New Years in Laos: Pommes, Canucks, Yanks and a monkey.

First thing new years day, people start leaving. Mike gets an early bus to Don Det in the south, and Jim, jo and Joe get their tickets to follow him a few days later. I go to an internet place and apply for my Australian visa, which arrives the next day (how fast is that!!). On the 2nd, Mick decides to head off to Vientiane and then back to Thailand, and myself and Joe accompany him to the bus station, which is a huge field where the airport used to be. There are two private buses heading for Vientiane, but both are full, so we head for the "office", which is basically four old men sitting around a table with chalk boards behind them covered in times and prices. Mick ques up to buy a ticket for a bus a few hours later that costs about $3 when I notice a bus that only costs $1. A quick enquiry reveals that it is in fact a pickup truck with a cover and some bench seats that takes about as long as the normal bus at a third of the price and a third of the comfort. However, one pickup leaves every 15 mins, so within a few minutes, Mick’s on the back of a pickup with about eight Laotians, a cage full of chickens and a dog. There are also about five kids on the roof of the pickup, and with everyone shouting we make hurried goodbyes and off he goes!!

A few hours later Jim, Jo and Joe head off to don det, and myself, matty, zan and Elaine head for the river to relax in hammocks for the day. In the evening we go to a restaurant to watch a movie, but there's a gang of Israelis there before us watching Braveheart, so we sit and wait. Me and matty are reading the menus as they leave, and a very tall one says something in some language i don't understand and all his friends laugh. Then Matty says something back in some language i don't understand and they all look shocked, turn, and practically run out the door. Turns out the tall guy said, in Hebrew "those two fat bastards don't need to look at a menu, looks like they've eaten enough already". Matty, having thought Hebrew in a Jewish school in San Francisco, turned back to him and said, in Hebrew, "us two fat bastards could kick your skinny arse any day". Sweet! We pick out Team America and settle in. As the film gets to the final scenes, the owner, who's usually very friendly, closes up the blinds to the street, turns down the volume, and generally scurries about looking worried. It's only then we realise the Kim Jung Il character's fake Asian accent is pretty insulting to any Asians walking around outside, and of course to the owner too, so we make a hasty exit.

The next day the four of us head to the bus station, pay our $1 each and get on a pickup bound for Vientiane. It's a great journey as always, and for the last hour, myself and Elaine stand on the back of the truck (it has a sort of flat cattle bar thing to fit more people standing) and enjoy the scenery coming into the city as Matt and Zan watch High Fidelity on an ipod. We try to find some cheap accommodation but everything is either expensive or booked out, so we head back to the same place i stayed with Joe and Mike and we get the five bed room again. We stick around Vientiane for about three days, eating, drinking, bowling and playing cards. On the last day, Matt and Zan head for the airport to fly down to Malaysia, where they tell me there's an amazing festival called Thaipusam a few weeks later, and i agree to follow them on. Me and Elaine mooch around for the day, and in the evening i get a sleeper bus south to Paxe where I’ll get a connection to Don Det.

On the bus i meet an Australian girl named Maia who knows some people who know some people i know in Florida. She's also heading to don det and i convince her to make the connection in Paxe with me. We wake up in the bus station where we're transferred to a little restaurant in town, where another bus will take us to Don Det a few hours later. We wander around town for a while, see the remains of a bike crash and check a little internet before heading back to the bus. I fall asleep as soon as the bus pulls out, and wake up when we stop somewhere for food, the food being some sort of mystery meat that the locals were calling chicken but I’d swear was dog. A few hours of sleep later, we make it to 4000 Islands, a big delta of islands at the end of the Mekong. The last part of our trip is a tiny boat across to don det, and as it arrives to pick us up, mike steps off, uttering "been there, don det". We chat for a minute and i tell him about the festival in malaysia. He says he's off to Vietnam for a while, but will try make it down. We get on the tiny boat (basically a two foot by fifteen foot kayak with a motor on the back) and after circumnavigating a few islands for a while, pull onto Don Det.

The arrival point on Don Det is a small beach with a restaurant overlooking. We walk down the track from the beach which turns out to be the "main street" - a tree lined dirt path with two bars, two restaurants, an internet cafe and a small shop. As the island has no electricity save two hours in the evening from seven to nine, the shop has a large red cooler outside containing tonnes of chopped ice with the odd can of coke or beer poking it's head out (each morning, boats come from the mainland with blocks of ice for the shop, the bars and the restaurants, and they chop them up to use as "refrigeration"). As we walk the path, one of the bars has a monkey tied to it's front gate, and we stop to say hello. Further down i meet Jim and jo. The path leaves the trees and follows the river for about half a kilometre before the guesthouses start. Maisa quickly meets the Canadians she's been looking for (Sadie, Michelle, Audrey and Winnie) and we rent a small hut with a porch and a hammock for $2 a night. I go off and find Joe who shows me around the island (this takes all of three minutes) and later we all meet up for dinner and drinks at a bar renowned for it's sunset views, and for good reason - it's seated area looks over about four kilometres of tiny islands in the delta, where the sun setting behind it all is an amazing sight.

The next day, everyone is up early (easily done when everything shuts at 11pm) and a plan is hatched over breakfast to build a raft from whatever's going and sail over to the small island about 30 meters across the water from our hut. Everyone's game but me, seeing as i can't swim and drowning in a river in Laos has always been one of those things I’ve never been interested in. At some point three English guys enter the equation (Keith, Dan and Andy). Maya cuts down some bamboo tubes to form a seated area for the raft, Joe rents some tractor tubes to float them on, someone comes up with some rope, god knows how, and around lunchtime, the raft is ready to go. I settle into my hammock with a Slash biography Mick gave me in Vang Viang (though sadly not my MP3 player which at this point had all but stopped responding) and watch them make their way across the river. Michelle has a festering bike wound on her leg (i have the same from stepping off my bike the wrong way the week before and burning my right calf on the white hot exhaust pipe), so she sits on the raft while everyone else swims alongside it like bodyguards on a presidential motorcade, albeit one where everyone's half drunk and laughing like loons. I meet jim and jo for dinner and spend most of the evening reading my book, swaying in my hammock (without doubt the most relaxing thing in the world), and feeling more than slightly jealous about the loud laughing/screaming coming from the island across from me.

All arrive exhausted the next morning - having forgotten to bring any kind of blankets and wary of the thousands of bugs that were falling on them at all times, they slept in a strange type of konga line, each facing the back of someone else's head. (A few days later, Joe and i talk with one of the local restaurant owners who says they're all mad for staying there over night - he went over about a month before hand and got bit on the leg by a snake, his leg then going black for six months. Egads!!) All are suitably exhausted and retire to beds and hammocks. In the evening we have a large dinner at the Indian restaurant (where i beat the owner in a Lai off - best explained in person) and i challenge Joe and the english lads to a century, a curious backpacker game where you have to drink 100 shots of beer in 100 minutes. We head to the sunset bar, find three oddly sized shot glasses (which due to their odd shape have to be used in a rotation) and settle into the challenge. And a challenge it is. The glasses seem to average about 12 to a pint, which means we're looking at eight pints in an hour and a half. After ten shots/minutes, everyone is jovial. After twenty five everyone is almost throwing up beer foam. At around forty five everyone's back on form. At sixty everyone's a jibbering mess. At seventy i bow out and head back to the girls who are chatting on the floor, a floor which unfortunately won't stop moving, so i head back to my room and crash, presumably (my memory being, to put it mildly, slightly hazy).

The next day is Audrey's birthday, so we organise a makeshift cake and a bottle of whiskey for her big night, and head back to the sunset bar. We meet a really nice Welsh couple named Leigh and Sara and all make for Reggae bar, where i'd spotted the monkey on the first night. I spend most of the night either playing with him or letting him sleep in my arms. He wakes up occasionally and freaks out, biting the inside of my arm, but he's only about 6 months old so has no teeth. What he does have however is a rather large burn across his hand - apparently while tied to the fence he reached up for the electrical wire and burned right across his palm and deep into his thumb, a thumb now almost gone as he refuses to stop eating the scab. The owner of the bar says his name is simply Laotian for monkey, so Sadie renames him Burrito, though i vow to only ever call him bob (a reference to Black Adder and the name of the last couch i'd had in Ireland). It also turns out the owner is a prick to him (to the point where bob runs off whenever the owner approaches) and that he doesn't feed him, assuming punters will give him enough to get by. We hatch a harebrained/drunken plan to buy him and smuggle him across the border to Cambodia where he can go in a sanctuary, and the owner agrees to sell him for $30. The next morning i come back with my $30 but the owner has upped the price to $100. Knowing the scheme was a bit daft to begin with, i spend a long time trying to convince the owner to let me take poor Bob on a tour of the islands. For some unknown reason, the owner is wearing a Cork football jersey so i make up some story about knowing half the squad (laughable to anyone who's even met me) and he agrees that i can take Bob from sunrise to sunset each day while I’m on the island.

Myself and Bob set off down the path towards my hut. I've been hanging out with him on and off for the last few days so he trusts me, but i keep one end of his leash (a small piece of string tied around his neck) tied to my left index finger at all times. Having seemingly never been around the island before, he's more than a little freaked out, and holds onto me tightly, alternating between looking around and looking at me, eeping. I get him back to the hut and first order of business is putting some antiseptic drops on his hand. Next order is swinging in the hammock, where he falls asleep pretty quickly, but doesn't freak out when waking. I bring him out to eat berries from the trees but he's dying to climb them, so i let him off. A few times he gets out of his depth (having only one usable hand) so he looks to me and eeps, i put my arm up, and he climbs down it onto my shoulder. A few times i get bored while he's swinging around and make to leave, and he legs it down the tree, up my leg and into my arms. We go back to my hut for more hammock time, and as i read my book, he climbs up to my shoulder and grooms my hair, eating anything he can get his hands on.

In the evening i bring him back to the bar and it's an absolute mammoth effort to get him back on his perch - the banister at the front of the bar where they have him tied with enough string to get up to his bed on the roof. If i try to put him down, he clings on tightly, or climbs onto my back where i can't reach. If i try to walk away hoping the string will pull him off, he freaks out as soon as it gets tight around his neck. If i try to calm him down, he just falls asleep. It takes time but we get him off and i head off for dinner and drinks.

The next few days continue the same. I book a flight for Malaysia for the 17th to go see Matty and Zan for the Thaipusam Festival. The group leaves bit by bit as the Canadians and Maya head for Vietnam, the English lads head for the south of Thailand, and Joe and Jo head for somewhere i can't remember. Joe is the last to go, hatching a plan with the Welsh couple and a Lithuanian guy named Dane to go on a bike ride in the mountains near paxe. The morning they're leaving a flip a coin to see if i'll come with but the coin says no so i watch them leave and go play with bob before going out for a few drinks with a Mexican guy i meet in the evening, on to a party in one of the huts at night, and eventually to sleep.

The next day i get on a boat and leave Don Det. I get a bus to paxe with an english couple and some Nigerian guys before being dropped with a Japanese couple in a remote bus station to get my connection to Vientiane. I get my ticket sorted (it's already paid for) and call a tuc tuc to go into town to an ATM when i realise i can't find my bank cards. And i've only about $0.08 on me. Shit. I unpack my bags on the floor and go through every single pocket but nothing. Shit. I try my phone but realise i have no credit and nobody to call. Shit. I sit on a chair and think shit shit shit - i've no money, no way of getting money, and no way of contacting anybody. Screwed doesn't even cover it.

Luckily, they have internet at the station and i convince the woman at the counter to let me use it for four minutes with my remaining $0.08. I go on the Vodafone website (my old mobile phone provider from home who let you send free texts to Irish numbers off their website) and text my brother and my mother. A few minutes later mam rings and we hatch a plan for her to wire some money to me for collection in Vientiane. She rings back a few minutes later with an ID code for western union and i'm safe again. Thank god for mothers!

I talk a bit with the Japanese couple and the guy lends me a few dollars to get a drink and a ride from the bus station in vientiane to the town. The bus journey to Vientiane is long and relaxing, save for two mid-fifties Danish guys who give some old Laotian woman grief for not wanting to sit next to a man. I cuss them out and fall asleep. The next morning i get into town around six, but the Western Union doesn't open until nine, so i find a hotel who'll take my bags as a deposit on a room and sit across the street from the WA office. Outside is a young soldier of about 15 with a machine gun that's about twice the size of him. He stares at me menacingly for three hours, never once looking away. About every fifteen minutes a tuc tuc pulls up between us, turns off the engine and does what i call the Vientiane Tuc Tuc Hustle:

Driver: Hello sir! Tuc Tuc?
Me: No thank you.
Driver: Marijuana?
Me: No thank you.
Driver: Opium?
Me: No thank you.
Driver: Lady boom boom?
Me: No thank you.

The driver then guns the engine and speeds off, and i swear to go, each time the machine gun toting teenager, gives a slight smile and a nod of the head in the direction of the departing driver (which i take to mean "Tuc Tuc drivers, mad bastards aren't they!") before returning to his menacing, unending stare. Eventually the office opens, i get my cash (the woman at the desk comments on my beardless passport photo saying "No beard in passport! Very handsome. With beard, very ugly!") and head back to my hotel. I meet the Japanese guy in the afternoon, refund his money, buy him lunch, and crash out early in my hotel. The next day i get up early do a long blog, and catch a taxi to the airport - Malaysia here i come!