Si Pan Don, Laos

Also known as 4000 Islands.  Mat called it "as close to paradise as anything I know."  His wife almost died there, dengue fever in a land without real doctors. It's 18 hours from the closest second world city, a series of remote islands in the middle of nowhere in one of the poorest countries there is.  So I took it as a recommendation.

It took fourteen hours to reach the island from Vientiane.  First there was a sleeper -- a narrow bus crammed with dank inch-thick mattresses and itchy sheets.  The curtains hinting at privacy were useless -- people were sandwiched in at your head and your feet, and officials would jerk open the curtains unexpectedly.  I asked for any bed, "as long as it's far from the toilet."  So the agent reserved the three beds flanking the commode, just for us.  ("The other beds," he insisted, "they sized for Lao people.")  But it didn't matter: some pharmacy in Bangkok sold cheap knockoff xanex, so I slept like a lamb for ten hours.  Second was the minibus -- three dusty hours on an unpaved, uneven dirt road.  We followed the deep tracks of thousands of cars before us, veering left and right in a slalom, as if to avoid UXO.  Or to keep us awake and queasy.  And finally, in a small shack-filled town, we hopped a long-tail, and set off down the Mekong again.

Forty minutes later, the boat-driver shoveling bucket after bucket of water overboard, we arrived at Don Khon.  Rooms for a dollar a night.  Electricity for four to six hours a day.  You could check your email, of course, but it took an hour just to get there.  The ATM was a half-day's journey away, and involved phone calls, your passport, two men in bad suits, and half-a-dozen forms in triplicate. Hot water was never, but you didn't need it -- you were drenched in sweat by the time you'd toweled off, anyway.

And, about as far removed from the rest of the world as you could get, it was pretty close to paradise.  

 

We felt high-class, so rented a slick pair of bungalows for $12 each, with private hammocks sitting out over the Mekong.  Sit-down toilet.  A single electric outlet, useful only for a few hours.  Local women washed their hair in front of our balcony, while kids swam naked except for goggles and wooden guns.  We drank Beerlao out there to the sounds of birds and cicadas, but it was the chickens, dogs and pigs all over town that I loved the most, darting up to you and then bolting away at your strange smell.   Eden, this was.

We rented bikes, and took them out to the waterfalls.  Two mammoth falls where only tourists are fools enough to climb in.  (The locals know the falls are traps for spirits of the dead.  The few tourists that have tried, so we heard, didn't make it out.)  They were amazing to behold.

(*Maybe ignore the next paragraph if you like pets.  Or balked at Poultrygeist.  Or are named Mari or Gubba.)

I witnessed my second food-pet of Laos at the waterfalls, as some Chinese lady searched for the best lunch she could find.  Waiters in a stretch of restaurants would open their coolers of fresh fish -- begging her to come inside.  At the sight of a fat fish in one cooler, she did a double-take, but then kept walking.  The Lao waitress grabbed her. "Come back, you didn't see it all," she demanded. Or that's what she maybe said. It was in Lao.  She reached into the same cooler and hefted out a heavy plastic bag, revealing the drenched dripping fur of the dead cat inside.   The Chinese woman dismissively turned and walked away, while I resisted the urge to vomit on my flipflops.  It was horrible.  (The first food-pet was at the day market in Luang Prabang. A woman was selling her offerings from a plastic mat: one bunch of bananas and one roasted whole dog.  She wasn't to be confused with the woman selling one bunch of bananas and one dead rat, who was down another street the day before.)

(*Gubba or Mari can start reading again)

We got lucky in Don Khon -- we hit two of the island's annual celebrations the weekend we were there.  By big celebrations, I mean everyone gets mad drunk and hits the temples.  

Friday night, the Wat laid out a huge spread: hand-driven carousels, dart gambling, bands on a stage, dancing, and tons of food and drink.  

Old ladies lay inside the temple, minding babies and sucking on massive joints, while fifty kids crowded around a small TV watching brutal Thai kickboxing flicks.  They were mesmerized.

At the side, in a small tent lit by a hundred strings of christmas lights, a young monk told fortunes.  Fortunes?  Booze?  Kickboxing and doobies?  I didn't think any of this seemed too Buddhist, but I don't know much about much, so I thought "Why the hell not?"  You already know I got my fortune told.

As I kneeled in awkward prayer before him, hands wai'd before my face, the monk juggled a cup of chopsticks.  I plucked one out, he grabbed a microphone, and boasted my fortune to the entire temple.  It was in Lao.  I didn't understand a word.  And, being in a small Wat in a small town on an island in the middle of nowhere, not one person spoke English.  If they did, they were too drunk to remember any.  But he handed me a printout of my fortune, and I had someone translate it for me a few days later.

"This mean you will win everything in your life, you know," the guest-house manager proclaimed with a smile.  "Very good!  This like a Buddhist game, but is not game.  You will have nice wife, she is very nice.  You are like Pan, you know Pan?  He very old man, he have young wife.  You like Pan.  You are very proud to do that!  You are a very lucky man.  If you lost something, you will get it back."  Someone distracted him with a question about their laundry, and he walked away.  I picked up my discarded fortune.

Of my fortunes told, I liked this one the most so far.  Even if the monk might have been drunk.  I'd actually plucked a "6", and -- from what I can read -- he gave me a fortune for a "5."  I'd handed it back to him, saying "Ba ha, hok!"  But this might not have meant what I wanted it to, and he'd shoved the fortune back towards me, almost jubilant, and an old lady smiled, pushing it into my hand.  Maybe it was rigged.  Maybe his mistake was divine intervention.  Or maybe I can't read Lao and didn't know the rules of the not-game.  So I bought a bottle of warm beer instead, and watched teenagers dance to psychedelic Lao rock into the night.

Two days later, Don Khon was just about recovered from its hangover, and the calendars turned to International Women's Day.  And they celebrated again, with beer and whisky and singing and dancing in the temples, all day long.  A truck drove up and down the single road, generator and speaker strapped to the back, playing pop while drunks trailed and barking dogs gave chase.

I was sad to leave Don Khon.  Sad to leave my friends from Quebec.  Sad to scarper just as I was learning to suffer the incredible heat, developing a darker tan, and remembering the turns of the rocky path by the light of just the moon.  But it was time to get back to Bangkok, and civilization.