Travel guides can be really quite deceptive. Where they should be giving their customers a service, in the form of good advice like an estate agent or a lawyer, they instead choose to lie, like an estate agent or a lawyer. Using cleverly crafted language and heavily selective and edited photography, they seem to make every corner of the corner-less globe look like paradise. In Laos, Ollie and I fell for it, hook, line and stinker!
Si Phan Don was our last major port of call in Laos, an inland delta of the River Mekong right in the South of the country. Having spent the majority of our time in the North of the country, in Luang Prabang and Huay Xai, we decided that it would be worth getting another flight to spend the remainder (and actually the majority) of our trip in Si Phan Don. The reason? We believed the lies.
When reading about Laos before our trip were completely captivated by what was written about it. I’ll give you a taster:
“Si Phan Don is a tranquil, riverine archipelago…”- Indie Traveller
“Southeast Asia’s largest – and what many consider to be most spectacular – waterfalls are also located here.”- Rough Guides
And my favourites:
“The pendulum of time swings slowly here…”- Lonely Planet
“Many a traveller has washed ashore here, succumbed to its charms and stayed longer than expected.”- Lonely Planet
And yet as so often happens when you fall into their linguistic snare, it doesn’t take too long to realise your mistake. I can’t remember exactly what my first words were as I stood on the mud bank, dawning on me that this mudbank was where I had paid a lot of money to visit. However, on reflection, here is what the Travel guides all meant if you put what they wrote into Google Translate and translate it from English (Fib) to English (have actually visited the place.)
“Si Phan Don is a *tranquil, riverine Archipelago* bunch of small muddy islets in the middle of a dirty river.”- The Honest Traveller.
“South East Asia’s *largest* most ordinary- and what many would consider to be most *spectacular* unremarkable- *waterfalls* splashes of water are located here.”- Accurate Guides
My favourite ones cannot be directly quoted but must be paraphrased:
“The Pendulum of time swings very slowly here…”- English (Fib)
“There is literally nothing to do here except count the seconds until your departure.”- English (have actually visited the place)
“Many a traveller has washed ashore here, succumbed to its charms and stayed longer than expected.”- English (Fib)
“Many a traveller has washed ashore here and succumbed to the ridiculously cheap booze and readily available narcotics and stayed longer than expected because they run out of money and do not have the funds or the wherewithal to leave.”- English (have actually visited the place)
Unfortunately, this seems to be exactly what happened to our landlord…
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As I washed up on the bank of the particular mud bank that I had agreed to stay on, my heart sank. It was exactly the opposite to what I had expected. There was a degree of hustle and bustle that I had not expected, and most of what I could see was it’s own unique shade of brown. The sandy banks of the river were essentially silt and in places, just mud. The river, which had been fairly picturesque up in the north, was also just brown and smelled very suspicious.
We had booked to stay in the nicest and most expensive hotel in the area, desiring to lap up the luxury and relax for our last few days in paradise. As we were ushered along a narrow and bumpy track towards a large building, heavily camouflaged by a worrying amount of scaffolding, I began to doubt whether this would be the case.
In accordance with what seems to be the norm in Laos, we were greeted in the hotel reception by absolutely nobody. Again, in accordance with what I can only assume is the custom, we participated in the National Sport of Laos, Hunt the Proprietor. It is a very boring game which almost always ends upon the discovery of a mass of sedentary bodies lying on the floor and watching the TV. You tend to spend the first part of the conversation, the sparring as it were, by speaking directly into thin air, before, at last, the individual who is the most junior is forced to engage with you. Even then, such engagement takes place with them lying on the floor, head tilted back to look at us. It is no wonder that they look so surprised to see us: from that vantage point, it would have looked like we were nimbly hanging from the ceiling, which considering Ollie’s stature, must have been a magnificent sight. It is only when you convince them that they are in fact expecting paying guests that they can muster enough energy to leave their horizontal existence behind and stagger, bleary-eyed to the reception desk.
The fun is only just beginning, however, because, after fumbling around for a few minutes, this most junior member of the team (if indeed he is actually employed in said establishment) realises that they have absolutely no idea what to do and shuffles off in search of the manager. And it was this introduction that I think best summed up the sort of place that Si Phan Don really is.
After a strangely long wait, emerging from the deep recesses of the hotel, came the proprietor. He shuffled out, dishevelled, thrown together and unbelievably drunk. His greeting was accompanied by a warm scowl and his stale-liquor flavoured breath muttered annoyance. I don’t think he had been woken up- I think he had been resuscitated. Against his will apparently. His very bald head glowed a throbbing sun-burnt red, which unfortunately clashed with the alcoholism-pink of what would be described on everybody else as the “whites” of his eyes. He was Belgian, and quite friendly when sober as we later discovered. At this moment, I didn’t know that he had lived in Laos for fifteen years. I hadn’t realised the he had left his family, job and entire life in Belgium behind in order to build his hotel. I never will know how he truly feels about the place that he now by necessity had to call home. But I kind of knew already. He had believed the lies and he had given everything to set up a life for himself in paradise. As he led us on a complicated journey through the labyrinthine corridors of the hotel to our room, and my heart sank further, the sense of disappointment that I had initially felt and the humour of the situation wore off, it was replaced with a far more permanent sense of pity, that sat quite stubbornly in my stomach for the remainder of our trip. A pity that extended to the vast majority of people that we encountered here: people who seemed to have exchanged motivation, purpose, community and joy, for alcohol, drugs and so-called liberty. Despite the sense of desperation that hung in the air, the trip was still a memorable one, right from the beginning.
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The Laos culture is, lets say, quirky. Like all cultures it was fascinating in some of it’s customs, beautiful in some of it’s art and challenging in some of it’s perspective of the world. However, like all cultures, it certainly has it’s foibles. For Ollie and I, meal times were when these eccentricities really came to the fore, more entertaining than they were nourishing.
We came down to breakfast on the lawn expecting to meet and intermingle with the other guests as one tends to do whilst one travels. It is a time to meet new people, exchange ideas and plans for the day, catch up with people that you have bumped into before, and sometimes quite simply to speak to other people who speak English. And we would have done apart from that there weren’t any other guests. This large, very nice hotel, the largest in Si Phan Don had only two guests: Ollie and I. I mean, in fairness, maybe they just preferred quality over quantity. Also, in fairness, I think Ollie counts as three. Regardless of this, as we emerged from our room and sat down expectantly at a table, the look of complete shock on the face of the poor waiter (who was probably expecting to sleep through his shift) told us that we hadn’t been expected.
After a few minutes he shuffled over with our breakfast menu and hovered awkwardly as we digested it. We both chose the continental.
“Ah, yes”, he smiled pleasantly at us. We smiled back.
“And what is in it?”
You may think that the question was posed by Ollie or myself, keen to learn exactly what we were going to enjoy. But that is because you have never been to Laos. If you had been to Laos you would not be surprised to know that our poor waiter had no idea what the continental breakfast that he was offering might contain. I was tempted to tell him it was caviar but thought better of it, I may have been waiting for years.
“Well, there’s toast,” Ollie started.
“Fruit” I added, suddenly realising that I didn’t really know what was in a continental breakfast either.
“You want egg?”, he asked hopefully.
We looked at each other in that bemused way that friends do when they’re not quite sure what to say. I think we came to the conclusion of “why not?”
“You want fruit?”
At this point I think we were just grateful that he was offering food and that he hadn’t mistaken us for the plumber, or in Ollie’s case, a mythical giant.
And then… the wait. If you are eating in Laos, and there is no buffet, then you become accustomed to waiting for your food. And I’m not talking 20 minutes either.
We had already fallen foul of this a few times already. In Luang Prabang, Ollie had ordered chicken breast in one of the little riverside restaurants. What had arrived, a good ten minutes after my noodle dish, was a lonely, overcooked and ridiculously small chicken drum stick. It was hard to complain, it was exactly what Ollie had ordered from the menu, it was just hard to believe that anybody would want to order a solitary, overcooked and ridiculously small chicken drum stick.
In fact, only the previous night, on our first night in Is Phan Don, we had really seen the full magnificence of Laos cuisine. For the first time in weeks, we set eyes on the word, “pizza”. Sitting on the river front, tired from our long day of travelling, we both had a sudden paroxysm at the evidence of our other life in the heart of Laos. I was dubious. Pizza? Really? I had several reservations about ordering Pizza here. Firstly, having witnessed lonely, overcooked and ridiculously small chicken drum stick, I was not quick to believe that this tiny restaurant in the middle of nowhere would be able to produce pizza. If they could, I wondered if it would actually look or taste like pizza. My reservations were not helped by the fact that this pizza was the most expensive addition to the menu by a country-mile.
“I think they’ve just mis-spelled noodles,” I warned Ollie, cynically.
But Ollie insisted. He regretted it. And he regretted it for a significant amount of time. I’ll give you a rough idea of the time- frame for said pizza to arrive.
6:30pm- Order food.
6:50pm- Harry’s noodles arrive. Noodles are stared at hungrily by Harry for the next ten minutes.
7:00pm- Harry decides that etiquette can stuff it and eats his noodles.
7:10pm- Harry finishes his noodles and secretly wonders whether he should order more.
7:30pm- The decibels emitted from our table (From Ollie’s side anyway) rise at a steady pace.
7:45pm- Engagement bingo invented.
Interlude
To assuage Ollie’s stomach and peeved mood, we decided to pass away the time by inventing a game. Bored of waiting for food, I had gone on facebook, yes that was strangely possible, and discovered that one of our university friends had just gotten engaged. What started as a friendly conversation about our friends very soon became a savage and competitive game.
The rules were as follows:
Each player must take it in turns to guess three couples who they think would be engaged imminently. The first player to get all three correct, wins. There is no time frame: it ends when it ends. It is a game of endurance, one that requires patience and inside knowledge. Worryingly, the pizza only just arrived before the game ended… ok slight exaggeration!
End of interlude
8:30pm- 2 hours after ordering, yes 2 hours, not an exaggeration, Ollie’s Pizza arrived. At least we think it was a pizza. It was circular in shape, however, it was more the size of a crumpet. I am pleased to report that the waiter departed before Ollie had the chance to recover from his furious, but mercifully silent, stare of rage at the insult in front of him.
8:31pm- Ollie finished his pizza.
Our breakfast the next morning, was no different. Our stomach’s were not rumbling, they were howling cries of mercy. I wasn’t sure which emitted more noise: Ollie’s stomach or his mouth. As the minutes ticked agonisingly pass, we began to notice a steady trickle of people file past us too. It was a bit strange. They almost seemed to tiptoe, as if they were embarrassed to be there. As one man hurriedly tried to hide a couple of eggs from us we began to realise who they were and what they were doing. One item at a time, this was our breakfast being delivered. After a while, a large lady, the sort that could sink a small boat, staggered by with some bread rolls folded up in one of her rolls of skin. A few minutes later, a row of boys carried in fruit, one carrying an orange, one with a bunch of bananas, thew biggest one proudly escorting a pineapple into the kitchen.
I wanted to ask them to give it directly to us and cut out the middle man. But I didn’t. For whilst we were painfully hungry, and whilst this was painfully slow, this was a Laos breakfast, made by friendly, smiley people. And it is moments like this, the hilarity and the strangeness, that m makes travelling such a memorial experience.
It’s easy to laugh…
I mean it. It really is easy to laugh sometimes! And in Is Phan Don, it is best to laugh, because otherwise I would be far too tempted to cry. Unfortunately, I was crying later on that day.
NB. About 18 months later, I was declared the winner of marriage bingo. I would like to thank my opponent and wish him the best of luck with the rest of his career.
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