The International Writers Magazine: Boys Go Wild

Wild Boys in South East Asia • Ted O’Connor I’ve just spent the past five weeks in Vietnam, Thailand and Laos and I wish to do it justice without clichés. People have read enough verbal scintillation about timeless French facades and back drops of glistening floating markets with steaming rice paddies, so I’ll provide you with the highlights of a twenty year old romping about a beautiful part of the world with four of his best mates.

AirAsia was our mode of transport and as soon as we boarded the plane, discoveries were made as to why it’s the world’s cheapest airline. Namely the Black and Gold toilet paper level of comfort and no TV screen letting you know whether the plane was flying in the right direction, but it got us out of the country without fuss and landed in Kuala Lumpur.

During the bus ride into Kuala Lumpur from the airport I discovered the city was designed by an imaginative 10-year-old boy. The thoughtful little fella started by designing one ordinary house and put about 200 of these identical dwellings in the one area, like a commission suburb. This principle extended to blocks of flats and an outrageously gargantuan skyscraper, he decided to make two of and throw right next too each other to boggle the mind of passersby. Then for his own enjoyment he made a huge building that looks like the Jedi temple, a monorail the weaves through the city and crammed every other available space with trees. The local McDonalds has now coined the ‘double prosperity burger’, which felt like the perfect allegory for the Malaysians who have not been left behind in the slums. Whimsical observations aside the food is flavorsome, the beer is cheap and plentiful, and the locals enjoy a good laugh when tourists like myself foolishly have a chew on a chili and then dive for the ice cream end of the neighboring 7-11.

Laos. If you enjoy looks of disdain from uppity back packers, pronounce it ‘Lay-os’, emphasizing the last syllable with a distinctive Aussie twang. It doesn’t matter how you say it, it is the least pretentious amusingly ridiculous and strikingly attractive place I’ve ever been.

Most kids my age go to Laos to take part in a glorious activity called Tubing in a little town called Vang Vieng. Occasionally you meet a sensitive metaphysical type, who warns you that Vang Vieng is a debaucherous hell full of philistines and other uncultured types and the preferable option would be taking an eco-tour deep into the hill tribes, but I can do that in 30 years time with my third wife, so the hill tribes were put on hold.

Tubing involves floating from one riverside bar to the next on a tire tube, having all number of cheep and often free beverages (mainly Laos rice whisky, you can feel your liver shouting abuse at you every time you lean a shot towards your mouth) with hundreds of happy souls squeezing maximum enjoyment from the prime of their life. Just to extend this to levels of limitless joy, there a swings, water slides, flying foxes and yes some of these people will point they’re dangerous (they’re not wrong), but this is a country where there would be no native translation for ‘workplace health and safety’, harness or ‘compensation payout’, so tourists are left to scrounge up what ever common sense they have after five bars and keep themselves out of trouble.

Tubing does attract Steven Milne and Luke Steele from Empire of the Sun types, roaming with their non-personality, genial devoid mates, traveling in noisy groups of nine. Their main endeavors are to dominate the bars’ attention with plenty of double tuck, pikes into the water followed by enthusiastic look at my hair flipping to the mildly miffed crowd. Their other features are run back up to the dance floor, trance dance in quite a serious self involved fashion to try and garner impressive looks from the opposite sex. This is so great to watch it’s disappointing these people are the minority, as most people on the way are instant gems, as soon as you give them a moment for a noisy chin-wag. It really isn’t the swings and beer that is the best part of tubing (but they would be a photo finish for second) it’s meeting someone at the first bar and declaring that they will be your best man at the last. Once such man was wearing Speedos and pinks Ray-Bans, so we decided those characteristics rendered him worth getting to know. An outstanding Englishman he was, who upon finding out we were Aussie’s quipped. ‘There are two things that could survive a nuclear holocaust, cockroaches and Ricky Ponting.’ It did seem exceedingly hilarious at the time.

After a couple days of this mayhem we took the eight-hour bus to Luang Prabang. Yes, the timetable says six hours, but Laos has a very vague, near enough is good enough ethos. Much like when their watering holes advertise nine to five happy hours. You could take thirty sleeping tablets, your local anesthetist and a hammer and you would remain awake. When I accepted this the trip it became quite a social eye opener, after I realised the bus was mostly tooting his horn to scare tribes of kids of the road, because it’s the only place they can play when their houses are perched on the sheer hillside.

Luang Prabang is the old capital and old really is the appropriate adjective. Architecture from its French Indochina years and traditional Laos housing is surrounded by the Mekong and the slightly smaller, but equally scenic Nham Khan rivers, who’s banks are covered with these charmingly smallish crops not usually found outside medieval movies and or dusty old paintings.

This can be all soaked up at the river side bars and restaurants, but climbing to the top of the monastery on the hill in the middle of town and seeing a view void of anything ugly, modern, or downright tacky is the best way to appreciate this scene of pure nirvana.So typically, after being stunned for a minute all we could say, (as a measly attempt to stir anyone looking a bit to involved in the experience). ‘Do you know what this view needs? A Target, a McDonalds and a concrete three-story car park.’
‘Absolutely, have you ever looked down upon Altona and Footscray, now that is something to behold,’ ect ect.

This was when we decided to hire scooters for US$15 a day, which is quite expensive for South East Asia, but because too many tourists have injured themselves (Lonely Planet stated it was illegal, but the local police we met just smiled and went on their merry way) the price jumped up, but it was unmistakably worth it. We wove through the traffic, which seemed to obey perhaps three discernable road rules (that’s being generous) all broken on a regular basis. Horns weren’t used in anger, instead to give a friendly reminder a motorbike or large truck requires you to move aside, because while it's passing it will be spending plenty of time in the oncoming lane. No one even considers panicking or merely raising one eyebrow they just sway to one side, or off the road in a very synchronised harmonic way. It is the most no nonsense system, relying on the common sense and the sanity of the person next to you, I’ve ever seen and I commend them for making work so efficient at times of sobriety (Lao’s holiday road death toll could be improved).

It was fascinating driving through all the tiny hill side towns who all seemed having a day off and making generous amount of merry at three in the afternoon, it was incredibly sad we couldn’t actively join them. We observed this might lead to accepting a shot or five of rice wine, so the decision was made to get the bikes back on time without disappearing down a hillside. As we descended from the hills into the city I suddenly heard my friends exclaimed one or two solid profanities up ahead and I wondered what sort of conundrum could have befallen them, but then I turned the corner, the tree line dropped and I was given an absolute extraordinary view of Luang Prabang. No words could give it justice, not even my friends adjectives. It felt like an Indiana Jones movie, where he crashes through a clearing and finally finds the lost city housing the crystal phallus or whatever he’s after. If you travel for these moments I do hope you one day visit Laos.

Laos people are funny, kind, very laid back and seldom perfectionists. I’ve blocked of a whole lane of traffic and the only response was laughter and a generous spot of waving and smiling. Reading anything written in English is always comedic gold with dishes like, ‘pork and beef vegetarian skewer’, and administrative document with points 1, 2, 3 #, 5, 6. It is heartening so find a culture where perfectionism happens as a communal whole rather than through any dogged ambitions of individuals.

I was quite sad to leave Laos, but I was about to have the best five days of my young and woefully unfulfilled life at Full Moon Party, on Kho Phanghan island in Thailand. We met up with another mate who would join us for the rest of trip and four others I’d lived with on residence past the past year, who were in the middle of an odyssey of a trip themselves, so the first thing we did was adjust our body clock for the days ahead by staying up until five and waking up at midday. Essentially we lived like possums and each night became better as thousands more filled the beach until on full moon night when 30,000 young heathens danced until the sun rose and got up to all manner of mischief. We started the night on Changs’, an unusually festive beer with an approximate six percent alcohol content that can put anyone in a lively mood and then we progresses to the buckets.

You won’t forget your first bucket. Well actually there is a fair chance you might, but I would love to have seen the incredulity on my face, as I watched nine shots, red bull and lemonade being brought together into a coalition of frivolity. The night went by in flashes of brilliance, and ended when one of us announced at ten the next morning well after we were tearing outrageous dance moves all through sun rise. ‘Which one of you fellas’ ordered me that ton of bricks?’ This marked the end of possibly of the wildest night I’ll ever have.

One of the many silly inconsequential things on my bucket list is to be listening to Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival the first time I set foot in Vietnam. I managed to cross it off, with the sort of smile usually only reserved for occasions like Chevy Chase gracing my TV screen, or at three in the morning at Meredith Music Festival.

The first meal I had in Vietnam, in sunny Saigon, cost $1.50 and consisted of fried lemon grass fish on a very generous plate of rice topped of with a multitude of succulent vegetables. After too bites I proclaimed, “I don’t want to call it early lads, but this might be my favorite country.” Apparently I was calling it early, but that night we drank fifteen cent beers that didn’t taste like carbonated pond water and after our third or fourth round my earlier observation was acquiring some support. When a pot tastes as much as a couple of sherbet bombs would in Australia you know you’ve discovered something magical and in Vietnam the magic doesn’t end at the price of an ale.

I’ve seen quite a few different movies about the Vietnam war. The bad ones, where the urban looking character’s called Johnny or Bert and always gets shot seventy times to the face at the climax of the movie while the anglo characters plead, ‘Please Johnny I promise you we’ll make it home.’ Then the classics like Full Metal Jacket or Platoon, who were denied military funding because they actually had an honest and reflective storyline. So, I did have more than inkling to visit the War Remnants Museum, which one could feasibly describe as educational experience by visibly confronting mans’ darkest capabilities. This started when I bought a book off a middle aged Vietnamese man at the museum courtyard and shook his hand at the stub of his elbow, which I won’t forget in a hurry. The first room had the appallingly grotesque deformities suffered by the Vietnamese civilians and their offspring, due to the unrestrained use of Agent Orange by the Americans. The next room told the story of the Mai Lai Massacre where Lieutenant Calley and his troops murdered up too 500 Vietnamese civilians in an unexplainable act of desperation and spite fuelled violence. I was disappointed not to see any American tourists around  (they're not hard to find, because I can imagine how startling they would be to discover the appalling repercussions of their government’s headlong determination to stop the spread of communism.

The museum’s plain lack of objectivity was defined by its absences. The South Vietnamese story was told in the phrase ‘American puppets’, which I found slightly incredulous, because for puppets they put up an impressive fight, while the Americans blundered around in the jungle, but communist countries aren’t widely known for the objectivity we take for granted in Australia.

Just when you were enjoying that very profound last paragraph I’m going to take a sharp left and talk about Vinpearl Land, which is on an Island we visited during our stay at Nha Trang. Imagine a very mediocre, but endearing version of Disneyland and ignore comments Lonely Planet told about it being just for the kids. Besides the kids would be too small for half the water slides and they would not have come close to making the racket too middle-aged French men did in their outrageous budgie-smugglers when they flew down the Tsunami.

The roller coaster lacked fortitude and there was definitely a potential sandpaper job to be done on the inside joins on a number of the water slides, to improve the comfort to fun ratio, but there was one slide that did not muck about. You needed extra oxygen to climb to the top and it was all over in five seconds, but absolute maximum fun.

Out last two places were Hoi An and Hanoi, which we visited right in the middle of Tet, the Vietnamese New Year holiday. This is when the locals will gauge how charitably festive they’re feeling and will take a couple days to often a couple weeks holiday with the extended family. For us it was extremely gratifying as it was as close was we could socially experienced Vietnamese culture. Especially at three in the morning on New Years Eve, we met a group of twenty year olds like us a partying inside a bank (yes you did just read that last word) so we joined them until almost daybreak. By just saying ‘Happy New Year’ in Vietnamese it felt like you had just made unbreakable friendships with everyone around you. Every local told us with wild excitement about the fireworks that would be being set off and we’d nod and smile, because I mean let's be honest they’re brilliant when your four and then the gasps and wows run dry when you grow up, but by god they came roaring back. It was just uninhibited and jaw dropping, something only Gandalf could pull off and the last bang just about brought back a few seconds of day light.

However Tet, while exciting is peppered with some very frustrating and impractical problems. A great many things like restaurants, bars, tailors are closed and buses book out fast, but that wasn’t too much of a concern for us, because Ha Long bay was open for all too enjoy.

It was without any hesitation or deliberation the most stunning place I’ve ever been and I’m well aware how much I raved on about Luang Prabang earlier. That partly was due to the weather improving and giving us a couple days of blue skies and sun. But honestly imagine Avatar without the floating island nonsense and you’re on your way. We spent a night on a boat, not unlike the one that sank and killed twelve people a week later, but I assure you that unlike a great many things in Southeast Asia they looked as sturdy, safe and had bucket loads of charm and I’m very sad that such a freak occurrence might tarnish future tours out on the bay, because it is so unequivocally worth a day or two out of any persons calendar, no matter what kind of dazzling life they lead.

A couple days later I arrived back in Melbourne and after growing up in Mortlake in Victoria’s southwest I’ve always assumed it provides all the excitement one could ever harness, but this assumption has been pushed aside. The sky was too blue, there wasn’t enough traffic, no one on the street asked if I would like to purchase narcotics or bed a prostitute, the parks and street were too clean, the traffic was too orderly and quite and every tradesman wore hard hats and high-visibility T-shirts. It was all a little bit too politically correct and dull and I really did miss the unrestrained and often-ridiculous sights I’d come accustomed to in Southeast Asia that really do seem to be fizzling out around the rest of the world.

© Ted O'Connor
tedoconnor2@gmail.com March 2011
http://tedoconnor.tumblr.com/

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