Bao Ling for Laos

It's early April in Luang Prabang, The Water Festival (songkran) and Lao New Year are upon us, the world is descending by bus and plane (250,000 tourists, 2005 figures), and there’s something about this town that irks me.

I know it’s all ‘right and proper’ – World Heritage Status, Eco and Sustainable Tourism, a fair deal for the locals, limited 5 Star and big business access, and so on – and I do feel awful for saying it, but all of this good thought, work and will seems to produce a grand façade of sorts.
It's a bit like a gay Madi Gras, only nice, and it agitates me.

I want to look behind the curtain. I don’t want beige, I want reds, blues and yellows. I don’t want cappuccinos, I want chickens, pigs, dirt and plastic bags. I don’t want polite manner, I want polite disorder.

I guess I just miss my bike, and all that it bestows: the open road, the turn of the stomach that spells danger, the pain in the legs, the despair of another hill and the ecstatic laughter of running, jumping, screaming kids in grubby shorts.

It takes all sorts, I guess.

I wander into the Phunpaksom Guest House, and get shown to room number 4 at the top of the landing.

The room is large and airy, has a ceiling fan, a wooden floor, a hard double bed and a couple of shuttered windows overlooking the Mekong River, and despite the recent coat of thin white paint, it can't quite shake that ‘lost in Asia’ feel.

“I’ll take it,” I say.

It's the kind of room I know well. You can smoke opium, go mad, have mystical revelations, despair of life, read a book, make love, masturbate… in fact, pretty much anything goes as long as long as you pay your bill and don't flush paper down the toilet, and I’m fine on both points.

“All right, mate!” says Mitch, the tall, lanky, forty something ex-pat Kiwi who seems to be in charge. There’s a couple of Lao folk sitting docilely in big black leather chairs in the hallway, but they haven’t said a word.

“On holidays, are ya, mate?” asks Mitch.
“Kind of,” I say, “but I’d be just as happy to escape the lunacy outside.” Outside, Luang Prabang is winding up for the big tomorrow where they’ll be gallons of water to throw, a Miss Luang Prabang contest and parade to admire and oodles of UNESCO approved fun.

“This is Disney Land for adults, mate,” says Mitch, “Relax and enjoy it!”
“Right, yeah, I guess so…,” I say, as I fill in the register.

The Lao Quiet. If they could bottle this and sell it, the Loation import-export trade imbalance would be solved in one masterful, eat-your-heart-out Body Shop, stroke. But where is it? Buried under an avalanche of safety-first politically correct infrastructure.

I can see Mitch has pegged me as a potential wet blanket, but as long as I pay the bill and don’t flush paper all will be well, I’m sure. “When will it be over?” I ask.

“A few days after the festivities it’ll all go back to normal, mate!” says Mitch. Mitch has a way of turning each sentence he speaks into a cut and dried pronouncement, so that all I can reply is “Right!” while I try to gather my thoughts. I find I’m saying ‘right!’ a lot.

The Phunpaksom Guest House is on the low side of town down by the Mekong. It’s a large, white, high ceilinged two-storied house with sky blue shutters on the windows. If Luang Prabang was a Monopoly board, this would be Whitechapel, the cheap end of town and a long way from Go. Old Kent Road, in the guise of the Luangsumbao Guest House, is right next-door. They’re almost identical, except that Whitechapel sports two grubby share bathrooms, instead of just one, which is why I chose it. Contrary to what some may think, I’m not averse to a bit of luxury.

I take a shower, climb on the bed and settle into ‘Welcome to Hell: One Man's Fight for Life Inside the Bangkok Hilton’ by Colin Martin, just to remind myself how shitty, dark and mind-stonkeringly moronic Asia can be. It’s the cautionary tale of one man’s major fuck-up and the subsequent, requisite decade inside the belly of the beast, read: trapped in Asia.

(It’s very similar in content, style and emotional effect to the book ‘The Damage Done: Twelve Years of Hell in a Bangkok Prison’ by Warren Fellows. Warren was a first-class rugby player from Sydney before he blew it all one day on a drug run out of Bangkok. I particularly liked the before and after pics.)

In the room adjacent to mine is Tyrone, an ex-pat from California. He’s about 45, thin and wiry, and tells me he lives in Cambodia - which is where I've met him before, I realise, but say nothing. There's something ragged and imploring about Tyrone. He’s like a boy on the wrong side of the Municipal Swimming Pool fence who wants in, but can’t afford the fee.

The three of us, Mitch, Tyrone and myself, sit on the terrace later that night, swapping stories, feeling each other out, keeping the demons at bay. The other two are knocking back Beer Laos, and I’m nursing my usual two Cokes, sobriety of mind being a state I genuinely enjoy.

Tyrone's world view, fuelled by Beer Lao, stretches far and wide; a little too far and wide to make make much sense at all, really, which is not unusual in Asia. Still, it's humorous and populated by the unhinged, and I prefer listening to this jibberish rather than the usual basic tourist fare on offer. At least the man knows how to take a risk, even if, it seems, most of them are bad risks.

He has a way of looking up after he's spoken, head bowed to one side, waiting a reply, that says 'please don't humiliate me'. It’s odd, but it seems to make sense. I don’t fancy the home life of the boy in the grubby shorts on the wrong side of the municipal fence. Yeah, the damage done.

Maybe he just needs a bit of kindness?

Next morning I meet Mitch clobbering down the stairs, arms and legs whirling. "Have you seen Tyrone?" he asks. There's no 'mate' at the end of the question which probably means Mitch is not happy.
"Not since last night," I say. "Why?"
"The bastard skipped out without paying. He left me a teeshirt and note saying something about 'good kama'. Jesus Christ, who needs a shitty old teeshirt? It wasn't even washed."
"Right!” I say, and stand at the bottom of the stairs at a bit of a loss.

When I stroll back from the Miss Luang Prabang Parade late in the afternoon, Mitch is handling another crisis. Andre, a young French chap who’s been in Room 3 across the hallway for a week, and mainly kept to himself, is adamant that somebody has slipped into his room the night before and stolen 100 dollars. “I not can pay…!” he says. Oh, dear.

Mitch and I know this is turkey shit. Andre knows this is turkey shit. Andre knows that we know, and we know that he knows that we know, and so on, spiralling forever upwards into an everlasting budget tourist scamming loop, which would drive you mad if you let it, so what to do?

Don’t ever run a guest house is my advice.

Mitch proposes Andre pay half what he owes, and leaves it at that. “Fuck me!” he says, plonking himself down heavily onto the black vinyl couch that stretches along the front veranda.
“Right!” I say.
“You wanna go bowling?” he asks.

Ten minutes later we’re in Mitch's van, passing through the high wire-mesh gates into the dusty carpark of the Bao Ling (Bao Ling?) Ten Pin Bowling Alley on the outskirts of town. Above us looms the Bao Ling's large and lurid advertising billboard, somewhat reminiscent of a karaoke club.

“What kind of place is this, Mitch?” I ask.
“No, mate,” he says, chuckling, watching me eye the well defined picture of the scantily clad, young and rather fertile Lao girl with the bowling ball stuck between her legs, “don’t worry about the billboard. It’s just an aberration.”
“Right!” I say.

Yeah, Bao Ling for Laos, and I recommend it.