Young entrepeneurs in a communist nation

We were sitting under a parasol on the bank of the Mekong, sipping cold drinks and reading books. It was low tide, and a wide strip of mud split the river in two. This sector of Ventiane, Laos's capital city, was dominated by lounging Europeans and their exceedingly pleasant Lao service people.

I noticed walking our way a family of two women and two children. The first woman carried a baby in a sling, and the second child, a little girl, tottered along without any pants on. They were all barefoot, and they walked in a sort of daze. I nodded to Mike that these must be villagers come into town to gather supplies. Then I yawned like a lion. They walked past a Lao family and the second woman, beautiful if filthy, approached our table. She started doing something like praying, moving one prayer hand up and down her body, then back and forth. She obviously wanted money. We gave her 3,000 kip, about 30 cents American but a pocketful for her. It wasn't the first time, but I feel like any such encounter is really just a rare and unseemly revelation of the western presence here in Laos.

Someone from a food stand chased the women away so they wouldn't disturb any more of the foreign customers. I watched my empty glass; the flies were hurrying to absorb the bits of smoothie that i'd ignored in my voraciousness. Then I hated myself for that analogy. Curiosity, then pity, condescending by accident, then hating ourselves for it, then protesting is it our fault anyway. That was our psychology when it came to these things.

And then afterward I sat there writing about it in the breeze while someone did my laundry, putting a pen to my teeth, all ponderously, because I don't actually have to work. There's no escaping the guilt. Or there is, you can ignore it, but I mean there's no thinking it through.

History lesson

It was several days since we arrived in Ventiane, and we were beginning to feel like those Europeans who sat outside our guesthouse all day smoking cigarettes, unaware of how long they'd been there or what their plans ever were if they'd had any. We arrived from Nong Khai via the Thai-Lao friendship bridge across the Mekong River, and we found a higher concentration of travelers and expats than we had anywhere else so far. Restaurants included Swedish Bakery and Pizzeria, Nazim's Indian Dining, Kitchen Tokyo, and other international varieties. The city itself was partly French in design since Laos used to be a French colony. There were French architecture, sandwiches, and cafes -- we stayed on Rue Francois Ngin.

Laos has always been a slow, rural region as far as I know, but for the last few hundred years it has been pummeled by countries from all over the world. Its history is really worth reading about on Wikipedia or something. It includes the Secret War, conducted by the U.S. military in the 1970s, in which the U.S. was not constricted by Geneva conventions. Laos is supposedly the most bombed country, ever. Now the country is communist, and some say that for the last thirty years it has been trying to build a nation for really the first time.

We visited the National Museum in Ventiane, where the photo displays included captions like, "Example of the grueling labor that Lao people were forced to undertake under French imperialist rule" and "A U.S. imperialist smiles over the bodies of Lao villagers." The modern-day portion of the museum seems meant to show that Laos has the basic infrastructure of a real country. There are photos of the women's club, a doctor's office, mining operations. Beneath a picture of a mentally handicapped girl singing karaoke, the caption reads, "Disabled children are well take care of." A case on the floor holds over-the-counter drugs and a basic prosthetic foot. The foot didn't belong to anyone important, it was just there to show that Lao health care can indeed provide prosthetic feet.

Go shopping lady

At our guesthouse in Ventiane, I befriended the guy who worked at the desk. His name was Chid, which means "forethought." He was 26, wore trendy clothes, and spoke softly. I told him that before I came to Asia, I knew nothing about the U.S. Army's "Secret War" in Laos. He was surprised about this, and also that most Americans didn't know about our support for the French war there. I did explain to him, though, what a protest was, and that protests were part of the reason the Indochina War ended when it did.

Going bowling was our only definite plan for Ventiane. Later that week, we invited Chid to join us for a few games, which also meant that he gave us a ride to the bowling alley, showed us where it was, and told us how to pay. The bowling alley was located inside a vast athletic/shopping complex. Lanes were modeled after the rugged terrain of northern Laos, and the balls were shaped like coconut shells. Chid's friend Nit (small), an expert bowler, scored a 111 in his best game.

After bowling, we told Chid that the night was up to him.

"I think maybe we go small shop," he said, "drink small beer, go shopping lady."

"Go shopping lady?" Mike said.

"Yes, for a long time I don't do this."

"Okay, but I don't want to go away in the night. Don't want to pay for lady," he said.

"No, don't have to pay. Don't have to go away. Can sit with us. Maybe you can kiss."

"Pay for drinks only?"

"Yes, pay drinks."

"Okay, same America," Mike said.

"Yes, same. I think maybe we find some lady fourteen, sixteen years."

"I don't know, maybe sixteen okay."

"Okay, sixteen okay."

We arrived at small shop, a cozy wooden two-story restaurant near central Ventiane. Upstairs, we ordered our drinks and food, and Nit invited four of the waitresses to partake with us since we were the only customers.

The one they seated next to me was by far the best-looking. I forget her name, but lets call her Ting, which means "girl who would be so much more aloof in America." She had a beauty mark just above her tender jawline and just below the corner of her full and mocking mouth. From there her cheekbone rose softly to her eye, forming the squint in her sly, squinting smile. None of the girls spoke English, and Thai wasn't working very well with them though the language is similar to Lao. Ting and I exchanged some basics --hometowns, etc.-- but communication was pretty garbled. Sometimes we laughed together, but it was probably at different things. After a couple of beers I assumed a position of chin in palm, eyes studying Ting.

We drank Lao style, which means that we each had a glass of beer and a few more were passed around to be drunk in turn. Laos can drink much more than Thais.

"Jissting," Chid said to me solemnly, "I not happy same this for long time. Not drink beer have funny time like this."

"That's because you had that girlfriend for a year."

"Yes. Not fuck-boom for one year already."

Chid's girlfriend never had sex with him. This is part of a weird dichotomy we've noticed so far in Southeast Asia, which should become obvious in this blog post.

Chid was fine waiting for marriage, he loved her very much, but he had reason to think she didn't like him. So he told her parents he was breaking up with her and then he took a hike, without a word to the girl. I told him that in America things are much different; there must be a great war for independence. At this he nodded.

Meanwhile on Mike's side of the table, he was joined by a girl who said she was 16 but looked about 13. [CENSORED] His face looked like a Basset hound's.

"Seriously," he said, "every time I set my drink down, somebody fills it with beer when I'm not looking." (See last entry's "Notes on Disco.")

The girl beside him was named Nawy, which means "little." She looked like she might cry.

"What's wrong with her?" I asked Chid.

"I tell her 'fuck-boom,'" he said.

Mike wasn't interested in Nawy, who would only laugh at him anyway. Eventually Chid got her to sit next to him, but she squirmed at his advances.

"Jissting," he said, apparently deep in forethought, "this one I don't think she like me. I only take girl who like me. When we go back and I pay, then maybe I can see if she really love me. In the middle of the sex, I can see if she love me, maybe. If it's good, I pay up to her. If it's not good, I pay up to me."

"That's a good plan," I said, or something. I turned to Ting and tried to talk to her again. "Do you like any American songs?" I asked in Thai. Lazily she unfurled her confusion.

"Seriously," said Mike, his face now dangling over his plate, "who just refilled my beer?"

"Jissting, what you think about?" Chid said. "You will take her home with you?"

"Gee, I don't know," I said. " She's real pretty, but I mean she's a big girl, she'll do what she wants."

I should insert here that I've in the past been unbelievably oblivious to something in a social setting. Soon, Mike shuffled back to the guesthouse so he wouldn't have to drink any more. I hung back because it was only ten-thirty.

"I think this one, she will go home with me," said Chid, who was now sitting with a slightly fatter girl who looked about 17, taken from Nit's side of the table. "Tonight I very happy."

It came time for everyone to get up, and Ting started talking with Chid in Lao. Chid's girl stood up smiling with her hands clasped at her waist, sort of murmuring to herself.

"Jissting," Chid said, "you don't take?"

"What do you mean?"

He and Ting spoke again. "How much you pay for her?"

"What?" I looked back at the girl. "That's what she's saying to you right now? I just thought..."

He nodded. They talked some more.

"Okay. You want only short time or all night?"

"No, it's, I mean [pleh--fleh--prostitute? Me no know? So pretty. T-shirt, no high heels. But then quiet. I see.]." I approached him. "Look," I said, "I don't do that, don't pay. Besides, I only have 30,000 kip ($3 U.S.) left after dinner." I looked back at her -- "She shouldn't be--" and almost said something that dumb.

"Okay," Chid said, and spoke with her again. "She say $25 American. Thirty thousand kip is --"

"No I know. Twenty-five dollars is a very fair price. It's such a fair price. Just will you tell her that I think she's a very sweet and pretty girl but I don't pay, and if I did I don't have the money anyway."

He spoke to her, and on hearing it, she looked disgusted at having wasted so much time. I approached her to say something, and she recoiled.

The next morning I talked to Chid, whom I found sleeping in the lobby of the guesthouse. Apparently he paid the girl $10.

"Boom boom," he said, "but not good."

"Why?"

"Her not good. Just sleep."

"So, pay up to you?"

"Pay up to me."

Massage brutality

On our second day in Ventiane, we got massages at a place called Holiday Massage, where in the ad photo all the massage girls wore Santa hats. We ordered a "traditional Lao massage," not knowing at all what that would entail.

Mine was going fine until the girl started jabbing her finger at my butthole. She would do it at various stages of the massage, giggling merrily. Mike told his girl that he had a bruised tailbone, so please be careful, and she started pounding on it with her fists. She told him she thought he was a homosexual and that he had the HIV virus. I saw her spank him when she thought he was sleeping.

Meanwhile, mine had cooled down with the anal business, and everything was going well, then she put a gob of menthaledum in my eye. I was half-weeping. That was it, I returned the favor. Without depth perception, I think I poked her pretty hard. I spent the rest of the hour in contrition: I'm so sorry. Do you want to take a break? Here, hit me in the face. She would pretend to cry, then burst out laughing when I tried to comfort her. Mike's massage girl had put menthaledum in his eye as well, and he bodyslammed her for it, but he couldn't bring himself to put the gunk in her eye.

After our time was up, we went downstairs and they served us tea. I'm enough of a sucker that I still tipped her for the massage.

There was a chihuaua playing by the receptionist's desk. "He look like you," Mike's massage girl said to me.

"Goodbye," we said, and walked back out into the street to begin our evening, bleary-eyed and sore.

One country's poverty, another continent's playground

I was writing the previous section on the bus ride from Ventiane to Vang Vieng, and I had to stop several times because it was making me sick. The mountain roads that took us there were just one switchback after another, so the back of the bus behaved like the tip of a puppy's tail.

Vang Vieng is essentially a few dozen bars, guesthousese, and massage shops, huddled together in the flats among jagged terrain. Thus the sky is rimmed with mountains, strange mountains that seem to have been hacked out in spasms by a lovesick god, he shutting his eyes and swinging his hammer-axe downward, diagonally, and sideways, then in and out of the formed shapes, long after he should have stopped. The result is a monster of a landform, a hundred hills in all, with steps and buttes and peaks jutting out at all angles.

The town itself is full of mostly Europeans and Australians taking advantage of the ready supply of drugs. Here in the middle of nowhere, they lie in little comfort pads at an outdoor restaurant and watch Friends on a single TV, each of them as high as the nearest mountain. Shrewd Laos take them on long "treks," where they can alternately tube under waterfalls and peer academically at village poverty. Oh yeah and there's this tubing thing we went on where you go to a bunch of Bob Marley bars and jump off high swings.

Many restaurants and bars in Vang Vieng have a special section of the menu labeled "Happy and Fun for you." At Smile Bar we ordered a couple of mushroom shakes which, upon consumption, were pretty obviously just weed shakes.

We played a few games of bocci ball--big there--then we swam out into the river to lay down on a shoal of stones in the middle of the water. Mike lit a joint and we sat there quietly for about twenty minutes, watching the swift motion of the water between our spot and the shadowy riverbank. That and the huts on the town side, the infinitely shrinking river ahead, the hushed cool shade behind us, the wet smooth stones, the sun glare in the clear sky, the swift water, the grass between stones. It was all perfect and everyone's heart was full blah blah blah.

We crossed the rest of the way and started to investigate the trails on the other side of the river. They turned out to be cow trails, but we found an area I really liked. We came to a circular clearing where the low western trees let in a great gout of late light. An aperture in those trees showed two overlapping mountains, near and towering. Best was over to the right on the northern side, two rows of arching bamboo stalks, a tunnel leading away into dark. I wanted that tunnel, and I knew I would go in later, but I preferred to stand a moment on the threshold, in the light, where I could see how dark it was.

We dove back into the turquoise river and let it pull us downstream to where a bridge crossed. There we swam cross-stream to the bridge's out-of-town end. Mike went back for his camera, and I went into the cowtrails, which were really much too overgrown. Fifteen minutes later I emerged, dirty, bloody, half-naked and stoned, into the company of a young German couple who had just crossed the bridge. I was first drawn to a stream, home to many small creatures. I cupped my hands in the water and lifted some of them out. "There's so many tadpoles," I called to the Germans. "Ah, yes," one said. There really were a lot, some with little legs growing already. Isn't it strange how tadpoles are one of the very first things you learn about in school?

Gone fishin'

We rented a motorbike from our guesthouse and headed north, Mike sitting behind me and swigging from a large bottle of Beerlao, the official brew of the People's Republic. We were a couple of kilometers outside Vang Vieng when we pulled onto a sandy turnoff to investigate.

Recall this classic film scene: Our heroes are fleeing their enemy when they come to a long, swaying rope bridge with broken and missing planks. They attempt it only because they have to; it's a choice between certain doom and likely doom.

When we got off our bikes at this turnoff, we came across this very bridge. Now, I've done some exaggerating on this blog, but believe me when I say that this bridge was fucked. It was skinnier than you might be picturing it -- the width of four bamboo poles -- and more irregular. The ropes were instead metal wires, and the planks were old, old strips of bamboo laid vertically across very scant lateral boards. It must have been a long-defunct bridge, or some kind of joke bridge. It lay high in the air, across a river and its rocky banks. Why we tried to cross it I don't know.

As per usual, Mike sent me on ahead of him. The beginning was the worst.

"In the movies, it always breaks," I said to Mike as I started going. "Every single time."

Except that in the movies, they're able to swing on the broken bridge, eventually to safety. Here, the bridge was longer than the fall, so when it broke we were rock food.

"There's no way I'm doing this. Why am I doing this?" I said.

Mike watched curiously. Squatting, I held the cables and tried to shuffle lightly along the flimsy shards of bamboo. I pushed down on the cables to take some weight off my feet. "Why do I let you talk me into these things?" I said to no one in particular.

Mike started when I was about a third of the way across. Presently, we turned around to see a small crowd of Lao villagers perched at the start of the bridge, laughing at us.

"This is no working bridge," I said to Mike. "It's out of order or something. They're watching to see us fall."

One of them waved his hand and shouted the words for "go on." So they weren't gawking. This was their morning commute!

On wobbling legs, I at last reached the savior tree at the end of the bridge. Then, behind me, I heard a terrible crunch. Mike had put his foot through some bamboo planks. Shaking, he lifted himself back up with the cables and hobbled on.

On the other side, we found a single-file line of children carrying diving masks and some sort of spears -- bayonetted toy rifles, they looked like. We followed them through a maze of trails in the rice fields to another bank of the river. There they would dive underwater near the shore and occasionally come up with small fish stuck to their spears. These they put in baskets. Then they made a fire, singing and shouting, and cooked their fish.

Having finished our requisite ogling of the villagers, we collected our badges and rode on down the road.

We got about forty kilometers out of town before we turned around. In the remote villages, people who saw us stopped what they were doing and stared. Children would all shout "Sabai dee!" their greeting, with big smiles. Between villages we would stop on the shoulder and stare in turn at their mountains, admiring the serpentine way the road descended away from us until we could see it was the crux of a pattern that was too big to view when we were among it -- a deeply-layered "V" of gnarly slopes, paling and paling as the layers receded.

The landscape really was something to behold, and I could fill the whole Internet writing about it if I could describe it, so I'll turn it over to Mike with the photographs.