Laos leftovers

I've still got a few trip stories in the can. Rather than starve you with a diet of strict contemplation, I thought I'd spool those out over a few posts instead. Except more - hell, demand more.

Laos 1

I was walking down a Vientiane street early one evening, and there was a Lao boy of about five perched up on the corner of a pickup truck bed, humming to himself, oblivious to the world. I was taken by the simple beauty of it: here's a child entertaining himself with song. Turns out there are still places on this earth where imagination is the first toy. This made me optimistic, happy to be there. Then I got closer, and saw that he was looking down into an iPhone and trying to phonetically pick up the lyrics to Gangnam Style.

Laos 2

Vientiane gave me my first real sense of physical danger. The Lao government, frightened (like all one-party political organs) of anything reminiscent of civic disorder, shuts the city down at night. As temperatures drop and midnight draws near, the capital transforms into another Vientiane, a ghost town, eerily silent and utterly actionless. No food, nothing open, nowhere to go, no one outside. The night is turned over to a few roving, face-swaddled tuktuk drivers and a handful of frightening ladyboys prowling for johns.

These aren't your Thai ladyboys, who now and then achieve the semblance of a pretty woman. These are all boy and no lady: grotesque, low-rent crossdressers fooling no one, with tight whore dresses, stiletto heels, a thick spackle of bad makeup, and crazed, hungry eyes. Poor southeast Asian men with a vicious, fucked up profession. With barely a soul out of doors except for a few drunk tourists, you know these hemales aren't getting much business, so when they proposition you as you pass - and they do so obsessively and invariably, no matter who you are - instinct tells you that if the streets were just a little emptier, they'd put a knife to your face and just take your money.

I first saw all this on a sleepless night. My bed was crawling with bugs of three different sizes (or were they three maturity stages of the same bug?) so sleep was not an option. I went out, hoping to find somehow to pass time till daybreak. I was hungry. A ladyboy propositioned me; a whitefaced abomination of a thing. Compassionate fool that I am, I said no without immediately ignoring his existence and walking coldly away. Experience should have taught me that only a full stop makes these monomaniacs leave. Instead, I mumbled something overly pleasant about looking for a place to eat.

From that moment, he refused to leave my side. He became my own private Gollum, his high heels tap-tapping beside and behind me, sometimes at a distance, sometimes right next to me, but always going where I went. He offered to show me a place where I could buy things. I refused. Whenever I hinted bluntly that I will be going elsewhere now, and thank you and goodbye, he said "I go with you." At first I thought he was harmless, so I made the further folly of asking a bit about his life. How old is he? How'd he get into this line of work?

Curiosity isn't always wise. In his rudimentary English, the young gargoyle said he'd chosen this path because he was unschooled and had no others. A pretty lie, of course, yet one delivered at dead night on a frightening empty street in a foreign country. To him my questions meant only one thing - that I was not completely uninterested. The hungry, hopeful question never left his eyes: will I eventually break down and hire his sexual services for money? He shivered from the cold in his trannie hooker outfit. He wore a twisted, desperate smile, and rarely blinked. Must be starving or on drugs or both, I figured. Most frightening in his smile, however, was the dumb, stoned hope, an insane hint of relief as if I'd somehow already conveyed to him that we were "together." I tried ignoring him, but it was too late.

I stopped outside one of the cheaper, trashier youth hostels, where a small group of young foreigners was chatting. An oasis of sanity, I thought - the only people like me to be found outside. Among them was a young American guy with dreadlocks who, days before, inside two minutes of meeting me, asked me to promote a "bar hop" he was going to put together. He had seemed shifty then, and I disliked him. I said hi now, and he managed to recollect me with some fake camaraderie. I mentioned to the group that I was hungry, and everywhere's closed. The rasta kid said he has some cup ramen in his room that he could get.

"Thanks, I really appreciate it," I said, cup noodles being better than nothing.

For a moment he looked at me unsurely, then blurted: "15K."

"What?" said I.

"I'll let you have the noodles for fifteen thousand Kip."

This was five times their price, but still less than two US dollars. For this amount, he was willing to take advantage of my situation.

"You're out of your mind," I said and walked off at once, disgusted.

The cheap little schemster called after me, "Sorry, Raz!... I'm sorry!"

I knew that he genuinely was. I could see his entire story in that single moment when he'd blurted out the price, almost against himself. He was a born liar who was bad at lying, a bottom-feeder who wished he could be a complete, decent human being but didn't know how. And a repugnant little creep I would have nothing to do with. I left, deciding to go home and go hungry until morning.

All the while the ladyboy had been hovering by at a short distance, waiting.

"Where you go?"

"Home. Good night."

"Where you stay?"

I didn't want to tell him. I tried leading him off down a false street, but he would not fall for it. He followed me right to my guesthouse, into which I ran, shutting the glass-paned door behind me without looking back, as if against a charging goblin. I had a feeling he was capable of anything. I rushed into the shadows of the stairwell inside the lobby, and only then allowed myself a glance back. He was still standing in the street, exactly where I'd left him, his white mask unchanged from its half-smile, staring maniacally into the guesthouse as though I was coming back out any second. I rushed upstairs and locked myself in my room without turning the lights on, so as not to give away my location. He could easily lie to the night watchboy and tell him I was his guest, and the night boy was simple enough to believe it. I made no noise. I stayed away from the windows. I did not sleep.

Laos 3

Some images.

This kid had no idea what I wanted from him.

Ten years after I last saw this sign, it still stands at the gate to Vientiane's number one landmark.
Apparently they cut and pasted from Lonely Planet without actually reading it.

Pass a grass and your ass is... you know.

Driver repairing tuktuk (see below).

Baguette and coffee place, belonging to ethnic Chinese Lao people.

Symbolism at its simplest.

Vietnamese Buddhist temple, the nicest temple I saw in Vientiane

Buddha chillaxing after a hard day at Nuremberg.

Tuktuk under repair.

Home is where

(Typed but not edited)  

As I lay sleepless in bed in a guest room in Vientiane Laos, shrouded tightly and hotly in a sheet against the local dive-bomber mosquitoes, tiny invisibles who sting painlessly but hurt like a bastard when they pull out, mustering the last ounce of my self-possession not to succumb to the maddening itch in the many red welts on my lower legs and upper arms – Had bedbugs done it? Chiggers? Or god help me, scabies? – as I stared into the ceiling fan and tried to find the right mixture of resolve and composure to suppress my anger and helplessness, a completely new thought shot into my head.

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Don’t feel fucking sorry for yourself. Ask yourself: how did you benefit by this—”

But I’m getting ahead of myself thematically. What I should do first is jump ahead chronologically – way more style to it that way. At this very moment I am in the airport in Moscow, and it is 5:17 AM. There are five hours left to my sixteen-hour, overnight wait for the connecting flight to Tel Aviv. I am going home. I had a 4-5 month trip sketched out, with the possibility of staying somewhere long-term, and instead I will be returning just shy of two months out. How did this happen?

Here’s the short version. Early in this blog, I wrote that you can’t step in the same river twice. Well, it turns out you really can’t step in the same river twice. Whatever attempt I made to revisit, relive, or even revise the adventures of yesteryear has crashed and burned. My trip began in Thailand with a stretch of boredom, disenchantment, and labored enjoyment, shifted up in Laos into misery and disgust, segued in Japan into understanding and a resolve not to take any more crap, and now ends with a newfound sense of home. Home is Israel. Israel is home.

You will notice that (with the exception of Israel) those are all descriptions of my own feelings, not of the places. From the start of this Asia trip, it was obvious that the things in which I once saw romance now seem to me largely devoid of it. I think this is due in equal measure to two reasons:

1. The trip objectively went wrong. Shitty flights, actual changes for the worse in the places I visited, higher prices everywhere, hotel bed parasites, etc., etc. I figure this is statistically inevitable: some trips will work out great, most will be okay, and some will just bomb.

2. My perspective has changed, so that even things that are still the same as ever now strike me as flat, empty, fake, meaningless, or plain not worth the trouble.

Now the long version.

I wrote throughout my stay in Thailand, so there’s not much need to elaborate. I’ll say only that, with a few cherished exceptions, I find the Thais to be a hostile, uppity idiots, with childishly fragile egos, high-school mental maturity, and an obnoxiously unmerited pride in themselves and their country. Political correctness and cultural relativism be damned. The people in Chiang Mai were far better mannered than anywhere else, and it was still obvious that you as a foreigner are constantly the butt of their collective private joke. To the best of my judgment, unless you’re in their country and need to court their favor (read: kiss their ass for every fucking little thing,) the joke is clearly on them. Here and there you meet a foreigner who states that Thailand is “freer” than his own country. That foreigner is willfully blind. You’re free in Thailand to do the one and only thing Thais want you to do: use money to purchase goods and services, including the vaginas of women (mysteriously) desperate to leave their country. Oh, the wonders of freedom.

From Chiang Mai I took an overnight bus to Khon Kaen, in northeast Thailand, where I spent one day and actually had fun and met nice Thai people. From there I continued to Vientiane, Laos, where I had the honor and privilege to meet an old friend, a Lao man I cherish and respect, and whom I hadn’t met for 10 years. This alone was worth the visit, which except for this was torture. I once saw Laos as a romantically rundown ex-colonial outpost (of France.) The colonial buildings and the Buddhist temples, the freshly-baked baguettes, the French street names, the lazy pace that lets you relax for days on end with a super-sweet cup of Lao coffee and watch the Mekong ooze by. In the decade or so since my last visit, Vientiane managed to become both more developed and more broken-down and backwards. The tourist infrastructure has improved – more shops, some better roads, some new amenities, a few old buildings razed for new hotels, and much higher prices everywhere. But for the rest, it was filthy, decrepit, and maddeningly difficult.

I encountered laziness and indifference on levels that would soon become painful. Indifferent cops sleeping midday in hammocks inside tuktuk drivers’ tuktuks and playing checkers with beer caps; hotel clerks that both don’t know shit, don’t give a shit, and aren’t allowed to do shit; and an almost universal lack of knowledge about directions, where to find necessities, etc. Those necessities became pressing when my body began to fill with red welts so itchy that they woke me up at night, covered new ground each day, and scared the shit out of me. The worst scenario was dengue fever, which I once had in Laos. A slightly less horrific scenario was that now my entire wardrobe and luggage was crawling with skin parasites. There is no hot laundry, which you need to kill the fuckers. There was barely a hot shower anywhere. But there was heat. The soupy, thick heat of that region, which makes any discomfort ten times worse, torture upon torture. Most of what I remember from this visit is physical misery, and constant fear that this misery will follow me for a while to come. The only saving grace, and it was a saving grace, was that I had local friends who essentially gave me shelter. Here is a good place to thank the two T’s. Thank you Tui, thank you Terry.

My next stop on the trip would have been China. That was the plan – overland from Laos to China, and in the end, if money permits, Japan and/or Taiwan. So I went to the Chinese embassy in Vientiane, Laos, and found out that their requirements there for a tourist visa, which in China’s case have always been strict, have gone ahead and become psychotic. They had stopped accepting cash payments: now you had to get a special bank slip from them, go to a bank and make a deposit to them, and return with the receipt. But you would only get that slip once you showed a return flight ticket. And a hotel reservation in China. Or if you were staying with friends, you had to get a copy of their ID, and a letter of invitation, in a specific format. Thus, to get a visa as a simple backpacker in China, I would have to make three expensive trips to the embassy, which is far outside town, to produce several documents and reservations, to bother friends, and to wait four business days. Struck with the gratuitous horror of it all (a sensation often elicited by Chinese bureaucracy,)  I rode the expensive tuktuk back to town, and on the moment had a moment of zen clarity: screw China. I’d been ambivalent about visiting anyway. I’d been many times, and had a long relationship with that country, but recently I’ve realized the obvious – that they’re bullies. People today say “China” the way they said “computers” twenty years ago, like it’s your only viable future, but China not the only country in the world, and the fact is that I simply don’t like it as much as I did. Not at all. And just like that, China was out.

When the insect bites got too much, I came to a decision: I would either cut straight to Japan or go home. I bought a non-refundable ticket to Japan, and changed my mind the next day. I almost gave up that ticket and cut to Bangkok to find a ticket home, but my friends from Japan (with whom I was to visit) called to yell at me for being an idiot. They convinced me that being in the region, this is probably my only chance to visit, and we’d have fun. Jumping through hoops to have an outbound flight reservation to show the notorious Japanese immigration officers when I came into Tokyo’s Narita airport – or otherwise they might not let me in – I went, every three hours slathering on my person what liniments I was able to find in Laos to allay my monstrous itching.

Japan was freezing cold, which was excellent for the itch. Like stepping into a freezer. It was fine by me. Japan was also prohibitively expensive, and beset at every turn with restrictions, rules, and impossibilities. This is the same as ten years ago – in fact, Tokyo seems not to have changed at all from what I remember. But here again the difference is me. I found that I could not put up with this shit. When, carefully calculating my money for one month’s rent on a tiny room, I was told I could not bring overnight guests there, something in me reared up in anger. Pay all this scratch and be bossed around like a child? Not this time. Tokyo is heaven, but it can also be the other place. Again, all money. But a LOT. To Japan, more than to any other place, you must come on your knees, humbly prostrating yourself and accepting all dictates. And boy, are there dictates. And boy, could I care less about those. Or there’s the option of cheating, sneaking around, slinking around the rules, lying. I didn’t want that either. Ten years ago, in my first visit, I took their shit and broke a few rules, all so I could have fun. Now, for some sick reason, my fun consists in being true to myself, and being true to myself, I decided I cannot stay in Japan for a month. I got the flight ticket I am now en route on, and spent the rest of my time meeting old friends from way-back-when, eating like a pig (mmm! éclairs! ), and shopping for souvenirs. Here too the best aspect was meeting my friends.

So, as I lay miserable on my last night in Laos, in a guest room given me by my friend and saving me from another night in a guesthouse bed potentially infested, I had this thought:

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Don’t feel fucking sorry for yourself. Ask yourself: how did you benefit by this trip? What did you learn?”

I learned that my nostalgia is now good and dead. RIP nostalgia, 2001-2012. I learned that I love my friends and family. That I am Israeli, and this is my identity. That not only is my own culture good, but it is better. That thrills do grow old. That, with age, I’ve grown unwilling to put up with the massive childish egos of East Asian cultures, or with any gratuitous bullshit for that matter. That next time I’ll choose a single destination and bring more money, especially if it’s Japan, so I could enjoy myself like a gentleman. That all the magnificent glories the big places I’ve seen feel less real to me than strolling on a boring Netanya street with my best friend, or laughing with my brother in our small town, or sitting on a secondhand couch on the outskirts of Tel Aviv looking at a smile that knows me, and whom I know, and who speaks my language. I learned that I love you. But of course, I knew that.

I’ll post a bunch of pictures later. Don’t worry.