Vientiane
I arranged for a minivan to take me from my village to a modern apartment block with two swimming pools and large leafy grounds in a quiet part of Vientiane. It was still very hot and the verandah was unusable in the afternoons when the full brunt of the burning sun bore down on the concrete and glass brutalist monstrosity I called home for two months.
There were a couple of middle-aged women who ran the place and there were teams of youngsters doing the work. When the bosses were away it was party time and even when they were present the kids enjoyed themselves, noisily teasing each other and getting up to fairly innocent mischief, as far as I could tell. One girl seemed to run everywhere. I ordered meals from the kitchen and also prepared some simple food myself in the modernistic kitchen.
The French had left behind a taste for quality bread which was lacking in the rest of South East Asia. I often walked home with a long baguette poking out my bag which also contained some reasonable cheese and even marmite or vegemite on occasion. There were general stores which speciaised in Western foods and did a good job finding choice items like Swiss and American chocolate, goat cheese and butter from New Zealand. The locals sat on tiny plastic chairs on te footpaths and consumed their staples of meat flavoured noodles and various other snacks of which I knew nothing.
As usual I sought out the Indian restaurants around town and the best cafes. There were numerous temples to visit and photograph and a forbidding presidential palace in the centre. The wide streets easily accomodated the traffic, the Mekong flowed relentlessly nearby and across on the other side I could see Thailand. One could not, of course, go there without satisfying all the legal conditions so it was far away, in a sense, although it was just there, a few hundred metres away.
I wrote a little, played some music and spent many hours on the internet, reading the world news as well as learning about the area I was in and all its history of conquest and migration as civisations rose and fell and the ordinary people grew rice and vegetables and hoped the warriors would pass them by.
All the news from Australia was bad. Murders were featured and gang wars, over tobacco nowadays, and home invasions proliferated as the authorities struggled to cope. I started to get the idea that Australia was tearing itself apart. There were so many sides and divisions and opposite forces and the Art scene was never mentioned. It seemed to have died. The ABC appointed a new Arts Editor who proceeded to ponder the wondrous allure of female American lip-synchers who were presented as triumphs of diversity which had a sameness that belied its intentions.
Divorces were big: they were like complex soap operas involving legions of coke-snorting lawyers and celebrities who made grand statements of varying veracity as the world looked on and wished they could afford such shenanigans. The wars were ongoing in various parts of the world and the great cities of the west were becoming hell-holes of homelessness and ‘substance abuse’. The world was going, as we say in Australia, to the dogs.
It was refreshing to see the youth of Laos enjoying life as if there were no tomorrow, coping with difficult conditions, extreme weather and poverty, happily unaware of politics and mortality, just living as expressions of life and energy and the eternal innocence and hopefulness of the new generations who had not yet known tragedy or war.
Travels to Nepal 