The End of This Road

To be honest, my next couple of days in Vang Vieng were mostly repeats of the same, but with the British kids instead. We played around in the water a lot more; I hardly drank at all, except for taking some of the radioactive snake whiskey shots just for kicks. Instead I just subjected myself to the cruelest of water punishments my body’s ever handled, and pushed myself more and more; I think, ultimately, the biggest drop I took was about 20 feet or so into the water, which was pretty wild. I would love to go back and push myself some more; who knows when Laos will call me back.

The first of the next couple of days with this group was the birthday of one of our crew members, Beth, and to celebrate, we went to an Indian restaurant that she was particularly excited about, and it was actually quite good. I sure love me some naan bread.

Some other short stories:

At some point during the madness, I ran into the Russian-Israeli girl that I had originally met back in Chiang Mai in Thailand, as she was carrying some flowers on the way to her other Israeli friend whose birthday it was. She recognized me after a moment, and it was an awkward minute, in which she seemed even almost concerned, and I brushed her aside with ease.

One of the last days, the Danish guy I had also met in Chiang Mai, Jens, showed up, and we hung out at the river together as well; we never did quite manage to hang out further in that town, but we had a few good hours, and made tentative plans to meet again in Shanghai further along in his travels (which, as of the time of this writing, has since transpired. We had a good one night of bar crawling in Shanghai in the rain, along with a few other friends of mine, in a variety of bars that were completely devoid of other customers, bizarrely so).

There was also a night where I decided to not hang out with the British people for at least a little while, and I instead found myself wandering around the streets some. I think I might be giving myself a little too much credit; I think this might’ve been a night where everyone just sort of disappeared, as they were either sick, exhausted, or hooking up, and I had no part in any of it. So I wound up close to the bar where me, Evan and crew had started out that one night, with a pool table. I had a beer, and got bored, and started to walk away, when I ran into Roland, a British guy (also living in Shanghai, but, working here) that I had met a few days prior when I was with Evan’s gang and the Irish girls.

This guy was off of his mind after having consumed one too many mushroom shakes. I’ve never seen anyone tripping this hard before in my life, and, as I could vaguely count him as a friend in the way that backpackers do, I felt a mild responsibility to watch over him for a bit. So we stumbled, thanks to him, back into that bar, and as I just hung out politely smiling and laughing when appropriate, but he was totally in his own world, and it was probably utterly unnecessary. After a little while, he went straight to a group of three people hanging out at a small table and crashed their little world.

I tried to apologize for him, but they were cool about it, so I ended up sitting down too, and we chatted for the next couple of hours. They were all Dutch, including a Dutch chief of police who was a bit upset over how friendly Roland was with his girlfriend (who thought it was hilarious, especially when he tried to lean it to kiss her and utterly failed). I mostly talked to the third Dutch guy; he had some pretty boring job, but he was a super friendly guy. The three of them were all in their 30s, and all taking extended leaves of absence from their jobs. A couple hours later, I was tired enough, and I think they were also, so we all said our goodbyes, figuring we’d meet again on the river.

We did, actually, on the Slide of Death. I wish I had gotten pictures of them, because they were really sweet people, and they would’ve been worth keeping in touch with, but such is life. I’ve made a lot of new contacts from my travels, I can’t be too dissatisfied with what I’ve accomplished so far.

Here's a few photos of the people I did catch on camera from these days:

But a few days passed, and a few more fingernails got painted, and it was time for me to say goodbye. I needed to get racing back to Shanghai; there were a lot of concerns in my mind about how it was going to be timed, for me to get back in time to start classes again. I had had to wait until the Monday of the week I needed to be back (Friday at the latest) to get my visa back to China, and I got a overnight service for the Visa, so I could take an overnight bus back up to Luang Prabang on Tuesday. From there I’d try to continue on to the border with China, hopefully before 5pm on the Wednesday so that I could actually cross over, and continue my journey on from there.

So I had a final farewell dinner at the Aussie Bar, getting one last huge burger in me before moving on my way. I was expecting the Brits to show up, as we had arranged a specific time for it, but I wasn’t too worried about it when I was all alone. I ordered a beer and sat back; a young girl came by, started talking to the owner a little bit, and he actually sat her down with me. We ended up chatting for the next hour, and ordered our respective meals.

If she had been my last person to talk to in Vang Vieng, I would’ve been totally fine with that. However, my other friends ultimately did show up, and we arranged a couple of long tables for seating all of us. At this point, the girl I had been talking to started to ratched up acting drunkenly obnoxious a bit, and the chemistry was just off between everyone all of a sudden. No matter, I still enjoyed my burger before I left. I checked in with the office nearby to see if my passport had returned yet, which it had, and then I relaxed for the last hour or so that I had until my bus was due to leave back up to Luang Prabang.

I said my goodbyes, made my hugs, and made my way out. Then, I sat at that bus station for about three or four hours, as the bus showed up over two hours late. There was nothing I could do about it, though, so I sat, and took a couple pictures of this lonely station, as I was the only one getting on a bus this evening.

Finally it did come, though, and I got on, and it was dark and dreary. I don’t remember if I managed to sleep at all, but I doubt it. We arrive in Luang Prabang at 5am, just at daybreak. I had little to do until the next bus, which didn’t leave until maybe 9am or so, to get up to the border with China. I went back to JoMo’s bakery and got myself another solid breakfast, thanked god it opened at 6am, and then got into a tuk tuk that was probably the most confused tuk tuk driver ever. Luckily I had a lot of time to kill, but he kept going back and forth trying to figure out which bus station I was supposed to be at, asking for directions and stuff.

He did get me there, eventually, and an hour later, I found myself on a bus to Luang Namtha, the northern hub of Laos, from which I’d be able to continue on to the border town of Boten.

When I got to Luang Namtha, I had finished reading Burmese Days by George Orwell. They dropped me off at a random intersection with not so much as a goodbye and good luck, and I looked around, being sleep deprived after over 15 hours of transit, with not so much as a single word of English in sight, and was completely lost.

Ultimately, some gus sitting around some minivans and I were able to roughly communicate, and they knew I wanted to go to the border. They charged a rate I thought was exorbitant, but I had pretty much no control over it, as I wasn’t about to walk 20 km to the border.

So I paid up and hauled myself in to the jankiest van I’ve ever been in. The thing’s engine broke down several times on this tiny stretch to the border, it was so pathetic. By the time we got to the border, unfortunately, it was 530pm, and the immigration offices were shut down, so I was stuck in town for the night.

Boten is the crappiest excuse for a town I’ve ever been in. If there were more than ten Lao people there, I’d be shocked. It’s entirely for Chinese people crossing over the border, to get all kinds of things that are illegal within China itself.

I had to find some place to sleep, so I walked a mile from the border to the town itself, and asked around for a while to try and find my ways to the cheapest lodgings available. There were no ATMs in town, so that made things trickier, as I was down to my last bills of Kip, and ultimately I got stuck in a “hotel” that was actually a lot of rooms divided in two with basically thick cardboard walls to increase the number of rooms, with simple hard mattresses and TV sets with DVD players. I hunkered down, went out to buy some noodles, then came back with a couple of beers and watched bootlegged copies of Iron Man and some other crap movie, and then passed out, with my alarm set to get me up nice and early.

I got up the next day and walked back across the border, said goodybe to Laos, and walked another half mile to the Chinese immigration office. It was obvious there was a lot of construction going on in the area in anticipation of further cross border traffic in the future, as Chinese investment in Laos builds up.

Something I forgot to mention was that as I went further north from Luang Prabang, there was a lot of road construction and expansion going on, all carried out entirely by Chinese construction firms and Chinese people. It was kind of fascinating in a political science kind of way.

But I did make it across the border, and I got all stamped in and such, and when I found myself on the other side, I had no explanation for how I was supposed to get to Mengla, the Chinese equivalent of Boten. Here, I was suckered into getting a taxi to the nearest town from which I could get a bus all the way back to Kunming. It would be an expensive taxi ride, although nowhere near as expensive as that legendary taxi ride in Japan, for those of you who have faithfully been following for a while, but it would certainly be a fast way to get to where I was going.

The lady who drove me was really kind; she actually took me even though I didn’t have any cash, on the agreement that I’d get some from a bank at our destination, which of course I followed through on.

From there, it was another 12 hour ride to Kunming, in which I read in its entirety a book called something like The Girl in the Photograph, which was about the life story of a girl who was the central subject of a very important photograph taken in the later years of the Vietnam War. This book moved me to tears on multiple occasions, causing my other passengers to wonder what was going on, most likely, but, whatever.

When I got in to Kunming, it was already close to 11pm, and I had to wait another 10 hours or so until my airplane back to Shanghai for the next day.

I made a return trip to the Hump Hostel that half of my friends had stayed at back at the start of the Yunnan trip, and hung out there for a couple of hours with some young French guys who were just starting up a tour of Western China, debating politics as tends to happen with Europeans, and then finally left when the staff said I couldn’t hang out overnight if I wasn’t paying, and made my way to a McDonald’s, where I put my head down for a few hours, until I thought it was time to get going.

There’s some poetry in here somewhere, I know it. But it was time to get going, and get back to my life in Shanghai.