PAK LAY. COMMUNIST FLAGS WITH FRENCH ACCENT.

               

Two weeks passed before Chaning and Rocio from the Cyclown Circus showed up in Luang Prabang, Laos. It followed that soon after having crossed the Chinese-Laos border they had met a local circus that traveled in a truck. This local circus consisted of 25 artists, all of which were crammed in in truck, which also carried all the equipment, stages, instruments, etc. In every location they would stop, the circus would proudly annonunce the performance of two “falangs”, as foreigners are known. As this was a very particular opportunity for them, we agreed that we would meet up again in Chiang Mai, where by the way the rest of the Cyclown Circus had already been working for a month. They would tour Laos with the circus on board of a hino truck and then come down.




January 2007. My God…two calendars are gone and I am still traveling. I left Lao for Thailand through an unusual border crossing, where until a few months ago tourists were not allowed to show up. Route 4 had more traffic than expected, and I was soon in Sayanbuli. The truck that had given me a lift crossed the Mekong river on board of a ferry decorated with communist flags. We are after all, in Lao Democratic Republic!



In Sayanbuli I tried to find free accomodation at a monastery. The young monks and novices said there was no problem to sleeo there, but then their English teacher came to ruin my plans. The man went by the book, and was afraid that the police would come to check or something like that. He was the “Foreigners should go to a hotel” type of person. Enough to demonstrate how ineffective religious institutions can be confronted with reality. As the novices were more than happy to test their English with me, their tutor had to let me stay for a while. The orange-clad razor shaved boys came up with some English books that seemed extremely complicated for their level, and I was supposed to read the sentences. Besides the meaning, they were really interested in learning phonetics, since unlike their pairs in Luang Prabang they rarely have the chance to listen to native speakers. Some of the sentences of the book seemed alltogether inadecuate for future monks, for example “The beautiful girl is wanted by a youngman” Take it easy little Buddha, avoiding attachments was your choice, not mine….

 

                         

On the way to Pak Lay, the last big town before the Thai border, elephants march on the roadside with their carers. Elephants are still used in th forest industry for carrying loads. In Pak Lay, by the Mekong river, a few old French colonial buildings stand with faded splendor. Unlike Luang Prabang, there are no tourists here to witness them. In the Bureau de Finance (all official signs are in French) the folks play voleybal. I wish that people would play voleyball in all the bureau de finance of the world… One of the men asks me if I speak German. “I lived three years in DDR” –he comments proudly. Next to the Mekong river, not really far from a communist red flag, a man from Lao is speaking to me in German about the DDR. Evidently, the universe is about to collapse and I am witnessing the first twists of the last metamorphosis. At a restaurant wher I have had lunch, the old landlady waves to me: “Merci monsieur!” I am still surprised at how universal history has allowed communism and French language to sneak into a tucked away realm of jungle and elephants. The one thing missing was a 1935 Citroen Avant Traction speeding through the dusty main street…

                            

Pak Lay was also the place where I got rid of my boots. They were felling appart. I had bought them in Egypt for 30 dollars, they had crossed Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Tibet, and Laos…only to join the unnoble trash cycle. I stayed overnight in a guesthouse with the only porpouse of doing my laundry. I had heard that Thai border officials had been known to turn away foreigners entering on foot who looked like broken, and I certainly did. In spite of my efforts to look tidy I was covered by a cloud of dust as soon as a hit the road the following morning. After five minutes I had got a ride in a tractor, and a truck coming the opposite direction turned me into a sepia image that resembled a 1920s portrait. When I reached the border, I seemed straight out of the bushes…

HITCH-HIKING LAO

Watching tropical landscape roll by from the back of a pick up. A pleasure for a hitch-hiker worldwide.

Folks in Pak Lay play an old game inherited from the French, called "petanque". And they are really serious about it. The picture is taken in the back garden of the Bureau of Finnances. Not much accountancy to do around here it seems.

 

The mist and the road on the early morning.

A road builder smiles when photographed with his work on the back. The bridge may have been borned in the board of an engineer, but it's still the road builders' work.

Tradition and change.

Peasents process and pack corn by the roadside.

Curious type of oil pump widespread in Lao countryside.

Rural workers wait to be called for their shifts atop an old  Hino truck.

IN LUANG PRABANG, WHERE PEOPLE CAN HEAR RICE GROW…

 Lao is so quiet that John Steinbeck once penned “People in Cambodia see the rice grow, in Lao they hear it grow”. And it makes sense. No town in Lao is big enough to minimize the sorroundin nature, the rice fields, the banana plantations, the jungle… Luang Prabang is one of the touristic spots of the country. In spite of the quantity of tourists, and the artificial character of the town, with Western style cafes, bistro bars, etc, the town is undeniably charming, with its French maisons of the time when the country was French IndoChina, and its temples of a more glorious and independent past. In adititon to the colonial houses, the French left –God bless them- baguettes! For less than a dollar is possible to have a chicken baguette on the sunny streets of Luang Prabang.

 I have very ltttle to say about the real Lao. I spent most of my 25 days in the country I Luang Prabang, working on my book project, and selling my old book to finnance my staying. I soon fitted into a comfortable routine, spending the mornings selling my book in the cafes along the Mekong River, and the rest of the afternoon writing (the evenings, of course, drinking). Earnings from the books typically added up to 20 dollars a day, while the accomodation was only four….

The most interesting aspect of selling books is the people you meet. One day I ended up having a beer with Maureen, the granddaughter of ex-Chilean preseident Allende, the one that was overthrown by Pinochet. He was travelling with another two Chilean friends, and the funny thing was that Pinochet had died only a few weeks before! His grand-grand father had been the founder of the Communist Party of Chile, confirming the lineage. On another ocassion I met Kath, one of the organizers of Bummit, a charity event that involves a hundred people hitch-hiking from the UK to different points in Eastern Europe, raising money for orphanages.

Some days before Christmas I met Harver, a French resident of San Fransisco, who insisted that we should all wear Santa Claus suits for Christmas night and then get drunk on the streets. According to him this was a way to demonstrate against the commercialization of Xmas, and is supposed to be a major event in alternative San Fransisco. He didn’t quite get the reception he expected, but I respect all crazy endeavours! I also found interesting his idea that Americans are over-achvers in everything from war to festivals. They cannot make a party, they have to do Burning Man. If the bike already exists, they have to build “tall bikes”.


Among the rest of the people I met I would like to mention some friendly folks from the Isle of Man, and also a Libanese who lived in Australia, and who gave me my first lessons on Arabic writing. I had learnt how to say Salam Aleikum in Norway, and I learnt how to write it in Lao… I may master this languagew in another 300 years. I also met Stephane, her Freckled Majesty of Sydney, but that’s another story. I will only say that she had a car, if you can use that word for a 1983 Subaru. And the car had a name, which was Jeff. Stephanie had a amorous ralationship with her car, and was sad because it was comprehensively starting to fall apart.

Most importantly, there was a more meaningful meeting. I am talking about the Poi tribe that I met in the streets of Luang Prabang. Pois are ropes which have a ball knotted to each of their ends, and which you can spin a million of different angles and directions. Another way of playing with movement. I happened to think that Pois are, in a microcosmic level, something similar to hitch hiking, another way of diving into movement. There is no way to relate in a tidy prose all the things that crossed my mind those days. Fortunately, a combination of marihuana and an accidental overdoes of malaria medication gave me a free trip that inspired me to put it down in a more coherent way. Good luck with reading it. (see next post “Circus in the dark”)

Circus in the Dark (Barfuss)

Caravan suite in D minor for drunken poet, broken violinist, base and fire.


“The only people for me are the mad ones, th e one who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a common place thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles…” Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

I love Laos, it‘s magic, like us –Maddi told Ronan as they both spanned fire by the Mekong River. Don’t tell me that you guys also believe that the freaky marvelous accident of happiness takes place in the outskirts… We do, and moreover we believe that it’s possible to juggle and to spin fire at the same time. That would be total freedom – said Ronan. I met this family short time ago. In the beginning, Maddi used to play with the street kids. You have to allow the balls to become an extension of your hands. I understand the point in movement you are talking about.


Barefoot, once you get used to walk barefoot it’s beautiful. The pavement is also the Earth on which Michi, the German rasta girl, steps, and the Earth she belongs to. Barfuss…each word of the German language is sweet, but the accent can turn then quite monotonous. When I had seen the family in the street I was sure I would run into them again. The same with all the circus. This is like a convention of fire artists! Pois can be made with 110 grams of rice or with tennis balls. I cannot allow myself to eat out in restaurants every day. Barfuss…the true traveling band. Are you from Lubeck, Michi? No, from more to the North, from Schleswig Holtein. That’s where they speak Plat-Deutsch, one of those dead languages that some nerdy always tries to resuscitate. I was once in one of the islands south of Funnen, and somebody said: there’s a boat sailing out to Germany tomorrow. Is anybody up for it? While she let the ball guide her, she smiled and said to me: it’s all I do in life tanzen und spielen!. Her eyes, of an infinite clarity. I can play the “contact ball” with my feet – I rather stupidly told her. Ronan was saying that only when we will have complete awareness of our balance and movement possibilities we will stop being tamed by the pressures of the material world. And Ronnan, was a smart guy.


Everything rolls down the Mekong river, specially the oranges that have just fallen from Maddi’s backpack.. It was warmer in Chiang Mai, wasn’t it? Some of them are going to the Rainbow. What do you do? I am a verse smuggler. I sell books and words to pay for the beer and the food. In a way I juggle with words to create worlds.


(interludium for fire)


The spinning balls glow in the dark. Carnival of fireflies defies the integrity of night. Maddi says they should have an alternate rhythm. Maybe the balls are actually a spell, and like the meanings in a poem, they unlock worlds that exist only for the eyes that detect the frequency. Juggling. Poetry. Hitch hiking. Synergy. Same same. Its like the one word poems, whose letters can cypher the history of a kingdom or a love. Beer Lao. Sabaidi. Don’t worry about a thing, cause every little thing is gonna be allright. It was allright that we finally didn’t sleep the seven of us in the same room. Ronan knows Michelle, the girl from Galway, thanks to whom an Afghan hat designed to fit the defenders of Allah (Akbar –reply musicians) unexpectedly passed to accommodate beauty.


The weed – and an overdose of malaria medication- prompted into the night the colorful symbols of Reiki. That crossroad had already been foreseen by a homeless shaman from Buenos Aires. We cannot expect the words to become more than empty nets. Otherwise, Michelle would have revealed me more than her thoughts. It’s a pretty dirty kind of trade. Since they heard the one word poem, some kings have dwelled penniless and barefoot. Juggling. Poetry. Hitch hiking. Synergy. It is imperative to have always on tap an excuse to make the village children smile. What about spending Christmas eating free bananas? Another free thing that was given away in a corner were hugs, and the people who received it became lit with new energies. Some couples protested with orgasms and through the wall you could hear voices in Hebrew asking for the exact location of the Rainbow. Four years before, in Argentina, a bunch of people had also started to hit the road by thumb. They celebrated movement and the furtive production of the distance that, paradoxically, brought them together. Viky had been the first one to wrap it in words, and the first one to talk about messing up the soul and launching assaults to the park’s carousel. There were so many ways to emigrate…! In other latitude, some loonies had decided to build double deck bikes in order to reach the upper leaves of the trees. They pedaled with the circus on their bikes. Simultaneously, they pedaled against the oil wars. Nobody opened cans of Coke anymore. The societies they visited were deconstructed by slapping pedestrians in their face, addressing them with the tender label of… “stupido”. Tribes, communes and squats, had all set free their bulldozers bound for Babylon. Each time the jewelery maker twisted a world out from the alpaca thread, a bullet would pierce the chest of the Minotaur who preyed on Beauty. Latin America had finally starting marching towards herself. It was the topic of conversation even in the arctic pubs of Tromso, where people had never seen a man of the color of the night. I was there the only one who had grown up gazing other stars. Of course, among the ciclonauts there was also Rocio, who loved to say “Voy caminando por el aire” but had forgotten the word “carozo”. In Nicosia, the circus had squatted a large house inhabited by a rasta who coexisted with his trash. They had to clean consciously before getting in. When he met Channing, Bo, the Chinese fellow from Kunming had quited his job in Siemens. He didn’t want to sell X ray equipment for the rest of his life. La vita e gioco. Life is fire… pyros…fire…fuego…


(interludium for fire)


Months had passed since a magic drop in the Himalayas had made our eyes tremble. We had been the rain and also the mountain to avoid the divergence of the Ego and the world. Reality yelled behind a watermark of purple and orange hexagons. There is a little confusion, don’t you think? –asked the Captain. It wasn’t clear whether the shapes who danced rock and roll in a corner of the Shiva Café belong to Tibetan farmers or not. With our breath synchronized we all become interwoven in a vibration that ended up in the OM. We all suspected that Dionisia, the Greek girl, was the sorcerer behind the scratches in the Veil of Maya. Lucas had an explanation: some mushrooms free photons that codify information about the universe. Lucas as a gentlemen in every sense of the word, but we all wondered how he hadn’t been evicted from the gene pool way before. In the Mayan calendar it would have been the day of the self existent red moon, but instead, it was barely a Friday. The satori couldn’t last forever: what looked like a cat soon became a cushion again,. That was unacceptable, so to cheer myself up I remembered the people of Venado Tuerto, who dance murga over the corpses of the empires, and I also remembered Cecilia, who when the mercury smashes the glass wanders the sleepy streets of Corrientes on stilts. Dear memory also rescued the day in which The Count and I awoke a 1938 Ford pick up that was rusting away in an abandoned farm in the middle of the Pampas. That had been our way to receive the millennium, I mean, crashing the brake less Ford against a truck in the first crossroad. But better to let some kaleidoscopes in the dark.


Michi brought me back into reality. Is it true that Christiania has been shut down? I don’t really know, it’s closer to your home. Michi was a believer, that’s to say, a believer in the farms of unicorns, which are not compatible with the European Parliament. All creative spaces seemed to be packing up. In an attempt to delay destiny, some travelers had set off to cross Mauritania in white camels. There they found timeless tea rituals punctuating dirty unpaved roads. They knew beforehand that the best things in life were not things, but they were free. Kinga had told them the secret, before directing her steps to heaven. Pinochet had left for the same place, but a collision was impossible. Somebody asked me when would I go home. I answered that somebody always made the top spin, and that I admired snails. I walked down the Mekong to crush on my bed. The event took place in Luan Prabang, Laos, at the end of last December. Each word that portrays it is one second younger than the previous one. Besides this unfaithful mirror, I know that the balls keep spinning in the dark. Juggling. Poetry. Hitch hiking. Synergy. And every other invisible circus.

THE ROAD FROM KUNMING (CHINA) TO LAOS

 

Pablo eventually took his train to Shanghai. He was transported in the front luggage carrier of Channing’s tall bike. Suddenly afterwards I realized that it was the first time that I had had a travel companion for more than a month in this trip. Channing, Rocio, and I, started together our trip to Laos. As they were on their bikes and I was hitch-hiking, we agreed on intermediate points where to meet. At last, I was on the road with the circus!




The first of these meeting points was a town just 20 km south of Kunming. We couldn’t be ambitious, since we had hit the road at 4 pm. Meeting up there was not a problem, I arrived first, leaned over my backpack by the roadside, and waited for Channing’s bike to stand from the rest of the traffic. Together we looked for a place to camp, and were happy enough to do it in the new motorway which still being built. It was funny to set up the tent in the middle of the pavement! On the following day we made a fruitless attempt to get a ride for the whole pack, which counts not only us three but the 2 giant bikes loaded with accordions, clavs, etc It was impossible, so we split. As usually happens with the circus, separations are parenthesis that opens indefinitely, and the circus was going to have its own adventure before meeting up with me again.

                    

Without difficulties I reached Jinghong, not really far from the Lao border, in a region called Xishuanbanna, famous for the density and diversity of the ethnic minorities that inhabit its hills. These groups have more in common with Lao and Thai people that with the rest of China. I spent five days in town, selling “Harmony of Chaos” (my old book) to other travellers in the Mei Mei Café, owned by a Belgian ex-pat. In that venue Ihad the chance to speak with a group of Norwegian anthropologists who told me that the central government had sent coreograophers to make the native’s dances more stylish and therefor more marketable for tourism. Trekking with an official company in Southern China? Now you know what you are up to！I didn’t dare to go look for these hill tribes. As the readers may have already noticed, there has been a change of priorities since I entered South East Asia. I am exploring only those things that come across my eyes. All my efforts have deviated towards the completion of my next book “Vagabonding in the Axis of Evil” whose street version should be readay in a couple of months. I will continue to work in an extended version of it to be presented to some publishers in the UK and Spain, but that will take another year. The sooner I get the book done, the sooner I will join the Bike Circus in body and soul. Until now, I am travelling with them, but I haven’t done any move towards articulating with their show.

 
I crossed the Chinese-Lao border at Mengla. The ride consisted mainly of Chinese trucks “:Dongfeng”, those blue square moving structures that bump around the whole country. Even if the road was at moments really bad you could see the new motorway being built at the side of our road full of ditches. Outside the Chinese customs I changed my remaining yuans for kips, the currency of Laos. On handing out the equivalent of 50 euros the woman started to take out bricks of money from a large plastic bag. I received, in total, 633,000 kip, and considering tthat the largest denomination consisted of 5000 notes, I received enough notes as to full my front backpack to a point the zippers needed to be forced in order to close it. I felt as if I had just robbed a bank! I got my Chinese exit stamp and walked towards Lao, a new country in this trip.

 

I camped for two days next to the road, sheltered by a group of trucks that were posted there for the week waiting some merchandises from China. I was hoping to see Chaning’s bike appear on the horizon at any moment, since this time we had arranged that we would simply meet after the border. I wouls cross the border and sit in some visible spot on the right hand side to wait for the circus. However, three days passed and the circus didn’t show up. As a border is a really boring place to be waiting, I decided to head on to Luang Prabang. I soon got a ride in a Mitsubishi Pajero 4WD of a Chinese businessman going all the way to Vientianne, the capital. We stopped overnight in Udumxoi, and in the following morning we were entering the sleepy town of Luang Prabang. In the meanwhile, nevertheless, I had the chance to get a picture of the countryside that this time I didn’t intend to explore. Most of the houses along the road were straw huts built on stilts to separate them from the ground which gets really floaded in the rain season. Its inhabitants can be seen most of the day chatting around fires next to their dwellings, smoking, and drinking a rice wine known as lao-lao. Only in larger towns houses are made of wood or bricks....