-bags, and mattressy patios on stilts hanging out over the green river that runs past town.
The river is the thing. The Nam Song. And you tube on it. It’s actually completely lovely, despite the drunken college party-fest that it’s a part of. It just costs you six or seven dollars, and they give you a big yellow tube and drive you out of town. You then spend 2 to X number of hours floating back to town…. the X relates to how many of the bars you stop at along the way. Most of them are confined to the first hundred yards of the river. There are seven or eight of them crammed together, and the staff bombard you with plastic bottles full of water attached to ropes, so that if you want to go to their bar you just hang on to the rope and they drag you in. It’s a very efficient system, but it seemed to me that they were mostly enjoying lobbing heavy projectiles within inches of my head… as they continued this lobbing after it was very clear that I had passed their bar up and was no longer a potential customer. The grins on their faces had a vague twinkle of Evil and Revenge as thick wet ropes thwacked across my head and bottles hurtled past.
However: The river is clear and green and the precisely the sort of soft, delightfully cool temperature you want around your body on a scorching hot day. The jungle hillsides are lovely. And once you’ve run that first gauntlet, the seven kinds of cacophonous top 40 rock music fade away and the remaining bars are scattered, quiet, and lovely.
We did this three days running. We even stayed an extra day so we could do it that third time. It was just too lovely, too cool, too nice a way to spend your day. We even drank some Buckets. (Mark of the college travel scene in Asia: a glass or a bottle is not enough, they must serve you your booze by the bucket. )
From there to Luam Prabang, which is a UNESCO world heritage site, and deserves it. It’s gorgeous. Also tiny. Lots of french architecture and bread. And so many old white people it boggles the mind. The main drag in LP could be somewhere in San Fran, you wouldn’t know the difference. And the kind of old white people who you just KNOW aren’t BUSING there. Good god no. They’ve got their fanny packs and six inches of ankle showing above their sock-and-sandal feet. They get driven around on these lux -style tuk-tuks, with wooden railings and forward-facing bench seats, ooing and ahhing out the sides and clicking their cameras, loudly demanding absurd specificity from Lao servers. Freddy and I were sent into fits one day by an old british man behind us at breakfast one day, who went on and on, in the firmest and most patronizing of tones, about how he wanted his fried eggs “hard, but not too hard, you understand? Hard? But not TOOO hard. Still a BIT SOFT, yes? You understand me? Yes?” – to two separate staff members. For a period of no less than four minutes.
Y’know, there’s a THING. Where, y’know, you’re in a foreign land. And these people – being LAOS- have merely a rudimentary grasp of your language. And be grateful for it, too, because what if you were Dutch? You think they speak any Dutch? No, they have the English basics, some more firmly than others. Beer Laos. They know that one. Soup, also, or Fried, or Eggs, or the very very basic things represented on the English menu you are lucky to have. You start getting all finicky and detailed in your ordering and it looks to me like you’ve forgotten where you are, thank you very much. You order the eggs and you’re lucky to have ‘em, and if you don’t like the way they come you go somewhere else tomorrow. And get over it, by god.
Anyways, we stayed there a number of days and liked it. There was nice coffee and good sandwiches and clear air.
And then… the last five days. Six, I guess. Have been a litany of places, one day, maybe two, a boat ride, another boat ride, a night under a mosquito net, another boat ride in the morning. I keep getting all the names mixed up, the mish mash of random syllables that mean nothing to me. From Luam Prabang. to Nong Khiaw, sitting in the back of a truck on a bench for six hours. Two nights there, then a crammed-like-sardines boat ride two hours upriver in a low-slung wooden long boat with a claustrophobic roof that made me very nervous, as the lawnmower motor, large rapids and thirty passengers made capsizing seem like a real possibility. Freddy tells me after he’d immediately run through the “how he would save me” scenarios. I admit, I had only run through “how I would save myself”. (terrible? I hope not, I have great faith in his ability to take care of himself, and an awareness of the likelihood that he would immediately concern himself with me – though hopefully not at his own expense. Therefore, if I take care of myself quickly he needn’t look to me at the detriment of his own safety. See?)
Then a night in Muang Ngoi Neua, a village with electricity only from 5 pm to 10 pm. We took a boat trip to a village where the french ladies who came with us embarrassed us most completely with more Finicky Detailed Ordering. This, in a setting most eminently rural, a cluster of huts in the dust on a hillside, half-naked children running barefoot, staring at us, no electricity or plumbing whatsoever. And these women seemed to think they were somewhere that could offer you more options than “veg-e-ta-ble…. wi rii (rice)…. or noo-dle soup” It was so bad I had to walk away, and look at the weaving looms and silks the women were working with under their stilty ramshackle huts. So rad, though! Rainbow silks winding onto spinning wheels made of sticks, loom contraptions made also of sticks, houses made of larger sticks. And you expect a widely varied menu and that these men care that you already had soup today? Come the fuck on!
We stayed up late that night with a pile of random folks, including some members of a cool Swedish family I’d met hanging outside a cave the day before. We had found wild ripe grapefruits and eaten them while sitting on big jungle leaves in an old rice field. Which was pretty awesome. We found out that the boat out of there only leaves when there’s enough people, and it was leaving the next morning and so who knows when the next one would be, so we got up early – again – and left town right away.
To a place that was supposed to be nice enough. Muang Kuah. Except… it was a HOLE. Just, jesus, an absolute HOLE. The first guesthouse we looked at had a naked woman tiled onto the bathroom wall. WAY weird. the whole place was dingy, rocky, sooty, smelly. And there wasn’t even anything THERE… to make it nice. No sweet bungalows, no nice market, no electricity half the time. No internet. And we were supposed to be killing five days there before our Vietnam visas kick in and let us cross the border. We’d only been there a few hours when we decided that we had to leave. So next morning, we got up and caught the 8:30 bus out to Oudomxaia, a BIG lackluster town of 88 thousand, which at least would have a decent place to stay, some decent places to eat, and decent internet. I mean, if we have to kill five days, I want at LEAST a decent place to do it in… not what is probably the ugliest, least-appealing town I’ve spent any time in whatsoever.
So here we are. Eating yummy Chinese food (lots of Chinese in this town, we found a place that makes the most UNBELIEVABLE sweet and sour crispy chicken with roast garlic and peppers) and late-night pringles while watching silly movies on the tv in our room. I mean, if you’re GOING to kill five days.
Really I just can’t wait for Vietnam.
Like last time, after a month in Cambodia… I’m tired of dirt roads. I’m excited about lovely, tidy markets and a bit of civilization. A more well-developed infrastructure, more history, more…. life.
And like last time, I find myself… unconnected to the people, and the culture, here. Maybe because I don’t care about a homestay. Don’t want to live uncomfortably in somebody else’s family home, feeling extremely weird about the whole thing. Maybe because I just don’t find connection to a culture so focused on speaking softly, not displaying emotion, affection, or body parts. Being polite in the face of being screwed.
I like passion. And zazz. And not taking things seriously. I like wicked humor and places that aren’t rife with Taboo. I like putting my feet on things.
I’m stoked for Vietnam. There’s so much more there I loved, last time. But I don’t belong here. And I never will.
