We trudged through the jungle for two days, slept in a bamboo hut in a village, swam in a mountain river, ate traditional Lao food with lots and lots of sticky rice, drank Lao Lao, that putrid powerful homebrewed rice whiskey, with the chief, waded creeks, pulled squirming black leeches from our bleeding ankles, filled our bottles with boiled water that tasted more like charcoal, and sweated like sprinklers.
Tomorrow Chiang Mai, Thailand.
I feel much better today, thank you.
LUANG NAMTHA, LAOS
I wish I had some amazing bit of insight to share with you, my ever faithful reader. But would you like to hear about the slow death of idealism? Or of my failure to find that which I was seeking? What that was exactly, I cannot say, though perhaps one day I will know.
After two weeks traveling, planning, partying together, we split, at last, our happy little family of five, each in their own way. By fast boat, slow boat, elephant, and thumb. David and I stood by the road, thumb extended until at last a truck stopped and offered to take us halfway for a fee. We, hot and sweaty in the noonday sun, agreed.
Would you cross the globe just to sit on a balcony, float down a river, chat with friends, spend all night perched atop a porcelain bowl?
'This sucks man...' I moaned and rolled over on the hardwood mattress. Curled up, trembling, each muscle shaking its tin cup begging for relief. My stomach is a boyscout knot, my flesh is aflame. I couldn't stop the question from bobbing at the surface of my food-poisoned mind, 'why are we here?'
Oh I've had a wonderful time. That's certain.
See the same things I enjoyed before, I enjoy now, and the same things that brought me pain, pain me still. But each is here, so far from home and unfamiliar, intensified ten fold.
So what am I saying? I'm rambling. Because I haven't anything compelling to say.
I awoke in the morning, emptied of all force and fluid, gulped the rest of my bottled water tastelessly down my paste caked palette, and went to the bathroom to try to wash off the wretchedness of the previous night. The shower was little more than a dried up river bed, now hot, now cold. But it did the job and gave me courage to cross the street to check the bus schedule.
We're travelers see? We don't belong here, yet nor do we belong at home. Maybe that's why we need each other.
Yeah?
We need and love each other. Create these surrogate families. Then awake and leave, say farewell without any great feeling. Depart to our various corners of the world, bleeding all the while for the loss. But growing stronger, more resolute as these wounds heal. Laughing and crying together because it's all so necessary, so vital, so beautiful and so sad.
Amor fati.
Maybe, if we're lucky, we'll all grow wiser.
Totally abandoning the idea of hitchhiking, at 11:30 a.m. we boarded a bus bound for Luang Namtha, that Northern trekkers haven. We snaked around the most brutal, nauseas mountain paths imaginable. I wrapped my scarf over my eyes and tried to sleep off my sickness. Eager to reach Thailand, where I entertain the unlikely fantasy that all are happy and all are well.
