Marmalade Daydreams

In which our hero bikes to hell, heaven, and not quite back, is assisted by mere children, and ends up that ass on the bus who would be taking up three seats but for Laotian ingenuity.

Well, I must say: after a good night's sleep, another walk down to the Mekong to chuckle at the aerobics class and eat longan fruit (the poor man's lychee) discarding the skins and seeds along the riverbank, and having just enjoyed a fantastic pain au chocolate, it all seems like some fantastic dream, dressed in organdy, but no; all you are about to read is the Buddha-honest truth.

I suppose it all began a couple of days ago, when Ian, a wild-haired, wild-eyed ex-pat of Northern Ireland, told me of Xieng Khuan, the Buddha Park, over our noodle soup breakfast at the Thai-Laotian border. He described a bizarre garden full of oversized statuary created in the '50s by a former drug addict turned charismatic religious leader who preached a unique blend of Buddhism and Hinduism. "You've got to see it, man. It's mad." He told me that it was an terrific bike ride -- about 25 flat kilometers alongside the Mekong on a bike path through villages and such, with the kids waving and all, and I figured that just about planned my day for me.

I guess I should have been more wary about renting a girl's bike. It wasn't until later, popping the chain back on the gears for the umpteenth time, that I realized that the bike was a "Fairy Turbo". I don't know if the name alone would have dissuaded me from the bike ride, but maybe I would have shopped around a little more.

I certainly should have been more discerning when renting the bike. The guy asked me if it was okay, so I hopped on it and rode down the street -- sure the brakes screeched, but they worked fine. I didn't look closely at the chain, so who's to say if any of the links were broken before I rented it, or if I snapped through the metal with solely the power of my quadriceps and my near-complete ignorance of the workings of bicycle mechanisms.

The day started pleasant enough -- a good breakfast, seeing the golden stupa that is the symbol of Laos, supposedly a stylized lotus bud but more closely resembling a device for interplanetary communication, chatting with a fellow New Yorker on the pleasurable absurdities that plague travellers in the region -- yes, all was going just dandy. As I biked out of town, though, a strange chunking noise began in the gears. On my bike at home, that sometimes happens when I shift gears and it doesn't catch properly, but this bike didn't have a gearshift. Regardless, I stuck to my general strategy of bike riding -- pumping my legs and not knowing much about what exactly is propelling me forward.

Once I turned off onto the bike trail, I could see why Ian had recommended it -- despite being unpaved, so a bit harder pedalling than the main drag, I passed innumerable families who were delighted to see me, and a grin crept across my face as I began exchanging the "Sabadii" greetings that meet the traveller all across this friendly nation. Goats without a goatherd, an enormous teak houseboat, happy dogs, children running after me, all was great until... my pedals start spinning tensionless. No problem -- I pop the kickstand, flounder for a minute with the chain until two local dudes on a motorbike, convinced I have no clue what I'm doing, come over and show me a real easy way to get the chain back on. Sweet, I learned something new. That's what travelling is all about.

Well, I got real good at it, because it began popping off every five minutes or so. I decided to get back on the main road, despite the traffic and the lack of ambiance, because it was a smoother ride, which helped the chain stay on for about ten minutes at a time. I passed many many rice patties, as well as the immense Beerlao facility (the country's only beer, brewed by the state -- gotta hand it to communism for doing it right and eliminating the competition, though I disagree from most kowtowing backpackers and think the beer is rather crap). My bell was disabled in the sense that I could not ring it, but it rang out every time I went over a bump (which was fairly often, as even the paved roads in Laos are in an equivalent state of disrepair as those in East New York), and as a ding-donging fool cruising down the main drag on a girl's bike, I was continuously being waved over by folks who wanted to hang out with a sweaty goofy-looking farang in a cowboy hat, and I gave a few the pleasure.

At one point, the chain was caught between the namby-pamby metal plate that was supposed to be guarding it from mishaps and a screw protruding from the kickstand, and I was having a really hard time getting it out. To my rescue came a group of kids, maybe from about five to seven years old, and with their dextrous little fingers, they got it out, however, not without blood being shed. The oldest had set himself up on pedal duty, and he neglected to ensure his little brother's digits were clear of the gears before vigorously cranking. I wowed them, though, with an alcohol wipe and a band-aid, and all were satisfied. Then I bought a green mango, of which you dip slices into a salt-sugar-chili mixture, and all rejoiced.

I stopped at a mechanic at this point (which I think most reasonable people would have done about an hour earlier, as I biked for a good hour under these conditions), who replaced the broken link and tightened the chain (I think this may have been the problem from the get-go), and it was all systems go. Amazing how much more quickly I moved once I no longer had to stop continuously. However, I had made a vow to stop the next time I saw someone with green coconuts, whose innards are tasty, hydrating, and are said to aid digestion, and so I did, delighting the family with photos of New York and my students, who were the same age as their daughter, who, being raised without bovine growth hormone (and probably without a whole lot of protein), was more the size that you'd expect a twelve-year old to be, as opposed to some of the Godzillas that I teach.

Anyway, it was as I pulled away from their roadside stand, waving my hat in the air and mustering my best "Yii-haw!", that the rains began. Thankfully nothing like the downpour of the previous day's jungle meditation, but enough of a rain to get me drenched and elicit even bigger grins as it washed off the grime, cooled me off, and, I suspect, made me look like even more of a freakshow as I became even more popular with the roadside crowds.

Amazingly, the final drops fell and the sun emerged just as I pulled up to the fabled Xieng Khuan, my destination, hours after I'd left the city, and before going in I decided to grab a drink at a stand and chat with a pretty Dutch girl who was sitting there. She laughed at my soaked hat and shirt, that I'd ridden up on a bicycle when anyone with any sense had taken a motobike for the 25km journey, and asked if I'd been in the garden yet. When I replied in the negative, she said, "Oh, you must! There's a big pumpkin, and you can climb in it, and up it, and even on the top, though I wouldn't..." I didn't quite know what to make of this, but I knew that the journey had been well worth it.

This blog entry has gotten fairly long, as I am fairly longwinded, and I'm not sure my words will do this place much justice, so do yourself a favor and, once you've finished reading this paragraph (or any other time in the near future), click here and it will take you to my new flickr account. click on the "vientianne" slideshow on the right to see the pictures in the proper order. Anyway once you climb inside the mouth of the "pumpkin", you are inside an immense depiction of the three worlds, penetrated by the axis mundi, filled with demons, gods, other crazy beings being tormented, delighted, or just going about their day. You must see the pictures to find out what happens when you emerge from the pumpkin's head...

Anyway, I wax on. Long story short, it began to rain again, the chain broke again, and, after some initial forays into the world of being a bike mechanic (I'm staying with my day job) finally a bus agreed to pick me up, bicycle and all, and drive me back to town. It was a deja vu-ish experience, recallign one of my most impressionable experiences from my first trip to Laos -- riding in the back of a pickup truck carrying 26 people, two busted up motorcycles (we'd come across an accident and took on the victims and their vehicles), a pig and some chickens (in wicker baskets, of course), except this time there were only 23 of us, the vehicle was a bit larger, so no one had to ride on the roof, and it was the lone farang who had the assed-out vehicle being taken back to town.

What a day, and I'm tired of writing. Next stop, Vang Vien, with spectacular karst orbs rising improbably from the ground, limestone caves to explore, and the such. Now that I'm getting better at the whole photo thing, it should be more fun to check the site, so tune in, and post some comments. That's part of the fun of this for me.