On
a mission of discovery to one of Asia's last and fast-disappearing
"unknowns", our correspondent knocks heads with the
strangest beasts of all, his fellow travelers.
***
I was having a wonderful
time and the whole world was opening up to mebecause I had no dreams.
Jack
Kerouac, "On the Road"
*There
seems to be a gap between what people expect when
they come to Laos and what they actually find there.
Laos has only started blooming as a tourist destination
since about 1998, so the travel guide I had (published
in the same year) was considerably out of date. Towns
that had then had electricity for only a few hours
a day now had late-night internet joints. Prices across
the board had of course gone up and the currency had
lost more than half its value. Many of the maps had
changed as villages grew and new roads were laid.
And there were many more tourists traveling what has
become a clearly defined track through the North.
The
track: Start in Vientiane and head north up Route
13. First stop is usually Vang Vieng (though some
stop at Ang Nam Ngum along the way). The main draw
there is caving and splashing around in the river.
And getting stoned. North to Luang Prabang, which
is a UNESCO World Heritage city-the whole city-and
as such, very prominent in the tourist literature.
West by river to Huay Xai and the Thai border, maybe
stopping for a day at Pakbeng along the way. Some
people do more or less the same trail but in reverse,
ending their journey in Vientiane.
If
you stay on the track, which has become pretty easy
to travel, you are guaranteed to see many other tourists
doing what you’re doing. Some people find this hard
to accept. Descriptions like “exotic”, “undiscovered”,
and “off the beaten track” often come up in travel
writing about Laos, so many are dismayed by the camera-toting
legions they find at these places; they are not any
different from the people you’d find on Khao San
Road (Bangkok) or just about anywhere else on “the
trail” in Southeast Asia.
“Legions”
is not the right word. There are not nearly as many
tourists in Laos as there are in Thailand, but the
number is growing. You can still find plenty of quiet
places if you like, yet you can still find nightclubs
full of farangs and the action that follows
their dollars around.
*
People
go to Laos to “discover” the country in one way
or another, but for some people there is joy in this
discovery only if they can convince themselves it
was “undiscovered” before. It’s hard to be a
discoverer when they are surrounded by other discoverers
who have arrived there from every point on the compass,
having blazed trails from every direction leading
to the point where they now find themselves. What
is left for them to discover?
This
is a hopelessly narrow definition of discovery. Discover
the country for yourself, and discover a thing
or two about yourself along the way. Discover
a new way to prepare rice, discover a gecko in your
bathroom, discover yourself lying on the floor of
a restaurant after a day-long moonshine bender...there
are all sorts of discoveries to be made, and the good
news is that they will all be Firsts. No one else
will have had that same experience before, simply
by virtue of no one else being you.
Why
is it not enough to simply discover something? Why
must we feel we have to be the first? We like to think
of ourselves as unique and original individuals (just
like everybody else). The truth is we are,
but the days of Columbus and Magellan, Lewis and Clark,
are gone forever. The world has shrunk, which seems
to me to be a good thing--people weren’t just “popping
on over” to Southeast Asia when that meant retching
for weeks on the pitching deck of a Chinese junk.
*
One
of the manifestations of this misguided notion of
discovery is the remarkable rudeness of many of the
foreign travelers I met in Laos. Those of us who live
here in Pusan don’t say hi to every person we meet
on the street because there are many of us, both foreigners
and Koreans. But in small villages the world over,
we tend to say hi to the people we see, especially
if they are among the handful of human beings we see
at all. People living out on the edges tend to look
after each other, and there often a sense of community
even among strangers passing through.
So
how is it that I can sit right in the middle of a
little village in Laos, and the only other foreigners
in town can pass a few feet in front of me on an empty
street, avoiding eye contact, pretending I didn’t
exist, saying nothing even after I greet them first?
They seem to be busy “discovering” Laos, and another
discoverer becomes a rival with no place in their
fantasy. Maybe they want to go home and tell their
friends, who are of course hanging breathlessly over
every word of their story, “I was all alone out
there.” Or maybe they are trying to believe that
themselves.
At
times I felt, ironically, that I was able to “understand”
the locals better than I did a lot of the foreigners
I met. The Lao people seemed always to lay themselves
open, and if they played mind bending games of doublespeak
and hidden motives, I confess I missed it entirely.
The
foreigners (read: Westerners) are another story. We
are more complex (complicated might be the
better word), which is to say, we often don’t know
whether we are coming or going, we plague ourselves
with questions and searches for meaning, and as a
result of all this second-guesswork, we confuse the
hell out of each other. It was after all in the East
that the maddening question was posed: What is
the meaning of a flower?, which only begins to
make sense when you throw meaning itself right the
hell out the window.
Any
time I greeted a local in Laos, I was greeted in return.
A Wave of the Hand--one of the simplest contacts between
two human beings. And what does it say? Something
like: I exist, you exist, and we are not completely
alone in the world. Ugly sociological concepts
like “anomie”, “alienation”, and “going
postal”, were patented in the West, and stand as
twisted monuments to what happens when you push individualism
a bit too far.
*
I
encountered a lot of travelers who believed that the
time to visit Laos is now (others would say
it was years ago), or in other words, before it is
“ruined” by tourism. As Pico Iyer once wrote (Video
Night In Kathmandu), there is a veiled conceit
in this attitude. They seem to be saying, “It’s
alright for Me to be here because I am somehow more
entitled to a unique experience than the Ugly Hordes
who will swarm in here if the door is not closed and
locked behind me." For them, going to a place like
Laos and finding other travelers there is a rude shock.
And
what, please, does it mean to "ruin" a country? To
some minds, all change is ruin, but they are not to
be taken seriously. Others regard ruin as the loss
of some essential characteristic--a dilution or perversion
of local culture to better suit foreign tastes. To
be sure, this process is well under way, and it is
a worldwide phenomenon. But again, this attitude often
reveals another strain of Western arrogance--it seems
to say that it is natural and right for the West to
deify and worship Progress, evolving itself beyond
recognition from one year to the next, while the rest
of the world should be hustled off to the taxidermist
and preserved as a museum piece for our enjoyment,
forever petrified in a state of quaint backwardness.
I
bought some hand-woven fabric from a Hmong woman in
Northern Laos. It's a lovely piece of work--vibrant
colors and rippling patterns on a field of cool lavender--and
after careful inspection, I found it to be entirely
devoid of Mickey Mouse images, Nike logos, or any
other kind of Western iconography. When I handed her
the money, she smiled and thanked me. If I had ruined
her, she tolerated it with stunning tact and grace.
*
Some
people think it noble to travel rough. They stay in
guesthouses with either a squat toilet or nothing,
sleep in sheets crawling with bloodsucking parasites,
bathe in cold rivers early in the morning, flirt with
malaria, cholera, and the host of foul demons that
plague our systems. One of the weirder expressions
of this impulse to go hard is the popularity in Southeast
Asia of overland truck trips in places where the roads
would be more accurately labeled "dry stream beds"
just about anywhere else in the world.
Or,
if the roads are good, they opt for ancient buses
which are known to have a better-than-average chance
of breaking down and stranding them somewhere long
enough to be inconvenient, but not long enough to
be truly dangerous. Here I remember the Canadian couple
I met who told me about their own harrowing breakdown
experience, and I was struck by the unabashed glee
with which they told the story, as if they couldn't
believe their (good) luck. It's a matter of time before
we start seeing "I Broke Down in Laos" t-shirts...a
point of pride...
...and
if there are pigs and chickens on the bus, so much
the better; these add a lot of color to any travel
story; "There I was, and the lady next to me has like
eight or nine live ducks, bound by the legs and dangling
from a stick she has lying across her shoulders. They
were shitting all over the place, and one of them
was nipping at the hair on my arms for hours..."
For
those who think it somehow noble to ride in the back
of an open pickup during a monsoon over a road which
is not a road, which rises to meet the truck, which
in turn rises to repeatedly batter your flesh and
bruise your bones for eight, ten, thirteen hours,
I have a question: What the hell is wrong with
comfort?!? One can interpret the whole of scientific
history as the expression of humankind's drive to
make life easier. Hot showers make me feel good. Air-conditioned
coach buses are nice. Ditto for cold beer.
Okay,
I'll admit that it's good to be able to do without
these things for a while--and sometimes you just don't
have any choice--but if I hear one more jackass tell
me "It builds character!" I'll plant some of these
goddamn scabies in his bed and then sit back
and enjoy watching the spectacle of him becoming a
better person.
Me and
some new friends in the dark heart of the tourist
track itself, Route 13, somewhere between Vang
Vieng and Luang Prabang. The beer we were drinking
was warm.
Even
though I have my doubts about this character-building
nonsense, it's still not without a twinge of pride
that I say I sometimes drink warm beer. But given
the choice, I'll take the cold one. Only lunatics
and Englishmen drink warm beer.
*
"I
didn't come all the way over to Laos to hang out with
a bunch of other foreigners..."
Of
course not....everyone should at least try to meet
the locals--that is a very right and proper impulse--but
what often gets lost is that a lot of the foreigners
you meet in Laos, or anywhere, came there with a similar
sense of adventure, curiosity, and fun. They're not
the same types who would be content to lollygag around
my local pub at home, getting stinko drunk every day
and mouthing the same thoughtless bullshit I've heard
a million times before. These people have stories,
information...they've been places I haven't and done
things I never thought possible. Often they make excellent
drinking buddies, and it's a big plus if we speak
the same language.
Ever
try to have a conversation with the little language
section at the back of Lonely Planet? After name,
age, nationality, and marital status, you're on your
own, unless you want to have a little fun and start
screaming "Please call an ambulance! I've vomited
several times!" Or you can go to a nightclub and see
if "I like it hot and spicy" (from the "Food" section)
gets you something a little more interesting than
the curry of the day. These "conversations" can be
fun, but I get paid to have conversations like
that just about every day in Korea; it's frustrating
sometimes, especially if that's the only communication
I have with someone who has such life-and-death power
over me as keys to the only beer cooler in town.
All
this is not to say that I didn't have a good time
with the Lao people. I wouldn't say that not having
a language in common is preferable, but it is fun
sometimes in a very raw and human kind of way. I find
myself compelled to focus on the common elements,
the smiles, the gestures, the weird faces we all make
when we drink alcohol that shucks the enamel off our
teeth; these are easy to miss when I let myself get
hung up on words.
And
once again I found communication to be greatly aided
by alcohol--that great and wobbly bridge over cultural
chasms. I did a fair amount of drinking with locals
I met along the way and had a good time by any standard.
We drank the local moonshine (Lao Lao) and I found
it to be a great leveler, in more ways than one. Conversation
stops mattering so much when the party goes beyond
the point of coherence in even their mother tongues.
After that, laughter rules.
*
True,
true. But I'll take Dorothy's word for it and skip
Kansas for now.
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