guest houses

a quick note on guest houses.
in our overwhelming and reckless enthusiasim for our elephant adventure, after hiring a boat, ben and cath and i decided we might try a homestay in pak lai. we knew the few guest houses would most likely be filled by the tens of thousands of lao arriving early for the festival. and we all liked the idea of a home stay. i had been considering the idea since i entered lao and thought this was a great time to partake. a french organisation involved in the festival set us up with a home. when we arrived in town we walked up the pier and down the main roan a hundred meters to the temporary tourist information desk. we were assigned a house, number 104, given a map, and pointed down the road. we walked down the road and a few nice houses with home stay signs pasted to their doors with other numbers. we walked for a while and then realised we had gone to far. we returned to one of the other home stays, a nice looking home on the banks of the river with a helpful and smiling family out front. they looked curiously at our map, and then recognizing something, gestured across the road.
it was a delapitated barn-like house. there was a small and exceptionally dirty crowd of lao out front. they were very poor. as we approached there were frowns and they avoided eye contact. we gingerly walked up a rickety flight of wooden stairs to a raised platform. a very old woman gestured inside and entered the dark house, that wasn't all that dark for all the holes in the walls and the roof. there was a person lying on the floor at the back of the room. i noticed right away that this man had a serious condition. his feet were swollen and pointed at a strange angle straight down. the skin was cracked. then i noticed a catheter bag next to him. we put down our bags, looked at each other nervously, and left. no one really addressed us in anyway. there were nervous giggles amongst the crowd, who i now recognised, were drunk too. (though to be fair it turned out that most of the town was drunk the whole festival. it was more of a drink festival with an elephant problem.) we immediately agreed to look for a guest house, but we were all scared that we would not find one. there was a hushed awkward tension. cath was already feeling a little rough from the night before. i was too, a little. the red wine, though fantastically alchoholic, was truly awful, and we were all a little hung over. the lao rice whiskey moonshine surely didn't help.
we passed the pier and saw a guesthouse on the bank of the river. we entered trepidatiously. a man walked up to meet us. we asked for rooms. he mumbled and asked how many, for how many nights. he said one moment. he returned and led us up a flight of concrete stairs, unlocked a door and waved us through.
the room was spaceous. there was a big bed and room for me on the floor. we had a balcony overlooking the river and the boats. it had an attached bathroom, which was not great, but not bad. we were ecstatic. we went back to the home stay, grabbed our bags, just smiled a lot and said thank you. they seemed to be expecting that we would leave. the old woman stopped us as we were leaving and pointed to a bag of food and water we had forgotten. we retrieved it and returned to our guesthouse.
five minutes later we sat on the deck of a bar, next door, watched the sun set, and toasted guest houses.
its difficult travelling in a poor country at moments like this. though its clearly much more difficult being poor in a country like this. there are days when you want to help. there are days when you do help. and there are days when you don't want any part of it, the dirt and disease and helplessness, and you are quite happy to have the money to pay for a room overlooking the river, for dinner in a restaurant, and for a ticket out of town the next day, all the while keeping your return airplane ticket home tucked away in your pack. in laos i have encountered a few abject, poor beggers on the streets, in vientiane. but mostly the urban poor that i have encountered are those living and sleeping in small street-side garages, that double as simple shops selling water and pop, or bananas and oranges, or something like that. and they are generally quite quick to smile with you or their friends. they are social and appear fairly happy. this is the spirit of the laos that so many speak of, and it is remarkable for its close relationship to the poverty of the nation. laos economy is booming, and most are surely doing better and better every year. there are wealthy middle class with with money to burn on fancy hair cuts and cloths in some of the small towns, here in paske, and even in pak lai. but you know that behind many of the closed shop fronts there are old and sick laos who cannot imagine the comfort that we know.
i always remember this when i am bartering over the price of a motorcycle ride, or a boat, or a pair of pants. i barter because it is part of their culture, it is a social function. i don't care about the money. i think of myself as a one man walking micro-develoment fund. i look for excuses to spend money in places i like, with people who smile, and some who don't. frankly, i don't know why i'm not mugged on every street corner. i'd be tempted to do so if some stupid white hairy guy who was unjustly loaded and rich came stumbling down my alley, and my kid was at home with diarhea, my wife was pregnant again, and i was selling baseball hats in the market for a dollar.