Laos....on a motorbike circa 2001....old Overgrow post..

[Gypsy Nirvana]

Laos......(S.E.Asia) on a Motorbike!!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Resuming my search for the perfect tropical sativa:

Seventy thousand feet above Culcutta in a Thai Airways Jumbo Jet (was really 33,000ft, but I was that High!). I awoke a little befuddled because I had taken 20 milligrams of Diazipam (Valium) 8 hours ago to sleep thru most of this longhaul, non-stop flight from London Heathrow to Bangkok. One of the Thai trolley dollies came by and handed me a hot and clean scented towel to wipe the sand out of my eyes and I started to come out of my drug induced tranquillisation thousands of feet above the Bay of Bengal.

Heathrow airport had been an absolute nightmare since I had arrived for a 10.50a.m. flight nice and early at 9.00 a.m. Once I had checked in and made my way to the departure lounge it became apparent that there was going to be a delay, the delay turned into nearly all day.

Eventually the flight left the airport at 6.p.m.!! By that time I was sick and tired of being in the twilight zone of transit, bored stiff with walking around all the so-called duty free shops, mind-numbingly disturbed for having to walk by these Burberry and Harrods overpriced clip joints, over and over again, for hours and hours and hours. Before I had left home I had topped my meds up with a nice fat spliff full of H.D. sativa and some of the Tibliza hashish that I had acquired in Tilburg, Holland a few weeks back when I had been running around Southern Holland with K.C.Brains. I had decided to take the hash with me to Thailand because I was not certain to score some good weed as soon as I landed and did not really want to take the risk, preferring to rely on my own stash until I felt comfortable scoring some Thai weed in Thailand once, or if I could locate some old friends. The 20 gram lump of Tibliza hash had to be cut in half for me to be able to fit it all into a 'Swan Vesta' match box, crammed in with a packet of hemp smoking rolling papers. This matchbox with its illegal contents would soon be passing thru Thai customs at Don Muang airport in Bangkok safely nestled up against my testicles, hopefully they would not end up being searched.

Modern Bangkok....

Thailand had been an old stomping ground for me years ago when I lived in Hong Kong and could get a $100 return ticket to Bangkok back then for some serious rest and recuperation from running a security company in the red-light area of Wan Chai. Still most every year I return for one reason or another. This time I was just after getting a visa to gain entry into Laos, a small and very poor country that lies to the North-East of Thailand.

When I had boarded the Thai Airways B747-300/400 I had been handed a copy of Asia week, which had a bunch of facts and figures in it pertaining to many nations economies.
For Laos the G.D.P. or gross domestic product (a measure of the total value of all goods and services produced by all resident producing units of a country in one year) it is just $280 u.s.d. per year!! In the U.K. that figure is $23,793, in the U.S.A. it is $35,277 and in Thailand that figure comes out at $1984 u.s.d. Laos is a very poor country by world standards indeed.

I slept for most of the flight, thanks to the sedative powers of the diazepam, 20 milligrams knocked me out for a solid 8 hours, long haul flights are a total drag in my book, especially if your lower back resembles mine, sleeping is the best option, and by the time that the effects had worn off we were just about to land. Just before we did I went to the toilet and put the Swan Vestas matchbox with the hash and rolling papers down my underwear. If it was to be found then they would have to put me thru a full body search, and usually (touch wood) it does not go further than a cursory baggage search.

 

[Gypsy Nirvana]

Killing time in Bangkok....

Typhoon the driver told me that in Bangkok the average working wage was around 6,000 Baht a month (about £100 sterling or $150 u.s.d.) when I asked him. So when he had taken me back to the hotel I gave him a nice 500 Baht tip (about $12).

With a couple of days to kill in Bangkok, what can you do but shop?, or at least window shop. The whole place seems geared to flogging as many products as possible.

Everywhere you go virtually is decked out with accompanying food, clothing, mobile phone, gold, shoes, you name it, it's there! I wandered thru mazes of shopping malls interlinked, you could tell when you were between them because the aircon ran out, and suddenly you were sweating, especially if you walked fast, then you would be soaked thru any clothing in a matter of minutes. In these monolithic shopping malls they have huge food eating/food stall areas where you have to buy coupons to give to any individual food seller that you might want to buy from at a 'Coupon Booth' Then you pay for you food, whatever it may be (and some times you are not so sure) with these coupons in 5-10 and 20 Baht denominations. When you leave this food fair, if you have any coupons left, then you have to go back to a 'Coupon Refund Booth' to get your money back. Was all so bloody confusing for me, probably not helped by the fact that I was completely Mullard on the Tibliza Hashish. I just went in and got these smiling Thai ladies to fix me some chow. Then I pulled a few bills out to pay and they just kept saying 'Coupon!', Coupon!, and pointing somewhere way over the other side, where I had just come from.

Stoned.....Thai......Munch-Out!!

Man I had the munchies bad!! For hours I had been wandering around without eating a thing and the only reason that I was going to do it now was because my guts had started up with that drained noise, plus a touch of gurgling, and that Thai green chicken curry smelled so bloody delicioso!! Bollocks! My mouth had already started to salivate as she ladled that spicy culinary delight over the fresh steaming Thai fragrant rice. Now I looked like a complete Div, and they were giggling at me as I realised that I would have to trek right over to the other side of this food bonanza to queue up to buy bits of paper coupons with my bits of paper money! Must be doing it so as not to let the employees handle any cash!

I bought a bunch of boot-leg D.V.D's and went back to the Landmark Hotel where I was staying with all intents and purposes of going for a well needed swim, then I remembered that I could not do that so I just zoned out on watching a very blurry copy of 'The Planet Of the Apes', and an absolutely excellent film called 'Heaven and Earth', Directed by Oliver Stone, based around the Vietnam-American conflict.


Looking up old friends....

Later I wandered out of the hotels air-conditioned luxury over to the other side of Sukhumvit Road to Soi 5 to see if Jimmy Wong had opened his studio yet. It was 7.p.m. but still it was shut so I went and hung out at some bar where the ladies made a fuss of me because I bought a beer.

First two of them came around me with cold towels and rubbed my neck and forehead to cool me down and take the sweat off me, then they kept flirting in any way that they could, trying to make as much eye contact as possible, and pinching and squeezing you constantly. You could not have much of a conversation with them, since their English, or any other language for that matter (bar Thai) was rudimentary to say the least. I stared at the video that they were playing, and most of what they showed was boy bands, these prefabricated half talent-no talent record company produced pretty boys posing about and warbling about love. Whatever happened to ROCK AND ROLL!!?? Some of the girls could be quite rude, and kept trying to grab you, so I would just move on to a place where they left you alone with but a smile.

Yeah... I had already sown my wild oats here back in the 80's as a younger man, and found the experience to be a momentary fun/release thing, but never thought that I could have a good long term understanding relationship with a Thai lady. Wham bam thank you maam is all it ever amounted to with me back then, and could not see the worth of just getting my rocks off in the same way again. Been there, done that, got the T-Shirt and video, shagged myself silly there years ago. I wanted to get to Laos, the scene here in Bangkok was nothing new to me, and it got tiring, quickly.

On top of Bangkok!!

Jimmy Wong was there later on at his shop and I invited him over to the Landmark Hotel Bar for a drink. Went up to the Piano bar on the 31st floor in this glass elevator that gave me a distinct case of vertigo What a city-scape it revealed, wow!

We chatted about this and that, and he confirmed my suspicions that most of the good grass in Thailand was coming from Laos and that the Cambodian stuff that was around was generally not nearly as good. Jimmy drank orange juice and would not toke up with me in my room because he had to go back to work later and Tattooing needs much accurate concentration, unless you want to ink someone for life with a completely botched up job! Even though this huge hotel was only 400 yards from his shop, he had never been here and he revelled in the fact that he could actually see right outside his shop from here, because we were right across the road, but 31 stories up! So Jimmy split to go back to work on the big Russian.

 

[Gypsy Nirvana]

On my way FINALLY to Laos!!

The hotel car was booked for 5.30 a.m. to take me to Don Muang airport, so I stayed up all night, wandering around the alleys and klongs of Bangkok, purposefully getting lost, with no real direction or aim but to look and walk. I went thru areas full of big people from various African countries who would talk in very loud voices, in their own tongues at each other, as if they had some perpetual row going on, maybe I caught them in a crisis? There were still many people sleeping on the street, and I was propositioned by something or other every half block or so. The creatures of the night were out in all their finery. Katoi's (lady-boys) would affect feminine voices as you passed to try and get you to pay attention to them. They would even follow you, calling out something like 'Hey, you like me?' The same would go for older, tired looking women who could no longer work the clubs for business, and I guess that they perhaps looked their best right then in the middle of the night, and not the bright light of day.
I just passed ignoring these calls to what would probably be an unsavoury encounter and strode on till 4.30 a.m. when I hopped in a Tuk-Tuk (3 wheeled Dihatsu taxi) to speed me back to my luggage, and to check out of the hotel.

Completely knackered, and well stoned after toking up on more hash in my room, disguising the smell with my strong Vietnamese incense and flushing the roach and ash down the toilet. I checked out and slipped into the quiet air-conditioned comfort of the black limo, which whisked me to the airport in seconds, well it could have been hours, because I was sound asleep.

Vientiane.....

Getting out of Thailand has always been a heart-racer for me since most times I have been carrying something that could get me in serious hot water if found. This time was no exception since I still had a nice chunk of the Moroccan hash in a 'Killer Loop' sunglasses bag in my pants!
I don't know of an X-Ray machine yet that can spot 10 grams of hash attached to your nuts yet, so I reckoned that I had a pretty good chance of getting it to Laos with me. I kept to my usual airport protocol of staying relatively quiet and straight faced, and made it thru to the departure lounge without a hitch, just an hour and a half to kill looking at so called duty free items that were at least 30% more expensive than in the centre of Bangkok.

The flight to Vientiane was at 08.20 and left around that time I reckon. I watched the Choapraya river reveal its stark, meandering brownness as we gained altitude and the huge built up area that is Bangkok around it slowly disappear into the clouds. I slept but managed to take some pics when I could see much from out of the small scratched window of the Thai Airways airbus. It was just an hour until we started to decent below the heavy cloud cover, and I caught my first few glimpses of the forests of Laos. Yeah, sure it was very green, then we came in to land at a very wet Vientiane airport. It was pissing down.

Lane-Xang on arrival...

Vientiane is positioned on a bend of the Mekong River. It was once one of the Lao valley fiefdoms that were consolidated around the time that Europe was just leaving the Dark Ages.
The Lao who settled here chose the area because the surrounding alluvial plains are so incredibly fertile. Over the ten or so centuries of its history Vientiane has lost its standing as an independent city and has been controlled at some time or other by the Vietnamese, Burmese, Siamese, Khmers, Japanese and the French. The name Vientiane can be translated as 'Sandalwood City' and is actually pronounced 'Wieng Chan'. Seems like the French glossed it up some to make it more easily pronounceable.

No hot water though!!......don't really need it!

As far as classical Indo-Chinese cities go, it is one of the three (along with Phnom Penh
Customs didn’t even take a sniff at me at the airport. It seemed like they all were glad to see me, and it took just 45 seconds to be processed by Laos immigration.
I pulled a guidebook out on Laos, and made my mind up that I would go and have a look at the Lane-Xang hotel, which was positioned right next to the Mekong river. This place, until recently was considered to be the best hotel in town for any visiting V.I.P.'s (am I?). What I liked most about it was that it had a pool and I could finally swim. Well the pool wasn’t exactly pristine, a bit run down looking, and you had a good view of the hotel staff chowing down on the afternoon rice dish!!. But the water was not quite green, so I took a suite, 2 big rooms and a huge separate bathroom for $50 a night (£35 sterling)!! You would be very lucky to get a flophouse at that price in London for the night.

 

[Guest 26753]

Great read mate. They were heady days back then, in more ways than one lol

 

[spindlywicket]

Not going to post more?

 

[cellardweller]

trying to delete

 

[h^2 O]

i love these stories. Hight Times used to do an expose' or two on different people or even boats...it was cool.
why'd this get binned and resurrected like jebediah springfield?

 

[imnotcrazy]

Yo I think Oldpink asked no one post in here cause it's going to take Gypsy like 34 posts to tell the whole tale or something like that. They wanted to keep the whole thing in a bunch of successive posts so I'm betting ours will be deleted

 

[oldpink]

yeah its a work in progress, theres a lot of pic's that need to sort and 34 pages of text to sort out

 

[icmag.is.#1]

ok sooo ive been waiting a couple of days for the next segment of the story but..... WHERE IS IT!?


is gypsy still alive or are you getting it all organized before you begin to post the rest of the story?

 

[Gypsy Nirvana]

Checking it out....
From the outside this 4 story hotel looked a bit rotten, with streaks of grey dirt all over the front, and back for that matter, seemed like they needed to spend a few quid to tart it up a bit. Inside it was all old polished hard wood floors, and excellent service. I was checked in and toking a fat one within 15 minutes!! This mellowed me out so much that I dozed off for a couple of hours before venturing out to the Mekong River and checking out what small stalls lay along its shores. There was a Laotian family that had one of these eating/drinking establishments, and I am always attracted by laughter/activity, so that is where I went to sit staring out over the Mekong sipping on a tall bottle of Bier Lao whilst showing the kids, Mother, Father and Grandma the wonders of digital photography by taking some 5 second Mpegs of them and playing them back on the camera monitor.

After saying my farewells to them I strolled on content to discover a new sight at every available corner. There were beautiful old colonial French villas standing tall with heavily louvered windows, many of them really showing there age, and in a certain way a classic beauty, like relics of a by-gone era. Many temples or 'Watts' did I pass with their extremely ornate and colourful facades, gradually getting warmer and warmer as my exertions at walking sweated me up. The laid back, slow pace of Vientiane did not bring forth visions of what I reckoned cities were all about. It was more like a provincial town to me.

I needed air-con and transport, so I could think of no better way than hiring or buying a good motorcycle. Lo and behold such a place as would hire me a fine Honda 250 dirt bike was just around the next corner. First of all I had to get my passport as collateral, for this is what they required before they would impart with any of their motorcycles, for a fee of course, and the fee was for only $20 u.s.d. for one day. They first made sure that I could actually ride a bike, so I took one of the lads that worked there back to my hotel to get my passport on a 225cc Yamaha. It lacked power and I was not too impressed, but was keen to get some sort of transport for the trip North in my search for the Perfect Tropical Sativa. With his basic and very difficult to decipher English, he told me that he had a Honda 250cc, and that I could take that for the same price!

Sure enough upon our return a 250cc Honda stood high off the ground outside the little Vietnamese restaurant that the bikes were hired out of. They never asked me if I had a licence, good job too since mine was back in the U.K.!!

I swung my left leg over the saddle and sat tall, with my feet just nicely planted on the ground on either side. I didn’t even have to kick-start it because it had an electric starter, unlike my old Yamaha 250 'XT' or 'The Jumping Master' which I once owned back in San Francisco 20 years past. Oh right, I remember clearing the intersection of Leavenworth Street 7ft up in the air after coming up Taylor at 60 miles an hour on that baby a few times, WoW!, but I was a very young man then. I'm 41 now, and believe you me I feel it some days, what with all the use and sometimes abuse my body gets and has taken.

 

[Gypsy Nirvana]

Back on the road again.....I'm burning one for Overgrow here!!
Yeah!! what a F***ing buzz man.....Wow!.....just to open up a half way decent bike (for Laos this was like having a Harley!!)....and feel the kick of that single cylinder. I hauled ass thru Vientiane smiling at those that I passed, some of them on their little Honda Dreams catching up with me when I slowed, but all I had to do was kick it down a gear or two and Wheeeyyy-Hheeeey!!, the bike ROCKED!!

Most of the time I just puttered along in 4th gear with that loud, deep, Thud-Thud-Thud of the engine keeping me company, the other vehicles on the road (mostly little scooters, and a few cars) would drive on the right side mostly. I was a bit confused, but just went with the flow all the same since sometimes they would drive on the left. I was in my element again because I had not been on a bike for quite some time, and to be in a classic S.E.Asian city to boot raised my spirit to such a high level that I was in an absolutely elated state and I opened her up flying thru space and time, controlled by my wrist, spinning the throttle!!....Oh Yeah!....Oh Yeah!!

Gotta find WEED!!
I drove thru and past many monuments (some were arches), temples and pieces of unknown (to me) history, revelling in the lightness and power of the two wheeled metal and plastic horse that I rode, standing up in the saddle sometimes to feel the wind blow thru me. Jumping over rubble and puddles, lifting the front end up off the ground momentarily. This wheeled, suspended motor could take me almost anywhere, and over most anything road or trail-wise. Maybe it would, maybe it needed to, and maybe I would come to grief and end up dead or in hospital. Whatever it was worth it for these moments, there was no better tool available for the job as far as I was concerned. Anything with more power would be heavier than the 160 kilos that the bike weighed and so harder to control at low speeds, and might break easily if you had to lay her down at some point. She had power-a-plenty to propel my big 95-kilo, 6ft frame around, whereever, whenever and in fine style.

After an hour or two of exploring the city, I was thoroughly lost and looked for someone to ask directions of. There were 3 Lao dudes hanging outside a pavement front food stall, they all had Tattoo's, so I thought that they might be able to kill two birds with one stone for me. 1. give me directions to find my way back to the hotel, and 2. help me score some WEED!!

 

[Gypsy Nirvana]

Don't look like your in too much of a hurry!
I pulled the bike up right next to them and got off it, then went and sat down ordering a Bier Lao from the woman that came over with a menu. Before too long I was chatting in Pidgin English, interspersed with a bit of Thai and French with them. They must have been nearly half my age but after a couple of beers I got around to the fact that I would like to get hold of some Lao Marijuana. The short skinny guy with the bad dragon tattoo on his forearm nodded his head and indicated that we would have to go up the street some place to facilitate this action and the tough looking fat dude with the badly dispersed (ink) snake over his shoulders was more interested in drinking the beer I had offered them. The waitress/cook came over and I ordered some of these non-descript meatballs in a non-descript soup and another beer, playing it cool, and trying not to act like I was in too much of a rush, that I was too eager for the herb. They asked me if I was married, and I showed them a pic of my daughter next to a Cannabis Sativa(hemp) plant which I keep in my wallet. It was all very casual and friendly, so I felt no paranoia, just excited to see what I might get, and for how much.

Success....WEED FOUND!!
After a few minutes the waifish looking fella indicated that I should follow him to where the weed was. He hopped on his Honda Dream scooter, and I hopped onto the Honda 250 'XR', to follow him up the road a bit, around a corner and into some alleyway. We pulled up at this house up on stilts, this being necessary so close to the Mekong river, since it is prone to flood regularly. Underneath the house and to the back of it I could see that there was some activity going on. Yep! it was two older Laos guys and one of them packing a bowl from this bamboo bong that he was holding. The other older heavily Tattooed guy was preparing the weed by chopping it up on a well used wooden chopping board. Shaking hands they passed me the bong and helped me light it as I pulled on that sweet cheeba!! The spice tinged smoke was pulled in a deep slow toke into my body, I held it there for a few seconds feeling the effects almost instantly. Wow! What a buzz!! I asked their ages and they were both well into their forties as I am myself. Soon a good-sized half-ounce or so of the weed was produced for me to examine. My trusty Swiss army blade came out and I cut the top of the plastic bag that it came in open and stuffed my nose deep inside to take a deep whiff of the resident herbage. It was a smell that I remembered from 20 years ago in Thailand, it was the properly dried and cured smell of what a good sativa should smell like in this part of the world as far as I was concerned, and it was sticky, yes tacky to the touch, so if you squeezed a bud it would stick to your fingers because there was plenty of resin on it. The colour of the Laos Marijuana was many shades of brown with a reddish hue here and there and it smelled so good that I had to have some, so I asked them how much did they want for it?

A Closer Examination needed.....
$5 for around half an ounce of good sativa seemed like a great deal to me, and a great deal to them as I watched the guys face light up as I produced a five dollar bill, a bit crumpled and sweaty from my back pocket. The deal done, I felt that they wanted me to split, seemed like they were a bit paranoid about there neighbours knowing that they were selling weed to a foreigner, so I jumped back on the Honda, started it up and roared off back down the alley and out onto the main road towards the centre of town and my hotel.

.....Later I learned that the real local price was 5000 kip....or around 50 u.s.cents per bag!!...I had paid $5....Duhhhhh!!

Terror on the news!!
I was not sure exactly what time I awoke, it was early in the morning, but I wandered down into the hotel lobby to see a few people of various nationalities gathered around a television. They seemed glued to the screen and they were watching what looked like a disaster movie, but it turned out to be C.N.N., the American news channel that was showing graphic shots of an airliner crashing into one of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York. The depth and the far reaching implications of what turned out to be 4 Kamikaze attacks, using 4 different passenger aircraft on high profile targets, the Pentagon in Washington was hit as well as both Towers of the World Trade Centre and another airliner was hijacked, but crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.

It was a terrible reality to see it all in naked reality here on a T.V. in Laos, of all places. Everyone on the planet would remember this day and where they were when this crime against all humanity took place.
My mind was overloaded with the incredibility of the whole scenario, and the suffering of all of those people and their families was a bit much for anyone to contemplate for too long. So I rolled up a good fat spliff of some of the sticky Laos buds and a little of the ever-shrinking lump of Tibliza hash, smoked it slowly whilst watching Oliver Stone's 'Heaven and Earth' (an excellent movie), then went to bed.

 

[Dr Dog]

Jealousy from me

Looks like a great trip, I wish I could see that area of the world like that.

The world maybe getting smaller, but not for us here in North america

 

[Gypsy Nirvana]

On my Lonesome in a strange town again....

Marky, my friend from Vietnam was supposed to show up that day, but there were no messages for me when I enquired at the hotel lobby. It was time to get going up North of the country, two or three days in this Asian capital was more than enough time to see what there was to see.

I decided to leave Vientiane the next day for Luang Prabang province. Today I decided just to tour the town again on my bike and went to Pha That Luang (the Great Sacred Reliquary or Great Stupa) This is the most important national monument in Laos for it is symbol of the Buddhist religion and Lao sovereignty. In the 3rd century legend has it that Ashokan missionaries from India erected a reliquary stupa or 'thaat' to enclose a breastbone of Buddha. It was an amazing monument and looked like a gold covered multiple missile silo from a distance.

I pulled up to it and sat down at a table under shade near the entrance with an old Buddhist Monk in his bright orange robes, and he offered me tea, then chatted to me in French for a while, since his English was not so good. It was broiling hot off the bike, and I started to sweat up again just sitting there in the shade and chatting a little about the colonial past of Laos and what French influence you could still see today, the coffee and the French baguettes (bread) were foremost in my mind and reminded me of the same in Madagascar which was once also a French colony

Yeah....I got stoned with a Monk!!

A younger monk came by and he was introduced as being able to speak English very well, since he told me that he was a translator and teacher of the language. I had a little difficulty understanding him since he would speak so fast with a heavy Laos accent. He wanted to show me around inside the main wall of Pha That Luang, so I walked and he chatted away in his Pidgin English. Man was he ever a chatterbox!! After walking around the soft lawns that bordered the main stupa I sat down and pulled out half a spliff which he gratefully shared with me, and we talked about how the cannabis plant was sacred to Buddha, for I have seen his image depicted with a cannabis leaf just behind his ear. This was very special for the younger monk for he had never smoked Moroccan hash, but he had smoked the Laos weed for many years, mainly in Luang Prabang province, where I was next headed, and he said that the quality was very good there indeed!!

funny money.......

I chugged around Vientiane in 4th gear, now and then opening the agile bike to fly along happily stoned. The faster I went, the cooler I got. At the bank dollars needed to be changed into 'Kip', which is the Laos currency. Now for $1 you get around 10,000 kip, which seemed like a good deal to me at the time. Jeez! with $100 you could be a millionaire here!! So I went about becoming a kip millionaire and changed up $100. This was a mistake really because for my single $100 bill I could receive 200, 5000kip notes!! You see in Laos the biggest bank note in circulation is the 5000kip note, and this in real terms is only worth 50 cents!! (U.S.).

The smiling lady teller gave me a whole bunch of 2000 and 1000 kip notes and some 5000kip notes and it looked like I would need a small box to carry it all in.
There was absolutely loads of these bills to count and try and fit in my pockets, masses of cash, bundles of moolah, individually the bills were worth next to nothing and the idea of them not being worth the paper that they were printed on occurred to me, plus imagine all the time it takes to keep counting these virtually worthless notes. It seemed like paying for a dinner would take more time in counting out the money than the time spent actually eating it! They even had a 100 'kip' note, work that one out!!

*The pic is of $40 worth of 'Kip'

Marky finally Shows!!

I headed back to the Lane-Xang Hotel stopping off briefly for an M-150 vitamin drink washed down with a Vita-Milk (soy-bean milk) and passed by 'That Dam' or the 'Black Stupa'. Local mythology has it that the stupa is the abode of a dormant seven-headed dragon that came to life during the 1828 Siamese-Laos war to protect local citizens.

The hotel was a kind of funky place and relatively empty except for the huge complement of staff to be found there. I informed the concierge that I would be checking out the following day and went up to my room to have a hot shower, which was not possible since only cold water came out of the shower head, even after running the tap for 20 minutes!

There was a knock at the door and there was Marky with his good buddy Thon from Hanoi. They had just spent 24 hours on a bus in the rain all the way here and looked a little worse for wear. It was great to see him again after 6 months since he had showed myself and the Mrs around Saigon back in March. My first contact with Marky had been thru the boards of the cannabis grower’s web-site https://www.overgrow.com./ He had been keen to get growing some good weed and one of my companies had supplied him with the seeds to grow in Vietnam. He had grown the A.K.47 from Serious Seeds, but had a big problem with spider mites, so the end result could have been better. Out of his money belt he produced a gift for me of some Vietnamese weed that he had grown. I countered his gift with one of my own and gave him a bag of the sticky Laos herb, much to his satisfaction. We placed the Vietnamese next to the Laos grass and compared the two. It was plain to see that the Laos weed was the most resinous, and to me it had the overall best smell and high. Still Marky had every reason to be proud of his first growing efforts and I thanked him for this gift smuggled into Laos, just for me.

 

[Gypsy Nirvana]

Well there's some Bud Shots for Ya!!

After chatting for what seemed like ages, and smoking up on the grass and hash, I took them both up to the Vietnamese restaurant/bike hire place where I had earlier rented the 250cc Honda 'XR' and Marky rented the 225cc Yamaha that I had tried out a couple of days earlier. I negotiated a two-week deal on the rental of the 250, for $250 u.s.d. And Marky and Thon got a much better deal on the 225 since it had a slight oil leak and they could haggle in Vietnamese with the cheery lady owner of the business.

Later we ate at a French Restaurant drinking fine Muscadet dry white wine, Marky and Thon ate Pizza and I had the beefsteak with pepper sauce. Vientiane has a sleepy charm about it and the two Vietnamese were impressed with the low density of the population coming as they were from a country of 80 million people to a neighbouring country (Laos) with only 5 million, but with a similar landmass.

We dawdled around on the bikes and stopped off at a nightclub with just a few people in it, the girls dancing away to some heavy dance anthem, trying to do Ibiza in Laos!! After a tall, cold Beer Laos we were all tired so retired back to the air-conditioned comfort of the hotel. They had checked into a double room, so we stopped off in the lounge of the suite that I was staying in to view the latest on the New York/World Trade centre disaster whilst getting thoroughly baked. Then I just flopped out face down on my bed and was unconscious before you could count to ten.

Getting out of Vientiane.....

The rain could well have spoiled the next day since we were planning to ride around 400 kilometres to Luang Prabang province. Fortunately it did not rain on us that day. You never know in the tropics. One moment it can be clear and blue, the next a veritable torrent of water could explode from the heavens upon you, soaking you thru completely in seconds. This is not what we wanted whilst motorcycling North that day.

Somehow I managed to condense what luggage I would only need into a lockable aluminium box (camera's, laptop, transformers, connectors, electrical leads, batteries e.g.), a back-pack (clothing and wash kit), and a money/camera belt. My trusty Samsonite suitcase kept all the stuff that was not absolutely necessary, and I left it at the hotel, locked in the baggage room, patiently awaiting my return on the 25th of the month. The hotel staff gave me a hand fixing the box to the little luggage rack of the Honda, tying it on with coloured pieces of nylon string, and soon we bade them all farewell with a few well placed tips, then roared off together in the direction of national route 13.

It was a fine day and I revelled in the freedom to explore that the bikes offered us. We stopped and filled the gas tanks to the absolute limit because we were not sure where and if we could gas them up next. Gas/petrol was 30 cents a litre! Back in the U.K. it was now around $1.20 for the same amount and the U.K. has oil pumping out of the North sea everyday! Both tanks could be filled for $5 u.s.d.!!

Free as a bird!!

As we left the city behind, the ever-apparent beauty of the Laos countryside opened up to us. We passed groups of school children in bright white shirts, cycling along on old bicycles with umbrellas to protect them from the baking sun. Cows with skittish young calves would at times be all over the road, and we either had to slow down and twist and turn thru the herd, hoping that none of them would suddenly turn into our path. Or more effectively just open up the throttle and passed them at speed, before they even realised that we were amongst them.

I would feel the toil and trouble that these people had to go thru to reap a living from the earth as I saw them labouring away in the hot noon-day sunshine and heat out in the rice-fields with only a conical hat to save them from frying, the old women would be carrying large heavy bundles on their backs, and the children would be working right along side of them. The further we got from Vientiane the more friendly the locals became, huge groups of Laos people of all ages would wave and smile at us as we passed, and of course you just had to wave back. At one point I had my left hand was doing much more waving than holding onto the handlebars. The three of us would stop every hour or so for a refreshment/spliff break, so becoming the centre of interest for ever increasing groups of Lao.

Marvelling at the Beauty of the place....

The morning turned into the afternoon and when we would stop, after a few minutes the heat would become unbearable, even if you managed to find some refrigerated cold drink and shade to cool you down. Getting back on the bikes and twisting the throttle immediately solved the heat problem. We flew like birds thru this most excellent landscape, I marvelled at the way the light would catch the densely forested hills and mountains, casting brilliant shadows and halo's all over the land.

Marky had spent a good half an hour that morning rolling up some pure Laos grass spliffs, and these were gradually smoked thru during the day. After 4-5 hours of riding we had very sore asses,(saddle sore), so debated on stopping for the night in a beautiful place by the Nam Song river, a few kilometres passed Vang Vieng, famous for it's caves.

But after stopping for an hour and eating some fried rice with egg and sipping a Beer Lao, Marky and myself out voted Thon and we pressed on towards Luang Prabang Province, which was some 230 kilometres away over, around and thru much mountain country. The Manager of the resort by the fast flowing river was very helpful and spoke pretty good French, so I was able to communicate fairly easily. He told us that the road ahead was fine for the bikes that we had, it had been very dangerous up untill about 5 years ago when regular Hmong guerrilla attacks had made it very dicey.

 

[Gypsy Nirvana]

Total Awe!!

The resort was set in a great location and was relatively new. Marky was curious as to how much a place like this would cost. He asked the Manager and was told that it had cost around 60,000,000 'kip'. We laboured with the mathematics for a couple of minutes and arrived at the sum of around $6000 u.s.d. for the whole place!! I would have bought it then, if I could have, since it was such an absolutely stunning location with plenty of shade from the unrelenting blaze of the burning sun, set as it was by the cool fast flowing river, and in the shade of a monolithic green mountain. It was not really possible for outsiders to buy a piece of Laos, unless you went thru various government ministries and paid vast bribes.

We left there at 4.p.m. with the 200 klicks to do and I told the two Vietnamese guys to haul ass whilst we still had the light, I figured that we would have about two and a half hours of light left (this area of the world has nearly a 12/12 photoperiod throughout most of the year), since it got light about 6.30 a.m. that morning. The three of us were in complete awe of the scenery and thoroughly enjoying this journey to the North of Laos. For a couple of hours we made good time till the light started to go and it all became possibly very dangerous. As the sun started to tip below the edge of the mountains we were blinded on turns facing west. Even with the best Oakley shades that I could buy! Still the falling Laos sun blinded me and I had to put my hand over my eyes occasionally to stop myself from being completely without vision. This nearly caused me to go 'Over the Edge' and into premature oblivion on quite a few occasions.

You never know whats around the next corner!!

Once the sun had gone it got cold, and a tad wet since we were 4000 feet above sea level, and in cloud base. The contrast was extreme for we had gone from an oven to a freezer in minutes. It necessitated a stop for us to put on more clothing, so we stopped in the dark, with only the lights of the bikes to see by as we donned more garments and fired up the last spliff!

Never had any of us travelled this road, and the fun of discovery and exploration in the light of day turned into an eyrie and potentially lethal situation once the light had left us. Still we thundered on thru the night, glad to stop and stretch our now weary bodies in little Hmong hamlets along the roadside, where we would always be greeted by curious and smiling children and adults, never stopping for longer than 15 minutes. The journey now demanded much more concentration from us, to be able to make it. Visibility was down to what we could see in the headlights of the two bikes, and every time we got up to 50 k.p.h. we would invariably have to slow down to 25-30 k.p.h. to take one of the many bends in the road. Fallen rocks, many people, kids and the odd cow would loom out of the darkness suddenly in our path causing us to swerve on more than one occasion.
Sometimes the rough asphalt would disappear into a red, rutted, pot-holed surface which you would just have to open up the throttle to, and hope for the best as the mud flew all over the place.

Supreme Concentration.......Somehow...

When the light went, so did the shades (sunglasses). It would have been sheer folly to have worn sun-glasses in the dark, simple because you could not see much if anything in that foggy darkness.
The problem was that without the protection to the eyes that the sunglasses afforded you, many small and large insects and pieces of grit, dust and stones kicked up from the vehicle in front of you, could bombard your vision at the most inopportune moment.
Smash! A large piece of entomology would hit your cheek, just a centimetre or two from your eye, it would hurt, but you would still be grateful that it had not been bang on target and wiped out more than half of your vision.(I am half blind in my left eye anyway!).

Swarms of Mosquito's would be hanging around, and we would have to pass, squinting, so as not to present such a big target. My eyes took a few small hits and it momentarily freaked me out. Still we pressed on towards a meal and a cool bed in Luang Prabang. Most of the time I would lead, but after a while I let Marky and Thon go forward thankful to focus on the glowing red tail light of their bike, and not having to figure out where the road was going, for it went round and round, up and down, to the East, then to the West, to the South, then back to the North again. Round and round and up and down, from the fridge to the furnace and back again.

Made It!!

The last 60 or so kilometres were the hardest with very steep inclines and declines that had the tightest twists and turns imaginable. We made 360's, 270's and 180's, not knowing what to expect once into a turn. There was no white line or dividing line on the road until we came to within a few kilometres of our destination, where we must have both sighed with much relief.
It could have all gone bad, and very easily, so we were super-extremely relieved to eventually arrive in Luang Prabang by 9.30 p.m. that night, very much alive, tired, but in one piece all the same!

It was not just the lack of visibility or the potential loss of it that bothered me. I realised that we were also getting tired. We had started out from Vientiane at 10.30 a.m. and it was now 9.p.m. with still some distance to go. Pushing myself to concentrate as much as was possible thru the meandering darkness. Within half an hour civilisation loomed before us in all the finery/luxury of electic light and the comfort of a good bed for the night in an air-conditioned room with satellite t.v. Showing more grief and disaster in New York, but this time in French and Chinese.

 

[Gypsy Nirvana]

The Sanakeo Hotel looked brand new, and we found that it had only been in existence for 3 months. I did a quick recognisance of a couple of it's rooms and it looked spotless, no roaches, no filth. Ah! Sanctuary. Out came the weed and hash, and a spliff was rolled and smoked before the Vietnamese retired to their room to sleep after a questionable meal at the restaurant next door, which to my delight had a couple of half bottles of French Muscadet white wine in their fridge. 'Naam Keng' (ice) I asked for, since the bottles, even though chilled were getting warm in the late evening heat on our table. So we drank it on ice. My dinner went to the dog because I was not too pleased with what I thought would be steamed fish in coconut sauce turning out to be this fish pasted coconut steamed in leaves. The stuff looked like hot avocado with a fishy stench and it gave my stomach quite a turn when I tasted it. This must be what fish shit tasted like, Yeachh!!
Yeah, sometimes you just have to order blind, not knowing the local cuisine and all, you might strike lucky and get something that you really like to eat, but often much of it is a bit of a let down

Interesting Information....Hmmm..

The Aussie fella went on to tell me that there was a whole bunch of Farang(Foreigners to Laos) there that mostly just got stoned and hung out in this wonderful setting beneath the mountains, and next to the Naam Song river. Kieren asked if I would like to toke on some of the grass that he had scored here in Luang Prabang, so I ordered 2 beers from his guesthouse and we went into his dingy little room to roll a spliff or two. He had this huge old bamboo bong sitting in the corner, but was a bit upset because he was unable to use it since it had no cone on it to pack, just the body of the bong and he said that it came with the room. I looked around the room as we both rolled a couple of joints. This was one of the cheaper types of guesthouses, but for one dollar a night you got a fan and an en-suite bathroom! The room looked well worn and very untidy, it reminded me of the places in Thailand that I used to stay in 17-18 years ago, but usually then I had to share a bathroom with a number of other guests. Still when your eyes are closed and you are well stoned, does it matter what sort of room you are in?



Stranger in a strange town....

The following morning I was up bright and early hammering away on the laptop writing and watching the local population go by in Samlors, Jumbo's, Honda Dreams, bicycles and on foot.
No one looked like they were in a mad rush and generally they seemed well fed and clothed.
Such a perfect day really, the bike came out and I put-put-putted around the town looking for an internet cafe, which I found completely empty, so I booked myself in there for a good two hour session, sorting out my international affairs and answering a multitude of e-mails from all over the world. Over the Mekong I went on a very narrow bridge that was only two bikes wide, just enough room to pass those coming from the other direction. Soon I settled at an idyllic location under the welcome shade of a Banyan tree , just overlooking the river where I wrote and wrote, trying to catch up on what had transpired over the last couple of days. As I wrote groups of orange robed Buddhist monks passed with old umbrellas to keep the sun off their shaved heads, probably on their way to one of the many temples in the area.

Where's the Weed?!

Close to dusk I chased the disappearing sun with my camera trying to get that perfect sunset shot over the river. I heard an Australian accent behind me and turned to see this young Aussie fella buying some fresh papaya from a street fruit vendor. 'I heard that you Aussie's like your fruits'. I said to instigate a possible conversation. Turned out that this guy, Kieren, had a good sense of humour and, like most Australasians, was a devote stoner!!
Kieren was only 23, and I went back in my mind to when I was first travelling around S.E.Asia when I was that age some 18 years ago. Laos looked to me like Thailand did back then, so I could relate to the buzz of adventure he was going thru at that age, and we chatted about the cannabis situation as we knew it so far in Laos. He took me back to a room in this tiny little guest house, dirty and equipped with cockroaches, dirty laundry scattered all over the place, to smoke some of the weed that he had scored in Vang Vieng, which was fairly good. He said that there was where we needed to go if we wanted to see the good stuff, so far he had not seen anything spectacular in or around Luang Prabang and pointed us at Vang Vieng, where he said that they was a very buoyant market in cannabis and opium.

 

[Gypsy Nirvana]

Back-Tracking...

Soon we were both toking away merrily on the spicy Lao sativa and Keiren told me more about Vang Vieng. Later back at my hotel I told Marky and Thon about the place and we decided then and there, that we would bike it there the very next day.
To get to Vang Vieng, we would have to travel over the same mountains and hills that we were so lucky to have made it thru un-scathed the day before, and on the very same road, Route 13(Un-Lucky for some?). Basically we would have to backtrack and since we would be doing it all in daylight this time, thought that it should be much easier. Little did we know then.

I did not try and score in Luang Prabang, since the Oz bloke had said that the stuff was much better in Vang Vieng and we were off the very next morning to that destination.

It all started out with good weather as we left the town at around 10 a.m. in the morning, hoping that the 230 k.m. would be a total breeze in the daytime. Sure it was for the first hour as I attacked the mountains with the 250, getting it to make the sound of a buzz-saw, switching my weight from one side then the other as I took sighted corners at speed. Most of the corners were blind, and then you had to keep well to the inside or outside or you might find yourself buried in the front grill of a huge truck, or indeed the belly of a cow.(which held us up occasionally). Without due caution you might run over some kid coming or going to school or the fields! Or just go over the edge, and down into certain destruction!

Nightmare!!

Then the rain started. At first I found it quite refreshing as the rain was very light and it would evaporate from my clothing before it would soak them. This made the road surface more slippery and we both had to ease off the speed some, particularly on the corners where there was loose rock/shale on the road, which you could easily slide on if you caught it at an acute angle.
Then the rain stopped for a while and we did too, at some small grocery shop to sip on the M-150's in plastic bags full of ice, Thon had a Vitamilk and Marky sat smoking away on a cigarette trying to find out how much, if any Vietnamese these people could speak.
They knew the odd word in Vietnamese but could not hold any sort of conversation that made any sense to them or me. We did much better with trying to speak to them in Thai, and they knew all the Thai words that I knew and more since the Laos language is very close to the Thai.

As we took off again we ran straight into a wall of water!!
The rain was absolutely bucketing down. I could hardly see a thing with my sunglasses on so they had to come off, much to my discomfort because now large drops of rain would bounce off my eyeballs and temporarily blind me! The road turned into a small river at some points as the water completely covered it, here we would have to be very careful. No longer able to distinguish how deep the potholes were in the road (because they were filled with a reddish water), we had to be very careful and pick our way thru them, at a very low speed, or we might well disappear into one, and some could swallow me and the bike whole!!

Sheltering with the Hmong.....

A fun, exhilarating ride soon became a very cold, wet and ridiculously dangerous one. Soon we were literally shivering with the cold and the visibility was so bad that we just had to pull over to the shelter of one of the Hmong people’s houses. They were sheltering too from the deluge, so Marky and Thon along with myself got to take a bunch of photo's of them as I sang 'Unchained Melody' amongst a bunch of other golden oldies, much to the delight of the kids who, all grouped together under the tiny bamboo awning were laughing and giggling away with their adult minders/Mothers at these strange men from another world singing to them in a very foreign tongue.

I have always found that when communication in a particular language is not so easy, then the best thing to do is just sing. Yeah! sing with the joy of your heart, and these emotions and feelings that you can relate in song can be understood by anyone. At least it made them laugh, and served as some sort of exotic entertainment for the 10 of them sheltering from the downpour with us. Kind of like karaoke 'un-plugged!'.
We tried to get them to sing back, but this never happened. Never mind their warm smiles and laughter were music to my ears and soon the rain eased off temporarily for us to say 'Bye Bye!', remount the bikes and roar off again. Within 5 minutes we ran into another torrent of water, but this time we just tried to press on, squinting into the painful barrage of rain, powering out of the muddy parts of the road where deep ruts were filled to overflowing with the ocre red coloured water, turning the hard baked earth into a maroon sludge.

Wicked Water......

Eventually it got so bad it would have been just plain stupid to try and carry on another mile. At a town called Kasi our hunger overcame us and we stopped at a little noodle stand to eat double helpings each, cold and absolutely wringing wet. The chillies in the noodle soup helped to warm us up and we dawdled away a good hour drinking, smoking and watching what activity there was in the small centre of this unknown town with a name that in colloquial cockney slang means toilet. 'Kasi'.

Finally it seemed like the rain had subsided enough for us to carry on, so we paid the bill, which is always a real mission in Laos because you have to produce large rolls of wet Laos 'kip' banknotes from inside your bulging pockets to pay with, trying to figure out which was a 5000 note and which was a 2000 note.
After Kasi the route became more manageable with some decent straight parts, so enabling us to really open up the bikes that had been kept tame in the slippery, potentially lethal wetness that we had just passed thru.

The weather seemed to ease off for a while and this enabled me to bring my speed up quite a bit. Our plans to be in Viang Veng with plenty of light to spare had been eaten away by the rain and the quagmire it created. Now we hoped to make it whilst there was light left in the day. Water is usually our friend, today it was against us, slowing us up, and then I was nearly blinded by it!

 

[Gypsy Nirvana]

On thru the turbulence....

As we twisted and turned between valleys, hills and mountain passes we would find ourselves going thru different kinds of rain. Sometimes the drops were just like a mist, pleasant to feel the wet coolness on your face, and sometimes they were much, much bigger.

As I came onto a good sighted straight and flat part of the Route 13, I twisted the throttle full open and flew up to 100 k.p.h. Then I stood up on the footrests, holding the handlebars with a good strong grip, to stretch my legs out and shake them around a bit. All of a sudden, I hit another wall of water Out of the grey; a very large drop of rain hit me with a force that felt like a good punch, right in the eye. Owwwccchhh! Man that stung bad! Somehow or other I managed to slow and stop, more by luck than design, my right eye throbbing badly. I could not fix my vision on anything properly for quite a while and I sat there on the bike in the pouring rain groaning and softly rubbing the affected area. Marky and Thon came back to offer me a little sympathy and support, but by then I could focus once again, the eye felt bruised, but seemed to be in working order, just about.

20 Klicks from safe haven........

On we rode till we were within 20 k.m. of our destination, dodging herds of cows, chickens and ducks in the wet, overtaking three wheeled Samlors and Jumbo's, diesel powered buses pumping out plumes of black greasy clouds of smoke as they accelerated. Again the going just got too heavy, too precarious and too fucking dangerous! So we once again pulled over, this time to the shelter of a wood smoke filled shack/grocery store/bar at the side of the road. Now within a few minutes ride of our destination we took a little sigh of relief knowing that we would arrive as soon as the intermittent barrage from the heavens ceased once again to allow us to continue.

Shivering and very wet we gathered around the smokey wood fire and tried to converse with the couple of drunk Lao guys that seemed pleased to see us. I bought the house a round of beers and we sat and drank and smoked, Marky trying to see if they knew any Vietnamese words. The best language to converse in we determined was Thai, since I knew a bit. Many Lao words are very similar to the Thai and both originate from the ancient Khmer. One of the Lao was getting a bit over zealous and loud, in a silly way, postulating wildly and laughing hysterically at times. The rain eased off again and we said farewell 'Sabaai-dii', and thankyou 'Khawp Jai', before mounting the bikes for the last leg of this crazy journey.