JOHN, CRAIG AND RAY...

Slacks in the Lao P.D.R…

Photo: A nice man we gave John’s camera to near Pha That Luang

With the cool season upon us, fleece is the word and talk has turned to slacks.
My friend John looks good in slacks. In fact he looks good in just about everything, the bitch.
As usual, I don’t have a thing to wear.
We’re preparing for our Ray Mears winter challenge deep in the python-infested suburbs of Vientiane, capital city of Lao P.D.R. (which officially stands for ‘People’s Democratic Republic’ but actually means ‘Please Don’t Rush’, as anyone who has ever been there can confirm).
Choosing the task has proven onerous. John is not easy to please.
Having ruled out “caring for your blistered feet”, “carving your own canoe” and “fashioning a blowpipe from flax”, we finally settle for a combination of “outfitting yourself” and “hitting the trail.”
If the outlandish ensemble Ray is sporting on the flyleaf of his book is any indication, things aren’t looking good.
“Try to avoid camouflage: in many countries you may be mistaken for a soldier and find yourself in trouble,” warns Ray in his contentious Ray Mears’ Essential Bushcraft: A Handbook of Survival Skills From Around the World.
Aside from military night at Midnight Shift, it’s unlikely John or I would ever be mistaken for soldiers. Caught cavorting with one, maybe, but moving right along…
“I prefer Lycra cycling shorts as underwear: they don’t chafe between your legs.”
Okay, Ray, too much information.
And our favorite: “Trousers can be used as a buoyancy aid – knot the ends of the legs and draw them quickly over your head to fill with air. Passed under your armpits, they function as very effective water wings.” While the legs over the head bit, I can state with absolute certainty, would not prove remotely challenging to any of my friends, the water wings thing is just silly.
“I don’t think I care much for Ray,” declares John, who has made it clear he won’t be seen dead in any of the Mears Winter Bushwear Collection. Fussy fashionista!
So John opts for fabulous polka dot bottom-hugging shorts and a designer t-shirt, while I stick with my batik beach smock and crowd-pleasing tribal turban.
We fly to Vientiane courtesy of Lao Aviation, which now ranks as the world’s 103rd safest airline, up four places from 2009 and just ahead of Qantas.
The Lao capital is an acquired taste, and here I must digress from my bush babble to bang on a bit in my alarmingly alliterate way.
“Vientiane’s charm is engendered by its population and its quirkiness,” writes Irish author Dervla Murphy in her fabulous One Foot in Laos.
In Bamboo Palace, journalist and writer Christopher Kremmer described the city as a “low-slung, balmy town cradled in a bend of the Mekong River, where the only tension was an intermittent struggle between the rising dust and the lowering dampness of the air.”
Both were writing in the late 1990s.
To be sure, Vientiane is still a balmy dust bowl of a city -- the plain, somnolent sister of glamorous Luang Prabang to the north, and somewhat lacking in aesthetics and tourist attractions, which is why I love it and why I am I’m drawn back to it again and again. Well, that and a 6 foot 3 American-Hmong guy called Jai.
I love Laos for what it doesn’t have: fast food outlets, busloads of bossy, obese tourists and high-rise hotels.
And it is, as Dervla Murphy writes, quirky.
Among my favorite quirks are its colorful and candid signs that reflect a sense of humor one doesn’t find elsewhere in Asia, or at least I haven’t happened upon it anywhere else.
“From a closer distance, it appears even less impressive, like a monster of concrete,” reads a huge sign at the base of Patuxai – Vientiane’s version of the Arc de Triumph, built in the 1960s from cement that was supposed to be used for an air base during the Vietnam War (in which poor Laos was almost bombed into oblivion).
I adore the “Important Notice” in the restroom of my favorite restaurant Sticky Fingers that warns “Excessive Amounts of Toilet Paper will Cause Blockage,” and the accompanying cartoon illustration of an exploding water closet hurling colorful excrement in every direction.
Unfortunately, Laos is on the move. It is trying to shed its sleepy image, tart itself up and bring in the tourist dollars.
Backpacker cafes advertising overland bus trips and banana pancakes are springing up, its been featured in the New York Times “destination of the year” section and on those vacuous travel shows featuring irritating hosts talking about themselves in front of gilded temples.
Most recently, the London Daily Telegraph described it as “Never Never Land.”
It’s all been a bit over-hyped.
While I despair that tourists are now coming in droves, I take some consolation from the fact the good-natured, generous Lao folk won’t be rushed into mass-tourism action. And that Vientiane is not everyone’s cup of green tea.
“It’s a flyblown hellhole, the service is dreadful, no-one speaks English and the roads are a joke,” an Australian woman in a polyester jump-suit shrieked to her dinner companions at the table next to me a few visits ago. She was sweating profusely and so sunburned I seriously thought she might burst into flames.
Chill out or go home lady, I felt like telling her, and probably would have done -- in no uncertain terms -- had I been on my sixth bottle of delicious Beer Lao instead of my second.
Ms. Furnace Face had probably read about Laos being an “exciting time-forgotten land” in numerous glossy travel mags.
She’d come with visions of traditionally costumed, smiling staff serving her intricately carved fruit platters while dancing a ramwong.
At the very least she’d expected some semblance of infrastructure, a functioning air-conditioner and a comfortable vehicle for her day tour of Vientiane’s “Splendid Colonial Era Homes.” And don’t even get her STARTED on what a fiasco that turned out to be.
Boy has she been let down. Riddled with blisters, unable to make her understood, her holiday in paradise is now in ruins. Absolute ruins.
But things are changing.
I observed with dismay during John and my bush boy adventure that the ramshackle bamboo lean-tos where I’ve watched many a sunset and imbibed many a Beer Lao next to the Mighty Mekong River have been razed to make way for a concrete monstrosity pretending to be a promenade.
“It’s very stark,” John remarks in typically polite understatement. It’s an atrocity, a Chinese-funded horror to compliment the Vietnamese-funded cement high rise hotel and the Thai-sponsored fountain park , all of which have been erected faster than you can say ‘investment opportunity’ or ‘environmental impact study.’
But time to end my rant, flee the cement and get on with the tasks at hand. Having memorized Ray Mears’ “Hitting the Trail” chapter it’s time for Johnny boy and I to learn some life skills. As usual we’ve modified the tasks to suit ourselves.
My task is to make my way via tuk-tuk to Wat Sok Pa Luang, or the forest temple, and endure 30 minutes in of herbal pore-cleansing in its wonderfully rustic stilted wooden steam room, followed by an hour of gentle Lao massage by a handsome Lao man while staring out at the lush tropical gardens.
John’s task is to sit under a beautiful frangipani tree adjacent to the monastery school, observe gorgeous, saffron-clad monks and “immerse himself in the moment.” We both pass with flying colors. If this were Amazing Race, we’d go straight to the next pit stop. Okay, it’s probably not the Ray Way, but we liked it.
I haven’t known John for very long. I met him through a mutual and dear friend Roque, who is a frequent guest at my funky Bangkok apartment in between UN assignments in Afghanistan, Kosovo and almost any dangerous destination you could name. Roque and I go back years. We met through Amor, another of my offshore pals-and-lifelong-best-friends-in-this-world, in Bangkok in the mid-1990s.
Many people stay at Chez Craig while passing through Bangkok, but over the years I’ve grown reluctant to let folk I don’t know inhabit my guest bedroom. It’s a middle-age thing!
I’m glad I made an exception for John. Aside from being a talented designer and photographer (he gave me a framed exquisite photograph he took the last time he was here of monks in Laos – future houseguests PLEASE NOTE), he’s a gentle soul, a funny and fabulous travel companion and now a new friend, which is nice. And he looks good in bush slacks. No. Make that, purple polka dot, butt-hugging bush briefs, which went down a treat during our holiday in the land of shadows and saffron.