jai-dee Posted August 7, 2002 Report Share Posted August 7, 2002 It is my last day in Laos and I don't feel like leaving. But my visa expires tomorrow and I have to go back to Vientiane. My bus leaves at 1 o'clock. I spend the better part of the morning walking all the streets in Vang Vieng up and down, trying to absorb the atmosphere. When the bank opens I go there to exchange some money. I ran out of kip last night and this morning I had breakfast on credit. The bank is practically empty, there is no queue and no waiting. I exchange smiles with the teller and hand over my 1000 baht note, she punches the exchange rate (195) in the calculator, takes two bundles of 5000 kip notes, tied up with an elastic, removes one note and hands the money over to me. The entire exchange takes about 5 seconds, there are no forms to fill out, no passport numbers and addresses to record, no commission to pay, not even any money to count. This works even faster than in Thailand. Not far from the bank is the departure point for the 10 o'clock Luang Phabang bus. This is the only bus that doesn't leave from the bus station. Most of the passengers are falangs. I have met many of them before. I say hello to them for the last time. They have only been in Laos a few days so it is my turn to deliver travel advice. I give my internet printouts on Luang Phabang to the elderly Swedish couple, they seem so lost and helpless. I wish I could just hop on this bus and go back to lovely Luang Phabang. Instead I walk all the streets two more times. Vang Vieng has recently developed into a major destination for travellers. My 3 years old Lonely Planet book barely mentions it but today almost every second house is a guest house or a restaurant or both. All throughout the morning I see tuk-tuks full of travellers going out of town, with a load of truck inner tubes on the rooves. They are being taken a few kilometres up the river where they will engage in the most popular sport in Vang Vieng - tubing. Tubing means floating on a tube down the slowly flowing river back to Vang Vieng and watching the life on the shores. I don't want to go away, it feels as if I am leaving part of me here. I pay my room at the guest house and say good-bye to the friendly staff. Before going to the bus station I stop at the "health food" restaurant for one last fruit shake. The girl serving me remembers me from the other day. I'm the only guest, it is midday and it seems everybody is having a siesta. She is eating her lunch in the kitchen. I motion her to come and sit at my table. She is a little surprised but comes and joins me anyway. I try to explain to her that I'm very sad because I'm leaving but I don't think she understands me. Her lunch consists of a baguette filled with condensed sweetened milk. She breaks it in half and offers to share it with me. I take a small piece only, and thank her using the second Lao word I've learned, khawp-jai. She speaks next to no English so we mostly exchange smiles. Then it is time to go to the bus station and claim a seat. The Austro-Kenyan couple are also travelling on this bus and I spend the time to the departure talking with Shoushan. The bus is quite crowded. It stops at every village and more people are getting on. I watch how complete strangers immediately start cheerfully chatting. It is late afternoon when we arrive in Vientiane. The bus stops on Thanon Fa Ngum by the Mekong before going to the main bus station and I get off here to save me walking back to downtown. Within seconds I run into the guy from Luxemburg whom I met on the bus to Nong Khiaw. We greet each other like old friends. He asks me where I will be staying. I don't know yet, but I have a list of guest houses that I printed off the internet. He urges me to go to the one he is staying at, it is just around the corner and very nice. He is very convincing and I accept his recommendation. When I get there I find that my Austro-Kenyan friends are also staying there. There more than a hundred hotels and guest houses in Vientiane, and we both pick the same one. The guest house is in a big colonial house, the floors are made of polished teak, the room is spacious and comfortable and the location is very central. At 7 USD it is quite good value. By the time I shower and change it is almost dark. I go to an internet shop to check my email. I sit down at an idle station. The guy on the right asks me how to change font size in his email application. I try a thing or two but nothing works because his application uses fixed size fonts. There is a surprise in my inbox. I just received a message from a school mate from California that I haven't seen or heard from in 30 years. I quickly type a brief reply and promise to be in touch once I get back home. Then I take a closer look at the workstation on my left. Wow, it looks like another lucky day for me. The person sitting there is a lovely young Lao girl. She is struggling with a two-paragraph email she is typing, constantly consulting her dictionary. In the 15 minutes that I spend processing my email she completes the one sentence she is working on. When she finishes I start talking to her. I expect her to be some schoolgirl. But no, she is a university graduate, and not only that, she now teaches at the Lao National University in Vientiane. She is 24 and is very pleased to hear that I thought she was much younger. She speaks English very well, better in fact than almost any Lao person I've met, and I'm thrilled at the opportunity to communicate with her. She is a very nice and friendly girl, and seems as excited talking to me as I am talking to her. Like most Lao, she smiles a lot. While her English vocabulary is quite extensive it is obvious she hasn't had much practice talking. She speaks very slowly, searching for words and constructing sentences. You can almost hear her brain working. She studied economics at the Thamassat university in Bangkok and is now planning to go for her masters degree, possibly in Japan. She confesses she speaks some Japanese too. I ask her if she would like to study in Australia. Yes she would, if only she could get a scholarship. She tells me about herself, about her family, about her studies and work, about where she's been and where she'd like to go. It is a real pleasure to be able to go beyond the few elementary themes that usually limited my conversation with Lao people. Oh yes, for the record, she is not married and does not have a boyfriend. I ask her to have dinner with me. My invitation is probably too sudden and seems to startle her because she declines. She is waiting for a friend to pick her up. In spite of repeated questioning I can't quite figure out where they would be going and what they were going to do there. And that friend doesn't materialise in the one hour I spend with her. Eventually we exchange email addresses and promise to write each other. After I leave I realise I forgot to ask what her name was. It is getting late, I am hungry and walk back to Thanon Fa Ngum. I sit down in a non-pretentious little restaurant, serving Lao food. I am still thinking of the girl in the internet shop and for a change I don't mind eating alone tonight. But 5 minutes later the guy who was sitting on my right at the internet shop walks into this same restaurant. I can't help myself and invite him to sit with me. He is Dutch, has just arrived in Laos and plans to travel in Australia later on so we have plenty of things to discuss. I have noodles with fish, followed by an obligatory fruit shake. We both drink Beer Lao. It is my last Beer Lao, in fact my last beer for a long time. Before going back to the guest house I walk up and down the street a few times, collecting smiles from Lao people for the last time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chilli13 Posted May 2, 2003 Report Share Posted May 2, 2003 cheers for beer lao :: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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