Where In The World Is Evan?

I arrived back in Vientiane on Saturday afternoon, en route to Bangkok, and checked into the first available hostel. Feeling pretty tired after another long cramped bus ride I rested in my room for a couple of hours before heading out to grab some dinner.

It wasn’t until after 8:00 pm that I realised that the money I’d withdrawn in Luang Prabang wasn’t going to cover my 10 hour bus ticket to Bangkok. With enough money left to indulge myself for dinner I grabbed a pizza and a couple of pints of beer at a restaurant I’d been to previously. When I’d finished I went straight back to my hostel and fell asleep almost immediately.

I woke in the early hours of the morning feeling rather nauseous. As I lay in bed contemplating getting up I farted and shat my pants. Jumping out of bed I dashed into the en suite just in time to vomit in the sink. As I sat sideways on the toilet with my head in the adjacent basin, violently erupting from both ends, I reassessed my earlier complaint that the bathroom was too small for comfort.

When the worst had passed and I began to feel continent again I stood up and tried to flush the toilet. Unfortunately for me, however, the water had gone out at some time the day before and there was no water left in the cistern to flush with. Staring down at the mess that was the toilet, the basin and myself I cursed this city with as much venomous passion as I could muster in my weakened state. Without running water I had no hope of getting clean so I just crawled back into bed and lay in my own filth.

About an hour later the food poisoning took hold again but when I got up to turn on the light nothing happened. Looking back into the bedroom I noticed that the tiny pedestal fan wasn’t moving. The fucking electricity was now out, just great! For the next 4 hours I lay in bed, too hot to sleep, sheathed in sweat, vomit and faeces.

When morning came I changed into the least dirty clothes that I had and checked out of that hell hole. Leaving my bag at the reception desk I walked down the street to withdraw some money so I could escape this horrible city.

When I got to the only money change counter in the whole city that is open on a Sunday I was devastated to discover that their credit card machine was broken. Consulting my Lonely Planet I was informed that none of the ATMs in the entire country accepted international credit cards and none of the banks were open.

Looking in my wallet I doubly cursed that fucking pizza from the night before, because I didn’t have enough money left to even buy a bottle of water, let alone eat and find accommodation till the banks opened on Monday.

Feeling faint with exhaustion, dehydration and heat—it was another 30 plus day—I staggered up and down every major street in the centre of the city for the next two hours checking my VISA card in every ATM I came to. I can’t express the relief I felt when I finally found an ATM that would let me withdraw Lao kip. This was not ideal, however, as I planned to leave that day, and wasn’t sure what my exit fee would be—I’d overstayed my visa by about a week. Nonetheless I cashed out US$100 and went straight back to collect my bag and buy my bus ticket out of there.

With a little time before the scheduled departure I had the only thing I thought I could keep down—a fruit smoothie. This seemed like a good idea at the time, lots of vitamins and much needed fluids, but what I’d not considered was the speed at which a stomach full of nothing but fruit passes through your bowels. And I was about to depart on a 10 hour bus ride. Having long since run out of my previously ample stocks of Imodium my immediate future looked pretty bleak. With nothing else to do I spent an hour catching up on some emails and boarded my bus to Bangkok.

With great willpower I survived the bus ride, only to arrive on Khao San Rd at 5:30 am. As I stood on the side of the road watching the absolute dregs of the traveller community stagger about smashing bottles in the street and sexually harassing any woman who happened by, I started to wonder what the hell I was doing here.

Having been to Bangkok once before I’d successfully avoided this licentious place, and with good reason. Khao San Rd is the backpacker hub of the southern hemisphere. Every drunken lout who passes through South-East Asia ends up staying here, in one of the myriad of guesthouses that overlook the crass commercial shops lining the narrow street.

Standing there in all my shit and vomit stained glory I was oddly reminded of a conversation I had had a week earlier with a posh British couple in a French restaurant in Luang Prabang. They’d described the movement of western youth through Asia as a pattern of drunken stumbling from one white ghetto to another, completely insulated from the cultures they were supposedly there to experience. At the time I acknowledged their point and expressed regret at the destruction western tourism had done to Thailand in particular. Yet here I was, standing in the very epicentre of the cultural debasement and tawdry sleaze that I so reviled. Good thing I’ve never claimed I’m not a hypocrite.

After withdrawing just enough Thai baht to cover a hostel room for the night I treated myself to the shower I’d been dying for since getting sick more than 24 hours earlier and collapsed into bed for a few glorious hours of unbroken sleep.