Rangoon – Like Nowhere I’ve Been

Sule Paya in central Rangoon.

High above the Thai-Burma border on an Air Asia flight from Bangkok I opened my photocopied, water-stained Lonely Planet Myanmar for the first time. I flipped to the money section and read what I already knew – Burma has no ATMs. Fantastic. For some reason the idea of a whole country in 2012 without something as commonplace as an automatic teller seemed more exotic than a thousand sun-drenched beaches or spear-wielding hunters.

            I watched for a glimpse of Rangoon like it was my first time abroad and felt a nervous fizz of excitement as a flat grid of roofs appeared suddenly out of the cloud. We dropped towards busy roads flanked by ramshackle terraced houses and shops until I could see the faces of the workmen sitting in the open trucks. A row of rusted roofs flashed 100 feet below our wingtip before we crossed a concrete wall and touched down neatly. It looked like we had landed in the middle of the city.

            The airport was small with swept-clean concrete floors. I stood in the line marked passport control-foreigners, chatting to a Californian called Santiago. We agreed to split a taxi and as we waited for our bags a young Frenchman named Gil overheard us asked to share the ride. None of us had booked rooms and it was dark when we climbed into a battered cab.

            The trip took 45 minutes through late peak hour traffic past dark footpaths and dirty buildings. We honked and wove between ancient smoke-stained trucks, battered 25-year-old Toyotas and men walking calmly through the traffic in longyi, the checked sarong that looked to me like an oversized tea towel. The streets were unlit and many cars had no lights. What I took to be oncoming motorbikes were cars with one headlight out – I later heard that motorbikes had been illegal in Rangoon since a government official had outlawed them in a fit of pique after his car was damaged but, like everything about Burma, it was hard to tell between rumour and fact.

            “Ten years ago, could you imagine ever going to Burma?” I said, breaking the fascinated silence that had set in soon after leaving the airport.

            “Ten years ago, I’d never heard of Burma, man.” Said Santiago.

            “I was eleven years old.” Said Gil.

Mobile phones and traditional longyi in front of British architecture.

            In the city centre the taxi driver dropped us at the White House hostel but they were full, as were the next three we tried. And the ten after that. Eventually a local, barefoot on the broken pavement, signalled to us to follow him. For an hour we sweated and struggled to keep up with our self-appointed guide as we were refused by every budget place in town. In the end our guide shrugged and held out his hand. I gave him the only small money I had, a one dollar bill. My companions had only 100 dollar bills. Our guide glared at us and stalked off. It was 9pm and we were sweat-drenched, aching and hungry. We sat on a filthy step and Gil announced that he was going to sleep in the park. Santiago said the same and we shook hands as they staggered under heavy packs. I was still feeling good so I carried on. In fact I was better than good, I felt exhilarated, excited to be lost and homeless amongst crumbling British-era buildings in this strange, dark city. By 9.30 all the restaurants were closed and the streets were empty except for the occasional taxi, headlights off. A few dogs sniffed the in the gutters and I had to watch my footing where the roots of gnarled trees had torn the pavement. On most corners small shrines sat in tree trunks – a dim bulb hanging from the branches illuminating a dirty stone Buddha and burned-out incense sticks. It was a perfect antidote to the 24-hour neon convenience stores, midnight traffic snarls and leering prostitutes of Bangkok.

            At around ten o’clock I stumbled upon Rangoon’s central landmark, the Sule Paya, a golden temple on an ancient religious site which now forms the middle of a roundabout from which four-lane roads spread in three directions. Nearby, I found a Chinese-run business hotel where I paid the astonishing sum of $50 (I had averaged $8 dollars per night in the rest of South-East Asia) for a ‘delux’ room – a windowless box with whiny air conditioning and Chinese satellite TV.

            After a free breakfast I checked out and dragged my bags to the Garden Hostel where I got a $6 room with walls stained the same black as the cracked buildings outside.

For the next three days I walked through the heat, filling SD cards with poorly-framed photos of men hanging out of ancient buses singing out destinations, bicycle trishaws stacked 10 feet high with propane tanks, barefoot workers sleeping on mounds of gravel in the backs of rumbling dump trucks, pretty girls with thanaka-swirled cheeks selling sliced watermelon from buckets they carried on their heads and action shots of stub-toothed men spitting the blood-red juice of beetel nut they chewed wrapped in leaf and spiked with spices. The background was always the same – peeling paint and mould-stained brick of the once-grand architecture of the British looming above broken, beetel polka-dotted streets teeming with pedestrians and beaten-up vehicles. In the evenings I ate steaming plates of rice, vegetables and stringy curry chicken in tiny, smoky restaurants and washed it down with longnecks of Myanmar Beer. Afterwards I bought loose Red Ruby cigarettes from one of the plastic canisters that sat on every table. I hadn’t smoked in years but I was free and unknown away from mobile phones, skype and email and it felt appropriate in such a grimy, tumble-down city.

Most Burmese women and some men paint their faces with thanaka as an all-in-one sunblock and beauty treatment.

It was only February but the heat and humidity were building and I had vague ideas about catching a riverboat to the beach. After a long walk down the Strand, past the city’s grandest whitewashed colonial buildings, boxy factories and muddy construction sights advertising river view condos, I reached the ferry port. Sandwiched by the broad, swift flow of the Irrawaddy river on one side and a four-lane highway on the other, Rangoon’s port stretched along the muddy bank. Dozens of pontoon jetties bobbed under the footsteps of wiry, bare-chested men shouldering 70kg bags of chicken feed – more than their body weight – from rusted ferries into waiting trucks. A man crouched in the sun husking coconuts with a machete, one every few seconds, before flicking them blind to a boy standing on the cabin of a truck 20 feet away. Between trucks, under trees – wherever there was room – women sold fruit, cold drinks and cigarettes from bamboo stalls or folded beetel nut packets from behind tiny booths. I sat on a concrete bench and watched, feeling self-conscious with a DSLR camera hanging over my shoulder. The river below where I sat was a traffic jam of boats big and small. I watched a huge rust-bucket of a container ship glide past on the swift current, looking ridiculously out of scale against the bamboo houses on the far bank and scattering dozens of open wooden dinghies riding too-low under stacks of coconuts or bags of rice on which passengers balanced. Their un-muffled, single cylinder outboards put-putted furiously and sprayed brown water into the sky as they scrambled to avoid the bigger boat’s wake. On an open ferry, a monk in red robes stood high on top of a pile of rice sacks, a serene splash of colour through the diesel smoke. As the boat beached, he dropped lightly onto a plank laid on the sticking mud and strode past me towards town. He must have been eighty.

Rangoon's ferry terminal.

I could have watched all day but I had to find a ticket office. Farther along the bank were some more substantial buildings, one of which was restaurant. I stopped for lunch and the man who shooed a cat off my table before seating me spoke English. I asked about boat tickets and after lunch he led me to a cloyingly hot, corrugated iron building where 100 people stood in line or sat on rows of wooden pews bolted to the floor. Behind a door marked ‘foreigner tickets’ a neatly uniformed man sat at a desk next to a rattling fan. He spoke perfect English and sold me a ticket to Pathien on the Irrawaddy delta from where, he explained, I could catch a bus to the beach. A deck class ticket cost me $7. The boat left at three o’clock the next afternoon and would take 20 hours. I was to meet him half an hour before departure.

Faded colonial buildings on the Strand.

Koh Samet to the Burmese Border – Insert Witty Title Here

Koh Samet

Alicia had left me in in Koh Samet to fly to Shanghai and on the ferry to Rayong it felt strange to travel alone. In Bangkok, I spent the night in street-side bars chatting to backpacker couples with clean hiking boots who were obviously bored of each other’s company and talked over one another constantly. Most of them were on a four week trip through Thailand, Laos and Cambodia – their first time in Asia. They stopped talking each time a street vendor approached with a tray of wooden frogs and plastic shit, smiling and no-thank-you-very-much-ing. They all had a morning buses to Chang Mai or Koh Samui and one by one they made their excuses. Later, as I sat alone, I overheard a French girl talking to a busy waitress.

            “Excuse me, I asked for fresh orange juice, zis is not fresh.”

            “Yes it is. We make it everyday.”

            “Non. Zis is, how you say, concentrate. It’s full of chemicals. I can’t drink it.”

            The waitress shrugged and started to walk off.

            “I’m not paying for it.” The drink was less than a dollar. They argued for ten minutes until the waitress stalked away. It pissed me off.

            “Excuse me, what happened?” I asked the French girl.

            “This juice, I’m not paying for it. Here, taste this.” It was fine.

            “It’s terrible. You know that she’s gone to get the police right?”

            “What?”

            “Yeah, I speak a little Thai and I think that’s what she said.” I lied.

            “Oh… really.”

            “Yeah, might be easier to pay. You know what Thai police can be like.” I was laying it on thick.

            “Well, yeah, maybe.” She thought for a minute then slammed some money on the table.

            “Thanks.” She smiled at me.

            A manager had been watching us.

            “What did you say to her?” She asked as she collected the money.

            “I said you called the police.”

            She laughed. “Stupid bitch. You want another beer?” I didn’t, I just wanted to get out of there. I dodged and elbowed through a whole community of hustlers – tuk-tuk drivers who doubled as sex show touts flashed explicit photos like they were FBI badges, massage parlour girls and lady-boys beckoned and whined, girls in lycra Heineken outfits and welded smiles held menus in front of ladies selling greasy noodles from carts which blocked the road. Everywhere people sold fake watches, glasses and underwear beside tasers, handcuffs, num-chuks and flick knives. Back at my hotel I locked the door behind me.

Night time Bangkok.

In the morning I caught a train to Chumpon. As we rattled south, I read and watched the sunset out of my second class carriage’s open window. The land was brown and dusty and I remembered how green and wet everything had been just a few months before. We arrived late at night and I wandered the wide streets past closed shops and dark houses. At a 7-11 I asked directions to a hotel and an English-speaking customer left his place in line to point me in the right direction.

The Farang bar and hostel was just closing when I walked in. Farang is Thai for foreigner and Ivor, the farang, led me to a bare room with a pedestal fan and a shared bathroom. There was no food so I sat with him in the closed bar drinking Singha and chatting. He had come to Thailand from England twenty years ago to work on the then-undeveloped island paradise of Koh Pha-ngan where he had met a Thai girl. They had gone from island to island, moving on as development and tourism pushed the prices up before settling in this dusty little nowhere where the only trade was from SCUBA divers on their way to Koh Tao. It seemed all veteran travellers and expats ever talked about was how much better Thailand had been twenty years ago – friendlier, safer, cheaper, more beautiful. I wondered how much of this was misty-eyed nostalgia and how much was true. A lot of the same people said that Burma was like Thailand in the ‘80s or Vietnam in the ‘90s or Laos ten years ago – the last undeveloped, unspoiled country in South-East Asia. I mentioned this to Ivor but he had never been, even though the border was only 30kms away.

“Can’t go anywhere, mate. Chained to this bar seven days a week.”

By then a big olive-skinned Welshman, the only other farang in town, had joined us and I asked about the chances of getting across the border.

“I doubt it mate. You’ll be locked up.” But he hadn’t been either and, like everyone else I had asked, was just guessing.

In the morning Ivor gave me a business card for a travel agent in Ranong and pointed me to the bus stop.

I waited an hour for the mini-bus to fill before we left. The road soon left the river valley and wound past small villages, terraced rice paddies and concrete towns. As we skirted the Burmese border, a soldier flagged us down at a road block. He swung the door open and collected IDs before speaking to the driver. A young guy near the back of the van was beckoned outside where the soldier directed him to stand against the side of the van and took a photo. He grabbed the young passenger by the collar and marched him away as the driver jumped into the van and roared away. I wanted to ask what had happened but nobody spoke English. An hour later I was standing in an empty lot between industrial buildings that served as Ranong’s bus station. I jumped on the back of a motorbike taxi and asked to go to a cheap hotel. The driver awkwardly cradled my bag between his legs as we wound through grubby streets, the back wheel scraping harshly with every rotation. At the hotel I checked into a bare room. The driver gave me his phone number and waited at reception for his cut of my $15 room charge.

One of Ranong's many fishing boats

Ranong sits on the Andaman Sea where Thailand meets Burma and the locals make their money from fishing and trade – both illegal and legal –  from across a wide estuary which separates the town from Kawthoung, its Burmese counterpart. I chained my bags to the bed and went in search of the travel agent Ivor said might be able to help me. Pon’s Travel is a one-stop western restaurant and ticketing service and Pon himself gave me the low down as I wolfed a curry. He told me that I could get to Kawthoung but only on a special one-day visa that couldn’t be used to travel more than five miles outside the town. I already had a 28 day tourist visa and was hoping to make my way by boat to Rangoon. He doubted that I would get my visa stamped and even if I did no boat would let a foreigner on. It wasn’t looking good for my overland route but I decided to give it another go. I bought a ticket for the small island of Koh Payam, where I knew there were travel agents and expats.

In the open back of an old pick-up a handful of backpackers and I drove through the heat to Ranong’s dock. The ferry shared the dock with a thousand wooden fishing boats. In a huge shed next door hundreds of people unloaded, gutted and packed fish into ice chests – there was no mechanization and they operated like a yelling, sweating production line. Blood and guts sluiced down the sloped concrete floor into a mangrove-choked stream and the workers moved quickly through the filth in flip-flops. The road in front was covered in rubbish that crunched under the tyres of reversing trucks. The smell was unreal – like a fishy hell. I noticed that the sing-songs yells and jokes weren’t in Thai. As I walked closer a wiry, dark-skinned man in a shirt stained black with fish blood waved me over. “Where are you from?” he asked.

His English was good and he told me that he was Burmese, as were all the workers, and had moved here from Rangoon two years ago to earn Thai wages.

“I like Thailand, so many jobs, but not Thai people.” He said. “They are not nice to us. I live with these people in the Burmese part of town.” He indicated the workers. “I don’t even speak Thai!”

I told him that I was going to Rangoon and he said that his father worked there as a diplomat. It was strange to think that this diplomat’s son with his perfect English had come to this dreary border town to make his fortune processing fish.

We docked at the end of a long concrete pier on Koh Payam where I rode a rented scooter to a thatched bungalow near the beach and watched it rain for two days – a steady tropical downpour that clattered on the palm fronds and seeped through the roof.

You know you're bored when you start taking photos of yourself reading.

I liked Payam, especially once the rain stopped, and spent a few days swimming in the warm clear waters and waiting for the generator to come on at the posh resort next door so I could use their wi-fi. I learned that my granddad had become gravely ill and spent hours trying to get through to his hospital bed. He was morphine-confused and hard to hear on the scratchy connection and the call left me deeply homesick and wondering what I was doing. It was the last time I spoke to him.

In the morning I caught the boat back to Ranong. As we came into port, I hung my feet over the side and watched the Burmese coast slip past a few hundred metres away – dull-green jungle over dense mangroves and muddy water. Back at Pon’s Travel I booked the night bus to Bangkok and an Air Asia flight to Rangoon for the following day. 

Koh Payam.

Bangkok – Again

Playing with my new camera on Soi Rambutri, Bangkok.

In a couple of months back in the land of Aus I celebrated my thirtieth birthday, attended four weddings (some of them of complete strangers, I just like free champagne), built a shed, bought a camera, broken a puppy’s toe, done no writing whatsoever, and – most importantly – finally beaten Dad at table tennis. It was mid January 2012, time to get back to the trip.

It was good to catch up with the clan and to meet Amy.

          The new plan – if my vague ideas can be called plans – was to try to cross the Thai-Burma border on the Andaman coast, travel up to Rangoon, north through Burma to the Chinese border, then through Southern China to Shanghai where Alicia had landed a teaching job. How hard could it be? Except everyone said that the Burmese border was closed to foreigners, so was the Chinese border. Hmm, only one way to find out.

            I woke on my second day in Bangkok with a nightmare about being tied in a burlap sack and beaten with bamboo by Burmese border guards still lingering in my brain and set off for a spot of visa shopping. First stop was the Chinese embassy – hardly a byword for friendliness and convenience.

            For anyone wanting to get a Chinese tourist visa in Bangkok, here’s a brief outline of how not to do it. First, don’t spend an hour at the riverboat terminal waiting for a boat that never comes, then you shouldn’t give up and sit in the mid-morning traffic for 45 minutes listening to your taxi driver swear in Thai. Whatever you do, don’t get to the embassy an hour after it opens, spend 20 minutes filling out unbelievably complicated forms and attaching two passport photos and a photocopy of your passport. Then under no circumstances should you take a number and wait THREE HOURS for it to be called only to be told by the turkey behind the Perspex that you can’t get a visa unless you have proof of flights in and out of China and proof of hotel bookings for EVERY NIGHT you are in China. That’s what you shouldn’t do.

            What you should do is find a travel agent on Khao San Road who, for an extra 20 bucks will simply take your passport for three days, forge all the required documents and give you a passport complete with 30-day visa for you while you sit sulking in a bar plotting petty revenge like braking an arm off a terracotta warrior or spray painting a giant cock on the Great Wall. Who says you have to be mature just because you’ve turned 30?

Drinking whiskey buckets on Khao San Rd with some Saigon friends.

             Have you guys ever seen that Bourne Supremacy thing? I know – pretty rubbish film. But there is one scene that made me a bit spongy in the trousers. No, it’s not that French chicks boobs, it’s the scene where Matt Damon opens a Swiss deposit box and finds a little compartment full of passports, credit cards, licenses, loads of cash in different currencies and a gun. Well, now I’ve bloody got one. Ok, so there’s no gun – although there is an unusually sharp-edged library card that could give you a nasty graze – but my big old leather wallet does contain two passports (Aussie and Pommy), three bank cards, two drivers licenses and about a thousand bucks in US dollars and Thai Baht. It also has a laminated four leaf clover which – on reflection – I think I may have stolen, which would explain all the bad luck and Irish people punching me in the face.

            All this is a long-winded, silly way of saying that the upside to the awful shame of having an English-born father is that I have two passports. So the next day I woke up early and trekked to the riverboat station, paid thirty cents to get to central pier and hiked to the Myanmar (Burma to you and I) consulate.

            The visa section of the consulate is a barely signposted building down a side street behind a shopping mall. It wasn’t hard to spot though because at 8.30am (half an hour before it opened) there was a line of 50 travellers sitting on the footpath chatting and reading. With a mixture of sensibly-shoed German backpackers and aging Americans of the floppy-pants, tie-dyed bandana variety it looked like someone had double-booked the Grateful Dead fan club and a Gore-Tex expo at the same venue. By the time the doors opened at 9am the line stretched 100m up the street. I braced myself for another long day but I was in and out in 45 minutes. The only awkward moment came when I had to ‘fess up to the whole double passport thing. I explained to him that my Aussie one with the Thai stamp was at the Chinese embassy and that the reason I had a beard in my UK passport photo had less to do with international espionage and more to do with a beard race I had been involved in at the time. After deciding I was too simple to be a spy he handed me a receipt and told me to stop talking and go away. Two days later I returned to get my newly visa-ed passport.

            For the record, I won the beard race in both length and coverage.

            Paperwork sorted, Alicia and I decided to GTFO of Bangkok to the island of Koh Samed. We spent three days swimming in the warm blue water, eating good food and buzzing through the national park on scooters – just your standard Thai island stuff. It was so pleasant it’s not even worth writing about.

Island life.

            Alicia had a flight to catch to start her new teaching gig in Shanghai. I planned to stay on for one more day before making my way to the Burmese border. As her boat chugged away I could see her, squashed between some fat Russians, crying. On her way to a strange, faraway town to start a new job while I pissed around Burma and China for six weeks. I stood waving and smiling – I can’t remember ever feeling like such a massive prick. After a while I must have got some shit in my eyes. That afternoon I rented the fastest dirt bike I could find and tore around the rutted tracks and sandy roads. Helmetless I jumped, slid and wheelied though the jungle at stupid speeds. Then I booked a boat out.

Pretty Koh Samet.

Vientiane to Australia – Home Jeeves

The Mekong river at Vientiane.

Although only a couple of hundred kilometers apart, Vang Vieng and Vientiane couldn’t be more different. Well, I suppose they could really. If Vang Vieng was the term used to describe that feeling of melancholy and regret one feels after paying to watch a Bruce Willis film and Vientiane was, say, a variety of orange, then I guess they would be more different. But you get the point, they’re a bit different.

            As astute readers will infer from the above paragraph, three weeks riding a motorbike through the rain followed by three days partying in Vang Vieng had done strange and probably long-term things to my brain. Fortunately Vientiane is a likeably boring place, a good place to wind down. It’s not drink-Windex-and-pierce-your-own-nipple, Adelaide-boring or anything, just quiet and restrained, with a smattering of colonial-era French buildings, pretty parks and the muddy Mekong flowing past.

            After a lie-down and a little deep breathing, the first order of business was to offload the bike. I only had a couple of days in town and it had to go. I stayed at the same guesthouse as I had a year before when I had sold my previous bike after riding from Saigon, through the Mekong delta, into Cambodia and up through southern Laos. I bought that bike from the same street in Saigon that I had got this bike from and now I was selling it at the same guesthouse in Vientiane. Viewed on a map, these two trips would make an unbroken loop through Indo-china. The symmetry of it pleased the map-nerd in me no end.

Over 4000kms through three countries on two motorbikes.

            I festooned the bike with for sale signs, posted some more ads on the internet and spent the next couple of days sitting in restaurants with the bike parked conspicuously and waited for the phone to ring. One morning as I lingered over a coffee, I watched an old lady poo into a public rubbish bin. I was tempted – when in Rome and all that – but decided against it. I’m not in Kansas anymore, I thought.

            By the afternoon before my train left for Bangkok, the only offer I’d had for the bike was from a taxi driver who offered to swap it for a ride to the train station – haha. I drank a beer and wondered what to do. I was resigned to riding it to the train station and gifting it to someone when my luck turned. A couple of middle-aged American ladies looked interested. I wandered over and gave them my best pitch. After a brief but terrifying riding lesson I had my asking price of $300us. Those of you who’ve been paying attention will know that that is a $70 profit. Oh yeah.

Not fast, not pretty, but look where she got me.

            The following afternoon I jumped in the back of a little truck with a bunch of other backpackers, stamped out of Laos and boarded the party train bound for flooded Bangkok. It wasn’t advertised as the party train, but when you put enough lonely backpackers together and sell them beer, things kick off.

The train was one of the usual Thai specials with too-cold A/C and arm chairs that turn into bunks for the overnight trip. On the way the to the station I had been espousing the wonders of the Thai dining car to my fellow passengers and once I had chained my bag to the luggage rack I headed in that direction. Beer ordered, I watched the sluggish Mekong pass slowly under the Laos-Thailand Friendship bridge. Not far into northern Thailand the sun set and the backpackers emerged. Unlike the freezing sleeping carriage, the dining car was had open windows and was full of warm tropical air. I had a very decent Massaman curry, begged a cigarette and kept the Singha flowing. When we sped through a village the car filled with the smell of woodsmoke and cooking. Through the flooded paddies it smelled warmly of mud and stagnant water.

Soon eight backpackers had taken over and we set about emptying the ice box. It was like a budget murder on the Orient Express. Only without the murder. Or nice clothes. There was a Belgian, but he had no moustache and his sleuthing abilities were substandard (I hid his beer in a luggage rack but, disappointingly for both of us, he never found it). As well as Herclueless Poirot, there were four Frenchies, an Irishwoman who lived, like most Irish, in Sydney, an Englishman and a Yank. The great thing about meeting people like this is that you know you’ll never see them again. You have about seven hours to conduct an entire relationship. This makes people completely mad, which is fantastic.

ACME Insta-Friends - Just Add Beer.

Except for the Belgian, everyone there was a perfect stereotype. The American was fat, southern and enthusiastic. The Brit’s first name was Conningsby. The Irishwoman was incomprehensible but great craic. One of the Frenchies had just stolen something. Ok that last one’s a bit mean. But she had just been released from a Laotian prison. Apparently the Gallic quartet had come from Vang Vieng to Vientiane with a bagful of leftover weed which they’d smoked in the park. Soon after two of the girls found themselves admiring a clock on the wall of a busy Vientiane café. One of them nicked it. Unfortunately for her the café was owned by the son of a government official. Oops. After two days in jail and a 1000 euro fine she was told to leave the country and never come back.

“I don’t want to go back anyway. It’s a sheet ‘ole.” She told us diplomatically.

The night got louder and drunker as we trundled south through farms and villages. At midnight the attendant told us to stop being silly and go to bed.

Flooded fields north of Bangkok.

In the morning I watched the sun rise over flooded farms north of Bangkok as I nursed an instant coffee and a spongy brain. The extent of the flooding was amazing. For miles the raised train line was the only dry ground. The tops of rice paddy dikes stretched into the distance and islands of dying trees broke the surface. Some houses were on raised ground and surrounded by sandbags, others were window deep and abandoned. Closer to Bangkok the stagnant water had formed motes around apartment buildings and filled streets. People were expecting the water to rise for another week at least and there wasn’t a house without sandbags at the door or newly-built concrete wall.

At the station I shared a tuk-tuk to Koh San Rd where I met Alicia. We spent a day walking near the river watching the water stream out of the drains and over the city streets. There were hardly any tourists around. We boarded the sky-train to the airport under ominous skies and as the doors hissed shut the sky unleashed on the flooding city. It was a good time to go home.

A river-front bar in Bangkok. The water rose for another week after we were there.

Vang Vieng – In the Tubing

Camera tricks and cattle in central Laos.

After three weeks of travel so authentic and off-the-beaten-track that even a Lonely Planet writer would nod sagely in approval, I needed a bit of trash – a place where you don’t need to eat the food, talk to the locals or wear a shirt. A place where Family Guy reruns, grilled sandwiches and marijuana are so plentiful I could be in a student share-house. I needed a place where tube is used as a verb. I needed to get some laundry done. I needed Vang Vieng.

This town in central Laos is blessed with sheer cliffs, stunning jungle, green paddy fields and clear streams. My 1996 Lonely Planet guide book describes it as a village at the end of a bad road where you can meet some locals. Well, not anymore my friends. It’s now Laos’ number one party spot. Kind of a water theme park for people who like to drink a litre of whiskey and have sex with each other. The only local you’ll meet now is the lady selling you magic mushroom pizza at 1am. And thank god for that. I’d fucking had it up to here with natural beauty and foreign types. I wanted to hang out with teenagers from Essex and talk about sunglasses and orgasms. Or Californian college boys who like my accent and want to know which part of Europe I’m from. French guys who say… Well I never really know what French people say, I just switch off.

I was looking forward to it.

A detached headlight on the way to Vang Vieng.

I just had to get there first. The only thing about the place that hasn’t changed since 1996 is the road. The problem is not that it’s particularly bad – I’d had much tougher going in parts of Vietnam – but that it’s a lot worse than it looks. After chugging along at my customary 70kph on fairly reasonable tarmac I’d round a bend to find a pothole so deep I could seeing boiling magma at the bottom. In one hole I discovered a hitherto-unknown species of troglodyte amphibian and had to free-climb to safety. I managed to swerve around most of these behemoths but as I pulled out from a cloud of dust to overtake a bus at 80kph I knew I was in strife. It was about a foot deep, two feet long and 10 feet in front of me. I knew enough not to brake and instead rapped on the throttle and pulled back on the handle bars as hard as I could, shrieking in a manly fashion. The front wheel lifted just enough to skip over the ditch but the back tyre hit the far side of the ditch with an unhappy thud. I stopped at the side of the road to reattach my lips and perform some minor surgery on my pelvis and noticed that my rusty steed’s headlight had fallen off. I got out my toolkit, screwed the light back on and set off.

It wasn’t until a passing truck enveloped me in dust that I realized I’d lost my sunglasses. By the time I got to town an hour later I may have well have had my eyes surgically replaced with a raccoon’s testicles for all the good they were doing me. After I’d showered and scrubbed my corneas with an old toothbrush, I hit the street for a traditional Laotian club sandwich and an episode of Family Guy. I was home.

I now had six days before an unmissable appointment with a pretty blonde in Bangkok. I needed to sell the bike. Incredibly for a vehicle that spelled its own name incorrectly on some components my $230 bike had covered around 2500km in 15 days. To say it didn’t miss a beat would be unwarranted hyperbole (and as you can see from the above paragraphs, I detest hyperbole) but it had gone from the sea to the mountains through all kinds of weather from rain and precipitation to showers and downpours – I think one day the sun even shone – and lived to tell the tale. I gave the old girl a service, adjusted stuff, lubricated other stuff and washed her. I then bought a Laos SIM card, stuck a couple of signs over the headlight and the packrack, and parked her on the street. She sat there glinting invitingly, her gently askew handlebars seeming to say, “buy me big boy, buy me now.” I was sure it would sell. It was time to tube.

           

Saucy minx.

 Now as a few veteran readers will know, you can’t just go tubing. No. Like all the best social occasions tubing has a dress code – fake billabong board shorts, the more lurid the better, a white singlet 4 sizes too big that reads ‘In The Tubing, Laos’, and most importantly, fake ray-ban sunglasses in any primary colour you wish. Optional extras for the more seasoned tubinger include tribal tattoos, dreadlocks and found objects jammed through earlobes. Sadly I had only packed clothes that a human being would wear. It was time to go shopping.

The next morning, resplendent in my new outfit, I walked down to a tin shed stacked full of inflated truck inner tubes, signed a waiver in case of serious injury or death, jumped into the back of a small truck with ten strangers and drove to the starting point.

Basically tubing involves jumping into a swift-flowing river and floating downstream from bar to bar drinking local whiskey or vodka mixed with red bull, soda and whatever else is in the ice box, swinging over the river on huge rope swings and flying foxes and, at one bar, sliding down an enormous tiled water slide which spits you out twenty feet above the water. Eventually you float back to town, return your tube and, if you are capable, go to the pub. A couple of hundred people do it everyday, floating in groups of newly-made friends, bumming each other’s dry cigarettes. Very few are over thirty. There are no designated drivers.

          

At the tubing.

 Like most traumatic memories, tubing comes back to me in unconnected snapshots.

 It’s dark and I’m racing my new American friend downstream, paddling hard and giggling. We notice the Serbian bloke we’d been drinking with is, unaccountable, trying furiously to paddle upstream, away from town.

“You’re going the wrong way!” The American screams.

“And you paddle like a Bosnian prostitute, you Slavic fucker!” I add helpfully.

“Fuck you, English.” Touché.

He told me later that he’d paddled for hours thinking he was heading back to town and ended up in a rice paddy. Bedraggled he knocked on the farmer’s door and begged a lift to the pub.

It’s still early and I’m easing into the afternoon with a beer and watching some lads backflip from the top of a rope swing about 20 feet above the river. One guy bottles it and doesn’t release at the top of his arc. He swing back towards the rocky bank and lets go, hitting the water head first. He resurfaces with blood pouring from a cut over his eye.

“Fookin’ hell,” he says as his mates pull him out. He’s missing a tooth. 15 minutes later the bleeding’s stopped and he’s necking a whiskey bucket and dancing to Lady Gaga.

Sometime later I’m drinking with two Americans and a German by the river near town. The yanks eat from a bag of magic mushrooms. I stick to beer. The police pull up and Fritz and I quickly explain that we’ve not been partaking. The barman backs us up and we bravely scarper. The Americans spend the night in a Laotian police station watching the walls move. They have to pay a $500 fine – i.e. bribe – to get their passports back.

After three days of this I have the liver function of Montgomery Burns and the mental cognizance of an apricot. No one has even looked twice at the bike. I decided to try my luck in Laos’ capital, Vientiane.

The aftermath of a previous tubing outing.

Ky Son to Phonsavan – Bordering on the Sublime

Near the border on top of the world.

The ascent to the Vietnam-Laos border at Nam Can may be the most astonishingly remote, interesting and beautiful ride in South-East Asia. It was a shame then that the thought of being beaten and robbed by men dressed like Albanian generals was somewhat distracting me from the virgin rainforest and startling views. This fear stemmed from a conversations I’d had earlier in Ky Son. When I told the hotel owner I was headed for Laos, he had eyed my old bike dubiously. He checked my papers and when he saw that it was still registered to someone called Tam Loc Nguyen, he shook his head.

“Not you!” He exclaimed astutely. “No good. Police, they take moto, take money.” He pointed vaguely towards the border.

This wasn’t welcome news but I wasn’t going to ride back to Saigon.

Visions of soaring over the border fence Steve McQueen style evaporated as my hands froze in the frigid mist as the road wound up from Ky Son. I struggling to co-ordinate throttle and clutch as I changed down for greasy corners with sheer drop-offs into cloud, wobbling and over-revving like an L-plater. Luckily there was no one around. And I mean no one – for miles I didn’t see a house or another vehicle on the smooth tarmac.

The only village between Ky Son and Laos.

            My worries were temporarily forgotten when I climbed above the clouds and saw the view. Immediately below me lay a deep valley with a tiny ribbon of brown river an impossible distance below me. Above that I had a 200 degree panorama of mountains peaking out of the clouds. Mist accumulated in small valleys and gaps like snow drifts. Everywhere was deep wet jungle drained of colour by the grey sky. As I stood snapping photos, clouds parted and moved, exposing new peaks and obscuring others. A procession of trucks began trickling past. Most were fuel tankers but a couple were painted olive green and full of khaki-clad men. I guessed that the sudden appearance of vehicles meant that the border had opened.

            An hour later, I reached the concrete arch that housed Vietnamese immigration. We were surrounded by jungle and at least an hour from the nearest town, but it was well-staffed and clean. Nervously I parked next to a vehicle observation pit and said hello to an elaborately uniformed official. He ignored me and pointed inside while he had a perfunctory look over the bike. Inside my passport was grabbed by a disembodied hand darting out from under scratched Perspex. Within a minute it returned and I was waved away. I was almost out the door, forcing myself to walk slowly.

“Stop. Motorbike. You pay.” An older guy festooned with medals and insignia waved me over to a desk.

Shit, I’m going to have to bribe him, I thought. I had some US dollars in my pocket in various bills.

“60,000 dong. You pay.”

“How much?”

“60! Vietnam money. Dong”

Just under three dollars. I paid him and he gave me a stamped customs document.

I crawled through no man’s land in second gear. The Laos border post was empty except for a friendly young guy who took me through all the paperwork in about ten minutes. He taught me some Laotian phrases and shouted in Vietnamese at a couple of impatient truckers.

Goodbye Vietnam.

A hundred metres into Laos the road deteriorated into a rutted track and I was soon despairing of getting anywhere. A couple of miles on, as though playing a trick on the Vietnamese, it reverted back to smooth tarmac and I whizzed out of the clouds and into blue sky, dry roads and warm sunshine. I stopped for a pee and as I looked out over the forest I realized I had made it. I was in Laos on an empty highway in the sun. I did a little dance, hummed a few bars of what I imagined the Laotian national anthem might sound like and sped down the road.

After an hour of leaning hard through perfect bends brought me gently down a curving ridge and into a green valley between tiny villages and rice paddies, I reached the first town. Laos was clearly less populated and developed than Vietnam and the town was a couple of dozen houses, a market, a bank and a gas station. I was low on fuel, had no food or water and held no kip, Laos' currency. Being Sunday the bank was closed and the gas station wouldn’t except dollars. I rode on in a more economical fashion, aiming for the small city of Phonsavan. The weather grew warmer and the road even better and I marveled at how empty the road was. I only passed a handful of trucks and some tractors loaded with straw. By the time I found a $4 hotel room in Phonsavan it was mid-afternoon and I had done at least 250km without refueling. The motorcycling gods were smiling at me again.

The reason you should buy a motorbike right now.

Phonsavan is a flat, dusty industrial town on a high plain and as I went in search of a money changer a dry wind was blowing from the north bringing cold air from China. I exchanged $50 for a wad of dirty kip and set about spending it at a tourist bar near my hotel. I congratulated myself on making it this far with a good coffee, a giant hamburger and a couple of bottles of Beer Lao – what I believe after a couple of years of thorough research to be the best beer in South-East Asia.

This part of Laos is famous for two things – the ancient and mysterious plain of jars, which is just a bunch of old jugs in a field, and the fact that you can’t take two steps into the woods without exploding. That’s because during the Vietnam war American pilots were ordered to drop all excess ammunition on this geographically convenient and sparsely populated part of the world. A lot of it, of course, exploded and wiped innocent villages off the map. But a large proportion didn’t explode as designed and has been killing locals ever since. The two groups most at risk are farmers, who hit the unexploded bombs with their ploughs, and young boys for whom the ball bearings inside the palm sized ‘bombies’ make perfect ammunition for their slingshots.

All around Phonsavan, American military hardware has been turned into building materials. Hammered-flat shell casings become shelves and fences while hanging plants swing from machine gun stands. When I sat on my hotel’s balcony to watch the sunset over another beer, I looked over to see a rusty machine gun with a stack of huge bomb casings stacked behind it – a reminder of stunningly beautiful, fantastically friendly, dirt poor little Laos’ tragic and undeserved history.

Rusting military hardware is everywhere in Phonsavan.

Cuo Lac to Ky Son – The Wild Wild West

They call it rainy season for a reason.

The first two trucks I had seen in days were side by side coming around a corner towards me, spitting a hard mist of water and gravel. Thank God for that, I thought as the bike squirmed through soft grass between the overtaking truck and a concrete retaining wall, I’m back on the Ho Chi Minh Highway. Narrowly avoiding being smeared into an abstract painting felt familiar and comforting after yesterday’s ride through empty jungle – at least it would be a quick end. Better than spending two weeks drinking my own wee before being raped to death by monkeys, or whatever happens in the jungle. At least now I was making good time in my race for the Laos border.

            I spent the next three days muttering as I rode through patchy jungle, flooded rice paddies and constant rain. Occasionally steep mountains would loom out of the mist, giving me a glimpse of what was probably a very pretty part of the country. I stayed in no-name towns and passed the evenings looking for food and attempting to dry my belongings. As I veered left and away from uncle Ho’s highway I began climbing, following a swollen river. Washouts and mudslides became more frequent and often I would have to wait for an oncoming truck as it bounced and skated on the edge of an eroded cliff. By the time I arrived in Ky Son the river had narrowed and the road clung to the side of a steep hillside that angled into thick cloud.

Another truck edges passed a recent mud slide.

            Ky Son is the last town before Laos and a steady trickle of trucks rattled down the main road. At the end of town where the highway turned sharply away from the river and into the mountains, I checked into a sprawling wooden hotel which half hung over the muddy river. It was a nice change form the narrow concrete-box hotels which scar most Vietnamese towns. I changed into less wet clothes and walked the length of town. Squeezed between the river and a mountain Ky Son stretches maybe a mile along the highway but is never more than a hundred metres wide. It felt like a border town, the locals were less curious – obviously used to strangers – and many people looked more Laotian than Vietnamese. Floods had ripped through the area a couple of months before and the river banks on both sides were freshly eroded. Jury-rigged stilts held corrugated iron houses above the torrent. On the other side of the highway a mudslide had partially engulfed a small house. I bought some unidentified fried food and a beer from the market and sat on the hotel’s deck watching workers reinforce the riverbank with sandbags and gravel in an attempt to save a teetering house. I wondered how they would fare in this latest flood.

Ky Son's riverside houses hang precariously.

            That night I broke a personal rule and accepted an invitation to karaoke. In normal circumstances, like all  people with properly functioning ears, I would sooner tear off my own eyelids than let someone sing karaoke at me but the novelty of talking to a fluent English speaker proved too much to resist. Huy was an engineer from Ha Noi who worked for a Chinese company contracted to built a hydro-electricity plant nearby. With a touch of characteristic Ha Noi snobbery he made it clear that he was only here for the money and hated living in this backward nowheresville. It was Saturday night – I hadn’t realized – and as we chatted in the backroom of the karaoke joint he drank Johnny Walker while a group of younger guys shyly filtered in. With Huy translating we made introductions and shared bowls of sunflower seeds, spitting the shells on the floor and watching the joint fill. Loud young men with stupid haircuts drank quickly while pretty girls in heels sat in quiet groups, drinking nothing.

            Groups began moving into the private karaoke rooms and soon conflicting pop beats boomed around the building. As I returned from the bathroom – a room built above the river with a hole in the floor – two giggling teenagers pulled me through a door. The windowless room was the size of a small bedroom. On the wall a large TV sat on a stack of speakers. A guy belted out a local pop tune into a cordless mic and twenty people danced and jumped. The music was deafening and the scene lit in strobe snapshots. A familiar funk of testerone, cigarette smoke and blind energy filled the hot room – it was exactly like a Saturday night at the small-town pubs where I did my formative drinking. Young people cramming a week’s worth of dangerous, desperate energy into this one night a week where they were free to drink, scream, fuck and fight before returning to real life in a dead town. It could have been Benny’s Tavern in Leongatha circa 2001.

Like that teenaged haunt, the room had a strong undercurrent of violence – an exaggerated, fragile crust of camaraderie that could break in an instant. As I was pushed and pulled through the crowd, grinning youths shouted questions at me in Vietnamese and gave me plastic cups full of sugary vodka mixers. One of them pulled me into the middle of the room where half a dozen guys were half dancing, half fighting, laughing as they shoulder charged each other and spilled drinks. My new friend began talking to me, his face a couple of inches from mine. He was skinny and shorter than me – at 5’10” I was the tallest guy in the room – but all muscle, like one of the workers you see shirtless and barefoot on Vietnamese construction sights. Even if I spoke Vietnamese I wouldn’t have been able to hear him over the music and screaming so I just shrugged and smiled. He still had a tight grip on my arm. Maybe he’s gay, I thought. I’d been propositioned a couple of times in Saigon, once during a class I was teaching. Before things got too awkward Huy found me and, with some difficulty, dragged me outside.

            “Man, you shouldn’t go in there.” He said once we were back in the bar. “That guy you were talking to is a gangster. He’s crazy.”

            “A gangster? Bullshit.” He had been about nineteen.

            “No bullshit, he’s crazy.” Huy repeated.

            We said our goodbyes and I made it safely to my hotel and lay in bed. After a couple of minutes I decided to dead lock the door. It had been a strange and strangely fitting last day in Vietnam after an amazing nine months.

Tomorrow night I would be in Laos.

Soggy little Ky Son.