A familiar shiver of panic forces me upright in bed and I turn on the tv to check the time. It's 8:04. I was supposed to meet Hannah downstairs at eight and most of my stuff is still decorating the floor of my hotel room. The plan was to catch a tuk-tuk, two buses and a boat to Mong Ngoi Neua today and the first bus leaves the Luang Nam Tha station at eight thirty. The station is fifteen minutes away. She knocks on my door as I begin to toss everything in sight haphazardly into my pack and I tell her not to bother waiting. She tells me she'll wait downstairs anyway. Five minutes later I'm on the sidewalk and she's nowhere in sight. As I scan the street for her I see a full tuk-tuk pull away in the direction of the station and I know that was my last chance to make the bus. It's just as well. Hannah wears her Canadian accent like a skintight neon jumpsuit and I wasn't sure that I could have maintained my composure as she recited "hey?" after every sentence over the next ten hours...(read more)
I go to the office where I booked the jungle trek three days ago and they tell me the next bus leaves at nine thirty. Perfect. A quick breakfast and I'm off to to the station with time to spare. Here's the first bus to Udom Xai. It's a twenty seat van that, from the looks of things, has never been new. The driver places my bag on the roof and I manage to convince him with a series of hand signals that the guitar stays with me. He directs me into a seat in back. A number of Lao men eye me suspiciously as they chat and smoke. Their conversation is peppered with farang (gringo) and geetah (guitar) the only two Lao words that I recognize besides hello and thank you. A young woman in front noisily gathers the contents of her neck and her lips send it sailing across the isle and through the open door.
Nine thirty comes and goes. Ten thirty comes and goes. At eleven o'clock there begins a heartening flurry of activity as several more passengers board and the driver repeatedly climbs in and out of the driver's seat. False alarm. The activity dies down and the waiting continues. But the bus is now full so I feel that we must be getting close. At eleven thirty the driver starts the bus. This is very exciting.
As I glance around the van searching for more potential signs of an impending departure, I suddenly begin to see other passengers producing small white slips of paper. Very official looking white slips of paper with some Lao script and multicolored stamps. They love to stamp things here in Laos--everything always has to be stamped in triplicate, even bus tickets.
Shit, bus ticket! The driver had directed me toward the bus not the ticket window and I had assumed we were to pay later. I squeeze myself from the back seat and climb the other passengers toward the door, rush to the window and buy the last ticket for the bus on which I have been sitting passively for the past two and a half hours. The woman stamps the ticket in triplicate and hands it to me through the window. She then follows me back to the bus where I hand the ticket back to her, she scans her clipboard for the corresponding number to determine it's authenticity and then we're off creeping slowly up and down the mountain pass as the transmission groans in protest.
We pitstop at a roadside market where table after table seem to specialize in dead rat and some kind of fat white root. The stop is welcome as the metal bar in the seat has begun to call unwanted attention to bones in my backside that I had previously not known to exist. As I disembark to find a private bush an elderly woman thrusts a handful of the roots towards me entusiastically, but my attention is drawn rather to the strikingly vivid greens and blues of the parrots to her right. A half dozen of them hang limp from the neck by a collective noose.
At three o'clock we arrive at Udom Xai. I need to catch a bus east to Nong Khiaw where I can stay the night and hop a boat north to Mong Ngoi Neua first thing tomorrow. Mong Ngoi is a small town in the North East accessible only by boat about which I have heard nothing but good things. Juri from Holland who I hung out with in Pai gave me the name of some guitar playing locals there who had taken good care of him and it sounded like a nice change from the socially sterile town of Luang Nam Tha that I had recently fled.
The woman at the ticket window informs me that the next bus to Nong Khiaw does not depart until nine o'clock the following morning. I buy a ticket on the four o'clock South to Luang Prabang. Oh well.
Four o'clock comes and goes. Five o'clock comes and goes. I gradually gather from the body language of the driver that we are waiting for someone and I remember a girl who had appeared hours ago to dump a bag in the front seat and then vanished. The girl reappears at five thirty laughing and holding a large coffee pot and we are on the road by quarter to six.
This time I managed to score a front seat in the van. Though there are four of us wedged into the three seats across there is extra legroom in front and things are looking up for the second part of the journey until an unexpected pothole sends my head hard into the ceiling and the young guy to my right in the red t-shirt bursts into a fit of laughter. I smile at him begrudgingly.
Apparently we bonded over this interaction because suddenly his legs and arms began to make imposing trips into the restricted airspace in front of my torso. Clearly this gentleman is not savvy to international unspoken personal bubble laws delineating the invisble social and physical barrier extending forward from the junction of the hip and shoulder between two unaquainted individuals in any given crowded public transportation scenario. Mildly annoyed at his intrusion I continue to follow protocol I remain silent and restlessly lean away from his flailing limbs. But he is only emboldened by my response and in and unprecedented manuever he leans forward and actually begins to rest his elbow across my knee applying a substantial portion of his upper body weight. Shocked by this aggregious breach of ettiquette I prepare to engage in the requisite non-verbal passive-aggressive resistence. I begin to deploy a series of slight elbows and hip checks masked as abrupt position shifts and accompanied by disgruntled sighs. This eventually stems his attack.
Or so I thought. Without warning his left hand is suddenly across my leg and cupped ever so gently around the inside of my right knee. Before I can react his right hand has crept over and the fingers of his left and right hand interlace, holding my bare patella in a loving embrace. The nails of his little fingers, yellowed and dirty, protrude a full inch passed his fingertips in typical Lao fashion. As I scoff audibly and shake him loose he lets out a chuckle. I don't know what in the name of all that is holy has just transpired, but it occurs to me that I'll have at least three more hours nestled next to this gratuitous knee-hugger to contemplate it.
When I finally escape the bus in Luang Prabang it is ten thirty p.m. and there is nobody to greet me at the bus station save for a lonely moto driver and two very small Lao men with very large guns. As I gather my belongings from the top of the bus the moto driver starts to give me a sales pitch but my my attention is currently divided between my pack and the two little gun wielders who are wearing matching shirts in olive drab. The shirts read "U.S. Army" on the left breast pocket. Not entirely sure of their role I begin to hope that they don't ask me for anything knowing that I will not have any choice but to hand it over.
Luckily their interest in the situation is only as well-armed on-lookers and I enter negotiations with the moto driver for a ride to a guest house as they stand uncomfortably close. The price is finally agreed upon at half his initial offer, after I begin to walk away in digust. This is lucky because I have no idea where I'm going or how long it will take to get there. I climb into the cart that's welded to his motor bike. After another several minutes of failed attempts to start his bike we set off for a hotel that I've chosen at random from the guide book.
He takes me down a darkened dirt road to a large empty gated and locked building with no sign or lights which he assures me is the guest house I've named and begins running around shouting over the gate as a pack of wild dogs gather to protest my arrival. I manage to convince him that this is not, in fact, the place and we navigate back towards town. Wary of another wild goose chase which will result in the driver demanding more money I tell him to stop on the first lighted street that I see. I get out in front of Mano Guest house which is incidently the one I had initially requested. The driver sees this and smiles pointing at the sign. "This Mano one . . . that Mano two," he says gesturing back in the direction of the empty dirt road. Mano, however, is full and I set out on foot to find an available bed.
But there are none. It is the night before New Year's Eve and the entire town is full of Thai and Chinese tourists, although you wouldn't know it as the streets are completely deserted. Hotel after hotel, they are all full and noone knows where I might find an available room.
I wander for an hour and begin to resign myself to the probability of having to find a warm spot of pavement to curl up on when I meet Dith, a friendly Lao air traffic controller with a motor bike and a good buzz on. After a few minutes of conversation he offers to drive me around until I find a room. He seems trustworthy and, having no other options, I graciously accept.
The first stop results in a long conversation between Dith and the night clerk in the driveway at the completion of which he takes the hotel business card from the clerk and informs me that there are no rooms. I wonder why this has taken so long to establish, but happy to have a seemingly motivated and friendly local guide I hop back on the bike at his prompting.
It's the same story everywhere. Eventually Dith informs me that his brothers have a snooker bar and should we fail to find a room he assures me, "We go there and I sleep with you". I optimistically accept this as an unfortunate mistranslation as he has already informed me that his girlfriend is waiting for him at home. After several more strikes we head to the snooker bar where I meet five of his brothers and he gives me a beer. But before we snuggle up together on a snooker table, he pulls out the card from the first hotel. After a lengthy conversation on his cell phone he informs me that I can have a room there for 100,000 Kip. As we ride back I inquire why the situation has changed in the last hour and he explains that this hotel gets 50,000 kip an hour from prostitutes. Presumably accepting my 100,000 so early in the night would simply have been bad business. After sixteen hours of travel and not terribly interested in splitting hairs I thanked Dith profusely and paid the pimping clerk. I politely waved off the clerk's curious late night invitation to a nearby bakery, and repeatedly told him that I did not know how many nights I'd be staying and I'd tell him tomorrow, and no, I'd rather he not keep my passport until I leave. Not entirely content with my response he tells me he will knock on my door at eight o'clock in the morning. Fine. I take the key, lock the door and, eager to complete the day, I climb under the mosquito net and into bed.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment