Laos: There

My idea of a good vacation involves lots of walking, lots of eating, sleep and a good book.

Exhausted from my overnight journey across the country, I checked into a hotel, took a shower and resolved to get out and explore the capital. My first stop had to be breakfast though, and as I stepped out from the hotel, the heavens opened and the rain began pouring down, indicating a perfect time to sit down and savor some food.

Laos is famous for spicy meat salads but I was after something a little more tame. I settled for a bowl of hot noodles, the perfect fare on a rainy morning. Negotiating food, I realized I had three languages to work with in Laos; Thai - which is very similar to Laotian, French – the colonial language of the country, and English – good for tourist spots.

I thought I had successfully communicated leaving peanuts out of the noodle dish and used all three languages just to be sure, and to be fair, there were no crushed peanuts floating on top of the dish. There was, however, a dark paste in the soup, which contains what else but ground peanuts. For some reason, in the hierarchy of deathly peanut allergy attacks, ground paste or sauce is the worst (boiled peanuts in curry seems to cause the least severe attacks). I dosed myself with powerful antihistamines I carry around for this very purpose.

The drugs do their job, which is to slow and stop my allergic reaction. They also have a tendency to make the world slow down and become wrapped in cotton wool. It is recommended that people who take these pills not drive or operate heavy machinery. Most days I just go to sleep, sometimes for up to 14 hours.

I didn’t have 14 hours to waste in Laos, so I spent the afternoon floating through the gray city feeling like a ghost. My only aim was to find a new book as I had finished mine, and a herbal sauna that I had heard about.

At the sauna, I booked a Chinese massage for an hour. For the first 30 minutes I got my muscles kneaded to a pulp, which, after untold hours on busses, was simply divine. Then came the suction cups.

The masseuse holds a flame under a glass cup. The flame consumes the oxygen in the cup, creating a small vacuum. If the cup is quickly placed on a surface, it acts as a suction cup. In this case the surface is my back and the cups are arranged over pressure points determined by Chinese medical practice. I have about 15 of these glass shot glasses stuck to me when I fall asleep and start drooling on the masseuse’s pillow.

The feeling is odd. I could feel the skin pulling in strange directions and the weight of the glasses in some places. I felt like a porcupine, a heavy, fat, stoned porcupine.

After some time, the glasses are taken off and changed. After my hour is up, I leave feeling refreshed and far more alert than before. My back certainly felt better.

As a former French colony, Laos has a few things that Thailand does not. It has fashion, for example, fashion inspired by the French tradition. Far more importantly to me, Laos also has strong coffee and delicious pastries.

There are few places in Vientiane where it is not possible to get a baguette for breakfast, and not just any baguette. Freshly toasted baguettes are served up with locally made meat paste (a version of pate) and laughing cow cheese. Most sandwiches are also stuffed with some kind of local salad, like cold slaw. I wouldn’t eat anything else for breakfast and after the peanut fest, I wouldn’t eat anything else in Laos period.

Most bakeries sell baguette sandwiches and a few also offer strong coffee and every now and again you find one that also sells fresh fruit shakes. There is nothing like a mango shake or a creamy coconut shake for a sore throat.

I head back to my hotel, intending to lie down for a short time after my baguette dinner. There is a market that sets up on the banks of the Mekong, not far from my hotel, every night and I have heard that Laotian beer is the best in the region. But the moment my body hits the bed, my first day in Laos is over. I fall into a deep sleep that takes me all the way until morning.

Something in the mirror catches my eye as I am taking a shower. I turn around to get a closer look. My back looks like a spotted leopard. I am covered in black spots from the shot glass massage. Back hickeys… lots and lots of back hickeys.

My wandering begins. I wander to the baguette store for my breakfast and coffee and to the morning market, Talat Sao. I wander through the market up and down stairs, past electronics and textiles and cell phones and jewelry. I wander to the city’s most famous temple, Wat Si Saket, and pass slowly in front of the rows and rows of Buddha statues under the tiled roof of the ancient temple.

I make a mistake and walk all the way across the city before I realize I’m going the wrong way and retrace my steps. I spend some time in the shade of the Laotian version of the Arc de Triomphe, Patuxay.

Patuxay is in the middle of a large round about and from there I intended to walk up one of the connecting streets to the Thai embassy. Unfortunately I took the wrong one and ended up walking a long way through a very un-scenic neighborhood before I realized my mistake.

This time as I retraced my steps I spent more time thinking just what was going wrong with my head. The answer: water. So I sat in the shade of Patuxay for a while and kicked back a liter of water, sweat cooling on my body and the sun radiating from my skin.

There was no line to pick up visas, and things were quite calm when I arrived and scooped up my passport from the embassy counter. I flipped the pages and found what I needed: permission to stay in Thailand just a little longer.

I grabbed another bottle of water and walked back to the bus station where I found a bus to the Buddha Park.

The Buddha Park is this place on the banks of the Mekong where a rich guy with a little too much concrete decided to build a tourist attraction. He made a bunch of concrete statues depicting Hindu and Buddhist creatures. Falling into decay, with vines around the statues, it actually manages to look a little mysterious at times. However, the Mekong has risen in the past week and flooded part of the park, making huge stagnant pools that smell worse than crap. The park in the end, is just plain bizarre.

Because its bizarre, I love it, and laugh my way through the statues, the mud and the mosquitoes. I laugh my way back to Vientiane, over the dusty bumpy road and back to the baguettes.

I walk back to my hotel along the river, or rather, next to the sandbags set up beside the Mekong to stop the flooding. There is no market that night because the water has flooded out some of the market area, but I watch the sun set over the water and then take a bottle of Lao Beer home to drink from my balcony.

On my final day in Vientiane, I spend a lot of time drinking strong coffee (almost too strong to drink) and savoring baguettes. I walk up to the country’s largest market and spend a lot of time wandering through the aisles, past heaps of slaughtered meat and still jumping fish, past piles of mushrooms and heaps of chilies. I sit and watch traffic go by with a fruit shake for almost an hour.

But finally, I have to pack up, make the trip back to the border and get back to Thailand. I take an overnight bus that evening from Nong Khai to Bangkok, spend Sunday in Bangkok running errands and watching movies, and a night bus back to Mae Sot. I arrive at 4am back home, to the familiar land of cats and cuddles, ready to start work and begin teaching at 8am that day.