From canton to Laos (what a stretch!)

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APRIL 4
I’m on the train Kowloon - Shenzen. Nothing to report on the landscape, but we all get off at the border post and stand in line. It’s a large, ugly concrete building with sign posts giving advice to the tourists before they enter Red China: “Preserve Social Morality, Don’t Litter!”
“No Smoking. Violators will be fined!” I notice a few older Chinese guys in line and they’re smoking like chimneys. I assume they don’t read English and the signs are for the likes of me. I don’t light up. I promptly get my three-month stamp and enter the station in China proper. The waiting hall is full but I don’t see a sign for “Canton”. I look for Caucasians and notice a couple seated in the throng. I ask them, “To Canton?” - “Yes, get your ticket and ask for Guangzhou.” Done.
I’m on the train and it’s a fast breeze. We get to Canton by night and I step out of the huge station into a huge parking lot. My guidebook says, look for red bus Number Five in the middle of the parking lot. Beware! There are many number five buses. Climb on the one in the middle of the park and ask, “Sha-Mian?” I find it quickly enough. It’s the Sha-Mian bus.
Long trip across town and I get off at the ticket-taker’s command: “Shamian!”
I go straight to Shamian Hostel. It still exists and I highly recommend it. Courteous staff and they speak English (I shall soon discover that it’s a rarity here, even at hotels).
My little bag resting on my bunk bed, I step out and head for the river, then for the market district where the outdoor restaurants are. I run into two girls, one of which was the lady who gave me a funny look back in the Hong Kong hostel. “Hi!” “Hello?” “Where you from?” Etc.
A burly, bearded fellow from Sardinia joins us and we head to one of the outdoor restaurants. The girls are sisters from Brazil. We sit and order dog ragout. Oh well....
As soon as we pick up the chopsticks, pedestrians stop and crowd around our table. I shall henceforth witness this phenomenon repeatedly. Yavoys (foreigners) being followed or observed by crowds of Chinese men of all ages. Our attempt to use chopsticks unleashes general hilarity. We are the spectacle. They keep their distances, though. They stay two meters away from you and never come closer. They don’t attempt to talk to you, they just want to watch. The infamous ragout arrives.
The Sardinian guy, Franco, is an old hand at travelling and he has a well-honed sense of humour. The sisters are very lively. I stay quiet and listen. No way I’m attempting wit on this trio. One of the girls, Helen, the one who stared at me in Hong Kong, drops me the line, “Do you live in New York?” - “Yes.” - “In the East Village?” - “Yes.”
“Did you ever go to this bar called King Tut’s Wawa Hut?” - “Yes. A couple of nights a week. Why?” --- “I saw you in there many times!”
“When were you in Manhattan last??” - “Last month. I knew it was you when I noticed you in Hong Kong.”
Wow. We’re on the other side of the freaking planet and she saw me in Tut’s a month ago. I know, I know. Small world. This is too much.
The girls declare that tomorrow evening, they are taking a boat to Wuzhu, and from there a bus to Guilin. The bus trip is a killer: you cross Quartz Country, that land with those huge steep rock cliffs that dot a flat landscape of rice paddies. I’m going too!

Night boat: April 5 to 6th.
We got berths, all four of us. Franco is already socializing with the native passengers. His Mandarin sounds fairly good. I flirt with Helen and fall asleep. In the morning, we’ve arrived at Wuzhu, a plain-looking town and we get on our bus. To Guilin country.
Very fast, the landscape assumes a beauty I cannot describe. The road is narrow but well paved and we cross a hundred little towns full of peasants in their bluish outfits. I see a lot of water buffaloes. I have an instamatic and I snap photos from the open window. It’s a long, difficult ride with unforgettable sights that make the discomfort worthwhile.
We arrive in Guilin at dusk and the temperature is rather cold. I’ll have to buy a jacket. Helen and her sister have decided on a huge government-run hostel, the only building in town that has more than three floors. I choose a private room with a hot shower for myself. Guilin is spread out amidst those huge rock pythons that make the legend of this country. The average building has only two floors. The town is pleasantly run down and the restaurants without numbers. We’re out and about and find a canteen Most of the food we get is served boiled, in large soup bowls. I shall get used to this and appreciate it. Nothing fried or broiled. The result is that I see no one remotely fat in China. Everyone is slim and surprisingly tall. They have a good sheen to their skin. These people look healthy and awake. I bet it’s the food. It may be mostly served as soup, but the ingredients have a wide range: catfish with pigeon, all sorts of veggies. I will soon learn that the restaurants never close and life goes on twenty four seven. People seem to eat about five meals a day, but each meal is relatively light. Remember, I’m talking about 1985 here. I will return to China twenty years later and not believe the changes!
The next day, the four of us take a boat trip up and down the river. It’s fun travelling with those three. Franco is extremely sociable and deft with the natives. As for Helen and her sister Betsy (both from San Paolo) their exuberance is impossible to match. I don’t even try. Helen can be especially aggressive. This morning, as she stood on the sidewalk, she saw a teenager go by on his bicycle. In an instant, she ran after him and jump to hitch a ride. The boy wasn’t happy. He stops, turns to her and raises his finger in warning, eyes wide with displeased surprise. Yet, Helen, with her gab and good humour, manages to put him t ease and get him to smile in a minute. The boy seems to understand some English and her apologies do the trick. She gives him a handful of cigarettes and he rides off beaming. He sure has something to tell his parents tonight! “This crazy girl-Yavoys jumped me as I rode my bike! She thought it was all a joke!” The things Helen gets away with.
Our boat trip is splendid. It’s partly cloudy and a little frisky, but I don’t want to leave this country. I want to move here, stay here, and die here if necessary. I have found the spot! (Future travels shall reveal me plenty of other ‘spots’ where I could spend my last days, but the Guilin region is one of them. It’s the land all westerners know if they have ever seen a Taoist ink fresco. This is it, live version. It’s easy to see how Taoist hermits, painters, poets, or Kung Fu students, would have taken a liking for this paradise. Although I’m happy to be in such raucous company as Franco’s and the Brazilian twins, we shall soon go our separate ways and I wouldn’t mind trying a little isolation in this region I would not have time to go anywhere else. I have to be back in HK in two weeks, and I’m wondering if I couldn’t get someone to go back in my place. This might be a problem, though. JAL would have to cancel my ticket and make out another one for a different name. I won’t think about it for now. Let’s enjoy Guilin Land.

APRIL 8
Franco and the girls have moved on. They’re going to Dali. I’m visiting a little monastery outside Guilin and looking at Zen-like frescoes. Antony Artaud, the actor, once wrote: “Drawing is writing, and writing is dying.” I didn’t know what he meant. Twenty-three years later, I do. The writing part. You write a part of you that you must abandon. It’s like saturation that you must unload before it poisons you. This may explain why most people write when they are miserable and don’t come near a page when they are happy.
Maybe it’s just a cliché. But I’ve never written a line while I was travelling. Only when I got back to my brutal sedentary world would I use the power of the pen and exorcize memory while it lay fresh, and before it rotten away inside me. Yes, I find sedentary life a bore, but a necessity. I’m not cut out to be a professional adventurer. I’ve met some. This English guy in Ayuthaya, Thailand, whose specialty is photography if ruins ad Asian temples. He can sell them because he’s good and he’s connected in London. I’ve not yet found a way to make a living as an expatriate, and that’s because I hate teaching. Tough luck.
Just looking at the Zen frescoes makes you meditative, but the landscape lends itself to that also. Something already tells me that if I lived here six months, I wouldn’t write a line. I would just rent a bike and wonder the country day after day. I already sense that my style of globetrotting is to cast myself adrift. No particular plans. No deadlines, beyond a return flight or expiration of a visa. I travel like one flees forward and doesn’t look back. Suits me. There is a virtue in flight that I shall detail for the reader a little later; it’s from an interesting theory about animal Ethology, elaborated in the Sixties by the biologist Henry Laborit. Artaud travelled to outrun the voices in his head that hounded him unremittingly. And the day e stopped running, the voices caught up and he moved into an insane asylum, where he died broke and alone. Doesn’t sound too rosy, but life can be barbaric.
The amateur writes for himself. The professional writes for others. That’s what they say in the industry. So be it. I have never known anguish with the page unless I tried to imagine “what would a reader like or hate”. Writer, start with yourself. And end with yourself, too.
I am both solitary and sociable. It is a flaw, since I insist on being sociable only when it suits me. It’s an immature way to socialize and it leads nowhere. To have friends, you need to be one. I know. But I have a profession that requires solitude: I program a computer. And I have a hobby that requires solitude: I write, which means I also must read a lot. The third part of the equation is: “Live a lot.” You need others for that, instead your idea of living is alpinism or scuba diving, or sky diving, or fishing, or....well, that list is quiet long. If it’s to live a lot, I’d rather do it with others. But when you spend long stretches by yourself, you get rusty and lose your social graces quickly. It’s always a problem with me. I have no understanding at all of PR, and for a writer who wants to be read, this can be fatal.
But, trying to tell a story right, with rigor, without coherence and without confusion, it is a full-time job and it absorbs me. I have no room for anything else. I heard that Doris Lessing, the novelist, had a pattern in her personal life. She went through a number of boyfriends or husbands and absolutely always privileged her novels and their design over everything and everyone else. It was indifferent to her if she ended up alone and impossible to be around. She had simply decided on what counted most for her. “Between the novel and people, I choose the novel.”
But I digress. Guilin country did that for me, and I’ve acquired a real taste for this land of flat rice paddies and huge steep pythons of quartz. Nature gone wild. I returned to New York the following week and did no further travel for years. But when the chance came up again, I shopped around: where else can I find landscapes like Guilin? Here it is: Phang Nga Bay, south Thailand. Halong Bay and Bhin Minh, North Vietnam. Vang Vien, central Laos.

I returned to Asia 20 years later. Landed in Bangkok, avoided the town and went straight up to Ayuthaya, and there met Danny, that London photographer. He told me about the joys of Laos. How cheap and low-key it is. I spent three weeks in Ayuthaya roasting under a pulverizing sun and humidity. Still, I love the town. So close to Bangkok mayhem, yet so peaceful. And the women there! My first look at the legendary Thai girls. It’s all true, what you see in the magazines. I was surprised to discover that, in addition, most of them are really not shy, and I mean not at all, as I shall soon describe.
But first things first. I take the night train Ayuthaya - Laos border, right across the Mekong is Vientiane. Bound for the ‘heart of darkness’.
To be continued.


Kon Kaen, Thailand. Early April 2004.
Song Kran, the ‘Water Festival’ is about to begin in most Indochina. I’ll have occasion to see just what a sham it is (and Bangkok journalists agree: “A shameless, month-long display of aggression and vandalism!) They’re not wrong, as shall be seen.
For now, it’s early morning and I get off the train. The station is quite far from town and the border. The tucman takes me, not to the border, but to a way station where some guys sell you ‘visas’. I tell them I already have one: thank you. And off I am to the real border for a real visa, since I don’t doubt these ‘brokers’ sell you a worthless piece of paper for 600 bhats.
At the Thai frontier, the agent tells me I’ve overstayed already (I already spent a month in Thailand, mostly on the river Kwai). One day extra: 500 bhats! Chucks.
I get into Laos no problem with a month pass and up on a Sang Thaen, larger and cheaper version of the Thai Tuc. He drives me to the riverfront in Vientiane where all the foreign hostels are. That part of town looks absolutely splendid, in the old, rundown colonial fashion, with a few authentic French restaurants here and there.
I get a cheapo room for $4. Accommodations in Laos are fine and low-priced. Then I wander the Vientiane for the rest of the day. It’s all low key and no one bothers you. Little cafes abound and sell the notorious Lao coffee: it’s good-tasting but very very strong. I pay no attention and swallow two cups. Then, I walk some more and swallow another cup. A hundred meters later, I think I’m having heart palpitation. I’ve never had a coffee this strong.
I walk by this travel agency and notice they have daily buses to Vang Vien. It’s recommended to use these. The regular Lao buses go too, but they make all the stops and take an eternity, and I hear bus travel is hard-going in this country: the driver won’t leave until his coach is full, and I mean FULL.
Comes evening, and Vientiane youth shows up in force to hang out at the river front, which is no more than a huge unpaved parking lot with candy sellers to the right and a beer stand to the left. That’s it. Again, despite the large numbers of youth and scooters, the ambiance is low-key and peaceful. I stroll to a French restaurant and get a Pizza Provencal, the real thing, with a bottle of Lao Red - swallow-able, not too bad.
I go back to the Mekong, to that huge gravel parking lot where town youth arrive on scooters in ever-greater numbers. It’s Friday night and warm.
I know people who do more travelling when they stay put than when they finally do get a holiday. What do I mean? They stay put because they must work, keep a routine, and they spend much of their time fantasizing, travelling in the imaginary. I don’t know if most of us do that, but I do that. When I’m sedentary, I spend too much time inside my head, especially during long tedious commutes. I look forward to getting to the office to have something constructive to think about. Still, whenever alone at a cafe or during commute, I escape, I fantasize - nothing scandalous, to be sure. I wished. It would be more exiting. No, I fantasize about historical events, or things I’ve seen on the news, or places I’ve never been to, never places I’ve actually visited.
It never stops. I was born with this fantasy bug.
And when I travel somewhere, it all stops. I don’t fantasize anymore. I don’t live or travel in the imaginary anymore. I draw a blank and keep my eyes and ears open. I move. It’s peaceful. It’s like quietude, what some people describe when they say they’ve been to a retreat somewhere, or have spent a couple of weeks on the beach just lying in the sun. It must be the same thing for me, this contentment I get when I’m moving. I never stress out over it, even with the unexpected that always pops up when you’re globetrotting somewhere.
For me, the holiday is when I’m nomadic, the strain when I have to sit still, like right now as I type this. I’m used to doing it. Once I spent year after year just going to work without ever taking a holiday, for something like eight years.
I just worked on stuff. Occasionally, I’d get bored, but usually not. Still, being this sedentary was bad for me. I’d pick up nasty habits. I would eat too much, get fat, and sleep less. I ended being totally anti-social at some point, and angry all the time, about the news, about delays, about routine, about my diet, any excuse was fine.
When I’m a nomad, it all vanishes. I no longer fell an ‘internal life’. I don’t daydream. I don’t fantasize. When I sleep, I don’t remember my dreams. I lose weight. I stay sharp.
A rolling stone gathers no moss, they say. It’s true, sure. But I have the nomad in me. When I travel, I seldom spend a long time in the same spot. Some of my longest stretches were, lets see: a month in Ko Phagnan, Thailand. Over a month in Mattala, south Ceylon. A month in Halong Bay, Vietnam. I spent two months in Hampi, South India. That’s about it. Otherwise I always hopped like a locust.
I’ve known too many people who live too much inside their heads, and I’ve been one of them. When you stay put for long stretches, for whatever reason, it’s bound to happen. I only speak for myself (and I always do but that on this-here blog), but this bent to fantasy is unhealthy. It begins to make me ill when it goes on for too long. But, sometimes I’m unable to hit the road. Like most people, I have obligations that, sometimes, demand my commitment.
“In Praise of Flight!”, a book by Doctor Henry Laborit is titled. In it, he details the medicinal virtues of social-professional cowardice. It’s pretty funny. Check him out.
Needless to add, when I travel, I don’t write a line. I don’t need the fantasy. It’s a struggle to get to an Internet and report once a week to one of my relatives (some demand it since they don’t like me bumming about the world on my own).
So, when I travel, especially those long train and bus rides, I catch up on the reading.
“To live is to drift alone alive, at the depth of a limitless instant where the light never varies.” Sam Beckett.
Wow! “When they didn’t expel him from the place, he would expel himself. I have changed refuge so many times that I now confuse ‘home’ with ‘ruin’.” Sam Beckett.
No, I read the likes of this guy when I’m sedentary.
“Life is only possible with the forgetting: you must forget each evening so you can go to sleep. Each morning, you begin a new adventure. Or rather, you continue the same after an interruption. To disconnect is necessary so you may keep the illusion that your life renews each morning.” Emile Cioran.
Here’s another one I never read when I travel. Joseph Conrad and Herman Hesse are better suited for travellers. And I hear that Rudyard Kipling, of all people, wrote an extraordinary tale about life on the road in India. I have to check it out.
It’s late in Vientiane and I stroll lazily back to my hotel near the riverfront. It’s not midnight but the streets are already emptying, and I notice a handful of friendly joy girls pacing and giving furtive looks. Ah, here too? What did I expect? My room has a TV, but only two Lao channels. I drift off and sleep soundly.
Morning. A midsize bus packed to the hilt with young westerners barrels out of town and heads for the mountains just north of Vientiane. I’m sitting in the back next to a German fellow who can’t stop talking. He’s rather pleasant, though. Thomaz, a diving instructor who has a scuba shop in Pucket. He’s lived there five years, so I quiz him about living with the locals down there and learn a handful. It’s just as well: Lao buses give no legroom, the mountain roads are narrow, the turns sharp, the country beautiful, but the ride extremely long. I note that Lao farmers practice slash and burn cultivation. Some hills are totally bereft of trees and brownish in colour. In certain spots, the burning stench is very sharp. Most of the houses I see in the countries are built on the same model: wooden cubicles raised above ground on pillars. The villages are small and very modest. Occasionally, you’ll see a guy standing by the road carrying a Soviet assault rifle. Militia of some sort. We reach Vang Vien after a ten-hour ride. Oooff! The town is a series of broad streets with no pavement, all red dirt, and cute houses three floors on average. A future boomtown like in the Old West. Thomaz and myself decide to find a hotel. It’s easy. We’re in low season. In the evening, we stroll the ‘strip’ and notice that most ‘cafe-restaurants’ do not have tables and chairs, but rather mats with long low tables around them. You eat and drink lying down. A look at the menu shows me why these places remind me of opium dens - they kind of are. For desert, you can choose from opium shakes, mushroom shakes, hashish pies, opium hot tea, space omelette, ‘surprise’ soup. I get the idea. This town is Stoner’s paradise. We’ll see.

Vang Vien.
Thomaz has gone to rent a motorcycle. I go for breakfast and I have an opium milkshake, a small omelette, and a mushroom milkshake. The omelette is good but the drugs are weak. They’re not crazy; they don’t want foreigners freaking out on them here. I walk to the ‘tire rental’ and rent a tire for the day. What you do in Vang Vien is: they take you to a point on the nearby river north of town and you get into the river, on your tire, and you can float down lazily for the rest of the day. Sounds grand. On the west bank, the cliffs rise very sharply. It’s low season so the current is very weak. I drift down seated on my tire. I get to a way station, a group of mini-bungalows facing the river with beer stalls in the back. And they’re playing music in the background: top-notch British Rock. Perfecto. I land and get myself a riverfront bungalow, order force-beers (Beer Lao is excellent, strong and rough on the palate) and watch other backpackers like myself climb a ladder up a huge tree to a platform at the top. There’s a cable up there and you’re supposed to grab a roller, jump off the platform, and let yourself ride some twenty meters above the river. Let go when you wish.
I’m going up there, of course. I down two beers and begin the climb. By the time I’m up there I’m so scared I want to climb down. There is a problem. Other travellers are down in other bungalows watching the action. Now I’m not allowed to chicken out, but do I want to! Too late. I grab the roller and bail off before I have time to think. I let go and fly into the air. Gravity lands me into the river with violence, but the water is deep, and nice. It’s done. I can swim back to my bungalow for another beer.
I lounge at that way station for quite a while. As day declines, I get back on my tire and float back towards Vang Vien alone. The view is staggering, beautiful cliffs tower above me. No snakes, no rats, no crocks. I swim now and again. No current. Piece of cake. People, this river ride is worth the trip to town, the stop to Vientiane. I thought that Thomaz would join me, but he’s elected to moto-ride around the region. I get back to town and select and empty cafe set up like those opium dens. They have a DVD player and a library of movies. Since I’m the only customer, the boss says, “Help yourself!” I select “Assault” by John Carpenter, lie on a cot, have opium tea served to me on the low table nearby, and watch this wonderful early thriller by the director of “The Thing”. I’m not really stoned. They serve you their concoctions with an extremely low dosage to avoid accidents. It’s disappointing, sure. But it’s just as well. What I frankly appreciate is that none of the locals make an attempt to approach me with their junk for sale. You are left alone if you want to, which is not the case for some Asian countries. Later, I shall walk across the street and have local crawfish, and run into Thomaz who’s already flirting with a local Lao girl who wants a visa out of the country. So it goes. I end the evening at that resto by asking for a ‘spiff’ on the menu. The waitress brings me a huge bag of untreated pot. That’s it? “That’s it?” How much do I take? “That’s the spiff.” Okay. I roll myself a cigar and attempt to smoke it. Soon, I’m in hyperspace and paranoid. I can’t believe a $3 spiff is the entire bag. They’re setting me up! I ask the waitress but she replies, “No. That’s it. It’s yours.” I stagger back to my hotel room with the bag and flush it down the toilet. I’m speeding through a wormhole, I can hear Captain Kirk in the background declaiming, “Warp seven, Tchekov!” Where’s the bed?? Here! Sleep!

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