Moles, Poles and Automobiles

The pace of life is slow in Laos. The village of Nongkiaw, where we disembarked from our little boat, is the biggest thing within a day's journey despite the fact that is has only one road--the one that leads west out of town. We rented a couple single-speed bicycles and puffed over its hills one day, passing a couple of even smaller towns where the houses were on stilts and everyone sat around watching kids play or shelling beans.



No matter how far you get into the countryside, though, you see satellite dishes next to some of the huts. This kid's clearly been watching too much TV:



On New Year's Day we set off again to the west, this time on a songtaew, a converted pickup truck with seats on either side of the bed.



We bumped along in the dust until the end of the line, a village still several hours from our destination of Nam Neun, where we planned to go trekking and before heading south again. A friendly kid led us down the road to a ramshackle bamboo guesthouse where there was a note in English tacked to the wall. It explained that the only transport west was a bus that came through every night at one or two a.m., and that the proprietor of the guesthouse would wake us up when it arrived. Susannah was incredulous. Didn't anyone else need to travel? Didn't people have business to take care of in the next town over? She stopped in several shops, hoping to find someone who spoke English or Chinese (we weren't too far from China). Finally she did find a Chinese couple, who laughed uproariously and confirmed this bizarre state of affairs.

It was now about 4 pm. There was nothing to do but hang out in this little village until the bus came. We ambled down the road and stumbled into a raucous party, two long tables full of locals celebrating the New Year. They enthusiastically waved us over and poured us big glasses of the local firewater, an old beer bottle full of pickled lizards and other strange objects. As these were the only glasses in evidence, we shrugged and tossed it down fast so someone else could have a drink.





Pretty soon we were dragged to the dance floor. By lottery we, the guests of honor, were assigned partners from among the locals. Everyone hooted at the marvelous impropriety as we slowly swayed two feet away from our wide-eyed partners, to the rhythm of the village ancestors turning in their graves.



The great thing about drinking firewater in the afternoon is that by 7pm we were ready for bed, and managed to get a bit of sleep before the guesthouse owner pounded on our door at 1 am. Without waiting for a reply, he threw it open to reveal a bus idling right outside, its passengers blearily watching us pull on our pants. We stumbled onto the bus and miraculously found two empty seats between sacks of rice.

As night gave way to day, our bus stopped frequently to take care of pressing local business. In a typical episode, our driver slammed on the brakes in the middle of a remote hill-tribe village so that passengers could haggle over a live mole suspended from a pole outside of a hut. Finally one man prevailed, swaggering back aboard with his subterranean snack slung over his shoulder. He lorded his victory over the rest of the bus, extolling the size and likely savor of his mole -- until an old woman climbed aboard an hour later, with an even larger mole of her own!

We had told the conductor we were going to Nam Nuen. Expecting to arrive mid-morning, we waited to see what we knew should be a big, bustling town. Finally, the bus pulled into a gravel parking lot on top of a bluff and every last person got off. Unfortunately, although there was a big town down below, it didn't meet our guidebook's description of Nam Neun. We had no idea where we were, and couldn't find a single person who spoke English or Chinese. You'd be surprised how hard it is to ask for the name of a town when you don't speak the language. Finally we stopped someone and asked, "Nam Neun?" and looked around theatrically. He pointed off in the distance to the east, where we had come from. Then he pointed at the mountains not far to the west and said "Vietnam." Uh-oh. We had overshot our destination by about three hours.

Oh, well. The town of Sam Nuen (what a difference a letter makes!), where we had landed, was freezing cold but had a great market full of cheerful ladies selling everything from sweets to live bats and dead rats.



We took a day trip into the countryside and then headed south through the depressing, bombed-out city of Phonsavan and the lively capital Vientiane, finally stopping just short of Cambodia. Here, in the middle of the Mekong River, are the "Four Thousand Islands," where there is little to do but watch as the fishermen bring in their catch with silvery nets, and the rice farmers wade through their technicolor green fields.

Laos is delightful, but after three weeks we were ready for some action. With a nod to the fried tarantula lady at the bus stop, we headed south for Cambodia like a bat out of a bamboo hand basket.