At the height of Vang Vieng's drug-fuelled partying era, the thing to do was tubing. You get dropped off a few kilometres upstream with a tractor inner tube, and you float down to town, stopping at any of the numerous bars on the way to drink buckets of cocktails, swallow hallucinogens, and zip-line from precarious platforms into the rock-filled water. This was why scores of backpackers met their end every year in the waters of Vang Vieng, and why now there are only three bars left (one oddly owned by the local chief of police) along the river and the drugs far less freely available. These days, the demographic has shifted from revelling backpackers to families and Asian tourists. Tubing, while still possible, is only practised by a few.
Today I'm in a group of five couples (three of them Korean), myself, and one seven-foot African American man (“hey, why you so big mister?” asks our tour guide entirely sincerely, “what you eat to get so big?”) and we're being driven up along the Nam Song river to a cave which run under a limestone hill.
We strip down to our shorts, grab an inner tube, fix a head-lamp on, grasp the rope which leads into the dark cave, and plunge our behinds into the icy water to explore the dark water-filled caverns.
At the furthest point into the cave the rope allows us to venture, we're instructed to switch off our head lamps, and the sensory deprivation is intense and the feeling is all consuming. I'm reminded of when Nic, the American, told me about his experience in a sensory deprivation capsule and the effects he described are similar to what I know about the effects of psychedelics. Curious. This begs a quote from an intriguing article by the neuroscientist and public intellectual Sam Harris:
There is nothing that one can experience on a drug that is not, at some level, an expression of the brain’s potential. Hence, whatever one has experienced after ingesting a drug like LSD is likely to have been experienced, by someone, somewhere, without it. - samharris.org
Later, after we dry off, warm up, and have our lunch, we're driven down the river a bit where we start the kayaking back into town. The weather is clear and warm, the water, splashing up as we navigate the relatively easy rapids, is cool, the limestone karsts shimmer in the early afternoon heat up over our right shoulders, and I'm in the back of a two-man kayak, relishing my steering duties, pretending these rapids are harder and more treacherous than they really are.
Along the way we stop at one of the three remaining 'tubing' bars. There are a handful of backpackers, already on their first uneasy steps to severe inebriation, telling anecdotes and trying to party like its 2011 in Vang Vieng, but its the last day of 2013 and these rivers have been calm for over a year, and this bar is currently filled out mostly by quiet Koreans - sipping water and taking photographs of the mountains - and the underemployed staff playing Petanque behind the bar.
We get back to town and I definitely need a snooze if I hope to see the first moments of next year.
I'm waiting out the front of the Irish bar, its six o'clock as we had agreed last night, and neither Craig nor Chris and his girlfriend are here. They're not here 20 minutes later either, and I stand on the street like a mug, and I'm damning them, and damning myself, and resigning myself to the prospect of seeing in the new year in my bungalow with a fifth of Lao whiskey, a longneck, a lonely game of solitaire and a wretched mood.
Craig arrives and I'm relieved and feel silly I ever thought those tragic thoughts. He's with an American guy, Ross from Philly, he looks nice at first glance, with intelligent eyes. A few moment later Chris and Lauren arrive.
“Hi Martin! You've been waiting long?”
“Hi. Nah, just a few moments”, I say, of course.
As we eat dinner and work out our plan of attack for this final night of the year, we get to talking to a couple from Adelaide at the next table – Bell (yes, Bell) from Waikerie and Jason from McLaren Vale. They join us and we're now seven. A veritable fucking snowball. To think not an hour ago I was convinced I would be by myself tonight.
Craig tells us he's on a three month trip alone which he was supposed to be on with his now ex-girlfriend. Everything has been planned and paid for already, for two people, and Craig is just getting on with it. He's hurting, and the only way he knows how to deal with it is make friends, pooh-pooh his ex, pretend he's all okay, tell exaggerated tales, and relate every single conversation in the group back to himself.
Craig, nonetheless, successfully works his Australian charm and before long we're an optimistic, bright-eyed group of 11 after the addition of two Norwegian sisters – Karina and Molly – and two crazy, fiery Thai girls – Rain and Olive. We're down in the only surviving bar on the island in the river drinking buckets of cocktails, and slowly the number of revellers grows as all the loners, all the people who not long ago, like me, thought they might end up finishing their year on a mildly melancholy note, are with us. And at midnight we fire off the giant party popper cannons the locals set off at weddings and hug all these strangers with sincere ecstasy.
As with all New Years Eves, after midnight time moves with a different cadence, and by two we are in a dark bar on the main road slowly sipping beers we realise we don't even want, and the group has fired off the tired, the weak, and the sensible, leaving a nucleus of me, Craig and the two Norwegian sisters. Craig's talking about himself still – he hasn't stopped – and he's doing well with one of the sisters. The other sister confides in me she's worried what her sibling's getting herself into, so I leave them all to it and stumble in the direction of my guest house.
On the way I meet two Russian guys, who are obliging when I ask them to help me finish my beer, and we chat about Russia and Latvia and travelling. They are on touring motorbikes, making their way down through Laos from North to South.
I continue on home.
A ladyboy (correct nomenclature being 'kathoey') is standing in my path. She drags a plastic chair out and motions for me to sit. I sit. I don't know why, but I sit, and at the table are two Finns, and one other ladyboy. The one next to me pours me a beer.
“I won't pay for that though. I didn't order it”, I say defensively.
“Don't worry. Drink. Happy New Year”, she tells me, with a smile, and sits down herself.
I talk to the two Finnish guys, but its generally stupid banter. It's four in the morning on New Years Day after all. I need to get back to the guest house. Next to me my neighbour ask, with a searching raised eyebrow, “now we go massage?”.
I look over my shoulder to where she's gesturing and I see we're sitting out front of a massage parlour. A 'massage' from a ladyboy at four in the morning, I suspect, means only one thing.
“Ah, no thank you. Thanks for the beer, Happy New Year", I say with as much tact as I can muster.
I rise, and say good bye to the Finns and the lady boys, find my bearings again and set my coordinates for a dreamless sleep that will bring me into the daylight of a new year, a year I'm looking no less forward to than any other. A year that will bring me back to Australia, and who knows what else.
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| Entrance to the cave |
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| Happy kayaker |
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| Many tourists forget this is a modest Buddhist country |
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