Life In Laos

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I last left off in Thailand with only the Mekong River separating me from Laos. I spent my last night in Thailand with our guide Brandon playing cards in our hotel. We decided to go for a walk with no intention of spending more than a few minutes outside while Brandon had a cigarette and we talked about what we'd be doing the next day. Then we came upon a teepee. Yes, a teepee in Thailand. Turned out it was some kind of bar (a guy selling beers out of a cooler) and we sat down in a circle of thai and englishmen. The teepee owner was a 6 foot shirtless thai guy covered in tattoos and an 8 inch scar across his stomach. His name was Oh and he was nuts - constantly jumping around the teepee or playing the drums on his dogs' heads.

"Yabba" said Brandon. "What crack is to cocaine, yabba is to meth."

Soon it was just four of us. Brandon, Oh, and I, and an Englishman passed out in the corner occasionally regaining consciousness to sing along to Frank Sinatra or Phil Collins. Oh would occasionally bounce across the teepee knocking over tables and chairs to find something to keep himself busy- like an accordion. Everytime a new song came on he would try to play along to it on the accordion and it wasnt until "Damn It Feels Good to be a Gangster"came on that he was actually able to hit a few notes. At about 3am Oh decided he needed another bottle of whiskey to get himself through the night and took off on his flames painted motorcycle and took off. Honestly, Brandon and I thought we'd never see the guy again, but sure enough 20 minutes later he stumbled back up the driveway with a 7-11 bag carrying a bottle of whiskey and jumped into his hammock hanging across the middle of the teepee 6 feet in the air.

The next day we crossed the Mekong to Laos on a 10 minute canoe ride and after getting visas and exchanging money (1 us dollar to about 10,000 kip) we spent 8 hours floating down the Mekong once again through beautiful Laos. The hours passed reading, sleeping, and watching the scenery go by. We stopped off in a small village for the night and with nothing to do ended up on the roof listening to The Knife with a couple of Laos guys firing bottle rockets at eachother from close ranges. Awesome.

Day two on the river was another 8 hours which a break to visit a buddhist temple that is built into the side of a cliff face alongside the river. There we hiked up a few hundred stairs to see the main hall of the temple which is basically just a cave filled with thousands of small buddha statues. We paid our homage with some incense and flowers and then headed back to the boat, while being constantly badgered by little kids selling baskets of birds. I almost caved just so that I could free the birds for a few thousand kip, but was warned that the birds were trained to fly right back anyways. Oh the things kids will do without television and the internet.

Finally we arrived in Luang Prabang - the second biggest city in Laos to the capital - and its tiny. Magee had our own bungalow to ourselves overlooking the river and after a quick nap we headed into town to find the 'food alley'. Picture 80 tables with an old asian woman cooking nothing but meats on sticks and sticky rice - all yelling at you to choose their table. We ate about 4 meals that night and filled our bellies with beer for about 2 bucks a piece. After dinner we stopped by an awkwardly trendy little bar for Lao-Lao (the local moonshine) and spent another dollar or two on more than enough rounds for the whole table. Everything was fine until Magee started yelling at the DJ to play Oasis - he always does it and we always love it when they do, but this place was a fucking techno bar. They swiftly kicked us out.

At the curb we were met by 15 different tuk-tuk drivers all wanting to take us home.

"Bowing! Bowing!" one of them shouted.

No way, a bowling alley in the middle of Laos? We were stunned and still unconvinced that one might actually exist but we hopped into the sidecar of his motorcycle and took off. As it turned out, it did exist - eight lanes of fun. I'm pretty sure Magee and I have the biggest feet in all of southeast asia right now so we settled for shoes half our size and joined some wasted Irishmen on lane 6. Obviously we destroyed them. Half the bowling alley (Asian prostitutes and their drunk white victims) were chanting "U-S-A! U-S-A!" That part ended with us having bowling balls thrown "towards us" by our lovely irish brotheren and we knew the night had to come to an end.

The next day we woke up to breakfast in bed - the best way to wake up - to get ready for our whitewater kayak trip. Not a whole lot of white water really, just two white guys seeing who could ram their kayak into the other harder. We actually outpaddled our guide so badly that we had to turn around and paddle upstream for a few minutes for him to catch up. That night Magee and I took the night off before our real test of endurance the next day.

Somehow we biked 40 kilometers up a mountain to a waterfall. The Kaung Si falls. Worth every second of miserable uphill pedalling on bikes with no brakes - mostly thanks to the village kids that would chase us and cheer us on with high fives and giggles. We cooled off diving off some of the smaller falls below the Kuang Si and flinging ourselves aimlessly off of a sketchy rope swing some thirty feet in the air. After visiting the Tiger and Bear cages in the park we wimped out and had a tuk tuk carry us and our bikes back to town.

Now im in Vientiane, the "huge" capital city of Laos, after a one hour flight from Luang Prabang. Its another world of its own and I've got stories to come.

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