A Short Venture Into Lao

Holy smoke! Smoke smoke smoke! I can't even see across the Mekong which is 100 m wide! Agricultural slash and burn is smogging this city! It's muggier and more humid and I need another shower already. The longtails on the Mekong are using lights! It's 5:15 in the afternoon, sunset isn't for another hour and a half! It's so hazy I feel like I'm stumbling through a drug trip. I write this after 10 short days in Lao, and I want to tell you guys what my experience was with the three different cities I was in.

The current one, (smokey Luang Phabang) is a UNESCO World Heritage city, with small brick lanes and alley ways of families - kids playing, women grilling chicken and men riding up on motorbikes. Hazy market stalls in every glance selling mahjong sets, opium pipes, ancient coins, Hmong silver, handwoven silks, of Lao sandwiches, stir-frys, and shakes. Coffee and pastry shops lining main street with wooden chairs and tables on the terraces. Lao used to be a French colony and that is still represented in the food. Lattes and baguettes everywhere. The most beautiful waterfall I've ever seen in my life. Wine bars! Old wrinkled women selling birds in cages and families (women with three children) setting up their stalls. Two dark skinned Lao girls selling Hello Kitty helium balloons to overjoyed pigtailed kids. Since it's a World Heritage Site, everything must close down at 2300 - bars included - which means there are a lot less drunk people - or people drinking to get drunk, and the town is quiet at night instead of thumping loud disco music. Twice I've returned to my guesthouse around midnight and the front gate and doors were locked, with the front desk boy asleep on a mattress behind the desk on the floor and huge pink mosquito net strung across the room. How charming - I love it here!

The capital city, Vientianne, has the same coffee and pastry shops but without the charm. Dirty guesthouses but a wide variety of cuisine. Nothing to sight-see but bulldozers running along the dried up bank of the Mekong. What do they do in the wet season? Mostly I was here for a visa (the Thai embassy is here). There is a 3 storied mall with a crowd of goldsmiths pounding, burning and cooling small trinkets into toothpicks of gold outside. So much French food around! Who would have thought I'd be eating ratatouille and salmon rillette, all after a sweaty cramped 12 hour bus ride where I was cuddled by the drunk guy next to me? I thought Asia was all about tea, but here it's coffee - Lao coffee, latte, and the ever popular NesCafe - with sugar and Carnation goodstart. This city is the site of the most amazing sauna I have ever been in. I now regard the herbal sauna as almost a holy experience, bringing me to the depths of my consciousness and leaving me dazed and peaceful. When I open the door to step inside, I push aside a heavy, drenched curtain keeping the steam in, and immediately I start to cough because the steam is so thick. Not only thick, but fragrant. Like walking into a pot of chai. After 15 minutes my breathing becomes very labored. In between showers and sauna sessions, I am served a hot, bitter red tea. Men and women are separated, and while I only saw local women, I did see two Western men visiting the sauna. The women were all rubbing their skin with a lightening solution - some were even homemade from tamarind, milk, and honey. I have never sweat so much in my life I kid you not. The YMCA sauna has absolutely nothing on this place.

Babylon, Sin City, Gomorrah, or Vang Vieng. I felt like Ulysses with the Lotus Eaters, you can't leave once you arrive, you are gravitationally held in an apathetic emotionally dulled limbo of no ambition and a desire to get more fucked up. There really are a few things to do here besides party, but the town sapped my enthusiasm by surrounding me with pretentious zombies high on the power of their money, behaving badly because no one is frowning upon them here (Lao people expect Westerners to be assholes). The scenery was beautiful, huge mountains straining up in pillars of rock hovering over the town, but I couldn't separate myself from the debauchery and it made me sick. I really didn't like Vang Vieng and I wouldn't want to go back there.

All in all, the beer is cheap and good in Lao, they have delicious local coffee, the people are friendly and speak Thai (whew!), the landscape is probably the most beautiful I've ever seen. It's just a tiny bit more expensive than Thailand, and they accept US dollars, Thai baht, or Lao kip. When I returned to my guesthouse today around 5 pm, the front desk boy was letting his friends play FIFA on his Xbox or Playstation in the lobby. How endearing is that? A bunch of teenage boys greeting me at my guesthouse by jumping up to help me open the fridge. How sweet. I'm sad I didn't get to spend more time in Lao but I made my choice of what I want to do next and I'm very excited for it. I'm going to the south of Thailand (think beaches) to do a 10 day Anapanasati meditation retreat at Wat Suanmokkh. I hope I learn how to clear this mind and find some inner peace, wish me luck... woo hoo!!!!!