V

Vang Vieng, on the left bank of the Nam Song (Song River), is growing rapidly, but is still hardly more than a village. There are now dozens of guesthouses, restaurants, and internet cafes and a handful of tour companies. It is a backpackers' haven of cheap places, but has one nice hotel, the Nam Song Hotel, overlooking the river for which it is named and that has most of the creature comforts we crave (hot water, air-conditioning, fridge, clean linen) albeit at an inflated price compared to the local guesthouses. We pay $25 a night. Most backpackers pay $2-$4 a night. The most exclusive feature of the Nam Song, mind you, is that it has a fabulous view of the river and the limestone crags beyond. It also has musical entertainment.

The afternoon of our arrival we took it easy, first eating a late lunch overlooking the river at an over-priced “French” restuaurant, then wandering the town (village really) to find out what was there. The restaurant we knew about because of a flyer picked up in Vientiane, and like all advertisers, it is priced higher than other places. The food was okay. After eating we discovered that there are at least three places to rent large tubes in which to float down the river and at least three places to do email. We picked one of them, paying, as expected, more than double the Vientiane price (250 kip/min rather than 100 kip/min = 1.25 cents/min)  and then went a few doors farther to discover a bar that sells glasses of red wine for only a dollar. Of course we had to sample it and found it quite excellent.

We then looked at a few guest houses and decided that while they were far cheaper than our hotel we preferred to pay the extra money for the view and slight increase in comfort

We'd passed a place where  "Mr Kham" offered a trip where he guided you to three caves, gave you,  a picnic lunch, and 4 km (1-2 hour's) tubing on the Nam Song river. Having thought it over we went back and signed up for Sunday (the next day).

We had also got to talking to two American college students because we are always wanting to trade books. We saw them in the street ahead of us (they were off to Mr Kham's to go tubing) and chased them, asking them to trade books. They agreed to do it after they went and returned from tubing. Two hours later, after our internet session and the glass of wine, we were walking down another street when we heard cries of "Gerry, Gerry, Gerry". At first we ignored it because we thought it must be a misunderstanding on our part. But it was them, Heidi and Alelia, calling from their balcony, which was nearly right above our head.

We went up and besides trading the books talked for an hour. You could call it a bull-session, or at least that is what Gerry called it when he was in college. Beside books our conversation was focused mainly on the environment and what should or should not be done to save it. As we usually find, we were on the opposite side from them: They didn't like President GW Bush's actions on the Kyoto treaty and Alaskan oil development and we did.

We felt like real millionaires hearing about their budget. They have wandered all over, including India, Nepal, Thailand, and Malaysia and are doing it for under $5/day and say they are very comfortable. Their guest house, which we looked at and except for the view is almost as nice as ours, costs each of them $1.25/night. Heidi and Alelia are both studying at McGill University in Montreal. They broke their studies for six months to make this trip. They have budgeted about $2000 each. With them was a third person, Michelle Tan, who they met on the road. She is 30, also an American, and teaches Western Civilization at a university in Bangkok. She is of Chinese ancestry and at first we thought she was a Thai with an amazingly good accent. In her Civilization class she is used to conducting discussions of values and problems. During the discussion of the environment she was mostly silent, perhaps meaning that she was reflecting on our "radical" ideas. Jan thinks it more likely that she was exasperated with such right-wing views.

Back at our hotel, we unpacked and showered and then just before we were about to turn over and go to sleep, we heard what sounded like a very loud cuckoo-clock. "Cu-koo", it went, followed a couple of seconds later by another and another and another and then silence. We were quite bemused. Had the landlord done a stint in Eastern Germany and brought back a souvenir?  If so, it wasn't very guest friendly. But thinking that the noise was over, we quicky forgot it. Unfortunately, however, it recurred about once every ten minutes or so. It was so regular that Jan started timing it and finally concluded that there was no regularity at all.

Eventually, we managed to go to sleep and the next morning at breakfast we asked the hotelkeeper if he knew what it was. He laughed and said yes, it was a large gekko that lived in the ceiling above our rooms (The rooms were built in a row, motel-style, with a verandah in front where we sat every evening watching the sunset over the river.) He said he had tried to get rid of it, but had never succeeded. It's hard to know why we had never encountered the gekko's eponymous call (Ge-ko) before, but we sure heard it often during the rest of our stay in Asia. The funniest part of it was always the beginning of the call which sounds like a motor revving up before the series of Ge-ko calls are made in increasing volume and intensity until some climax is reached and the call stops.