Adventures in South East Asia

35 ~ Scams and new roommate

Along the Mekong to Luang Prabang, Laos

I waivered back and forth with my decision to go to Laos. It was hard to settle on a location to spend my final week in Asia. The four days I had stayed in Laos in February just hadn't felt like enough. So I booked a pricey (for Asia) van and slow boat journey to Luang Prabang. The minivan ride took all day and we hardly stopped.

By 4:30, we had arrived at the edge of Thailand. Our driver looked at the time and ushered us out of the van. "Go, go! The border closes very soon." However the infrastructure for the border was nowhere in sight after the Thai official stamped us out of Thailand.

If it was anything like Cambodia, that zone was the strange neutral area where you left one country without actually entering another. On the bus to Siem Reap, Cambodia, my friends and I had discovered one of the few places where gambling was actually legal near Thailand. Apparently, the ambiguous border area was a tourist draw for the Thais.

The journey to Laos was not similar in the gambling respect, but it did take a ten minute walk up and down a hill or two to reach office on the other side. The other tourists were confused, but I set off walking because if he said it was closing, the office likely was. I had no intention of just lying around this no-man's land until morning.

Once we arrived at the small wooden cabin, we waited behind another tour group getting their visas processed. The situation wasn't as urgent as he had predicted. Last time, I had paid in Thai baht and gotten ripped off. I came ready with my US dollars and found out that the Canadian visa price was the highest of any other country on the list of every other country in the world. Gee, whose milk had we pissed in to earn that title?

We took a new can to the little hotel area and when room assignments were doled out it looked like we had to share rooms even though we were paying more than enough to buy out one each.

"Not enough," they had said when we expressed our concerns.

We walked around and peeked in the rooms, each in its own little cabin. We left those with queen beds for the couples until we looked through and realized they were all queen beds. Joy. It also hit me that we had an odd number of girls and I was the one without a friend. It came down to me and a Brazilian man who introduced himself as Alberto. He was friendly and pleasant.

We went for supper at the hotel restaurant which was essentially a patio with a table like many in the area. The place was a bit of a one horse town so we weren't missing out too much. I got a nice vegetarian discount and played with a dog and her three adorable puppies. We sat around drinking beers and sharing travel stories since there was little else to do.

In Cambodia, a few of the guys had found a gun range where for a price you could look through their weapons menu and shoot any product, from machine gun to grenade launchers. They even joked you could also order up and animal to shoot the weapon at and ventured it could make an interesting restaurant business idea, shoot your own meal. It seemed like such a wasteful proposal.

After our last beers, I tried not to be too awkward about sharing a bed with a stranger I had just met that day. He could be a nice and respectful. Mariano had been great when I shared a room with him in Myanmar. I hadn't been robbed or harassed.

Reflecting back on my pre-travel life, I had woken up on sleeping bag in my friend's kitchen next to a dog and a random guy dressed in hot pants before, whom, although I hadn't even recalled even having a conversation with him, seemed confused when I took off in the morning. I could do this: share a bed with a stranger.

With Alberto, I made things as low key as possible. I wore baggy and unflattering pyjamas and tucked into bed at a modest ten o'clock, claiming to be so tired. He seemed a bit skeptical but kept playing on his iPad all the same.