Photos: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2058269&l=b7688&id=1101094
Turns out all I needed to feel I was back in the developing world was a nice long ride on a public bus. After spending a couple hours in a fancy Wi-Fi café in Luang Prabang, I headed down to the bus station, and back into non-gentrified Laos. I bought a ticket for a night bus to Vientiane; it left at 7pm (the 6pm was full) and took twelve hours, so by my estimation that would put me into the capital in time to get to the Cambodian Embassy right when it opened to drop off my visa application.
This bus was unlike anything I’d seen since India. The top of the bus was loaded with boxes of food, huge brown sacks of God knows what, and even several motorbikes. The inside of the bus was a disaster: the seats were falling apart, all the windows were either stuck open or stuck closed, and the whole thing smelled like rat feces.
We boarded the bus, and just when I thought the thing was packed full, the bus driver started filling the aisle with stools. By the time we left, every seat was filled and the aisles were overflowing with sweaty bodies.
It would be an understatement to say that the road to Vientiane was curvy. It’s more accurate to say that I don’t think we drove more than 30 seconds at any point without taking a sharp curve one direction or the other. An hour into the ride, the girl next to me wretched out the window. I nearly followed suit.
The road was so curvy and the bus driver was so crazy that I literally had to hold myself in my seat to keep from falling into the aisle. And when you have to hold yourself in your seat, you can forget about sleeping. I think I dozed for about 30 minutes the entire ride, and I paid for the nap by being tossed into the aisle. So much for sleeping on the night bus.
We pulled into the Vientiane bus station, and I thought it looked rather dark for 7am. That's because it was 4am. Somehow we had arrived three hours early. I guess the bus driver could have taken those curves a bit slower.
But I really shouldn’t have been too surprised—after all, the rule of bus arrivals held true: the only buses that arrive early are the ones that you don’t want to arrive early. What was I supposed to do at 4am in Vientiane?
I tried napping in a chair at the bus station, but soon a swarm of mosquitoes encircled my head, and besides the back of the chair wasn’t high enough to allow for any real sleep. So I got a tuk tuk to the city center and started looking for a guest house, but every one of the ten I checked was either full or locked for the night.
I finally found a hotel that had a sofa on its front porch; I collapsed on it and went to sleep. But I woke up 20 minutes later with mosquitoes buzzing around my ears and fresh patches of bites on my arms, legs, and neck.
Giving up on sleep for the night, I walked 3km out of the town center to the Cambodian Embassy and planted myself outside the locked gate. At this point it was 5:30, which meant I only had to sit and wait for two and a half hours before the place opened. Damned overnight buses.
I dropped off my visa application and passport and told the man I’d return Friday to pick it up, although it would be ready for pickup as soon as tomorrow morning. Then I headed back to the bus station to get a bus back north to Vang Vieng.
I arrived at Vang Vieng at 1pm, exhausted. I wandered around town for a bit looking a guest house, and finally a man who spoke excellent English approached me and asked if I wanted a room with a private bathroom for 40,000 kip (~$4). That sounded ok to me.
It turns out the man, Mr. Phai, was quite an interesting guy. He had gone to school for five years to become an English teacher, and now he taught English to kids in Vang Vieng—and got paid $30 a month. He had borrowed money to open the guesthouse, and now it provided him with a crucial supplementary income. His family lived in a small hut outside the guesthouse.
Vang Vieng, unlike Luang Prabang, has very little to offer in the way of culture; travelers stop here for the many outdoor activities that the area has to offer. Set on the banks of the Song River and surrounded by limestone cliffs, Vang Vieng and its environs allow for kayaking, tubing, rock climbing, trekking, and caving. I signed up for a caving and tubing trip for the following day with a few other people from my guest house.
I ate some Lao food for lunch—noodles with vegetables and chicken. Though nothing I ate was objectionable, Lao food continues to consistently underperform Thai food.
I took a much-needed nap and had an even more necessary shower and shave, and then, feeling refreshed, I walked into the center of town looking for some nocturnal action. What I found shocked me. Every single restaurant in town had a TV, and on that TV every single restaurant was playing reruns of Friends. There were no exceptions to this rule; no restaurants lacked a TV, and no restaurant was playing something other than Friends. Why Friends? If it were Seinfeld, maybe I’d have some sympathy, but Friends?
I closed my eyes and pointed and sat down at one of the restaurant clones. Sick of Lao food, I decided to order pizza and beer. If I was going to sit here and watch Friends, I was going to get drunk doing it.
Beer is one of the pleasures of a visit to Laos. Beerlao, the only brand that matters, is sold everywhere, and it’s quite good, and it’s dirt cheap. A 650mL (nearly 24 ounces) bottle of Beerlao ordered in a restaurant or bar costs between 8000 and 10,000 kip—so you’re getting the equivalent of two cans of beer for less than a dollar.
Four episodes of Friends, three bottles of beer, and one Hawaiian pizza later, I was actually enjoying myself. Sure, Friends is awful, but I was beginning to appreciate its stupidity. But was I going to sit here and do this for the rest of the night? Everyone else at the restaurant showed no signs of budging, that’s for sure. Was this really the best nightlife Vang Vieng had to offer?
As if reading my thoughts, two Irish kids walked into the restaurant, looked at me, and said, “You don’t want to be here.”
“Uh, what?” I said, totally unprepared for the interaction.
“You don’t really want to spend your whole night watching Friends, do you? Come with us. We’re going to a party on an island in the river.”
Within seconds I was on my feet, ready to go. Marcus and Jack, my Irish saviors, laughed at my enthusiasm.
“You really didn’t want to be here, did you?” Jack chuckled. “Guess we picked the right guy.”
Five minutes later we were walking across the river on a bamboo bridge, and what we found on the other side was like another dimension compared to the Friends restaurants in town. Two bonfires blazed in the center of the island, and crowded around them were more than a hundred revelers, both Lao and foreign. Music was thumping, Beerlao bottles were more than one to a person, and a cloud of pot smoke hung over the whole scene. Standing there taking it all in, I felt I was observing a cross between a high school keg party and a rave. But however strange and un-Lao this gathering was, I was happy to be there.
We stayed until the party shut down at 1am—apparently the police come and start arresting people if a party goes any later into the night. Supposedly there was an afterparty somewhere in town, but a few of us walked around for half an hour and couldn’t find it, so we just ended up sitting on the side of the road and talking till nearly 4. Of the ten or twelve of us sitting there, we represented something like 7 nationalities on three continents. Sure, the backpacker scene can be lame, but that night I rather enjoyed myself.
The following morning my alarm went off at 8:45, waking me for my caving/tubing trip. But when I staggered outside my room, I realized that it was pouring. I found Mr. Phai, and he told me that we’d have to reschedule the trip for tomorrow.
The only problem was that I was supposed to pick up my passport and Cambodian visa tomorrow, and after tomorrow they’d be closed for the weekend. Not wanting to ditch the tubing trip, I decided to day trip to Vientiane to pick up my passport.
One thing that I experienced the entire time I was in Laos that I really haven’t experienced anywhere else was full buses. Every time I tried to get on a bus in Laos, whether public, express, or VIP, it was full. Apparently this wasn’t much of a problem for other backpackers because they book their tickets in advance. But what’s the fun in that?
So when I got to the patch of tarmac that serves as the Vang Vieng bus station, the 9am bus to Vientiane was full. No problem; I’d take the 10am. Full also. My only option was a sawngthaew—a pickup truck with two benches in the back that’s also common in Thailand.
But the sawngthaew was full, too—or, at least the benches were. My only hope of getting to Vientiane was to ride on the rack that hung off the back of the sawngthaew. So that’s what I did—I stood on the metal rack, prayed that it was fastened securely to the back of the truck, and surfed the four hours into Vientiane. The good news was that I had great panoramic views of the green, hilly landscape. The bad news was that it started to rain on the way, and rain hitting one’s face at 100 km/h feels less like rain and more like tiny pebbles.
We finally arrived in Vientiane and I picked up my passport without problem. I headed back to the bus station for my return trip and was back in Vang Vieng by 7pm.
I walked into town, picked a restaurant that had good Thai food, and sat down for my first real meal of the day. After I’d been sitting there a few minutes, I noticed a Lao girl a few tables over staring at me. I looked over at her, and she just kept staring. A minute later she was walking up to my table.
“You here… alone?” she said.
“Yes…” I replied slowly; was I about to be ambushed?
“You come sit with us?”
I looked over at her table—two Western guys and three Lao girls, including the one who was standing over my table. Uh oh—I was the missing link.
“Ok,” I said, not particularly excited to be chosen for this little gathering. But I had no excuse for not sitting with them—I was sitting by myself watching Friends, after all.
I switched tables and introduced myself to everyone; I was sitting with two Finnish guys, both named Mikel, and three Lao girls, named Nok, Nak, and Dak. I’m not great with names, but this table was a breeze.
Nok, the girl who had recruited me to join the table, continued to stare at my throughout the meal, which was uncomfortable at first and then especially awkward once it came out that she was Mikel #1’s girl. They had met in Vientiane about a week ago, and now she and her friends had come up to Vang Vieng with the Mikels. Apparently, Mikel #2 wasn’t in the Lao girl picture at all. How disappointed he must have been.
We finished dinner and played a few games of pool at a bar across the street, and the situation got more awkward by the minute. Mikel #1 would go to the bathroom, and Nok would walk up to me and put her arms around my waist and look up at me in the most scandalous way I can imagine, all while Mikel #2 stood there and watched. I assumed I’d be punched in the face momentarily, despite the fact that I had done nothing to encourage the advances.
But, strangely enough, the Mikels didn’t seem to care. Nok gradually got more bold and started hanging all over me even when Mikel #1 was standing right beside her. After a while I couldn’t take it anymore and suggested we go across to the island where I had been the previous night. At least there it was dark. Maybe I could run away.
By the time we got to the island it had started raining, so we bought drinks and sat in one of the bungalows that formed a wide circle around the two bonfires. Mikel #2 and Dak went to the bathroom, leaving Mikel #1, Nok, Nak and I sitting in a semicircle staring at each other.
But apparently that wasn’t awkward enough, because a few seconds later Mikel #1 and Nok started making out right in front of us. I gazed off into the distance, pretending not to notice. But a minute later Nok sat up and said, “Switch!” and before I could say anything her tongue was in my mouth.
I said all that stuff before was awkward. Forget all that. This was awkward. I was sitting there being kissed by a guy’s girlfriend (mistress? prostitute?) right in front of his face. I shuddered to imagine the look on Mikel #1’s face. I expected the tongue that was currently in my face to be quickly replaced by a fist.
But when Nok finally stopped mouth-raping me and went back to her seat, Mikel #1 just sat there and grinned. At first he grinned at no one in particular, and then he grinned at me. What kind of twisted party had I gotten mixed up in? I jumped up and headed for the bathroom.
When I came out, I went as far away from the Mikel/Nok bungalow as I could; I found some English kids I had hung out with the previous night and started talking to them. Within a few minutes I had forgotten all about the strange events that had just occurred and was back to having a good time. But just then a small, feminine figure approached from out of the darkness, and before I knew it I was being attacked again. And, as it turns out, Nok is a biter.
This particular assault lasted for about thirty seconds, and then Nok walked away, giving me the filthiest look you can imagine. The British guys were beside themselves; their mouths gaped open, and then they started clapping me on the back and cheering. I assured them that this was nothing to be proud of, and explained the situation.
“Ooo,” one of them said. “That is awkward.”
The next two hours progressed in much the same fashion: enjoyable conversation with the British guys, or some Irish girls, or some Aussies, interspersed with semi-hourly attacks, or attempted attacks, from Nok. By the third or fourth time I was getting good at spotting her from a distance, and I began to ward off the attacks with reasonable success, but that didn’t make it any less awkward.
Finally, just as the party was about to end, she walked up to me and handed me a scrap of paper that had her number written on it. “Call me when you in Vientiane,” she said. I touched my tongue to the back of my swollen lip and smiled. “You bet.”
The following morning I woke up to more rain, but by 9am it had stopped and the caving/tubing trip was on. We took a sawngthaew 10km north of town to a cave called Tham Sang. This cave wasn’t particularly impressive—it was small and contained some uninspiring Buddha images—but a short walk away were two caves, Tham Loup and Tham Hoi, that were far more exciting. Both Loup and Hoi were kilometers deep; we followed them each for about a kilometer, getting a look at classically formed stalactites and stalagmites along the way, as well as labyrinthine passageways and vast, open “rooms.” Both caves were damp and warm, but we actually appreciated the temperature given that it was 60 degrees and drizzly outside.
Next we visited the most exciting cave in the area, Tham Nam. A tributary of the Song River flows out its entrance, and when the water is high enough you can tube in. Despite the fact that it was the dry season, the water was plenty high for tubing, which came as no surprise to me given the whether I’d had so far in Laos.
We reluctantly stripped down to swimsuits, grabbed our tubes, and paddled up the stream; the water was freezing, and combined with the outside air the situation was nearly hypothermic. But none of us was going to give up the chance to tube inside of a cave, so we paddled on.
We followed the stream for about 20 minutes, and then the water got too low for us to clear the bottom, so we ditched the tubes and continued on foot. None of us had brought shoes into the cave, and in the darkness the sharp rocks cut our feet. But the whole experience was fascinating and, despite the fact that thousands had done it before us, we got the sense that we were trekking into the unknown.
After we paddled back out of the cave and hurriedly threw our warm, dry clothes back on, we headed for the Song River, where we’d begin tubing. On the way, the rain picked up and the temperature continued to drop. Hardly tubing weather, but once again we didn’t care.
Tubing the six kilometers back to Vang Vieng took about three hours, including stops at a couple riverside bars. Though no one was in the mood for cold beer, the bars had bonfires lit and we warmed ourselves by the fire before venturing back into the chilly river.
The highlight of the afternoon was the rope swing that one of the bars had built: you climbed a tower about 40 feet high, grabbed a rope, and swung out over the river before dropping down into the water below. Forty feet doesn’t sound high, but when I got up there and prepared to jump off I found myself a bit jittery.
Back in Vang Vieng, I showered, warmed up, and ventured down the main street for my final night in of Vang Vieng nightlife. I ate at the same restaurant I had eaten at the previous night; I figured the chances of Mikel and Nok eating there twice in a row was slim, so it seemed like a safe bet. Sure enough, the odd couple wasn’t there, but I did run into some Swedish girls with whom I had hung out on the tubing trip, and I ended up eating dinner with them.
One of them, Hanna, was blonde, blue-eyed, and boring; I don’t think I spoke more than four words to her the entire meal. The other, Honey (ouch), was dark-haired and dark-skinned, with brilliant green eyes and a personality to match. It turned out she wasn’t really Swedish, which came as no surprise; she was Persian, and had grown up in Iran and California before moving to Sweden with her family. She spoke Farsi, Swedish, and perfect American English, which she claimed came as a result of too many hours in front of the television.
The girls had a massage scheduled for after dinner, so we planned to meet at a bar later that evening. But an hour later when Honey arrived at the bar, Hanna wasn’t in tow; she had gone back to the guesthouse early, which of course was fine with me. That night was the most fun I had in weeks—I met quite a few interesting travelers, and towards the end of the night a Puerto Rican Rastafarian played a live show, capped with a performance of “All Along the Watchtower.” He gave me a high five after the song was over; I was the only one who had known all the words.
I spent much of the evening talking to Honey; we exchanged stories from our travels as well as tales from home. I informed her of my past experience with Persian girls, and she grinned and said, “It’s true, man, Persian girls are crazy.”
But my favorite moment of the night was when an Aussie guy walked up to us and said, “Let me guess—Canada and Canada.”
“Wrong on both,” I said. “America and Sweden.”
“Sweden? You’re from Sweden?” he asked Honey.
“Yup,” she said, apparently unwilling to go into detail.
“Wow. For a Swedish girl you’ve got a really good suntan!”
Eeeeeeee.
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