Sunday 24 June 2012

Escape to the Four Thousand Islands

We were squeezed in between the tanned and tattooed shoulders of Lynx-scented Europeans. One of them had a half-drunk bottle of Johnnie Walker in his lap and was slurring his words. 'Nice breakfast' sniggered his mate who was sporting a particularly offensive pair of luminous pink shorts. It was 8am and we had made the foolish and lazy mistake of taking the tourist minibus instead of the usual local bus. As we pulled away, Nic looked like she was chewing on something rotten 'there was a girl outside our hostel' she said, mouth twisted in disgust 'smoking with one hand and shaving her legs with the other.''
As the minibus continued its southern trajectory, the drunk lad was muttering something about dolphins in one ear while Nic was busy recounting her shock in the other.

When we finally came to a stop, Nic and I leapt out and practically ran to escape the others, scampering through a small market thick with the smell of fermenting fish and down to the swirling waters of the Mekong. Turning to check the progress of our drunken pursuers, we fled toward a small wooden jetty. From here, boats left for the islands that lay a kilometre from the shore. We bought our tickets but the others were fast approaching, the drunk one was burping notes into a didgeridoo, the one with the offensive shorts had doffed an equally offensive headband. Run. They were nearly on us when a man waved us onto a boat and we were slipping away, the mud brown waters sealing us off from the shore. I looked back to see the jetty receding into a landscape of greens and browns, the only other colour was provided by a shrinking pair of luminous pink shorts.

We were approaching Four Thousand Islands, a place where the Mekong spreads its limbs wide, encircling a cluster of palm-fringed islands. Wooden canoes drifted past on the current and a thousand butterflies flickered in the undergrowth that seemed to sprout from the river's surface. The boat hit the muddy bank near a monsoon-faded old bridge. We disembarked and walked past stilted wooden huts and a rotting French school, the last evidence of a colonial past that was being slowly digested by the jungle. We found a cabin by the river and swung in our hammocks, watching scooters putter over the bridge and boats putter beneath it. Amongst these various putterings and flutterings we were lulled into a pleasant stupor and the days, like the great river itself, rolled languidly by.

We had enjoyed Laos but were pleased to be leaving for Cambodia. We crossed the border and followed the Mekong on its journey south. We stopped at the town of Kratie where we took a boat out to see the endangered Irrawaddy River dolphins. We sat watching the water, drifting between islets of half-submerged grass and were soon rewarded. Dolphins broke the surface all around. Even Nic, who has a deep resentment for dolphins because of their 'smug attitude', claimed it to a beautiful experience.

I'm actually way behind with this blog as we're now staring at lovely blue sea and swimming has become a more pressing matter than blogging. I shall endeavour to catch up in the next few days, selflessly sacrificing my beach time for your entertainment. It seems I have become the dolphin of Nic's hatred, a smug face grinning inanely from the waves.

Saturday 9 June 2012

Foreign Devils of the Mekong

Foreign Devils of the Mekong

It seems I have created great confusion with my last post. One road may have ended but we're not quite done yet. But gone is the dust! Gone are the barren plains! For, dear reader, we are now in a world of lush vegetation and unimaginable humidity, watching the monsoon skies explode above our heads.

This new chapter of our trip began on a train in China, a train that headed ever south into stifling valleys of palm and bamboo. This verdant corridor would break now and again to reveal glinting paddies full of coolie-hatted peasants planting rice. [If anyone has less colonial name for the 'coolie' hat, do let me know.] We found ourselves in the southern Chinese town of Jinghong where a diverse population includes Han, Thai and Burmese peoples. Dipping our feet in the Mekong, which was stained luminous colours by the neon of the karaoke bars, we watched the great river flow ever southwards. We took a bus to the border with Laos and crossed into this sleepy little republic. Laos is a place where the people seem to wilt like bamboo, one often has to wake them in order to buy a bus ticket or a bottle of water. Even the name, Laos, is pronounced with an almost feline listlessness.

After a few days, we were standing by the Mekong once more, hoping for a passenger boat to materialise on the lazy brown waters. A morning mist lay on the green hills of the Burmese shore, rain fell on the rattan cabin in which we'd slept. The cabin was a wonderfully authentic affair of rusting fans and mosquito netting. The wooden shutters
would open to a world of green and rain and a wall of sound, raindrops drumming on palm fronds, crickets and cicadas trilling like a thousand tiny machines. As we waited for a boat that would never come, we watched local tribal women hauling sacks of potatoes up the muddy banks from dugout canoes. They wore fantastic headdresses dripping with silver medallions and many were naked from the waist up.

When we finally understood that a boat wasn't going to come, we back-tracked through lanes of stilted rattan houses and wet-nosed water buffalo before catching a bus to Luang Prabang. Our guesthouse there displayed a list of rules from the local police office warning us of potential criminal activities. To my great disappointment, we were not allowed to 'bring drugs, crambling or bringing both women and men which is not your own husband or wife into the room for making love.' This I could just about handle, but the next rule dealt a serious blow to our entertainment plans. We were not allowed to 'bring prostate or others into your accomodation to make sex movies'. I wasn't entirely sure how to prevent my prostate from entering the room without a serious operation but we did put our porn movie plans on ice.

Somehow we managed to enjoy Luang Prabang without resorting to such deviance, relying instead on massages, ornate temples and Lao coffee to keep us entertained. The strange thing in Laos is that a thousand other backpackers have already walked the puddle-ridden streets we now look upon. Laos suffers from a spill-over of fun seeking backpackers from nearby Thailand. People that wear vests sporting the names of their last destination, people that flock to the infamous Vang Vieng to party all day and watch episodes of Friends while smoking opium (I'm not sure which is more mind-rotting). There was a Guardian article recently detailing the madness in Vang Vieng which explained how 26 travellers have died there in the past year after taking drunken dives into the river. The locals are now afraid of the waters, scared that they are cursed with evil spirits. Just idiotic foreign devils. We ended up in a bar in Luang Prabang that was filled with western revellers. Appalling commercial R'n'B pumped out as muscle-bound Aussies played volleyball and fluff-faced backpackers did shots. It felt like a party scene from an American teen movie. Perhaps, we thought, Laos is not the place for us.

Lao culture is already in great danger from its powerful neighbours. China is spreading south with neo-colonialist tendencies, stripping the hills of timber as they pass, Thailand and Vietnam are squeezing in from the flanks. And perhaps we are no better. Though I believe that independent travel (if done sensitively) can be a force for good, in Laos it is bringing the very worst parts of our culture to a little developed country. Sometimes we don't feel like we're even in Laos, just a playground for stoned and drunken westerners. Buddhist monks crossing paths with girls in bikini tops.

While travelling the Silk Road it felt like we had purpose (however illusionary that may have been) and were learning and, to a lesser extent, teaching as we went along. We were never really treated as tourists, simply foreign guests. We now feel like we've fallen into a world of meaningless travel, a world where the backpackers are simply on extended beach holidays. I am possibly being a little superior here (imagine!) and perhaps we cannot so easily separate ourselves from them. However, it doesn't really seem right here and so we're heading southward toward Cambodia. Apparently it's not been entirely colonised by f**kwits just yet. Unless, of course, you count the Khmer Rouge. On that rather tasteless note, I shall bid you farewell and hope that I won't resort to more whinging in the next exciting post...