Other Writing

 

 

Laos

 

When I was small and living in a housing estate in the east end Glasgow with my parents and two brothers, our family holidays were both rare and rain-sodden. They would generally consist of a snail slow, car sick, vomit covered journey to the pebbly beaches of Yorkshire or Lancashire in the back of a diminutive Ford Anglia or Hillman Minx held together by hope, Hail Marys and bits of copper wire.
Once there, and squeezed, shaken and pale-faced into a single room in a seaside boarding house that reeked of poached eggs involuntary bodily evacuations, we’d venture out into the English rain and quickly come to the conclusion that to find real summer sunshine you had to journey more than one hundred and twenty miles south in bumper to bumper holiday traffic.
So my parents emigrated to Australia, and the rest, as they say, is house buying, lawn-mowing, barbecued snag suburban dream history.
Thirty-two years after my parents, siblings and I left Scotland on a ten pound ticket to the western suburbs of Melbourne I was living in Saigon with my own partner and progeny, working on the English language newspaper and trying to remind our cook Miss Ha to put eggs in the quiche. With memories of those suicide-inducing soujourns to the north of England still festering in my mind, I decided to invite my father over for a proper holiday.
“We’ll go to Laos,” I said.
“What’s Laos?” he replied.
We decided we’d go to the Laotian capital, Vientiane, via Cambodia. We’d been there before and I had a soft spot for Phnom Penh and the Hawaii Hotel, where we’d stayed. Given the recent terrible history of the country and the dirt poor, gun-toting state of the capital, whoever named the hotel either had a warped sense of humour or was seriously addicted to hallucinogenic drugs.
Once we were safely checked in at the Hawaii, we all decided to have a nap. It was hot and dusty and we were buggered. My father, however, being the sort of working class Glaswegian physically incapable of sitting still without the aid of televised horse racing, American soap operas or a comfy seat at the Bingo, decided to go for a walk. So when we awoke he was nowhere to be found. I have to admit the thought of a septuagenarian Scotsman in questionable shorts from Forges in Footscray wandering the streets of a city where sporadic gunfire could still be heard piercing the night had me worried. Indeed, I pictured him floating lifeless down the Tonle Sap River.
I trawled the streets and coffee shops around the central market and was about to give up when I spotted him and his shorts positioned expertly over a pool table in a bar. He was playing with a professional Cambodian woman clad in a mere suggestion of a dress. He didn’t seem too unhappy. He’d been a champion snooker player when he was young. I assumed that, at his age, he’d potted nothing more than the black.
The next day we flew to Vientiane, the sleepy, but charming capital of Laos. We spent a few days there walking the streets, admiring the French colonial buildings and drinking huge brown bottles of beer by the banks of the Mekong at sunset. We enjoyed the spicy local food, except for my father who preferred to order Italian.
We then took a flight north to the old imperial capital, Luang Prabang, a delightful city of historic temples and crumbling French buildings that now has UNESCO World heritage status. We were happy there for a few days, exploring the temples and markets, breathing in the fresh mountain air.
We met a young Laotian couple who took us up the Mekong in their boat. Despite the US having dropped more bombs on Laos during the Vietnam War than it did worldwide throughout World War Two, the jungle around the Luang Prabang region of the Mekong is still thick and bustling with life. While my wife and I stood on the deck marvelling at the scenery and the magnificence of the Mekong, my father was under the awning teaching my two daughers how to play pontoon.
I gave them the predictable “you don’t know how lucky you are / when I was your age” lecture about poverty, Glasgow and holidays in the Lancashire rain, but to no avail. When you’re eight, nine and 72 years old respectively, card games with money at stake are infinitely more interesting than one of the world’s great waterways.Despite my father’s and my children’s lack of interest in the bird life of the Mekong our week in Cambodia and Laos had been truly memorable. So when we boarded the flight from Luang Prabang to Vientiane I felt happy that we’d given my father a trip to remember.
The flight to Vientiane was listed as direct, which was crucial for us as we had booked a connecting flight to Pnom Penh and another to Saigon where my father would continue on to Melbourne. It was all fairly tightly scheduled but entirely possible on paper. It was only when when we landed in the middle of nowhere that I realised that the ostensibly Vientiane-bound plane had made an unscheduled stop.
In my research for the trip to Laos I had read about the Plain of Jars, where 250 stone jars weighing up to a tonne each were scattered throughout various sites near Phonsovan. The purpose and use of the 2000 year old jars is still a mystery to archaologists around the word, and presumably was still so to the team of American archaeologists on board our plane who were joyfully disembarking for what was to them a holy grail site. The problem was that no one on the flight, except the pilot and the aforementioned archaeologists, was aware there was to be a detour. The other problem was that Phonsovan was a long way from Vietntiane.
As we milled about the runway waiting for the plane to take off again for Vientiane, we realised that unless the plane could fly at supersonic speeds we would miss our connecting flight to Phnom Penh. We explained this to the pilot and he finished his cigarette and herded the remaining passengers back on board. We took off and he gunned the engines.
As we finally descended into Vientiane airport I peered anxiously through the window to see passengers boarding the plane – our plane. Once we landed I sprinted across the runway in the deluded hope that I could get it to wait for us. Of course, it couldn’t and didn’t.
Our flight schedule collapsed like a pack of cards. We missed all our other connecting flights including my father’s plane to Melbourne. And we had to spend another night in sleepy Vientiane. Still,we had a lovely Laotian dinner. My father had the tagliatelle carbonara.
The next day we boarded a Lao Aviation plane bound for Phnom Penh. It seemed the aircraft was not regularly in service and may indeed have been a reject from Bolivian Airways. It shook, rattled and shuddered even before it took off. Once airborne, we felt that it would become unairborne at at moment. The collapsible seats indiscriminately did just that - banging and clattering with every spot of turbulence. Condensation dripped relentlessly from the roof and rained on everything, including the passengers. My father said it was just like a summer holiday in the north of England.

© Graham Reilly