May 13, 2001

Southern Laos

Sa bai dee, all! This chapter comes to you from a rather unexpected place, or at least it certainly wasn't intended at the beginning of the trip. I'm currently in Kyoto, Japan, spending time with a good Missoula friend and fellow-Euro Brendan Magone. We're champing at the bit here waiting impatiently for the arrival of the last member of the soon-to-be Japan musketeers, Porter Hammitt. Once he gets here, we're gonna inflict some serious damage on the social scene! But in a sensitive and environmentally friendly manner, of course. I'll have to save the details of those adventures for the next issue of this comic strip, though. This one is devoted to Laos and Thailand (again?).

And in the spirit of having been away for 8 months and getting to spend my birthday bored and alone (due to stupid travel arrangements), here's my stab at The Top Ten Ways To Tell You've Been On The Road Too Long:

10. A new underwear purchase is an event worth celebrating with a beer. Or 7.

9. You consider it preposterous to spend more than $4 on a hotel room.

8. You measure the distance you've traveled by the number of visa stamps in your passport.

7. You'll watch (and enjoy) an animated Disney movie at the theatre just 'cause it's more western than anything else available at the time.

6. KFC becomes appetizing.

5. You will walk a long way for a decent cup of coffee, even though you know its quality will invariably be inversely proportional to the distance you walk. (Nuke Nescafe!!!)

4. You can have an interesting and fulfilling conversation with a non-English speaking gutter-bum.

3. Germans are funny and entertaining.

2. Karaoke is cool!

And the number one way to tell you've been on the road too long is:

1. Prostitution becomes more than a curiosity.

(And a couple of extra: The algae waving gently in the bottom of your water bottle now looks cool. And cheerful happy people at the wrong time (like during daylight hours) can make you want to pull their ears off.)

In the last email I showed pictures of and briefly wrote about a fellow-cyclist I'd met and hooked up with for a while in Laos. What I failed to mention was that this guy was actually Joe Lemire, a bike racer from Montana who I knew fairly well, and who was ALSO travelling around Asia by bike, unbeknownst to me (or just about anybody else, for that matter). I didn't identify him 'cause I wanted people who knew him to be as surprised as I was to see him. When we saw each other I'd only been in Louang Prabang for a couple of days. I was hanging out at an outdoor cafe there with Tory and she was telling me about this OTHER Montanan she'd met on a bike the day before. Literally, as she was in the process of describing him (I knew I'd at least know the guy by face - the Montana bike racing scene ain't exactly huge), he rode past us, water pistol in hand and familiar happy grin on his face! One cool reunion later and I now had an awesome new riding partner for the next few days.

After our adventures together in Louang Prabang, we had a great time hanging out and riding together to Vientiane, spending long hours in the saddle (and on the roadside fixing multiple punctures) yapping away about anything and everything. Other travelers may have their problems but only bikies can truly whine like little girls about terrible road conditions and the intense sun. And believe me, I spent a good bit of time whining! Joe hates me now, I'm sure. He and I parted ways in Vientiane, him to head back north and me going further south, both of us thinking we MIGHT be able to arrange a rendezvous somewhere down the road. But seeing as how SE Asia has this space-time relativity thing going that stretches time, shrinks distance, and makes dried squid appetizing, I remet Joe again (unplanned, of course) in Bangkok 3 weeks later. Same scenario: outdoor cafe, I'm sitting there eating, Joe rides by, I knock him off the bike and demand the money he borrowed from me. You know the story.

Southern Laos: South of Savannakhet, the main highway is now under construction - completion time scheduled for sometime just before the entire population rises up in disgust. Or when some other sucker country feels sympathetic and ponies up the cash necessary to finish it - whichever comes first. The road runs near the Mekong river and as you make your way south, it rapidly turns to graded crap. What sections that HAD been completed so far were blocked off by tree trunks laid across them, obviously in an attempt to prevent the shiny new road from getting dirty by such a disagreeable event as a vehicle actually using it. I felt it was my duty as an American to ignore each barrier, and I hopped over them whenever they were low enough. My own personal road, all to myself.

A story I heard that illustrates my favorite American tendency ("you can't tell me what to do!"), and how fundamentally different seemingly similar western countries can be, is the following, though I'm not sure how true it is: A while back some museum in Canada decided to run a social experiment and constructed a hallway with a line painted down the middle of the floor. At the entrance to the hallway were instructions to walk through it without deviating from the line. The results of the study showed that Canadians would tend to toe the line (both literally and figuratively?) while Americans would do anything but!

I actually performed my own scientific study in Laos at one point, though on the local food, not people. In major towns (any gathering of buildings that actually contains an intersection), the long distance buses would stop long enough to allow the passengers to overheat, and the street hawkers to rush them en masse and thrust hot food (such as barbecued buzzard and skewered barbecued eggs) through the windows at them. On the only bus ride I took in the south I decided to try the eggs, figuring if f nothing else, maybe I'd learn: 1) how you skewer a raw egg for cooking without breaking at least 7 for each one you actually get on the stick, and 2) why you wouldn't just boil 'em like the rest of the world. Result? My study left me with the realizations that, not only did I still not know how they managed the skewering biz, but that while doing it they also managed to mysteriously replace the egg inside with spiced foam rubber! Amazing feats by an amazing people, for sure. A bonus result of my study (not realized until 4 hours later) was the sudden appearance of stomach cramps and the runs, leaving me thinking that from now on I'd leave the scientific studies to the REAL eggheads.

In the south of the country, to the east of the main road (just as the surface starts to get consistently decent) lies the Bolaven Plateau, a huge tabletop over 100km wide and containing a couple of major towns and several villages. I decided to get off the beaten track and check it out, spending 3 days circling around behind it before climbing up to it from the backside. The scenery in this part of the country was stunning: steeply plunging hillsides, hardwood rainforests made almost impenetrable by thick vines and brush, and beautiful clear streams and a couple of rivers. And the red red dirt roads from hell, of course. Since not a huge number of folk visit Laos, and since even less people consider doing it by bike, the guidebooks are crap when it comes to advice for the best cycling routes. Even fellow travelers aren't much better, since they mostly stick to the buses on the main roads. So I rode the plateau region based solely on the decision to head for areas of more contour lines on the map. Haven't had enough of the climbing yet, I guess.

What both the contour lines and guidebook failed to tell me was that, approaching the plateau from the front gave you 10 km of hard climbing on smooth asphalt and then level the rest of the way, while approaching from the rear (my chosen route) presented you with over 50 km of steady climbing while trying to balance on fist-sized rocks. Just a small detail to a mapmaker or truck-riding travel writer, I suppose. Not fun for me. Especially as I'd frittered away a good bit of needed daylight earlier on by doing some nude sunbathing at the first great deserted river I passed. But then this is why I do this by bike in the first place: the opportunity to do things impossible for the average traveler in beautiful areas they'll never see. (I still sometimes downplay my experience on the bike to folks I meet on the road, hoping to at least postpone the inevitable future onslaught of tourists.)

Finally arriving in town after dark, exhausted and hungry, I slumped down in the first available cafe and scarfed a fried rice dinner, only to be screwed on prices by the cafe owner for the FIRST time in Laos. Aaagh! Why does this always happen at the worst times!?! However, this disappointment was more than made up for by the wonderfully comfortable local guesthouse with its great staff. So great, in fact, that the next day one of the owners spent 6 hours with a Dutch tourist after she had her Walkman, helping her file a police report and trying to track down the thief. All because he was worried tourists would come to associate Laos with problems. According to him, it was the first such incident reported to the police in over 3 years in that town! Man, I love this country.

This was also the guesthouse where I met and spent a good bit of time talking to (well, ok, mostly listening to) a Swiss guy involved in forest conservation in the area. Fighting a tough battle, he's trying to teach reforestation as well as conservation to the villagers and local officials, all the while major government officials are getting fat by knocking down the hardwoods around their heads as fast as they can ship them out. This despite the fact that there exists government quotas on the max amount of wood that can be cut annually in each area. These rules are strictly enforced, at least until the government cutters arrive to take what the big guys want. Incredible. Just down the road from the town was a 20 ton bridge that had recently buckled and collapsed under the weight of what was estimated to be a 50 ton truckload of logs being taken out. Some of these things were 4 feet in diameter! A day after the accident the logs were long gone, but the bridge was still down (and will be for a while, I think) while a line of people was busy transferring their produce or belongings from full vehicles on one side to waiting empty ones on the other. Hey, the big bossman's gotta build his house and fatten his bank account.

I passed a couple of logging trucks on the road away from there, slowly grinding up a short hill, and gave 'em a dirty look as I passed by. That'll teach 'em! Of course, not 5 km later I was more than happy to use one for a free tow and I grabbed onto the back as it passed, spending the time trading jokes and taking pictures with the workers riding the load. (A week later when I crossed the border into Thailand, I passed a line of 26 trucks, all fully loaded with raw logs and cut timber, headed out of Laos. More than likely, all will have documentation 'proving' that they're legally cut (some carry false papers showing that they actually originated in Cambodia and are just passing through). Somebody is getting RICH here and it ain't all the wonderful villagers I've been meeting.

In one of the little towns, while in the market looking at tribal textiles (beautiful handwoven rugs and table coverings that took 20 or so hours to make selling for $3-5), I met Chattaphone, a young guy working for the government-owned national tourism magazine (2000 tourism slogan: "Try our improved forest hikes - now with 50% less trees in your way!") who invited me back to his place for dinner. As is usually the case in this country, I'm quickly learning, this invitation was more than enough reason to break out the liquor, with shots passed around ceremonially at regular intervals. Interesting guy, he knew enough English for us to carry on a decent conversation, but not enough to realize the English meaning of his nickname 'Rat'!

During dinner (barbecued pork and fish, eaten by hand with sticky rice and spicy bean salad and cooked and served by his nephew/slave), his brother and a friend joined us. The brother is a doctor with Medecines sans Frontieres and speaks decent French but not much English. Since my French is limited to the more important phrases (such as "voolay voo cooshay avec moi?" - one I didn't particularly feel like trying out on him), it made for interesting dinner conversation. Much translation was needed all 'round, at least until the magical translating properties of the whiskey kicked in. It's amazing how well it works, though I gotta admit it's probably facilitated more by our tendency when drunk to stick to such lofty subjects as soccer, women and 'more whiskey, dude'! At the end of the meal, I learned the Asian way to indicate to your guests that it's getting time to leave : 'Do you wanna go into town and chase women with us? No? Ok, then you go home now.' I like this! No chance whatsoever of overstaying your welcome.

But sure as the sun rises in the west here (at least that's what my damn internal compass has been telling me for 3 months - must be all the heavy metals in the drinking water), I ran into Rat a few days later in another town. My brain must have been stuck in first then - how many times in Laos do you have to hear someone shouting 'Williams! WILLIAMS!' before you realize that its probably for you? Not too many Laos guys named Williams around here. (But more than a few named Rat, I guess! :-) This time we stuck to beer and he left early to go and find a Thai prostitute, leaving me alone in the company of the first german Swiss I've ever met with a good sense of humor. Good time...

Laos, in an exit summary, is fascinating, beautiful, and amazingly friendly (especially considering how much ordinance we dropped on them during the Vietnam war - and why is it called the Vietnam war when it involved 3 Asian countries and at least 2 western ones? At least we had enough sense not to call our most recent one the Iraq war.). But it was also quite tiring for me, both physically and emotionally. I didn't realize how much the fatigue was building up until I started feeling tired all day long every day, despite frequent days off. And I was also getting irritable with having to translate, use baby-English, interpret new gestures and body language, etc - all the things that are enjoyable parts of the whole experience but take extra energy to appreciate.

Even interactions with other westerners who spoke pretty good English was getting tiring. You just don't realize how much of your normal speech is slang or idiomatic expressions until you're speaking to, say, an english-speaking Dutch or German. Suddenly American and English become quite different languages! I wanted people around me who wouldn't go "huh?" when I said "Man, I'm wasted - I just wanna kick back with a cold one and veg the rest of the day". And the quirks or behavior of locals that you just don't understand can be downright frustrating sometimes. In Malaysia it became a running joke between Danny and I that the next time some well-meaning but empty-headed tourist said "oh, its just cultural differences" in response to our bitching, we'd pop 'em one and then holler "No! It's NOT just a cultural difference - there are assholes HERE, too!" And the superficial and occasionally just plain wrong guidebook! If I meet the author on the road anytime soon, I'm gonna do future travelers a favor and shove him into a ditch He writes like he has geriatric tour bus vacationers in mind, which doesn't quite work for Laos.

So obviously it's getting time for a good long break. As my Laos visa had almost expired and with a week to go until my flight to Japan, I decided to take a few days off on the beach in Thailand and recuperate a bit. That and the week in Japan with friends should leave me in a much better state of mind. With the sunny sand in my mind as the dangling carrot, I headed for the border, stopping only long enough to grab the national breakfast of Laos. A legacy of the French occupation, it's a fresh toasted baguette with liver pate and pickled vegetables. As the vendor was making it I looked into the pot containing the pate, and vowed to never again be quite so curious. A little bit down the road after finishing the sandwich I was actually relieved to start feeling slightly queasy. I'd have been worried if my stomach HADN'T protested - it would've made me think it wasn't functioning properly.

Crossing into Thailand, the whole procedure was so lax, I was in the process of getting my Thai visa when I realized I hadn't been stamped OUT of Laos yet. I quizzed another traveler about it, and he told me about the time last year when he did the same thing. On his return back to Laos a year later, the customs guys said "you officially never left the country - you owe $500 for overstaying your original visa for a year before we'll let you back in". !!??!!! Maybe I'll backtrack a bit and get stamped out - I wanna return here sometime!

In eastern Thailand I headed to the island of Ko Chang to hit the beaches and had a nice few days staying at the Happy Hut, a little group of bungalows run by some Thai rastafarians. Though the hills were brutal by bike I endured them to get to the far end of the island and to as much peace and relaxing quiet as possible. There I ran into, of course, another traveler I'd already met and spent a bit of time with in Laos. Small world example #58. Maybe I'm following the wrong path, if I'm seeing all the same people...? Anyway, I kept myself amused for those few days by lounging in the hammock, sleeping day and night, reading 3 books at once, and playing with their young pet monkey. Funny little guy, his best friend was a small hairy dog, and he had the hyperactive inquisitiveness of a 5 year old on four cups of coffee. At one point the owner's 10 yr old son decided to feed it some Coca-cola. Yeah! Sugar and caffeine in a baby monkey - he was literally swinging from the rafters for an hour. Even caught the little guy masturbating at one point! Early starter, I guess...

Though the island is obviously starting to suffer under the deluge of tourists, building continues at a rapid pace. The little coast road will soon encircle the whole (pretty small) island, and bungalows are already sprouting up in more remote areas in anticipation of its completion. The bay where I stayed used to be coral, but has died off due to water pollution and erosion piling silt into it. And you'd think that a civilization or community only a generation removed from the days of living off the land would be more conscious about trying to preserve it. Not so. The owners of our place routinely killed off any wildlife that happened to enter the area, including multiple snakes that were more than likely nonpoisonous. But they didn't know. Hell, his methods for determining whether or not a snake was dangerous was "fast snake-bad, green snake-ok" (guess he never ran into the Green Tree Viper, a native of Thailand). And he believed that placing a wet banana leaf on the back of a moving boa would cause it to freeze. I'd hoped that the local folklore would be a tad more accurate than that. Before you know it, they'll be believing that a glass of red wine a day helps prevent heart attacks or something equally preposterous!

Back in Bhangkok, I spent a day sorting out gear and hotel reservations for my return from Japan. Mom is coming out to Thailand to visit me and experience someplace different for 10 days! This should be mucho cool - I get to have a little more fun here before moving on, and make myself look good as the resident expert on Thailand at the same time ("Don't worry, Mom. The green rice is fine!"). And since my birthday was spent travelling from Ko Chang to Bangkok in order to give myself time to do some errands, I'll celebrate it more fully with Brendan and Porter in Japan! Domo arigato, Mister Roboto! (That and seppuku being the only Japanese words I know yet - that'll impress the ladies!)

Mark

Mayflies - millions of them carpeted the ground under street lights in Savannakhet to a depth of 1 inch. Their wings sounded like a strong breeze through leaves, and the air smelled mildly of fish!	Laos bicycle salesmen - if you think she's leaning now, wait until the wind blows!
Young Lao beauty at a roadside noodle stand.	Three of the ladies who rush buses to sell 'em food. (Like skewered eggs.) The one on the left was a regular model, she wanted to pose for so many pictures.
Bridge over a small river and the now defunct (and sunk) ferry on the other side.	Tribesman and his son fishing and hunting on the river. This was the sticks!
The main road up the back side of the Bolaven plateau.	Resting by a river, getting ready to tackle the next 40km of rocky trail.The hat is great, if you can keep it on your head. I couldn't.