Siam Chronicles 5 - Out With a Bang in Ban Farang

A Litany of the Unlikely
In retrospect, the stunning sunburn was ineluctable in the circumstance. I had carefully cultivated it four days before, directly after disembarking from the atrabilious elephant that was ruefully resigned to cavort my copious bulk through the jungle preserve. At this pivotal juncture, in the least likely event that has ever occurred in the history of creation, I willingly wobbled into a kayak for a four hour haul down the Nam Khong. Besides my eminent mistrust of physical exertion, my malaria meds were positively plastered with exhortations to stay out of the sun for the love of god - but god was spiteful, the sun was strong, the sun block was in the bus, the bus was long gone, and there was nothing for it but to row, row, row.
In the second least likely event in the history of creation I was discovered to my chagrin to have a natural knack for the kayak. The guide gladly sat back, put up paddle, and sang a simple Hmong love song while I jolly well put my all into it. I was alive with angelic afflatus get that damnable dingy downriver as we flew over the protean swirls and past cascading crags while I noted that my legs began to radiate angry red heat of their own accord.
At the end of the day, dreggy and doused with encomiums about my hereto nonexistent but suddenly superlative strength, I realized that my legs were so badly burned that the bones ached.
I liked the elephants.

The Road Less Travailed
The bandanna Brit in back was apparently attempting to regurgitate his lower intestine - again. The dainty Dane to the right was more demure, vomiting quite as capaciously but much more quietly. The tiny Thai family guy in front was genteel enough to run to the “bathroom” at the back of the bus (read: hole in floor) between goes. At this moment, with total and complete impropriety, I reveled in my rare fortitude over my fellow man, took a strong sniff of tiger balm and watched with wonder as the drenched protuberances of erratic peaks paraded past the sickeningly snaky road. The occasional village of thatched huts on stilts, some with massive satellite dishes stuck precariously to the side (making one wonder how it kept from toppling down the mountain with a sigh), kept time as we lolled and lurched our way to Vang Vieng.

Black Sock a Go-Go
The sheer severity of the sunburn precluded me from going whole hog in Vang Vieng, called Ban Farang (foreigner’s town) by the locals as it swells and shrinks temporarily based on the tides of the tourist trade. My crimson husk had taken on the cracked texture of an avocado, adorned with numerous fetching fallals of gleaming blisters. Abjuring the local nostrum of scorpion in whiskey, I parted with an over-exorbitant ten-spot for a tube of questionable cream that I kept thick and drippy over the injured legs. I felt pretty.
We did make it to a vaulting cave and sacred spring where the fish found my boils beguiling bait. The daedal butterflies thronging the bushes were quite the sight, and I stalked them mercilessly with my camera, capturing the souls of the more fearless for a later date with brush and paint.
Armed with the winning combination of thick black socks and sandals, I bravely assayed a tubing foray the following day. The least graceful of all water sports, tubing involves throwing oneself into the river and drifting peacefully past stunning vistas until you reach one of the riverside bamboo bars. At this point, the proprietors will push a pole at you and the real flailing begins, wiggling with all your might in your over-sized inner-tube. In recompense for the hilarious wounded musk ox impersonation it takes to reach shore in the high fast rapids of rainy season a bottle of lao lao is planted at your table with a shot-glass made from a sawn-off plastic bottle, along with a slew of fresh lychees and of course the ever-present beer. At this point you can opt to be flung from rickety swings off dizzying cliffs into the river - ostensibly for fun - or amble over to the cool caves and immerse into the still pools hiding hugger-mugger behind the warding stalagmites. There are also volumes of voluble bronzed backpackers flitting about sporadic bonfires, sharing in the comic observation that you are the only one wearing wet calf-length black socks.

Tomorrow we leave Laos until September, and migrate south in search of a beach-side bungalow in a soul-searing delve for all possible meanings of that most magical of words: "gadabout."