SE Asia — VII (and the last): Siem Reap, Bangkok, leaving

I arrived in Siem Reap in the early afternoon. I'd planned on spending basically all of my three days there seeing Angkor Wat, but when I stepped off the bus, I considered it and decided that I wasn't going to bother with trying to do any of it today. Right now all I wanted was some food and a place to sleep and a relaxing walk around town. So I found all those things.

Siem Reap is much like Chiang Mai, full of hip shops and cafes that the locals can't afford, except maybe once in a while for a big celebration, or if they're pretty well-heeled, like the tuk-tuk driver sitting near me at the Khmer food place where I stopped to eat and get my bearings. I had amok, which has become famous among people who go to Cambodia. You can tell right away that it's Cambodian: it's served in a folded-up banana leaf bowl. Banana leaves are the plastic bags of Cambodia. Every time I got food inside one in the country, I felt a little like I had come to a long-lost land that no one had ever explored. Inside the leaf is the amok: vegetables and fish in curry made with coconut milk. The only way I can think of to describe it is that it tastes very relaxing. It's the taste of being in the tropics, probably lounging on a papasan chair and watching people walk by unhurriedly. I wished the banana leaf were bigger so I wouldn't have to do anything for longer. But the amok ended, and I had to figure out where to sleep.

I ended up at a place with a bunch of mattresses spread out on a deck inside of mosquito nets, at a dollar a night. Then I took off walking. I found the river, which is lined with curlicuing trees that would seem more at place in an ancient fairy tale. Nearby there was the most well-maintained temple that I saw the whole trip. It was in a courtyard made by four walls all covered with bas-relief story murals, and inside was a reclining Buddha made out of half of the boat of a 1500s monk who would make a long river journey every day just to get rice, but always return with the rice somehow still warm. With everything in the temple so well-kept and shiny, I felt like I was finally seeing the fully intact, as-intended version of the temples I'd been seeing this whole trip all centuries old and run-down or ruined.

I noticed that Siem Reap had a lot less garbage than everywhere else I'd seen in Cambodia. I hadn't mentioned this yet, but Cambodia is a dirty, smelly country. The normal method of disposing of garbage is to just throw it on the ground. They're completely unashamed about this, and the gutters of the streets are basically buried under paper, cups, plastic bags, and food wrappers. This is true all throughout Phnom Penh but also on the intercity roads between places. It never gets cleaned except for the items that can be sold, like cans or bottles.

I was about to climb a tree when I heard drums, and ducked down an alley to find people celebrating Chinese New Year. They were doing the same thing yesterday in Phnom Penh, but it's a multi-day celebration, so it made sense. It was a squad of teenagers and younger boys, dragging a wheelbarrow. The wheelbarrow had a big drum on it, and the chief of the squad was banging out an entrancing, energetic rhythm on it. Nearby, inside a building, were other kids dancing under two different two-person dragon costumes, bouncing up and down and apparently having a great time. Another boy was dressed as a smiling Buddha. As Buddha passed me he gave me the peace sign with his hand. They finished up with a final rhythm from the drum and all the Cambodians around applauded, and the squad moved on to the next place. I guess they just go into different buildings—this time they went into a massage spa. It was really cool to watch.

Wandering some more, I stumbled upon an Australian guy and a Russian girl and hung out with them the rest of the night. We had cheap food at a little Chinese place in the Old Market, and then the Australian guy had to go so I went with Olga to a cafe where she'd been hanging out with a highly international group of friends nightly for a while. I joined the group and we talked for a long time, and eventually I went to bed feeling great about Siem Reap.

It turned out that the price of one dollar was available at my hostel because it would be hard for them to charge more with the amount of noise and light that come from the rooftop bar that the hostel runs. But this worked out okay for me, because I had actually been planning on getting up at 4:30 in the morning so I could see Angkor Wat at sunrise. I shambled downstairs, rented a bike for the day, wrested the menu away from some late-night drunks, and took a baguette out on the road. The way was surprisingly smooth and flat, but there were hardly any streetlights. I felt like I'd done the ride before. I realized why: it was like the time I biked to Rock Creek State Park, along a smooth, unlit path in the dark. Except that this time I ended up at one of the most stupendous monuments in the world instead.

I parked my bike in a place that I deduced to be near the temple based on the huge numbers of other vehicles parked there. I couldn't see anything, though, so I just had to take each new thing as it came. That started with a huge stone bridge guarded by seven-headed serpents (and a human gateway of ticket-takers). I walked over it across what I assumed to be an enormous moat, and passed through a wall. The wall was surmounted by an enormous carving that I couldn't make out, and I was passing through just one of several arched gates big enough to ride an elephant through—and I wouldn't be surprised at all if that happened regularly back in the day. Then there was a walkway, and the silhouette of the wat, topped with its otherworldly stone pinecones. The sun was starting to cast purple light behind it. I stood on a lawn, a little away from a pond and outside the crush of hundreds of other tourists. I stared at the brightening wat as the sun revealed its details to me. And boy, was I not disappointed. I was prepared to be bored by just another wat in the long series of wats that I've seen on this trip, but Angkor Wat might as well be in its own category. The sunrise came to fullness and showed me a building that seemed eternal. The gods themselves could have placed Angkor Wat when they created the world. Or it could have grown there, now waiting patiently and watching the story of the world until it eventually ends.

With enough light now, I walked up to the building on a wooden staircase that was there to replace a stone one that had crumbled in some forgotten century. I could hardly get in the doorway at first for wanting to look at every detail I could find. Once I got into the open-air hallway on the bottom level, still piled high enough that a jump to the ground would injure, I started to get a better idea of what kind of place I was in. The inner wall of the hallway was a bas-relief carving mural stretching from the floor up to the high ceiling, illuminated by light bouncing in from the jungle between the columns on the outside, and all the way from where I was standing to the corner of the temple, and keep in mind that this is the largest religious building in the world, so that's a long way. Hundreds of graven soldiers away, and I stared at the carvings of all of them, and their swords and horses and wagons and elephants and gods. People go to museums to see paintings made with as much skill per unit area as any part of this gallery wall. And here the walls were built of it, as though the concept of plain, smooth walls didn't even exist. Everything in the temple but the floor, in fact, was carved, no column left unpatterned, no scrap of wall space unclaimed for the evidently limitless Ramayana stories illustrated. I circled the entire building on this gallery, walking the better part of a kilometer in the process, and it was like that the whole time. Halfway around, I stopped to look at an eroding stone stupa in the grass outside the temple. As a tour guide stood there explaining it to some tourists, a monkey walked casually out of the forest and climbed up the stupa. When I came down to look, it was eating fruit from an offering plate left there for Buddha.

Without even breaching into the interior, I'd seen all this. I went in now, and the carvings turned from complex stories into simple repeated patterns, but they were still everywhere. Faces, flowers, elephants, monkeys; plain walls still not an option. The effort it must've taken—were there even that many people in the kingdom of Angkor? Apparently so, and they were all master stone-carvers an artists. The size. I could've wandered around for days and not seen everything. Months, even. A person could write books about the enigmas drawn in the stone.

I made it to the top level, a courtyard in which there stands a tower of rock surmounted by the beehive lotus buds that make Angkor Wat like nothing else on the planet. The clifflike stairs that went to the top of this place wouldn't open until 7:40, and the line had already started forming over half an hour ahead of time. A French couple, the woman bald and the man in a typically French striped shirt, had circumvented this by getting drunk, climbing over the fence, and sitting barefoot at the top of the steps with a can of beer and utter disregard for tradition and propriety. The weird thing was, there was a guard, but he did nothing to them. They just sat there like children gleefully getting away with something their parents told them not to do. He barely even scolded them when they later came down: "You are crazy." (The guy, clearly amused that this was the worst they could do to him, said, "Yes, I am crazy.") Anyhow, the time came and they opened it and I stood in line and reached the top and had a tremendous view from the seat of an ancient empire's power, and got a closer look at the lotus buds but still didn't really understand them. Maybe someone does, somewhere.

After several hours of fascination, I came down out of the temple and walked over the bridge. There was in fact a moat under it, as I'd guessed in the dark earlier—an absolutely enormous moat. I got supplies from some of the unlimited supply of little kids and old people here who peddle trinkets and sustenance and hassle you and try to guilt you into giving them money. The girl I bought the water from was with another girl. Both of them had guided me to a place where I could park my bike for free, which was a sham already because you can park your bike anywhere along the road here. One girl said, "You want cold water? You buy from me." I asked how much and she quoted a price over two times too high. The other girl immediately offered to sell me some water. I managed to haggle her down to a reasonable price. Then the first girl said, "Wha bout me? You know I said free parking first." As if that entitled her to a free dollar or something. The soup was a ramen, probably available at a cost of a dime to the locals, but the lady at the stand told me the price was three dollars. I got it down to one dollar, and to be fair she did put an egg in it for me.

Then I moved on to Bayon. Because there's not just one wat at the Angkor Wat complex. This used to be a city, the capital of the Angkor kingdom, an empire that was bigger than any country that still exists in this area, claiming most of Thailand and Laos. There were temples and lakes and moats everywhere. Then the empire collapsed, and the houses of the people, all made of wood, rotted away, leaving only the houses of the gods, and even those were forgotten or abandoned, except a few.

Years ago, archaeologists came to this place and chose Bayon as the temple they would completely disassemble and examine. They took it partway down and turned it successfully into a giant field full of blocks, keeping meticulous notes all the while. Then the Khmer Rouge started their insanity and in the mess of everything all the notes were lost forever. So now it looks as though it exploded a few decades ago. To get there I rode through a massive gate in a city wall that was about the same scale as the one in Chiang Mai, but in terms of architecture skill, made it look like something a kid had made with just the square Legos. At Bayon was where I first got the feeling of being Indiana Jones. Far enough away from other people, I could almost imagine myself exploring a series of abandoned temples in a remote jungle that hadn't seen humans since the time of the ancients. It was completely different from Angkor—smaller, few enclosed spaces or intact ceilings, and instead of lotus buds there were lots of giant heads, each with four serenely smiling faces—but it had the same feeling, made out of the same softly eroded blocks and probably carved by some of the grandsons of Angkor Wat's carvers. I walked around and wished there weren't so many signs telling me not to climb stuff, because this was the perfect place for summiting an ancient head and feeling like the master of everyone down below. I watched some men with heavy machinery among the blocks in the grass, trying to piece some of the walls back together. But I had a lot of temples to see, so after an hour or two I called Bayon done and moved on to the next place.

Angkor Thom had its own character, just like the last two—this one was grand and taller than the others, but also more wild and primal, having been left to meld with the forest for what must have been several generations. It's walled with forest and full of secret nooks and crannies, which allowed me to climb to weird vantage points just as I wanted to. Even the trees in the temples here look like nothing I'd ever seen before, with roots like a flying squirrel's wing between the trunk and the ground, and trunks like logs rolled hastily out of clay, ascending completely smooth to heights taller than most entire trees back home before even bothering to sprout any leaves. Or others had roots like a serving of tangled pasta being lifted from the bowl. I hid and climbed in the tree roots and witnessed the spectacle of a man asking his tour guide how many more temples he had to visit today. How could anyone possibly be bored here? Outside the temple was a long wall with bas-relief scenes of elephants and gods and the sea. I looked at everything and then found myself at my bike again, so I moved on to the next place.

Preah Khan was where I started realizing that these temples had at one point been seriously abandoned. It was the same scope as any of the other temples, though on the ground instead of raised up. But the roofs had fallen in on whole hallways, even wings of the building. Trees were growing in what were now courtyards, but might once have been rooms. Trees were everywhere, in fact, even growing on top of the roofs, with person-sized roots somehow reaching down to the ground around the walls like an attacking octopus. Most people stuck to the intact halls, which made it easy to get away from them for a while. I climbed heaps of fallen stone and saw young papaya trees. A lizard was cautiously looking out from under a block. The air was warm and quiet. I could just as well have been the first person here since the ancient city fell.

But I wasn't, and I had more temples to see. The next, Neak Pean, was a bit like Preah Khan, except that it was surrounded by an ancient manmade lake instead of a a forest. I found it hard to conceive of people making something like this without even the help of a single bulldozer, but the lake was vast, easily big enough for playing a league's worth of simultaneous underwater football games, and perfectly rectangular. Out front, on the walkway to it, was a platform where a band of amputees were playing hypnotic traditional Khmer music on handmade-looking instruments. Later that day I saw another band of amputees. Later still, someone told me that Cambodia has more amputees per capita than any other country, on account of all the land mines left over in their country from when the Khmer Rouge wanted to keep anyone from farming land they weren't supposed to farm. Inside, Neak Pean was of course as amazing as the other temples, but it was an amazingness that I had gotten used to, because it was like the other temples. So I was more impressed by what was special to this place: the causeway over the moat outside the back entrance (which historically was the front, but the road was simpler if it came the other way). It was lined by a long row of headless Buddhas. Fascinating, perplexing.

There were a few slightly more modest temples—a short one called Ta Som and a tall one called East Mebon. At the next, Pre Rup, I stopped and played a pen-and-paper game involving dots with some Cambodians who were selling books to tourists. Even these temples were sights worth traveling a long way to see. But I wasn't able to devote much mental energy to them, because I was looking forward too much to the last temple of the day—Ta Prohm. By now I was dead tired and it was nearly time for sunset to arrive, so I headed there to watch sunset. Ta Prohm was left alone for longer than most of the other temples, so it's been engulfed by trees much more thoroughly. I got there and found that it's still definitely more a temple than a forest, but the land doesn't belong completely to either the gods or the jungle. I treated it as a playground and climbed and visited the giant crowned four-headed faces up close. Kings and priests once walked where I was walking now, on this land now woven with tree roots.

Unfortunately for me, there were so many trees that it was impossible to get a view of the horizon for the sunset. But I made the most of it and left while there was still a little light in order to try to see it inside the Angkor Thom walls. Not much luck, but I had seen enough splendor to last me years already today, so I was feeling pretty satisfied when I biked back into town.

When you buy a ticket to Angkor Wat, you get a one-, three-, or seven-day pass. I wasn't even going to be in Cambodia long enough for a three-day pass, so I got a one-day pass, and now I couldn't go back without paying another $20. But that was okay, because even though Angkor Wat is enough for one town to have, Siem Reap is also just a modest, bumpy bike ride away from the Tonlé Sap, the largest lake in southeast Asia. I got a bike from my hostel again and went there, with really no clear idea of what I'd find. Olga had told me you could find some cool things exploring the shore, and there was a floating village, although it could only be seen by a $20 boat ride. Along the way I left the domain of English-language signs and entered an area that I think few travelers bother to see. The forest fell away to a low-lying plain covered in wet rice fields. I was biking along the Siem Reap River, and it got wider and its banks soggier as it got close to the lake. But people didn't let that stop them from building houses on it; they just built their houses on stilts. Here and there dirt roads plunged away from the (mostly) paved one I was on and headed out into the rice fields.

I could tell I was getting close to the lake, and then a gate appeared across the road. To get around, I had to go through a tollbooth and pay $2. I emerged from the tollbooth on a vast area of gravel and got instructed to take a long pointless circle on it before getting back to the road. And then it turned out there wasn't all that much more road. It became gravel and then dirt and then seemed to peter out into a place where people were doing things with gas tanks and stuff. But I was on the banks—I could see water, though I couldn't see what was going on in it.

The only place where people were going was a white building on top of a slope above the water. So I went there. Inside they were selling high-end souvenirs and snacks. I got an ice cream bar and sat down in a papasan chair on the side of the building facing the lake, which had no wall, and listened to a band of amputees playing traditional Khmer music and watched boats come and go at a dock at the bottom of the slope. Streams of rushed-looking tourists were arriving and departing and I guessed this must be the place where you buy the $20 ticket to the floating village. But I'd already seen some houses on stilts, so I was content to lounge back with my ice cream bar and a friendly cat I'd found and relax from biking.

After a while I got up, intent on getting my two-dollar toll's worth. I headed toward the gas tanks I'd seen earlier. It turned out that beyond them was a spit of dirt that stretched out into the distance, as wide as a dirt road, with water on both sides. All along it were lots of things: restaurants (that is, tables with umbrellas, or sometimes without, and a burner somewhere nearby), motorbikes, shacks, shallow wooden boats, boats being built, garbage, more garbage, naked children, clothed children, people on motorbikes that somehow stayed upright on the gouged dirt, a Korean church, a Korean-funded school—everything, it seemed. People waved hello to me. There were no other tourists.

Just absorbing all these sights, I walked down this spit of land. It kept going for quite a while. A white guy on a bike overtook me. Shortly afterward, I passed a few dirty, parked trucks and discovered that the land had sloped all the way down into the water and this was the end of it. Then, after a moment: "But what about that guy on the bike?" I asked myself. I looked ahead and there he was, pedaling furiously to get through the water to a stretch of sand a few dozen yards away. "Looks like an adventure," I thought, and took my shoes off to step into the water. As I crossed, some children came past me the other way.

This spit of land was much shorter. When it ended, there was nothing across the water to walk toward, just a house on a steep-looking bank. To the sides were narrow but deep-looking channels with boats in them. The bike guy was there. "Well, I guess that's it," I said to him.

He agreed that it wouldn't be possible to bike any farther. "I think this is the part where I don't really know where I'm going next, but I find someone driving a boat and get on." He gestured to the shallow wooden boats puttering back and forth on the water that was now nearly surrounding us.

"That sounds amazing. Like exactly the kind of adventure I'm always wishing for. If you do that, I'll go with you."

While we talked some more, he held his hand out to the first boat that went along, but it didn't stop. Then he tried again with a boat piloted by two teenagers. They came over to the bank for us. Wasting no time, he balanced his bike across the front of the boat and stepped in. We both quickly discovered that you have to stay very still exactly in the center of one of these boats in order for it not to tip. The teenagers knew we wouldn't be able to communicate with them to say where we wanted to go, but they seemed to have a plan, so the bike guy and I sat back and relaxed as they drove us down a narrow corridor lined on either side by something like bamboo, which we couldn't see over. Now and then another boat would pass us from either direction, usually going faster than ours. Despite my canoeing experience, the wakes from these boats alarmed me, but we never tipped. I saw people standing chest-deep in the water, collecting firewood from the plants lining the channel, and other people setting up wooden structures I didn't understand—maybe fish traps.

The bike guy's name was Graeme, and he came from Canada. He told me he's been going around southeast Asia in about this way for the last few months. Whenever he's in a place and wants to go to another place, instead of worrying about bus timetables he just looks for some form of transportation that can take him toward there and asks the person manning it if he can ride. For food he eats whatever the locals eat, at the same place they eat it. He avoids any other Westerners, because there are plenty of those back at home. (Except for the occasional drink he enjoys with Westerners. For example, he woke up with no money in his wallet and a black eye that morning, and didn't remember why, but wasn't too worried.) Travel is the time for getting in touch with locals. I didn't just agree, I was inspired. Here was someone traveling in a strange land in the exact way that I aspired to. And it was simple. Just do what the locals do. It was too late for me to make much use of this inspiration here, but I told him he was exactly the sort of kick I needed and I would definitely be traveling like this in Mongolia and also for basically all of the foreseeable future.

The channel emptied out into an open area of water, and all along the banks were houses built on boats, all rickety wood structures made permanent through sheer determination, with Buddhist pictures on the walls and children lounging on hammocks on the decks. Boats rumbled hither and thither all around us, sometimes piloted by little kids, though mostly by adults. Our pilots dropped us off at the most likely-looking place for us, inasmuch as it wasn't someone's home: a restaurant boat with souvenirs and about one other tourist on it. We thanked them as much as our command of the Khmer language allowed, gave them a dollar, and checked out where we'd ended up.

There were crocodiles in an enclosure that opened up to the lake below. That made Graeme wary of swimming, which had been his main goal in biking to the lake. The boat had three floors, the top two empty. We sat down with a Cambodian and a Japanese guy who were talking in what English they knew. Beers appeared, and we started bullshitting each other. The Cambodian claimed to be from London, and Graeme said he intended to wrestle those crocodiles. Someone bought a sheet of snake jerky and a plate of shrimp and we all shared them around. (Snake jerky tasted a lot like beef jerky—I guess the seasonings are similar and you don't get much of the flavor of the meat itself. But I thought, "Man, I'm going to have to start catching snakes!") Graeme and the Cambodian arranged to have drinks together later. Later I went off on my own for a little and found three little boys all holding big constrictor snakes. I took a picture of one of them, and a couple of them let me hold their snakes. "One dollar!" they said. They were charming enough that I actually did give them some money.

Graeme swam, despite the crocodiles, and came out unsavaged, though he'd lost a bracelet given to him by a Dutch girl to remember her by. The Cambodian and the Japanese left and some Australians appeared, and eventually Graeme and I decided it was time to head back. Though if he hadn't had to return his bike, he said, he'd probably have tried to hitch a ride with a local going all the way across the lake and then get to Battambang.

The first boat that went by was piloted by a middle-aged woman who had it completely full of fruits and vegetables, so we couldn't get a ride. But a minute later, a man chugged by and was willing to stop and let us get on and ride with him back to the place we'd started from. He wanted ten dollars from us, but that would have been absurd, so we gave him one and we were glad that he had to stay in his boat and couldn't chase us for the money or anything. Then we walked up the spit of land again, fording the underwater part, and looked for food.

We found an old woman at a portable table and she made us a sort of Khmer soup—egg, vegetables, broth, all extremely fresh and combined while we waited there on plastic chairs. And it was delicious too, Graeme and I agreed. Besides a $20 bill I didn't want to break, we only had $1 between us—but we didn't even have to break the twenty, because it cost us fifty cents each. Delicious food at an absurd price: that's what happens when you travel like a local.

We split up here because he was planning on heading back to town by asking someone if he could hold on to their fender and just roll, but I didn't have nearly that much trust in my guesthouse bike. With nothing else for me on this side of the tollbooth, I left through it, and since I was inspired, I looked for anything on the side of the road that seemed interesting.

It didn't take long—there was a staircase with dragons for banisters, leading up a steep, tall hill where I'd be able to see forever. I got to the top of the stairs and found that there was much more hill before the summit, but a man was insisting that I needed to pay or have a valid Angkor Wat pass to go the rest of the way. I decided I was content right where I was, because as I looked out, I did already have an excellent view. There was the road I had come in on, and there was where I'd see the floating village if it weren't so far away and low to the surface, and there was the way back to town, and off to the horizon was an expanse of rice fields.

A guy I'd met through Olga and hung out with in our favorite cafe, Mike, came up. Go figure. I told him the awesome stuff that had just happened to me, and he told me about when he went to Nepal and we talked about what a shame it is to travel without actually experiencing anything. This was what the busloads after busloads of Korean and Chinese tourists tooling down the road below us seemed to be doing. The buses would go through the tollbooth, empty out at the boat launch lounge, and all the tourists would get on the busy $20 tour boats. They would see—from afar—a village of houses built on boats, very nice, good photo. Then they would turn around and go back up the steps to the lounge and get on the bus. They could have accomplished the same thing by looking at a photograph of the floating village, because that small, framed image is all they saw anyhow. While we were talking, a bike came speeding down the road at the top of the stairs, and riding it was Graeme. He briefly stopped to say hi but then went back to being a badass.

Mike and I resolved to bike back together and go down any side road that looked even faintly interesting. So we climbed down the dragon stairs and rode. The first turnoff was a little dirt path, sized for an ATV or a motorbike or our bikes. The path was lined with bushes a little taller than a person. After a while we saw a woman and her kids in the bushes, and I told Mike that on the way back I'd stop and ask if I could help her with whatever she was doing. After a while and a couple forks, the road dead-ended under a tree next to a sea of rice paddies. The low sun was shining off the water in them. We walked on the earthen berms separating the fields out toward a guy walking through knee-deep mud in his paddy and pushing a machine that seemed to serve to churn up the mud. We didn't get close enough to talk, and anyhow there was no way he spoke English, but we stood there and appreciated the effort that goes into rice.

The woman and her children were just collecting firewood, and she seemed to think I wanted to take some of it away from her, so I let them be and we found the main road again. Within not too long, we had found another side road, this one bigger and higher above the water table. There were a few buildings but we didn't want to accidentally walk up to someone's house, so we stayed on the road looking at some mysterious structures we found. They were wooden frames the size of a full-length mirror, but instead of the glass they had plastic like from a trash bag, and at the bottom was a tray full of algae-covered water. At the top of each one was a fluorescent light set up to shine down. Beyond the fact that something was supposed to grow here, we had no guesses whatsoever.

Then an old man walked slowly up to us from a field below. He was nearly with us before I noticed that one of his legs was prosthetic. He handed us each a lotus flower bud, pink and the size of a fist, and gestured us to open up the petals and smell. It was as fragrant as any rose I've ever smelled. And in a complete departure from everything I'd come to expect while on the tourist trail, the old man didn't ask for money. He apparently just wanted to give us flowers. We thanked him and really meant it. Mike asked about the plastic-algae contraptions. With more gestures, he tried to explain that the plastic caught something from the air and kept it in the algae tray, but we couldn't figure it out entirely until he reached into the water and pulled out a big beetle and mimed eating it. We asked what happened to his leg, and "mine explosion" was an easy concept for him to get across in sign language. For a little while, we just stood there, paralyzed by the moment. Then the old man waved goodbye and walked away.

We got back on our bikes and made for town, since sunset was coming, though we had time to stop and drink some coconuts. Mike got a flat, so I ended up back in town alone and ate with Olga's group at the cafe. I told my stories and felt utterly relaxed and content.

The next day I took a series of buses to Bangkok. The only interesting thing that happened on that trip was that I saw a sign at the border, put up by the Thai government, that said, "illegal drug trafficking will be punished by the death penalty." It was in the lightning-bolt font that was designed for the cover of the Harry Potter books. A Korean guy helped me find a guesthouse near Khao San Road and I went to bed early.

Olga had told me about something in Bangkok. It was a Sikh temple. One of the many things I didn't know about the Sikh religion was that every Sikh gurdwara (temple) offers an absolutely free communal meal every day to anyone of any religion or nationality who comes by. I had never seen a Sikh temple before, or their rituals, or anything, and free food ranks high in the pantheon of life's great joys.

I walked there. The walk took me through a few of Bangkok's distinct districts. For a long time I was walking through the electronics district, passing shop after shop selling amps, speakers, clocks, TVs, fans. Then I turned a corner and transitioned to the flower district. Underneath an archway of colorful umbrellas, flower sellers were peddling tens of thousands of blossoms, and the whole sidewalk tunnel I was walking smelled like what a bee smells when it finally finds the perfect flower full of nectar and gets inside.

I almost missed the gurdwara, since it has a small frontage on the street, but a long, sunlit hallway takes you to the main body of the huge temple—huge for a city as crowded as Bangkok, at least—round and tiled checkerboard, with men in turbans with big beards walking around purposefully. I felt out of place and did my best to look like someone who needed instructions. A beard-and-turbaned man told me to take my shoes off and hand them over a fenced pit to a man standing in it with his head at floor level. Then I tied a cloth around my hair like other people were doing and took some wide marble stairs to the fourth floor, where someone had told me to go.

People were sitting on carpets watching the front of the room. At the front there was a pedestal, like a curtained royal bed except podium-sized, on which lay the last guru. Olga had explained this to me. At the beginning of Sikhism, there were ten gurus. The last one declared that after him there would be no more gurus, and the last guru would be a book collecting the writings of all ten of the gurus who had lived. Since then the Sikhs have treated that book as one would a human guru. Each gurdwara has a copy of it; they put it to bed every night and wake it up each morning before reading from it throughout the day. The guru had already been awakened, so now there was a man standing in front of it reading intently in a language I didn't understand even slightly. I sat cross-legged for a while watching the reading. Occasionally someone would bow three times before leaving the room, or someone would enter and sit down to watch the reading. At one point the man doing the reading took out what appeared to be a feather duster and waved it over the guru.

After a while, I decided I wasn't likely to understand anything else by sitting there longer, and went down to the cafeteria on the third floor. There are no fancy rituals there, although I expected some. I just got a plate and walked down a long table spread with Indian food: yellow rice, spiced chickpeas, naan bread, lentil curry soup, yogurt to mix with it, tapioca pudding. Food given away free is so rarely this amazing. I sat down and ate but I didn't have the luck of sitting down next to an English-speaking Sikh, so I ate alone. I did talk to an English speaker and he explained how to get seconds, which must have been funny for him because there's no ritual in it and here was this American who was such a nitwit he didn't even know how to serve himself food. I was happy to provide the amusement.

I ate way more than I realized I was eating, and descended full to bursting. Retrieving my shoes, I walked out to the bright Thai day and wondered what to do until my bus to the airport. I walked toward where I was pretty sure the river lay. Before I got there, though, the Chinese market got in the way.

The market was easily as bountiful as a mall. But infinitely better, because there's no Muzak and no sedate tiled floor and no giant hallways, and hardly even a ceiling, except for the plastic shelter that's overhead at some points. It's the biggest concentration of store-booths I've ever seen. All of them are packed together with the maximum possible efficiency, leaving no square foot of ground space unclaimed by either a merchant or one of the narrow lanes for customers to walk on, so crowded that I felt like there should legitimately be traffic lights for the pedestrian traffic flow. All the goods were cheap, often obvious knockoffs of more prestigious brands, all of them made in China. There were stores for everything. I found cheap headphones at an electronics store, and got looseleaf tea at a tea store, and had drinks from wagons in the street, and admired the other things I saw. Plastic hands and plush pairs of breasts, rolls upon rolls of raw fabric, plastic toys, jewelry, stationery, all of it endlessly fun to just stop and look at. An acquisitive person could spend a fortune in there and fill up several wheelbarrows and still have a long wish list of other cool things he saw.

But I had gotten what I came for, my headphones and tea, and I had a bus to catch. I walked back to Khao San through a slow but relentless rain. The bus was a van. I loaded my stuff and then stepped in, taking my feet off the streets of southeast Asia for the last time.

SE Asia VI — Transit, Phnom Penh

"Roomy" is a word that I wouldn't use to describe a Lao bus. Another one is "restful". I suppose I can give them "effective", though, because technically I did start out in Vang Vieng and end up in Phnom Penh, which was where I'd intended to go.

I left Vang Vieng in a van. The drive from there to the capital of Laos, Vientiane, was nearly as beautiful as the drive from Luang Prabang. Laos is a sparsely populated country, and accordingly its capital city is pretty modest. I latched onto some people from the minivan—a Catalan couple and two hot French girls—and we saw the sights in Vientiane. It didn't take long, because there are only two of them and neither one is all that impressive. There's the Wat Si Saket, which is basically the same as every temple I saw in Chiang Mai, except that it's enclosed by a square of roofed shelter that houses tens of thousands of Buddha images. It's famous because of all the little Buddhas and because it's the oldest wat in Vientiane. And there's the Pha That Luang*, which the Lao think highly enough of that its picture is on almost all their money. It's a sort of big temple-monument thing:

It takes about two minutes to walk around it, and you can't go in. It's pretty, although black stains from the rain are starting to run down the gold leaf.

All that seen, we found the bus station, and got a bus to Pakse, a city in the south and the closest I could get to Phnom Penh. It left about 5 minutes after we got there, at 4:30. There was a stack of plastic chairs in the aisle, which I had to step over to stake out a real seat in the back. It left and started visiting various local destinations so local people could come in and sit on all the plastic chairs in the aisle. The ride was scheduled to take about 10½ hours. I couldn't stretch in any direction. But when night came I curled up in a sort of upright fetal position and tried to sleep. There were interruptions. The bus might stop near some nondescript buildings for a while, for example, just kind of sitting there. It did that at three in the morning and the drivers sat outside on plastic chairs for about half an hour, smoking. Then a motorbike arrived carrying two new drivers and we were rolling again. Or the bus might stop and let on more people, some of whom might pile their baggage on top of the bus, or pile bags of what appeared to be cement in the aisle. They really don't waste a bit of space here, apparently. It's encouraging for the future of efficiency, but also extremely uncomfortable in the moment.

We arrived at 6:30, only 3½ hours behind schedule. The French girls and the Catalan couple had gotten off to spend a couple days at a nice place called the Four Thousand Islands, but I was able to find a group of other foreigners heading further south. We'd been dropped off at the bus station, so we went to inquire about getting a bus to the border. Turned out the next leg of the trip, around three hours, wouldn't be by bus but by tuk-tuk. This was a serious tuk-tuk, one run by locals for locals. They filled it up with people. There was barely room to turn your head.

And as it headed farther south more people kept getting on, though occasionally one would get off too. At one point a mob of kids and old people came to the truck to sell us corn on the cob and chicken heart kebabs.

Before we got to the border town, Vön Kham, a minivan in front of the tuk-tuk stopped and asked the tuk-tuk driver if he had any foreigners on the truck. So I was shuffled onto this shuttle to the border. That seemed dodgy at the least, but it worked out. I and some Italians and other Europeans arrived at the checkpoint and a local guided us through. We got nickeled and dimed by a series of rickety guard posts but finally received visas, and then I boarded yet another vehicle, a big bus full of foreigners. It took us to Phnom Penh. This was another long trip. The sun went down on my second solid day of travel.

We eventually got there, and I latched on to some people I'd been talking to on the bus, a Belgian girl (Zoë) and a Massachusetts guy (Paul) and his fiancée, a Swiss girl named Samantha. All the cheap guesthouses in town were full, but we found a slightly fancier one for $11 per room. (They use American dollars in Cambodia. But they give you change in their own currency, the riel.)

I got up the next day and had breakfast with Zoë and Paul and Samantha and we decided to see the sights together so we could combine costs on tuk-tuk fares. I wasn't really interested in palaces and temples, since by this point I was getting pretty fatigued on fancy architecture with symbolism that I couldn't begin to interpret. Luckily they were willing to go along with what I wanted to do for the day, which was to see the museums dedicated to the sad part of Cambodia's history.

This is something my history classes never made it to, because they all stopped around World War II. So I needed some background, and I suspect other people might too. In 1975 a group called the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia from the previous eccentric but mostly harmless ruling party. The Khmer Rouge were interested in creating the most purely communist state in the world. In their vision, every person in the country would be a simple peasant, wholesomely farming their land. Which is a nice pastoral sentiment if you don't think about it too hard, but there were cities in Cambodia at this point, and those didn't fit into the scheme. Thus the Khmer Rouge emptied the cities of people completely. That didn't work either, though, because the city people didn't know anything about farming, and they wanted to go back to their homes in the cities. Some of the city people were smart enough to realize that the farming thing wouldn't work. These smart people were killed. They didn't bother with finding out whether the smart people had actually agitated or said that the Khmer Rouge scheme was foolish; they just killed everyone who might be smart, like people who spoke another language, or people with glasses. Also, people who'd worked for the overthrown government had to go.

At this point they had a populace of more pliable people, and these people worked hard. But in order to enforce their reign, the Khmer Rouge had to buy guns from China, and to do that they had to sell all the rice that the pliable people grew. Thus the populace started starving. Some people might accept this as a sign that their experiment was a failure, but the Khmer Rouge just worked the peasants harder and harder. This is when the real dying happened: over the course of a few hungry years, about a third of the people in the country died. Many of them died by starvation, most of them being city people, who were second-class citizens with lower rations in the grand plan. And many of them were actually killed, for various reasons like not working hard enough. Only hard workers were allowed the precious food that was left after China bought its share. In the end, in 1979, the Vietnamese overthrew the Khmer Rouge and gradually freed all the people. But the country is still recovering.

There are two museums dedicated to giving an idea of this time: the Chœung Ek Killing Fields and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. At first it seemed like there'd be nothing wrong with taking in both of these sights in one day, but of course death gets to you. The Killing Fields are outside of town a ways, right next to some regular people's farms. The four of us went there in a tuk-tuk. It turned out that the thing there is an audio tour. My first thought was that that sounded pretty cheesy and classless for such a somber place, but it's actually really well done. We split up to walk at our own paces, so I walked alone to each station on the walking path. At each one I could press a number and listen to a survivor from those years telling me what happened there. It's not a vast place, only forty acres with a pretty big pond in it. It so happens that I have a pretty good sense of how big forty acres is because that's the size of Warder Park, the place where I did all my most extensive outdoor wandering during childhood. Warder has a pond too. That lent a certain vividness to the tour. After all, before the Khmer Rouge came to power, this place wouldn't have been too different for Cambodians from what Warder Park was for me. Just a place in a neighborhood.

All the buildings had been torn down after the Khmer Rouge fell. It wasn't that people were infuriated about the killing that happened there, because they didn't know about it yet—they just really needed building materials. So they had signs where each building had been. A truck stop where trucks loaded with prisoners stopped and unloaded. A shed where tools were kept—originally garden tools, but they were pressed into service as killing weapons because bullets were too expensive. Another shed where chemicals were kept—DDT mainly, which they spread on victims to cover the stench and kill any who were still alive. A mass grave where about 450 bodies were found: it was the size of my last dorm room. The pond, which you can walk around and listen to stories from survivors. There was one survivor who was so enraged that he became a UN representative of some sort and denounced the Khmer Rouge. In another piece of audio it was explained that despite that, Khmer Rouge party members have still had an active part in the nation's government ever since those days, even up to the present. The stories kept going—one woman had to watch her baby die of starvation because she was forced to work all day in the fields and wasn't given enough food to breastfeed well enough. That kind of memory never goes away, and she pointed that out.

Away from the pond, back on the path, the heavy-duty dark stuff began: a glass box with victims' clothes found on site. A glass box with victims' bones, collected from the ground I was walking on. Some of them, found more recently by visitors, had been left on top of the box. And lastly a tree from which had hung the loudspeakers broadcasting the revolutionary songs that, combined with a diesel generator, were the last things the victims ever heard. In the center of the fields was the memorial stupa, a tower, filled ten levels high with glass cases of hundreds of skulls, all of them sorted into categories like "juvenile Khmer females, age 10–17"—and on top of those levels, seven more levels of other bones.

I regrouped with Zoë and Paul and Samantha, and we took our tuk-tuk back to the city. More precisely, we drove straight to Tuol Sleng, the prison where people were taken before getting killed at Chœung Ek. But before facing that, we had lunch. That was a good break to take.

Tuol Sleng started life as a high school, though grimmer than any other high school building I've seen, all concrete and white paint and glassless windows. On the third floor of building "D", I watched a one-hour film showing victims' families and survivors and a few guards who talked about how they'd killed. There was a man who painted scenes of torture from his time in detention, and he asked a guard if any of them were exaggerated. They weren't. I saw those same paintings later, and there were the sort of images that you would normally expect to be the product of the imagination of a particularly deranged person. Pulling off fingernails, drowning people upside-down in vats, any way you could think of to cause pain. And there were mugshots of the victims, and there were more bones, and it was a lot to handle. I felt weak by the end, and just sat down. It's hard to face all that after a while.

Done with death, the four of us went off to get bus tickets. I would be heading to Siem Reap tomorrow, after just one day in Phnom Penh, because I was starting to run short on time. Then we wandered around looking for Chinese New Year. Today was the day of it. But it wasn't all that easy to find. There was a squad of people going around town drumming and dancing in dragon costumes, but that was really all we saw, and we only caught the tail ends of these performances. Even the Central Market, where I'd expected to see all the culture of the city concentrated, had nothing—just clothes sellers.

So we went to the mall. Here the mall is vertical. It's also aimed at extremely rich Cambodians, full of stores selling upscale Western clothing at Western prices. And yet it was teeming. I couldn't quite figure it out. We ended up at the food court and I navigated through the masses of people in order to buy food, far too much of it in fact. Then Paul and Samantha went back to the hotel early because Samantha was sick, so I wandered around with Zoë awhile. We walked down the river on a promenade with flags from all over the world on tall poles. We just missed some guys playing Chinese New Year songs on marimba, and we talked a lot about languages. She told me about Belgium, and admitted that it's not much special, except that they did invent Godiva and Toblerone chocolate.

I slept on her floor to save money—not, as you might have supposed, out of any particular interest in her, because I never described her physically to you, so you didn't realize this whole time that she's a bit large (and I must never link her to this blog without deleting this sentence first)—and that was it for Phnom Penh. I left in the morning to have what could only be a much happier time in Siem Reap.

*I hope you're not pronouncing that "Fa Thhhat Luang". H's don't do that in transcriptions of Lao. It's pronounced "Pa Tat Luang".

SE Asia — V: Vang Vieng

The drive to Vang Vieng was along probably the most beautiful, and also most harrowing, road I've ever taken. In Luang Prabang and even on the slowboat I hadn't even begun to get acquainted with what Laos's geology has to offer. Geologists will tell you that it's an exemplar of karst topography, which is something to do with limestone eroding at fantastic rates due to rain being naturally acidic. Which is nice to know and all, but it's not what I was appreciating when I was staring at the karst landscape. I was focused on the insane, precarious beauty. Most mountains looked as though they could fall apart at any moment. They were made entirely of cliffs, scrambled up and pointed every which way. They were gumdrops, castles, shattered rock candy, the plates of titanic stegosaurs, yet somehow managed to be so immense that the trees covering them could have been moss.

Probably because of this, the road was sometimes smooth but mostly a mosaic of potholes, like driving across a lava flow. It was strung along the closest thing they could find to a level ridgeline. That wasn't very close, because this landscape is like the answer to a question: "Q: How densely can you pack mountains together within the limits of geological possibility? A: Laos." Fairly often, the driver would put the tires on the very edge of the asphalt to let a Chinese-marked hopper truck full of something heavy but not visible pass by. At lunchtime we pulled over at a restaurant perched atop a knob that offered the best view of all the many views I'd seen today that stretched belief. I felt almost as if I had created a planet and was now looking down upon it. You may have seen this picture already.

I ate curry and then the van pushed on the rest of the way to Vang Vieng.

Within seconds of me leaving the car, a Westerner with lots of tattoos pointed me to a place where I could sleep cheap, so that task was out of the way quickly. I was annoyed that we'd gotten in too late—4:00—for me to do tubing today. Tubing is what Vang Vieng is famous for, almost synonymous with. I understood what it meant the first time I read the word, but I guess that's because when I was a kid I would go to my Papaw's house in West Virginia in the summers, and he would blow up an old truck inner tube he had, and I would sit on it and float down the creek in his front yard. Most people have to have it explained to them, but it's basically the exact same thing as what I did on those lazy summer days in my childhood, except with a somewhat bigger river and stupendous amounts of booze. Nostalgically, I was more looking forward to the floating-lazily part, but in any case I would have to wait until tomorrow. So I started walking around.

Vang Vieng is a sad, sad place. Once, presumably a very short time ago, it was inhabited only by Lao people. They were the ones who would wake up every morning and get to enjoy the view of the thousand-foot teeth of green rock just outside town and the Nam Song River winding by downhill. Then some locals hit upon the relaxing practice of tubing. Westerners coming through loved it and latched on to it and then added loud music and Tiger Whisky and body paint and all the worst things. All those things bled over into the town. Now nearly every establishment in the town is one of these: a bar, a restaurant or street food stand, a store with cheap booze, or a travel agency. Nothing is left for the Lao. Not coincidentally, this is one of few places in Laos where you can go down the street and the locals, instead of waving hello cheerfully to you, will just glower.

But the travelers coming through aren't too concerned about all this; most of them seem to be far too wrapped up in making sure they spend as little time possible sober. People party harder in Vang Vieng than in any other place I've been. Now, I don't seek out party destinations, so I can't compare it to the likes of Ibiza or Koh Pha Ngan, but this is a place where people voluntarily get their arms branded with heated metal—three lines to make a cougar scratch—to show how hardy they party. A girl at my hostel had been in Vang Vieng for over a week, working at a bar as many travelers do here (not for profit but rather for free booze and a bed), and she had been yelling so hard to passersby about free cocktails that she had no voice left. She didn't recover her voice the whole time I was there, and in fact one night I saw her somehow playing through the pain to yell about drinks some more. There are functionally no laws here. Laos has plenty of laws, most of them pretty strictly enforced, but they've noticed that Vang Vieng is a river of gold, so they've decided not to enforce any of them there. So on the signboards at restaurants and food stands, you can see things like: Happy pizza. Opium tea. Mushroom shake. Opium weed. And these are just the things that you can buy openly.

After a tour around town I just couldn't face it. I sat on the deck of the hostel for the evening and looked at the view and read a book I found. Later a hostel employee went to his second job at a restaurant and gave me a ride there on his motorbike and got me a free bucket. Buckets are another thing they have here: they're little plastic ones, like a kindergartener might use to make a sand castle. Easily large enough to pour two beers into. But the operative booze in them is usually the extremely cheap Tiger Whisky, and it's combined with things like Coke, Sprite, or Lemonade. The same buckets are used to manually flush toilets throughout the country: dip into a trash can full of water next to the sit-down pot, then dump it into the pot and the new clear water replaces the old dirty water. I thought the hostel guy said I was going to get a free baguette, but here I was with a bucket, sitting with a Dutch guy named Pieter, and I was just going to have to deal with it. So I ordered food and chatted with Pieter. He turned out to be pretty interesting, and a good guy. He was doing something I wish I'd done: he bought a motorbike in Hanoi and was now just riding it around everywhere. No need to worry about bus routes or schedules—complete freedom to explore any interesting little road. If I go back someday I'll probably do it that way.

The next morning I ambled around and tried to decide what time was a good time to go tubing. I had some breakfast and got my shoes glued back together by a guy with a shoe repair shop consisting of a homemade roof and about three wooden skids and a chest of tools. Around 2:00 I decided to go for it. I entered what appeared to be an abandoned warehouse with the front wall removed and paid a little to get a tube of my own. This was piled on top of a pickup and I got in the back with ten other people and we were driven to a place a few kilometers up the Nam Song. Once I got off, I was immediately greeted by a Lao guy who gave me two absolutely free shots of Tiger Whisky, even though I had no idea what bar he was working for and didn't plan to go to it later anyhow. Right across the river, not even downstream at all, was the first bar, blasting loud music and with probably a hundred people roaming its decks, drinking, talking about sex and partying, writing obscene things on each other in permanent marker, getting designs spray-painted on their bodies. The paint wasn't anything specifically designed for human skin. It was straight-up motorcycle paint. But I figured this was part of the experience, so I might as well check it out.

From the decks of this bar, I looked down the river. All the bars were right next to each other. I could clearly see at least three from where I was. I assumed they were spaced evenly along the whole stretch of river reserved for the tubing experience. And there couldn't be that many, so it looked like the tubing experience was pretty short, maybe a few hundred yards, and composed entirely of a succession of loud bars. Disappointed, I gave up on the leisurely float I'd been envisioning and tried to enjoy being in a bar.

But I couldn't. I moved on from one to the other until I started getting to the ones that had rides. These were what attracted me to tubing in the first place. The lack of laws in Vang Vieng extends to safety regulations, so bar owners have felt free to build whatever rides seem like they could be thrilling. One of them is a cable stretched from a high place to a low place, going over the water. You get on a trapeze at the top end, jump off, and descend quickly toward the bottom end until you hit a catch and the trapeze stops dead and you flip off end over end into the water. I rode that, but I let go before the catch, like a wimp. I rode another trapeze-based ride, too—a swing that starts twenty feet up over the water's surface and approaches as close as about six feet. That's where you're meant to let go, so I did. But some people timed it worse, and some people, supremely unwisely, went two at a time, and the Lao guy who was handing the trapeze to each person who came next had clearly been practicing for a while, because he was able to actually swing back onto a lower part of the deck. Later he spray-painted his legs completely blue and looked like a frog and did lots of dangerous things on the trapeze.

Then there were waterslides. First a narrow one with an abrupt upturn at the bottom that hurts the tailbone just enough to disorient you into nearly bellyflopping from about seven feet up. Then the Big Slide, also known as the Death Slide. It's made of tile and concrete, starts at least thirty feet in the air, and lets you go ten feet over the water. It earned its nickname by being at one of the last bars along the route, where people arrive already extremely drunk but decide they're just fine to tackle the slide. Each person you ask has a different answer for what the yearly death toll is. One person told me 11. Wikipedia says in 2011 22 people died there. Yet the slide keeps operating. I suppose the theory is, it's hard to stop drunk people from doing stupid stuff, and sometimes they'll kill themselves doing it. I assume everything is at-your-own-risk, because if it weren't, the Big Slide would have been torn down years ago. At any rate, if you're one of the thousands who manage to ride it safely, like I was, it's pretty darn fun. I rode it two or three times, though each time there was that weird twinge from knowing I was doing something that could be fatal if I were a lot drunker.

After the Big Slide, the bars pretty much petered out. The last one had a sign saying "90 MINUTES TO FINISH". I was puzzled. That long? Then I realized that the bars were all clustered at the very beginning of the tubing route. There were still kilometers left until I got back to town. But I'd wasted so much time at the bars thinking they were all I got that now it was getting on toward dusk. Other revelers were heading back to town in tuk-tuks. But I couldn't be that lame. So I kept floating. So did a Californian guy. We floated along near each other, and egged each other on to keep going all the way to town. The sun went down behind the rock teeth. The stars came out. We got cold. But we kept floating. It was nice, and it was relaxing—it was everything I'd hoped for. Except that it was nighttime.

We did get out before the finish, fearing hypothermia. We walked back to town and ate a lot. I passed Michelle in the street and arranged a time, then failed to meet her one more time when she didn't appear. After this we never saw each other again. I read a book until bedtime while the sounds of drunkenness swirled around town.

With the requisite tubing done, I woke up in a mood to do some serious climbing and exploring around all those rocks. And luckily, a Lao guy working at the hostel had just the thing for me. He wanted to start running treks of his own for people at the hostel, but he wasn't from town, so he didn't know the area. Today he wanted to go gathering information, and take along a few tourists to tell him how fun the stuff was. This tailor-made opportunity was in place of spending upwards of $35 on a guided tour. Sweet.

So I joined an Englishman and a Canadian and the hostel guy, named See, and we walked over the bridge on the river, past the river bars, through the fancy hut resort, and straight out of town. We were in rice fields. Endless, dry rice fields. Each one bordered by a bank of dirt, each the size of a respectable American backyard. Completely level, the whole patchwork of them, to the horizons. Or to where a hill or a massive wall incongruously poked straight out of them. This was the dry season, so they were all fallow for the moment. Nothing was happening. It was peaceful. We just walked.

Guided by See, we found our way to Par Poak, a hill sitting on the rice fields like a haystack on a barn floor. Some Lao guys were lounging around under some trees where the path got to the mountain, and we paid them about a dollar each, and we climbed. I loved this hill. It wasn't built like any other hill I've seen. It was as if someone hastily dumped a load of rocks there a few thousand years ago from a dump truck the size of a skyscraper. There were hollows and giant crevices and obstructions everywhere. The people who set up the trail to the top had to add bamboo ladders and bridges. I was desperate for some climbing, so I circumvented all the suggested routes and made everything difficult and found myself at the top a happy man. From there I could see the patchwork of the rice fields much more clearly, and it was amazing the way it stretched out off into the distance completely flat in this landscape that was in most places the mathematical opposite of flat. The other guys all called me crazy as I perched on points of rock and looked out, and I was glad to have earned that title.

On the way down we stopped into a little cave. It only took a few minutes to explore every crevice and look into the very deep and unenterable pit there. But it was still cooler geologically than anything I'd ever seen in Ohio.

So I was looking forward to seeing Lusi Cave, the next place See wanted to take us. It was a long walk on a path through the jungle. I got ahead and walked quietly to listen to the jungle, and I heard a noise from a tree near the wall—which by now was only a couple hundred yards away, but through impassable forest. The noise was a monkey. I was pretty content.

At Lusi there was a similar shade grove with Lao guys hanging out. One of them took some money from each of us and then waited. I didn't know what we were waiting for, but See seemed to. Eventually another Lao guy came from the direction of the wall with a few tourists who left after coming out. He took a break, had some water, gave us flashlights, and invited us in. He would be our tour guide. He unlocked the gate—ah, so this was why we had to wait—and led us up another bamboo ladder to the entrance.

And it was a tremendous cave, chamber after chamber, some of them big enough to fit several temples inside. Our guide, Phouvang, pointed out various impressive rock formations to us, calling them things like candle, flower, toilet, "big pussy". He appeared to think he was hilarious. But at least he showed us plenty of cave. There were some interesting things, like a natural podium and floors that were secretly just thin shelves over a massive underground reservoir. Really, though, I wished he'd let us wander on our own. A guide seems to take the fun out of everything. But maybe it was better we didn't: by the time we came back I had no idea that we were about to arrive at the entrance, and when he pointed down one corridor, he told us that it would take over an hour to get to the end of it.

Then we sat around a bit. See talked with Phouvang and evidently worked out some deal with him. Phouvang led us on a different path out of the grove, not the one we'd arrived by. We foreigners were puzzled, but See assured us we were going somewhere interesting. It was bushwhacking through the jungle. There was barely a path at all, but Phouvang led us surely. After at least 45 minutes, when we had all resigned ourselves to wandering the jungle forever and not having the food we'd been hoping to eat very soon, we punched through into some rice fields. They had cattle in them. Phouvang took us on a walk across them, sometimes on paths, sometimes not. He talked with locals in their stilted huts on the edges of the fields. He showed us edible plants. I slowly realized that we weren't just getting back to town really slowly—we were actually getting a heck of a tour. I'd never imagined that in Vang Vieng, of all places in Laos, I'd actually see the way traditional rice farmers live, and the fields and the cattle that they live on.

Finally, after a lot of wandering in all different directions and some questioning whether Phouvang actually had any idea where he was going, we went through a little collection of houses near a manmade forest next to the fields—a village with no road—and looked at the fluffy pillow-stuffing plants they were growing and crossed a bamboo bridge guarded by a group of giggling little girls. It took us across the Nam Song, over today's tubers, to a place where a big market was being held. It was almost exclusively Lao people there. We sat down at a counter and had noodle soup and it was great—and about as authentic as you can get. After we ate I bought some weird fruits, which I later forgot on a bus, and looked around. This was authentic Laos.

We walked back to town. I relaxed and read a book again. Managed to get through an entire novel, actually. I fell asleep feeling a little better knowing that, even here, it only took a short walk for locals to get away from the opium weed and the mushroom shakes and the cougar scratches and find real life once again.

SE Asia — IV: Luang Prabang

The slowboat pulled in to the Luang Prabang boat dock in a simpering rain. I climbed up into the town and started looking for a place to sleep.

I discovered quickly that Luang Prabang doesn't have the same target market as Chiang Mai. Here instead of people who are young, adventurous, and carrying backpacks, they tended to cater more to people who are middle-aged, seeking luxury, and French. All the guesthouses along the main road were at least twice as expensive as I was counting on. And it was raining, and I was walking around with no clear endpoint and I was getting soaked. I began to get annoyed at Luang Prabang.

I stopped at a restaurant and asked to use their bathroom, but the owner was all too happy to tell me I had to buy something first. Luckily, I'd been planning on eating soon anyhow, so I got something, used the bathroom, and came back. I was doing my clueless look again, and when he saw this he apparently softened up and took a little pity on me. In what English he knew, he asked what I was looking for, and I told him a cheap guesthouse, and he told me to go down along the river a bit. So I ate the soup he gave me and then, still wet and getting wetter, squelched off in that direction. It didn't take long before I was getting toward the edge of town. Luang Prabang is a small place, population barely 100,000, where you can see pretty much everything within a few hours, and there are no buildings taller than about three stories. But I found a place. It was a white, colonial-style house with wood details painted brown and a brown sign out front saying the name in engraved gold lettering. But this wasn't a surprise because every single building in Luang Prabang is a white, colonial-style building with wood details painted brown and a brown sign out front saying the name in engraved gold lettering.

Some time ago, UNESCO visited Luang Prabang and decided that the French colonists who'd lived there and built luxurious houses for themselves had left the city looking so delightful that they named it a World Heritage Site. What this meant, and what the city leaders had just agreed to, was that they had to keep it looking just as delightful in perpetuity, as enforced by a mandatory set of guidelines on how to build and decorate new buildings. Maybe it was my frame of mind, but to me they didn't look delightful. They looked like they were stuck with the ostentation of people who hadn't lived there for decades and who, when they did, were the kind of people who thought their own architecture was just so much more wonderful and special than the architecture of the primitive locals. Around when I was thinking about this, I realized that Luang Prabang really wasn't growing on me yet.

But I was determined to give it a fair shake, so I went out and found the night market. And I instantly started changing my mind about the city. They had all the tastiest things there, like discs of dried curry paste and coconut confections and tea and coffee grown perhaps just a few miles away. But what really amazed me were the buffets: there were three, and each one allowed you to pile awesome Lao food high on a big old plate, easily enough to satisfy even a human garbage disposal like me, for 10,000 kip, or $1.25. Unfortunately, I'd already eaten at the place where the guy gave me directions, so I would have to tackle the buffets the next night. Instead what happened was I walked past a table where a Chinese woman and two Japanese guys were chatting in English, and they invited me to sit down and try some of their chicken and coconut balls and such. I sat with them for a good long time and we chatted about traveling and languages and I was pleased to finally be getting to know people from countries that were never owned by England. I invited one of the Japanese guys, Sata, to take over the empty second bed in my room.

Then I headed off to Utopia, the coolest place in town, a bar hidden down a long series of twisting alleyways so as to get frontage on the Nam Khan River (which joins the Mekong in town), made of straw, with decks overlooking the water and low tables to sit convivially around and a very relaxed atmosphere. I managed to meet Michelle, the American girl from the boat, on accident, and we decided that tomorrow we'd bike to the waterfall outside town together with some other people. Pretty soon, though, it became late, which on Lao time means that 11:00 came around. The whole country has an early curfew, and practically nothing stays open past 11:30 or so. So I walked back to my guesthouse and was momentarily thrown to find the gate closed, but it wasn't locked, so I could just open it and go in.

I woke up hot, disoriented, and queasy. Ignoring it, I ate an omelet at a riverside restaurant, distracted from wondering whether it would stay down by the conversation I was having with an English girl. I went to meet Michelle at 11:00 at her guesthouse, but due to some sort of misunderstanding, she and her friends had already left, and I was just standing around there clueless for a while.

The waterfall had been my only plan for the day. Now I had to make all new plans, but I really wasn't feeling up to it. I rented a bike and pedaled aimlessly around and looked at a really old wat and tried to believe I was interested in it. Then I gave up and biked to Utopia and collapsed on one of their cushions on a deck overlooking the river and listened to a bunch of people talk about traveling. I tried to contribute something to the conversation every once in a while, but I was mostly too feeble to talk, and just focused on not moving and staying in the shade. This was probably the best way for me to pass a few hours.

Some deep, steady drums sounded from inside the city. With great effort, I got up and thanked the talkers for letting me listen, then found where the sound was coming from. It was a little shelter, done in the style of a temple, where a group of monks were banging on the drums—a giant one, and a set of cymbals—with all the effort they had. They looked half-hypnotized. I watched them in a daze and tried to get hypnotized myself, and succeeded a little. But eventually they stopped playing, and I had to find something else to do.

I turned my bike in and then ran into a Canadian couple from the boat, nice people in their late 20s named Emily and Evan, and arranged to bike to the waterfall with them tomorrow. Then I staggered over to the night market, but I couldn't stomach any food of any kind, least of all unfamiliar Lao stuff. So I drank a 7-Up and talked with the Chinese woman and one of the Japanese guys from yesterday. They wished for me to get well soon. I told them I'd try. Then, with no energy left to try to fit something more into the day and make it a less-than-total waste, I stumped back to the guesthouse and fell asleep even earlier than most people in Luang Prabang. I knew it wasn't the city's fault, but I still wasn't feeling much more friendly toward it.

Unlike all my meetings with Michelle, the one with the Canadian couple succeeded on the very first try. I had managed to eat a baguette—these are another vestige of the French colonization and are everywhere in Laos (and Cambodia too)—and an egg, and I felt more or less ready to take on the 35 kilometers between town and Kuang Si waterfall.

So we biked. The road was well paved and nice and level outside of town, and I started genuinely enjoying myself for almost the first time since stepping off the slowboat. Then it got hillier, but I managed to find time to take rests, so it kept on working out okay. We even gained a member in our party, a woman we overtook who then caught up to us while we were resting and talked with us a little. During the ride we didn't talk a whole lot because we were spaced apart. If I'd been well I could've gone full bore and kept pace with Emily and Evan, but as it was it was just me and the road.

Biking is really the way to see a place. The speeds allow you to actually cover a respectable amount of distance, vastly multiplying the number of things you can see compared to the number you could get to on foot. But you're also going slow enough that you can see the places you're passing as more than just blurs in the window. And you're out in the air, which makes everything feel a lot realer. For a while, I was just biking over hills and through jungle. But as the kilometers wore on, different things started appearing. Villages, to mention the most interesting ones. No grand, stately, white houses to be found in these places. These were places where the villagers lived in huts and farmed rice and cattle and had nothing more than what they needed and managed to flourish and be happy anyhow. Little kids walked around on the streets on their way to or from something fun. One of them held out his hand to me as I biked by for a high-five, and we connected perfectly, and I yelled, "Yeah!" Shortly afterward, there was a group of little boys walking down the road, and one of them was casually naked. I guess they were on their way to go swimming. In another little village there was a wat, and a loudspeaker somewhere was chanting something, and people were walking in and out of it and all around the street through town. I stopped for a moment to watch, but then Emily and Evan came through and paused for only a moment, and I decided to try to stay on pace with them. The whole ride was full of these little slices of Lao life. I couldn't get enough.

Four kilometers from the waterfall, my derailleur burst apart. Damn it. Now I'd have to walk the rest of the way, and pay to get taken back to town with the bike later, and buy a new derailleur for the owner of my guesthouse, where I'd borrowed the bike from. So I walked. From time to time tuk-tuks full of Westerners on their way to the waterfall passed me. I passed a little group of cattle, just standing there on the road. They looked like they knew they were supposed to be walking somewhere or other but they couldn't remember where. They also looked like they might take a mind to flattening me, and since I really wasn't in any condition to defend myself—no pocketknife, sick, and hauling a broken bicycle—I gave them a wide berth and they didn't take any interest in me. The party member we'd picked up, after lagging behind a long time, caught up with me after two kilometers. Kilometers seem small compared to miles, but when you're walking them in the Lao sun and you're not feeling 100%, they're still pretty damn long.

Eventually I got to the gate, and a tuk-tuk driver helpfully showed me where I could park and made me promise to choose him as my ride back in a couple hours. I was wrecked. I walked dead on my feet past a bear rescue center that, on any other day, would have fascinated me and had me standing next to the fence trying to understand everything the bears were doing and communicate with them. I got to the waterfall and fell to the ground and sat a lot in the sun. The waterfall was a spectacular mineral shade of neon blue and shone like a flower in an oasis, but all I could do about that for a while was stare. It took a lot of willpower to get me to step into it, and then it turned out to be way colder than I'd hoped. I came out and I was cold and then I had something to focus on—becoming warm again. In this way I passed the time until the tuk-tuk driver was set to leave. I hadn't planned on honoring the promise that I'd given him just in order to get him to quit clinging to me, but the time seemed right, and he was offering free transportation for my busted bike.

I got back to the guesthouse and the owner quoted me $100 for the derailleur, but promised to go to the market tomorrow with me and find the real price. Fatalistically, I said okay and walked off to find dinner. I had barely eaten anything for two days and had biked 35 kilometers, but I still had only the ghost of an appetite, and none whatsoever for any food I wasn't intimately familiar with, so I found a restaurant on the shore of the Mekong and ate something Western and watched the sun go down. The sunset made me feel better about life, though.

I walked to Utopia and on my way I ran into Michelle (and Ivan, the Alaskan fisher from the boat) and talked to them about missing the waterfall trip with them, but we didn't chat long. I read a book for a while and later Michelle came back to Utopia with some Irish girls I'd met on the boat. One of them had rented a bike and given her passport as collateral—something I'd done once in Chiang Mai—and then the bike got stolen. The rental company was now holding her passport hostage for $2000 US—and that made it pretty clear that the thieves were working for them. The tourist police are ineffectual or corrupt in Laos, and there's no Irish embassy, so her way forward really wasn't clear. I reflected that I could have it worse than $100 for a derailleur. Still, at the moment we were having a good time, or as much as circumstances allowed, and all was well in Utopia. I passed the night there and eventually went back to sleep.

On my last day in Luang Prabang I woke up feeling almost back to normal, and I was determined to seize this day, which had become effectively almost my only day in the city. It started out pretty well: the guesthouse owner took me to the odds and ends store and found a derailleur and it was only $70. Still a complete rip-off, but I suppose specialized parts aren't easy to come by in a place as remote as this. I checked out of that guesthouse and into a cheaper one that I'd been alerted to, and then launched into some real walking around, none of that feverish stuff from days before.

After some delicious soup for breakfast at the morning market, which I was really pleased to be able to digest, I crossed a hilariously rickety bridge over the Nam Khan made entirely out of bamboo. A sign on one side explained that every year the floods wash it away and they have to build it anew. Unfortunately there was nothing interesting on the other side. So I moved on to the next interesting-looking thing, a staircase with dragons for either handrail, pushing straight up a mountain located in the middle of town. I had seen this place from below but hadn't yet had the gusto to look from above. It was Wat Phou Si, the crown of the city, lit up every night and visible from any place in town. Ascending, I passed by a long series of Buddhas, each one in a different pose, some with snakes, some meditating, some named mysteriously after days of the week ("Tuesday Buddha"). A few of them were stationed underneath overhanging black rocks. The geology of Laos isn't smooth and straightforward like in most places. It's as though the earth were a series of chocolate-chip ice cream cones all in the midst of melting unevenly and from different angles, often from the bottom up. Then they froze again and became covered with trees. The result is mountains that occasionally slope up gently like you might expect, but in other places just drop off more or less vertically, becoming walls studded with crumbling rocks. All the alcoves resulting from this on Phou Si mountain were full of Buddhas. The Buddhas seemed to encourage me to keep climbing, even though it was steep and laborious. Not that I wouldn't have without their help, but it was a nice gesture on their part.

At the top was a wat that, up close, actually seemed a bit run down, but I wasn't bothered and, feeling more charitable, I reflected that it must be hard to do maintenance if you have to carry all your supplies up a staircase of over 300 steps. Instead of trying to find meaning inside it, not being Buddhist, I went to find a view. And there was a great one. Not just all of the town, but both the rivers flanking it, and every mountain around the town for miles and miles. I tried to get my camera to capture everything, but I knew I'd have to rely heavily on my memory to get the whole feeling. Even so, though, here's an attempt. (I had a panorama, but the camera stitched it wrong.)

I'd reserved my place in the new guesthouse too early, so I went back and brought my luggage this time. I ended up staying around and playing a few rounds of pool with a guesthouse employee on the most jankety-ass pool table I've ever seen. There was a big patch missing from the felt, and instead of slate it had wood that was warped every which way, and there were only ten balls. I think it might have been homemade. We talked over the game and afterward too, and I found out he's a Hmong, a member of the most populous hill tribe in the country. I told him I'd read a book about Hmong refugees in California (The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, a translation of the Hmong phrase Qaug Dab Peg), but he hadn't heard of it. But he did recognize the Hmong phrase, which means "seizure", and he told me what the book's protagonists kept trying to convince the US medical establishment of: that when someone has seizures, it's not an illness that needs to be cured, but a sign that spirits are choosing the person and taking them wandering through spirit worlds. In the book the hospitals weren't too fond of this explanation and insisted on treating the epileptic little Hmong girl their way, rather than listening to anything the Hmongs said about the necessity of animal sacrifices and training the girl as a shaman. The whole book basically described an enormous impasse, with no good way out.

The guesthouse guy asked me questions about America. He asked if we have kings. He'd heard something about the election and asked me why Obama might be getting kicked out of his role if he hadn't done anything seriously wrong. I showed him American money and told him when each of the statesmen on it had been around, and he asked why we had such old rulers on the money. The Lao money all has the same person on it: the current president, Khaysone Phomvihane. A helicopter went by close overhead and he explained that it was probably a visiting dignitary from the national government in Vientiane. They like to visit the various provinces, and each time they do, the provincial leaders throw them a banquet and a celebration, all paid for by the poor taxpayers. He also told me that someday he'd like to visit America, but it's hard for him to go, because in order to get permission to leave the country, Lao people have to pass an interview that serves to make sure they're not trying to escape the country and never come back. That's a hard thing to convince the government of. He doesn't want to stay in America, though. He does know of the big Hmong communities in California and Minnesota that formed after the US's Secret War. It's a sordid episode and I won't try to tell the whole long story here when you can find it on Wikipedia (as I did—I was too busy doing other stuff to read much about it while I was in Laos), but I'll give a run-down. It was of course part of the Vietnam War; the US trained an army of Hmong people to fight against the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese captured a large chunk of Laos anyhow, and turned the Lao government communist. So the US planted thousands upon thousands of mines there. These mines are still exploding and killing people today. Also, as retribution for the Hmong episode, the communist Lao government threatened to kill every last Hmong, so they fled, and many of them ended up in big communities in the US. But the guesthouse guy said he wouldn't want to stay in one of those communities—he likes the Lao countryside too much.

I watched the sunset on the Mekong again, this time with some backpackers I'd met at the guesthouse, and then went with them to have dinner at the night market, since I could finally for the first time take advantage of the buffet. And it was delicious indeed. I managed to have a long conversation in Korean with some Korean schoolteachers who were on vacation and excited to meet a foreigner who could actually speak their language. I rounded the night out at Utopia with a game of Giant Jenga with the same backpackers from earlier, and then called it quits.

Before I got on the bus the next morning, I made a point of going to see the monks' procession. Every morning at dawn ever since there have been temples for them to live in, the monks have come out in a line and walked through the streets with empty bowls to ask food of the people living in town. I got up before it got light and walked with other backpackers down to the main street and eventually found where to wait for the monks. I may actually have blocked them for a moment by sitting on the sidewalk in front of their way out of the temple walls (which were low enough to see over), completely oblivious that they were all standing lined up behind me. There were about twenty of them, all clad in bright orange robes with shaved heads, some of them just little boys. They walked slowly out the gate. Immediately dozens and dozens of tourists swarmed them and started taking pictures with extremely bright flashes. The monks must have felt like they were in a lightning storm. And yet they do it every day. I guess they're used to it by now, but I still felt incensed on their behalf by all the shutterbugs who didn't pay any attention whatsoever to the guidebooks and brochures that all tell you to keep the ceremony silent and to stay back unless it's personally meaningful to you as a Buddhist and not to take pictures of monks without their permission.

They must have gotten the food they were after, because they circled back around into the temple walls and the shutterbugs put their cameras away and moved on to buy souvenirs from the morning markets or whatever. I made my way to the bus station, which was actually a travel company's storefront, and got on the bus, which was actually a minivan, and left town.