Bus: Luang Prabang � Vang Vieng

               Cram on. Sham on. Next to us a few guys hoist a motorbike up to the roof on this cool clammy day of a haze. Dark eyes of no sleep and one too many thick banana shakes. Ganja-sprinkled laap hangover. All the tourists in their BeerLao t-shirts. Same fuckin� faces from last week. Hungry. Hungry to get to the destination despite a beautiful ride ahead. No turning back now at take-off.
               Little bag procured from the old-lady local market network, ready to jettison at any sign of trouble. But these countries with such harsh penalties simply lack the enforcement of their convictions. The Anti-Narcotics Unit of Southeast Asia possesses/employs only 11 narcs. Useless and not getting the point across, and no worries all through Laos (PDR).
               Take off. Again the futilely endless streams of pineapples. Feed a nation. Build a house. Images. Imagine a pineapple-walled house. Crop the top-leaves and thatch for the roof. And a door? No. Just imprison the angry and weak and let them eat their way out. Perhaps the angry devour their partners (provided they are not one and the same) and allow their spiny fruit walls to over-ripen and soon mush down around them in fly-ridden nauseous stink. Awaken blanketed by collapsed roof-leaves, morbid fruit defeated and rotting and promulgating any number of fruit-fly strains.
               Where do the angry go from there?

               I�m happy, smiling out the window to clouds and green, green mountains. High vertical round-peak and greenest country I�ve seen. Bus rages around corners sometimes in the wrong lane, honking and hoping for no oncoming traffic, through mudslides and fog down the twisty mountain roads. Can�t see thirty feet ahead at times, and can barely see over the dramatic drop-offs to the immediate edge, guardrails not included. Faster, faster still. Light rain. Heavy rain all week muddying up the roads. Landslides everywhere. Video game danger and the driver must be accustomed. Completely used to these gorgeous and hostile conditions.
               Only a few years ago, armed bandits have hijacked tourist buses, taking hostages and pillaging. Gunshots. Bloodclots. �All part of the adventure,� an article claimed somewhere. Ridiculous clich�, and true to-the-point. All part of the adventure.
               Window (for support) seat or not, you couldn�t sleep on this ride, no way. �Villages� wet and gloomy. Tiny sleeper huts built on cliffs, long support beams down one side awaiting disaster.
               Pure human memory: Village stop. Locals on, locals off. Wet and cold mountain town. Moist, sandaled, military parka-style jacket and t-shirt: young man leans against a hut, ignored by everyone. Shifty eyes, forgotten and forlorn. Sadness in his mouth. He watches the bus and those around him with helplessness. Just leaning there, no place to go, no place to move to, no other place to lean. Weak, weary, and depressed. Depression has no treatment out here. Only family and love. This man has neither it appears, and he just leans, eyes telling sorrow. The bus rolls on. Depression. Wonder.

               How fast can the driver go? Surely there�s a fatality rate for Luang Prabang � Vang Vieng journeys. Surely. But who would collect the statistics for these things? Democracy? Communism? There�s no order here at all in these middle-zones. Just a yen to survive.
               As we descend and the sun appears, white stakes in the ground play treason to confusion and delusion, foretelling of Vang Vieng�s imminent arrival. We�re going backwards and everyone�s tired here.

Vang Vieng

               Upon landing (it�s a bus, you know), the usual greeting of guesthouse touts. Just a large field of gravel. Open field � airstrip? � and the town beyond. The weary anxious newcomers, some still attached to their bulging backpacks distinct and segregated from the ease and comfort and familiarity of veterans to the experience. Some only a day old. Small towns here welcome and warm you fast. Doesn�t take much to get by in parts of these parts. Just let go, because it requires little. This is required. Suitcases and attitudes will become valid targets for mutual extraction of goods, services and nourishment. Those settled in, watching, knowing.
               �Fuckin� tourists.�
               We settle in for 3 bucks a night, all amenities (all those offered, deal with it). Across from a quaint restaurant. Cute son-of-a-waitress running around laughing and playing with fire.

               Nothing but a block, Vang Vieng. Fraught with guesthouses, restaurants, variety shops, and those permutations thereof. Speckled with the wooden houses and smiling faces over a BeerLao and local games. Beyond the central block weans out to more wood huts and variety house/shops. Rice fields soon after, quieter local smiles, and the odd snake.

               First night small baby King Cobra leans over, asks: �Ganja? Opium?�
               Again, first night shakes, darkness having not yet revealed the miniscule locality of this locale.
               But it�s big enough that I never see this reptile again. As he shows with the space between his fingers a length about as long as his pinky,
               �70 000 kip.�
               �Maybe tomorrow,� (but see above).
               He�ll cook. Sounds risky, having read the $200 U.S. get-out-of-jail not-so-free card, when the rattlesnakes invade the den. Take your passports and scat.
               Instead, people are watching movies all around, eating amazing noodle fresh rolls and drinking the cheapest yet tastiest fruit shakes.
               This media circuit observation is reverse of yester-memory�s Luang Prabang: where all locals gather and conglomerate around TVs come evening light. Entering a shop, they don�t even look up at you. Even in Pakbeng, a girl seemed to suffer whiplash difficulties in taking my money from dinner (a dinner which suffered its own difficulty, being repeatedly pre-empted for some other television program). Here, in this mid-way miniature town, weary well-traveled travelers take their turns at the sets, perhaps missing pop culture. Takes some time to get to Vang Vieng, and a decent movie might be in order here in zoneless.
               No clash of the titans here. All peace. Eating ganja itemized as pizza ingredient right on the menu.
               �Ahhh...happy!� the man grins at us.
               Large pizza topped with local mushrooms and chicken and green sprinkles. He points at three slices with small, grassy knolls piled upon.

               �I�m from Germany!�
               Days have gone by and now I watch, know. I forget where I am sometimes. Usually it�s not so loud, but some people...
               Hot at all times. Only need these three walls. Guesthouse room has four, but who�s counting? And the heat has buckled the door, so it�s forced entry each time, and unsure whether it�s really locked or not upon journey outside.

               Local �tourist� activity: kayaking.
               Note upon arrival in Vientiane: Israeli overturned turned dead. Can�t swim, and no helmet. Head crashed off a rock and floated off to lifelessness.
               Our company was the only one offering helmets. And no one was informed of this euphemistic �mishap� the previous week, or of which helmetless company was running the show on that one. Lible is non-existent. There�s nothing to do in these tiny towns forgotten and unheard of by the rest of the world and their anonymous patrons. [Average annual income in Lao P.D.R. = $U.S. 200 *]. Suing is out of the question (as would be a trial, court room, judge, and lawyer), imprisonment would mean little � maybe more regular meals?
               And who would prosecute any how? And who�d build the jail? Is there one? We�re all taking our lives into our own hands (as we always are) on these activities. It�s the unwritten fine print: whatever happens, happens. Knick knack paddy-wack give a dog a bone.
               The hospital sits quietly in a field back beyond a long stone gravel path. Silent and motionless, small, and not very useful-looking. Imagine life is beautiful all the time.
               Safety lesson for the trip ahead, merely briefly. And then settle into the blue plastic kayaks and shoot right out into rushing water. Appropriate metaphor: baptism by fire.

A pleasant day-long day-trip (all for twelve bucks). Buddha caves and a crazy monkey tied to a short string. Jumping to the extents of its leash and clinging to anything within reach. Apparently it doesn�t like the girls. Further on, the rain begins to precipitate as we cascade into an immense labyrinthine cave. Swimming/walking/pulling our weight on a cable against the current in milky neck-deep water. Soon we stand helpless in ultimate cool blackness, waiting for our guides to fire up the water-proof battery packs. Two out of three ain�t bad, but it�s a treacherous one-mile hike. Bats flying at our heads, echo-location allowing them to turn at the last moment, even feeling the breeze of their thin, leathery wings. Guano squishing beneath our feet, second to sucking, glutinous mud. We had to put our faith in survival into our mouths, bite down and take the plunge as we slide down a steep concaven mudslide into a cloudy muddy pool of unknown depth. What goes down must come up in this cavern. Next task was to scale a 45� ledge of mud. One wrong step takes you back to the bottom to try all over again with bonus exhaustion. Added trimming: half way up the stakes are more dire than a restart. Jagged rocks then reward a misstep and slip with cuts, abrasions and other lacerations.

* A police officer busting an unfortunate traveler in an opium den could theoretically make the average annual income in a mere moment...

               A slicing, constricting squeeze through a twisting aperture in the rocks finally brings a tinge of light of gloomy day. Back into the compressing air the rain continues, muddying up a makeshift path back to the kayaks. Jumping into an outbound cave stream I find myself to-the-knees in thick mud. I am cemented to the ground, my struggles only futile. Other spelunkers wade past as I try to pull my submerged legs up out of the ground, only wedging them deeper into the mud.

X-Files-like commercial break to re-open to bright colourful sunny scene of us all happily kayaking down the river again. All muddy problems solved. In calmer waters, I practice my surfing, and one of the frolicsome guides practices his capsizing of my ship. Good fun all the way down to Vang Vieng �Resort,� a grassy grotto by a series of Buddha caves. One water cavern produces a crystal blue pool with razor-edged rocks all around. One can swim/pull oneself along the rocks far up into the cave, only to let go and get pushed right out with the transparent current. All around, giant roots hang down from invisible origins up in the cliffs.                At night, the guide group hosts a small party with BeerLao giving way to intoxicating medicine-scent of Redbull Lao lao cocktails. The men all live in a small high-ceilinged home. Beds are merely blankets or ground mats spread out on the floor with domed mosquito nets surrounding. About ten people live in this small bachelor-sized home. It�s a very nice gesture, inviting the day�s customers over for a small social, especially given that their service to us, as kayak tour guides, is over. Still, they do this every night, and perhaps the fee for the day left some money over to buy the drinks, as it did, no doubt, for the day�s lunch. Every night. Day in and night out. When do they get a chance to themselves?

               But the Lao people are very friendly and hospitable, and really don�t seem like they want anything in return other than friendship and enjoyable conversation.
               Once again raining as we half-run back to the guesthouse. For dryness� sake, fortunately almost everything can be reached within five minutes in Vang Vieng. Music from the busier corner of the block can be heard, its lower frequencies carrying through the night air. Travelers gather from all around in these bars and restaurants and gab the nights away.
               (�I�m from Germany!�)
               Rarely ever so pompous, the talk can be enjoyable. Most are talking about the same stuff: where they�ve just been, and where they�re going next, and all in-between. But its this common ground that really makes the backpackers so sociable. They all have collective experience to share with others in the group. Without this, opinions, judgments, politics might get in the way. I�ve seen no squabbles, none at all, between backpackers as of yet. Some tension between a backpacker and a local has been noted, the language barrier and locality factors causing minor occasional misunderstandings. And definitely there are a lot of characters out there, weirdos, eccentrics, dope fiends, debauchers, older men nostalgic of adventure and romance. Without these folks, there would only be Disney World, and a group of clean-cut smiling faces and safety precautions. Where would the grimy, weary mugs be? The frustrations of inter-destination travel and the pure relief upon arrival? The eagerness to go on despite occasional negative anecdotes and the dusty fatigue?
               The experience is alive in all who go off to these places. Walls coated with geckos. Giant moth touches down, gecko in the watch ready to pounce. Moth reorients itself and spreads wings revealing large threatening eye-like circles on each wing. Who�s gonna� eat who with these defense mechanisms? Gecko runs off, others chirping at its failure. Lepidoptera wins. Imagine life is beautiful all the time here.

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