3 June - Travel & Perils
I have travel envy, though I can’t do anything about it right now, except suffer. Met F. ex colleague who’s raking exotic trips up and in October she’s going to Eastern Bhutan and will see the Taktsang Monastery (Tiger Nest). Which is just stunning and clinging to some rocks. Though am sure she’d be wide eyed too at what I saw in Nepal a few years ago, we’re just the same. She’d want to add Nepal and I want Buthan, Burma and Tibet. Oh and China and Mongolia and so on. The list is endless. Next year she knows she’ll return to Vietnam and will also go to Laos. I love it.. it’s those moments where one says excitedly to the other ‘And I’ll be in Hoi-an again’ and before she’s finished you scream “Hoi An!!!! I love it!!” And it’s all I love it, no I love it , no I love it, I love it more… before you start bemoaning how many more new hotels there are. F’s line ‘I am never going to go back to Angkor Wat now, too busy’. Yeah, like Med beaches or something. Anyway, I start dishing her advice on Laos.
It’s all magic in retrospect though I remember a massive downer in Laos for a few days when all was damp, my clothes never dried, the roads were a river of mud, I was not partaking in the sack-fuls of dope that most of the downmarket travellers seemed to have come there for and the Valium I took to overcome the tedium of a long bus journey backfired by not kicking in until a few hours too late (ie not on the truck) when I actually wanted to stay awake only to fall asleep at 7pm and wake up again at 3am to listen to cocks cocking or whatever they do. And you understand why the kids play with catapults so much. You wish you had one but in the dark finding the cock would not be so easy. Torture, kike having jetlag, how do people take this sleeping pill stuff, how can a universal pill work for everybody’s different body sizes and weights and rhythms?
I was bored out of my mind in Laos (which is exactly the point and a sort of achievement and reason why people go there) till I surrendered and didn’t pay attention anymore. One day I found myself as usual walking alone in undergrowth on the way to some cave which I entered again on my own followed by some local teenager and that’s when you reflect (a little too late) ‘Nobody knows I’m here, nobody will miss me for days and if he decides to rob me and rape me and kill me and hide my corpse nearby, I’ll never be found’ and uh, you sweat a lot and try to remain calm whilst you retrace your steps out of the cave and wait for a while till some other tourists appear and hope the fact there’s a woman in their group spells they are not a psychopath couple intent on also killing you.
But on that occasion I didn’t sweat as much as that time in Cambodia when I misread the distances on the city map and, incensed about the price the taxi drivers were quoting me to go to the airport in Phnom Phen, I decided to defy them and asked a local boy on a motorbike nearby to take me there for what I was prepared to pay.
And he did. Only I had thought the airport was a couple of miles away when in fact it was a couple of miles away from the edge of the map not the centre where I was, and so by mile 3 I slowly started to convince myself I was being driven elsewhere, in total darkness, to my sure death on a road that had probably seen hundreds if not thousands of deaths back in the days of the Khmer Rouge. I couldn’t sweat it as I was on a fast bike from which the prospect of throwing myself off was not appealing, partly because I thought he’d turn around and pick me up before I had time to run into the fields which I presumed he knew and I didn’t. As usual I stayed calm and within the longest agonizing minutes I started to see some lights in the distance and willed myself to believe that maybe that was the airport. And yes, it was and he dropped me off at the entrance and my friend C. turned up an hour later or so from Bangkok and her driver took us back to a posh house of diplomat friends living there and a housekeeper who washed my smalls and left them beautifully folded on the bed the next day.
On the shielded large terrace of Mr G Snr with gin and tonic in hand (has to be done) civilization prevailed, though we were but a mere few hundred yards from the infamous Tuol Sleng prison. More on that some other time. I told C. about my foolishness and she told me off most sternly and not for the first time. A couple of days later she had real reason to save my life as I stupidly took a drag of a cigarette in a dark, though not dodgy bar and was violently sick and passed out in a not very salubrious yard and surrounded by strangers who didn’t look that friendly. I was gone and had she not been there, this time I don’t know what would have happened. We correctly worked out later that my joint had heroin in it and uh ho, that’s what it does first time you take it (apparently), make you sick and throw out. So no blissfully spaced out feelings for me. Silly girl.
But of course it was all fantastic experiences I turn over and over in my mind often. These days I have a Sprite and I feel weird. Yes, once a month I feel the need for a Coke and reach for a Sprite as it seems less revoltingly full of sugar and that’s what happens. I feel weird. But there’s no sense of danger in that is there? And no nourishing memories...
It’s all magic in retrospect though I remember a massive downer in Laos for a few days when all was damp, my clothes never dried, the roads were a river of mud, I was not partaking in the sack-fuls of dope that most of the downmarket travellers seemed to have come there for and the Valium I took to overcome the tedium of a long bus journey backfired by not kicking in until a few hours too late (ie not on the truck) when I actually wanted to stay awake only to fall asleep at 7pm and wake up again at 3am to listen to cocks cocking or whatever they do. And you understand why the kids play with catapults so much. You wish you had one but in the dark finding the cock would not be so easy. Torture, kike having jetlag, how do people take this sleeping pill stuff, how can a universal pill work for everybody’s different body sizes and weights and rhythms?
I was bored out of my mind in Laos (which is exactly the point and a sort of achievement and reason why people go there) till I surrendered and didn’t pay attention anymore. One day I found myself as usual walking alone in undergrowth on the way to some cave which I entered again on my own followed by some local teenager and that’s when you reflect (a little too late) ‘Nobody knows I’m here, nobody will miss me for days and if he decides to rob me and rape me and kill me and hide my corpse nearby, I’ll never be found’ and uh, you sweat a lot and try to remain calm whilst you retrace your steps out of the cave and wait for a while till some other tourists appear and hope the fact there’s a woman in their group spells they are not a psychopath couple intent on also killing you.
But on that occasion I didn’t sweat as much as that time in Cambodia when I misread the distances on the city map and, incensed about the price the taxi drivers were quoting me to go to the airport in Phnom Phen, I decided to defy them and asked a local boy on a motorbike nearby to take me there for what I was prepared to pay.
And he did. Only I had thought the airport was a couple of miles away when in fact it was a couple of miles away from the edge of the map not the centre where I was, and so by mile 3 I slowly started to convince myself I was being driven elsewhere, in total darkness, to my sure death on a road that had probably seen hundreds if not thousands of deaths back in the days of the Khmer Rouge. I couldn’t sweat it as I was on a fast bike from which the prospect of throwing myself off was not appealing, partly because I thought he’d turn around and pick me up before I had time to run into the fields which I presumed he knew and I didn’t. As usual I stayed calm and within the longest agonizing minutes I started to see some lights in the distance and willed myself to believe that maybe that was the airport. And yes, it was and he dropped me off at the entrance and my friend C. turned up an hour later or so from Bangkok and her driver took us back to a posh house of diplomat friends living there and a housekeeper who washed my smalls and left them beautifully folded on the bed the next day.
On the shielded large terrace of Mr G Snr with gin and tonic in hand (has to be done) civilization prevailed, though we were but a mere few hundred yards from the infamous Tuol Sleng prison. More on that some other time. I told C. about my foolishness and she told me off most sternly and not for the first time. A couple of days later she had real reason to save my life as I stupidly took a drag of a cigarette in a dark, though not dodgy bar and was violently sick and passed out in a not very salubrious yard and surrounded by strangers who didn’t look that friendly. I was gone and had she not been there, this time I don’t know what would have happened. We correctly worked out later that my joint had heroin in it and uh ho, that’s what it does first time you take it (apparently), make you sick and throw out. So no blissfully spaced out feelings for me. Silly girl.
But of course it was all fantastic experiences I turn over and over in my mind often. These days I have a Sprite and I feel weird. Yes, once a month I feel the need for a Coke and reach for a Sprite as it seems less revoltingly full of sugar and that’s what happens. I feel weird. But there’s no sense of danger in that is there? And no nourishing memories...
Labels: travel
posted by Lisa Taylor @ 4:41 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home