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to celebrate gerard's 39th birthday (what!? is he that old?!), we headed to the 'the land of one million elephants' (called the land of one million irrelevants during the vietnam war) - the people's democratic republic of laos. i might mention at this point that we did not see a single elephant for the whole trip, though with the amount we both ate we certainly came back the size of one.
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our first afternoon in luang prabang, we hopped into bed for a quick nap and woke up 15 hours later. the mood was thus set for a relaxing holiday. to be honest, the population is so laid back that you can't really be anything but relaxed in laos, and the closed restaurants and deserted streets at 9:30 in the evening made sense when in one hotel we read a sign saying we had to be in bed by 11pm by government decree! we had no problem with that. the land of one million cuddles ;)
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.the french had a saying during the colonial period: 'the vietnamese plant the rice, the cambodians watch the rice grow and the lao listen to the rice grow'. how very zen. the storekeeper below was listening so intently she entered a trance-like state.
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.luang prabang is an ancient capital, situated at the confluence of the nam khan and mekong rivers. replete with colonial architecture and 32 ancient wats, it is supposedly one of the best preserved cities in south east asia. and yes - it was beautiful. we spent our days hanging about drinking lao coffee, inspecting wats filled with monks that were holy by day and cigarette-smoking, foul-mouthed spit-in-the-bushes type monks by night, and perusing the tropical homes that we might want to live in one day too.
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.there wasn't a great deal to do, and that suited us just fine. in fact for the most part we were curled up in bed exhausted from doing absolutely nothing.
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.half way between the ancient capital of luang prabang and the current capital vientiane, our next destination, vang vieng, was a tourist town on the banks of the nam song, surrounded by the same gorgeous karst mountains we have come to know and love from vietnam and guangxi province in china.
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.waking up to a vista of lush green mountains draped in a tropical fog from a small lover's cabin set between a rice-paddy and a river is something one could do every day of one's life. apart from hiking in the mountains and visiting the caves, the number one thing everyone in vang vieng does is 'rubber tubing'. basically, one hires a huge inflated rubber inner-tube, jumps into it, and merrily merrily floats 5 km down a tropical stream surrounded by mountain peaks. to cater to the hordes of young, drunken western tourists floating by, every 20 metres or so along the first km or 2 are bars where you can leave your tube, have a drink, and swing like tarzan into the river, slide down a concrete water slide, or cruise on down a flying fox.
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.click on the video link below to see my flying fox experience. for some reason i had thought that i would gently come off the wire at the end and plop into the water feet first, but when the fox suddenly stopped and my body kept going, it was more like crash-test ondrej.
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once i'd relocated C5, we were able to jump on a bus to the capital.
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i can't say we loved vientiane. a funny little city on the banks of the mekong, with thailand on the other side, it evokes some of the other south east asian colonial capitals, but with not quite the same charm. one day we headed out to a bizarre little buddha park filled with concrete statues of a variety of gods, but otherwise we just chowed down. when in doubt, chow down right? we managed to push back litres of fruit smoothies, noodles, soups, baguettes, and even a meal at a sophisticated french restaurant with francophonic staff. like mum says - diet starts tomorrow.
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and then suddenly it was time to go home - back to melbourne and work and study and reality. i hadn't even taken time off - just squeezed in a trip to laos between shifts - how weird is that?! we jumped on a plane to KL where gerard left me for HK. i rubbed my eyes, finished the final chapitre of 'harry potter et les reliques de la mort' (what were you thinking j.k. with that stupid epilogue?) and then found myself in front of a newspaper announcing obama's election victory in the USA. i cried my little eyes out. i'm not sure how you all felt. but suddenly i felt really good about america, and i was proud of my american friends, and i felt like i was living through something momentous in our world's history. not so much about a black president in america, but more about a shift in the way the world is headed, a shift that signals a change for the better. something felt right with the world.
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after a week in super-saturated 30 degree lush and dripping asia, i'm back in rainy melbourne contemplating work and study and the future. there's something about travel that makes me feel so good. when a life is but a sum of one's experiences, then surely filling one's days with new and unknown sights and sounds and smells and thoughts is what living life is really about. it feels so strange that one could waste even a second of it in front of a television or in a mind-numbing job one hates (which is not my case if you were concerned). yet even that could be richly valuable as an experience of its own. it doesn't seem to matter what you do or don't do, life's stream carries you along at break-neck pace (even in the absence of a flying-fox), and when you step away from it for just a moment, you look back and feel such pleasure because you're the one that's there living it. you have lived! what a delightful thing to have done.
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diet starts tomorrow.
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joyeux anniversaire mon chéri d'amour. je t'aime grave :)
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