I'm scribbling notes in the Luang Nam Tha airport "waiting lounge"; rammed earth floor, bamboo hut and BeerLao bunting hanging abundantly from the grass roof.
"Sabaidee"... and a glass of Lao green tea arrives steaming. There's a French couple next to us, mid-50's and I'm thinking that they don't look nearly as nervous about this flight as I do. Maybe it'll be bigger than the 6 seat ancient Cessna that I've got in mind? We'll see...
We're juggling kip and tiny amounts of $US - trying to leave Laos without too much of their folding stuff. It's impossible to change it outside their borders and nearly as difficult to swap it for anything else from within.
Laos will slide away from my current memory as Bangkok gets closer over the next 24 hours and fills the quiet, lacadasial spaces with neon signs, hurried people and pollution. I'm worried that the tiny vignettes of village life and rural idyll (& hardship!) will slip away and be forgotten. Laos is a hard place to pin down; just exactly why it's charming and great fun seems inexplicable in words.
These next few paragraphs will probably fail to explain it too...
An iron-horse came chugging through the river yesterday next to where we stopped on the banks; the noisy diesel engine preceeding any visuals. I looked down into the back of the tray from the riverbank edge and saw 3 men carrying large bowls that they were trying to stop from slopping around as the stones made the tractor lurch from side to side. As it drew nearer, I could see the bowls were full of dark red blood; the men straddling the rails of the tray so their feet didn't get caught up in the mound of entrails that were glinting in the late afternoon sun like mother-of-pearl oil slicks on tangled cables. A large pair of buffalo horns sat on the top. On closer inspection, I traced the edge of the horn down to the forehead, along the nose, mouth and eyes.
The bloke reached down and picked up the buffalo head to show Sam who was level with the river and couldn't yet see the fully butchered array. I was less disturbed with a decapitated buffalo head than I thought I might be. It made me laugh. Not out of a nervous reaction, but a genuine laugh at the craziness and difficulty these blokes had trying to contain the blood of an animal not-dead 30 minutes whilst crossing the river on the back of a home-made mechanical contraption that only vaguely resembled a tractor.
Almost every Laos moment holds a surprise if you stay open to it all.
