| The wild west Posted Friday, 19 May 2006 | ||||||||||
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| You know that part in 'Acpocolypse Now' where Martin Sheen is sailing slowly down the river and from out of the darkness comes the surreal sound of music and piercing neon lights and there, in the middle of nowhere, is a stage set up to entertain sex-starved half crazed GI's? Well, Vang Vieng's a bit like a backpacker version of that but with less dancing girls and less fear of imminent death. You drive for six hours along the winding mountain roads in Laos' bandit country. All you pass is villages clinging to the sides of the mountains where houses are made of bamboo as a matter of course - not as part of a UNESCO protected heritage project. And suddenly you drive off the main road and down a red dirt road into small town where the only sound you can hear is not grasshoppers, or Lao people chewing the fat, or even radio broadcasts from the central government - but Monica, Joey and Chandler. Vang Vieng is seemingly a whole town designed around indulging pleasures traveller's have been denied for so long - namely cannabis, floating down the river in a tractor inner tube and watching American TV. Where we stood, on the dusty main street, three bars were churning out Friends. All you could hear was; "Joey! Monica! How you doin'? Ross! Phoebe! How you doin?" And yet somehow, inexplicably, we ended up at a bar showing only piss-poor Lao karoke and communist marching tunes Now, we've met some really nice people on our trip - Seb, Kris and Magda in Chiang Mai, Doug in Pai and Erin on the Mekong. But we've met some right old tossers as well - one of which we met in Vang Vieng. We went to a barbecue on the other side of the river that divides the town from the countryside. As we ate fresh fish and aubergine over burning bamboo a thunderstorm, complete with fork lightening, was raging some miles away in the mountains. I turned to one of the people eating, let's call him Gary, and said: "Isn't this weather amazing?'' Gary turned to me and replied: ''Have you ever experienced real weather?'' Real weather, I thought? Surely all weather is ''real'', but, no, obviously Gary thought he'd seen more than me. "I've not only walked 20 minutes in a hailstorm but also worked in a field in a monsoon." Gary informed me. "Well, I cycled home from work in a rainstorm once. That seemed pretty real." He chuckled in a way to suggest I was extremely naive about weather and had never really seen it. Then he went on: ''Working in an office is like being dead. Don't you think?" Now, I'm no great defender of office work, per se, but there's no need to go overboard, ''That's quite a harsh judgement of office work, isn't it?'' I said "Sorry,'' he said, "I mean I know you might be inactive in an office but, sure, your brain is working doing plans and things - but it's all make believe, isn't it?" Cocky little shit. "Well, given the choice,'' I said, ''I'd rather be in an office looking at ''real weather'' with a nice cup of tea than sitting in a field getting drenched - don't you think?" And with that he started going on about how there were ''tourists'' and ''traveller's'' and obviously he was the latter. I decided my tolerance levels had reached their limit. If he's a traveller than I'm a tourist and proud of it. What I saw a monk doing in Vang Vieng: There are mo monks in Vang Vieng, only travellers. Ben's squit-o-meter: A dodgy chicken soup in Luang Prabang leads to Wendy and I floored for days and rapidly going through our Immodium collection The sound on the streets of Vang Vieng: When it hasn't been your day, your week, your month or even you year. | ||||||||||
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