Asian Walkabout

“I can handle this."Handle" is my middle name. Actually, "handle" is the middle of my first name.” Chandler Bing, from an unnamed episode of the hit 1990s TV show Friends.

Vang Vieng, Laos. Before the invasion, this small town nestled against the banks of the Nam Song River was a slow-paced fishing village populated by ethnic Loatians and tribal Hmong people. Soaring limestone karsts provided a stunning backdrop to the sunkissed rhythm of daily life. Women caught crabs with their bare hands on the riverbank, while men in pole-driven skiffs searched for bigger fish.

Then they came. At first they visited in a slow trickle, scouting the land for appropriate resources. When they discovered its bounty, they started coming in droves, changing the face of the town forever.

I should interject something here. Marijuana is a form of traditional medicine in Laos. As more and more tourists started visiting this beautiful, landlocked strip of Southeast Asia, the pot found its way into pizzas, where it gave birth to a traditional tourist delicacy known as the “happy pizza.” This snack evolved into a host of other laced delights with names reflective of the states they induced: the space shake, for example, might contain psycosilibin mushrooms along with the traditional weed. The Lonely Planet says to watch out for anything labeled “cosmic.”

So when you combine copious amounts of weed and Beer Lao with stunning scenery and a slow-moving river, you get creative. And when you get creative, you realize that inflating a tractor tube, bringing a few beers along, and floating down the river is not a bad way to spend a day.

Then the locals get creative and realize that tourists like booze, Bob Marley, and rope swings. So they line 90% of the river with bars, blown speakers blaring Bob, and rope swings. Thus, the formerly sleepy fishing village of Vang Vieng has become a party village.

In the midst of all this, there is, inexplicably, Friends. Ross, Courtney, Phoebe, Joey, Rachel, Chandler. Their sitcom lives play out 14 hours a day on Vang Vieng’s main drag, to an utterly stoned—and often passed out—audience. The idea is to get a happy shake and happy pizza and zone out. But only to Friends. The bars, which are identical in color, size, and TV screen placement, show nothing else.

It starts at around 9 am and lasts well into the night. It is also utterly creepy. You see one bar playing out the episode where Joey finds Rachel’s erotic book (Season 7, Episode #2), then you turn the corner and see the exact same thing. Same happy shakes, same mustard-yellow Beerlao tablecloths, same creepy studio laughter echoing down the main drag. Same erotic book. After passing the third or fourth such establishment, you have to pause and wonder whether you’ve walked into a space-time rift, where it is actually the same restaurant, time and again, containing the same people.

OK, so it’s not, especially if you’re sober—but you see my point. We spent a day in Vang Vieng tubing a river so slow that our tubes often stopped completely. The next day, we kayaked/songtheawed to Laos’ capital city of Vientiane. That river was much faster: They sent us down a Class III rapid, then had us jump off a 25-foot cliff, if we so desired.
That was scary. But I still don’t think it was quite as frightening as the Friends thing.

In many cultures, if you want to be a monk, it’s a lifelong commitment. You shave your head, retreat into a monastic order, and nurture your vows until the day you die.

Not so in Laos. Every Buddhist Lao male (read: most men in Laos) are expected to become novice monks between the time they graduate school (18-20 years old) and take on a career or marriage. For some, this means as little as a week in robes. Others spend up to two years in the order. As one novice, speaking from his own experience, put it,
“That’s a really long time.”

In fact, just outside of Luang Prabang, there’s a Vipassana center where monks learn to meditate. It’s not that they’ve been doing this all their lives. They learn from Square One and, after a ten-day intensive, might meditate for another few months, then leave the order.

In the meantime, hundreds of them populate the resplendent World Heritage Site that is Luang Prabang. Home to no less than 22 wats, or temples, the city is a visual paradise. French colonial architecture makes for chic hotels, cafes, and shops, while ancient Theravada Buddhist wats shine mysteriously through scented frangipani trees. Novices clad in sunset orange robes populate wats, streets, even cell phone stores.

We spent four days in Luang Prabang after a long commute from Thailand via something aptly dubbed the Slow Boat.
It’s a long, houseboat-style vessel packed to the gills with two-person school benches. Tourists cram on butt-numbing seats for two straight days, reading books, zoning out to scenery, or getting plowed on the half-liter bottles of Beerlao sold by ambitious village kids.

The benefit of the slow boat was that we got a scenic view of Laos, the most laid-back country in Southeast Asia, from the vantage point of the epic Mekong River. The river’s source is Tibet, but its bounty is here in Southeast Asia, where Thai, Lao, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Cambodian fisherman reap and export the river’s incredible bounty. It’s giant catfish season, so they cast bamboo nets all along the sides of the river. Meanwhile, naked little kids played in the water and fishermen waited out the heat of the day in makeshift shelters.

Luang Prabang was one of the most beautiful places we’ve seen, fully earning its status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.