#2 Vang Vieng (The Black Hole)

Three South Africans and an American set out for the Laotian border with poor planning behind them and complete naivete ahead of them. The Saffers, as they and everyone else called the South Africans, were planning on having a little vacation before they started work at a school in the north of Bangkok, the American, me, was in search of a little adventure and the Saffers seemed a good avenue to trek down and find it. It took ten hours to get off the bus that had set out from Khaosan road for the border crossing at the friendship bridge. The bus alternated between unbearably cold and excruciatingly hot as we tried to occupy ourselves with books, sleep, and video games. The actual border crossing was a relatively short waiting game, visa on arrival was our only option and after a forty-five minute wait, and fifty dollars, we were granted entry to a country that the US dropped 260 million bombs on some forty years ago, I couldn't wait to see if the people would remember my countries great deeds in the name of a disgraceful cause.

Once across the border we had a more exciting four hour bus ride through the Laotian country side up to a small town called Vang Vieng. Known for it's famous tubing, the town had essentially become a year round fraternity party for international tourists looking for sex, drugs, thrills and a complete loss of consequences—for a time at least. Among the miscreants that I met in Vang Vieng there was an unfortunate looking British doctor, two New Yorkers who'd been married nine months earlier, a female native of Baltimore who would try and sleep with the unfortunate looking British doctor, a trio of eighteen year old Canadians, a trio of eighteen year old Dutchies, a Frenchman who refused to properly pay restaurant bills and his two Spaniard friends that tried quite hard to smooth things over, a couple of London ladies who worked in television and were constantly being mistaken for lesbians, and lastly and perhaps most importantly a sweet dutch girl that loaned me 100,000 kip (about $12.66) so that I could get the hell out of dodge in time to make it to work on Monday. The greatest strength of Vang Vieng is also its greatest weakness. A town so far removed from modernization that it truly is a black hole of time where one enters and time itself warps around you so that some seconds seem to be hours and some days seem to be so miniscule they are only sparks from a flint too wet to turn fire. Don't go to Vang Vieng without an exit plan or you'll end up as stuck as the American military in Vietnam, and probably with as many casualties too.

As we arrived in the town the Saffers decided it was a good idea to move into the hostel the bus pulled into. It was $7.60 a night for a double room and as two of the Saffers were a couple the obvious decision was that the other Saffer, Lauren, would share a room with me. That night was simple, we had dinner at the Aussie Bar and poured beer and whiskey down into our gullets at a pace I'd not experienced since the week before during my dealings with the Brit, the Swiss, and the Thai prostitutes they cavorted with. We went back to our hotel room and met an American who had gone tubing that day, he was so drunk and stoned that his thought process boiled down to only one basic concept, don't buy a tube when you go tubing, it's a waste of money. After this piece of insightful information I insensitively called this bald, drunk, stoned, American, Harry. I say insensitive because he was bald and as it turns out his name was Dave. So naturally we dubbed him Harry David, and to his credit he wasn't taken aback by my insensitivity, which was rather entertaining to us relatively sober folks. I do say relatively sober because in Vang Vieng sobriety is a matter of degrees. I was certainly not untouched by the alcohol I had been drinking but I would have trusted myself to make most major decisions and certainly to socialize safely without offending too many people. Harry David however, was so smashed and tired from his time on the river that day that had I been him I think I would have locked the door to my room with me inside it in fear that I might speak to someone I cared about. Harry David either didn't care about anyone or was so vastly impaired that he didn't even realize how nonsensical he had become. After meeting him, I couldn't wait to get on the river.

The next morning the Saffers wanted to move down the road to a hostel that was cheaper, to save sixty cents each we walked a block with our bags and moved into a room so much more inferior to our previous accommodations I do not believe I could accurately describe them. Then we were beset by the realization that Lauren, who had to get a new Thai visa before work on Monday, was faced with not enough money nor enough time to get these things taken care of. This revelation delayed our foray into debauchery for about three hours and much to my chagrin she began crying at the prospect of missing work and having been so stupid as to have traveled right by the Thai embassy without stopping off to leave her passport for processing. She would dry her eyes and begin drinking buckets before we would hop a Tuk Tuk to the river for our first true run in with the insanity of Vang Vieng.

The Tuk Tuk driver dropped us off in a little clearing that was twenty or thirty minutes up the road from the town. He crammed as many people as he could into his Tuk Tuk and charged us all 10,000 kip each, roughly a dollar and a quarter. Waiting at the clearing were a few Laotians who had been hired by the bars to greet you and advise you on the best course of action, this is all a joke. Once you walk through the brief bit of forest and arrive at the water's edge you realize that everything that had happened previously is no longer of importance, any promises made, any sage words of wisdom, all of it is useless when faced with the sight at hand. There is a river about one hundred yards across, and as you gaze down it you see a few wooden bridges strewn across it, a couple of sand banks with a rock or two sticking out of them, and down each side of the bank there are bars with platforms that stick out over the river and loud dance music blasting from speakers while foreigners and Lao's alike swing from trapeze and plummet into the rushing water amidst the masses of bodies of every color bouncing and drinking and sitting and laying on every part of every piece of this forsaken land. Behind the bars there are drinking games of various kinds, volleyball courts and frisbee accompanied by undercover police waiting to nab a dumb kid who lights up a bit of weed, and though I call him dumb I label him this only in the sense that common knowledge of the river disseminated by everyone is “Don't smoke weed on the river!” However if you'd like to drink until you vomit your brains out and then fly down a slide that starts on top of a building and deposits you into the thick of the river, that is of course perfectly fine.

We headed for the first bridge to enter the first bar and next to it was a young boy with a large tower full of what looked like beer. He had shot glasses of it and Jauck, one of the Saffers I was with, sat down cross legged on the bank, took the plate that was full of ten shot glasses and began downing them one at a time. He walked back over to me and told me it was actually red bull and whiskey to which I smiled and shook my head, Jauck was in for a bit of trouble at this pace. We all crossed the river and got beers and buckets, buckets are literally buckets filled with ice, coke, alcohol and red bull, then we sat on the edge of the bar watching the insanity that surrounded us. The Saffers were slow movers and they wanted to go from bar to bar every few hours, I realized that at that rate I would leave the river with the place that I had started at still in sight, so I struck out on my own rather quickly.

After doing a flip off the edge of the first bar and having a swim across the river to the second bar where I found a trio of Canadian girls who proved to me that not all foreigners one meets are worth meeting. These girls attached themselves to the first guy that would buy them a drink, which is funny since every bar on the river offered some sort of free promotional drink. Beautiful as they were I took leave of them and headed to the center of the platform. In the middle of the bar there was a bamboo shoot that was roughly twenty feet high and as thick around as my calf. After looking at it for a while one of the dubiously employed foreigners at the bar told me that if I climbed the pole I would get a free bucket. “I'm not much a fan of buckets,” I told her and she said she'd get me a beer. I wrapped my legs around that pole and was up it in about thirty seconds, after that people started trying to climb it and I didn't see anyone else get up it for over an hour, which is as long as I hung around there. For my next bit of travel I climbed the ladder that had been built onto a tree that overhung the river, there was a trapeze swing in it that they'd constructed using what looked like an old piece of a crane. The swing, at its lowest point was still ten meters off the water, and if I were to let go at the height of the swing I'd be guaranteed a painful entry into the water. To complicate things the water was deep enough to fall into but also shallow enough that if I were to go in like a pencil I'd definitely find the bottom. I know this because I was smart enough to swim around that part of the river before flinging myself in. If I'm going to do something stupid, I'm going to do it in the smartest way possible.

All the way down the river there were Lao's and occasionally foreigners wielding ropes with plastic bottles half full of water that they throw out to you to pull you in for a drink. The next bar I stopped off at required just such an entrance as it was in a particularly quick part of the river. There was nothing of note here except that a soccer game was being organized in the sand behind the bar. I eagerly joined in and killed quite a bit of time playing the game with the odd mix of foreigners and Lao's that seemed to produce the culture of the river. After a bit of time I backtracked to find the Saffers. Walking along the bank the beauty of the mountains that surrounded us began to set in. Everyone who goes to Vang Vieng talks endlessly about the tubing and all that goes with it, but rarely do you hear them remark about sipping a beer while hanging your feet over the edge of the river and gazing onto the Laotian mountainside. Beauty in nature is similar to beauty in most other instances, it can be missed if one doesn't take the time to notice it.

The Saffers were stuck very near the beginning, Lauren had taken up with a Lao boy who wore small red shorts and looked to be eleven years old. I smiled and shook my head at the whole thing, how many western men came to these countries and found themselves a Lao girl or boy who actually was eleven years old, at least I could be sure that this boy's free will was still intact. After briefly catching up with the Saffers I realized just how much I wanted to be farther down the river and so I took off back into the water. I found myself almost immediately out of sight of the first round of bars and quickly approaching another set that seemed less raucous. I also found myself in the midst of a group of about ten people who actually had tubes, a rare sight on this river. I got into a British girls tube and to my absolute delight she was quite nice. This was one half of the Londoners who would be mistaken for lesbians. Among them was the British doctor, the New Yorkers, the girl from Maryland and a few others who would end up being of no consequence.

We stopped off at a bar that advertised some food and also had a huge tiled slide that began at the top of their two story bar/house and swung up at the bottom like a ski jump. I took a few runs on this slide and found it quite enjoyable thanks to the tremendous speed you could pick up if you flung yourself off the landing at the top and really flattened out as you slid down the tiles. It was also at this bar that I would discuss with the American girl why I hated Baltimore and why she loved it. Everyone in the group abstained from commenting except for the New Yorkers who were split on the merits of Baltimore. Eventually after the night was over I would meet up with the British doctor, who happened to be from Cardiff, and he would confirm for me her lack of intelligence as she got him in bed and upon finding out that he didn't have a condom told him to fuck her anyway. She didn't portray herself as terribly smart in general but certainly not dumb enough to ask a doctor to have sex with her without a condom in the middle of a Laotian party town that probably had seen every manner of sexual disease there is to see. Needless to say the doctor kindly said no thank you. Perhaps one day, thanks to our friend from Baltimore, Vang Vieng will get it's own STD named after it.

With the sun setting and all of us exhausted from the drink and the sun and the water we shared a Tuk Tuk back to town. I showered and went looking for the girls from London but not before I ran into the Saffers and lovely Lauren who still had the little Lao boy attached to her. In all the time I spent with him, which would end up being more than I would have liked, he spoke less than thirty words of either English or Laotian. I missed the Londoners and ended up drinking wine with a Frenchman who was helping to run the restaurant in one of the higher class hotels in town, a three story building that offered a view of the river from every room. I wasn't disappointed with the early night, I was tired and new there was much more in the very near future.

Now it would be quite nice if I could end the night here, if I had just slept pleasantly and forgotten my dreams in the morning while eating a small plate of Phad Thai or a baguette and cheese, but this was not in the cards. I awoke at roughly two in the morning to a banging at my door. I looked in the bed next to me and realized that Lauren was not in it so I assumed it was her. I was right, she was standing there in the open air hallway that led us to our room, I didn't know where her key was but at this point I didn't really care because behind her was the young looking Lao boy wearing the same red swim suit that he'd been wearing the whole day, and of course as before, no shirt. I wasn't quite sure what to say, perhaps I aught ask her how the night had been, maybe she wants the room to herself for a bit, really it didn't matter what she wanted at that point, I was sleeping in this crummy bed that we were paying for and that was that. I said “hello” and then turned and climbed right on top of my pillow where I'd been moments before. I closed my eyes but I did not sleep, sleep would come eventually but I was listening intently for what would happen next. Lauren and the Lao boy walked into the room laid down on the bed and began kissing. Nothing too suggestive, just simple, and I can only imagine, awkward kisses. The sort of kiss you give when your parents might be watching. I set a line right there in my own heart, should she begin to go any farther I'd stand straight up and make a scene, after all, her best friend was in the next room and I can't imagine that she'd want her to know that she just took this little incommunicable Lao boy into a bed with a man who by all common standards had been quite nice to her. After a few minutes the kissing stopped and sleep overtook us all, thankfully there were no moments in the night that I awoke to find any sort of unsavory business going on but when I woke up in the morning I dressed and left the room quickly so that they could have at least the few waking hours of morning to themselves.

The next morning the Saffers took off to go to Vientiane and sort out their visa issues. I loaned the equivalent of $100 dollars to Lauren so that she could survive the weekend in Lao and then get home, I knew it was more than enough. Truthfully I felt bad for her, she had to apologize for bringing the Lao boy into our bed and then in the same breath ask me for money. Why on earth she thought it would be a good idea to go to Lao without any money I can't imagine, but mistakes get made and I couldn't very well just turn her down and leave her stranded in Vang Vien, little did I know I would find myself in her position very soon. That was still a ways off however, and I had another day on the river to partake in. It was similar to the last day except that my body was a little less energetic, despite this I spent my time perfecting my flips off the trapeze and getting to know some of the Lao's that hung around the river. The owner of one of the bars offered me a job but when he found out I was a teacher in Bangkok he told me I didn't want the job and that he hoped to see me again. I couldn't imagine working on that river and having my boss bribe the police to let me work and overstay my visa. Besides, that much drinking and sun would certainly amount to a complete destruction of all my senses. The day eventually did come to an end and the company of the Londoners, the British doctor and the New Yorkers made it come all that much quicker. We decided to meet for dinner later that night.

I laid down for a nap and woke up too late to meet the others for dinner so I walked around until I found a restaurant without any foreigners in it. They were grilling pork ribs on the sidewalk and serving them at a collection of four tables under a wooden overhang that was book ended on either side by rather large houses. As I sat there and ate raw cabbage and pork an old Laotian man began calling to me in French from the front yard of the house next to the restaurant. Being a former French colony it was not unusual for the older Laotians to speak French, and consequently they all spoke better English than most Thai's. I did my best to communicate with him and the young men he was surrounded by laughed as my broken French probably made me sound like a three year old. Then he came over and began pouring me beer, I tried to tell him no and that I was more than happy to drink my water as I had been drinking all day but he wouldn't have any of it. Then one of the men in the restaurant told me the old man wanted me to sit in his front yard with him, so I did. We sat there trying to communicate and the Laotian from the restaurant translated some of the French into English for me, but very quickly I was exhausted again and had to go home. Before I left the old Laotian man began puckering his lips and making kissing sounds at me, everyone seemed to think this was extraordinarily funny and my occasional translator from the restaurant told me not to worry and that he wasn't gay. Gay or not it was time for sleep, and this time it was uninterrupted and deep.

Nothing of particular note happened over the next day, the same as the days before with the exception of more rain and a random spat of line dancing at one of the bars. There's a ridiculous line dance that is popular in South East Asia and the song it is done to is extremely monotonous and unfortunately extremely catchy. Watching forty foreigners doing it in sync was great, especially when one of the New Yorkers tried to join in but with such poor timing he really was simply an embarrassment.

Later that night I was reading out in front of the hostel I was staying at when I began talking with a Dutch girl who was hanging around. She was going to dinner that night with a Frenchman and two Spaniards. We made our way to the outskirts of town and ended up having dinner at the fancy hotel I had been at a few days before. The food we ordered was delicious and only marginally more expensive than the normal food I would have ordered. It was about four dollars a plate. We were there quite late and the waiter eventually brought us the bill without our asking for it. We each put in our money right away, first the Dutch girl, then the two Spaniards and then myself. I counted the money and we were still short 50,000 kip before we gave the check to the Frenchman. The Frenchman sat there finishing his food and didn't touch the bill for some time, it began to feel awkward and rude as the waiter was obviously interested in going home and we had all put our money in but the Frenchman had not. After fifteen minutes of the waiter standing at our table waiting the Frenchman looked up at him and said, “Time to pay?” The waiter nodded and the Frenchman opened the check book and put some money in, I didn't see how much he put in but when the waiter counted the money at the next table over there was only 15,000 kip of change left and just between the two Spaniards and myself there should have been 20,000 in change. To make matters worse the Frenchman claimed he was owed 10,000 kip in change as well. To be perfectly clear we are talking about a grand total of about three or four dollars, but the Frenchman was rather offended that the values were not accurate and began accusing the waiter of stealing our money or adding it up wrong. The Spaniards began speaking with the Frenchman in Spanish and what I caught of their conversation was something along the lines of, “Forget it, it's nothing.” the Frenchman did not want to forget it but eventually the Dutch girl, who was only twenty, just said thank you to the waiter and he left. I was glad to forget the whole event and I didn't go with them to the club but instead went straight to my room and to sleep.

Saturday was when all the fun happened. All of the banks shut down on the weekend and all of the ATM's stopped working. The money changers machines wouldn't work and all the foreigners in the town looked at each other and had a momentary panic attack. I had to catch my bus by 1:30 so that I could catch a night train or a bus into Bangkok from Vientiane. I didn't even have enough money to pay for my hotel bill, about fifteen dollars, nor did I have enough money to get the bus to Vientiane, about six and a half dollars. After walking to all five ATM's and going back to the money changers a few times each I was prepared to email work and tell them I wouldn't be there on Monday, that's when I ran into the Dutch girl from dinner the night before. I spoke with her for a minute or two and she lent me 100,000 kip to pay my hotel bill and allow me to get a bus ticket to Vientiane where I hoped I would be able to find a working ATM or some other way of getting money out. Vientiane is the capital city of Laos and I imagined that in a capital city money could be had at any hour on any given day of the year. Of course, the trip was not so simple. First the guy who sold me the ticket at the hostel didn't give me a ticket or write me down on the log to get on the bus so I had to walk back into town from the bus station and convince him that in fact I had not lost my ticket and no one made any mistake on the log. I had no more money so it was very simple, either he was going to give me a ticket or I wasn't leaving. Eventually he did get me on a bus but this bus was hardly big enough for me to fit in the seats and nothing like the massive luxury liner I was supposed to be booked on, no matter to me though, I was on my way and in four hours I would be in a place that hopefully, would be a little bit less isolated.

Once in Vientiane the task of getting on the bus to Bangkok was no less easy. I ran into the British doctor at the bus station and he told me to catch a ride with him on the mini van to the border where a large bus was waiting to take him to Bangkok. The van stopped off at an ATM for me to get money out to pay my ticket but, unknown to me, anyone with a VISA card was not able to get money on the weekends. The logic of this makes no sense to me as everyone with Master Card could get money, but that was the way that it was. Luckily across the street there was a western union so I ran over to it. I asked the girl behind the counter for 1000 baht. She told me that she could take kip out for me and then exchange it for baht. I knew that the ticket was 900 baht so I really didn't care. She handed me the kip which I handed right back to her and then she counted the money three times. By this time the mini van had started it's engine and I could see the driver looking over to me wondering what was taking so long, no doubt thinking that I didn't have the money at all. When the woman behind the counter was done she informed me that she needed more kip to give me 1000 baht. Apparently she had to charge me a 3% fee, something that did not occur to her to inform me about. Something about me saying I wanted 1000 baht didn't translate so now I had 500 baht and a mess of kip, which was useless when buying tickets to Bangkok. I headed to the bus and borrowed 400 baht from the doctor, after explaining what happened at the western union he was flabbergasted, like I was, that she didn't have any smaller bills than 500's. No matter, I was done, off on my way back to Bangkok and unlike my Saffer friends I wouldn't have my things stolen.

To tie things up a bit, Lauren took her little Lao boy with her to Vientiane. I spoke with the other two Saffers when I got back to Bangkok and they said that the entire weekend they never saw him wear anything else except for his little red shorts, he never even put on a shirt. Apparently they parted ways that Sunday when Lauren decided it was a good idea to head back to Vang Vien despite having work on Monday. She eventually blew all the money I gave her and had to have her parents wire her money. None of this she told me herself of course, but nonetheless, when she showed up at work that Thursday she reminded me more of a refugee than anything else. I suppose karma does work in funny ways though because while she was asleep on the bus she had all of her things stolen, shoes, phone, bags, everything. It's a good thing I work with her otherwise I may never get my money back.

For now ta ta folks, and whenever you use an ATM, think of me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOE23Jehc8o Here's a link to the dance song. Unfortunately I couldn't find a video of anyone actually doing the dance, they're all probably too embarrassed.