Siam Chronicles 14 - Now We're Lao

Two from the Vault, A Postscript to the Six-Legged

Touching Family Reunion, Phnom Penh
We had met before, oh yes. Those beady eyes and that stretch of antennae were unmistakable. The first skirmish occurred on Rabbit Island. The roach in question introduced himself informally, after being unmasked in an attempt at stowing away in our dirty laundry sack. Emitting a shriek like a baby pig being trussed up was my first line of defence, followed by a prolonged bout of the heebie-jeebies and no small amount of arm flailing, as I extricated him from the salt-encrusted under shorts of my bathing outfit. Each time I lobbed him clear I would start to refold, repack and reload but there he’d be again, blitzing up from under the cracks between the bamboo on the porch and launching onto the bikini bottom once again. I called in for backup. Alex succeeded in the procedure through swift evasive maneuvering. He then deftly double tied the top of the sack and imprisoned the cargo inside, under protective guard.
(Days pass)
We had broached Phnom Penh again, when we commenced Operation Stinky Sink Laundry. Many secrets were divulged that day about our enemy. He was more inventive and tenacious than we had given him credit for, and further, he was a family man.
I surveyed Mama roach on defensive atop my swim trunks, fronting the cantonment entrenched in my bikini bottom. The porcelain pestle of sink was puddled in blue fabric which teemed like a watering hole on the Savannah.
Meanwhile Papa roach had taken the offensive and the loud reports of the mano a mano conflict in the bedroom accentuated my acute attack of the jim-jams.
After the commander succumbed to his injuries, the army was easy to overcome. Drowning a hundred babies is actually easier and far less of a moral strain than it sounds.
War is war, after all.

Night of the Drunken Moths, Koh Phi Phi
Who knew moths like beer? This is not a fact that my bio teachers ever mentioned, and yet this seemingly spurious allegation proves to be true. I have photos, you see - proof.
The squadron solidified while Alex was out obtaining provisions. I was toasting the sunset over the rock-ringed bay with the brown bottle, an amber tear tipped over the flare of pebbles floating through fire, when the whisper of wings predicated the onslaught. Suddenly the single porch light pulsed into a zoetrope of fluttering shadows, larking through the lintels like blurred angels of ascension. They had come for the beer. Brown with yellow spots, these were a typical breed of bar-brawling moth, dead-set on daring their drunk on. Swarming over bottle and glass their tortile tongues unfurled and began to suck up the nectar. Stultified, I let them have at it. One enterprising wino dived right in and was baptizing himself in the brew with bonhomie, a transverse of inter-species communiqués.
When Alex returned he was horrified that I’d let a legion of moths become insupportably squiffy, and his face was refulgent with concern for their safety. He tried to prize them from their increasingly erratic toeholds about the rims with the gentleness of a yearling ewe. I warned him that drunken moths get surly and are not interested in intervention. He discarded this information until they flew at his face and wavered away through the pall of the bay, off-kilter and surely screaming curses at his mother.


Now is Lao
We left the 4,000 islands with reluctance, watching the paddy fields patched in intermittent shade band into emerald and jade, fading into the gullet of lightning storms as we headed north to pitch base camp.
On the way we went through Champasak, Savannakhet and Vientiane. I have nothing of interest to report about this except that in Champasak Alex returned from forage with two bottles of lao lao (break through the clouds moonshine) instead of beer by mistake, so the rest of our visit to the comically named Wat Phou is a bit of smudge, and that Savannkhet is penurious and directly across the river from Thailand. This means in layman’s terms that the Thai writhe over the river for a cheap good time in droves. We were fortunate in our choice of accommodation in that we found ourselves stationed directly across the street from the Rose House, a brothel tended by transvestites. Its French colonial facade sparked a neon symphony of hot pink at night, and the sound of the clientele puking into the street kept us company as we tried to dream it all away.
With one more stop at Vang Vieng, a place where anything’s available for two bits a gander, and one more halcyon tube down the river, we were back in Luang Prabang.

Looking for an apartment in the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos is An Undisputable Experience. My favorite prospective was a twenty five room ex-guesthouse, with a bathroom in each cube, please understand. We told the broker, a “Mr. No” that we were but twain, and the amount of space was too much for our needs. With a smile like snagged leather he explained patiently that we would have our relatives come over and live with us, and our friends. While I was imagining my parents trying to navigate Laos PDR in their retirement I had a lingering nightmare of keeping twenty five bathrooms tidy, and a further sort of Shining flashback that made the whole effluent enterprise unacceptably unsavory.
The rest were all actually inhabited by families, who were generously vying to give up their homes for an exorbitant rent to move in with their moms for a year. These domiciles were not clean and the prospect of removing the insect population from their ensconced curtilage filled us with dread. One even possessed a full sized loom (eight feet by four) wedged into the kitchen. Again another fantasy of inexpertly weaving shoddy materials anointed with the aroma of garlic and onions blurred my vision, but this was quickly abandoned.
It was not to be. We settled for a westernized flat smack dab in the middle of the little town, across and adjunct to two major wats, with ample room for my studio, and started to settle on in.
The bartering in earnest and had only just begun.