| ||||||
|
Arts & Entertainment Books Comics Health & Body Media Mothers Who Think News People Politics2000 Technology - Free Software Project  Travel & Food Columnists
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Travel Services - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - Also Today For a full list of today's Salon Travel stories, go to the
Travel home page. - - - - - - - - - - - - Search Salon - - - - - - - - - - - - Recently in Salon Travel Book Bag Vagabonding Wanderlust Travel Advisor - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
Lotus-eating in Luang Prabang | page 1, 2
Whereas places like Bangkok, Phuket or Bali are stocked with a steady
rotation of Westerners on two-week stints of recreation and mild
decadence, Laos attracts adventure-seekers who travel for months or
years at a time. In my first four days in Luang Prabang I met a Canadian
whose most recent job had been prospecting diamonds in the Yukon, an
American who'd funded a year of travel by working in a Las Vegas
chocolate factory, a Frenchman who was in his seventh month of
motorcycling around the world, a New Yorker who'd quit his job as a
stockbroker the moment he'd learned how to surf and two separate
people with concrete plans to work in Antarctica. Since Luang Prabang makes a good staging area for exploring the
mountainous northern reaches of Laos, everyone had some sort of plan
to break out of the standard tourist circuit. Some people were headed for
the Plain of Jars (the Lao answer to the statues of Easter Island: a grassy
plateau scattered with -- you guessed it -- enormous, mysterious stone
jars); others wanted to explore the remote cave network of Vieng Xai (built by the Communist Pathet Lao in response to U.S. Gen. Curtis LeMay's plan to "bomb the enemy back to the Stone Age"); yet others had their sights set on the budding postmodern opium dens of Muang Sing. By the time I'd located Suki's acquaintance Robert -- an Alaskan salmon
fisherman who's spent every winter for the past 15 years traveling in third
world countries -- he'd already purchased a fishing boat named Mik Sip
(which was small enough to handle the shallows to Paklay) and prepared
it for a downriver voyage. What's more, he'd already found four other
people to go with him. "Can you fit a sixth person?" I'd asked him hopefully.
Click here for all the travel books you need at BARNES & NOBLE "No," said Robert (who -- in keeping with his calling as an Arctic fisherman -- was rarely long on words). Robert and the Mik Sip set off down the Mekong the following morning. I resumed my happy routine of eating coconut ice cream, wandering sleepy back-streets at dusk and indulging in $1 herbal steam baths at the local Red Cross building. My morning visits to find a downriver speedboat continued to get me nowhere. Then horror struck. On the morning of my seventh day in Luang Prabang, I arrived at the customs house to find Beckett in such a huff he could barely talk. "Foolish!" he rasped, showing none of his usual ironic cheer. "Very bad! Very very very bad!" He accusingly shook his finger at nothing in particular. I finally got it out of him that there had been an accident: an upriver speedboat had hit a rock at full speed, killing the driver instantly. The passengers -- all of them foreigners -- were on their way to the hospital. It didn't look good. Rumors spread quickly in a travel community; I won't even bother repeating what I heard about the accident the day it happened. Everybody was worried, of course, but nobody knew what was going on. Twenty-four hours after the accident, I knew this for certain: An Italian traveler had suffered massive head injuries from the crash, and -- in the main hospital of the third most populous city in Laos -- nobody could locate a doctor. Nurses arranged a hasty blood transfusion, but by the time the doctor arrived four hours later, the Italian was dead. The other victims of the crash -- two Norwegian girls -- were expected to live, but both had spinal injuries. Abandoning forever the notion of hiring a speedboat downriver, I
swallowed my pride, went to the bus depot and bought a ticket for Paklay. Tomorrow: "Still interested in going down the Mekong with us?"
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - Search Salon | |||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
|||
