The border at the end of the world

I remember, back in Kunming, when I had mentioned my next destination in Hilary and Charles' house, Charles had reminisced about Laos - "It was like the end of the world. Nothing from the outside came in, nothing came out". He then added, "But of course, that was forty five years ago".

Crossing the border from China, the change is indeed amazing. Once the border formalities are over and I have exchanged my 430 Yuan for 516,000 Lao Kips (and as none of my notes are worth more than 10,000 Kip, I have no idea where to put these piles of cash), there is a fantastic peace in the air. Gone is that nervous urgency that seemed to ebb and flow through China. No one in the tiny town of Boten seems in the slightest interested in selling me anything, and when they do it is clearly so that I will go away. They doze, watch television, play music, chat, compare babies. There are two dirt roads with large wooden houses (with corrugated iron roofs) surrounding them, and a large dirt area where a few buses and several empty lorries linger.

I sit for the first sunny hour in the town bus shelter, waiting with another man, who mostly sleeps, for the bus to Oudomxai. Eventually, he gets up and starts checking the tires - I realise he is the driver. "Are we leaving now?", I communicate - "No, tomorrow, 10 or 11am", the answer comes back. As I am the only interested passenger the bus will wait until the next day to leave.

In fitting contrast, my journey into Laos was a frenetic last experience of China. The bus took me away from Louise and Kunming, and its tv played a nice romantic film about a blind girl and her would be boyfriend, who suddenly becomes blind mysteriously when he starts dating her, then My Sassy Girl, a great Korean film I had already watched back in Macao. I felt confused - excited to be on the road again, missing deeply what I had left behind.
At six am we pulled into the city of Jinghong, and as it was still dark, I figured I'd keep going towards the border and hopped to the next bus. Brown-golden children rode bikes along the curving road, smaller boys stood in the back of a roaring van and yelled at everything passing them. By this point I felt extremely sleep deprived and kept dipping in and out of incredibly vivid dreams, each which seemed to continue where the last left off, mostly involving conversations with people I had known in Kunming. This pseudo-sleep was ruptured as the woman next to me screamed and the bus slammed to a halt. We had almost run over an old woman, who blithely continued her slow journey across the road.

I arrived in the pleasant, very hot little town of Mengla. Already this was feeling less like China, and more like some long imagined South East Asia. Amazingly for China, finding a restaurant was actually quite hard, and for the first time ever, there were lots of places just selling cold drinks and ice creams. A local teacher called Joseph approached me as I drank a sweet lemon mix. We talked, he tried to persuade me to stay and teach English, later he took me to a school to meet some of the students and I chatted with them for a while. They were lovely and keen to talk, but, to skip ahead to the ending of this story, Joseph and I parted that evening with me telling him he was a thief and I had no interest in talking to him anymore. I've told so many stories of cons and pseudo cons in China, sure you've little interest in hearing yet another one, but essentially, it occurred to me later that these weren't Joseph's own students, he was a freelancer, and he was probably showing me to them to make himself look good to future customers. He decided we should go to a rather expensive restaurant, saying it would be a treat for my last night in China, then expected me to pay for both of us. As he started explaining with a grin that this is all Chinese tradition, I smiled too, "You must think I'm a real child - goodbye, I don't ever want to speak to you again".

Here, in just inside Laos, night has now come, after several of the slowest, most peaceful hours of my life (or have they been years? I'm a little worried I will leave Laos after a month and, like a knight leaving a faery castle, find decades have passed for everyone else). I got talking to a Chinese man who, I'm guessing, runs this little diner with his Lao wife. They bring out an English textbook and I help the woman with some of the exercises - she gets every answer right, even though she seems able to speak only a few words (and he none). I'm a little bemused that he refers to me as "Laowai", given that we are both foreigners here, but I am already calming down about such things - he and I sit silently as on the next table as she and another local man chat in Laotian. That Lao man offers me some of his dinner - sticky rice that I dip into chili soy sauce to flavour; he indicates I should tear off a chunk of rice with my fingers and eat it. This probably wouldn't have bothered me had I just come from England, but, after spending the last few weeks with a girl who gave me a look of pained horror every time I touched any food with my fingers (most notably once crying out, "Are you an INDIAN"?), this shift in taboos feels quite disorientating. Into the night of shimmering crickets, the manager demonstrates that unerring Chinese talent for kitsch, and puts on a loud blaring CD of Chris Deburgh's "Lady in Red". By the time he switches on the tv and plays a DVD of blonde women doing striptease to equally loud techno music, I decide it's time to leave.

My guesthouse is fairly simple, in the darkness I almost mistake the toilet for the pig's sty, which would have been interesting. I sit on a tough red carpet with "Made in Thailand" emblazoned along the edge. Various family members/guests (I have no idea) sit watching a silly (occasionally singing) soap opera of beautiful people. Suddenly a guess rises in my mind - I point at the screen and ask one girl, "Thai"? She smiles and nods. I type some of the above and we all watch the tv for a while, then I retreat to my room and its four poster hanging mosquito net.

Daniel, 28 April 2004, Boten