Laotian boy plays at a Buddhist Wat (temple)‘My friend is having a birthday- we are making a party!’ Toby announces as he pops onto our wooden river-view balcony.
There are hastily patched electrical wires hanging across our porch, which we have ducked for the past two days. The wires are exposed and constantly at risk of arcing together, sending a bright green flare into the night. Somehow, the wires sneak through Toby’s dreadlocks and spark against his skin.
‘Yeah, that one is live’ I say, nodding to the neighbor’s porch light. The light flickers as Toby touches the bare wires again then yanks his fingers away. ‘Not too bad- maybe only 120 volts or something,’ in his very German-accented English.
We had met Toby on the songthaew (a truck with two rows of benches- literally ‘two rows’) ride to Ban Nakasan, the jumping-off point to the island Don Det where we were to reside. He has been on Don Det, our little emerald rice paddy island for six weeks so far. When we follow him to the party, he speaks in Lao to nearly everyone we meet, though he is having pretty much the same conversation again and again, presumably about the local spirit called lao lao that has intoxicated him. Toby is all natural threads and has a fascination with the conceptual simplicity of the laidback river island life.
He leads us to a bar where a sitting table of ten or so travelers is drinking and rolling cigarettes and grooving to sci-trance. Out of the din, Radish, an improbably skinny Gujurati-Canadian girl with dreadlocks and a layered, shimmering hippie skirt grabs Toby’s hand and says something about the indigo aura people and how glad she is that he knows about them.
The bar closes and the party moves to the nearby beachhead where electrical poles lay stacked. The promise of consistent electricity looms above us like the moon, but for now lights are out at 9 PM and from there it is all candles and conversation. Soon, I think, there will be video bars showing American movies and programs all night long, but tonight there is a campfire on the sand and guitars have been produced and everything is perfect.
After the circle around the campfire broke up, we found ourselves walking down the moonlight dirt path behind another group. A tall, blonde, curly haired Scandinavian plays guitar and the synchronic sound of our collective flip-flops keeps the time of a rendition of ‘Free Falling’ by Tom Petty that he sings so sweetly you would never expect from a 6’4” Viking descendent.
Don Det is a special place. Locals still live there because it just happens to be where they live. They raise their chickens among the modest wood and thatch bungalows and children come home from school at noon in their tidy uniforms to the family-run restaurant that also serves as the place to do homework. The island’s metronome is the sway of hammocks whose western occupants gaze for hours at the Mekong. It is the archetype of a perfect escape from everything for those of us fortunate to experience it now, before things change too much.
All too often, a place that was enchanting and magical loses its luster once workers arrive en masse to some palm tree island to resentfully serve cheap drinks to tourists. For now though, the Lao villagers have not grown jaded by these strange visitors and it is common for a group of Lao men to wave you down on the street to join them on a log in a clearing for a drink.
Sun sets over the Mekong River. View from our balcony, seriously.
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