Muddin'

The best part about Vang Vieng is getting out of town, away from the bars serving happy shakes and showing "Friends" reruns, the drunk kids coming back from tubing, the stores selling all the same Lao souvenirs. When the weather clears you get an idea of why people started coming to Vang Vieng in the first place. Tucked along the river, the town is nestled in the middle of a striking karst landscape: peaks that rear up suddenly from the valley floor, covered in deep green forest and riddled with caves. The muddy river that conveys inner tubes down the river and past bars is fed by streams that drip through limestone caverns and carve honeycombs of chambers in the mountains.

It wasn't raining when we rented our mountain bikes but it didn't take long to start. My friend Morgan, a French gentleman, and I were determined to leave the party kids behind and explore the surrounding area, regardless of the weather. We didn't see much for the first hour as the clouds hung low over the rice fields, but we were concentrating so hard on dodging the rocks and puddles that we hardly looked up anyway. The puddles were the trickiest part: you were never quite sure how deep they were until you were in the middle of one.

At one particularly soupy patch my front tire got horrifically bogged down, skittering out from under me. I put a foot down to catch myself, the only problem being the ankle-deep mud didn't offer much traction. Shloop! My foot flew out from underneath me and suddenly I found myself in a full butt-plant in the middle of the huge mud puddle. Tangled in the bike, floundering in the muck, I was laughing too hard to get myself upright and Morgan was too surprised to be of any help. Luckily there was a creek right there where I plopped myself down to rinse off the dirt. Not that it did much good - within ten minutes I was covered again from the spray off the wheel, my pants, shirt and face splattered like a Pollock painting. Vermont, your mud season ain't got nothin' on Laos.

The Rain in Phonsavan Stays Mainly in the Plain (of Jars)

What does one do in Phonsavan besides visiting the Plain of Jars? Once you're done discussing transportation conundrums and looking at all the remnants of UXO (unexploded ordnance) around town, not much. The Plain of Jars is the broad name used for sites spread throughout the surrounding countryside, consisting of these bizarre stone containers that sit on the tops of hills or in the middle of cow pastures. The are literally stone jars, from two feet tall to ten feet. There are several explanations: ancient people used them to store lao lao, the locally-brewed rice whiskey; or, said people used them for funerary purposes; or, the gods were having a big picnic and got so drunk they forgot to pick up their cups when they went back to heaven. I'm rather partial to the last one, although the first one could have made for some epic "jar stands".

Even though the sites we churned up to on muddy tracks (known as "roads" in the dry season) had all been specially cleared, this part of the country is still recovering from the heavy bombings of the Vietnam War. You see signs of it everywhere - bomb craters used as fish ponds, UXO shells used for school bells or flower pots, the places you pass along the road where they are clearing areas currently used as fields. There are still at least 1oo fatalities and just as many injuries every year from land mines, bombs, and other weapons of local destruction. Even here it's still a good idea to walk on the maintained trails.

All it took was an eight hour bus ride this morning and I'm a world away from the stark concrete streets of Phonsavan. Being in Vang Vieng is hardly like being in Laos at all. The streets are lined with chilled-out restaurants serving "hambergers" and showing "Friends" on TVs, places advertising tube trips down the river, bars servings buckets of some mystery alcohol, and internet places with shiny new computers for the outrageous price of 300 kip a minute. After travelling the north and east of Laos with very few other tourists, it's a shock to the system to be back in a place where everyone else looks like me, except more fashionable and better groomed.

The Cutest Little Thing

One of the tactical errors I made on this trip was bringing along sports bras that were already on their last legs. They're really one of those things that don't get better with age, and all the scrubbings in the sink and hot, sweaty, bumpy bus rides have just about finished them off. Having never shopped for undergarments in a foreign country before, despite seeing them hanging at nearly every roadside store and stall, I was a little puzzled as to how to go about obtaining one. Cleavage is one area in which this wanderer is less fun-sized than super-sized, especially in a land of small, slightly built people.

The clothes market in Sam Neua, eastern Laos, stretches on for stall after covered stall, featuring all variety of sinh (the beautiful embroidered tube skirt most Lao women wear), fashionable jeans, and neon colored shirts. And, of course, underwear. I stopped at one place and the matronly woman grabbed down a whole pile of frilly bras to lay out before me. Neither one of us could figure out what kind of size I needed. In a moment of inspiration I dashed off down the aisle to the stalls where women were embroidering brightly colored Hmong costumes and proceeded to confuse them first with my charades, and then with my drawings of a tape measure. They looked at each other, faces asking "Does she want a belt? A jacket? What is this crazy falang doing?"

Finally I spotted a measuring tape hanging on a nail, and amused the women to no end as I wrapped it around my chest and jotted down the relevant numbers. I returned triumphantly to the first woman, measurements in hand, and we proceeded to sort through the pile until we found the closest approximation she had. After some bartering with the help of a calculator, I am now the proud owner of the pinkest article of clothing I have ever come across, much less owned: a high quality lacy Lao brassiere for all of $2. We'll see how the delicate little thing puts up with life on the road; you may be reading a replay of all this in a couple weeks.