“I...guess so?”
In the dark of the woods, we had slowed to a crawl. Our headlamps, their batteries run nearly dry, barely illuminated three feet in front of us, and the muddy craters that dotted the road made riding impossible. We had gotten past what the Internet told us was the “hard part” of the day, and now had made it to the gently rolling hills and enormous potholes and mile-long stretches of unpaved road. Sixty-something kilometers from where we had started, we reached the closest thing to a “town” we’d seen all day: on either side of the road, haloes of insects flocked around streetlights that illuminated indistinct shapes in the trees. We saw the green reflections of our headlamps in the curious eyes of villagers, we saw thatch-roof huts and sheds and a dozen sparse buildings that could have been anything but were unlikely to be guesthouses. It was pitch-black, and though it was probably only about 6:30, I wasn't sure if this all wasn't just a dream.
This, we hoped, was Muang Beng, a village that our hilariously out-of-date guide informed us boasted "a basic guesthouse and restaurant." The rolling hills since Oudomxay had yielded gorgeous views of impossibly green rice terraces, bamboo forests teeming with snakes, thatch-roofed villages populated by adorable children and incredibly lazy dogs, and exactly zero guesthouses and restaurants. We were even too tired to wish that we hadn't sent our camping gear back home (though the black, impenetrable jungle probably wouldn't have been an ideal campsite anyway). Once again, we were exhausted, we hadn't eaten a proper meal in ten hours, and as far as we knew, the village we had arrived in was of the sort we'd been passing all day:
 |
| Oh, sure, beautiful, now show me something with an ensuite bathroom. |
"Sabaidee," I greeted her, to no response. "Hotel?" I mimed resting my head on a pillow and sleeping blissfully.
She straightened and began to smile. "Homestay?" she asked. I looked back to Jenn, who was holding our bikes somewhere in the shadows, then nodded enthusiastically. The woman put her hand to her mouth and called something into the darkness. Before long, a slight Laotian man in a dress shirt came out and greeted me.
"Homestay?" I confirmed, and he nodded with a smile. "Thao dai?" I asked, making good use of the other Laotian phrase I had mastered. He held up four fingers. "Forty thousand kip?" He nodded again and began speaking to me in rapid-fire Laotian. I did some quick math to make sure I wasn't forgetting something obvious in my exhaustion, and reconfirmed that the price came to about $5, well below anything we'd paid in Laos so far.
Before I knew what I was doing, Jenn and I were carrying our bags and instruments past a tiny but ferocious dog and up a creaky flight of stairs. When I started to chain our bikes to a column, our host (who surely introduced himself though we were unable to catch his name) laughingly motioned that it wouldn't be necessary. I smiled back at him and nodded my agreement, but locked them securely all the same. He then invited us to sit in a place of honor next to him, right beside the ancient TV that was blaring some ridiculous Thai sci-fi show. We obliged, and he told us about himself in Laotian and some excellent pantomime: as best as we could tell, he lives in that house with three of his children and two of his grandchildren. He has two more who are married and live elsewhere, and one of his children, the parent of the adorable little moppets who watched us warily from the corner, is divorced and moved back in with him. Also, sometimes other cyclists stay with him in his home -- either one cyclist stayed with him twelve days ago, or twelve cyclists stayed for one day. Bursting with pride, he showed us the souvenir that one of his guests had sent him in thanks, a license plate stamped with "J'♥PARIS."
In return, we attempted to share something of ourselves with our new friends, a feat made significantly easier by the cute little self-introduction I'd drawn to pass the time on the train from Beijing:
 |
| Goddamn am I adorable. |
As dinner still wasn't ready, our host made it known that he'd like us to play on our instruments for his family. Before we could start to tune up, he pulled out his own instrument from a hook on the wall. It was a skinny wooden instrument with a bow threaded between two steel strings (I would later learn that it's called a saw duang and it's from Thailand, though I wonder if our host would agree with that assessment). As we admired it, he began to play us a lilting, scratchy tune.
Then it was our turn. As we were unsure if Jenn could safely sing anything without blowing the roof off that little house, we played a couple of instrumentals that were met with polite applause from the family and enthusiastic cheers from our host. He told us something else that we were fairly sure we were misunderstanding, something about his daughter being a dancer and that we must play for her dancing, but as soon as we smiled and nodded, the matter was dropped and the party continued.
One of our host's daughters hauled a short, round metal table into the room and the other carried in big, steaming bowls of stewed mushrooms and potato soup. It was dinner time! I was eager to learn how to eat in the Laotian style (something that had been oddly hard to find in the touristy guesthouses in Luang Namtha), but I tried to conceal my disappointment when the family's basket of sticky rice was substituted in our case with plates of regular old steamed rice. We politely hoovered down the seven or eight servings that our hosts heaped on our plates while we watched the family grab handfuls of sticky rice, roll it into a ball, and use the rice to pinch a mouthful of mushrooms or egg from the communal plates. Conversation was limited, mostly consisting of encouraging us to eat more; some things reach across cultures, like apparently good-natured nagging.
When dinner was finished, our host rose to his feet, grabbed his instrument, and asked us to do the same. Wait, first there was another shot of lao lao. Then, before we knew it, we were bustled out the door and back out into the night.
The Muang Beng nightlife had come alive in the previous hour: clusters of teenaged boys squatted in the dirt roadside under the handful of streetlights, their faces painted in pale aqua by the screens of their cell phones. We walked down the center of the road, not wasting a thought on the non-existent traffic, and our host explained to us what was happening over the din of the jungle crickets: "Dancing gesture, my daughter, laughter, playing violin gesture, thumbs up, more laughter!" Over our heads, more stars than I had seen in my life winked down at us, as ignorant of what we were doing as we ourselves.
After unknown minutes of walking through the blackness, we arrived at a large white tin-roofed building. Inside were rows of narrow, uncomfortable benches and desks and years worth of cloth banners draped on the walls. It was only when I noticed a huge, beat-up blackboard leaning against the back wall that I was sure that we were in a schoolroom. A dozen or so teenagers loafed in the back corner, and a half-dozen adult men sat on benches throughout the room. Our host greeted them, and all eyes looked to us expectantly. We met their gazes with confident smiles (well, okay, manic smiles). "Ha ha!" we told them with our eyes, "I don't know either, guys!" The teens talked to each other expectantly. Were they bored? Or nervous?
Our host urged us to sit beside him, then explained through elaborate pantomime that he wanted the three of us to play something together while the other folks in the room danced (either that, or he had a sudden-onset case of ergotism). He readied his axe and we tried to think of what we could possibly play under these circumstances, discussing the matter through teeth frozen in smiles. Eventually we decided to play our fastest number, "Digga Digga Doo," and we acquitted ourselves reasonably well. Our host attempted to play along for the first three measures, then gave up his instrument for clapping along to the beat instead. He rose and danced as well as I've ever seen a grown man dance along to a long-haired hippie whanging away the chords to a song from the 1930s on a ukulele -- that is, he danced far better than I ever will. When we finished, there was polite if confused applause, then a return to pregnant silence. Hoping to restore the mojo of the jam sesh (or "session") that we'd seemingly spoiled with our heavily-rehearsed Western music, we pulled a few more instruments from our bag of tricks and distributed them to our new friends: finger cymbals, an egg-shaped rattle, and a kazoo, which no one present was familiar with.
Then, with a signal that escaped our notice, the teenagers began to line up out the back door of the classroom. Our host sat beside a drummer and another saw duang player and together they launched into a folk song that started the teens dancing. It seems, as far as I can tell, that we were invited to a rehearsal for the local school's folk dance performance. Most of the kids seemed to sleep through the moves, clearly having practiced before, but still, they all approached their art with far more earnestness than I've ever seen in teenagers.
One number turned into another, then another. The students practiced some songs three or four times, sometimes to the live band, sometimes to a recording that blasted out of fuzzy speakers by the teacher's desk. They did all the great dance moves: waving, stepping, shaking their arms around, grinding imaginary pepper mills. A fiddler asked to borrow Jenn's viola and played along with the band with great skill. Eventually we tried to join in the fun as well, Jenn doubling the melody on kazoo and me playing our egg shaker in a rhythm so simple it was almost racist.
Meanwhile, our host's grandchildren went absolutely nuts on the finger cymbals, the younger boy holding them with two hands like miniature full-sized cymbals (if that isn't too odious a phrase). For hours, as the rehearsal went on and songs repeated, they kept their eyes on the dancers and began to play more and more complex rhythms, always on the beat. As the rehearsal went on, I was more and more impressed by their enthusiasm and their rapid improvement (also, after four years of teaching little kids, I was awestruck at these kids' attention span).
By 9:30, the rehearsal was still in full swing, but our host informed us that we should probably head back to his home before we fell asleep on our faces or accidentally jabbed someone in the eye with a careless swing of a viola bow. Or something like that. We apologized to the kids for taking back our cymbals. They thanked us and bowed their heads at the urging of their grandmother, seemingly dazed after breaking their long concentration. With the kids and our hostess we walked back through the warm night, leaving the revelers behind.
Our accommodation was standard for this part of the world: a futon the floor and a mosquito net over our heads. After the day we’d had, we could have slept on a bed of snakes. While we laid in bed, Jenn and I discussed the events of the night. In two hours we'd gone from being desperate for a place to pass the night safely to witnessing an entirely unique, wholly authentic cultural experience, something that no amount of money could buy us in any tourist trap. And all for so little money, we were practically stealing from our host. We'd have to think of some way to thank him, we agreed, maybe by matching his beloved Paris keepsake with something comparable from Kansas. So...something with a sunflower on it, then. After another three seconds of reflection, we were out cold, and just like that it was morning.
 |
| We were awakened by the festive call of a Thanksgiving turkey (it happened to be Thanksgiving). "Happy Thanksgiving!" we didn't say, as we covered our ears and tried vainly to get back to sleep. |
Before we left on a sour note, I tried to recall the advice I keep giving myself about haggling. I know that haggling is de rigeur in much of Asia, but somehow I can never quite bring myself to do it with merchants (it helps that I'm terrible at it). Something seems so rude to me about devaluing the merchandise that locals sell for their livelihood, especially when the best possible result I can usually get is saving 16 cents on a bunch of bananas. "It's the principle," say lame backpacker types, and "It's unfair to charge a higher price of tourists than locals." Some make it into that same kind of pissing contest that backpackers are so susceptible to, being able to boast that you survived for twelve years in Thailand spending just 35 cents and a pocketful of lint.
To people with these protests, I always say (y'know, in imaginary conversations with them) that 16 cents is a completely different thing for people who live on a dollar a day, and no, Mr. Tourist Bargain-Pants, that does not include you. I certainly understand the feeling; I rankle at the idea that I'm being charged more by virtue of my perceived wealth based on my assumed country of origin, and nobody likes to feel judged or ripped off. But hell, dude, if you're traveling internationally, you are wealthier than the person you're haggling with, and you probably can afford the extra two bits even if you don't particularly want to. 200,000 kip was more than we paid before or since for any lodging in Laos, but considering that it was necessary for experiencing something precious and unforgettable, it was probably worth the $25.
We promised the family that if we returned to this part of Laos, we would stay there again. And we absolutely will, no matter the cost. Next time I'll bring my accordion.
Sweet story, and I'm with you on the haggling thing.
ReplyDelete