First things first: I’ve changed my tickets - delayed my return home for a week. I’ll be back on July 27th (instead of the 18th) - it’s only nine extra days, but it will give me a chance to do some exploring outside of Kathmandu without neglecting my work here.

Life has settled into a pleasant rhythm - waking by 5am (or trying to) for yoga at the Hindu temple three minutes from the house, buying mangoes from the produce sellers’ blankets on the way back, dodging the cars on the road barely wide enough for the bicycles - jumping to the sounds of their horns, which they employ exuberantly - squatting to take a cold shower under the waist-high faucet and grimacing over the instant coffee before shuffling into my sandals at the front door. I walk around the rice fields and guitar-playing teenage boys on the corner and up the steep lose gravel path to the tiny brick road which curves around another open field - the construction taking place there on an apparently permanent hiatus; the men have moved chairs into the field and sit with tea socializing rather than building - and then twists into a narrow alley of high brick walls with clinging vines and iron gates, squeezing to the side to allow old women in colorful saris and men in Nehru hats to pass. I have almost perfected the art of twisting my arm through the gate and sliding open the inside deadbolt. The boys of the Ama Dablam house, in neat school uniforms with ties and black leather shoes, greet me as I run up the steps: “Good morning sister!” “Namaste bhai!”

Hellos in the office are passed around in Nepali, French, Spanish, and English. The office consists of two small rooms on the top floor of a small storage building, in the courtyard of the largest children’s’ home, Ama Dablan. The country director of Umbrella, Jacky Buk, is a silver dread-locked Frenchman who used to work in the fashion industry before moving to Nepal with a folded face and a strong, carrying voice (you can generally hear Jacky long before you see him - sometimes well before even passing the gate) belied by his friendly eyes. An assembly of shoes - ranging from serious leather loafers to battered sneakers and rubber flip-flops - guard the door. The front room is occupied by the various Nepali staff, most of whom double as care-takers and managers of the children’s homes, and the back room filled with laptops and volunteers. From a pin-board high on the wall has the faces and names of all the 350 children look down at us - and we often look down into the courtyard at the children.

The Umbrella Foundation was started by Jacky and his wife Viva, a marvelous woman and a former lawyer who has been living in Nepal for twelve years and now teaches English Literature and Social Studies at an international/American high school, when they found a starving orphan on the streets of Swoyambhu and were unable to find a decent and humane orphanage to take care of the boy, founded Umbrella. In only a few years it has grown into an international NGO with over 350 children, eight homes, education and scholarship programs for not only their children but local college students, medical centers, and is working on building a large school/center in a rural village to, eventually, move the kids out of the city and back to the countryside where most of them have come from. The Gurje Project, named for the village in which it will take place, is also aimed at “village rejuvenation” - the civil conflict that has been tearing Nepal apart for the last decade wreaked awesome havoc on the villages, with the children being trafficked away and the able-bodied moving to the urban areas in search of work - work which isn’t to be found in the polluted, overcrowded cities that are now beginning to suffer black market and criminal problems previously unknown. Umbrella’s village project will combine all of the elements and programs that Umbrella is currently running in Kathmandu with expanded vocational training programs an agricultural program (buying and distributing seeds to grow crops, hiring villagers to take care of them, and creating a market to sell them).

And now I’m a poor regurgitation of the articles and files that I’ve been spending my days working with….

Some days I stay in the office, but most I spend running between the homes/offices of Viva and Prashant, carrying files, messages, and tasks. I’ve been put to work updating the website, doing everything from text-editing and proofreading with Viva (one of the founders of the foundation) to formatting the documents for the web with Prashant (the web designer who initially set-up the site - I get to use his latest versions of DreamWeaver and PhotoShop - and oh, how I covet), and coordinating/enabling the translation of the site into French and Spanish by Typhaine and Lorena.

By lunch-time I’m taking the same path back to the Volunteer House (frequently accompanied by monkeys who take to the ground in the afternoon; we calmly cross paths with each other) or going out to the neighborhoods’ main road to shop. There are dozens of little stores, dry goods inside and baskets of vegetables on the stone steps in front. Tomatoes, spinach, onions and tofu rarely cost more than 20 rupees (25 cents - or so) and there’s a bakery, hidden behind another iron gate, run out of the home of a Nepali chef with amazing English. Amazing bread and biscuits (cookies, sorry) are usually on the shopping list but I rarely manage to get out without sampling some new creation - today it was mango jam and tomorrow he’s promised us hummus. We’ve even found a local grocery store with yak cheese and yogurt.

I’ve surprised myself with the discovery that I am capable of (some rudimentary) cooking. I can saute, at least, and Typhaine and I are usually dancing around the kitchen together, comparing notes on various projects and putting together the pieces of the office-work. Endless cups of tea - there is always, I have discovered, more tea - fill all the moments between work, chores, and playing with the children in their homes. I wash my clothes on the roof, kneading them in buckets of water and spreading them out on the tiles to scrub and borrow needles to fix the tearing seams and rips in the knees from when I’ve tripped. I could take my things to any of the tailors along the road but, like cooking, sewing is another ability I’ve discovered - and an excuse for a few solitary quiet moments.

The camaraderie in the volunteer house is amazing, however, and most of the time is spent around the kitchen table. Lorena (from Galicia, Spain) makes us tapas in the evenings if we haven’t taken daal bhat (rice and lentils) at one of the houses or if Typhaine (from Bordeaux, France) hasn’t started cooking something amazing. We swap out ipods, plugging them into the power-box on-top of the refrigerator there’s only one outlet in the kitchen and the toaster takes priority); Cliodhna,(from Cork, Ireland) surprised us a few days ago with a recording of a concert she’d given - playing her own compositions on the violin. There’s an omnipresent pot of tea on the stove and even a vase (round plastic tubberware) of flowers. If someone has gone into Thamel (the western/touristy/backpackers’ district) we might even have red wine and chocolate - generally by candle-light, as the power tends to go out for several hours in the evenings.

It’s difficult, sometimes, especially in the kitchen, to remember that I’m not in Europe - or home. The walls are the quintessential Nepali-turquoise that seems to be the favored paint and dark wood lines the arched doorway. The windows, however, are protected by grates in the shape of swastikas and the view out them shows us fields, men and women planting and harvesting, women in sarongs washing clothing in front of their houses, monks with prayer beads serenely parading past, children playing soccer, people carrying humongous loads of on their backs (baskets piled high with straps tying them around their foreheads) and the colorful strands of Tibetan flags flying across roofs. The windows also bring us the sounds of drums from the temples - a Hindu temple to one side, a Buddhist to the other - and monks chanting, between and above the neighbor’s loud Nepali pop.

And then, to remind us where we are, there’s the monkeys. And Didi’s monkey-rampages.

They freely roam the neighborhood, climbing onto the roof and pulling clothes off the line, jumping in windows that haven’t been securely closed and even daring to come into the house and down the stairs. They rip the heads off of the sunflowers that Lorena planted in the front courtyard and absolutely terrorize Didi - although I suspect that she secretly enjoys their interruptions to her otherwise routine days. Her voice, normally shrill enough, gains in pitch and volume what it loses in timbre as she runs screaming and flailing through the house. The very word “monkey” is enough to set her off on a frantic search and she keeps a stash of pebbles to through at them. The first morning I arrived we woke up the sound of shattering glass as she accidentally broke a window in pursuit of a monkey - not that any of us actually came down to investigate, but as everyone slowly made their way to the kitchen and noticed the lack of a pane, the story was repeated over and over - complete with pantomime by Didi, who acted out both her own part and that of the monkey.

My room is on the roof (I have to climb three flights of stairs to reach it - or to get down to a toilet in the middle of the night - but the three walls’ worth of windows make up for that) so I get to bear witness to the majority of the monkey-rampages (and carry out my own). A few days ago I heard an odd combination of shouting and laughter and jumped off of my bed and out the open window (the door sticks and is hard to open) to find her leaning over the railing hurling stones at a monkey below with a broad grin on her face and laughter bubbling out; “Sorry, sorry sister,” she apologized for having disturbed me.

Didi Indu, the house-caretaker, is a widow whose two sons live under the care of Umbrella (her sixteen year old daughter, Latiimi, still lives in her home village with a relative). She’s a tiny woman a whole head shorter than me (and I’m short), only thirty-two, despite the deep lines in her face and the worried frown that lurks even behind her smiles and laughing eyes, and speaks almost no English. We call her Didi (older sister), as she does us - I was “Sister America” for the first few days until she learned my name but was upgraded to “Sister Dhading ramro” for a few days after I visited her home town with her and pronounced it beautiful - and try not to get frustrated as she follows after us cleaning the pots we’re still using, putting away the food we’re still eating, and refilling the tea jars with coffee and the coffee with tea. She takes care of the house diligently - for the most part. Some mornings (most mornings, to be fair) she’s up at 6am scrubbing the kitchen floor and walls - and others she’s belatedly emerged blurry-eyed and hiccuping, holding her head, and we’ve ordered her back to bed. Our frustration with her cleaning stems largely from our own discomfort at being served, I’m sure; dishes sit in the sink for no more than ten minutes before she intuits their presence and appears to wash them - but there is a fair share of miscommunication

Swoyambhu, the neighborhood in which I’m staying and where all of Umbrella’s children’s’ homes are located (all eight of the houses are within five minutes of each other), is absolutely beautiful. It’s probably (I’m stabbing in the dark with this guess) a middle-class Nepali suburb filled with multi-story houses whose architectural styles range from classical to Jenga-game construction.

The streets of Kathmandu, what little Ive seen from the back of a taxi, are brilliantly colored, utterly chaotic - and smell terrible. The river is so terribly polluted, the banks having become a dumping ground, that even driving alongside it is nauseating. Traffic, the bane of all cities, flows along uncontrolled by any perception of lanes or direction ; I can’t recall having seen a stoplight yet. Cows sleep in the middle of the busiest roads, meditating perhaps, with a profound aura of relaxation that rivals the monks. Cars are lined up for miles around the few petrol stations thanks to the serious fuel shortage. Piles of garbage, most of it simply rotting refuse, are everywhere - next to butcher shops, in the gutters, an on street corners. Goats, cows, and dogs sleep atop the trash while crippled beggars and children, shouting salesmen and hurried businessmen rush along. Golden-topped temples dot the horizon and incense fights a valiant, although absolutely futile, battle against the stench

It is beautiful.

I haven’t really spent any time exploring the city yet, although I intend to remedy that this weekend. I spent last weekend in Dhading Besi, the capital “town” of the Dhading district which, although it is next to Kathmandu, is incredibly rural. I visited Didi’s family - payed the bus fare so that Didi could visit her sick mother in exchange for amazing hospitality and a chance to see typical Nepali life - it was absolutely incredible. I’m planning to get to Pokhara and Baktapur - and probably a couple other places, I’m not really sure yet - and want to return to Dhading, after the majority of the website work is finished. (It has to get completed before the 14th, as Jacky and Viva are going out of town for a few weeks.)

I’ve been here just over a week - actually, make that nearly two weeks (oh how the time is flying!). I’m drinking what has to be at least my tenth cup of tea today and sitting at the kitchen table with two Irish girls who just arrived disrupting Chandra’s attempts to give them a proper introductory information session - they keep turning to me and asking questions (the American accent being easier, I’m certain, to decipher than his Nepali). Distraction is only fair turnabout - I’ve been disrupted so far, by: Cliodhna pulling out a box of tin whistles and distributing them to us (we enthusiastically butchered Ode to Joy and Frere Jaques); Didi on a monkey-rampage; being called to the courtyard as moral support to Typhaine’s haircut (model, as she tries to demonstrate with my hair what she’s asking for and referee, as Lorena and I jump around waving our hands and using the little Nepali under our command to minimize the loss of hair); and the inevitable power-outage.

Although I’ve started to think about home more and more - the idea of it is becoming increasingly foreign. I’ve settled in, settled down here surprisingly quickly. It’s the little things - the simple tangible elements like company and conversation around the kitchen table, snacks, red wine and cheese, and chai masala - as much as, perhaps, some larger and less explicable settling of myself that I can’t explain. I can’t wait to see my family and friends again. but I feel at home here - in our curious blend of west and east - old habits and new ones. I wander the house in silk sawal house and light mosquito coils in my room; I’ve hung my clothes on hangers for the first time in six months and, despite my lack of money, there will probably soon be art hung on the wall. I’m living on mangoes and, while on the phone home to my family blasely chasing monkeys across the roof to retrieve the colored pictures the children made - while searching for my keys because some things of course, never change.

So, normal apologies for not having written anything in a significant amount of time…. I met Kristin in Bangkok and we went to Siem Reap and Koh Phangan. Angkor Wat was amazing (though Cambodia was otherwise quite frustrating), Koh Phangan was a good mix of hammock-laying and beach-partying, and now I’m back in Bangkok… having missed my flight to Nepal… and trying to sort that out.

Still not really in a writing mood, but (having heard that I’m worrying people by not posting anything), here’s something. At least.

No travel story - just a poem. (Inspired by the plethora of languages I hear and the fragmented conversations I catch from everywhere.)

Syllables
have drifted lose from
words - which lacked the
weight to hold them
in, having themselves secceeded
from the hierarchy
of syntax (forsaking
the patriarchy of phrases).

They float
to my ears and my brain
reassembles them
to my Mother Tongue - nearly, for
it is a dialect of hers I find
incomprehensible.

“Wallah wallah,”
said the men of Babel and
the first generation, they
nodded sagely (with blank eyes
and empty smiles)
still thinkking they understood -
it was the second that went insane
(trying trying trying)
but the third that figured
it out, stuffing wax in their ears.

The Sirens
didn’t sing of sex,
no come on, no allure - they
simply sang their own sad songs,
and told their tragedies until
having lost themselves,
they shouted
only of the sea.

Listen. Listen.
Listen and you will
hear - you will hear yourself -
your fears and your desires. Have
you the strength to listen
to the languages you don’t speak?
Have you the strength
to ignore them?

They’re not speaking
to you, my friends. Not to
you but about you. So shut your ears and
open your mouth and
speak out all the stories
you’re holding onto the
ones you think you’ve
the rights to hold alone -
speak, speak, speak your
tragedy and your comedy, audience
regardless - speak
until they’re your stories no
longer and use up the words
of which you thought you
knew the meanings.

Use them
up and spit them out
and you will see what little use
they ever were ad you - you will not know,
not ever again - but you may understand that
in the cud you have spat in the
sound as it hits the floor
in the cough and the hacking cough the
choke and the sob and the sigh you
will read more than in
the face, more than is signed
with the hands
for you
will read through
the wallah.

And you won’t
give a damn.

(Such
is the manifesto -
of this revolution.)

So I’m not at Danum anymore.The second day there I started - and I swear I’m not making this stuff up and that I’m not a hypochondriac whatsoever - coughing up blood.

There’s some signs of ill health that you can easily brush aside as the cost of travel - an infrequent cough, a bit of extra fatigue, stomach cramps, headaches - and then there are some things, such as discovering that the phlegm coming up through your throat is an intense bright red color, that make you head for the nearest hospital and email your doctor.

Apparently, it was a fluke.

The chest xray came out clean. (”We can’t entirely rule out TB,” the female doctor in Lahad Datu told me from under her voluminous head scarf, “but it is an extremely early case if you have it.” To be fair, I was the one who had suggested TB in the first place.) She wrote me a request for a TB test at another hospital as well as a prescription for antibiotics - to cover any sort of lung infection - and cough syrup; I filled the prescriptions and opted not to bother with the TB or sputum tests. I don’t really have any other symptoms and, besides sleeping a lot, I’m fine. I think. Just irritated the lining of my throat by coughing, burst a blood vessel - or something.

I left Danum Valley Field Center, though - and chose not to return. It’s costly and, to be entirely honest, I didn’t really belong there. I feel bad for not having given it a better try - but - well.

So now I’m in Sandakan, holed up in a bright and cheery hostel (Sandakan Backpackers), lazing around the waterfront and feeling a bit foolish. I’m going to Sepilok tomorrow, considering some less rigorous and more guided trekking/camping with Uncle Tans, and shopping for village homestay programs - I’ve got a week-and-a-half-or-so left in Sabah, two days in Jakarta, and a few days in Bangkok before I meet Kristin. We’ll be making a run to Angkor Wat and then down to the Thai islands - and then I go to Nepal - plenty to do, but I’m already feeling the end of the journey approach and I can’t entirely quiet the silly voice in my asking, insistently, just what I think I’ve been doing all this time.

Tadlo - on the Bolaven Plateau in Southern Laos: beautifully pastoral, gorgeous waterfalls, cute children, and a five-day party (Pi Mai Lao!)

Don Khon - one of the Four Thousand Islands in the Mekong between Laos and Cambodi (Don Khon is on the Laos side - the smallest/quietest of the three with tourist facilities): unbelievably gorgeous, quiet paths to wander, French colonial ruins to climb, and a buff-cheeked gibbon to play with…

Or - if you’ve got time to kill - see all the picture sets!

I leave for Danum Valley in about an hour.Two weeks of trekking for orangutans and camping in the jungle!
I never did find a trekking partner - but instead of the Joseph Conrad style hacking through the virgin jungle with our food and water on our backs that I had pictured when I made plans to go to one of the most remote and pristine parks in Borneo, I’ll be staying amidst a variety of researchers and students at the Sabah Foundation’s camp site.

When I finally found the office last Friday (it was an endurance test of misdirection - I’d been in the proper strip mall for nearly two hours before I made it there, wandering around the back of fast-food like restaurants and auto shops), I expected I’d have to bluff my way into an entry permit by fluffing up my credentials - I was prepared to lie, I was prepared to beg - but I hadn’t really prepared anything to say. I was out of breath and red-faced as I opened the doors, blinking at the stylish wooden interior.

“Yes?”

“Selamat pagi. I would like to go to Danum Valley, please.”

“The Center is not for tourists,” a smiling woman in a sari told me.
“I’m a student,” I began “of -”

I didn’t have to get any further.

“Ah! Well, we are fully booked at the moment -”

“Until when?”

“Early June.”

I winced.

“But if you are willing to camp - ” this was said hesitatingly.

“Camping is no problem!”

“Please have a seat. When would you like to go?”

“As soon as possible.”

“A shuttle leaves in half an hour but it is unfortunately full - there is one every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.”

“Is this Monday possible?”

It was. She outlined the prices for me (transport both ways, breakfast, lunch, dinner, park entry fee, and the guides’ hourly rate), pausing and repeating as I scrawled them down. It came out to a little over $400 USD for the first week. She asked me to write down my name and phone number - and to return at 3:30 on Monday for the bus.

It was that easy.

I’m excited - but also rather nervous.

I’ve done none of the pre-trek-trekking I intended to, I’m probably in the worst physical shape that I’ve been in since leaving home (having succumbed to laziness and French food in Laos and then having wilted in the humidity in Malaysia). I’ve just barely skimmed up on orangutan behavior, rather than doing any proper research - despite the free wifi that I found here in town, and I’m about to be crashing into a campful of real scientists who actually know what they’re doing and have real reasons to be here!).

And, most importantly, I don’t want anyone else to say the word “leeches” again - just don’t - no - don’t even -

I’ll be fine. It will be great. I’ll just - drink water and keep walking and borrow someone’s bug spray - that’s a decent strategy, right? Right.

[Pictures of Vientiane!]

“Changing rapidly? I’ll tell you - ” said the Australian-who-wasn’t-one-anymore (we can call him Herc, instead - later, he’ll ask us to), with his characteristic smile-wink (head tilt and eyebrow raise included - it was a marvelous gesture/facial expression that I immediately wished I had the charisma to pull off) “this street was mud last year.”"Last year? This street?” I echoed.

It was a broad street equipped with ATMs, office buildings, and souvenir shops; expensive new cars (incongruous but omnipresent) were parked densely along both sides of the street. We were seated at “Fruit Heaven” enjoying fruit shakes and baguette sandwiches (of all the legacies of the French imperialism, the lifespan and quality of the baguette is indeed noteworthy).

“This very same street,” Herc confirmed, “paved just this year. That tells you something, doesn’t it?” He rolled himself another cigarette, pausing as if to offer a moment to let the thought sink in.

A few years ago the majority of the educated Western world couldn’t name the country, much less place it on a map; today its one of the most popular tourist destinations - a “must see” destination even outside of the backpacker circuit, well on the way to becoming a holiday destination for the middle class. Officially designated as one of the “least developed countries” by the UN (according to an edition of the Vientiane Times found on a coffee table at breakfast), the government has been hoping to achieve promotion by 2020 - an utter impossibility (according to an official interviewed in the same article). Two million tons of bombs were dropped on Laos during the Vietnam War (more than were dropped on the entirety of Europe during both World Wars combined) and only 15% of those have exploded or been cleared.

Laos is, indisputabley, a third world country - but the average visitor wouldn’t know that. The Yellow Brick Road has been freshly painted and scrubbed ’til it shines. Tourists breeze through the “charming UNESCO World Heritage city of Luang Prabang” (say that to yourself in a posh British accent) before “relaxing in the scenic Vang Vieng” (that gets a wink and a nod, for the happy pizzas and special shakes) and possibly (possibly) make it as far as the Plain of Jars or the Four Thousand Islands before utilizing Vientiane’s airport to leave - say, straight to Phnom Penh, Siem Reap, or Bangkok.

Laos is doing its best to emulate Thailand, particularly when it comes to building an tourism-based economy - it’s now been the Official Visit Laos Year several running - and this means creating a tourist-based infrastructure - the sort that while many come to South East Asia to avoid, they secretly draw great comfort and strength from having available. All the comforts of home (air conditioned hotels, broad paved streets, and dozens of pizza parlors) to keep the tourists comfortable - and quite isolated from the rustic charm and idyllic pastoralism that drew the first visitors.

Take, for example, the bus. Bus trips are almost a rite of passage for the hardened backpacker, a universal that alongside plastic bags in dormitory rooms, toilet paper, and motorbike burns (oh - and let’s not forget the Asian pop) will trigger story after rant after story in any group.

There are buses, however, and then there are buses. The former category includes those that give birth to travelers’ horror stories - double-digit hours on rock-hard benches with screaming babies and bleating livestock, acute bouts of food poisoning, motion-sick locals, bags lighter at the end of the trip then the start. Laos, however, has taken the second category to heart: complimentary drinks and snacks, beds with pillows and duvets, and karaoke through the night (may the lord have mercy on your soul - and your ears).

Having invited myself southward from Luang Prabang with Martin, we boarded a bus to Vientiane the next morning. An air conditioned, well upholstered, comfortable and modern piece of machinery that traveled over amazingly well-paved roads. (If you hear a backpacker grumbling about that road - and I actually have - don’t believe them for a moment). Trading seats to sit next to each other, we found ourselves under the curious gaze of an Australian schoolteacher traveling with her husband and teenage daughter that we’d met on the slow boat. “You’re together now?” she said, smiling. “We’re going to Vientiane,” I said, not quite catching the implication in her words until after I’d answered. We chatted a bit and I tried to read. I shivered in the blessed cold and Martin laughed at me (prepared for the enthusiastic cooling system, he’d worn a long sleeved shirt) I pulled out a large piece of silk I’d bought in Laos and wrapped it around myself. Forsaking the collection of O’Henry, I squirmed in my seat and eyed Martin’s shoulder - regardless of the sort of bus you’re on, I’ve discovered that they are far more comfortable with a friend, preferably a taller friend - and asked if he minded if I leaned on his shoulder. The Australian woman laughed. I blushed - I hadn’t meant it like that - but fell asleep on his shoulder regardless.

Vientiane was uninspiring, but to be fair, we may not have given it much of a chance. We didn’t plan on spending much time in there - just long enough to take care of some administrative details: Martin needed a visa for Cambodia and my passport was out of pages.

We quickly checked ourselves into the first guest house we found, a nondescript cement block that we affectionately dubbed “the opium den”. (Note: in Laos, if they ask you if you smoke when you check-in, they’re not asking if you want an ashtray.) Our room came equipped with a cubbyhole of a “balcony”, overlooking a crawlspace to the building next to us with a view of the neighbors surrealist collection of mannequin body parts. Every time we walked by the front desk, we were offered a drug or two and a deep breath walking up the stairs and down the hallways when we returned in the evenings let us know that at least some of the other guests accepted. No Persian rugs and water pipes, unfortunately - nothing so romantic - just nylon curtains and sheets with cigarette burns in a room that could have existed anywhere, at any time in the last few decades.

We watched a lightning storm brighten the sky on all sides the first evening while enjoying a mediocre meal on the riverbank. I spent the next day at the US Embassy; Martin went to the Post. Nearly two dozen simple bars, an identical series of woven mats and triangle pillows served beer on the colder side of lukewarm - we spent a few evenings doing nothing more than lounging and chatting. A fairground with a ferris wheel and machine-gun carrying men in camouflage (what fair is complete without them?) blasted Lao pop. A Buddhist temple sat across the road, its grounds filled with inflatable Christmas icons - from Santa Claus to Snowmen. We saw the museum - cute kindergarten dioramas of village life - and a market, wandered the town less than we should have, and managed to get a bus ticket to out of town - a feat that only took us two bus stations, one helpful-but frightening tout, one helpful-but-vague American tourist, three uniformed-yet-utterly-uninformed Lao men, a women pulled from the back of the shop who actually knew what she was talking about, and a surprisingly long tuk tuk to the outskirts of town.

We found ourselves at Fruit Heaven a few hours before our bus to Pakse, The most stereotypical American I’ve ever met, a large man in a Hawaiian shirt (tucked into his khaki pants), the zip-pulls of his fanny-pack held together by a small combination lock approached us - obviously desperate for a chat. He’d been teaching English in and out of South East Asia for the last several decades and was the sort of conversationalist who didn’t converse - he only spoke - and loudly at that. He only spoke to complain, albeit affectionately, about every place he’d been. Martin found him interesting; I didn’t make space on the bench for him to sit and, instead, stroke up a conversation with Herc, who did his best to explain Vientiane to me. He loved the place - he’d been living there for years.

“It’s changing, like the whole damn country is changing - but here, here its real change, real progress. Here it’s changing for the people,” he said. “This is what Laos will become - fortunate or not, who knows - this is the prototype of what Laos wants to become - not the fairytale amusement parks they’re tossing you backpackers - just the fairytale for the country’s rich.”

Vientiane, end of the Yellow Brick Road, was it turned out, neither on nor off of it.

[Pictures of Vientiane!] 

I’m back in Vientiane - hopefully at the end of all passport troubles (complications).

I picked up yet another new new passport this morning at 8am sharp as the Embassy opened - having arrived in the city at 6am, dropped my bag in a dormitory room at Sabaidee Guest House, taken a cold shower, and had a triple espresso at Joma’s (with yogurt, fruit, and museli) - having boarded a bus in Pakse at 8pm last night - having (essentially) hitch-hiked my way out of Champasak yesterday afternoon - having spent the dayclimbing the ruins of Wat Phu - having discovered that my passport was, weeks ahead of schedule, sitting in Vientiane waiting for me and that if I waited through the weekend (today is Friday) I would overstay my visa - as it expires tomorrow.

So, yeah, I’m a bit tired. At the moment.

My passport is currently in the hands of the Immigration officials who will, hopefully, grant my application for a three day extension - I can go pick it up between 11:30, when it should be ready, and noon - at which time they close through the weekend.

I’m also frantically comparing Air Asia and Malaysia Airline flights to and around Borneo, trying to decide if I’m going to Danum Valley, Gunung Palung, or Tanjung Puting - no longer having time for all of them - or none of the above. Maps, transport routes, details, budgets (’cause - oh yeah - I’m just about out of money and its time to start asking for loans, except that I hate to ask for any more than I absolutely need), whether or not I should try to buy things like leech socks, what I can empty out of my bag to lighten the load - are spinning through my head.

I should have planned all this weeks ago. The fact that I thought I had more time - I was on my way to Phonosavan, back through Luang Prabang and to Non Khiaw, maybe even up to Luang Nam Tha and Muang Sing - is no excuse. The thing is, I sort of have planned the Borneo contingencies before but, of all the travel I’ve ever done or listened to others discuss, it’s downright Kafkian in the intricacies of “can’t get there from here” and none of the details make any sense even five minutes after you’ve sorted them out.

A group of us from the boat had managed to get rooms in the same guest house in Luang Prabang and spent the next several days just hanging out. It was nice to be part of a group, for a change.

We (Olivia, Ruth, Louise - the British girls - Martin, Benny, and I) hired a tuk tuk to take us to the nearby waterfall, Kuang Si. It was breath-takingly beautiful; the water an impossible shade of light turquoise (no doubt due to some mineral in the stones), the setting stunning and - perhaps most importantly, at least to our overheated sweat-drenched bodies - the water chilling. Only a few minutes after we’d pulled ourselves from the water, walked down the hill, and seated ourselves at a table under an overhang in the parking-lot/tourist center, it started to rain - to pour, actually. We watched others come running, skidding, down the hill; it wasn’t cold, but the idea of carrying that much water in our clothes was less than appealing - except to Olivia, who got up to dance in the rain.

We hung Benny’s portable speakers, even smaller than mine, from the roof of the tuk tuk as we drove back and found songs we could all sing along to. “Bohemian Rhapsody”, of course, Martin managing some impeccable timing as he leaned out the back, waved his arms and shouted “Mama, just KILLED a man– ” directly into the face of a surprised, and hopefully non-English-speaking old Lao man. Hoping to reset the karmic balance, we followed it with “All You Need Is Love”.

—————-

“Mai ow, nong-ka,” my reflexes tell the young girl approaching me.

“You speak Thai?” she says, seating herself in a chair at my table and launching into her sales pitch. Bracelets, made of simple wooden beads, and small plastic dolls fill the cardboard box that she carries like a tray. She held up a necklace and, as I demurred, demanded to know why.

“No need, no want,” I explained. She tilted her head to consider this.

“So cheap,” she pressed. “How no want when so cheap?”

“Mai ow, korp jai.”

She changes tactics: “You souy. Souy mak. Very beautiful.”

“So are you.”

“One. Just one?

“No.”

“Buy me pepsi.”

I considered it and shrugged. I nodded. As I began to get up she stopped me.

“Buy me noodle soup.”

I’d obviously agreed to the pepsi far too quickly. I’m not very good at bargaining.

“Noodle soup. Only 40 baht. Down there. Very close.”

I was comfortable here, with my iced coffee and I was selfish. We went back and forth a few more times before she agreed to accept the pepsi - and only the pepsi. I went inside to get her soda and heard one of the waitresses chiding the girl. I’d been enjoying my solitude but was, by now, resigned to my companion. There was no reason, I figured, I couldn’t buy her a drink and chat to her - I felt only slightly abused.

I returned with the can and handed it to the girl, asking her name.

“Nok. I am Nok,” she said quickly, already standing up. She scampered off without any thanks.

I shrugged.

—————

“Did I…. did I go bowling… last night?”

I looked at Martin. He looked back at me, obviously confused.

“Yes,” I told him, trying not to laugh.

“Oh,” I think he said.

Laos shuts down early and while Luang Prabang probably stays up later than anywhere else in the country, when the bars close at eleven - close seriously and intently at twelve - and you’ve got only one option: bowling.

There is a bowling alley. It’s on the outskirts of town - I doubt anyone but the tuk tuk drivers are terribly sure as to it’s location (you get hounded by them while leaving the bars: “Bowling? You bowling?” and I’m sure a farang or two has ended up there unintentionally) - in a large flat building that looks neither French nor Lao. It looks, actually, remarkably, like something misplaced from somewhere in America. Popcorn and beer. Ninepins. Bowling balls. Computer screens keeping score. Fluorescent track lighting. (No shoes, though - you have to bowl in your sandals.)

I don’t bowl - I have before, a time or two, but I’m neither particularly talented at it nor interested - so I simply sat on the sidelines, talked, and begged whomever’s score was lowest to let me have a go ruining it for them.

It wasn’t terribly interesting - all the same conversations we’d all had and would have again (travel plans, country of origin, etc) - but it was incredibly surreal. I could understand how Martin might mistake it for a dream.

“You almost won, too. You came in second, I think.”

“… I went… bowling?”

——————-

“You’re still here!”

“Yup.”

I was getting sick of those exchanges.

I’d meant to leave. I’d been meaning to leave. I just… didn’t know where to go - and having a destination in mind seemed a bit of a prerequisite for hitting the road - at least to me.

The British girls had caught a flight back to Bangkok to meet some friends, Benny had left for Borneo to go diving, most of the Slow Boat had headed for Vang Vieng, and Martin and I were spending our days sitting around. L’Etranger bookshop and cafe, which had a cushioned reading room upstairs where they showed films in the evenings - conveniently next door to the Hive Bar, hopelessly modern and borderline yuppie, it wouldn’t have looked too terribly out of place in Santa Monica. There was a decent internet cafe. There were several coffee shops I patronized.

Martin was headed south to Vientiane the next day and I was headed - well, I needed to be headed somewhere. South. Or East. Or back North. South made sense, though, since I needed to get to the capital and get some more pages for my passport.

We were walking back from L’Etranger. I’d made an attempt, one day, to get out of the tourist district - I succeeded at that, at least, though the heat kept me from walking too far. Martin had gone swimming in the river with a bunch of kids and some monks - one of whom saved him from the rapids. (I was somewhat jealous - saved by a monk - why couldn’t a monk have shown up to rescue me at some dramatic point when things were going badly?).

“Would you mind… be honest… what would you think if… I headed south with you to Vientiane - I might even go as far as Savannakhet and the Four Thousand Islands. but I’m not really sure yet….”

I was talking about catching the same bus - at least at that point - but I was hoping he’d interpret the question the way he did.

“Sure! Let’s travel together! It’ll be great!”

“You don’t mind, really? I’ve just been wandering about on my own for a while in Thailand and I was sort of hoping to join forces with some other people once I got to Laos and I’ve been loving the company recently and… Are you sure you don’t mind me inviting myself?”

“Not at all - you’re great fun and we’re both quite relaxed so I don’t really see any problems…”

Women drive motorbikes one handed, pink and yellow umbrellas held aloft with the other.

Café tables are continuously filled, clusters of people leaning forward to trilingual conversations while assembling bottles of Beer Lao, cigarettes inevitably accentuating all hand gestures. Hands wave along the street as well as at the tables - crushing off tuk tuk drivers, greeting friends, and shooing away the children selling trinkets.

Middle aged Frenchwomen waltz between boutique shops. Silk blouses and dresses - no doubt fortunes less than they would cost in the West but still far, far out of my budget - paintings (elegant, ornate, traditional - sometimes all three), curious silver and bronze antiques, hand-worked jewelry - all beckoning.

i overhear an aged Brit demanding an explanation from his waiter as to the difference (in both flavor and texture) between buffalo and beef steak. The man is dining with his family - wife, similarly silver-haired and elegant, daughter and son-in-law - and the daughter is attempting to convince her parents to visit Khao San Rd in Bangkok: “True, it’s a bit of a backpacker neighborhood,” (the word she is looking for, I want to point out, is ’slum’) “but I think you’ll find it nonetheless quite interesting”. I know the waiter and while the man’s perseverance is admirable his cause is ludicrous; he’ll be lucky if he ends up with the correct dish by the time the meal comes.

Antique cars, only sightly rusted, are parked beneath iron street-lamps. Balconies, overgrown with ivy, hold people watching the street below. Oversized wooden doors, often painted in intricate patterns, serve to lure passerbys. Shutters hang open.

Young monks - they’re all young with attitudes; I didn’t see a single monk in Luang Prabang over the age of twenty-five and it seemed as if they’d traded in the normal quiet Buddhist glance for a challenging stare - prowl the streets, their robes of softer and more artful material in this town than elsewhere, thin enough to wave in the frustratingly mediocre breeze. They dodge into internet cafes which they use freely and indiscriminately (I watched one play a bloody video-game, another asked for my email to practice his English). They sit on the steps leading into the temple grounds on a street near my guest house, ubiquitous white earphones glaring from their orange robes.

The French Riviera lasts only a few blocks - Luang Prabang is itself a small rectangle between the Mekong and Nam Khan rivers; the main strip of cafes, art galleries, boutiques are backed up against an overgrown hill while a trails of bistros and guest houses lead to the Mekong River on the other side. The architecture tapers off more slowly than the tourist infrastructure, colonial buildings on the fringes (housing Lao families, it seems, rather than cafes) muggy with ash, and peeling-painted shutters hopelessly quaint despite themselves.

The area may be small, and the facade shallow - but the illusion is intense, and it goes past vision to the other senses.

I’ve had Tartine au Saumon for breakfast. Yesterday it was Quiche d’oignon. If I didn’t already have plans for dinner - at the nicest restaurant in town, a French-Laos fusion whose menu boasts dishes traditionall reserved for royalty, the chalk sign at the cafe next door offering Magret du Canard (au sauce d’orange or sauce au vin) might tempt. There’s a bar with a large selection of Belgium beer. Another with Spanish tapas, French cheese, and international wines. The coffee - oh, the coffee, the coffee - is somewhere between a Turkish roast and dark unsweetened cocoa. The croissants - there are not words for the croissants.

Although I have shamelessly given in, gastronomically, to my conquerer’s heritage - the menu is beautiful - there is a piece of me that is terribly disturbed. I have never felt more keenly Caucasian - not while dancing in a Burmese disco, not while peeing (and being watched doing so) in a field in Africa, not as a gringa in Mexico as a child, not in the streets of Kawe with a crowd of children following me and screaming. It is here, seated under an umbrella in a lounge chair covered with linen, watching unperturbed farang tourist after farang tourist wander the streets and patronize the cafes, the only Lao faces to be spied those passing on moving bikes, that I feel the most foreign. It is in Luang Prabang that I am mzungu, farang, gringa, memsahib. It is here, when the land has been taken from the people twice - once by the imperialists and now by the tourists, where the Lao people can no doubt not afford to live and “traditional culture” is simply a catch-phrase from a travel agents’ pamphlet - where the scenery and architecture are both gorgeous, the ambiance is relaxing and inviting, the entirety quite legitimately charming - that the paradox is presented. Is this colonialism as we wish it could have been? There is something undeniably dreamlike about it all. Is this Laos as we would like it to be - creature comforts and all - and is it this way simply for us? (More importantly - is Laos at least making a profit off of it?) Or, perhaps, is this Laos as it should be - replace the tourists with locals, make the cuisine more to their taste - is it wrong for me to expect poverty and filth, to consider anything less artificial?

I’m watching the school across the street. It seems to be an elementary (primary) school; the children, in well-pressed and well-bleached white shirts and navy trousers and skirts are running out. Parents are arriving on motorbike or bicycle to take them home for lunch. I take picture or two, but it’s all moving too quickly; it’s passed; I’ve missed the shots. I could have gotten up, I thought - forget the pictures, I could have crossed the street and talked to the children. I could have - and I realize that, I haven’t, in Luang Prabang, made even the slightest attempt to interact with anyone not tourist. I’m not convinced that I have it in me, not here. In the afternoon, I tell myself, I’ll make an excursion farther afield. Try some of the smaller side streets and wander further down the road by the river. But. But perhaps. Perhaps I’ll have another pot of coffee - with a croissant - first…

It was the second day down the Mekong and the God of Thunder was asleep on the back of the boat. The Three Graces were getting sunburnt on the bow before returning inside to play cards. Apollo flicked his cigarette ash into the river in synch with his twitching foot. Huckleberry Finn, who’d been sent home from the war in a body bag of opiates, looked as if he might jump. Assorted prodigaals wandered the deck, passing wooden bench to wooden bench, comparing travel routes and swapping near-death experiences while cheerfully swigging Beer Lao. I was perched on the railing - one foot outside, one inside, left arm crooked behind me to grab the pillar for balance, right hand clutching someone else” ipod - watching the river pass us by.

The slow boat from Huay Xai to Luang Prabang is more of an experience than transport. From the ice coolers of soda and Beer Lao to the endless conversational opportunities to the scenery, it’s easy to forget that the point is to get somewhere - you don’t want the journey to end. Fishermen steered wooden boats on the river, standing upright in their underwear and returning our stares. Smiling children waved was we passed - Sabaidee! Sabaidee! - and poker-faced ones boarded the boat with plastic bins, hung from their necks by thick straps, full of Pringles and packaged cookies, cans of beer and bottles of water. (Serious salesmen, these, they turned a quick profit before swiftly returning to the shore.) As we approached a large rock outcropping, girls came running, arms draped with silk - deep purple and brilliant red, gem tones and gold embroidery flying behind them as they scampered up the boulder and, toe-hold by toe-hold, worked their way as close as possible to the boat.

I didn’t get around to any of the things I’d planned to occupy my time - intense catch-up journaling, serious study of my Lonely Planet and some plan making, learning a handful of useful Lao phrases; I spent all my time either chatting away, playing cards, making friends, or contemplating the river. It was wonderful. I was the first passenger to board the boat by several hours, thanks to the unexpected six am wake-up call from my friendly Lao friend. I grabbed a seat at the back and pulled out a book - and quickly upgraded to a bench dead center as others arrived. It was low season, so crowding wasn’t a serious issue. No one stuck to their seats, anyway - some lay down in the back, most played music chairs. We sat on the railings and the bow, we wandered. Introductions were unecessary. Conversations were joined mid-sentence. Those intently reading - or sleeping - were left alone, of course, and a very minor few who made nuisances of themselves were easily ignored.

I met Apollo, in the form of a chain-smoking silver-ringed Belgium with an alluringly charismatic wink, first; he sat in the row ahead of me. I listened to his stories of India and shared stories of our Thai organic farms - my You Sabai/Pun Pun/Panya near Mae Teng and his outside of Pai and our bemusement at having found ourselves so attached - neither of us previously, or to be truthful, even afterwards - particularly passionate about farming. He and a curly-haired Brit with a small video camera (who was shooting a documentary on community-based entrepreneurs with social consciences in Thailand) spent hours talking; I wandered in and out of the conversation, without much to contribute but enjoying their stories.

A young American man, the intelligent-but-irreparably-damaged sort, was interesting - for a while. He was quite obviously lonely and a bit too friendly; he put people off and knew it. He was studying the effects of the drug trade on indigenous tribes - so he said. He managed, despite his unfocused eyes, to have an intense stare - his stare was only slightly less disconcerting than the sporadic dilation and contraction of his pupils (his drawl went in and out with his eyes). A Southerner by birth and heritage, he’d served in Iraq - volunteered, the dumb fool - until he’d been shot down.

I spent most of the day sizing up the other female passengers, trying to identify who was coupled up and who looked approachable - and battling my own embarrassment at the ridiculous predicament in which I found myself; I was out of money. (ATMs are far and few in Laos and travelers are recommended to bring in enough cash to cover their time in the country.) Having missed my bus out of Chiang Mai three mornings in a row and, falling asleep on the bus and nearly missing the Chiang Khong border stop, I was in a hurry and not to be distracted - I didn’t think to stop and count what was in my wallet; the wads of foreign currency are, after all, deceptively large. Plus, I met a Scottish-Canadian couple on a street corner and joined forces to (locate and) go through immigration together (without passing ‘Go’, so to speak). I’d had enough money for Huay Xai - barely - but not to go north like I was considering, which decided it for me: Luang Prabang, to an ATM, with all haste. My guest house room ended up being twice what I expected and I wasted considerable time and money in an internet café trying to Western Union myself cash, so when I bought my boat ticket it was with the absolute last of my cash.

Food wasn’t worrying me - I have spirulina tablets that were recommended for me by people at the farm when I thought I’d be spending some post-operative time unable to eat solids - but I’d been under the impression that we slept on the boat. I was quickly disabused of this - and needed to make friends. Preferably, another single female traveler who would let me share a room and pay her back in Luang Prabang. I finally pulled myself together about thirty minutes before the boat landed in Pak Beng, a town better described as a glorified dock, and dragged myself over to a trio of friendly-looking, bohemian-styled, book-reading young girls.

“Oh you poor thing of course!” they declared before I’d really finished speaking. “We totally understand - no worries at all!” They were grace incarnate; British accents - London, not that I’m capable of hearing the difference - and not only the first fellow travelers my own age that I’d met, but like me, traveling on gap year before university.

I nearly lost them as we got off the boat and searched for our bags. I found mine on the back of a young Lao man who refused to surrender it - and then demanded money for having carried it up the steep gravel-sand hill. I wouldn’t have minded tipping him had I asked him to carry it - and I might very well have asked him to carry it - had I any money. This, of course, didn’t translate and he refused to surrender my bag. One of the British girls pulled out a bag of rolling tobacco - and quickly found someone slipping something else into it and demanding money. She was awkwardly caught trying to give it back and refuse without making a scene. Guest house touts descended on the milling mass of confused passengers and while we had intended to simply wander on our own, when one came to our defense - yelling at the bag-napping sherpa and aggressive drug dealer alike (both of whom were, it should be noted, younger than me) - we gave in and agreed to go look at his guesthouse. The other two girls had attracted touts of their own, of course, one a pretty and friendly (more importantly, fluently English-speaking) Lao girl about our own age. Her guest house and our savior’s were in the same direction - the far end of town, up the big hill. Of course. All amenities, from the description, were the same, as was the price. We took the first one we came to (once you’ve climbed up the stairs to the room to inspect it, with your pack still on your back, it has to have a serious problem to make you turn around). Two rooms, basic but adequate - and cheap - and plenty of other friendly faces from our boat.

The British girls and I dropped off our belongings (literally letting our backpackers drop from our shoulders into the room, making the entire building bounce) gave the shower area a fleeting glance (one shower for the entire guest house; the odds were not in our favor), grabbed our cameras and hit the town. There wasn’t much to see. Pak Beng was perfectly sized - no doubt designed with such in mind - to accommodate the passengers of the boat. The main street was nothing but a series of guesthouses and restaurants; one could imagine the town swelling with each boat and shrinking again the next morning. It was rustic - wooden buildings on stilts, walls between rooms made of woven bamboo, mats on the floor - but entirely business. It was a stopover, full stop, and they did what they could to make as much money from us as possible in a short time. Simple restaurants with long tables and basic chairs served rather bland food, free shots of Lao Lao (a clear rice whiskey) both before and after the meal and, of course, Beer Lao.

(Let’s take a moment for Beer Lao. Beer Lao is, for all intents and purposes, the only drink in Lao. It’s owned by either Carlsberg or Heineken - depending on who you talk to - but it’s a symbol of national pride. Travelers rave about it for no apparent reason; it’s a tolerable, basic, average lager, nothing special when it comes to taste - but it becomes, inevitably, invariably emblematic of one’s time in Lao. It’s got a serious blanket marketing strategy - banners, flags, 10 ft tall stacked crates - and is often the only thing you can get cold. I have to admit that I’ve developed a taste.)

We had the luck to arrive in Pak Beng the night of some sort of music show/performance. I say some sort because, well… There was a man who gave speeches to which no one reacted. (Politician? Stand up comic? Who knows. Lao audiences neither laugh nor applaud.) Another man, his face grossly painted into a distorted mask, who ran around saying - something. And a group of chorus girls (the one on the far right the best dancer by far and most definitely a lady-boy) with uniformly bored expressions almost-dancing. And a couple of men who sang - poorly - but with at least moderate enthusiasm. A few magic tricks where performed - a girl climbed inside a box and it was sawn in half; she reappeared upstage in a change of costume.

The girl who’d sold us our guest house found us in the crowd; she was dressed up in a jean jacket - this is the height of cool in Laos at the moment - and had a boy, presumably a boyfriend, on her arm. They stood beside us and our group (the three British girls, Benny a New Zealand-Malaysian, two Irish girls, another couple of British girls, and Martin) were easily the most merry - perhaps I should say worst behaved - in the whole place. We didn’t stand still. We cheered as the songs ended. We had - oh, dear lord our audacity - facial expressions.

I ducked out of the music show early to find several others from the boat ride clustered in the street. We all chatted for a bit and, once the music show finished, were giddily joined by the others (apparently the finale had been quite something; they never did catch their breath enough to explain) and watched the street of Pak Beng drain itself for the evening. We found one group (also, of course, from our boat) still out - the two Belgians (Apollo and Thor), a pair of young Swedish boys and a Danish (?) woman - who were collecting empty bottles of beer Lao where we had left them after dinner. Olivia and I invited ourselves - were waved in - and others wandered in and out until Pak Beng’s curfew (10pm) when the electricity ended.

Thor held court long into the night. Seated at the center of the table he was a middle-aged man with shaggy hair and broad shoulders. I noticed him on the boat - noticed him watching, I think, and had simply assumed he didn’t speak English, since we hadn’t spoken. He’d been traveling an indeterminate but more than sufficiently lengthy period of time; he knew Thailand, particularly the southern islands, quite well. He was both intelligent and articulate but spent most of the time simply somberly and intently watching and listening to whomever was speaking - sometimes raising an eyebrow, often teasing; it was neither harsh nor gentle, but simply precise - the way in which he pointed out an exaggeration or hyperbole, commented on an unlikelihood or implausibility. It was often playfully sharp - particularly when pointed in my direction. I seemed to both amuse and frustrate him. “Stop being so god damn Woody Allen,” Thor told me. I wasn’t sure what he meant - he, no they - had decided that I was a “stereotypical Woody Allen female lead”. It was something to do with how I speak, I think, my glasses and, hair falling over my face in the candlelight, and cut of my shirt - I’d started out as “une belle de film noir” and, making my way to being “so New York!” transitioned into a Woody Allen character. I’m not sure that the stereotype holds but it was probably particularly adroit that evening - it was that sort of night. (Olivia was. according to the others, a French actress I hadn’t heard of. The God of Thunder named himself - we had officially decided that we were playing archetypes and when Olivia suggested Dionysius, I frowned and countered with a tentative “… Zeus?”. He looked up and smiled. “I am Thor.” Of course. Of course he was. He would prove it later, too, beyond a doubt - winning a bowling game at one in the morning and strolling, barefoot with a bottle of beer in one hand and a joint in the other, soberly herding others along in front of him, down the streets of Luang Prabang. The cinematographer/storyteller - the only other one to make it up so late - was never named, unfortunately. Orpheus? Perhaps.) We drifted between subjects - danced, more like, playing with words and ideas, skating and delving. At some point the conversation transitioned into French - I struggled to keep up, but the late hour (and the beer) seemed to make it easier. I remember few of the topics - only that, when we finally left the restaurant owner snoozing on the table and made our way back to our guesthouses, we all parted with the same realization would we would remember the evening. It was significant - I doubt any of us could tell you why, but, we all seemed to recognize it.

Olivia and I crept back along the road, our guest house at the far end of town up a hill, no light to guide us save my cell phone and a cigarette lit backwards and held like a torch. We found our guesthouse on the first try - but, neither of us trusting our sense of direction nor ability to recognize the house nor wanting to wake the keepers of the wrong guest house at half past two in the morning, spent another half hour wandering up and down the road, pausing at the fork and deliberating. We did make it in - we tried raising the grate ourselves and looked for something to climb over, to no avail - and up early the next morning, back on the boat.

The second day was much like the first - but even friendlier. I spent most of it with the British girls, Benny and Martin. I’d gotten to know Benny a bit the night before at dinner (he’d spotted me cash and we’d shared a variety of unfortunately disapointing Lao dishes - we did give it a good experimental shot, however, sharing the “point to what looks most interesting” strategy of ordering) and I spent a while talking to Martin on the boat - as well as clinging to his ipod (Tom Waits! He had Tom Waits!) - and communing with the river.