Day 74 - Phonsavan
Phonsavan has the plain of jars. Thousands of jar-shaped vessels up to three metres in height and up to 3000 years old are scattered around the town. They were constructed by giants to store rice wine, at least according to local legend. The plains are also littered with unexploded bombs dropped by the Americans in the sixties to eliminate the giants whom they probably thought were communists. After my relatively successful time on a bike in Thailand I feel emboldened to get another one to tour the jars. Thus far the bikes had been automatics with nothing more to worry about than faster and slower. But this one was semi-automatic with controllable gears thrown into the mix. My confidence evaporated as I stuttered down the road with the engine howling. Flight was preferable to fight as I contemplated turning around, throwing back the keys and, shamefaced, leaving town. But I didn't. I learned. I learned my response to adversity is automatic and it is limiting. Instant competence or nothing ties my feet, my hands, my tongue. As the gear changes got smoother I found again my capacity to surprise myself. And Google Maps, wanting to help me on my path of self-discovery, sends me up a path. A steep, deeply rutted path that bore no resemblance to a road. Again I wanted to turn from it, reverse, abandon, again I didn't. It may be hubris but I am finding a way to shape that to a productive end.
The clouds roll over as I walk around a couple of the jar sites and rumbling skies portend yet another test of my riding ability. One I don't think I fancy just yet. I wait out the storm over a bowl of noodles in a small village. I'm not quite desperate enough to toast my success with the single bottle of beer they keep in a switched-off fridge though. As I get back to Phonsavan to drop off the bike I realise I still have a few hours left on the rental. Switching off the navigation I point the bike in the first direction that takes my fancy and ride. The rain had left a cool mist drifting over the road and hills. It gives the landscape an atmospheric appeal as I ride the undulating tarmac to who-knows-where. The freedom of my own transport, wheels spinning on the axle of my whim is quite unknown to me. I do believe I like it.
The morning chill shivers me in a tuk-tuk as I head back to the bus station. I'd like to get the local bus to Vang Vieng which is spacious and cheap and may or may not exist. Looks like a minivan for me again. We leave, we shortly stop. We wait. After ten minutes the driver gets out and looks at his phone. After another ten minutes he gets back in, nothing having obviously changed, and we're off again. Do Laos people just not notice the petty annoyances that so grieve us in the west? Impromptu stops, phone notifications, people playing music, videos, games on them? Do they place no value in quiet? It's a noisy country I suppose. Can they tune it all out? I'd love to know how. Music suddenly starts playing over the van's sound system. It's the usual dreadful Laos stuff. I'd love to know who is responsible, for the song and the playing of it. They belong in the Hague. Laos music is the natural result of self-imposed exile from the west and its endless supply of corrupting bangers. They instead have a stupefying puddle of music here. Slow guitars and slower vocals with the charisma of a bar of soap are the template. I don't understand the lyrics but I am sure they are singing about the most unimaginative, asinine guff. The music abruptly stops after a while. I hold my breath in anticipation of its resumption. There is none, praise Buddha. Even the guy chewing noisily nearby has fallen asleep. Oh no, someone has phoned him and now he's awake. They're on speaker. It sounds like his godawful family. Minivan travel does not promote a generosity of the soul.
The music does eventually restart and it jolts my eyes open. The scenery has become dramatic and the sun is burning off the mist covering the wooded slopes. We're now on dirt roads broken up by weather and HGVs. Our minivan picks its way slowly, gingerly along a track that has turned into one of those 4x4 experiences that middle-aged, middle-class men enjoy. Other middle-aged, middle-class men. The bus arrives in Vang Vieng in one piece despite the driver's habit of overtaking flat-bed trucks on blind corners. This place is Laos' adventure sports hub. There's temples, waterfalls, caves and scenic countryside, the usual stuff. There's also trekking and rock climbing and hot air balloon rides but it is synonymous with 'tubing'. Tourists float down the river on tractor inner tubes and stop at numerous bars along the way until they reach the end of the route. Or die. Which an unsurprising amount have. 27 died in 2011 with 5-10 admitted to hospital with injuries...a day. Things are a bit more controlled now since it's tourist-culling heyday. Though saying that one managed to remove himself from the gene pool on a rope swing while I was there. The local people now avoid the river believing that evil spirits are claiming these lives. But no it's just cheap spirits and lots of them. I'm not here for the tubing or the outdoor pursuits or the buckets of drink or the drugs (n.b. not all of that is strictly true). Sitting in a surprisingly good Irish bar catching up on writing an Australian guy plonks himself down at the table. He's friendly with a slightly superficial predatory air that suggests he'd be talking to talking to the two girls at the next table if he could. And before long we are. Carly and Chelsea are both English and pleasant company. The rain comes at night in Vang Vieng at this time of year and it comes heavily. I wonder at Gary's logic in building 'Gary's Irish Bar - The Rising Sun' below street level. All that is currently rising is the water level in the bar as it cascades down the steps from the street. Half the patrons are already outside dancing in the deluge and soaked to the skin. We four stay dry until Chelsea mentions another bar around the corner that might change our perspective on things. We run for it until it we're wet enough that makes no difference. We move from beer to shakes and wait. A man dressed in a bin bag throws his 6 foot 5 frame into improbable shapes on the dancefloor. I am fairly sure at this point that that is actually happening. But soon enough conversation abates as our senses kaleidoscope. Time slows down yet remains the same speed. The lights cavort to the music and blue and green and red are feelings that drift around me. Every kind of input to my brain is wonderfully tweaked. I float home to the hostel on wet streets that writhe beneath my feet. There's no-one in the pool area so I sit there for over an hour (or was it five minutes?) watching the hidden magic in the streetlights and seeing cars lift themselves from the road and gently drop down again. Everything and nothing is as it is.
An enormous explosion is suitable reward for my speculative trip to Vang Vieng. The girls I'd met in Muang Ngoy had told me about a rocket festival that was held in Laos around this time in May. Reliable information on dates and locations was hard to find. A google search told me that Vang Vieng held the festival on the 13th. Or the 15th. Or the 16th. Now I was in town I found a tour operator that could confirm it would be held on the outskirts of town on the 13th. I was grateful enough for the information that I booked an overpriced private kayaking tour through them. Come the day I'd found an Australian girl called Ollee to share the cost of a taxi out there and the roads were clogged with teams of guys from local villages transporting their homemade rockets. They ranged in size from a metre or so to the biggest which were three metres of PVC tubing packed with explosives. I love exploding things almost as much as I love homemade exploding things with the bare minimum of safety precautions. And by bare minimum I mean a monk has blessed each rocket so what could go wrong? The rocket festival is held at the end of the dry season to encourage the rains to come and brings the fields back to life. Whomever fires their rocket the highest, presumably having got closest to the clouds and convinced the heavens to open, is deemed the winner. The irony is that it's been raining for days and the festival location is a muddy, waterlogged field. The small rockets lead us off, fun enough but I eagerly await the main event.
To pass the time Ollee and I drink fruity ciders and settle on currant as the best variety. There are guys walking around selling miniature rockets and some local kids help me set mine up. As the smoke hisses from the lit wick we scatter in all directions. It curves a pleasing arc over the empty rice paddies. One of the big rockets is now being loaded onto the launch platforms. The platforms are just a flimsy bamboo scaffolding about 15 metres high. The teams scamper up them, beer in hand and cigarette in mouth and secure the rocket before launch. They begin to descend and we wait. The only sign that something is about to happen is people running away from the base of the platform. Smoke spews from the rocket and we are engulfed in it. After a few seconds flames burst out and we are in Cape Canaveral. It heaves itself from the platform and gathers pace as it pierces the still sky. Unless it doesn't. A while later another of the biggest rockets is ready to go. The team evacuates the blast zone. Fire licks from the base, and then the top and then the whole thing explodes. Pieces of the rocket fly past our heads as panic sweeps the crowd. Flaming chunks of plastic litter the ground in front of me. That was more exciting that the successful launch. That may seem a wanton or even theatrical embrace of chaos and risk. And I'd concede that there has been an air of nihilism or fatalism hanging over this trip, though as Ferris cautions "isms, in my opinion, are not good." Given the circumstances, and I'm only here because things went destructively wrong, I think that's understandable. Going away to find myself, to reinvent myself, to find happiness was only one possible outcome. I also considered the possibility of laying on soft, loamy soil and sinking deeply into it. Letting thoughts and tissue melt away. Being at one with it, inseparable and without pain. Returning to a formless universality. And it didn't scare me so much as it did, the inevitability was suddenly more comforting. The great escape was never on. But that was, and this is mere weeks of experience talking, a surrender to externalities. An easy acceptance of a hard truth. I write this up from notes made at the time. And as so often it is a different person that wrote those notes, imbued as they were with the feelings of the moment, to the person that interprets them, shapes them into a narrative and sometimes reframes them with the benefit of gathered wisdom. A great distance has been travelled in a short time.
The south of Laos has rivers through caves, 1000 islands and a time cost that I just don't feel I can afford. Reluctantly I apply for my Vietnam visa. The process is run through a website that was created on a ZX Spectrum. The visa starts from the moment it is granted and there are no guarantees how long that will take. You have to nominate your point of entry and then that is the only acceptable route to get in. Flexibility for when and where you enter the country is therefore zero. It is, in a word, ridiculous. Officially there's no extension past 30 days either which in a post-covid world of decimated tourism industries seems wildly illogical. Hopefully the aggravation of the application process will be soothed by my kayak tour. A van picks me up from the hostel and I sit in the back with a guy who may also be on the tour or maybe leading the tour or maybe neither. No indication is given and this will become a theme. He pulls a buff up to cover most of his face except the eyes. Did I book on the rob-a-bank tour accidentally? We arrive at the river and a two-person kayak is unloaded from the roof of the van. I'm offered a life jacket by the driver but he looks dubiously at it and after confirming I can swim he chucks it back in the van. Clyde gets into the back of the Kayak so I guess that makes me Bonnie in the front. This will make a poor getaway vehicle. Especially since I don't know if I am expected to paddle or not. Clyde doesn't seem to care either way and still not a word has passed between us. I decide to paddle but I'm unsure whether I am actually helping or not. I am mostly making myself wet. Well, wetter because it has started to rain. The karst mountain scenery is impressive and some sections of the river are sedate but every 10 minutes or so we pass a riverside bar, this is the same route the tubers take I quickly realise. Music pumps from the bars as they down drinks like its someone else's day to die. Which, in probability, it is. Other bars are filled with Chinese tourists who seem to prefer the experience of sitting on chairs at a table that is actually in the river. It is unclear why. One guy is enjoying it so much he lustily belts out a tune loud enough to overcome the sound system. Buffalo swim and look accusingly at me as we slowly paddle past.
After two hours its over. It reminded me of Apocalypse Now, a backpacker crawling along the edge of a straight razor, but with more horror. There was almost nothing natural or peaceful about it, I learned nothing of the area from Clyde, what was the point? I meet Olle for a drink afterwards and to air my vociferous complaints. Her lack of sympathy is a most agreeable trait. We talk about things with unguarded ease. She asks direct questions and I give honest answers. I wonder if it is because I have recently learned to open my mouth and move my lips in a way that lets all the grimy thoughts and humiliations to spill out from whence they had been toxically bubbling for decades. Is it a lack of fear of judgement, there generally being none, or a perverse desire for it? Here is me, roiled in filth, behold a beast. Beastery loves company perhaps. I'm walked back to the hostel and weave an improbable fantasia of feeling. But it's feeling nonetheless and ridiculous or not it feels good. There's been an abject lack of it lately. I'd spend a great deal more time with her if I could. Which I can't.
Phonsavan has the plain of jars. Thousands of jar-shaped vessels up to three metres in height and up to 3000 years old are scattered around the town. They were constructed by giants to store rice wine, at least according to local legend. The plains are also littered with unexploded bombs dropped by the Americans in the sixties to eliminate the giants whom they probably thought were communists. After my relatively successful time on a bike in Thailand I feel emboldened to get another one to tour the jars. Thus far the bikes had been automatics with nothing more to worry about than faster and slower. But this one was semi-automatic with controllable gears thrown into the mix. My confidence evaporated as I stuttered down the road with the engine howling. Flight was preferable to fight as I contemplated turning around, throwing back the keys and, shamefaced, leaving town. But I didn't. I learned. I learned my response to adversity is automatic and it is limiting. Instant competence or nothing ties my feet, my hands, my tongue. As the gear changes got smoother I found again my capacity to surprise myself. And Google Maps, wanting to help me on my path of self-discovery, sends me up a path. A steep, deeply rutted path that bore no resemblance to a road. Again I wanted to turn from it, reverse, abandon, again I didn't. It may be hubris but I am finding a way to shape that to a productive end.
The morning chill shivers me in a tuk-tuk as I head back to the bus station. I'd like to get the local bus to Vang Vieng which is spacious and cheap and may or may not exist. Looks like a minivan for me again. We leave, we shortly stop. We wait. After ten minutes the driver gets out and looks at his phone. After another ten minutes he gets back in, nothing having obviously changed, and we're off again. Do Laos people just not notice the petty annoyances that so grieve us in the west? Impromptu stops, phone notifications, people playing music, videos, games on them? Do they place no value in quiet? It's a noisy country I suppose. Can they tune it all out? I'd love to know how. Music suddenly starts playing over the van's sound system. It's the usual dreadful Laos stuff. I'd love to know who is responsible, for the song and the playing of it. They belong in the Hague. Laos music is the natural result of self-imposed exile from the west and its endless supply of corrupting bangers. They instead have a stupefying puddle of music here. Slow guitars and slower vocals with the charisma of a bar of soap are the template. I don't understand the lyrics but I am sure they are singing about the most unimaginative, asinine guff. The music abruptly stops after a while. I hold my breath in anticipation of its resumption. There is none, praise Buddha. Even the guy chewing noisily nearby has fallen asleep. Oh no, someone has phoned him and now he's awake. They're on speaker. It sounds like his godawful family. Minivan travel does not promote a generosity of the soul.
The music does eventually restart and it jolts my eyes open. The scenery has become dramatic and the sun is burning off the mist covering the wooded slopes. We're now on dirt roads broken up by weather and HGVs. Our minivan picks its way slowly, gingerly along a track that has turned into one of those 4x4 experiences that middle-aged, middle-class men enjoy. Other middle-aged, middle-class men. The bus arrives in Vang Vieng in one piece despite the driver's habit of overtaking flat-bed trucks on blind corners. This place is Laos' adventure sports hub. There's temples, waterfalls, caves and scenic countryside, the usual stuff. There's also trekking and rock climbing and hot air balloon rides but it is synonymous with 'tubing'. Tourists float down the river on tractor inner tubes and stop at numerous bars along the way until they reach the end of the route. Or die. Which an unsurprising amount have. 27 died in 2011 with 5-10 admitted to hospital with injuries...a day. Things are a bit more controlled now since it's tourist-culling heyday. Though saying that one managed to remove himself from the gene pool on a rope swing while I was there. The local people now avoid the river believing that evil spirits are claiming these lives. But no it's just cheap spirits and lots of them. I'm not here for the tubing or the outdoor pursuits or the buckets of drink or the drugs (n.b. not all of that is strictly true). Sitting in a surprisingly good Irish bar catching up on writing an Australian guy plonks himself down at the table. He's friendly with a slightly superficial predatory air that suggests he'd be talking to talking to the two girls at the next table if he could. And before long we are. Carly and Chelsea are both English and pleasant company. The rain comes at night in Vang Vieng at this time of year and it comes heavily. I wonder at Gary's logic in building 'Gary's Irish Bar - The Rising Sun' below street level. All that is currently rising is the water level in the bar as it cascades down the steps from the street. Half the patrons are already outside dancing in the deluge and soaked to the skin. We four stay dry until Chelsea mentions another bar around the corner that might change our perspective on things. We run for it until it we're wet enough that makes no difference. We move from beer to shakes and wait. A man dressed in a bin bag throws his 6 foot 5 frame into improbable shapes on the dancefloor. I am fairly sure at this point that that is actually happening. But soon enough conversation abates as our senses kaleidoscope. Time slows down yet remains the same speed. The lights cavort to the music and blue and green and red are feelings that drift around me. Every kind of input to my brain is wonderfully tweaked. I float home to the hostel on wet streets that writhe beneath my feet. There's no-one in the pool area so I sit there for over an hour (or was it five minutes?) watching the hidden magic in the streetlights and seeing cars lift themselves from the road and gently drop down again. Everything and nothing is as it is.
An enormous explosion is suitable reward for my speculative trip to Vang Vieng. The girls I'd met in Muang Ngoy had told me about a rocket festival that was held in Laos around this time in May. Reliable information on dates and locations was hard to find. A google search told me that Vang Vieng held the festival on the 13th. Or the 15th. Or the 16th. Now I was in town I found a tour operator that could confirm it would be held on the outskirts of town on the 13th. I was grateful enough for the information that I booked an overpriced private kayaking tour through them. Come the day I'd found an Australian girl called Ollee to share the cost of a taxi out there and the roads were clogged with teams of guys from local villages transporting their homemade rockets. They ranged in size from a metre or so to the biggest which were three metres of PVC tubing packed with explosives. I love exploding things almost as much as I love homemade exploding things with the bare minimum of safety precautions. And by bare minimum I mean a monk has blessed each rocket so what could go wrong? The rocket festival is held at the end of the dry season to encourage the rains to come and brings the fields back to life. Whomever fires their rocket the highest, presumably having got closest to the clouds and convinced the heavens to open, is deemed the winner. The irony is that it's been raining for days and the festival location is a muddy, waterlogged field. The small rockets lead us off, fun enough but I eagerly await the main event.
The south of Laos has rivers through caves, 1000 islands and a time cost that I just don't feel I can afford. Reluctantly I apply for my Vietnam visa. The process is run through a website that was created on a ZX Spectrum. The visa starts from the moment it is granted and there are no guarantees how long that will take. You have to nominate your point of entry and then that is the only acceptable route to get in. Flexibility for when and where you enter the country is therefore zero. It is, in a word, ridiculous. Officially there's no extension past 30 days either which in a post-covid world of decimated tourism industries seems wildly illogical. Hopefully the aggravation of the application process will be soothed by my kayak tour. A van picks me up from the hostel and I sit in the back with a guy who may also be on the tour or maybe leading the tour or maybe neither. No indication is given and this will become a theme. He pulls a buff up to cover most of his face except the eyes. Did I book on the rob-a-bank tour accidentally? We arrive at the river and a two-person kayak is unloaded from the roof of the van. I'm offered a life jacket by the driver but he looks dubiously at it and after confirming I can swim he chucks it back in the van. Clyde gets into the back of the Kayak so I guess that makes me Bonnie in the front. This will make a poor getaway vehicle. Especially since I don't know if I am expected to paddle or not. Clyde doesn't seem to care either way and still not a word has passed between us. I decide to paddle but I'm unsure whether I am actually helping or not. I am mostly making myself wet. Well, wetter because it has started to rain. The karst mountain scenery is impressive and some sections of the river are sedate but every 10 minutes or so we pass a riverside bar, this is the same route the tubers take I quickly realise. Music pumps from the bars as they down drinks like its someone else's day to die. Which, in probability, it is. Other bars are filled with Chinese tourists who seem to prefer the experience of sitting on chairs at a table that is actually in the river. It is unclear why. One guy is enjoying it so much he lustily belts out a tune loud enough to overcome the sound system. Buffalo swim and look accusingly at me as we slowly paddle past.
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