Gypsy Road

Southeast Asia is full of hawkers, touts, and scam artists combing the streets where many tourists tend to congregate, and they are the most intense and aggressive in the border towns of Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Burma. The minute you get off the plane, train, bus or outside of your hotel touts of all types will undoubtedly approach you and quote you a price of a service you don’t even want or need. “Sir, tuk-tuk to bridge, 100,000 kip” was the first thing that came out of the tuk-tuk driver’s mouth who was parked across the street the minute I stepped out of the doors of my hotel. There are always at least three or four tuk-tuks parked near such establishments. At first I tried to ignore him because I was too pre-occupied with my luggage, dragging it out of the door, to even consider what the tout was offering. Then he said something that was incomprehensible to me and without even bargaining for it the price had gone down to “85,000 kip, ok?”

“No, I’m not going to the bridge” was my curt reply. Although my intention was exactly to cross the bridge over to the Thai side of the border I declined the tuk-tuk driver’s offer because I thought it was a rip off and because I thought that taking the bus from the bus station near the Morning Market to the bridge would be a much cheaper alternative. I was gonna walk from my hotel on Quai Fa Ngum to the bus station but even in the early morning hours the heat was already intensifying so I considered a tuk-tuk ride to the bus station. I asked “How much to the bus station?” “Bridge, 80,000 kip!” was his reply. The price kept lowering by the minute even without any sort of negotiation on my part, so I thought maybe if I was patient enough that the price may come down to almost nothing, considering that US$1 = 10,000 kip.

“No, not the bridge. The bus station. How much?”

“Bridge, 80,000 kip.” This went on for about five minutes and the guy seems to be holding on to the 80,000 kip offer. I wasn’t really making any kind of bid because all I wanted was a trip to the bus station. “Price the same. You take bus, I take you bridge, 80,000 kip.” There was a sense of firmness in his offer for a tuk-tuk ride to the bridge at 80,000 kip, but I was skeptical. I had been told by other travelers I talked to that I should avoid the tuk-tuk scam artists who will overcharge me for the ride, so I held my ground firm as well and said “No, I want to go to the bus station.”

“40,000 kip” was his reply.

“That’s crazy. It’s only two kilometers away” I said. Then I walked away. He came after me again at 30,000 kip. I said 10,000. He said 25,000. I said “15,000 or I walk away.” He said nothing. I walked away.

“Okay, okay. 15,000 kip.” He finally acquiesced. Success! I have never thought of myself as a savvy haggler or bargain hunter. Usually I just pay what they ask even though I know they’re ripping me off and I kick myself every time I do it, thinking I must be the biggest sap on the face of this here planet Earth. This was the first time that I didn’t give in too easily and not because I was desperate but because I knew that I could take the two kilometer walk (or less) with luggage in tow easily. A tuk-tuk ride to the bus station would’ve been a nice luxury that I could do without, and that’s how you win the haggling game, when you know that the alternative is an option that you would likely take anyway under normal circumstances. The tuk-tuk ride to the bus station took no more than five minutes and the guy was gonna charge me 40,000 kip if he could get away with it. This isn’t any different from the many unscrupulous taxi drivers in the United States, especially in Frisco, who will run away with your money if you let them. The trick is to know the ropes and never give in, otherwise you’re screwed.

At the bus station I asked a fella wearing a government issued uniform, presuming that he is an employee of the Laotian Land Travel Authority or some such governing body in charge of bus travel in Laos, which one of these buses in the station is destined for the bridge, meaning the Thai-Lao Friendship bridge, where the Thai-Lao border is located. The guy looked at me quizzically as if he had no idea what the hell I was talking about. It didn’t take me long to realize that he couldn’t understand a word I said. I was at a loss for words; the best I could come up with was “Thailand, Thailand, Thailand.” He shook his head up and down three times as I said it. Then he pointed me to an empty bus marked No. 40 in big block red letters. There’s no destination written anywhere on the body of the bus as I walked towards it and as I circled around it, looking for any kind of sign that assured me of its destination. But like an idiot that I am I just sat down on the bench close to No. 40 anyway thinking that it might be going to the Thai-Lao Friendship bridge because there were a whole bunch of local people sitting down there with me and because I thought that with these many people waiting the bus must be leaving in five to ten minutes or so. Thirty minutes later it was still parked and empty, and it appeared to me that it was going to stay parked and empty for a very long time because there’s no sign of it moving any time soon. The bus itself looked like it was a third hand me down reject bought from or donated by Japan or Scandinavia. It was rusty with balding tires that could seat a maximum of maybe twenty five people on its wooden seats even though I’m sure they’ll cram more people into it than three times its capacity. I saw other buses that were crammed with more people than I thought were humanly possible. They coughed and chugged and huffed their way out of the bus station and it wouldn’t have surprised me if they broke down on the road an hour later in the middle of nowhere.

I got tired of waiting after an hour. I finally asked another fellow in uniform who looked official and again he understood not one word I said when I asked which of these buses are headed for the Thai-Lao friendship bridge, and I couldn’t stress bridge enough. I kept saying bridge, bridge, bridge! He shook his head in agreement even though I don’t think he understood. “Bridge!” I said again. He managed to say something back that remotely sounded like the English word “Bridge” and shook his head in agreement again and then he pointed me to a white board on the wall at the side of the station office where the departure times for all the buses to all destinations were listed. The problem was that it was all written in the Laotian script which looks a lot like Thai scripts so that didn’t do me any good because I neither read nor understood the language. The only thing I understood were the times of departures. The bus identifications and its destinations all looked like just a bunch of wavy lines and circles to me. Vientiane being one of the major tourist stops along the trails of the Mekong delta I was sure that a bus schedule written in the Latin alphabet must exist somewhere since the Latin alphabet is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today, but I had no luck finding one anywhere in or near the Talat Sao bus station. The good thing about looking like a dufus tourist like me with luggage in tow is that you’re easy to spot, and it didn’t take more than a minute while I was scratching my head trying to figure out what to make of this bus schedule written in the Laotian script before a tout came to my attention to push a service that I desperately needed.

“Where?” he asked, or something close to the word where. As a matter of fact I don’t think that’s what he said at all, I just assumed it.

“Bridge, bridge, bridge!” I said. I couldn’t stress the word “Bridge” enough so I said it some more. “Bridge!”

“Minibus, bridge” he answered. Then he held up four fingers in front of me. I took that to mean 40,000 kip. He confirmed my assumption by saying so. I insisted “Bus! How much?” This minimal single or couple of words sentences or compact approach to communication with somebody who is not familiar with your language is necessary. It gets right down to the heart of the matter; what, where, when, and how much in two to three words or less. And the words are ones that is almost universally understood on the face of this here planet earth. Adding supplemental words which serve as adjectives, conjunctions, modifiers and what not in order to construct a well crafted, well thought out, highly meaningful and deeply substantive sentence will only add to the confusion of the non-speaker. So I did away with all the rules of articulation and got right down to the nitty gritty of my objective with the tout: I want to go to the bridge; to cross the bridge over the border in Thailand; to pay as little as possible. I said all this in three words or less. The tout pointed his finger on the white board directly next to a bus schedule that said 11:30 and a Laotian script describing the destination which was suppose to say Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge but it could’ve said Vang Vieng, Luang Praban, or to some Hmong village in the hills for all I know because I’m idiot. I understood none of it and I’m not sure if the tout was pointing out a time in the schedule that was two hours away from this very moment to discourage me even more from taking one of those rickety little white buses. So I thought about it for a minute. The tuk-tuk driver offered 80,000 kip. This tout was asking for 40,000 kip. It’s now 9:30 am. I’ve been waiting at the station since 8:30 am. I’m sweating like a dog and frustrated with all the confusion I am having with the bus schedules and the uniformed men in the bus station who were suppose to be representatives of the Lao Bus Travel Authority or some such governing body but have no clue about bus schedules and things of that sort. Perhaps these uniformed men weren’t employed by bus travel authority at all but occupy the office of a constabulary. The lack of arms however did not support that speculation, so I dismissed it, dismissed this whole bus business, and dismissed this whole place altogether. I decided to take one single shot at haggling. If the tout held his ground then 40,000 kip it shall be.

“30,000 kip” I said.

“30?” he said. I said yes. He held three fingers up and looked at me in a way that told me he was asking for confirmation, just to make sure we understood each other. I said yes. He said yes. Yes is one of those universal words understood by almost anybody on the face of this here planet Earth. We both understood that we’ve come to terms, so away we go. We had to walk three blocks away from the bus station to his minivan however. But that didn’t bother me too much because the minivan was nice, clean and air conditioned and the ride to the Thai-Lao border was a pleasant and comfortable one. It was a lot farther than I thought and I figured it should have cost more than the asking price of 40,000 kip. The scenery along the road to the border was as unremarkable as the town of Vientiane itself. Note that Vientiane is really Wieng Chan, and I can’t stress Wieng Chan enough. We passed by more of the same old things that you see in any town of each country in Southeast Asia or any region of the world for that matter. More shops, more Laotian-Russian friendship flags and institutions of some sort, more dust, more Beer Lao advertisement, more Wats, more motorbikes with four or five passengers riding on it, maybe a toddler in front of the driver sitting on the gas tank and just behind the handlebars. Sometimes it’s the toddler minding the handlebars while the driver is preoccupied with making sure his hair is still in place underneath the helmet so that he can maintain his groovy hairstyle without the helmet messing it up or the wind blowing it all over the place because it would not be a good thing for your hair which you so meticulously worked on for two hours all morning to get all messed up by something so silly as a helmet that you need to wear while riding a motorbike to protect you from splitting your skull into a thousand pieces and splattering all that brain matter on the pavement when the toddler who is minding the handlebars suddenly decides to turn it on a whim like any toddler is wont to do because it’s a fun thing to do which will surely result in an accident that throws the toddler off the bike a hundred yards and land safely in the cushion of the soft mud of the rice paddies while you and your meticulously styled capitulum land on the brick hard asphalt of the highway towards the Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge.

After I had my passport stamped at the Laotian Immigration two or three touts quickly and aggressively came up to me and pitched me a quote for a tuk-tuk or taxi ride to Udon Thani. “100 Baht!” was what was said all around me even though I show little to no interest at all whatsoever to whatever they were pitching. Fat chance, I thought. First of all I had no intention of going to Udon Thani. Second of all a ride to the Thai side across the Mekong Delta over the bridge cost only 4,000 kip. That’s like 40 cents to you and me. From there I intend to take a tuk-tuk to Nong Khai which I knew cost less than fifty Baht. I knew this because many travelers I talked to in Wieng Chan told me so. Crossing the Mekong Delta through the bridge was somewhat interesting. The bus was full of young Laotian women on the way to Thailand to try to find work. Some were Thai women going back home to Thailand after visiting Family members in Laos. I was told by one of them who spoke relatively understandable English that since the Pathet Lao government decided to open up to the outside world there have been a lot of families who lost touch with one another over the years to reunite again after the isolation. There were only two tourists as far as I could see; me and some Australian guy talking to a saffroned robed monk. The river on this part of the Mekong was wider than the one in Wieng Chan. It also looks more alive and vibrant, full of commercial activities of every sort compared to the lack of activity over on the Wieng Chan side up river. There are fishing vessels, tug boats, and border patrol boats traversing every which way in the water. It felt to me like I was crossing into another world even though there is very little difference in language, culture, and ethnicity between Laos and Thailand. Other than Thailand being more developed there is virtually no difference between them because they share the same history.

As soon as I made it past immigration and got my passport stamped, which only allows me free roam of the country for 19 days or something ridiculous like that compared to the 30 day stamp that you get when you enter the kingdom of Thailand by air, three touts came up to me aggressively and blurted out “100 Baht! Where you go?” which made no sense to me at all whatsoever. You don’t usually give quotes before knowing what the customer’s destination is. But these guys either didn’t care or did not understand the concept. My guess is that they most likely understood the concept but they just didn’t give a damn where you were going. They just wanted 100 Baht regardless of where you were going. I wondered if the 100 Baht offer was good for Udon Thani as well. Most likely not. These sonsabitches would probably have told me that the tuk-tuk or taxi fare is 1000 Baht for Udon Thani or something ridiculous like that. So I said “fifty Baht to Nong Khai Grand.” “No, ninety” was one reply that I heard and the tone of his response sounded a lot like he was correcting me instead of negotiating with me in the same way that one would correct another if he asked what city they were in. “Are we in Oakland?” one might asked. “No, we’re in Frisco”, the other might say. That’s how it sounded like to me. But that didn’t discourage me too much because I’ve been traveling for weeks now and have gotten the hang of this haggling business a bit, so I said sixty, he said eighty and eventually we settled it at 75 Baht. That was still too much in my and many other people’s opinion, but I took it anyway because I’m an idiot. I should have stuck to my guns at fifty and walked away.

Nong Khai is an insignificant little town just across the border from Wieng Chan, Laos. There are no tourists here, only a bunch of touts who know how to rip off tourists. The Nong Khai Grand Hotel is probably the only upscale hotel in this town. It is located on Highway 212, a four lane highway two miles inland from the Mekong Delta. The reason that I’m staying here is because it is relatively cheap at US$48 a night although that would probably be considered a luxury or at least mid-range for people traveling on a tight budget. But I am not traveling on a tight budget. My budget is fairly comfortable so my options are relatively wide and I am willing to spend up to US$120 a night if I find the accommodations agreeable. I make sure that I have the adequate resources to allow me to have a broad range of choices when I travel, otherwise I won’t travel at all. After all, traveling for pleasure is a luxury that you should not indulge in if you can’t afford it. My days of roughing it out are long gone. I did it and I no longer find it necessary nor enjoyable. That doesn’t mean I always fly first class and stay in five star hotels. No. I fly business class and stay in comfortable places without the gaudiness and obnoxity of the Hiltons and the Le Meridiens and places like that. The Marriott and Crowne Plaza hotel chains are okay because I can earn rewards points from these establishments and they’re not as gaudy and obnoxious as the Hiltons and the Le Meridiens. Classy hotels with rich histories like The Strand in Rangoon and The Manila Hotel are places that I am willing to spend my money on just for the sheer curiosity of it. But any hotel chain that charges above US$200 I usually try to avoid. I have never stayed at a Trader’s Hotel, a Le Meridien, a Shangri-La, a Sofitel, or any of those brazenly opulent and overpriced resorts and spas where you’ll find mostly senior citizens, housewives from Georgia, packaged tour mobs and groups of Japanese tourists with Nikons and Minoltas strapped around their necks. The Nong Khai Grand Hotel, if it was located in some heavily touristed area, would fit the description of a place I would try to avoid as I just mentioned above. My hypocrisy irritates me to no end every time I catch myself being hypocritical. However, since there are not very many tourists here, I am not kicking myself too hard.

The Nong Khai Grand Hotel clearly has seen better days. The wallpaper in my room is peeling. Some of the lamp stands are wobbly from the wear and tear of years of usage. People who have stayed in this room probably have at one point or another bumped into it, kicked, slammed it down to the ground, or thrown it over the balcony, and now it is dying from the many abuses it absorbed from guests past. The hotel itself seems somewhat deserted. I see two or three cars parked in the parking lot outside where the sun is shining brightly on the pavement and the mercury level is inching up close to the suffocating level of 31 degrees Celsius. I decided that since I had nothing better to do than contemplate on how uncomfortably hot the day will turn out to be that I should do something today, right now, which I can put off till tomorrow. I went outside to find a tuk-tuk driver who will take me to the train station so that I can buy a ticket for the midnight train to Bangkok the next day. I found one inside a lunch shack on Highway 212 right next door to the hotel. I said “Tuk-tuk to train station” to the man. Remember, brevity is the best policy when speaking to someone not familiar with your own language. Forget about all the adjectives and modifiers. Just give them a little hand gesture and facial expressions for emphasis and a little bit of gymnastics and acrobatics to add more clarity.

“80 Baht” was the response of this shirtless guy slurping noodles out of a bowl. Soup was dripping out of the side of his mouth and strands of noodles were all over the table. Sweat was dripping from his forehead all the way down to his big fat bare belly. 80 baht was just a way bit too much for a short ride to the train station I thought. The station was only two kilometers away. So I said “50 Baht.” He said yes right away without much thought or hesitation. That was way too easy so I figured the actual fare must be at least half that, maybe twenty five Baht or so. The shirtless guy with a big belly chugged down what was left of his big bottle of Leo Beer or whatever it was he was drinking, grabbed a shirt, and wiped his face and his whole body with it before he got up to kick start the engine of his two stroke motorcycle that drags the cart of his tuk-tuk. Then we were off on Highway 212 towards the Nong Khai Train Station. There is absolutely nothing charming about Nong Khai. The streets are dusty, the color of yellow and orange dirt on the shoulders of the black top asphalt being the predominant feature of the highway. Nong Khai is more of an industrial little hub on the Mekong full of auto repair shops, engine parts and supply stores, glass works shops, steel and iron supplies, pipe fitting tool shops, and warehouses full of construction materials. It’s not a place where one spends a week or two for rest and relaxation. This is not that kind of a place. Tourists end up here for the very reason that it’s a border town with a train station. That’s it. Yet I feel at home in this unremarkable little town. It is a place inhabited by ordinary average folks who work for a living. It is my kind of place. I feel like I belong here, or should belong. Perhaps I have an affinity for such a nondescript ordinary town without any special features at all whatsoever. This is the kind of place that with a mere mention of it will result in a resounding yawn for most people. It’s that boring. I was born and raised in a little place in the Central Valley of California that is just as boring and unremarkable as this place. This is what this place reminds me of and that’s what I like about it. It’s just about as hot also, especially in the summer time, although not as humid. But it’s hard to know if the people here are as unassuming and unpretentious as the people of my home town. My guess is that they probably are although they have a culture that is totally different from mine and which I don’t understand.

When I got to the train station the time on my watch says that it was already 2:30 pm in the afternoon. I thought it was much earlier than that, like around 1:00 pm or 1:30 pm. I must have spent more time watching the dead town of Nong Khai from the balcony of my hotel room than I realized. There were a few people sitting on the plastic chairs in the open air lounged waiting for their train. The station itself is pretty small. There was an open air lounge for the waiting passengers, a ticketing office, a station maintenance office, and a station police office. A few tuk-tuks were parked outside waiting to service the arriving passengers. Most of the drivers however, were having their after lunch siesta at the moment. It occurred to me that this town is just about as sleepy and laid back as Wieng Chan. I asked the fella at the ticket office for a first class sleeper cabin. They sell out at least two days in advance because of the high demand for it and it was too late for me to buy one if I wanted to travel tomorrow, so I settled for a second class air conditioned sleeper. I should have asked for a lower bunk instead of the upper but I didn’t know the difference at the time. Across the street from the train station are several vendors selling noodles, beer, soft drinks, and other local dishes. It is where most train passengers go to eat before embarking on their long journey. I went across just to have a look-see and maybe find something interesting. The only thing I found interesting was beer, so I ordered a big bottle of Singha beer. As I walked in a tourist from Belgium was walking out. Right away she was accosted by a tuk-tuk driver offering a ride for 100 Baht. To my surprise she agreed.

So I sat there for minutes under the shade of the canvas awning drinking beer and occasionally conversing with the proprietor, an old 50ish Thai who looks of Chinese extraction. He spoke relatively good English and we conversed in a more civilized way compared to the one word single syllable hand mime gestures that you end up having with a typical Thai person where much of the content of the exchange or conversation, if you could call it that, usually revolves around a service of some sort being touted for 100 Baht by the person you are having an exchange with. It never gets any more meaningful or substantive than that. The conversation I had with the proprietor of this little shindig with a canvas awning to shade it from the heat of the sun was the first somewhat intelligent conversation I’ve have with anyone in the Mekong region since I first arrived in Vietnam several weeks ago. The content of our conversation though was mostly about Barack Obama. He was just in awe of Obama. Oh my god first black president of the United States and all that. I myself am a little skeptical of Obama. No, I did not vote for Obama. No, I did not vote for John McCain. I knew these two were the flip side of each other from the very same coin of which I am fundamentally against. I want lower to almost zero personal income tax. No matter what these two said during the ’08 campaign you can bet your bottom dollar that they are going to raise the income tax that you and I will have to pay in the very near future. So I voted for a guy whom no one outside of the United States of America has ever heard of, the Libertarian candidate Bob Barr of Georgia. So far every place I’ve visited on this trip the people I've met has raved about Obama every time I tell them that I’m from the United States. Even if they didn’t know a single word of English they at least manage to blurt out “Obama”. Obama this, Obama that. Obama mania. Obama Nation. I am sick of Obama. It’s all about image. Like Andre Agassi said, “Image is everything.” I haven’t seen any substance yet. All I’ve seen so far is more than one gazillion dollars worth of unscrupulous government spending that we somehow have to payback one way or another, and it will get you, and no one has thought about the consequences of that yet.

I got tired of hearing the proprietor talking about the Obama Nation, so I moved on. I hired a tuk-tuk to take me to the waterfront. There was not much of a scenery to speak of. Every Thai town will have a Wat or two about town. That’s nothing remarkable. It’s like saying that every town in the United States will have a Presbyterian church. Along the waterfront are a few eateries, some shops, an auto parts store, and glassworks outfit. It’s about as charming as Bakersfield if Bakersfield was on the waterfront. Nong Khai however, is much smaller and more hot and humid than Bakersfield. If Lonely Planet tells you otherwise, don’t believe it. If Lonely Planet told it like it really is people would not be visiting the places they write about in their guidebooks. It really depends on what your preferences are. If you like places without very many tourists then this place is for you, and that’s what I like about this place aside from the fact that it’s as boring and unremarkable as the place that I grew up in the Central Valley of California. Once you’ve passed through the main streets of Nong Khai there really isn’t much else to see, so I flagged a tuk-tuk to take me back to my hotel.

The hotel is still barren and dead empty. Maybe I saw a tourist or two but the lobby was empty, the restaurant was empty, the pool was empty, and the bar was especially empty. I ordered lunch at the restaurant. I was the only customer there. I was outnumbered by the waiters five to one. The waiter who served me was glad to have a customer and someone new to talk to. Even though his English is poor we managed to have some sort of an exchange of words, a pleasant one I might add, not the acrimonial type that one usually have when you say “we had an exchange of words” but calling it a conversation would be a bit of an exaggeration. We did not converse. He said something somewhat intelligible but I took it to mean for something else. He tried again and I finally figured out that he wanted to know where I was from. He also said something about the Red Shirts. This too I understood. I have been watching the news on television. CNN, BBC, and all the alphabet soup cable channels with operations or bureaus in Asia have been broadcasting the demonstrations of the Red Shirts in Bangkok at the top of the hour every hour twenty four hours a day and seven days a week. So far the demonstrators have not burned down any government buildings or places and commercial establishments but they did manage to disrupt the latest ASEAN gathering in Pattaya. The last time I was in Pattaya was fifteen years ago. At that time it didn’t seem to me to be the kind of place where conferences for the heads of states of a regional quorum were held. It was more of a Big Fat German Guy Little Thai scene kind of a place. Maybe it has all changed by now. Probably not. I would guess that prostitution is still as active in that place as it ever was although I will never know because I have no plans of going there any time soon. After lunch I went straight to my room and promptly fell down on the bed like a ton of brick for several hours.

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