The Road To Vientiane

An
American in Asia:

His Quest for Cosmic Truth

(or at least a Decent Espresso)

The Laos English Newspaper, Vientiane Times (Mouse over the image to see a funny picture).

Airports everywhere have little differences and Don Muang is no...um...different. For instance when I attempted to go through the metal detector for my weekly dose of x-rays and they turned me away. Not because I was carrying any pointy objects. They wouldn't even let me go through because it wasn't boarding time yet. It seems like they'd want to get everyone through the checks so they wouldn't have passengers making the plane late by hanging around getting frisked. A minor thing, but these little hassles can freak me out when I'm amped up on traveling adrenaline.

In the taxi on the way to the airport I had been reminiscing about driving long, lightless stretches of American highway and how nice it was to be at the wheel and have total responsibility for my schedule. If I was late it was my own responsibility and I didn't have to depend on a taxi to get me to the plane on time, which in turn must get me to Vientiane to catch another taxi to the hotel to drop off my luggage and catch another taxi to another hotel to make it to the company meeting. On time.

If I had been driving, I would have left the day before and been flying through jungles and farmland along the Mekong River, crossing the Friendship Bridge from Nong Khai, Thailand to Vientiane, capital of the Lao People's Democratic Republic. It's a twelve-hour drive but Thai roads are good and who knows what I'd get to see along the way? And I'd be on time because, when it's left up to me, I'm obsessively on time.

It's OK, folks. Nothing to see here...

At the airport cafe, a child let out a bloodcurdling scream worthy of any good horror flick. This was not surprising in itself, but the reaction was very interesting. Everyone in the cafe immediately whipped their heads around like a bunch of wildebeest at a watering hole and the place went dead silent for a second and a half. I wondered if they were expecting to see terrorists or a chicken flu victim. A sign of the times, I guess.

I took a Lao Aviation plane to Vientiane. I read somewhere that the US government has listed them, along with Russia's Aeroflot, as a risky flight due to inconsistent maintenance or something. I'm sure it's still safer than the drive. Though I'd still rather drive.

Charging for a charge

Another funny thing about the Thai airport. The waitress wandered over to inform me that if I wanted to plug my laptop into the cafe wall, I'd have to pay $1.50 per hour. I'm quite positive my little Powerbook doesn't consume that much juice and I'm also sure that the airport is paying for the electricity, not the cafe. I unplugged on the principle that I'm not as stupid as they think. By the time she told me, my laptop was fully charged anyway.

Covering the ASEAN Travel Forum

I was going to Vientiane to cover the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) Travel Forum (ATF), a big conference where a bunch of hotels and big tour operators try to sell tour packages to other tour operators. The whole shin-dig was being paid for by the travel industry - in other words you, fair reader, if you've ever taken a plane, stayed in a major hotel or booked a tour through an agent. Thanks. When I drink free Lao Beer with industry bigwigs I'll always think of you.

ATF was going to be a bit of a challenge for me because my job is to find news and write it. But to find news, you have to know what news is. This is trickier than it sounds. Just because something is new, doesn't make it news if it's already been reported. And something old could be news if none of the readers have read it yet. Angkor Wat, a beautiful ancient city in Cambodia with a big pointy temple, has been on the World Heritage Sites In Danger list for ten years, but it was news to my boss, who's been in Thailand for at least that long.

A bunch of other reporters from my magazine would be up there with me, so I knew they'd be able to aim me in the right direction. Though this was the first time I'd be working with them so I didn't want to appear too ignorant. That's always tough.

A Laotian two-thousand-kip note worth US twenty cents. A bottle of Beer Lao is 8,000 kip.

The scariest thing that happened on Lao Air was dinner. Perhaps because of the current scare over bird flu, they weren't giving the usual 'chicken or beef' option. In fact they weren't even serving Laotian food as one would expect on an airline especially designed to bring people to and from Laos. Airline management figured that what we were all hankering for was a cold hamburger and a piece of cake. The hamburger possessed the minimum specifications to allow them to call it a hamburger, but the cake was quite nice actually. Very fluffy.

I sneak into Laos

At the terminal there was a special booth waiting for members of the ATF convention. There, one guy took my passport and another guy grabbed me and assured me that everything was taken care of and I'd be shuttled painlessly through the border procedures.

True to his word, we waltzed right past immigration and customs and out to the car park in the Lao PDR. At this point I asked the enthusiastic young man where my passport was. He looked at me quizzically and said, "You have no visa?"

I saw his quizzical look and raised him a bemused grin, reminding him that we had both just seen a guy walk off with my passport so how could I have a visa? I was an illegal immigrant in Laos. He led me back to the terminal and we went in search of someone who knew where my passport was. An intelligent young woman took me off his hands and marched me back through the whole procedure that I'd skipped so blithely through. All of the other passengers were happily out of the terminal by the time I was finally taken care of, but I eventually got through with a three-week Laotian visa stamped in my passport. I could have snuck into the country if I didn't care to ever leave again.

The Hotel Disco on the Mighty Mekong

They stuck me in the Mekong Breeze Hotel. A very nice little place on the river about ten kilometres north of Vientiane. I highly recommend it as long as you are not interested in getting to town quickly for things like meetings and conventions. The neighbourhood is constructed mainly out of found items like corrugated tin and scavenged wood delivered by the Mekong River. The hotel is only two months old but it has as much charm as any aging third-world building. My room came complete with lizard. No shampoo though.

The true bonus of the hotel wasn't apparent until I'd returned from meeting my coworkers later that night. I had settled in and turned on the TV to see what kind of hysterical gossip was being spread on CNN when I heard a metallic thumping. I stepped out on the balcony and found that, between the hotel and the riverside was a small but very loud disco blasting techno music. My intuition told me it was a dead end but how could anyone sleep without having a look at a disco in the middle of the Mekong jungle?

It was hopping full of boozing Laos out for a wild Sunday night and every table was taken. As soon as I stepped in, I made four friends who dragged me to their table and poured me a beer on ice. They were all in their mid-twenties and not entirely in control of their motor responses. Nor did they have much in the way of the fabled Asian shyness. Drinks were spilled, tables and chairs were spilled and, every time one of their female friends passed by, she was spilled in the general direction of my lap. This never failed to produce gales of laughter and not a few bruises.

Strobe lights are cool and all, but they really shouldn't be the only light in the place. After about thirty minutes I was beginning to feel like a good spasm might be a nice thing to have. I bought a round of beer and made a quick exit while everyone was distracted with all the new spilling opportunities. I went further down towards the river and took a seat at an outdoor restaurant. It was much quieter, despite the wailings of Lao karaoke that occasionally pierced the Mekong evening.

I had a good fifteen minutes of relative peace before my friends found me again. Their drunkenness was not nearly as endearing or forgivable in the quieter surroundings and I finally headed back to my room.

The view from my hotel room.

III

The next day I ran around Vientiane, interviewing ASEAN ministers and trying to guess if what they were telling me was news or olds. The company got me out of the Mekong Breeze and into a pretty nice serviced apartment. It even had a little bottle of shampoo.

I talked to the Lao Tourism Minister, the President of the Cambodian Association of Travel Agents and the Chief of Thailand's Ministry of Tourism. It was pretty interesting as all of these folks were highly intelligent and the type of sophisticated air one only gets from going to the kind of parties that have royalty on the list.

Cruising around with a driver to pick up my stuff from the Mekong Breeze and transfer it to my new place, I worked on learning to speak a little Lao. With his basic English we managed to have quite a pleasant exchange and I found out that the lightless road leading to the Mekong Breeze was a nice place for foreigners to go if they want to be robbed by the Lao Mafia. That said, I still recommend the Mekong Breeze. You really know you're in Laos out there and here's no reason to walk on that road anyway as you wouldn't get to town for a good hour without a taxi or a motobike.

While the chief went off to cover the ATF golf tournament, I went to the convention centre and laboured over the task of compiling all the random information I had gotten the previous day into three articles. All around the brand new convention centre, booths were being set up by hotels and airlines trying to sell their services to major travel agents. The convention centre was so new that Lao work crew was still building it.

At lunch time I and the other three reporters from the magazine crashed the CNN lunch and pestered the various ASEAN ministers for more stories. I got to use my Japanese skills in an interview with the Japanese Tourism Minister. Actually he's called the Transportation Minister, probably because the Japanese couldn't have something so frivolous as a tourism minister. Again we cruised back to the convention centre and wrote like bats out of hell. Bats with Macintosh computers and fingers instead of leathery wings.

Then it was off to the official press conference where the ministers let us know what they'd been talking about in all their meetings. Or, at least, they let us know what they wanted us to know. I had the pleasure of watching one of my feistier coworkers piss off the ASEAN tourism secretariat by asking him too directly about the bird flu. The guy didn't have any answers and so he got a little pissed at her, which is exactly the kind of behaviour that results in journalists writing hysterical alarmist crap. Luckily he was saved by one of the saner ministers who intelligently rapped out an answer that made it appear that the problem was being taken care of and if the epidemic spun out of control, a the possibility of creating a contingency plan would be discussed.

We didn't really get an answer, nor did we really want one. If we really wanted to know about the bird flu, we'd be asking doctors, not politicians. We just wanted to see if they had any idea what they'd do if the flu became an epidemic, and they showed us that they hadn't.

The reporter who asked all the controversial questions got in a bit of trouble for it with our editor, but they went out for a drink and that made everyone happy again.

Dinner was back at the convention centre and we were entertained by dancers and singers from Laos. The highlights came when the Lao prime minister busted out with a song on stage, showing us a world leader could actually have style, and later when we were entertained by a very flexible lady who balanced her chin in a vase of flowers and sat on her own head.

Thursday was the last day of the convention for us. I woke up at practically dawn, ate breakfast at the nicest hotel in Vientiane (run by a great Singaporean man who looked mysteriously like Robyn Williams) and got in the van to go back to the convention centre. I wrote up a story that I'd gotten speaking with the Cambodian minister, which was to end up on the cutting room floor.

Once the useless story was written I headed out onto the floor to find out what the buyers were buying and what the sellers were selling. Pretty dry stuff, and the business would certainly be a bit tedious but for the fact that I was dealing with the sharpest minds of the tourism industry and they were a pleasure to talk with.

So far I have only met one truly unpleasant man in this business and that was only because he was hampered by the fact that he was a Nazi with one foot out of the fascist closet, whose reason for being a hotelier was that he felt he wanted to show his guests his very proper way in which one should go about the daily routines of life.

Being a newcomer I was fairly inept at getting any useful quotes and I was not much more than a walking suit for most of the day. But in the late afternoon there were a couple of press conferences that were pretty easy to handle. At a press conference, you know who you need to talk to because he's sitting at the front of the room. Even better, he's presumably prepared for your questions, which you have time to research because the whole deal is scheduled at least a day in advance.

At the Tourism Authority of Thailand conference, I knew they had nothing new to say but I asked a few polite questions anyway so they would remember my face and associate it with a general feeling of benignity. If benignity isn't a word, it should be.

The second press conference was from a new budget airline that was announcing new flights. The owner was a former music industry mogul and he had flight attendants in short skirts prancing around with signs showing the details of the announcement. He played an ad video that came right off MTV and, maybe the tourism press isn't as jaded as the music industry press because they were actually cheering. So much for objectivity. I chatted with the mogul about music for a bit afterwards and he said, "Hey, let's jam sometime." Funny how I could be in a touring, recording band for five years and never meet the president of Warner until I'm a journalist in Laos.

Between the two press conferences, I went to some of the shops that had been set up. Locals were selling Lao stuff at what they perceived to be inflated prices. At a booth to benefit the specially abled (is that still the PC word?) a woman was selling her paintings. There were washy, impressionistic shots of Lao people doing Lao things in Laos. Backgrounds of rain or forest or rainforest were nothing more than washes of appropriate blues or greens that suggested the element in question and the figures were done with a half dozen expressive strokes that brilliantly captured their weight and movement.

There were six images of yellow-clad pairs walking in blue rain, that I later realized were monks in saffron robes, painted on really rough, hand-made paper. I bought all six for two dollars a piece. I almost paid more but everyone at the surrounding booths looked so impressed that she'd sold so many paintings at once for the sum that she'd asked, no bargaining required. I also remembered how annoying it is to expatriates when tourists come and pay any silly amount for things, making the locals think that they can charge triple the normal price if the sucker looks like he's from out-of-town. Tourists over-paying make it really hard on expats who are earning a local wage.

Party on, Garth!

In the evening, I went to a big party thrown by the Malaysian contingent. We were late and the place was entirely filled. I had a grand moment being led through the seated crowd to the front row table which had been reserved for us. I am the only man on a staff of rather stylish Singaporean women who have a reputation for fun and an intelligence made entirely of razors, so I was feeling rather special.

I may have been a little tired and tipsy, but it was one of the more amazing dance and music shows I've seen. Malaysian music has a much heavier, almost African rhythm than other Asian states. The women danced in a similar fashion to the Thais, bending their fingers back at impossible angles and seemingly doing a different dance with each part of their body. The men's moves were equally riveting and I could see that most of the hand and foot positions were the same one's I'd learned when I studied kung fu with a Vietnamese master in university.

However the show went on for friggin' ever so we escaped from our table discreetly by twos and headed off to the next function, at which we were the hosts. I had a ball running around with an ever-filling wine glass, chatting with important people and generally enjoying the cool Laotian night at the poolside among the palms at an ancient French hotel. I left just as the party went over the hump and people were getting too drunk to remember if they had fun or not.

I guess the US government warning about Laotian Airlines was right. My flight on Laotian Airlines was delayed by five hours, meaning I'd be missing appointments with the Chiang Mai Tourism Authority director and the Deputy Governor of Chiang Mai. I made a fuss at the Laotian Air office but there was nothing they could do. They only have two planes and one of them was broken. I took pity and stopped pretending to take notes like I was going to write a story about it. In Laos and Thailand, when you've truly exhausted the possibilities for a solution, it's very important to leave everyone smiling. If you meet again they will remember your grace in the situation and will not rest until they've done something nice in return. At least this time they didn't feed me a cold hamburger. Dinner was cold spaghetti instead, which I actually like. Often spaghetti tastes better the next morning, right from the fridge, doesn't it?

The Chiang Mai Flower Festival

VII

Since I was late to Chiang Mai, I arranged to meet my contacts the following day at the opening ceremony for the festival, and went walking around the town.

I quite like Chiang Mai, and if anyone is thinking of buying a place in a mountain town that's relaxing but not sleepy, I recommend you start looking soon because the government is trying to turn this place into a regional airport hub and, whether or not they succeed, property prices are going up. It has a lot of the city fun that Bangkok has, but the nightlife is significantly less seedy. I walked around for hours and nobody said, "Hello handsome man!" But then maybe I wasn't looking so good after the flight.

I shacked up in a low-budget guest house just one tier up from Leonardo DiCaprio's abode in the movie, The Beach. It was clean anyway. In the morning, I woke up at 6am and tried to shower off the three beers I'd had around town during my late night wanderings. It didn't work and, since no soap was provided, I was forced to shower with the little bottle of shampoo I'd absconded with from the five-star joint in Vientiane. It was conditioning shampoo so I emerged clean, but a little slimy.

I trudged to the location of the opening ceremony and eventually managed to get an interview with the regional Tourism Authority chief. Once the flowered floats started passing I snapped off a few shots for the magazine. I have never really liked parades, sports events or any other pastime that involves sitting or standing around watching other people have fun, so once the pictures were in the can I marched off to the local Starbuck's. I got my iced americano and quite a nice, fluffy croissant, and sat down to enjoy the quiet at the end of the journey.

I noticed from a paper someone else was reading that the chicken flu that's scaring everyone here has jumped to pigs. It's no big surprise to me: if it can jump from birds to humans, the move to pigs would not be that hard since, anatomically, we're nearly identical. But it's going to be a big problem here since pig is a Thai and Chinese mainstay and everyone who stopped eating chickens has been substituting pigs. They don't really eat cows much here because, as a Thai friend told me, "Cows have big life." I might be going vegan again soon.

I'm writing this from the bed of the guest house. There is a smell that I'm pretending is cooked broccoli, wafting up from somewhere. In a few hours I will be catching a flight back to Bangkok. After a week away I'm really looking forward to seeing my apartment again. The guppies are probably missing me. Come Monday I'll be working like mad to get all the news stories factual and sent off. Next weekend I'm working again....off to Southern Thailand to cover the Valentine's Day Underwater Wedding Ceremony.

Jeffrey Studebaker has been (in no particular order) a SE Asian correspondent for a Singaporean travel magazine, a teacher, consultant and translator in Japan, a guitarist with the band, Swoon 23 in every city of the US of A, a coffee roaster in Seattle, a bike messenger in Portland, a marine fire system repairman in Seattle, an osteoporosis clinic researcher in Providence, a mental ward counsellor on the night shift in Portland, a brief success in New York, and he has now returned to the US after nearly a decade in Asia to pursue a publishing career.