ain't no phousi

As soon as Maya and I got back from our trekking tragicomedy we decided that we were done with the hyper-touristed bullshit of Thailand, and that very night we bought plane tickets to Laos. Yes, I said Laos. And yes, we didn't really know anything more about Laos than you probably do right now (the country hadn't been on our original intinerary). All we really knew was that just about everyone we'd encountered along our travels thus far who had been to Laos said that we had to go. They said that it was like Thailand when it was still cool, still relatively untouched. We went to see some Muay Thai fights in Chiang Mai that night (saw a dude get his arm broken, another guy get knocked out via an uppercut elbow to the chin), then went back to our room, packed up, and the next morning we called a few hotels, booked a room, and flew to Luang Prabang, Laos. (We had thought about getting there via a 2-day slow boat on the Mekong River, but then we heard that one of the boats had sank recently; everyone onboard had been able to swim to shore but had lost all their luggage. We opted to fly.)

As soon as we landed, it became apparent that we were in a different kind of Southeast Asian country. At immigration in the airport, the officers checked everyone's papers then handed each of us an illustrated pamphlet with "10 suggestions will help you enjoy your visit while helping us preserve our culture and traditions." These suggestions included: "5) We believe that kissing, holding hands, and other displays of affection with the opposite sex are private acts that should be done in private," and "7) Lao people are modest, and it's uncomfortable to see people who are not. Nude bathing at the waterfall, in the river, or while rafting, is never appropriate. Lao women wear a t-shirt and shorts covering from mid-thigh to shoulders; for men, shorts are fine. When in Laos, we hope you'll do the same." Woah.

When we exited the airport, more differences became apparent. Whereas in just about every other city we've visited, there's been an onslaught of cab-, tuk-tuk-, and whatever-other-kind-of-vehicle-drivers eagerly trying to get us into their whatever-kind-of-vehicle and take us to our hotel, here there was all of 2 sawngthaews (those crazy pickup truck taxis) for at least 20 some newly arrived tourists. We ended up bargaining for a spot and a poor whitey got kicked out of the sawngthaew he'd been sitting in to make room for us. Sorry, whitey.

Rumbling through town, we found Luang Prabang to be something like Siem Reap in Cambodia - but minus all the fancy hotels. Dusty roads, kids and livestock running alongside the street, a muddy river - the Nam Khan - with naked children playing in it, shacks woven from dried palm leaves... When we finally checked into our hotel, we found ourselves in a room with walls woven from dried palm leaves...

...and a dirty, dimly-lit, and altogether sketchy shared bathroom. There's a sheet of paper posted to the inside of the door listing "accomodation regulations," including "6) Do not allow domestic and international tourist bring prostitute and others into your accomodation to make sex movies in our room, it is restriction." What the fuck had happened in this place? (That night we could barely sleep due to the rooster crowing at all hours - that shit about roosters cock-a-doodle-dooing to mark the sunrise is a total myth, by the way - and then at 4am, the mysterious sound of drumming and gongs chiming, which we learned was the monks making morning music in the nearby temple. Needless to say, we checked out the next morning - though the place was worth all $6 that we paid! - and moved to a much nicer, quieter place - for the exorbitant sum of $15 a night - along the one trendy, touristy strip in town. This new place had a sign posted behind its bar: "Say no to child-sex tourists. Don't turn away, turn them in.")

Other things that tipped us off that Luang Prabang was a little different? When walking from our first hotel to explore town, we passed a flock of flamboyantly feathered chickens, including two roosters who were clearly facing off and engaged in some crazy fighting dance. When the electricity went out - twice - at the restaurant we were having dinner at. When a little boy monk in orange Buddhist robes walked into the internet cafe where Maya was checking her email and sat down to go online. When we learned that at 10:30pm quiet time starts in the city, and by 11pm all the bars and restaurants close because the locals need their sleep so they can wake up early to give alms to the monks (who are all over town, as are their wats, or temples).

Basically, we've been in Laos for 5 days now, and it's pretty much fucking ruled. Here are just some of the other highlights:

Climbing the mountain in the center of town, Mount Phousi, in the dark on our first night to reach the golden wat at top, which is lit up at night and can been seen for miles. We found a number of young monks and Lao locals amassed up there, a few of whom seemed to be practicing their English by either conversing with the few other foreigners there or by reading lessons out of their notebooks. This dude Ian we'd befriended at the Chiang Mai airport - a 24-year-old New Yorker who'd just been laid off from his soul-sucking investment banking job and decided to use his severance by travelling - told us that he'd heard about a wat in Luang Prabang where monks go to practice their English by talking to tourists. This, it turned out, was it. While Ian started conversing with an 18-year-old kid who told him that he'd had to drop out of school in order to work a construction job that pays $2 a day to support his family, Maya and I, feeling much less social, sat on a bench, watching the Mekong River in the moonlight, and made fun of a young white woman who we could overhear talking to one of the monks: She was ostensibly helping him practice his English, but it sounded to us like she was pretty obviously hitting on him.

Laughing at the names of various estalishments around town. You see, in the Thai and Lao languages, P-H is pronounced with a P sound, not an F sound, as it is in English. So, for instance, the Thai city Phuket is actually pronounced Poo-ket, though it's temting to pronounce it Fuck it. This being the case, think about how the word Phousi, as in Mount Phousi, would be pronounced. And think about how Phousi Massage, Phousi Gallery, Phousi Hotel, et al, would be pronounced. Needlessly to say, Maya and I were in hysterics.

Taking a sunset boat ride on the mighty Mekong river and riding on the tin roof of the long, narrow, otherwise-wooden boat for most of the ride. The view of amazing, the wind fresh and cool in our faces - all the stress instantly drained from my body...



About an hour into what had been an awesome ride, the boat pulled up to a floating fuel station, which turned out to be closed. Apparently the boat was almost completely out of gas because our driver then began shouting in Lao at any passing vessel, eventually hailing down two, which pulled up next to us to listen to our driver's plea. The second vessel agreed to drive us back to the dock and so we switched boats in the middle of Mekong and sped back to shore, laughing at the unrelenting adventure/incompetence that we've encountered in Thailand and now Laos.

Watching Sin City upstairs in the teahouse/bookshop L'Entranger Books and Tea, a cozy oasis of semi-familiarity.

Taking the local boat to the other side of the Mekong where we found ourselves on a trail where we came across no more than 4 other whities in the course of a whole day; we explored abandoned temples, crumbling in the jungle, overgrown with palm trees and vines, and we came across, at the top of a long stone stairwell, a cave temple locked with a huge padlock. Retreating to the nearest abandoned temple, we found a man, who looked rather like a bald young monk but in street clothes, and asked him if there was any way we could get into the cave. He said that we should buy a ticket - he directed us to a little ticket table sitting under a tree (tickets were 5,000 kip each (about 50 cents) - and that he had the key. Next thing we knew we were being led back down the jungle path to the cave temple by a maybe 10-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy, both carrying flashlights (fortunately, we had brought our own along). They unlocked the door to the cave and led us inside. The cave was huge, winding and opening up deep inside the mountain, and pitch-black. "Buddha, no head," the little boy would say periodically, before flashing his light on the statue of a Buddha sitting among the stalactites in some subterranean corner - it's head, the kid correctly pointed out, broken off. The girl was mostly silent the whole tour; the boy, hilarious - making monster noises in an attempt to frighten Maya (she, of course, responded by making her own animal growls and sinister faces in the glow of her flashlight), singing bits of English-language (I think) songs, and telling us at one point to all turn off our lights - so that he could make even more monster noises in the absolute dark. Maya and I wanted to explore the cave even more, but the kids told us, "Sleeping," whenever we asked if we could go into a particularly shadowy offshoot of the cave; we think that they were trying to say "Slippery," but "Sleeping" made me imagine that we were the naively intrepid tourists in some horror movie and the kids were trying to warn us of the evil "sleeping" in the dark. When we finally emerged back into the light, the little boy pretended to shut the door on Maya, the little bastard, then when we tipped the kids a dollar each, the little capitalistic bastard asked for a second greenback since, as he explained, he had talked to us more than the girl. We just laughed - "You're like 5-years old," said Maya. "You get a dollar."

Exploring Khuang Si waterfall, about an hour's drive outside Luang Prabang - though our completely mad sawngthaew driver only took half an hour getting us there, whipping around the winding mountain roads as he did at terrifying speeds. The waterfall was gorgeous, multi-tiered and an otherworldly blue color due, we think, to its heavy calcium content, which had also built up strange stalactite-like structures along its banks (the photo below just shows the main section of the falls)...

We hiked to the top of the mountain alongside the falls (passing along the way a small animal sanctuary complete with bears who had been rescued from "bear bile farms" - bear bile is apparently a staple of Chinese medicine - and a tiger, who had been rescued as a cub from poachers), where we wandered through the jungle and, to alert any large cats that might be prowling in the area to our presence, we sang Pantera's "Mouth for War," Life of Agony's "Through and Through, and Metallica's "Fade to Black" complete with guitar solo to which we air-guitared along - if only some upsuspecting hippies had stumbled upon us up there. The truckride ride back was even more insane then the ride there had been - our lunatic driver was stopped on a number of occasions by herds of water buffalo loping about in the middle of the road, then he stopped to pick up three locals who piled in with a basket of vegetables; one unrecognizable veggie fell to the floor of the truck, and I picked it up to return it, but the Laos villagers shook it off, pointed that it belonged on the floor. Maya and I were confused. Then they placed a little baggie of cherry tomatos and a komquat-looking thing on the floor as well. Soon our sawngthaew stopped again, it seemed in the middle of nowhere, and the three passengers disembarked with a smile and a wave to us and our driver - it was then that we realize that they had left the veggies as payment for the ride! Our driver continued careening along the jungle road, then he suddenly screeched to a halt, calling back to a group of people hanging out in front of their palm-leaves-woven-shack-on-stilts; an older man runs over to the truck with a water bottle filled with a mystery clear liquid (it turns out to be Lao Lao, a 50-proof liquor distilled from sticky rice) and a shot glass, pours our driver a shot - "Oh, my God," says Maya outloud - which he downs in a smooth, unhesitating gulp. Then the older man pours a smaller shot and offers it to Maya who declines, then to me, who laughing at the absurd wrongness of this situation, accepts - if we're going to die, I might as well have a little buzz going. The man pours another a shot for Maya who relents this time. The shit is strong and warms us immediately. As Maya comments hopefully of our driver, "He'll probably actually drive a little more carefully now," and I think maybe he does. Either way, we ended up getting back to our hotel intact, and as we walked away from the pickup truck, having paid our fare (150,000 kip or about $15 for driving us there and back and waiting around 3 hours while we explored), our driver pantomimed puffing on a joint, asking us whether we'd like to buy some marijuana. We shook our heads and continued walking - as much as we've enjoyed exploring Luang Prabang so far, the inside of a Lao jail is one place we have no desire to see.