Day 75, 76, 77, etc..
I'm sat in the café in the hostel where I'm staying in the Laotian capital. There's a gramophone playing records from the 1920s. I feel like I've been here since the 1920s. The gramophone is set to the wrong speed, too slow, so the music is stretched and the vocals have a bassy, interminable groan. The gramophone is on all day and the sound makes time viscous and motionless. If I don't hear another saxophone for the rest of the trip that will be fine. Maybe I should get out and explore the city. But there's nothing to do in Vientiane except wait for your Vietnamese visa to come through. That's not quite true I suppose, there'd been some diversions in the evenings. I'd been having a quiet beer in a bar a couple of nights ago, studiously avoided the attention of an Australian bore who said things like "I've got nothing against aborigines right, but abos...", when I was co-opted into an odd social group of expats and Laos girls. The expats worked in the motor industry doing something too boring to recall. The most senior, Wayne, had a strong David Brent vibe (and a strong David Brent goatee) and offered, almost insisted, that he send a car to pick me up on the following day and take me on a tour to Vang Vieng. I explained that I'd just come from there and wasn't inclined to go straight back. He broadened the offer and said the car could take me wherever I wanted. I asked why he would make that offer to a stranger, "you know why? because I can". It all sounded like weapons-grade bollocks and I politely declined. I drank the beer he kept insisting on buying though, had to let him play the big man somehow. One of the Laos girls in the group was celebrating a birthday so we went onto a live music bar where Wayne and I danced with exuberant, slightly homoerotic vigour while his girlfriend looked on with an ennui that only a man of his hubris could ignore.
The group dwindled until it was only the girlfriend, who busied herself with a Frenchman, the birthday girl and I in a club. The former swiftly incapacitated herself on nitrous oxide and I left her on a sofa to fight a DJ battle with another tourist over the playlist. The following night I met an Australian guy called Mark who'd been drawn into the world of Outback Bar in Luang Prabang around the same time as me. He too had escaped and his wealth of life experiences made for good anecdotes. He was happy to drive the conversation which suited me just fine as the moment I feel pressure to find a topic my mind goes blank. We went to a jazz bar after dinner and then to a pub where I handily beat him at pool. My glory was short-lived though as I was drafted into a game of foosball with some French guys. They probably thought my protestations of awesome incompetence were just humility but soon realised they were nothing of the sort. Afterwards I asked one of them why he was wearing a plaster cast. He explained, with pictures, the experience of losing a game of chicken with a bus while on a bike. I suddenly felt as able to ride a bike through Vietnam (per my gestating idea) as I did to win a game of foosball.
So tick follows tock and staff wearing affected braces oscillate quickly beneath ceiling fans that oscillate slowly. Frederikke and I have fallen into a routine. Each morning we we pack our bags and check-out of the hostel, we sit and drink coffee in the café with Steven who also appears to have nowhere else to be, check our emails and watch the hours go by until it is time to check-in again. And the Vietnamese visa process goes on. It's day 4 and at this rate Al Jolson's bones will be dust before it comes. At 3PM there's still no email and Steven persuades us to step out into the light for some food. The point of staying in the hostel café is that, should the visa come through, we can immediately book the once-daily bus to Hanoi at the reception desk, grab the bags and flee this beige city. And lo as our late lunch is brought to the table our phones ping to the sound of our late visas arriving. We apologise as profusely as time allows and run back to the hostel. The bus has seats, we book, we're free. Returning to the restaurant we eat our lunch as slowly as time allows. Somehow the twenty hours of bus travel ahead of us manage to seem thrilling. If only for a moment.
"You!" It was only for a moment. The sleeper bus to Hanoi has a kind of conductor. And the orchestra of his English has but one instrument. We are invited to get on the bus with a loud and aggressive "you!". We are instructed to take our seats with a loud and aggressive "you!". We are ordered to change seats with a louder and even more aggressive "YOU!". He moves everyone around without any obvious purpose. Vietnamese is a tonal language so maybe there is a subtlety in his incessant barking that I am missing. Fred and I end up at the very back of the bus in a double bed with a guy we just met wedged between us. It is cosy.
The bus gets to the border at 4AM. The border doesn't open until 7AM so the bus parks up and the driver switches off the aircon. After 30 minutes of sweating in an airless box most of us get out and sit on the side of the road dazed with tiredness. A man is travelling with a puppy who he lets out for a walk. As the sun comes up he stuffs it back into what looks like a birdcage and returns it yelping to the darkness of the baggage hold. It is unpleasant to watch. Vietnamese border control is unsurprisingly chaotic. There's little indication of progress and no concept of queueing. People stride up to the counter with 20 passports at a time, visa-run services one imagines, pay the requisite 'fee' and we tourists look on with mute rage. Some of the tourists have put the wrong entry point on their visa. They are taken away into another room to be sent back, or shaken down, or imprisoned, who knows? We get our stamps eventually and make it to Hanoi by nightfall. We're staying at the Nexy Hostel, this will prove to be a fortuitous decision. Fred and I eat excellent banh mi for dinner, I'd been particularly looking forward to that, and stroll around the capital's lively streets. Dessert is lurid coloured cereal balls that send clouds of nitrogen out of your mouth when you bite into them. They're called 'dragon's breath' and are quite fun unless there's still some liquid nitrogen inside in which case your stomach fills with gas, inflates like a balloon and bursts from the pressure. The fainthearted should stick to angel delight.
My coffee stirs in the cup to Hanoi's ceaseless momentum. It's too hot to drink so I watch for some sign that I won't burn my tongue for the 100th time on this trip. It's a morning, well afternoon, where time passes but I have no grip on it. It slides into apparent nothingness like the fine mist of water the café blows into the air above me. The coffee cools, it is good. My hungover state incites a feeling of tremendous importance that is enhanced by the inability to communicate with anyone around me. But these moments I enjoy. My mind feels free from, and this is no indictment of recent company, the mundanity of dialog. I sit in this undersized chair outside of normality's box and cultivate an oversized self-regard. I order another coffee, small this time, and receive another coffee, large again. I take some sedatives to balance the stimulus, everything in moderation. Three countries in and emotionally I feel evened. I've met many people, good people, people that give you faith. I've got more company that I know what to do with. It's so much more difficult to dislike people when you don't dislike yourself. Bangkok feels a long way away. I take a great pleasure in sitting back and contemplating all that. But I still need a purpose. I also need a porpoise but that can come later. Ah, hangover mania. The previous evening had escalated from an organised street-food tour, to beers with a group of fellow Nexy dwellers on beer street, to something I dimly remember as clubbing. There was booze, balloons and shirtless men dancing on the bar. I was not one of them I say without conviction. Sufficiently recovered by the afternoon I feel able to sample some bia hoi. It's beer brewed without preservatives and delivered to Hanoi's watering holes every morning. The lack of preservatives means that anything left at closing time is poured away. In all my coming days in Hanoi I will endeavour to minimise this waste. My affection for this city is formed in a plastic chair drinking dirt cheap beer, eating the complementary monkey nuts and watching the world go by. Fred has booked us tickets for a traditional water puppet show so I pry myself off the chair that has become part of my person. It's a strange, childish and charming spectacle that I can't quite find the words to describe.
I detour along beer street on my way back to the hostel and decide upon a nightcap. After drinking my bia hoi the woman that runs the stall pours me another for free. It's near closing time and the stuff is going down the drain anyway so we drink the remainder between us. As she breaks off from the conversation to start packing up I realise I am having the strangest feeling. Or lack of feeling I should say. There isn't the least whisper of anxiety in me. The cavernous space it often fills is shrunk to nothing, unfillable. I wait a moment to see if it is a trick of the light, or maybe the beer, but nothing comes. No escalating worry spun by mind into a bitter candyfloss of angst. The damoclean sword is not just blunted but removed entirely. It'll be back, reinvention is never so absolute, but in the moment I am through the looking glass. I am free.
I'm sat in the café in the hostel where I'm staying in the Laotian capital. There's a gramophone playing records from the 1920s. I feel like I've been here since the 1920s. The gramophone is set to the wrong speed, too slow, so the music is stretched and the vocals have a bassy, interminable groan. The gramophone is on all day and the sound makes time viscous and motionless. If I don't hear another saxophone for the rest of the trip that will be fine. Maybe I should get out and explore the city. But there's nothing to do in Vientiane except wait for your Vietnamese visa to come through. That's not quite true I suppose, there'd been some diversions in the evenings. I'd been having a quiet beer in a bar a couple of nights ago, studiously avoided the attention of an Australian bore who said things like "I've got nothing against aborigines right, but abos...", when I was co-opted into an odd social group of expats and Laos girls. The expats worked in the motor industry doing something too boring to recall. The most senior, Wayne, had a strong David Brent vibe (and a strong David Brent goatee) and offered, almost insisted, that he send a car to pick me up on the following day and take me on a tour to Vang Vieng. I explained that I'd just come from there and wasn't inclined to go straight back. He broadened the offer and said the car could take me wherever I wanted. I asked why he would make that offer to a stranger, "you know why? because I can". It all sounded like weapons-grade bollocks and I politely declined. I drank the beer he kept insisting on buying though, had to let him play the big man somehow. One of the Laos girls in the group was celebrating a birthday so we went onto a live music bar where Wayne and I danced with exuberant, slightly homoerotic vigour while his girlfriend looked on with an ennui that only a man of his hubris could ignore.
So tick follows tock and staff wearing affected braces oscillate quickly beneath ceiling fans that oscillate slowly. Frederikke and I have fallen into a routine. Each morning we we pack our bags and check-out of the hostel, we sit and drink coffee in the café with Steven who also appears to have nowhere else to be, check our emails and watch the hours go by until it is time to check-in again. And the Vietnamese visa process goes on. It's day 4 and at this rate Al Jolson's bones will be dust before it comes. At 3PM there's still no email and Steven persuades us to step out into the light for some food. The point of staying in the hostel café is that, should the visa come through, we can immediately book the once-daily bus to Hanoi at the reception desk, grab the bags and flee this beige city. And lo as our late lunch is brought to the table our phones ping to the sound of our late visas arriving. We apologise as profusely as time allows and run back to the hostel. The bus has seats, we book, we're free. Returning to the restaurant we eat our lunch as slowly as time allows. Somehow the twenty hours of bus travel ahead of us manage to seem thrilling. If only for a moment.
"You!" It was only for a moment. The sleeper bus to Hanoi has a kind of conductor. And the orchestra of his English has but one instrument. We are invited to get on the bus with a loud and aggressive "you!". We are instructed to take our seats with a loud and aggressive "you!". We are ordered to change seats with a louder and even more aggressive "YOU!". He moves everyone around without any obvious purpose. Vietnamese is a tonal language so maybe there is a subtlety in his incessant barking that I am missing. Fred and I end up at the very back of the bus in a double bed with a guy we just met wedged between us. It is cosy.
My coffee stirs in the cup to Hanoi's ceaseless momentum. It's too hot to drink so I watch for some sign that I won't burn my tongue for the 100th time on this trip. It's a morning, well afternoon, where time passes but I have no grip on it. It slides into apparent nothingness like the fine mist of water the café blows into the air above me. The coffee cools, it is good. My hungover state incites a feeling of tremendous importance that is enhanced by the inability to communicate with anyone around me. But these moments I enjoy. My mind feels free from, and this is no indictment of recent company, the mundanity of dialog. I sit in this undersized chair outside of normality's box and cultivate an oversized self-regard. I order another coffee, small this time, and receive another coffee, large again. I take some sedatives to balance the stimulus, everything in moderation. Three countries in and emotionally I feel evened. I've met many people, good people, people that give you faith. I've got more company that I know what to do with. It's so much more difficult to dislike people when you don't dislike yourself. Bangkok feels a long way away. I take a great pleasure in sitting back and contemplating all that. But I still need a purpose. I also need a porpoise but that can come later. Ah, hangover mania. The previous evening had escalated from an organised street-food tour, to beers with a group of fellow Nexy dwellers on beer street, to something I dimly remember as clubbing. There was booze, balloons and shirtless men dancing on the bar. I was not one of them I say without conviction. Sufficiently recovered by the afternoon I feel able to sample some bia hoi. It's beer brewed without preservatives and delivered to Hanoi's watering holes every morning. The lack of preservatives means that anything left at closing time is poured away. In all my coming days in Hanoi I will endeavour to minimise this waste. My affection for this city is formed in a plastic chair drinking dirt cheap beer, eating the complementary monkey nuts and watching the world go by. Fred has booked us tickets for a traditional water puppet show so I pry myself off the chair that has become part of my person. It's a strange, childish and charming spectacle that I can't quite find the words to describe.
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