down the tube

It's funny how quickly shit changes on you when you're travelling like this. One second you're on top of the world; next, nothing seems to be going right. So it was in Laos.

We were enjoying Luang Prabang so much that we decided to extend our stay in the country and bumped our return flight to Thailand back by a few days. And since our experience in the cave temple on the opposite shore of the Mekong had been so fucking cool, we decided to go to the Lao town of Vang Vieng, which was supposed to have a number of Buddhist caves that you can explore, as well as a river - the Nam Song - that you can kayak and tube down, and amazing karst peaks akin to those in Halong Bay. We booked what claimed to be a 5-hour "V.I.P. bus" ride from Luang Prabang to Vang Vieng.

What we couldn't have guessed about the bus was that 1) it would have big speakers and a TV inside and there would be absolutely atrocious Lao karaoke playing for the first 3 hours of the ride. Think 3 hours of the shit below but worse...



2) that the toilet in the bus would be a particularly awkward hybrid of an Asian-style squatter and a western-style sitter, situated in the back of the vehicle, which bounced so extremely over the rugged, pothole-ridden roads that trying to keep your stream on target - there was also nothing to hold onto in the bathroom cabin - was just about impossible; 3) the vast majority of the trip would be on roads that were not only rugged and pothole-ridden but also winding through jungle-covered mountains along a nauseatingly serpentine course that had me fighting to hold in the vomit for much of the ride; 4) our lunch break would be in a shanty-town-like village in the middle of one of these jungle mountains and would include almost nothing that didn't look like it would make the latter fight against spewing, a losing battle (we ended up having some rice and bought some packaged chips and cookies); and finally, 5) 5 hours actually meant 7 hours.

Excruciating as this ride was, our first impressions of Vang Vieng suggested that perhaps it had all been worthwhile. As we neared the city, the landscape became even more dramatic than it had been, as otherwordly limestone peaks crawling with tangled foliage and vines reared up from the jungle floor around us. The bus finally dropped us off at the "bus station" - really just a big, dusty abandoned airfield along the road - and we caught a sawngthaew to our guesthouse, passing as we went the river and the jagged peaks rising above its shore.

That evening we stumbled on a fantastically chill bar along those same shores that had four or five little shacks on stilts with two hammocks inside each; we claimed a shack, sprawled out in our hamocks and watched the sunset, feeling perfectly relaxed and content as we sipped our bottles of Beer Lao to the tunes of Pink Floyd.

Unfortunately, this was just a brief respite. The next day we went on this caving trek that we had booked the night before. We were under the impression that it would be just us, another couple, and a guide, and that we would be taking one of the "customized tours" that the trekking place we'd booked the thing at advertised in big bold letters over beside its front door. Yeah, bullshit. We ended up being jammed into the back of sawngthaew with, it seemed, 20 other travelers so tightly packed that one dude had to sit on the floor and 3 of the guides had to hang on outside on the back of the truck. We had been told to show up at 9:30am, but the sawngthaew wasn't even ready for us until 10, and then it did a couple circles through town to pick up other passengers and a variety of kayaks and tubes before finally heading off out of town.

When we arrived at the starting point of everyone's various treks, we were all separated into groups; Maya and I into one with maybe 8 other people. Our guide - a fat, amiable Lao - told us that we'd be visiting four caves, tubing and swimming inside one, and visiting four villages. We couldn't hold our tongues, and Maya told him that we weren't going to any villages - we've been to enough already along our trip so far, and we've found that most are just poor and depressing and/or just an opportunity for the villagers to try to get you to buy their trinkets and shit. Our guide seemed a little taken aback and confused, but he agreed to arrange for a vehicle to take us back to town before the rest of his group went on to the villages.

Then it was off to caving. The first cave set a poor precedent - it was just a little nook in a cliff face with a big golden-colored Buddha in the back and an even bigger man-made "Buddha's footprint" in front. There was also a small altar in the opening of the cave where, our guide explained, you could shake this little shaker-thing, then take a slip of paper with Lao script on it off these little pads - the writing supposedly would tell your fortune. Maya, if you don't know already, is very superstitious and pretty into this kind of shit, so she shook the shaker and tore off a slip; she handed it to our guide for translation. He looked at it and hesitated before finally explaining what it said. "It says to keep an eye on your husband," he explained with a somewhat uncomfortable grin on his face. "He might have a girlfriend. Not now, necessarily, but sometime, in a few years." As if the cave itself hadn't been disheartening enough, now Maya was really distressed. And of course, I didn't help things by teasing her that this sounded like a really good fortune for me.

Then we went to the next cave, which ended up being adventurous as fuck but also absurdly dangerous. Let's just say that Lao safety precautions are basically nil. First, our guide asked the group if any of us had brought our own flashlights ("torches" he called them, as the Brits do); fortunately, Maya and I had, because, it turned out, he inexplicably only had 4 "torches" with him. These were divied up between our tourmates; Maya and I had been talking to this Irish guy and girl who had been traveling together through Asia about along as we have, and the dude ended up getting this headlamp that basically looked like a lightbulb attached to an elastic band and wired to a slightly sized-down car battery that you hung around your neck on a string. With him wearing this absurd contraption, we all climbed up and down these slippery, muddy rocks and into the dark mouth of the cavern.

Our guide, having given out his 4 flashlights, was holding just a tiny little candle and walking around in his flip-flops. We were all wearing hiking shoes or hiking sandles, and having a hard time with our footing, since the interior of the cave was essentially all mud and puddles. As walked deeper into the blackness, which was pierced only by our torches and half-assed headlamps, we passed a precariously narrow and deep crevass on our left, which the guide only pointed out after most of the group had already - fortunately, I guess - walked by it. The one safety precaution around this crevass? There was some barbed wire strung over it!

Around this point, the luckless Irish dude totally wiped out in the mud and fell into a filthy puddle; he righted himself, completely coated in dirt. His fortune wouldn't improve when we descended even deeper into the cave and he whispered to his friend that battery acid had leaked on his hand from his headlamp contraption and he said, "It really burns." Maya poured some of her water on his hand, and when our guide was alerted to the situation, he didn't seem too nonplussed and simply encouraged us to pour more water on the burn.

When we got into the third and final room of the cavern, our guide explained why caves were so important to the Lao and why so many were full of Buddha idols. Laos, it turns out, is the unlikely holder of the unenviable title of most bombed country in history - according to our guidebook, the U.S. dropped a ton of ordinance, an actual ton, on the tiny country every eight minutes for nine years during the Vietnam War! - and the caves acted as natural bomb shelters for the people.

Somehow extracting ourselves from this second cave, which, hardships aside, was really fucking cool, we went to a third cave, where, our guide explained, a Spanish dude had gone exploring by himself a few years ago and had ended up getting lost and dying a 3-days-distance inside its long winding channels. He said there was a lagoon inside, and we heard that there was a waterfall as well. Then we walked about 50 feet inside and he said we were going to turn around because it was time for lunch. Maya and I were like, That's it? What the fuck kind of "trek" is this?! All that build up for shit?!

So, lunch. Lao BBQ - meat and veggie skewers cooked over a little campfire - with fried rice and baguette, which we ate sitting on some tatami-like mats on the ground in a clearing among some banana trees. The food didn't taste bad, but I ended up getting the runs almost as soon - and very luckily, no sooner - as we got back to our hotel after the trek. After eating, we went to the fourth and final cave, a water cave in which we would tube and swim. Good thing, then, that the water was so absolutely frigid that Maya's toes went blue from just stepping in up to her ankles for a few minutes.

As he set us up with our tubes, our guide offered all of us those ridiculous headlamp contraptions with the hanging battery and the open wiring, which seemed like an insane thing for anyone to wear while in the water. I turned mine down, but the guide was insistent and Maya ended up wearing one, which kept on going out, then flickering back on, the entire trip through the cavern. As for the trip itself, Maya found it to be a journey through hell itself; I'm much less sensitive to the cold, and I found it to be pretty fucking cool, to be honest. We tubed deep into the cave, pulling ourselves on a rope strung along the rocky walls, and then we (well, mostly just me) swam in the small lagoon shrouded in darkness, where it looked to me almost as if we'd been swallowed by a whale and were swimming around in its shadowy ribcage.

When we finally got back to our hotel from the day's caving (mis)adventure, I got the aforementioned shits, then the next morning I locked up my backpack with what few valuables we have with us - which I've been doing this whole trip whenever we leave our hotel room - and then almost immediately afterwards, realized that I had no idea where the key was. While our new Irish friends, with whom we hung out for the next few days, were telling us about all the shit that they'd had stolen from them while in Southeast Asia, we were in the improbable position of having to break into our own luggage. I ended up trying to buy a bolt cutter from a local hardware store to cut through the lock, but had to settle for a wire cutter; using that, I wrestled with the little padlock for 45 minutes until it finally just popped open and I got into the bag, in which - surprise, surprise - it turned out, I had locked the key.

A variety of other things proceeded to go wrong - I won't go into the devilish details now (suffice it to say, we lost an email regarding a hotel reservation in Thailand, then found it only once it was too late to get back to Thailand to use the reservation; we were getting more mosquito bites here, in the most remote place we'd traveled to, than anywhere else in Southeast Asia so far; and some other shit) - but mostly the town of Vang Vieng began to get on our nerves. As beautiful as the surrounding landscape is, the place is a proper shithole. There are only three real streets to the place, and they're basically just all guesthouses, bars, restaurants, internet cafes, and trekking places, and 4, not 1 or 2 but 4, of the restaurants/bars play nonstop Friends episodes all day and night to steady crowds of young backpackers, most of whom seem to be basically just frat-boys and sorority-girl types but the Eurotrash version, which, take it from me, is even more despicable than the American version. And to what end are these young backpacking Eoropeans using the beautiful landscape? Put it this way, Vang Vieng's biggest tourist activity is tubing down the Nam Song and stopping at the numerous bars that dot the banks, some of which sell ready-to-puff joints. It doesn't sound like a bad way to spend an afternoon, but when you find yourself in a town that's been built up in the middle of nowhere in one of the poorest countries of the world, just around that singular pasttime, shit starts to seem awful lame awful quick.

So, after just 2 days and 3 nights there, we bought tickets for a minivan - we had heard that the minivan was much more comfortable and quicker than the "V.I.P. bus" - back to Luang Prabang, from where we were scheduled to fly back to Chiang Mai, Thailand. The morning of our ride, we showed up at the place where we'd bought the tix and where we were to be picked up at 9am sharp (originally advertised as 8:30), only to be told that the van wouldn't be there till 9:20. Then when the van showed up, it was far from "luxury", jampacked with locals, most of them with their luggage in their lap and their heads sticking out of the open windows, clearly panting for air; there was only the backseat left open for us, with shin-crushingly little legspace, and when we asked the driver if there was A/C, which we had been told there would be, he shook his head incredulously. Maya just about lost it - and justifiably so. She stomped back to the woman who had sold us the tickets and told her straightup that we were not getting what she'd promised and we wanted our money back. The woman hemmed and hawed, but eventually relented; and then we dashed to the nearest other office for bus/van tix and begged for spots on the 10am V.I.P bus, which was our last hope out of this hellhole and to our flight out of Laos the next day. Miraculously, there were 2 seats available (here's Maya in the sawngthaew to the bus station - her expression says it all),...

and after 7 nauseating - but, thank god, karaoke-free - hours back through the jungle mountains, we found ourselves back in what-felt-like the sanctuary of Luang Prabang, where, hopefully, our luck would change again but for the better.