Same Same
4 - 9 Feb, Ian
This week we found the routine that we had been
missing. In the morning we cycle from the resort to town for brunch: it's 5 km
to our favourite cafe. Then we cycle back and swim and hang out at the resort
for the afternoon. The pool not only looks attractive with play-friendly
shallow areas scolloped into the sides, it also has a 30m+ length down the
middle that's perfect for lap swimming. In the evening we return to Luang
Prabang for dinner, usually on the free
shuttle.
The highlight is the cycling, and the villages that merge into each other along the road into town. While Luang Prabang is heavy with tourists and is busily entrenching its status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site through a program of public works, passing the Post Office on the way out of town is like walking through a curtain into another world. Out of town, men, women and children sit around in simple houses that open onto the road, or at tables where they get on with whatever occupies them, walking along and shouting to each other in a community shaped like a long knotted string. Inevitably, there is street food. It's not at all surprising but I've been surprised nonetheless to see that each woman cooks up the same stuff every day. One grills whole fish, slashed, splayed and skewered, over hot coal. Another is always to be seen squatting right at the roadside frying up banana fritters in a bowl of hot oil.
At the centre of the community is the thick arterial road. I've never seen one so busy with two-wheeled traffic. Clusters of bikes bubble up constantly and you can usually see a few motorbikes, but its the mopeds that dominate. Kids ride them, and so do entire families. Toddlers and babies are either sandwiched between relatives or grip contentedly on at the back. Waves of them flow along the road in both directions, often half a dozen abreast, with tuk-tuks and trucks weaving in between. Cyclists occasionally latch onto the pedal of a moped or motorbike to get a drag of speed. And this is all done effortlessly: girls hold parasols as they ride and no one slows down to take a phone call. Paula and I have both enjoyed extended conversations with other road users as we cycle along. Many people are seizing a rare chance to practise their English with a native English speaker, and many are simply friendly.
The idea of lane discipline has no more currency than crash helmets. On our cycle rides I always bring up the rear, from where I watch Paula and the girls going into the maelstrom with the frightening perspective of Nebuchadnezzar sending Shadrach, Meshack and Abednego into the fire. Zoe and Heidi benefit from the attention that they always get here when we leave the tourist areas: everyone looks at them, and on this road it's safer to be noticed.
One night we returned from dinner in one of the more rudimentary tuk-tuks. It swerved all over the road trying to avoid the worst pot-holes and dips, and it often failed. One dip was so pronounced that the vehicle had to rock back and forwards a few times to get out of it.
After we arrived back at the resort yesterday we switched on CNN to hear an outraged head declaiming against the wickedness of Britney, who was apparently photographed driving her car with her baby wedged between her legs. It must all seem so irresponsible at home; here it's a joke.
The villages run only a couple of hundred metres or so at most away from the road, and behind that it's all fields and distant hills. The fields are cultivated, showing vivid green plants in rows worked by people in conical straw coolie hats. The only other tourists we see between town and the resort are little groups in vans or occasionally a couple of hardy cyclists who I guess are riding out to the waterfall. I deduce this from the fact that they invest $4/day in mountain bikes rather than the ubiquitous single gear bikes that we have that rent at $1/day and have comfy seats over the rear mudguard. Some kids even prefer to use the rear seat when cycling alone, reaching to the handle-bars like orang-utans.
With each day we like the town more. I often find that my first impressions of a place can be overly negative, and it can take me a while to find what it is about somewhere that's most likeable. I didn't like San Francisco when I first visited it, and I was unsure about Manhattan. Now I love them both. I especially take against places bustling with tourists when I've come from remote areas, and this coloured my impression of Luang Prabang when we arrived, even though I tried not to let it. Now we've been here two or three weeks we notice the other transient tourists less than the familiar locals and the spots that we've come to favour.
We've got round to some of the chores that I mentioned we'd not found time for last time I wrote. We bought a couple of silks for the house, and a pair of the carved stone figures that all of the curio shops carry. We've wandered around the night market a few times and taken in a little more of the town. I've taken more snaps, taking so many that I have enough usable ones, even though I feel photographically uninspired this month. One photo that I'd like to take but have so far missed is of the girl who works on the front desk called Ms Phone: obviously I'd like the corny snap of her wearing her name tag while taking a call. I may have to set it up by getting Paula to ring the front desk when I'm in position for the shot.
Today I went for another massage, and this time I'd booked a two hour session and an hour of reflexology for Paula and the girls. It wasn't the best day for it. Last night we had our worst meal in South East Asia. Billed as a spicy Luang Prabang fish stew, it tasted of washing up liquid and stupidly I ate it. I developed a sore throat and dull stomach ache for the first time in five months and barely slept, and today I haven't improved. I missed the brunch journey this morning but this afternoon I had to cycle into town with Paula and the girls because the bikes needed returning. Paula wisely advised me to have the same one hour foot and shoulder treatment that they were having but I couldn't bring myself to turn down my last chance for a full-on Laos massage. The masseur who I was assigned was androgynous and we still don't know whether s/he was a man or woman: I thought it was probably a man and Paula was fairly sure it was a girl, but it doesn't matter. Whatever the gender, s/he was no good. I didn't get subjected to as much heaving and bending as I have in my previous two treatments in the region, but it was constantly uncomfortable without the offsetting sense of being therapeutic. After over half an hour s/he was still on the first leg. I thought about asking him/her to skip the right leg but my stomach hurt and I feared that it might get worse when s/he started walking on my back. It's been a long while since I've felt so depressed. I felt I might cry, not from pain but from misery; but I'm not that type of guy. I got up, got dressed and left.
Paula and the girls had a much happier time and afterwards we repaired to our most reliable foodery, where I had a yogurt, a banana and a watermelon shake for dinner: Luang Prabang was good to me again.
I've said that my first impressions of places can be too negative, but my first impressions of people are generally more reliable, if only because when I'm uncertain I don't form judgements. But a couple of times this week I've rapidly formed a judgement on a person or people and had to moderate it. The first time concerned an American woman who was using the single internet point at the resort the other night when I wanted to wire my mac on-line. Shortly before I arrived she had persuaded a well-intentioned man from Miami called Tommy to set her up on Skype. Now, as I chatted to Tommy who seemed a little sheepish about his role in my on-going denial of access, she used her Skype account to call a friend from home who walked her through the creation of a Yahoo! account. When she'd done this she proceeded to use Yahoo! to search for hotels in Luang Prabang. Her interlocutor must have had the patience of a saint. The next morning I returned to check mail (since over numerous emails our tour operator wont, when repeatedly directly asked, disclose our flight number or flight time to Bhutan) and the lady was there again, Skyping her friend for all to hear on the only terminal.
She told me, with the air of someone who has seen a ghost, that I looked exactly like an acquaintance of hers. I know how that happens: I often used to catch glimpses of people I recognised in the most implausible places, until when I turned thirty I got my eyes tested and started wearing glasses; then the phenomenon stopped. Sure enough, the American lady called Tommy over to help her read one of her web pages.
I confess I thought she was senile. However, we ran into her later in town and I found that I had been unfair: she's very friendly and she'd managed to find herself a room she loved for a third of what she was paying at Villa Santi. And she was from Aruba, not the US, though she does have an apartment in Manhattan.
I may also have misjudged an older English couple we ran into on the shuttle bus. I'm above being influenced unfavourably by their Wallace & Grommit Yorkshire accents but when I heard them complaining about "No Go areas" in the Isle of Mann (show me - I'll go), the absurdly limited powers of the police and (heaven forbid) the benefits that would accrue from a return to National Service I thought I had their number. In truth, I wouldn't ever want to have to listen to them discussing politics again but they did have an interesting story to tell regarding how they're organising their retirement. Six years ago they bought a place in Chiang Mai, which they stay at for four months of the year and use as a base for travelling in the region. Regarding SE Asia they seem open-minded and keen to befriend the resident community. A couple of other retired couples we've run into have similar schemes. Not a bad plan, I guess, but more sad proof points for how unsatisfactory many people find life in England.
A few of our friends from home would love to emigrate and this week I had an email from one of them in which he expressed the view that my recent blogs make better reading than the older ones. I appreciated this opinion as it's impossible for me to look at the blogs as a reader does. I'm always grateful for such email and site comments and recently you may have noticed a few of them. I reply when I can, although I'll have to say how much we enjoyed hearing from our Fez pilot here as I don't have your email address.
I have used some of our time this week to lay out the blogs for printing so that we can read them when we get home and re-live our adventure. I've been doing this quite brainlessly but even so I can see numerous errors. I noticed, for example, that one blog in Africa (Baby Day) seems to stop half way through - I think that this was one that I had difficulty posting and it's probably a copy/paste error. I regret the loss of the diary fragment. I also noticed that in one of the more recent blogs I inexplicably called Jack Johnson Joe Johnson, losing the point of my comparison with Chet Baker. (Last night when I couldn't sleep I listened to his album On & On again, which is turning out to be a slow burn favourite for the year.)
Since about the end of October I've started to get statistics on Out to Lunch blog hits. The most interesting feature of this is seeing what leads readers to the blog from search engines: examples range from the prosaic - e.g. "steristrips" - to the fanciful - e.g. "time is an illusion and we are it's [sic] prisoners". I like this so much that yesterday I republished most of the earlier entries so that I can see activity on the pages I wrote in the first seven months as well. At my request, a couple of friends have emailed me information about how Google assigns rankings. I asked for it, I read it and now I find it regrettable: the numerous techniques that you can essay to improve your prominence are an assault by marketing on merit, and I hope that Google manages to stay a step ahead. Personally, I only wanted to stop the majority of my blog pages being invisible to my stat's; now I know too much.
One harmless piece of trivia I came across, which has a taunting relevance today, is that when Google was being developed as a tool for searching research papers at Stanford it was called "backrub".
Tomorrow we leave for Thailand, where the phrase "Same Same" is frequently used as a complete sentence. It's quaint and many tourists buy the t-shirt that says "SAME SAME" in block capitals on the front and "BUT DIFFERENT" on the back; I think they're all wearing these without intentional irony.
This evening as I sat down to write the girls were watching a film in which I was able to identify the stars as the Olsen twins, who they know of but didn't recognise, and to sing all the words to Suffragette City, which the band in the film was lip syncing. The girls quietly recognised my relevant cultural knowledge, and I have to enjoy all of these small victories while I can.
The highlight is the cycling, and the villages that merge into each other along the road into town. While Luang Prabang is heavy with tourists and is busily entrenching its status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site through a program of public works, passing the Post Office on the way out of town is like walking through a curtain into another world. Out of town, men, women and children sit around in simple houses that open onto the road, or at tables where they get on with whatever occupies them, walking along and shouting to each other in a community shaped like a long knotted string. Inevitably, there is street food. It's not at all surprising but I've been surprised nonetheless to see that each woman cooks up the same stuff every day. One grills whole fish, slashed, splayed and skewered, over hot coal. Another is always to be seen squatting right at the roadside frying up banana fritters in a bowl of hot oil.
At the centre of the community is the thick arterial road. I've never seen one so busy with two-wheeled traffic. Clusters of bikes bubble up constantly and you can usually see a few motorbikes, but its the mopeds that dominate. Kids ride them, and so do entire families. Toddlers and babies are either sandwiched between relatives or grip contentedly on at the back. Waves of them flow along the road in both directions, often half a dozen abreast, with tuk-tuks and trucks weaving in between. Cyclists occasionally latch onto the pedal of a moped or motorbike to get a drag of speed. And this is all done effortlessly: girls hold parasols as they ride and no one slows down to take a phone call. Paula and I have both enjoyed extended conversations with other road users as we cycle along. Many people are seizing a rare chance to practise their English with a native English speaker, and many are simply friendly.
The idea of lane discipline has no more currency than crash helmets. On our cycle rides I always bring up the rear, from where I watch Paula and the girls going into the maelstrom with the frightening perspective of Nebuchadnezzar sending Shadrach, Meshack and Abednego into the fire. Zoe and Heidi benefit from the attention that they always get here when we leave the tourist areas: everyone looks at them, and on this road it's safer to be noticed.
One night we returned from dinner in one of the more rudimentary tuk-tuks. It swerved all over the road trying to avoid the worst pot-holes and dips, and it often failed. One dip was so pronounced that the vehicle had to rock back and forwards a few times to get out of it.
After we arrived back at the resort yesterday we switched on CNN to hear an outraged head declaiming against the wickedness of Britney, who was apparently photographed driving her car with her baby wedged between her legs. It must all seem so irresponsible at home; here it's a joke.
The villages run only a couple of hundred metres or so at most away from the road, and behind that it's all fields and distant hills. The fields are cultivated, showing vivid green plants in rows worked by people in conical straw coolie hats. The only other tourists we see between town and the resort are little groups in vans or occasionally a couple of hardy cyclists who I guess are riding out to the waterfall. I deduce this from the fact that they invest $4/day in mountain bikes rather than the ubiquitous single gear bikes that we have that rent at $1/day and have comfy seats over the rear mudguard. Some kids even prefer to use the rear seat when cycling alone, reaching to the handle-bars like orang-utans.
With each day we like the town more. I often find that my first impressions of a place can be overly negative, and it can take me a while to find what it is about somewhere that's most likeable. I didn't like San Francisco when I first visited it, and I was unsure about Manhattan. Now I love them both. I especially take against places bustling with tourists when I've come from remote areas, and this coloured my impression of Luang Prabang when we arrived, even though I tried not to let it. Now we've been here two or three weeks we notice the other transient tourists less than the familiar locals and the spots that we've come to favour.
We've got round to some of the chores that I mentioned we'd not found time for last time I wrote. We bought a couple of silks for the house, and a pair of the carved stone figures that all of the curio shops carry. We've wandered around the night market a few times and taken in a little more of the town. I've taken more snaps, taking so many that I have enough usable ones, even though I feel photographically uninspired this month. One photo that I'd like to take but have so far missed is of the girl who works on the front desk called Ms Phone: obviously I'd like the corny snap of her wearing her name tag while taking a call. I may have to set it up by getting Paula to ring the front desk when I'm in position for the shot.
Today I went for another massage, and this time I'd booked a two hour session and an hour of reflexology for Paula and the girls. It wasn't the best day for it. Last night we had our worst meal in South East Asia. Billed as a spicy Luang Prabang fish stew, it tasted of washing up liquid and stupidly I ate it. I developed a sore throat and dull stomach ache for the first time in five months and barely slept, and today I haven't improved. I missed the brunch journey this morning but this afternoon I had to cycle into town with Paula and the girls because the bikes needed returning. Paula wisely advised me to have the same one hour foot and shoulder treatment that they were having but I couldn't bring myself to turn down my last chance for a full-on Laos massage. The masseur who I was assigned was androgynous and we still don't know whether s/he was a man or woman: I thought it was probably a man and Paula was fairly sure it was a girl, but it doesn't matter. Whatever the gender, s/he was no good. I didn't get subjected to as much heaving and bending as I have in my previous two treatments in the region, but it was constantly uncomfortable without the offsetting sense of being therapeutic. After over half an hour s/he was still on the first leg. I thought about asking him/her to skip the right leg but my stomach hurt and I feared that it might get worse when s/he started walking on my back. It's been a long while since I've felt so depressed. I felt I might cry, not from pain but from misery; but I'm not that type of guy. I got up, got dressed and left.
Paula and the girls had a much happier time and afterwards we repaired to our most reliable foodery, where I had a yogurt, a banana and a watermelon shake for dinner: Luang Prabang was good to me again.
I've said that my first impressions of places can be too negative, but my first impressions of people are generally more reliable, if only because when I'm uncertain I don't form judgements. But a couple of times this week I've rapidly formed a judgement on a person or people and had to moderate it. The first time concerned an American woman who was using the single internet point at the resort the other night when I wanted to wire my mac on-line. Shortly before I arrived she had persuaded a well-intentioned man from Miami called Tommy to set her up on Skype. Now, as I chatted to Tommy who seemed a little sheepish about his role in my on-going denial of access, she used her Skype account to call a friend from home who walked her through the creation of a Yahoo! account. When she'd done this she proceeded to use Yahoo! to search for hotels in Luang Prabang. Her interlocutor must have had the patience of a saint. The next morning I returned to check mail (since over numerous emails our tour operator wont, when repeatedly directly asked, disclose our flight number or flight time to Bhutan) and the lady was there again, Skyping her friend for all to hear on the only terminal.
She told me, with the air of someone who has seen a ghost, that I looked exactly like an acquaintance of hers. I know how that happens: I often used to catch glimpses of people I recognised in the most implausible places, until when I turned thirty I got my eyes tested and started wearing glasses; then the phenomenon stopped. Sure enough, the American lady called Tommy over to help her read one of her web pages.
I confess I thought she was senile. However, we ran into her later in town and I found that I had been unfair: she's very friendly and she'd managed to find herself a room she loved for a third of what she was paying at Villa Santi. And she was from Aruba, not the US, though she does have an apartment in Manhattan.
I may also have misjudged an older English couple we ran into on the shuttle bus. I'm above being influenced unfavourably by their Wallace & Grommit Yorkshire accents but when I heard them complaining about "No Go areas" in the Isle of Mann (show me - I'll go), the absurdly limited powers of the police and (heaven forbid) the benefits that would accrue from a return to National Service I thought I had their number. In truth, I wouldn't ever want to have to listen to them discussing politics again but they did have an interesting story to tell regarding how they're organising their retirement. Six years ago they bought a place in Chiang Mai, which they stay at for four months of the year and use as a base for travelling in the region. Regarding SE Asia they seem open-minded and keen to befriend the resident community. A couple of other retired couples we've run into have similar schemes. Not a bad plan, I guess, but more sad proof points for how unsatisfactory many people find life in England.
A few of our friends from home would love to emigrate and this week I had an email from one of them in which he expressed the view that my recent blogs make better reading than the older ones. I appreciated this opinion as it's impossible for me to look at the blogs as a reader does. I'm always grateful for such email and site comments and recently you may have noticed a few of them. I reply when I can, although I'll have to say how much we enjoyed hearing from our Fez pilot here as I don't have your email address.
I have used some of our time this week to lay out the blogs for printing so that we can read them when we get home and re-live our adventure. I've been doing this quite brainlessly but even so I can see numerous errors. I noticed, for example, that one blog in Africa (Baby Day) seems to stop half way through - I think that this was one that I had difficulty posting and it's probably a copy/paste error. I regret the loss of the diary fragment. I also noticed that in one of the more recent blogs I inexplicably called Jack Johnson Joe Johnson, losing the point of my comparison with Chet Baker. (Last night when I couldn't sleep I listened to his album On & On again, which is turning out to be a slow burn favourite for the year.)
Since about the end of October I've started to get statistics on Out to Lunch blog hits. The most interesting feature of this is seeing what leads readers to the blog from search engines: examples range from the prosaic - e.g. "steristrips" - to the fanciful - e.g. "time is an illusion and we are it's [sic] prisoners". I like this so much that yesterday I republished most of the earlier entries so that I can see activity on the pages I wrote in the first seven months as well. At my request, a couple of friends have emailed me information about how Google assigns rankings. I asked for it, I read it and now I find it regrettable: the numerous techniques that you can essay to improve your prominence are an assault by marketing on merit, and I hope that Google manages to stay a step ahead. Personally, I only wanted to stop the majority of my blog pages being invisible to my stat's; now I know too much.
One harmless piece of trivia I came across, which has a taunting relevance today, is that when Google was being developed as a tool for searching research papers at Stanford it was called "backrub".
Tomorrow we leave for Thailand, where the phrase "Same Same" is frequently used as a complete sentence. It's quaint and many tourists buy the t-shirt that says "SAME SAME" in block capitals on the front and "BUT DIFFERENT" on the back; I think they're all wearing these without intentional irony.
This evening as I sat down to write the girls were watching a film in which I was able to identify the stars as the Olsen twins, who they know of but didn't recognise, and to sing all the words to Suffragette City, which the band in the film was lip syncing. The girls quietly recognised my relevant cultural knowledge, and I have to enjoy all of these small victories while I can.
Posted: Thu - February 9, 2006 at 08:04 PM
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Published On: Feb 10, 2006 10:30 AM
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Published On: Feb 10, 2006 10:30 AM