Backtrack to Laos and forward to Cambodia

DOWN THE PAN

In the en suite bathroom of my room in Luang Prabang was no sign that said 'Pleas put paper in bin, nott in tolet!'. There was also no bin. So I put toilet paper down the toilet, just like the conditioned Westerner that I am. After a few days, the toilet was filled to the brim with liquid of spine chilling colour and throat mangling consistency. I was forced to tell the tiny slightly deformed guy who ran the hostel, who came into my room with three of his friends. Many toilets out here have a little spray hose with a trigger firing action next to the toilet for arse cleaning purposes. Fearless and businesslike, our man set about detaching the trigger, causing a jet of water to start firing out of the hose. He plunged his hand into the toilet up to the shoulder. His three friends gently closed the door, shutting him in there alone. They giggled at me while I sat on the bed mortified. Horrific sounds of splashing and squealing emanated from within the bathroom for ten minutes. Eventually he emerged, soaked in water from head to toe. The bathroom was spotless and the toilet was an apogee of flushable perfection once more. I couldn't look at him. All I could do was sheepishly press a wad of notes probably equal to a week's wages into his hand. He was naturally thrilled.


BIG JUGS

I travelled with Daniel and several to Phonsavan to look at the Plain of Jars. Fields full of unexplained enormous stone jars thousands of years old. They are huge things, hewn out of rock found nowhere nearby. Over 4000 jars in total, but you can only see 1000 because most of the fields are littered with unexploded ordinance from the USA's steady carpet bombing of Laos in the 70's. We took a 'local bus', which means it breaks down every 20 miles and has enormous bags of grit in the aisles. The bus was red and white and resembled something clambered together from scrap metal found at the back of a supermarket. The driver smoked cigarettes constantly, possibly to disguise the black smoke billowing from the engine. My knees were pressed into my head. But it was okay - the journey was only seven hours.

The jars themselves were differently shaped and differently sized, just like countries can be. Some had square holes and some had round ones, just like people can have. One jar in particular was big enough to contain at least three members of the New Zealand rugby team, whilst others could barely have contained a contortionist midget. None of them were filled with sweets or amphetemaines, but some had algae and even flowers.

We visited a Hmong village (a local tribe), where houses and fences have been built out of U.S.A. missile casings. We saw wide expanses of fields studded with enormous craters. Grass grows at the bottom now but the flat land was once blown apart by bombs. Strange to imagine that in peaceful arable land scattered with villages and rice fields.


FIFA KARAOKE AND WHISKY NATIONALISM

I managed to single handedly get all the tourists in Phonsavan to Fifa Karaoke Bar. Their concept of karaoke is to put Chinese karaoke videos on a tv while a DJ plays mix cds of cheesy dance music. However, it was 2 pounds for a litre of whisky. 20 Lao teenage girls danced on the dancefloor in a circle, taking in turns to dance in the centre. The other girls responded to the centre dancer's antics by letting out a collective scream you might otherwise hear at the appearance of headless zombie holding a dead baby and an axe.

Daniel and found ourselves in the street with two French guys and a Canadian. We respectively sung our national anthems while the others respectfully downed shots of whisky. We were then ready for Phonsovan Night Club. It was reminiscent of a Greek restaurant in Finchley, replete with pillars, murals and a fantastic keyboard player who was accompanied by two fat men singing with gusto. There had been some kind of event and the entire party was made up of middle aged Lao types. On the floor they danced in couples, not touching or even looking at each other, but twirling their hands and revolving incredibly slowly while the group as a whole moved round in a larger cirle, as waltzers at a fairground. Come to think of it, maybe that's why they call them waltzers. Did everyone else know this already?


VANG VIEN

...is a tourist strip on the Song River surrounded by vertiginous limestone karsts (cliffs, you dummy). The strip has restaurants which each serve 'special' food, such as marijuana pizza, mushroom shakes, opium tea, spaghetti heroin bolognese and crack waffles. Ok, not the last two. Many of the bars show episodes of Friends all day, which gives you the eerie feeling of being in Hell. Daniel and I acquired a gorgeous bungalow with a charming veranda overlooking the stunning view. I wonder if I might have included a few more positive adjectives in that sentence. Hannah and Emma, from Bangkok, Chaing Mai and Luang Prabang, were there. We all went tubing together along with Daniel's Germans and Irish.

Tubing is sitting on a massive rubber ring and floating surprisingly quickly down a river. In Vang Vien there are little bars alongside the river, where men with long sticks hook you in for a drink. Actually getting over to the side in time can be tricky. I had to watch Dan torn away from me by the current, screaming and clutching in vain at flimsy branches only to disappear round the corner. May I never see such a sight again. Caught up with him later in a bar. He had gallantly reentered the water to rescue Katrin (one of our Germans) and managed to sustain serious scratches on his arm as well as puncturing his tube. That's what you get. The bar had a swing on which you stand while three guys run up the hill pulling you back on a rope. There is a moment when you are thirty feet above the water, horizontal, staring straight downwards, when they release, and you hurtle downwards, skimming the water before being thrown in. For the rest of the way down the river I had to drag Dan alongside me on his deflated bit of rubber. We stopped several more times, being handed shots of Lao Lao whiskey (rather like sake's demented cousin). We were quite merry by the end and sailed well past our get off point, necessitating a 2km walk back to town. Fantastic.


VIENTIANE TO SIEM REAP IN 30 SHORT HOURS

Spurning Southern Laos and dodgy border crossings, Daniel and I opted for:

Vientiane to Bangkok - 11 hours
Bangkok bus station - 1 hour
Bangkok to Arunya Pathet (Thai border) - 7 hours
Cambodian Immigration and waiting for bus - 4 hours
Poyet - Siem Reap - 9 hours

Travel incident 1:

Laos immigration forgot to give me an exit stamp, so when we arrived on our bus at Thai immigration, they refused me entry. Our bus would not wait very long - it had to catch the connecting bus to Bangkok in the bus station. Er.. so did we. The Thai immigration officials were stonily intransigent. 'It's not my fault!' I wailed. They pointed back to Laos. I wildly banged on the estate car of a well-to-do Thai couple and begged them to take across the bridge to Laos immigration. Then I coralled a young Thai guy listening to rock music in his pick-up truck to take me back to Thai immigration. Daniel stood forlornly with our bags - our bus had gone. We boarded a tuk tuk which drove us torturously slowly towards our bus station, resigning ourselves to spending the night in wherever-the-fuck-we-were. But in the bus station, like a shaft of light penetrating the bleakest dawn, was our bus, all kitted out with pink frilly curtains and free cans of coke. I blissfully sank into the seat, my feeling of elation only partially undermined by the deafening volume of the Thai pantomime they were showing on the tv.

Travel incident 2:

I left my guitar on the bus at the Thai-Cambodian border. I realised when we were almost at immigration in a tuk tuk. We returned and I ran around in the midday heat from bus to bus. I frantically boarded 7 buses, but none was ours. Finally our tuk tuk driver stepped in, like Sylvester Stallone in Demolition Man when he has just been defrosted. He made a few calls and took us round some side streets to a barren country road, where our bus was sitting happily by the side of the road. My guitar had sustained a serious neck injury, but nothing that Cambodian glue can't fix.

Travel incident 3:

The road to Siem Reap from the border makes a quarry look like the M1. The distance is 120km but the journey takes 9 hours. Car-sized holes abound, and so do the passengers in the bus, up clear off the seat. We stopped occasionally to be mobbed by the cutest kids in the world selling stuff we didn't want. 'No thanks,' I said, several times, and then bought a pack of postcards, a bracelet, a drink and gave several donations. Cambodians are very pushy, and know how to use extremely cute kids to full financial advantage.


BYE FOR LAO

It is a beautiful country. Wonderfully relaxed, though that might be because most of the people don't have jobs. It's one of the poorest countries in the world, yet the people are so much less pushy than Thais or Cambodians. Might be the opium. Beer Lao is the elixir of immortality, though it makes you sleepy. The cliffs are astounding. I missed the 4000 islands in Southern Laos, but I figure I can go to the 3000 islands in North Vietnam and just take a bottle of thousand island dressing. I didn't do Laos justice; it's so hard to cram everything in. Or even anything. Not that I'm complaining. Hannah went off to Thailand so our frequent meetings along the way are at an end. Daniel has also gone the way of the Thai islands, and I'm now travelling alone for the first time. Daniel was an unexpected blessing, and we had a great time together. Now, for the open road, with only a brown paper bag and a plastic windcheater for company. I'll tell you about Angkor another time. If anybody's out there.