I
was driving peacefully, going about 25 km/h trying to avoid crashing because of
the trenches left by tractors in the moist ground, when I started thinking
about finding ways to avoid the attack of the insects directed at me. Well,
like I said before, the creatures were flying toward the light but I suspect
most of them had a really bad aim, so they ended up bombarding my face instead.
You see, I was so concentrated on getting somewhere, preferably intact, that I
didn’t really register the sunset and its aftermath. The previous day I didn’t
have as many problems with insects but this being truly the countryside, the
number of insects increased dramatically. Also, I should have seen ‘the
environmental disaster zone created by the recent flooding of the Nam Theun 2
dam’ on one side of the road, as my guidebook confidently instructed, but that
also leaves a gap in my memory. There shouldn’t have been a long way to the
next village and the obligatory guesthouse so I pushed on, deciding to leave Mike
to tackle his own insects (although, at the impressive speed of 5 km/h, not
even insects could have hit him too hard). And, as I reached the village and for the squashed bugs stuck in my eyes, night was peacefully wrapping around
the freakishly quiet village.
Along
came Mike 15 minutes later commanding to find the first guesthouse and stop
fooling around with this driving-through-the-night-on-a-crappy-road stuff and
just relax. The only problem was that we couldn’t find a guesthouse and not
even an open shop, not to mention somebody who would understand what we wanted and who could have assisted us. Thus I had to use my language skills yet again and I
trespassed some properties in search for someone. Kids and women, I decided,
would be of no help because neither are any good at giving directions so I
spotted some elderly men chatting around a fire who weren’t very impressed by
us, mostly because they had difficulty seeing us through the get black unlit
night. But, as soon as I put on my help face, they promptly started explaining
something in the tones on ‘faaaar away’. Wait! What?! To my great joy and
happiness, the village we were looking for was being pointed in the direction
where we came from with the indication of something along the lines of ‘30-40
km’. Apparently, we took the wrong road at the aforementioned junction and so,
ended up further inside the unseen Lao countryside. Off the beaten track, to put it mildly, eh?!
Mike
bluntly refused to turn back but he soon realized that there was no other solution
other than asking some chicken to move over and make room for us in their
chicken coop. So I offered to drive just in front of him so that he could see where
he should be driving. I’ll spare you the excruciating details of driving 5 km/h
under an amazing sky full of stars (of which Mike didn’t see any because he was
too concentrated on cementing his eyeballs on my rear tire) and doing
everything humanely possible so as not to get bored to tears by the voyage,
from standing up on the bike, singing every imaginable Disney movie soundtrack
and smoking while trying to drive without hands (at one point I even decided I
could light up while driving but gave up on that particular project). Two hours
later we were back in the junction village and were checking in at a very
respectable hotel where it sounded like they were having a marriage party (of
course, the karaoke people propped the bar, as always) so we set out in search
of some food; on foot, of course because neither of us wanted to get their
lower parts back on any bike seats sooner than necessary. And there was some food indeed: the only open place we found was serving only barbecued meat and didn’t even have any rice for that matter.
‘This
is how one becomes an alcoholic’ I reasoned while ordering another beer and
watching Mike sharing a nice barbecue dinner with the local dogs. With our bellies full
(some of us with food, while others with nausea-causing beverages), we went
back to the hotel where we planned to crash the party plundering everything
until I would find something to quench the thirst of my recently swallowed
beers. Simple: I would go out and smoke a cigarette and incidentally stroll
towards the area where people were singing before and now just cheerfully
chatting away and, surely they will not be able to restrain their curiosity and
would invite me over. And sure enough, it was exactly what happened. So I
sailed right in the scene where the only English speaking person out of a group
of about a dozen Lao, was a nice young Lao lady, who asked me the usual while handing
me – surprise! – a beer. They sat me down on the mats and in a matter of
seconds I became the focus point of the entire gathering.
‘And
your darling not coming?’ This took me by surprise.
‘Who?
Oh, Mike... well, yes, he’s coming only he’s taking a shower right now.’ To
which everybody laughed as if I’d made the joke of the day. So they made me go
and get Mike and then proceeded in keeping us well hydrated with beer after
beer, cheerfully shutting out any possibility of me desperately needing some food. However, by this time, I was in no mood for food any more.
‘Oh,
this is not marriage?’ I asked obviously confused by the reason of their happy
gathering on a Tuesday.
‘No.
It only because we had football match with other city.’
‘Very
nice!’ I said thinking of a lot of people that I am sure would have been really
impressed by this.
‘...
but we lost,’ the nice girl told me equally happy. ‘So now we drink because our
team so bad that not possible to beat the other team never.’ She then
translated this and my joke of the day was short-lived and this new über-joke
took the cake.
You might wonder how I escaped this joyous celebration without having to be dragged back to bed by someone slightly less inebriated than me. But I outfoxed them and, with the excuse of going to the bathroom, I left Mike in the loving hands of one very, very happy group of Lao people and sneaked in the room without a second thought.
Thus,
day two ended with me barely hitting the bed and already cruising on the
dreamland motorcycle.
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