Ferry Across the Mekong: Travels in Laos

I was in Louangphabang over the January full moon?the last couple days of waxing and the first few of waning. So the old royal capital of Laos?now a backwater outpost with just a trickle of Westerners passing through to see the wats and the palace of King Sisavangvong?was bathed in moonlight, the temples and the crumbling colonial architecture washed over in paleness, the palm branches dark silhouettes against the blue night. And for fun, I would venture into the streets looking for monks to talk to.

The onset of night was the only item on my agenda. I would walk up the steps to the stupa at the top of Mount Phou Si?said not Foo See, but Pussy?and watch the sun set in the green hills lining the Mekong River; I would descend as an overwhelming orange seeped from the crack of the west?the trail of the sun?and by the time the orange was bleeding into pink I would be walking down Samsenthai Road (literally, 300,000 Thais, which was the population of Laos when Samsenthai was King). These dusks were astonishing?unbelievable colors streaked across clouds that loomed like billowy hallucinations.

I was staying at the Auberge Calao, a Portuguese villa near the edge of the town, near the promontory where the Nam Khan tributary is swept into the Mekong. There's an old wat standing on the tip?Wat Xieng Thong?and on the opposite bank gardens carved in steps into the slope. From there stretched rolling hills of jungle for eternity, and China beyond. When the pink light turned purple I would be standing on the Auberge's balcony. The moon came up and its light was on the Mekong's dark water, which rushed south to Vientiane, to Phnom Penh, to Saigon.

When the sun still stands a few degrees above the river the temple gongs start sounding. There are something like 20 wats in the old town of Louangphabang?holiness is the local industry, the monks absolutely everywhere in their orange robes?and standing in the midst of it, the solemn clanging sounds at all distances from all directions, like a transcendental exercise in surround-sound. Then the monks file into the sims?the gathering-halls of the wats?and start chanting. It is the most absolutely transfixing sound. My first night there, I was at a cafe sipping Lao coffee?the blackest, suspended in supersweet condensed milk?and I heard the singing faintly in the dark. I was just drawn to it. When I found it, I stood there listening outside the temple gate when it occurred to me I didn't have to stand there; I could walk down the road and pass 10 wats from which the same chants were emanating.

It's a weird and magical place; still, I found the Lao to be less immediately forthcoming than the Khmer were when I was in Cambodia the week before. And I was alone?though mostly I was hanging out with the guitar on the Auberge balcony, writing verses for songs I was unable to finish back home; there was a nagging need for a minimum of personal contact. I learned, as I did in Cambodia, the starkest essentials of speech?Hello, how are you? Thank you?and would wander up and down the backroads, the residential stretches where languid Lao folk sat idling on mats in the open first levels of their houses. Sabaidee, I said, and the guy's face would light up in the warmest way. Sabaidee! It was the most retarded vacation I had ever been on; I spent hours staring at the Mekong passing by from my balcony, scratching a word down here or there, and then I would go out searching for people to say hello to. And a week of nothing but shouting greetings to strangers was the most bizarrely satisfying holiday I'd ever had.

I took a liking to a cafe on the main drag, Sisavangvong Road, a quiet boulevard of old French and Chinese shophouses, exuding a decrepit elegance, that stretched from the Phou Si to the Wat Xieng Thong. The place was called Le Potiron?the Pumpkin?but I'm certain that the Lao script on the sign read The House of Gay Waiters. There was a little strip of bistros there, actually, seemingly staffed by an amorphous squad of slender Lao boys in eye makeup who appeared to be freelancers, switching from joint to joint. I would order the soup from one guy, who would swish off into the kitchen, and another guy, kitted out like a Williamsburg hipster, would emerge, place the bowl down, and dash into the restaurant next door, his hips swaying.

European backpackers would occasionally drift down the road, Hammer-pantsed and t-shirted, looking a little beaten up, possibly by the unfortunate phenomenon of opium tourism. It's baffling to me that I can look into the googly eyes of someone, see him shuffling and stumbling, dirty-faced and woozy, and think?I want to be that guy. Journaling as I waited for the soup to come, I had to keep reminding myself of the time that heroin tacked up an eviction notice on my heart, bulldozed it and put up a strip mall.

There was an idiot who tended to inhabit that stretch, too, some disturbed Lao soul who frolicked maniacally between the shops and the cafes. He came up to me once while I was eating pumpkin soup and made some frenzied inquiry of me in Lao, slurring with a fat tongue, and I shrugged in bewilderment. I thought he was hitting me up for change, but in fact he was trying to converse with me; finally I said something to the effect of, Look, man, I don't understand a thing you're saying, and he answered me in Lao as if we were actually having a conversation.

 

Strolling toward the Mekong, down a side street where wooden Lao houses were clung to by vines like beards of shadow, I passed a gang of monks lolling in front of their wat in the moonlight. How are you! How are you! they called to me.

I stopped. There were four of them, stretched out lazily on the steps. None of them could have been older than 19. Their heads and eyebrows were shaved and their limbs were sharp adolescent shapes in their orange robes.

Where are you going? one asked.

I'm going to eat, I said.

Eat! he said, merrily. I don't eat since noon! You eat for me!

I'll eat for you, I said.

All the monks laughed?such a warm and lovely sound.

It much impressed me how these kids could stand the hardships of a monk's life?begging for their rice, not being able to touch a woman?if you're a woman and you need to hand something to a monk, you have to put it on the ground near him and let him pick it up?the intense lessons in Pali and Sanskrit, not being able to eat after midday. Considering my own dissolute hipster years in college it's doubly astonishing to me. The chief pleasure of some monks' lives, I discovered, was trying to ensnare Western tourists into English conversation.

I figured out that after the chanting was the best time to find them, so I started actively searching for them after a bowl of pumpkin soup at the House of Gay Lao Waiters. Sometimes their bag of English phrases was limited?monks shouting Good Morning! at the strolling tourist in the dusk. Other times I had fabulous conversations with these kids that as 14-year-olds had given up everything in their lives to study the teachings of Buddha, and to whom the identity of an English-speaker was absolutely as first-class supergroovy as an American kid might find being gifted at snowboarding or website design.

All the conversations followed a basic form: Where are you from? New York. Oh, United States. How old are you? Thirty. Are you married? No.

Ohhhhhhh, said the monks with sudden nervous embarrassment.

On my last night I was there I decided I was sick of looking like a loser to the monks, and they asked, are you married? I said Yes. Oh! They said. Do you have children? No, I said.

Ohhhhhhh, said the monks with doubled nervous embarrassment.

 

I did a couple touristy things?went to the palace, which is a museum now. There's a Soviet-built iron statue of Sisavangvong, who looks like an blazing-eyed, crew-cut, 9-foot-tall wizard-king in an outfit assembled from a bellhop's uniform and silk knickers, standing on the lawn. Across from it there's a wat that appears to have walls encrusted with emeralds?it glints blindingly when the morning mist dissipates and the sun is just right. In the palace itself there are throne rooms and sub-throne-rooms with huge gilt pillows, and a hall of gifts from foreign powers that includes a tiny Lao flag?the old, royalist kind, with three elephants?that went to the moon on Apollo XI, and a piece of moon rock on a plaque signed Richard Nixon, 1973. There are trinkets from Soviet space expeditions there, too?Sputnik trophies that look like medieval weapons?presented to Sisavang Vattana, the last Lao king. Which, along with the statue outside, is a little peculiar, considering that the monarchy was ousted by a communist uprising in 1975. There is a glass case displaying the keys to American cities?Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and a medal bearing the seal of New York state. The key to Knoxville is a crude wooden thing that looks like it was made by a seventh-grader in shop class.

There wasn't anything else quite as interesting to me as the gift room?some Lao mosaics, another image?a painting?of the awesome, massive, demonic-looking Sisavangvong, and the old royal bedroom, a lonely, windowless room with a huge wooden sleigh-bed presided over by a big photo of Sisavang Vattana, who looks melancholy and withdrawn, like a banker with a broken heart.

I took a long skinny motorboat up the Mekong to see the Cave of a Thousand Buddhas at Pak Ou. After a two-hour ride upstream, I blinked at the Buddhas a couple times?they give you a flashlight and let you walk into the sooty hole?and got back on the boat. There were water buffalo oafing along the dirt shoreline. Some of the trees right on the river showed massive, tangled root systems that lay underwater when the Mekong bloats in the wet season. On either side were towering limestone formations with wild lushness racing up their sides. Occasionally a jet boat?garishly painted in smooth airbrush colors, with a rudimentary Union Jack decal on the side and a giant rocket-like exhaust pipe, shiny chrome, pointing out the back?would roar by, chock-full of Japanese tourists in crash helmets. My narrow wooden boat, putting down the Mekong, would rock alarmingly in their wake. The boat's pilot, crammed up against a steering wheel in the very tip of the craft, was comically serene.

But these days were diversions, mostly done because I felt a strange touristic pressure to do something?a fleeting pressure anyway. My average day in Louangphabang was a little more esoteric, and poetic?lingering in front of a wat, the sky above blue and flawless. The top spike of a golden stupa poking above the trees. The sun, almost down, luminous behind a lattice of leaves?the sharp-shining, waning, pale orange sun. And a child running up and down the street, pulling a kite fashioned from a pink plastic bag.

My last night I went trolling for monks and was mostly unsuccessful?though I saw a Lao guitarist in a darkened housefront, strumming and crooning some Lao ballad. Sabaidee! I called. Rock on!

Ha ha! he yelled back. Sabaidee! Rock on! Good Morning!

I finally found some monks at the top of the steps leading up to the Wat Xieng Thong?it's a giant staircase, guarded by monstrous stone lions, that leads all the way down the cliff to the lapping lip of the river.

I climbed the steps, calling to them. The moon had waned sufficiently that a few clear stars were visible in the night. The hills across the Mekong were blue outlines. There was an enormous cloud sailing sluggishly past the moon?magnificent, and edged with platinum moonlight.

How are you? I asked.

I am?unhappy, said one monk.

He makes a joke, said another monk. He will be in the wat his whole life.

Are you unhappy that you're in the wat your whole life?

Ahhhhhhh, says the unhappy monk, waving off the rough question, and laughs a nervous laugh.

There were three of them standing there. The unhappy monk wore a blood-colored robe. The other two were in orange?one of them, looking not just a little like Jughead, stood there silently with his mouth hanging open. He wore a knit, ochre balaclava at a kind of cool-kid angle, such that the cap covered half his face. The third monk was very cordial.

I asked the cordial monk his name and he said: Andy. And I thought?how funny that a Lao name should sound like such a banal Western name. I turned to Jughead. What's your name?

Bob, he said.

The angsty monk in the blood-colored robe stomped off, and Bob and Andy and I sat there, talking about the monk life, and my pretend wife that I told them I had.

Are you happy being at the Wat Xieng Thong? I asked, looking at the sim, and the little room-sized side chapels beside it?surely this is one of the most beautiful houses of worship in the world.

It is good, and sometimes it is bad, said Andy.

And we three had a grand evening?Andy eagerly brought out his English textbook and I critiqued his pronunciation as he read aloud rudimentary tales of Alice who lives in Brisbane with her sister, Sarah, and who likes to ride her bicycle and to go dancing. At one point I was trying to teach him how to pronounce the Western "L" and there two monks and I stood, on the stairway to the Wat Xieng Thong, in the shadow of the stupa, under the stars, in the moonlight, going Luh-luh-luh-luh-luh-luh-luh...

It really was a fantastic time.

We will go with you to the airport tomorrow, said Andy.

And so they did. The three of us piled into the back of a tuk-tuk?a kind of wagon welded to the back of a motorcycle to create a single chimeric vehicle; in Savannakhet, in the south of Laos, they call them "Sakayalobs," after a perceived resemblance to Skylab?and hurtled in this rickety thing toward my flight to Vientiane. Bob asked to try on my sunglasses?big chunky Gucci ones, like the grooviest robot in history might wear?and he did, and was absolutely delighted; he leaned his head back and grinned like a petite Lao Ray Charles.

Are you allowed to own things?

O-own? repeated Andy hesitantly.

Are you allowed to have possessions?

Oh?said Andy?no. Only the abbot can have?possessions.

And I thought?fuck it. I said: Bob, I want you to keep those sunglasses. Then I pulled my paperback of East of Eden out of my bag and handed it to Andy and said, So you can have something to read in English. And then I gave them both copies of a CD of music I had written.

There was a terrible moment?a stunned silence. I had figured that if they weren't allowed to accept gifts they'd politely turn them down. But this was a dynamic shift that seemed to drop from outer space; a mood of shock and tremendous gravity.

I would like?to thank you?from the bottom of my heart, said Andy, grasping for the English formalities. And your wife?when you are with her again?to send my greetings to her, and to hope that she also will someday come to Louangphabang.

When we got there, everybody shook hands and I took some pictures, and Bob and Andy got back in the tuk-tuk and sped down the dusty road back to the Wat Xieng Thong?with, it seemed to me, a kind of sense of relief.

I met an Australian biologist on the plane?he sought me out because I was carrying a guitar, and he was looking for an American who might be able to explain to him the meaning of the word "hobo." I told him the puzzling tale of the embarrassed monks and he sighed with a kind of friendly condescension.

There is nothing ruder to the Lao than to decline a gift, he said. And monks aren't allowed to own anything other than three pieces of clothing and a begging bowl. I'm afraid you put them in a bad spot.

I was devastated that I did something so obtuse, that I fucked up a beautiful hang so thoroughly. And as the plane traced the muddy, mighty waters of the Mekong 100 miles, to the very edge of Thailand, I thought?Ah. It's not so bad. I can always write Andy and Bob and tell them that I didn't realize the depth of my faux pas. After all, Andy gave me his e-mail address.