Living Without Cheese

I never really managed to get to sleep properly, what with the dog and rain and the stupid English girl that persisted in brushing her hair all night and fear that I was going to be robbed, but I did manage to doze off for a while just before dawn.

I awoke to perfect stillness. The storm had left us. The dog was nowhere to be seen. A strange looking Frenchman with straggly white hair was sitting in the middle of us smoking, and staring into space.

One thing I’ll say about the barn – it gave a good view across the Mekong river (cos of having no walls like) to Laos. It was kind of exciting. My first sight of Laos. More specifically, dawn breaking over Houay Xai. It looked different. There was a shanty town feel to it, things just seemed to be stuck together in no particular method. It looked poor and disheveled.

I started to feel that maybe Laos was a totally different world.

And so we crossed by boat, after a brief fight with a gang of Vietnamese tourists (Learn how to use a fucking queue people! Look it up! It’s in the dictionary!), queued for this, queued for that, an hour later, visas stamped and paid for, we were officially in Laos. All the (fucking really annoying) Vietnamese tourists had managed to get there before us (hundreds of the fuckers) and taken all the buses. Because travel takes so long in Laos, there’s not much point in a bus leaving after 10am, cos it’s not going to get anywhere before dark.

And we were tired. Really really tired. And everything was so different. The people were so different. We didn’t have the energy to deal with it. So we decided to get a bus to the nearest town, just to get us away from the border and the crazy Vietnamese and the feeling that nobody wanted us there. We chose Luang Nam Tha.

I sat down on the bus. I was so tired. I hadn’t slept for so long. I dozed off.

I was woken on the bus by a strange Lao man yelling over me “Luang Nam Tha! LUANG NAM THAAAAA!”.

Um. Ok (you crazy bastard). Say it don’t spray it.

So I gathered my belongings, dragged myself up, and went to check out Luang Nam Thaaaaaaaaa.

And a few hours later, realized, too late, that I’d left my camera on the bus, which was well on it’s way back to the border. My initial reaction was, Aoife, you stupid bitch, followed by a general feeling of being gutted.

It’s weird how important your camera is to you when you‘re travelling. It’s like, if you don’t have a camera to document what you see, then it didn’t really happen. Or, you become sort of unwilling to go see beautiful things because you can’t take photos to remember them. And you’ll feel bad. It’s a crazy feeling, but it’s true.

So I moped and whined, smoked cigarette after cigarette, a topless lady tried to sell me some cotton, the guesthouse people tried to rip us off by adding a couple of phantom beers onto our bill (which turns out happens quite a lot in this country, in 4 days it happened 7 times. Weird), and I just thought to myself, this is so not what I was expecting or hoping things would be like.

The country had me confused. I got Thailand. Thailand is easy to get. The people are easy because most of the time, what you see is what you get. They’re so used to dealing with us falang that we’re almost part of their culture. And they know how to deal with us. Here, things run deeper. People live their lives around you, almost oblivious of your presence. And when they do notice you, sometimes I’m not sure if they like what they see. To be honest, during my first few days in Laos, every local I met was either grumpy, rude, or dismissive. Now, everybody’s got a right to feel like that every now and again, but at times I felt it was directed specifically at tourists. Especially when one shop lady yelled at Tracey about foreigners coming over spending their money. We weren’t quite sure exactly what she said or what she meant, but she was mad. And I was disappointed.

But onwards and upwards.

I never really managed to get to sleep properly, what with the dog and rain and the stupid English girl that persisted in brushing her hair all night and fear that I was going to be robbed, but I did manage to doze off for a while just before dawn.

I awoke to perfect stillness. The storm had left us. The dog was nowhere to be seen. A strange looking Frenchman with straggly white hair was sitting in the middle of us smoking, and staring into space.

One thing I’ll say about the barn – it gave a good view across the Mekong river (cos of having no walls like) to Laos. It was kind of exciting. My first sight of Laos. More specifically, dawn breaking over Houay Xai. It looked different. There was a shanty town feel to it, things just seemed to be stuck together in no particular method. It looked poor and disheveled.

I started to feel that maybe Laos was a totally different world.

And so we crossed by boat, after a brief fight with a gang of Vietnamese tourists (Learn how to use a fucking queue people! Look it up! It’s in the dictionary!), queued for this, queued for that, an hour later, visas stamped and paid for, we were officially in Laos. All the (fucking really annoying) Vietnamese tourists had managed to get there before us (hundreds of the fuckers) and taken all the buses. Because travel takes so long in Laos, there’s not much point in a bus leaving after 10am, cos it’s not going to get anywhere before dark.

And we were tired. Really really tired. And everything was so different. The people were so different. We didn’t have the energy to deal with it. So we decided to get a bus to the nearest town, just to get us away from the border and the crazy Vietnamese and the feeling that nobody wanted us there. We chose Luang Nam Tha.

I sat down on the bus. I was so tired. I hadn’t slept for so long. I dozed off.

I was woken on the bus by a strange Lao man yelling over me “Luang Nam Tha! LUANG NAM THAAAAA!”.

Um. Ok (you crazy bastard). Say it don’t spray it.

So I gathered my belongings, dragged myself up, and went to check out Luang Nam Thaaaaaaaaa.

And a few hours later, realized, too late, that I’d left my camera on the bus, which was well on it’s way back to the border. My initial reaction was, Aoife, you stupid bitch, followed by a general feeling of being gutted.

It’s weird how important your camera is to you when you‘re travelling. It’s like, if you don’t have a camera to document what you see, then it didn’t really happen. Or, you become sort of unwilling to go see beautiful things because you can’t take photos to remember them. And you’ll feel bad. It’s a crazy feeling, but it’s true.

So I moped and whined, smoked cigarette after cigarette, a topless lady tried to sell me some cotton, the guesthouse people tried to rip us off by adding a couple of phantom beers onto our bill (which turns out happens quite a lot in this country, in 4 days it happened 7 times. Weird), and I just thought to myself, this is so not what I was expecting or hoping things would be like.

The country had me confused. I got Thailand. Thailand is easy to get. The people are easy because most of the time, what you see is what you get. They’re so used to dealing with us falang that we’re almost part of their culture. And they know how to deal with us. Here, things run deeper. People live their lives around you, almost oblivious of your presence. And when they do notice you, sometimes I’m not sure if they like what they see. To be honest, during my first few days in Laos, every local I met was either grumpy, rude, or dismissive. Now, everybody’s got a right to feel like that every now and again, but at times I felt it was directed specifically at tourists. Especially when one shop lady yelled at Tracey about foreigners coming over spending their money. We weren’t quite sure exactly what she said or what she meant, but she was mad. And I was disappointed.

But onwards and upwards.

Tags: Laos, Travel

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 at 4:18 am and is filed under Laos, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.