Monthly Archive for July, 2010

Heart of Darkness

On July 22, 2010 from Laos. 1 Comment

Oh, what a place, what people! What a civilization is this of ours—this godless civilization founded on whiskey, Blackwood’s and the ‘Bonzo’ pictures! God have mercy on us, for all are part of it.
—George Orwell

The farang in Luang Prabang came in two broad varieties. First, the tourists, who found Laos on their itemized Lonely Planet itinerary after the tsunami forced vacationers heading to Thailand to move inland in 2000. These would stroll the colonial graveyard of the city, drink Lào-Láo in Veng Vieng, and head back into Thailand via the Friendship Bridge, with a Third World stamp to liven up their passports, and several complaints about the condition of the Laotian roads burning venemous holes in their mouths from all the retellings.

Second, the travelers, who stopped in Luang Prabang because it’s in the middle of Laos, and who are quick to leave for the country’s fringes: the Four Thousand Islands of the southern Mekong, the backwater towns like Muang Ngoi or Muang Sing or Phongsali, for a backroad motorcycle adventure, for a trek in the jungles around Luang Nam Tha, or to one of the mountainous crossings into Vietnam, at Tay Trang or Nar Maew, where the bus fords rivers and sometimes the passengers get out and pull it uphill by a rope.

The tourist says, “Why don’t you just fly?” and the traveler replies, “Where’s the fun in that?”

I was intent on heading north to one of these towns, the truly rural Muang Ngoi, but as I had to be back in Luang Prabang in four days to pick up a Chinese visa, and as my Dutch and German friends were heading south, and as someone had recommended an organic farm in the same direction—I instead followed them to Vang Vieng.

Remy, Neinke, Lars, and Karol left earlier that day on minibusses. Lars and Karol were in one full of Laotians, who constantly vomited with every twist of the road. At one pit stop Lars noticed that a pig was sticking its nose out of a potato bag in the back of the vehicle. He gave the pig some water, and then the driver noticed it as well, started shouting at the woman who had brought it onboard. Eventually they reached a compromise: the pig could come, but it would have to be tied in its bag to strut on the back of the van, and there dangle for the remaining hours.

I went to the bus station at around ten. There was some matter of no buses leaving until four hours later, I was informed by a company of Welsch I happened to know; and they had tried to arrange a minibus to take them, but the Laotians would not go lower than 950,000 kip. “You mind if I try and talk to them?” I asked. With their permission I crossed the highway to the minibus depot. Ten minutes later I came back, saying, “I got nine-hundred thousand. It’s the best I could do.” Sometimes I make a very good merchant, although I find the business abhorrent.

The first thing to be said about Vang Vieng is that the place was beautiful. On either side of the Nam Song river, high revetments of karst and gloomy jungle shifted in and out of misty curtains, over grand hours of time. The mist floated down the ravines and gullies like some slivered creeper. Behind this cloak, the highest battlements were transformed unto impressions of horrors, a statuary of the devils, the abandoned constructs of angels; and the mist divided, flowing in rivers below the cliffs and behind them, making sky castles of them. This was my first impression, as we approached Vang Vieng from the north.

The small town, with no small measure of tragedy, had become a backpacker town and a center of young debauchery perhaps unrivaled outside of Thailand or Cancun. The principle event was tubing, where tuk-tuk-loads of shirtless farang were bussed a ways upriver and allowed to float down on a wide truck tire tube, stopping along the way at any of the five bars, where strong-armed Laotians pull them in by a thrown rope, and there drinking whiskey and coke out of a little sand-bucket that was an icon of Southeast Asian travelers, and perhaps jumping off one of the high trapeezes or rope swings, where the signs say, “Please buy a drink before you try it,” and then ending up at the Bucket Bar, a platform of drunken dancing surrounded by bungalows of trashed and tangled travelers, a throbbing beat, and buckets of booze for a dollar.

The whole enterprise was ridiculous. The Nam Song was not at all safe in that season, when monsoon rains had washed down flotsam and jetsam into the fast-running water. Not to mention the rampant cases of pinkeye from dirty water, people do die every year. One young farang died when I was there, a backflipper who hit his head and did not come back up. Many tubists also missed the last stop at the Bucket Bar, where the water flowed swiftly between the pylons of a bridge, because they were too drunk to grab at the retrieval lines. One girl floated down a few kilometers before climbing up to the bank and through the woods. She returned to Vang Vieng at five in the morning.

Because of its beauty and danger, adventure tourists also frequent the Nam Song, and this is a sight only a photograph could fully express—a troop of kayakers in adventure gear, in helmets and lifejackets with waterproof cameras tied on and safety protocols memorized, gracefully gliding downstream, and alongside them, and mixing in with their formation, a mob of shirtless drunks collapsed lazily in rough black inner tube, crazy with Lào-Láo, laughing and splashing and likely to fall off their vehicles and drown in the muddy river.

The tubing scene sprang up over only a few years, and in that time it became as extortionary as any mafia. Renting an inner tube, when I was there, did cost about $7, which was more than the price of renting a motorcycle, and also required a $7 deposit, which was returned as long as the tube made it back before five in the afternoon. But so many tubers started around noon, because of their hangovers, and all the bars gave away free shots, and at the end the Bucket Bar was lively as hell, so almost nobody returned their tubes on time. That $14 was a fortune.

The thrifty tuber may wish to buy a personal inner tube, but that was illegal. None of the stores sold them, under a mandate of the Tubing Council. Remy and Lars eventually went to the market, where a Laotian whistled at them and whispered, “Inner tube?” He brought them back into a secret den, full of stacked and deflated flotation devices, where they bought two small tubes for $3 each. They had to conceal the tubes in their trousers for the tuk-tuk ride out to the first bar, because the drivers will not take you if you have your own.

The other scene in Vang Vieng was drugs. Many restaurants had a separate menu with bags of ganja, pot brownies, mushroom pizzas, and opium tea. (It was in fact easier to buy opium in Vang Vieng than to buy an inner tube.) They also showed reruns of either Family Guy or Friends, so let’s get high and watch TV! Now, drugs were very illegal in Laos, and if the police catch someone with possession, the punishment was three months in Laotian prison and a $700 fine—or offer a $300 bribe on the way to the station. Many farang who purchased drugs in Vang Vieng eventually had a local policeman knocking on their door.

When I arrived, my friends were waiting in the bus station. We split a tuk-tuk into town and arranged for rooms at Le Jardin Organique, right on the river. Karol, Lars and I stayed in a bungalow with air-conditioning and television showing some cartoon— “Oh, it is Star Wars,” said Lars, with his clipped Prussian accent, “I like Star Wars.” “I’m a big nerd.” “I love Star Wars.” “Let’s watch. Maybe there will be lasers and explosions.”

It monsooned at six, then we all went to dinner at a little floor-seating place, and then crossed the bridge to the island of the Bucket Bar, where it was raining and debaucherous. Drunk farang danced and groped in the rain on the color-spackled, strobe-lit stage, and at the bar farang operators served buckets of drink, and in the huts around the stage farang were passed out or making out, surrounded by drained buckets. The men all had their shirts off and wore necklaces instead. The women were all drenched and in heat.

We met Luuk and Charles there, who were having a great time. I observed the scene quietly, not drunk enough to join in, nor so straight-laced that I would turn away.

Neinke was not impressed: “This is not my kind of scene,” she said. “I like to dance, but not at a place like this. Ugh. I am—what is the word?—astonished.”

At midnight, a tight-shirted Brit announced that the music would move to the next bar on the Tubing Council’s list. Drunken English girls stumbled towards the his microphone like zombies towards brains. English girls can be attractive but generally lack class when you find them abroad. Any of the girls who that night slid into the mud, crashed over the fences, or nearly fell into the river were certainly Islanders.

We watched the drunks wander off—it really was like watching zombies—and then crossed back over the bridge and bought a few sandwiches on the way back to Le Jardin Organique. I told Neinke that I was also astonished by this place.

“My choices are: A— go to a farm and get up at six to milk goats, eat organic food, hang out with serious French people who smoke cigarettes, and ride my bike in to teach English to kids; or B— go tubing and get trashed on whiskey buckets and dance with drunken English girls in the rain.”

“Doesn’t sound like a hard decision,” she said sullenly.

“No. It didn’t take me long to decide.”

The following morning, during a break in the rains, I rented a bicycle and rode out three kilometers to the organic farm in Phandindaeng. I asked for Hom Singh, the keeper of the goats, and arranged to work there for a week.

The Laotian farmhand was my same age, and although he was already married and had a daughter who was six and a son who was a little younger, he acted younger than I, and always had a smile on his face and a merry joke for whatever Korean girls happened to be staying there. He usually wore a hat and a T-shirt and shorts and wore rubber boots when it rained and flip-flops when it did not.

There was the main hall of the Phandindaeng farm, above a lawn on the river, where the restaurant served its food and the family and the workers lived. A muddy path led away from the river to a long wooden dormitory, with a few rooms for private guests, then crossed a covered bridge into new forest, passing the goat barn, with the house of Hom Singh in the back, and the shed where Hom Singh made goat cheese, and then a few quaint mud houses.

The main product of this farm was mulberry leaves, which grew on a wide field below the barn and the houses. The mulberries were sold, the leaves given to the goats as feed. The farm also grew mangoes, bananas, jackfruit, and a few vegetables, struggling for subsistence.

No barrier separated this tranquil idyll and the chaos of Vang Vieng. As soon as I arrived I heard the thump and throb of distant music, of “I gotta feeling, that tonight’s gonna be a good night,” carried up the Nom Song from the first of the tubing bars, a tall mass of lashed wooden towers, rope swings, and screaming, like a recent shipwreck. Just upstream from the farm was the jetty where the tuk-tuks dropped off their truckloads of tubists and tubes to enter the river. A string of them floated past anxiously. Above and across that rushing water rose the grand escarpment, cloaked in rain and garlanded in mist.

There was one Frenchman staying in the dorm, a chef named Pierre, who had seen other volunteers come and go. “I don’t understand,” he said with Gallic tragedy,—“they can do this anywhere. Why they must do it in the most beautiful part of Laos?”

I asked if you get used to the noxious music—“. . . that tonight’s gonna be a good night, that tonight’s gonna be a good good night,”—and Pierre replied, “After a day or two. But you always hear it. It’s always there, from ten in the morning until seven at night.” The rope swing bar had been constructed only two years ago, and since then the Phandindaeng farm has known peace only in the early mornings and the cool evenings.

That day Lars and Remy went tubing. “Please ignore anything I do today,” said the German, and Remy had a look on his face like this was Christmas. They had hamburgers for breakfast and had a beer on the way out.

“You guys are going to have to get those stupid tank tops,” I said. “Into the tubing, Vang Vieng.”

“No I will not wear this. I might as well wear a shirt that says, I am an idiot, on it.”

But today was an exception, like a Black Mass or a Bacchanalia. They moved slowly because of the rain, wore only their swimming trunks and took only a few thousand kip for drinks. At they market they bought their contraband inner tubes, and they set to floating at the rope swing bar.

It rained all day. Sometimes it came down in cataracts, sometimes it merely drizzled, but it was always wet and nothing would ever dry. The river was in spate. It rose by a yard that night, covering up the islands and shoals, carrying down tree trunks and other debris from the hillsides.

The German and the Dutchman floated down the Nam Song, step by step, the bars like the Cataracts of the Nile. They soaked up buckets and shots of whiskey until they were half mad. Karol, Luuk, and Neinke met them at the Bucket Bar, and they all went crazy.

There is a procedure to milking goats—lock the head in some way, wipe down the udder with a rag rinsed in warm water, then form the thumb and forefinger into a ring around the base of the goat’s nipple, which is about the size of a thumb; squeeze the ring firmly to capture all the milk in the nipple, then squeeze the whole fist, and the warm milk will spray out into the jug rather than soak back up into the udder’s reservoir.

Doing this quickly requires timing and concentration, and milking both nipples on the goat requires even more. Performed properly, that reservoir can be lactated rather quickly. Then add the contents of the jug to the milk bucket and move on to the next one.

The goats each occupied a stall of the goat barn, which was made of old rotted timbers and sheared branches nailed together. These stalls were about five feet off the ground, so refuse would drop through cracks to a pile of fertilizer below, and to keep the building above the intransigent water and the creeping jungle vermin.

On this particular morning I had got through all the rest of the goats before the allied French—two bourgeois girls and a family with two young sons—had emptied one udder. I called myself a master of milking goats, which was not all that enjoyable, and decided the next day to offer to help Hom Singh with repairs to the barn. There were hammers and nails lying out, and one of the stalls had already been dismantled.

It was my third day on the Phandindaeng farm. There was always work to do, but the rain had ceased and the sky seemed brighter than in a long time. So I cleaned the red ants off my rented bicycle and rode into town.

The first friend I met on the sunny broadway was Karol, fresh out of the pharmacy with bandages for his cut up leg. The injury had kept him from tubing, but he told me all the news of the “crazy night” a night before, which I will not repeat here!

I went to Le Jardin Organique and waded through the water that had filled in the yard under the guesthouse. Neinke was on the porch checking her laundry and gave me a warm Dutch Hallo Jon!

“I can’t believe it, but I really enjoyed it that night. I danced, I loved it.”

“Wow, so you’re a real buckethead now. I mean, you like the lifestyle?”

“Well…”

“Maybe one night a year.”

“Yeah, maybe one night every five years.”

They all asked me how the farm is, and I said, “Oh it’s nice, quiet,” a little sheepish for having missed this amazing night. After I mentioned the organic food, we decided to go to Phandindaeng for breakfast.

This food is something I should have mentioned: it was really delicious. Fresh baguettes cracked apart with the slightest pressure and steamed up a delicious smell. Delicious omelettes cooked with fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, shakes made from new mulberries, and strong-flavored goat cheese fried with herbs in the Greek style. The curries were delicious and filling, the tofu perfect and crispy-edged, the satay coated with spicy-sweet peanut sauce, and for desert there was sticky rice marinated in coconut milk (the Laotian version of rice pudding) and served with sliced mango. They were not complicated ingredients, but the freshness of the ingredients and some Western sense of cooking, imparted by whatever farang owned the place, made it the best food I had in Southeast Asia.

Lars, Remy, and Neinke stared in mouth-watered wonder when the plates were served and the bread broken. When it was eaten, we walked downstream to the rope swing bar, the First Cataract of the Nam Song.

The river had risen up to touch the toes of the platforms, and the two Laotians who threw out the rope to passing tubists had to haul hard to bring them in. One was a mute, but he would constantly make this terrible noise to ward off those in danger of floating in too close to the platform and crashing into the pylons.

We sat around a table with a few beers and watched the farang jump off the trapeze. They started on a platform high in a tree and swung down over the river, releasing with varying degrees of skill and courage. There was a sign on the ladder up that said, “Please buy a drink before you swing!” What a safe regulation! Above us on the platform there was a line of people waiting to jump, a trembling line of legs.

Remy said, “Look at that girl. She has a nice ass. Man.” Remy left, and when he came back he added, “Her face is not so good.”

“You went to check?” asked Lars.

“Yeah.”

“She really likes the swing,” I said. “Here she goes again.”

We all looked up at the platform where she was standing, and Remy commented hazily, “Yeah, it’s only her ass I like.”

The tubists jumped and waved in the air, kicked their legs in a farce of running, or just fell screaming on the downswing. Some acrobats did flips or hung onto the trapeze by their legs before going face first into the brown water. Sometimes they passed right over the heads of some tubists, who waved their arms and cried, “Don’t fall!”

“Why all the tricks?” Remy wondered. “They always hit the water sideways and don’t get very high. All you have to do is this,” and he started thrusting his hips forward and back. “It’s the most natural thing in the world. Just do this and you move much faster. What’s so hard about it?”

When Remy went, he did get very high. Lars and I also went off the swing, and I found it terrifying. We sat on the edge of the platform where the bar was, turning our heads back and forth with the path of the trapeze.

The two Laotians threw out a rope with a small lifeguard’s ring on the end to haul in those who had jumped. Sometimes they missed and the poor fallen had to float downstream. Once a girl tumbled in, and when she came back up the Laotians got the ring around her neck. We all cackled like maniacs. We cried, “They lassoed her!”

After a while we walked down to the Second Cataract, where some Americans were playing beer pong, then we headed back to the farm. There was a black and gray wall of cloud sweeping down the valley from the south that we had to outrun, and we made it just in time, just as the downpour started again.

We had more curries, satays, and mulberry shakes for dinner, and talked about our plans. I would go back north to Luang Prabang to retrieve my Chinese visa, then head to the mysterious country of Cathay. Remy and Neinke would head south to the Four-Thousand Islands of the Mekong, and Lars and Karol would join them. The four left the next morning, and we arranged to meet that night for a last beer.

I showered and washed some clothes, then road into town with the last of the twilight, because it had stopped raining momentarily and because I did not trust the Laotian drivers. I had a coffee and arrived at Le Jardin so much on time that Lars remarked on my German punctuality.

Well at Sunset Village I toasted them all, and I said farewell, with handshakes for the men and a hug for Neinke, then rode off into the night.

Of Vang Vieng there remains one story to be told: that of an accident! I began working the very next morning to help Hom Singh in the goat barn. I much preferred swinging a hammer to milking an udder.

On the second day of this, I helped to pry out the old rotted boards of the ramp that led up to the barn. It would not last the rainy season and had to be rebuilt. Hom Singh was up inside and I was down below, working with hammer and crowbar. Some of the boards were still usable, and I took out the nails and piled them in a shed, and the rest we hauled to a pile near the pig pen to be burned.

One of the Belgian girls, Tatiana, came out and wondered what I was doing, and one of the farmhands started hitting on her in the desperate, say-something approach of the Oriental, as I helped Hom Singh crowbar out the last two planks of the top of the ramp: both five feet in length and stuck together tightly. One was so spiked with rusty nails that it resembled a medieval weapon. We heaved and tugged at them until they both fell loose, separated, and the medieval mace fell squarely onto my sandaled foot. It fell aside in short order, leaving two punctures and a dull ache.

I stood there staring at the freeflow of blood with a grim acceptance.

“I think you should clean it,” said the Belgian girl.

“I think I should get a tetanus shot,” I replied.

Well Hom Singh had leaped out of the barn and was running around, and his wife appeared with a bottle of iodine to dump on my foot, and a whole crowd of Laotian farmhands had appeared out of nowhere. In the midst of this troop I hobbled over to the hose to rinse the blood off. Hom Singh packed the wound with leaves and said it would be okay, pointing at similarly earned scars on his own foot.

“Hom Singh, no, I need to go to the hospital.”

Hom Singh drove me on his motorbike. The nurses cleaned out the twin wounds and insisted on stitching up the holes, a procedure for which they charged $10 per stitch, and which not only did nothing to help the wound from healing, but probably lengthened its infection by trapping in the dirt and grime, for which I was taking antibiotics. They wrapped it up so my leg resembled a golf putter, gave me a tetanus shot and sent me on my way.

At night, after dinner, Hom Singh came over and we talked in a mixture of loud pidgin English and charades difficult to describe, but the substance of the exchange was this:

“I don’t like these hospitals,” the Laotian related,—“they charge foreigners too much. When I stepped on a nail, I put the juice of a green papaya in the wound and everything came out. It was very painful. Then I closed it with a very hot rock. That was also painful.”

“It’s a good idea, Hom Singh, but I really don’t want to get an infection.”

“Don’t worry, I’m sure they won’t cut your foot off. That is ridiculous. But here is some money to cover the expense of the hospital bill, which was too much.”

“Hom Singh, I couldn’t accept. It was an accident. And besides, I have insurance.”

“No, please, I dropped the board. Please take it. And don’t say anything.”

“Alright,” I said, wondering in a sigh how to deal with this Asian dignity and honor,—“Thanks.”

Across the Mekong

On July 15, 2010 from Laos. 1 Comment

You burn in the Mekong
To prove your worth,
Go long, go long,
Right over the edge of the earth.
—Joanna Newsom

It took all day on a certain Saturday to bus from Chiang Mai to Chiang Khong, a Golden Triangle town alongside the Mekong. A Thai woman was waiting at the bus station with a pick-up truck to take arriving farang to an enterprising guesthouse, the Ban Fai, run by a strangely-accented old Floridan and his Thai wife, aka The Boss; and I went there with two aspiring English teachers from British Columbia and two Dutch students.

We all dined there as well, on a balcony over the Mekong, looking across to the lights of Huay Xai in Laos, and the two Netherlanders, Remy and Neinke, invited me to sit with them. Over dishes of rice and Thai curries, we spoke of Holland and America, our systems of education and welfare, and our sports passions. Remy finished off Neinke’s meal, saying, “It’s very good to travel with her. I always get extra food.”

They both spoke excellent English, like most Dutch—though Remy’s deteriorated with his second bottle of beer, so that Neinke, a pretty blonde girl, would look at me and laugh. The three of us had relocated to the comfortable chairs inside the guesthouse, and Remy went to the computer there several times to make sure the Dutch football team had no injuries or hiccups, because the World Cup final was tomorrow, and the Netherlands would play Spain.

“I wish I could be in Amsterdam for it,” said Remy, “but I don’t know. Man. If we win, it would be so great. If we lose, it’s okay. I’ll take off my orange shirt, I’ll be in Laos. You know some Dutch people wear a white shirt under their orange one, so they can walk home without some drunk Brit saying, ‘Hey you lost!’ If we lose it’s okay. Holland will drink for a few days, then start thinking about next year.”

Now the Dutch and the Spanish are both frenzied for football. The Dutch march in orange armies and watch the games in city squares or bars, and they drink and fist-pump and fight in the streets. The Spanish turn the lights off and listen to music on their bed when a game is on, lest they be carried away by sentiment. Otherwise they watch the game on television at home, shouting at the screen and the mothers of the team, alone with their triumph or their sorrow.

Remy checked the football news at least three times that night, to make sure none of the heroes of Holland had suffered an injury, and he celebrated at least one injury on the Spanish team. He checked again in the morning, rising early to ease his worry on the day of the final game.

To cross into Laos, the traveler reads a book while waiting for the Thai border guards to get their act together, is stamped out of the country, pays his fee of $15 per day of overstay, and is shuffled onto a skiff and carried across the Mekong to the Houay Xai docks. There he buys a Laos visa, $30 for Europeans, $35 for Americans, and Canadians pay much more for some reason.

Houay Xai was a small provincial town of five blocks, a few guesthouses and restaurants, and the county hospital. The change in atmosphere could be felt immediately: no climate shift, but a sea change in the way people lived, towards the clear-skied serenity, warm goodwill, and muggy laziness that characterizes the Laotians.

The two Vancouverites went off to find the slow boat to Luang Prabang, and I went with Remy and Neinke to the Friendship Guesthouse, woke the innkeeper, who was perpetually asleep in front of the television, and got a triple room for 75,000 kip (about $9).

I went down the street to a dim Internet cafe and was there reading my messages when a burly and mustachioed Alaskan came in to Skype some friend of his. In the loud and worn-out voice of a habitual shouter, he described a motorcycle trip he had taken with his haggard wife:

“It’s fucking nuts here, man. I mean, we were driving in the middle of fucking nowhere [laughter like a dying engine], and we spill like five times. I normally spill maybe a little, but five fucking times we spill, the roads are so fucking horrible. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s so third world here, it’s insane. We’re out in the fucking jungle, and the roads have all these fucking steep switchbacks, like, man! [More wheezing laughter.] Yeah, yeah, I have a two-fifty CC Honda. You know anything more than one-fifty is illegal here? It’s fucking nuts. It’s worse here than that trip we had in India!”

I told the Netherlanders about this husky Alaskan when we met for lunch at a small restaurant. We sat at a shaded table out on the dirt road, with sandwiches and bottles of Laotian beer.

The Laotians learned to make and appreciate baguettes, cheese, and coffee from the French colonists, who ruled the landlocked country for 150 years. They still call foreigners farang, from their word for the Gauls. Before these colonial days, Laos existed as a kingdom for 400 years, known as Lan Xang, the Land of a Million Elephants; and after the French were overthrown, so was the constitutional monarchy. The communists took over, and the Americans added Laos to her lists of Vietnam War villains.

In what is known now as the Secret War, US bombers dropped more ordnance on Laos than was spent in the whole of the Second World War, making little Laos the most bombed country in the world. By either some favor or some curse, a fourth of the bombs failed to explode. Children generally find these and tear them open to sell the scrap metal.

These days the Lao People’s Democratic Republic is as communist as the People’s Republic of China and reached that point after much of the same trials and tribulations. A few Laotians are rich, and many are very poor rural workers, living in the jungle or along the Mekong, the life of the country, and tellingly controlled by the country where it springs—China.

Well we sat in the room during the hot afternoon, watching cheesy Chinese music videos and HBO, and after dusk we went out to eat. I saw in the road Karol the German and said Hello, remarking on the earth’s diminutive span. He was with another Saxon, Lars of Rostock, a tacit and friendly fellow with a bald head, who had been half-coerced into drinking a large glass of Lào-Láo rice wine, the local moonshine. It had not made him blind, but Lars was not entirely in command of his mind, as we had dinner and coffee at a small outdoor restaurant. He changed his order several times, so that we thought he might end up with Chinese noodles and spaghetti sauce in pork broth.

Thus some time passed in our long wait for the game; then Lars said, “Alright, I need a beer or I’m going to fall asleep. Shall we go to a bar?” Dwn the only road in Houay Xai we came to Bar How?, and there was a projector and a screen out front. We settled in with an older Norwegian and talked and drank beers and smoked cigarettes to keep the nerves down as we endured the long hours until the small hour of 1:30.

We talked about travel and where we would go. Karol and Lars, who I called Larry, were going to take a bus to Luang Prabang, and Neinke, Remy and I wanted to take the slow boat down the Mekong. We talked nonsense and asked Neinke to let her hair down, and when she did with a commercial flourish half the table was staring at her. Lars looked around and muttered, “Oh man.”

Over another round of beers, the Norwegian said the following:

“If they’re looking for a super-human man, to collect genes from and use for science, they need to get Iggy Pop. He’s been at it for forty years. He’s sixty years old, and he still gets up there, high and hammered, and he fucking plays [finger-picking in the air] four-hour shows, with his shirt off, and he still looks fit. He sings. He still stage dives. Iggy jumped off the stage in London a few months back. Everyone stepped away, and he landed on his face. Sixty years old. Got right up and kept on with the show. It’s unreal. He’s had a hard life. A run-in with heroine, with coke. Now it’s all booze, but he still looks fit. You look at those guys from Rolling Stones, Richards and Jagger, and they all look like wrecks. They sound like shit. They should! Iggy Pop, he’s sixty-years-old, and he’s still great. He’s superman.”

The place began to fill in around us with orange, though not all of them were Dutch, and there were two Spaniards seated in the back with a silent yearning, a glimmer of hope, as the Dutch cried outtheir anthem in tune with the African orchestra—and the kick-off! The game began!

The Netherlands was hard-pressed, those underdogs, but they fended off an aggressive Spain in the first half. The field evened out. It could have gone either way. The Dutch stared when the Dutch Eleven came close; they shouted at the English referee and turned to an English spectator: “You stupid English, you’re ruining the game!” They screamed in pain at missed chances and sighed in relief when Spain slipped up; and they passed ninety minutes in absolute terror and unrelieved suspense.

“I just want someone to score,” they said,—“I don’t care if it’s Spain. It can’t go to shoot-outs. It would be so—what else?”

But it was Spain that scored at the end of the extra time. Utter dejection swept across Bar How? The Dutch lingered, stared at images of foreign victory, and passed stoically through the stages of grief until they had accepted it. Or they stormed away in anger.

I left withmmy friends, returned to the Friendship Guesthouse and woke up the innkeeper. Neinke collapsed on her bed, and Remy was full of drunken energy, perhaps relieved to miss the Amsterdam party now not to be.

“So you like that bald German guy?” Remy said to Neinke, for they had been friends long enough for him to infuriate her as an older brother would.

“Who, Larry?”

“I like both of them,” said Neinke.

“You going to hook up in Luang Prabang?”

“I hope we meet both of them in Luang Prabang.”

“I thought you said you hate German guys.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You were talking to him a lot. Putting beer labels on his arm like hmmm.”

“So? I’m going to bed.”

“She likes Larry, huh?”

“Yeah man, definitely.”

“Shut up!”

“We’re not talking to you!”

“You’re talking about me!”

“Go to sleep!”

“I’m going to punch you in the face!”

Remy woke up at 8:30 to reserve boat tickets. He came back at nine and said, “Guys, I got bad news. We have twenty minutes to get to BAP Guesthouse.” I said, with typical morning aptitude, “What? Fuck,” and Neinke added, “Are you serious?”

We asked no more questions, but silently packed our bags, quickly brushed our teeth, and were at the rendevous and down near the boat docks with enough time to buy sandwiches for breakfast and lunch. In accordance with a phenomenon known as Laos Time, our fully-boarded boat did not depart until eleven. It was a two-day voyage, with an overnight in a village called Pak Beng, and the longboat was packed with a strange menagerie of farang, a true cast of characters, perhaps forty in number, which we observed from nailed-down car chairs on the periphery.

There was a tatooed man chattering in American. There was a Spaniard, broad-shouldered as a gladiator, who was wearing no trousers, only boxer shorts, and eventually he took his shirt off as well and strolled up and down the boat in his underwear. He would tryst between the benches with his tiny girlfriend, who was half his size and weight, so that we could not help but wonder about the physics of their love. They had two big rollerbags and a backpack, and he carried them all while she smirked in the lead, with all the pride of the owner of a blue ribbon ox.

This compact Ecuadorian woman who, satyr-like, bore the massive waist and thighs of a much larger woman—she marched up and down the central aisle on some self-appointed mission, sometimes exhorting other passengers in all Babel’s tongues, sometimes haranguing her husband, a mild Canadian who had met her when she was a travel agent in Quito—“Robert take a picture of that! Oh look at that! There were rocks in the river Robert! Keep your backpack there! No, you’ll break it, Robert! God you’re so uptight!”—while her two sons, teenagers in long-haired rebellion, laughed at her receeding back.

There was a Chinese tourist sitting in front of Remy who, with that forensic attitude of the East Asian, would photograph repeatedly every passing curiosity. Remy made a game of it—for when the world is too bleakly black for man, man laughs, and by a game man turns annoy into joy. The Dutchman would spot some strange rock in the current, some fisherman in a boat, some naked savage swimming by the shore, a cliff, a tall tree, a beautiful view, and would guess how many seconds would pass before the Chinaman snapped the item up in his long-lens and large-sensor. In this way, Remy passed the hours with his sanity intact.

For the seven hour voyage, I sat next to a Hong Kong woman I’d run into in Burma and Thailand (and reportedly slept on her shoulder), read my book, wrote in a notepad, and looked out at the long world of the river—the wide rushing Mekong, heavy from rain, a rumble of engine, a rush of wind, a sleet-gray sky breaking up under the midday heat to strips of blue, oceans of blue. The hills sloped up from sandy banks, bearing young shoots and old pines and red-blossomed Flame of the Forest. You can imagine that there is no world, nothing beyond those hills: There is only this river under green shores and blue skies with variable weather, the birthplaces of mountain springs, the gallows of the granite shoals; the river, going south with a steady current, no matter how it seems to twist and narrow, roughen and smooth, with lively towns on the banks or strands of lonely solitude; a river always flows, always quests for ocean, until it reaches an unavoidable, unaccountable end at the everlasting sea, returning to the source of it all, and realizing there a world unimagined.

Around six we arrived in Pak Beng, a little town of guesthouses hanging from a hill over the west bank of the river. Dozens of longboats were moored there, and the steep and muddy bank was crowded with the envoys of the inns—men and women shouting about beds and their proximity to the docks and their views of the river. Remy, Neinke and I got our bags, waited for the crowd to clear out, then haggled out a good deal from one of the innkeepers and followed him to his little hotel. The three of us remarked on more strange travelers around the town. At the restaurant across the road, where I slurped a stew of water buffalo and coconut milk, there were bubbly Seattleites, demanding Germans, and this pompous Floridan who wanted to bargain for everything.

“Okay,” he was saying to the poor waiter, as his guests, another brash American and two polite French girls, watched on,—“Okay, so we take four BeerLao, eight-thousand kip each, and we get a free fish. I want a good fish, you know, not some crap fish.”

This went on for a long time, long enough for Remy to start muttering about it, and finally to turn around and say, “You know you don’t usually bargain in restaurants. The prices are set. They’re on the menu. And it’s only like a few cents.”

The Floridan tried to defend his rude ways, but we ignored him. An old Laotian came around with a bottle of homemade Lào-Láo, stuffed full of roots and leaves, which he poured into a small cup for us. It tasted foul and made us more than drunk.

“I like all the different travelers you see,” Remy remarked,—“there’s us, with just five weeks here. There’s you, gone for years with a tiny backpack full of books. There’s that Florida guy, being an asshole and arguing with everyone over a few cents, and that crazy lady on the boat shouting at her husband and marching up and down taking pictures, and all those tourists with their huge bags, and the old people with hiking shoes and socks and big hats, all their adventure gear—and us with our flip-flops and no idea where to go.”

“It’s better that way,” I said, amused.

In the morning Pak Beng was just like any other town. Tables of chopped meat and fresh vegetables crowd the little market. The stall-owners pull the boards out from the open entryways. Bells chime in the Buddhist temple, looking down on the sun rising over the Mekong. Then the tourists all wake up and shuffle down to their longboats, bearing sandwiches and water bottles, and the boats leave two hours after schedule.

We had a much smaller boat for this second run, another seven hours downriver to Luang Prabang. It was small and cramped as a slave ship, and the three of us sat against the walls in the front, eventually crammed in there by luggage and other passengers, as the whole of the boat was by the same. There was no room for the Ecuadorian march (though I afterwards heard complaints about her from the aft of the ship), but the improved scenery made up for the lack of entertaining passengers. Karst cliffs rose steeply out of the water, in high ridges and mid-current formations, and there were fishermen in the eddies and forests on the top. Thatch villages were set in the crooks of rolling hillscapes. The sun was bright and the air smelt fresh and cool, and in the afternoon we came to the docks of Lao’s old colonial capital.

Luang Prabang was geographically a little like San Francisco, in that the oldest and nicest quarter of town was confined and compressed on a slivered peninsula, formed by the final twist of the river Nam Khan on its winding way to join the mighty Mekong, which flowed past the city’s western side. This narrow peninsula was a theme park of French architecture, bars, bakeries, tourist agencies, and guesthouses, ringed by riverfront esplanades, bisected by alleys, and penning in a few forgotten temples between the well-kept colonial townhouses. Only four streets ran up the city, including those that followed the twin rivers.

On the inside end of the peninsula, there was a steep altar of a hill called Phu Si, with trees on the slopes and a Wat Tham on the narrow top, but nobody ever went up there, except the monks, because it was too hot. The Royal Palace stood across from this hill, and the street between hosted a night market, erected around sunset, which became more annoying the more you traversed it. Traffic was reduced to two skinny lines between the three rows of stalls, all selling the same things—blankets, art, trinkets, and nick-nacks. A low roof of interconnected red tarpaulins enforced a bent posture, and cooing Thais and travel-planned Westerners constantly obstructed the flow of the lanes.

Now turn right on the southern end of this gauntlet, into an alleyway lit up like a stage—a steaming, reeking, crowded and noisesome alley—and there was the food market, a much more delightful place. Outside the alley there were sandwich stalls with piles of baguettes, and if you said “Laos style” they’ll fill them with chicken and tofu and pork skin and chili sauce, as well as a few vegetables, for $1; and there were fruit shake stands and ice coffee stands, who sweetened the deal with a diabetic dose of condensed milk.

The alley itself was first lined with tables of regional delights: Mekong riverweed, fried fish in banana leaves, papaya salad, and cold, crisp spring rolls—then a few barbeque grills smoked up chicken and fish, and finally several buffets served Laos dishes from great tureens, for $1 a plate. There were picnic tables all along for diners, mostly farang, to sit, and the lane between all this was wide enough for maybe two peole to walk abreast. There were usually three.

On our way to the market, the two Dutch and I met Lars and Karol, whose twelve-hour bus had taken seventeen, and had been full of vomiting Laotians. We gorged ourselves on sandwiches, papaya salad, and fried food, washed down with the excellent BeerLao, and went down to a bar in the old French Quarter. Lars brought out his plastic bottle of stupefying Lào-Láo, and we made a good time of it, closing the bar at the late hour of eleven.

The next day the five of us, along with a Quebecois named Charles and another Dutchman named Luuk, set out to go to the Kouangxi Waterfalls, about an hour out of town. The broadway of Luang Prabang was lined with tuk-tuk drivers all selling the same thing, “Hey waterfall, waterfall?” except at night when they say, “Ganja? You want ganja?” We all walked down this thoroughfare after breakfast, talking to each and trying to haggle.

Now there was some rule limiting the tuk-tuks to a maximum of six farang passengers, and we exceeded that maximum by one. At great length, we accepted one driver, who had been following us down the road and parking along our intended path, for some amount per person. He was a frog-faced Laotian, sweating profusely, half-crazed on jaba and Red Bull, who drove around in a circle, shouting at people, parking in the road and trying to get one of us to go in a different tuk-tuk, but that was not the deal. At the police register he apparently wanted us to pay for the waterfall tickets through him—“Waterfall, no pay! I pay!”—and was enraged when we refused. He paid the police the seven-man fine, then left us with another driver, a kindly old man, professional and sober, who drove us back to the register and paid the fine a second time, before driving out to Kouangxi.

Thus we came to the waterfalls, which were exceedingly beautiful—the jungle, the walkways, the falls, the pools so pristinely blue, and girls walking all over in bikinis. My friends and I went up past several swimming pools to the main fall, which was so perfectly tropical, so picturesque, it appeared to be man-made. Some wooden stairs led up to the top of this high cascade. Following the advice of some Aussies, we left the stair at the top, going right on a wet and pathless slope slick with algae, past the sign that said “DO NOT SWIMMING,” and up a rolling waterfall, passing our bags up to the agile Remy before climbing ourselves, until we made our way onto a sort of terraced ledge at the very top of the fall. There was a wide pool like a basin, deep enough to jump into, that poured over onto the ponds far below, blue and beautiful.

After an hour in that paradise, we climbed back down to the wooden stair and returned to our tuk-tuk driver, joking and laughing all the way back to Luang Prabang.

The next day I invited an American girl, Lauren of Boston, to come breakfast with us at the Scandinavian Bakery in the French Quarter. Lauren’s speech when I met her included the same exclamations of exaggerated surprise—“Wow! Amazing! Ohmygod!”—that Remy and Neinke had charicatured for Americans. This made me more attached to her in a way, like yeah, this is American and I’m American so fuck you. I am commonly mistaken for being Dutch or German, and commonly told, “But you’re not a real American,” and told that real Americans talk in a nasally drone of metallic vowels and constantly say, “That’s awesome!”

Lauren was a real American, or rather a real New Englander. She went to an East Coast college where the students can attend class in the nude, was critical of American policies, and had been teaching English in a town in China called Qufu, the famed birthplace of Confucious. I asked her all about China, since I was excited about going there, and I planned to go to Qufu as well.

Well that day Laren went to the waterfalls, Remy slept and watched movies on an iPod, Lars and Neinke rode bikes out into the countryside and returned sunburned and happy, Karol did his thing, Luuk and Charles were leaving, and I went all over town to arrange a Chinese visa; and that night I was delighted to have two real Americans join us for dinner—Lauren and a Texan from Dalles named Bonner Dobbs. We sat by the Nam Khan drinking beer and talking about America, surprising the Europeans by the revelation that yes, we did all have guns at home. And then we went to a big terraced bar called Laos Laos and sat there until it closed.

The Old Man of the Mountain

On July 6, 2010 from Thailand. 0 Comments

Hop along, my little friends, up the Withywindle!
Tom’s going on ahead candles for to kindle.
Down west sinks the Sun: soon you will be groping.
When the night-shadows fall, then the door will open,
Out of the window-panes light will twinkle yellow.
Fear no alder black! Heed no hoary willow!
Fear neither root nor bough! Tom goes on before you.
Hey now! merry dol! We’ll be waiting for you!
—Tolkien

I was the last to enter the dim hall, to flash my paper ticket to the trannies and silicon-bolstered counteresses out front and proceed down that narrow aisle lined with red-lit bars, rows of girls arranged in front in short black dresses and plastic grins, and this eventually delivered us out into a wide chamber under a tin roof. The off-white ring stood in the center, surrounded by rows of couches, and then encircled by more bars of crimson lighting and seedy natures. There was the siren call of “Welcome!” and the bar girls gathered around the old foreigners so beckoned; and there was a noise of chatter and barter and a clink of glasses and a throb of bass.

I was there with four Danes, a Scot named Richard who was familiar with the sport, a pretty English redhead named Vicky, a broad-humored American from New Jersey named Mark, and three Irish lasses with very Gaelic names. So we ordered beers and jested with a Thai boy selling flowers and playing games of Connect Four for twenty baht a piece. In the southern isles the children are all experts at this, and they regularly win money from tourists who think it a joke.

Richard was telling us about this Deus ex machina device that his father had pressed on him. There were three buttons: one he pressed every five days to send out a signal with his latitude and longitude; the second, if pressed, would continually broadcast his coordinates for twenty-four hours; and the third button called a helicopter to his position, to airlift him out, at the cost of 2000 pounds.

“So they send the SAS to rescue you?”

“No, that would be awesome though.”

Then the first fighters came out, and the whole place was crowded with farang tourists and Thai gamblers, all waving money around. The first fighters were twelve years old and vicious, trained from birth in the brutal ways of Muay Thai kickboxing.

Look elsewhere for the elegance of the Asian martial arts—Muay Thai is all elbows and knees and deadly blows made to kill. They used to brawl in riverside dens, a bare-fisted bloodsport with only nominal rules, and fighters commonly died from more brutal techniques. Those days are over, outside of small events in the northern countryside; but they still gamble on all the match-ups.

The bookies roamed through the crowd, preferring one fighter or another, knowing the fix and the likely victor, and I did not bet on the kids fight. The second was a lady fight, between two women barely discernible as such, their naturally pubescent frames packed with masculine muscle, their faces meaty and boyish. Nong Ning and Phetlanna brawled into the fourth of the five rounds, and it ended with a knockout. Nong Ning won, and I lost a hundred baht.

I lost another hundred on the first real fight, a fight of heavy gambling, hard hitting, flying sweat, and at the end, though it seemed to me that Blue should win, it was Red’s hand raised up. There followed an intermission of dancing bar girls, and then a blind fight, the three boxers blindfolded and knocking crazily around, as a referee tried to shove them into punches and dodge misplaced blows—so certainly a show fight that they came around asking for tips at the conclusion.

At the start of the second real fight, as the boxers came out and warmed up in their corners, every bookie and gambler said Red, and there were no odds but 1:1, so why bet? “I’m not putting anything down on this one,” said Mark,—“I think Red must be a killing machine.”

A sort of jungle melody always plays behind the match, and the fighters dance to it, bobbing in their balanced stance and moving their gloved fists up and down, until they start swinging and kicking and sparring. Red dominated and won, and the bookies gathered up their winnings, and there was too much falang dollar going around for it not to be at least mostly a scam.

Well the last fight was Sebastian of Canada and his 200 pounds, arrayed against a Thai fighter in the Blue corner, and I surely bet on the local. There was cheering and the sluggish moves of heavyweights, and the Canadian seemed a novice next to the Thai’s precise blows. Continually he fell into a grasp, tired out by the quick sport. Always the White would close in to a grab and knee at the Thai, but after five rounds, blue had won—and I had earned back my losses.

“Boo!” cried Mark, who had bet the other way,—“Boo! Go back and play hockey you stupid Canuck!” This earned a glare from the fighter, who was climbing down out of the ring, and a few middle fingers from his entourage in the front row. He muttered a confession, “I feel kind of bad now. But he did suck.”

There were a few show fights, including one between a midget and a kid, which could never happen in the West. Richard and Vicky left during this (women had far less interest in the outcome of this spectacle than the men, who stared at it with wet eyes and open mouths), and I stayed to chat with Mark and the lasses, and congratulated one of the Danes on his thousand baht winnings.

After some time we left to saunter home, the night pleasantly cool after the hot day, and Mark asked the Irish girls, “Hey what’s the craic?”

The girls laughed. “You know what craic is?”

“Sure. I know all Irish love craic. Everywhere they go, they’re looking for craic.”

Craic sounds a lot like crack, so I was confused and asked, “Wait, what is it?”

“Craic just means good-times or fun in Gaelic,” said Mark. “The Irish always say, ‘What’s the craic?’ like, ‘Where’s the party?’ You know,” he said to the girls, “craic means something very different in the States. You say, ‘Where’s the craic?’ in the States, they’re going to take you downtown to get some crack-cocaine.”

We turned down the alleyway toward Julie’s Guesthouse, and Nikko was up on the balcony—“Girls, where’re ye goin’? Come up here and have a drink, whydontcha,”—but we went off to the food market near the southern wall and ate our fill of noodle soup, and we walked back before the storm broke and called it a good day.

Chiang Mai is laid out in the following manner: Rail and road stations on the far east end, across the River Ping, and a spiderweb of roads lead inward through the Yunnanese neighborhood with its Muslim eating houses, its brothels, its flower market and ancient night bazaar, and on across and through the square moat and wall into the Old Town, a Thai fortress against the Burmese, full of temples and narrow lanes, and these days with flocks of sweaty falang, caught up in wanderlust.

Cut-throat tourist agencies cater to every need. Signs advertise jungle treks, hill tribe visits, slipline jumps and elephant rides; ride a motorcycle, play with a tiger, shoot a Kalashnikov, buy cheap jewelry or kitschy art or a new suit that will fall apart with one wash; learn to cook, to massage, to fight Muay Thai, to practice Yoga or Thai Chi; see a boxing match, a movie, a traditional dance; cheap flights, cheap busses, trains, and tuk-tuks; the drivers puff their lips against two fingers and whisper, “Ganja? Opium? What you want?”; and there are hotels everywhere, and the restaurants serve every kind of food and drink, and there are harlots and lady boys up and down Moon Muang Road.

This is Chiang Mai. In only a few years time, the city has burst open like an overripe fruit, from provincial capital to mecca of romantic adventure, an all-you-can-eat buffet of pre-planned peril. If you don’t have time to seek out the mysteries of the Orient, come here—they’re all laid out in a brochure!

I was staying in an old guesthouse called Julie’s, cheap and loud and always full. Even with youth, beer, pool, and Irishmen diluting the mix, the common hall of the guesthouse resembled most startlingly the Malabar Hotel of Marlowe’s interview with Lord Jim, which Conrad describes so well that I quote it:

An outward-bound mail-boat had come in that afternoon, and the big dining-room of the hotel was more than half full of people with a-hundred-pounds-round-the-world tickets in their pockets.

There were married couples looking domesticated and bored with each other in the midst of their travels; there were small parties and large parties, and lone individuals dining solemnly or feasting boisterously, but all thinking, conversing, joking, or scowling as was their wont at home; and just as intelligently receptive of new impressions as their trunks upstairs. Henceforth they would be labelled as having passed through this and that place, and so would be their luggage. They would cherish this distinction of their persons, and preserve the gummed tickets on their portmanteaus as documentary evidence, as the only permanent trace of their improving enterprise.

The dark-faced servants tripped without noise over the vast and polished floor; now and then a girl’s laugh would be heard, as innocent and empty as her mind, or, in a sudden hush of crockery, a few words in an affected drawl from some wit embroidering for the benefit of a grinning tableful the last funny story of shipboard scandal. Two nomadic old maids, dressed up to kill, worked acrimoniously through the bill of fare, whispering to each other with faded lips, wooden-faced and bizarre, like two sumptuous scarecrows.

O Adventure! O Romance! We poor fools seek you out in all the wrong places!

As I said, there were a few Irishmen in Julie’s, small in number and gargantuan in personality. I was sitting in the corner and thinking about the roads out of Chiang Mai when they came and sat at the table, calling over everyone within earshot.

“Girls!” cried Nikko,—“girls, what are you doing? Come have a drink wich us, whydontcha? Here take a seat.” He guided her in, muttering, “That’s a beautiful body. You boys want another beer?”

Nikko had long hair and rarely wore a shirt, and he was traveling with a small bag and a pair of jeans. He made his money as a hat merchant, buying them in Morocco and selling them in Ireland, and had entered the trade in the following way:

One day whilst waiting for a bus in the Maghrebi desert, he happened to see an old Berber woman selling caps she had knit, and he bought ten for five dollars. Seeing how cheap they were, Nikko bought a few hundred more in Marrakesh, filled his bags with them, and sold them for a huge profit on college campuses in Ireland. He went back to Morocco, found business partners, expanded his business, and now has three stores of his own, which provide for his travel and his nightly drinking.

“Here you go boys, one more Chang,” passing the cluster to Michael and Cameron, friends from the Old Country.

Now Michael was some trouble. First, his Thai visa was long expired. The Thais charge $15 a day for overstaying a visa, to a maximum amount of $200, and Michael said once you reach that limit you can stay as long as you want without penalty—unless you are caught and deported, and then you have to pay the fine and start over with a fresh visa. Michael had been caught before, and he suspected that his Burmese girlfriend had ratted him out, and once she bashed him with a whiskey bottle so hard that he had to get stitches. This time he left his passport with an Italian friend of his, but the police had raided the Italian’s house on a drug-search and had confiscated the passport along with some bags of stuff, so now Michael was in real trouble, the kind of trouble that only the Irish can get into.

There were two English girls sitting with us, and a Texan named Andrew who was a teacher in Istanbul, and the Irish kept trying to call over more girls, or making fun of guys as they walked in. (“We’re just havin’ a laugh!”) We were talking autobiographically, and they asked me, “What’s your last name brother?”

“McDonald.”

Three sets of eyes went wide with surprise. “Irish!” they said,—“You’re bloody Irish!”

“My father’s family is.”

“I’m so glad you didn’t say nuttin’,” said Nikko. “So many Americans say, ‘Oh, I’m one-fourth Irish. I’m one-sixteenth Irish. I’m a Paddy.’ No yer feckin’ not.”

“I’m one-sixteenth Indian,” joked Cameron, twitching from the old crack habit he picked up on a sojourn to the States.

“Irish-American is a big clan,” I said with a laugh.

“It’s feckin’ stupid. You are whatcha are. If you’re born in America, you’re an American. Don’t feckin’ kid yerself, mate.”

“My last name’s French,” said Michael.

“No it’s feckin’ not.”

“So you’re French-Irish?” I asked.

“No!” cried Nikko,—“He’s Irish!”

“Feckin’ right.”

Pai is a small town a few hours north of Chiang Mai, which was appropriated by hippies in the Eighties who couldn’t make the last hundred winding miles further north into the karst hills along the Burmese border.

There are more farang than locals there these days, lounging near the river in the cool valley of the village, in bungalows and little bars. The tourist center of town resembles Khausan rendered in a square block of four streets, with guesthouses and restaurants, street stalls and cheap beer, ATMs and two 7-11s—and there’s little to Pai beyond this, and then there is hill and forest.

On one of these streets, furthest from the elbow of the river, at a noisy wooden beer-hall with a bar out front and a DJ with his laptop, I was called over by a Canadian girl and a wild Thai called Tattoo, who danced around in his cut-up jeans, his sunglasses and wild hair. I had a beer with a big mess of people similarly summoned, then wandered off to find someplace to eat. A German of Polish descent, Karol, followed after me—“Hey, I know a good place down here.” He told me about the childhood friend with whom he had been traveling, who was too aggressive a traveler for him—he just wanted to read his book!

Soon enough I found that I knew a lot of people in Pai: two British girls from the bus, Tattoo the wild Thai, Richard and Vicky, the Irish lasses, Abby the Canadian, and Karol. When I passed by the wooden beer-hall that night, Nikko the Irishman was dancing out front with Tattoo, and he said it had been days since he had eaten and that he was overdoing it on the drink.

The two Dutch girls I met in Kanchanaburi were also in town. I met Caren and Leonie that night at a street bar with a big flatscreen, because the Netherlands was playing Brazil in the quarterfinals; and because I had on an orange T-shirt, I was adopted by a gang of Dutch and inherited their vibrant underdog hope. The girls drew Dutch flags on my cheeks, and there were so many orange shirts there. The men were jumping and howling and spraying beer, and the women watched with interest—and somehow Holland won. There was a great celebration.

A big group of us drove around the corner to Poppies, where the Party was that night. Abbey, Nikko, Tattoo, and the Irish girls were already there. There was a small bar serving buckets and shots and cold beers, and a long corridor of people sitting on cushions on this dais, or lying there in a smoked-out haze.

I drank and talked with the Dutch, and then this German I had met said he had found some American girl. “Oh, cool,” I said, but he insisted on introducing us, so I went over and sat down next to her on the edge of the dais behind the DJ stand. She thought I was from Holland at first, because why else would I be dressed like that and wearing flags on my cheeks?

Apryl was from Detroit, Michigan, though she had been in Thailand for almost a year, mostly in Chiang Mai and Pai; and we talked thoughtfully about the freedom and autonomy of being abroad—freedom from judgments and the constrictions of expectations, a freedom to expose the truth of yourself, as lame as that sounds.

Apryl told me, “There are people you call your friends, and you do things together. But once you really need their help, if you’re going through rough times and you really need to talk, you can’t. Because if you tell them anything, it’ll just get turned against you. They will tell all their friends. It makes them feel better about themselves, to see others suffering, like, I’m better than that.”

“The other day I was thinking,” I said, “about high school reunions. You get together and it’s like a big pageant—show what you got, wear your best clothes, drive your best car, and who has the best job, the hottest girl, the coolest guy. Nobody really care’s how you’re doing.”

I kept asking her, What are you doing here? She said she just did as she pleased.

“I just go with the flow. I say that a lot.” She said she had realized that everything is connected, that all is one, that we all come from the same Source, and that we have to work to maintain a balance if we want to be healthy.

“I used to just give and give. I’m a very giving person. I would always give time, work, trust, and never take anything in return. I didn’t know how. People would try to do things for me, and I wouldn’t let them. It felt wrong somehow. But if you don’t accept it, when other people give to you—then there’s no balance. It drains you. I was drained.”

It was a remarkable conversation for being so different from the usual traveler’s fare of, Where are you from? Where have you been? Where are you going? You see the game? Who will win? I miss Mexican food—the “How about that weather?” of the wandering heart. All of that seemed like bullshit, as Apryl considered each question with a pensive concentration, a Zen composure. She told me, “I don’t know anything. The only thing I know is that I don’t know anything,” without knowing that Socrates had said the same.

I told Apryl about the social gadfly and his noble end, killed by the same laws that permitted his subversion, and she said, “You know what I take from that? The more you become a part of society, the more open you are to being destroyed by it.”

“And you’re separate from society?”

“No, you can never be separated, but I’ve come to realize what it’s all about. I’ll go home and do the same things and hang out with the same people, but I’ll see things the way they really are. And that’s a big difference.”

Then the Belgian with the Volkswagen bus on his shirt and tattooed under his arm leaned over and said this: “Hi, I’m sorry, but I am wondering—where are you from?”

“Detroit, Michigan,” Apryl answered.

The Belgian looked confused, and I could see him thinking very hard. “I’m sorry,” he said again,—“I’m very drunk. My English is not very good. You are born in America? Where is your family from?”

“Detroit.”

“Yeah, but, where are they from originally?” and he said it pointedly, as if providing a clue.

“I don’t know.”

I had my hand over my mouth like, Oh man, but it was not my place to say anything.

“From Africa?”

“We’re all from Africa.”

“You look like you’re from Africa. Maybe central Africa?”

Apryl said, “We’re all from the same Source,” and the Belgian was not satisfied. He persisted:

“Congo? I have some friends from Congo, and you look like them. Have you been to Africa? It’s so great. It will totally change your point of view. Get to your roots,”—but then he seemed to sense his unintentional offense and quickly said, “I’m sorry, I’m very drunk.”

“It’s okay,” said Apryl.

The Belgian rolled away across the neon-lit dais, and I asked her, “Do you get that a lot?”

“Sometimes. Yeah. I have to remind myself to stay calm, but it’s not easy. Sometimes it’s really hard. I usually just say, I’m from the Source, but that’s not what people want to hear. They want me to say what they expect to hear.”

“Africa.”

“Or Detroit, Michigan.” She sighed. “Nobody wants to know where you are born. Everyone wants to know what tribe you come from. Like it matters.”

The Belgian told me that Pai is a place where you come for a few days and stay for a few months, stirring memories of Paradise Beach. I stayed up to an unreasonable hour that night to watch the tragic end of Ghana’s World Cup bid to a Uruguayan handball, and the next day I only wanted to relax.

I went to 7-11 for some super-sweet iced coffee to wake me up and stopped at the cart in the shade of the temple’s peepul trees for a papaya salad. This is one of the delights of Thailand: shaved strips of a green and unripe papaya, crisp and tasteless as lettuce, mixed in a mortar with tomatoes, garlic, peanuts, lime, maybe some dried shrimp, and an even mix of palm sugar, fish sauce, and chili peppers, making a go. The Thais make it spicy enough to cry. I liked it that way as well and said, “Spicy, spicy,” and fanned at my mouth to show that I was serious, and I waited there in the shade for my salad.

“Jon!” There’s some word in Thai that sounds just like my name, so that I had lost the habit of looking up when I heard it, which sometimes interfered when someone was actually trying to call my attention—“Jon!”

“Oh, hey Apryl. Nice bike.”

“I know. Look at this chrome. And I got this bell like, ring-ring, can’t touch this.”

“You need that here. You gotta ring that every time you go around the corner, pass someone.”

“Yeah like, check me out.”

“What are you up to?”

“Going to Chiang Mai to visit friends. Load up on music and movies on my portable hard drive. Maybe cook something.”

“Sounds nice.”

“Yeah. I’ll take the public bus. Get a nice breeze. I don’t like those minibuses. It always makes me sick.”

“Local buses are better. Doesn’t take much longer.”

“Only like half-an-hour. It’s nothing. And the minibus always makes me sick. There’s no air, only AC, and it’s always just recycling the warm nasty air. Anyway, I didn’t call you over here to complain about buses.”

“I’m sick of these buses!”

Apryl laughed, and I told her I might go to the waterfalls, as soon as my friends stopped procrastinating—probably tomorrow.

“No hurry. They’ll still be here. They were dry a few months ago. Now it will be nice.”

“Yeah, I hope so.”

On the way back to where my bungalow was, intent on a regimen of loafing and hammocks, I saw Tattoo sitting at a table in the sun with two other Thais and a bottle of whiskey. He wore mirrored shades and the same white shirt and cut-off jeans as the day before.

I said, “Hey man, how’s it going?”

“Good, good, how are you?”

“You have a good night?”

“I have a pretty fucking good night.”

“Well, what are you doing now?”

“Fishing.”

“Fishing.”

“Have a seat. Just look. You can see so much from here.”

“What do you see?”

“Woman,” growled Tattoo.

Leaving the Thai to his bait and tackle, I pursued my regimen until that night, when I stayed up late to watch the Germany-Argentina game with Karol, Mark the Estonian, and two pretty Bavarian girls who had just been to China; and their company and cheer mitigated my sorrow in the wake of Germany’s 4-0 blitzkrieg, for my sympathies lay with the Latin-American team. Some of them left for this weekly electro party, and I stayed with Karol and some Aussie stoner to watch the confused end of the Spain-Paraguay match.

Mark the Estonian was on acid one day, patting down the grass and saying he’d lost his soul, that he could not feel it there anymore. Later, after midnight, he got drunk and passed out in the road near the 7-11. A Thai on a scooter nearly ran Mark over, and nearly crashed trying to avoid the drunken Baltican. Mark woke up when the wheel passed this far from his face, he said later, and the Thai started shouting at him:

“Stupid foreigner! What are you doing? I know you. I see you playing guitar. You learn guitar just to pick up girls. Stupid foreigner!”

All Thais brim with envy because they cannot draw the randy eyes of the young Western women that come to Thailand to “find themselves” and “let loose”—not with all their awkward guesses at gallantry and their mistranslated jokes—and the Thai was shouting at Mark about this, and thirty more Thais appeared, all raving mad on jabba, and they chased Mark down the street. That, at least, was the story told the following morning.

On Independence Day I spent all my time with Germans, Dutch, and Birmies, and after midnight voyaged out around town to find a few compatriots. I found two Americans, shared a toast, and was satisfied. Thank God for America.

I’d heard a few stories about a place called the Cave Lodge. It was an hour north of Pai, halfway along the beautiful winding road to Mae Hong Som, in a town called Ban Tham Lod, and everyone who had been there said it was amazing.

The principle attraction to my particular ears was the legend of the proprietor: an old Australian named John Spies, who had been in Thailand for decades, having fallen in love with the country (and a Thai girl). The district of Pang Mapha, with its caves and karst, was his favorite place, and there he made his home. He had dealt with tribes and border guards and several murder mysteries and had mapped out the limestone caves in the surrounding hills, the largest cave network in Asia.

So after the exhilarating ride over the hills, Karol and I parked our bikes near the entrance to Lod Cave and went in search of the Cave Lodge. It is sited up on a forested slope over the river that flows through the cave, and bungalows and a bathhouse ring like flies the Lodge. The main hall is open on three sides, with a fire-pit in the middle, a tennis table at the head where the King’s Bench might be, and maps along the walls—the maps of caves and villages drawn by the Old Man of the Mountain. There are books on the tables, caving reports and guides, and one tome of clamped together printer paper—“Borderline: Caves, Coffins, and Chaos in the Golden Triangle”—detailing John’s adventures, discoveries, mysteries, and his romances, which landed him this domain in the furthest corner of Thailand.

I flipped through the book with fascination as we took lunch at one of the low tables, and the Old Man himself passed through the chamber—lordly strides in fisherman pants and a T-shirt, with long gray hairs and the appearance of Cedric of Rotherwood, if that Saxon Cedric had married a sweet Shan girl and ruled as quiet a fief as this one, with its cool river, its caves and dungeon maps. I did not speak with him then, but went out with Karol to Lod Cave. I had only my little flashlight and no boat, so our foray into the cave was full of confusion and excitement, and ended at the first bend of the river, where the walls close in on the river and the caver needs kayak and paddle to proceed.

Outside in the hot air, we wandered around the hills past an old bridge, a wooden one built on the two stone stilts still standing amid the wreck of a broken attempt at modern construction. The other pillars were laid out in the water. We climbed up a hill and came down sunburned and exhausted and had a Coke with some Californians we knew in the park dining hall. Karol drove back to Pai with them. The German was only making a day trip, but I wanted to stay the night at the Lodge. The next day I would explore more of overhill and underhill, and drive back into Pai for a bus south.

While a pretty Shan girl named Nai was checking me in for the dormitory, I met John Spies. Our conversation proceeded in this way—

“You’re John?”

“Yes.”

“His name Jon, too.”

“But with no H. Short for Jonathan. I just like Jon better.”

John laughed and said, “It’s a common name in Thai, you know—Jon. It’s also an animal.”

“What kind? Something fierce?”

“Let me think. It’s a sort of mole. Digs in the ground.”

“Oh,” deflated.

“You’re from the States? From where?”

“Oregon.”

“Good. It’s good to hear somewhere different. Everyone is always California.”

“Where are you from, originally?”

“I was born in Sydney.”

“How long have you been here?”

“A long time. We opened this place in eighty-four.”

“You like it here?”

He looked around and said, “It’s my favorite place in the world.”

“Good business?”

“We’re still open.” He waved like a magic trick—tada! “And I put my kids through college. But I could have done a lot better if I did business elsewhere.”

“Like Chiang Mai?”

“Like Australia. You were in Pai before you came here? Pai was nothing when we started this. Just a name on the map. And there wasn’t a single hostel in Chiang Mai. Now, all of a sudden, Chiang Mai is full of tourists, and there are forty guesthouses in Pai.”

“It looks like Khausan, in the middle of nowhere.”

“It is the middle of nowhere. There’s nothing to do. If you come an hour north, it’s amazing. But the roads are rough, so people started stopping in Pai on their way here. Pai is big because of us.”

At sunset a cyclone of swallows forms outside Lod cave and funnels in as a constant stream, graceful and squeaking, rousing the bats to hunt and clear room for the birds.

There was a French family staying in the Lodge, and other than them I was the only guest. I sat in the hall and peered into my notepad and sipped a beer after dinner. Nai came out from the kitchen and sat near me, and we talked and joked for a long while. I asked her about the World Cup and about her life and the village. Though she was divorced and had a daughter, she was about my age, and when she asked me to come back and watch television, I was halfway incredulous.

I followed Nai into the kitchen, with some certain expectations, and she locked the door behind us. I followed her out onto a balcony and was confused to find myself in a common room, where John was working Photoshop and two old Thai ladies were camped out above an air mattress, waiting for the World Cup.

Then I realized that this was how I would watch the World Cup match that night—the Netherlands and Uruguay. The old ladies were apparently big football fans and had come in from their villages to watch it. Nai left with her daughter, and John left with his Shan wife, and soon I had fallen asleep on the couch and the game went on without me.