This Isn’t Just a Souvenir

This Isn’t Just a Souvenir begins at the Laos border crossing — a broken-down bus, a handful of strangers, and the start of an unlikely friendship that captures everything unpredictable about backpacking Southeast Asia.

The bus died as soon as it reached the Laotian border. The weather was warm, and tropical light drifted through the canopy. The winter parka which had protected me in Tibet was now rolled up to serve as a pillow so that I could sleep against the windowpane. The drivers were sloshing bowl after bowl of water on overheated tires. Clearly, this was a revival process that could take hours. A gateway of banana trees opened into a haven of endless red hills.

The bus driver announced that a second bus was coming. Behind him, his young trainees had resorted to their own personal drinking water to get the old hunk of junk to wake up. All passengers got off the bus and idled around the checkpoint. There wasn’t much to see or do, but we’d all be stuck here for several hours before that second bus arrived.

As I walked about and observed the scene at the border, I noticed a certain slack in posture by the military men with rifles slung lazily over their shoulders. A few guards at the border had bare feet and were using sticks to scratch themselves with. Their smiles were easy like the lope of stray dogs searching for dubious morsels buried in the sand.

These were the telltale signs of an economy doomed to stagnation. But maybe it was all just a calculated ruse to separate us from our precious foreign currency. I wandered over to the currency exchange kiosk and watched my red yuan turn into purplish Laotian kip, The currency exchange office was just sitting there, ready to send me into fiscal demise.

Lao money is worthless, but this it’s only on the other side of the border that you find out that only dollars are desired. Even the paper feels cheap somehow, like they couldn’t spring for the extra ply.

Without knowing it, I’d entered a game where human life was the real currency, backed not by the acquisition of precious metals, but by the ability to harvest the energy of people with the exactitude of a machine. It was simple: We were all equal now. We all had nothing.

After my plunge into a money-pit of kip like Scrooge McDuck, I approached the shade where groups of travelers sat at separate tables wondering if they’d fallen into the same hole that I had. Language was the magnetizing force. The Chinese sat at one big table; the Laotians were organized by family ties. There were also gatherings of assorted brown folk I couldn’t confidently identify. I eyed the tables, uncertain which group I’d fit in with. I bade my time, buying some odd spiky fruit, just to rid myself of some kip.

Suddenly, I saw the flash of a wave.

“Hey there, over here!”

A girl the frizzy hair waved and smiled warmly. Her wire spectacles kept sliding to the tip of her nose, perhaps due to the heat. She was a brown-skinned girl in a rainbow muumuu who resembled a bespectacled teddy bear with frizzy black hair.

“Sit down and join the club,” she said in a familiar accent. “This is my partner, Paprika.” Paprika smiled and gave me air guns. She had a buzz cut and wore a white T-shirt with cut-off sleeves like she was an extra off the musical Grease. The teddy bear introduced herself as Maya.

“A fellow American,” I said in surprise. “Where abouts?”

“Orange County, California,” Maya informed me. “What about you?”

“The Garden State,” I told her. “My name is Sam, Sam Iam, and I do not like green eggs and ham.”

Maya laughed, but the joke went over half of the table’s heads.

“Hey, your English is much better than mine,” a guy who was sitting at the table observed. He looked like the Asian version of Clark Kent. “You’re an American, huh? I’ve never met an Asian American before. You seem Asian and American at the same time.”

He was no Sherlock Holmes, but he had the kind of torso that polo shirts were made for. He introduced himself as Louis, and almost forgot his girlfriend, who he quickly added was named Bee. I assumed that her bright yellow tennis outfit was just a coincidence and smiled politely.

Beside them was a girl who wore the sort of sunglasses you find at rest stops. She was dressed in a tank-top, with droplets of sweat glistening along her collar. Her hair was the color of burnt honey, tied up haphazardly and in the sunlight not unlike a bird’s nest on fire. “Jacky,” the blonde with the sunglasses said in an Australian accent, as if a speaking stick has been passed to her.

“Have you guys been to Vietnam? That was the worst for us. We were almost there for a whole day,” Maya said, continuing some previous conversation about receiving visas at the border.

 “Don’t ever give a guy off the street your passport. This dude said he could expedite the process for like thirty bucks and my friend gave her his passport and never saw him again.”

“Your friend no longer exists. She lives in Romania now and has a fair amount of credit card debt,” Louis remarked with a laugh.

“That’s why I don’t trust anyone. I don’t even use my real name,” Jacky said.

“So, is your name not ‘Jacky’?” I asked.

“Just one of many names,” she replied and removed her sunglasses. I was suddenly confronted by her unshielded eyes. A corona of bluish-green light radiated from her irises, reflecting the trees and sky.

“Is there anything to drink around here?” I asked.

“It’s never too early for a Beer Lao,” quipped Louis, making his voice sound like a commercial none of us had heard before. “Want me to order for you?”

            “Sounds good,” I agreed.

“Make that two,” Jacky added.

Louis called to the vendor in Lao.

“If you don’t mind me saying, your English is also quite fluent,” I said to Louis. “Did you study abroad?”

“Nope, we both went to international school in Vientiane. That’s the capital,” Louis explained, glancing at his girlfriend, Bee. “Now I’m training to be a diplomat, so I use English all the time.”

“He always comes home late. Smells like perfume,” complained Bee. “Tells me he’s out fighting crime.”

This was followed by titters of uncomfortable laughter.

“It’s true. The job of a diplomat is serious business. Sometimes I deal with weapons dealers and drug cartels. These aren’t the kind of people who have offices. You need to hit them where they work and play,” insisted Louis.

“The job of a diplomat is a lot different in Laos than in America, I guess,” I said helpfully, unsure if he was joking.

“If you’re ever in trouble, you know who to call,” Louis chirruped in mock superhero mode.

“Hey, you can be our tour guide,” Paprika suggested.

“Sure, just pay me in Beer Lao!” Louis said with a chuckle.

I imagined us following this drunken diplomat turned super-bro, running around Laos, showing us plenty while explaining nothing.

Two bottles of Beer Lao arrived.

I clinked bottles with Jacky, and we drank. Jacky held the bottle to a near vertical angle over her head and gulped the beer down halfway. She let a belch fly, and then covered her mouth, suddenly ladylike.

“God, I miss Thailand,” said Jacky, as if this stunt brought back memories. I watched her staring beyond the table as if somewhere through the trees, Thailand was there waiting. 

“I bet Thailand misses you, too,” I remarked, guessing at the trail of hearts she’d left behind.

“Where’re you coming from?” asked Jacky. 

“China,” I told her. “I did about a month there, traveling from Beijing to Tibet. What about you?”

 “I’ve been in Southeast Asia for years,” Jacky confessed. “Where else can you wake up, eat fresh fruit, and do fuck all for the rest of the day? I’m just doing a visa run in Laos so I can go back to Thailand. It’s a pain in the ass, but unless I marry a Thai man…”

Her voice trailed off coquettishly producing some light laughter from the table.

“Well, the bus is headed to Luang Prabang,” Paprika said. “Are you guys staying for a few days?”

“After that, it’s off to Vang Vieng,” added Maya.

“You know who else is going to be there,” Jacky said knowingly.

“Candidate Dim,” Maya and Paprika said in unison and exchanged glances.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

Paprika, Maya, and Jacky were shocked that I’d never heard of the Laotian demagogue known as Candidate Dim. They took turns illuminating me on all the things there were to hate about him: his pug face, his fat body, his short little legs, his chain of fast food restaurants, his misogyny, and his brood of nasty children from three different wives, all former contestants of Miss Universe pageants.

“His next campaign stop is going to be in Vang Vieng. Timed perfectly with the opening of another one of his restaurants,” Jacky said with a snort.

“Just another example of hyper-capitalism erasing the purity of the local culture,” Maya murmured sadly. Then, perking up with inspiration, she said, “We’re going to join the protest there and let the people know we stand with them. Power in numbers!”

“Right on time for the Full Moon Party,” Paprika added.

“That’s when the cosmic energies will be at their strongest. We’ll dance with our brothers and sisters in love and unity,” Maya said, her brown eyes glowing behind her spectacles. “Every journey begins with serendipity. How about it, Sam? Do you want to join us in the fight against bigotry and injustice?”

“Get your ass on the front lines!” Paprika cheered.

“What about you, Louis? Bee?”

“Sorry, we need to go back to Vientiane for some family stuff. But if you ever find yourself in the capital, feel free to contact me. I’ll show you guys around,” Louis said.

Perhaps Maya sensed that I was already thinking of a way out because she looked directly at me and without allowing me wiggle room declared, “You’re coming with us.”

“Welcome to the party,” Jacky said and chugged the rest of her Beer Lao.

And like that, I was one of them: a diaspora of the privileged and insane.

I downed my beer for courage.

That’s the heart of This Isn’t Just a Souvenir — proof that the best part of backpacking Southeast Asia isn’t the border crossing itself, but who you meet while you’re stuck there. If you enjoyed this, you might also like Klickitat Street, another irreverent story from the road.