It's on the Meter

by Paul Archer

  This sounded like the perfect place to stop for a couple of days and regroup our thoughts. My two sisters were flying out to see us as well, so we agreed to meet at this small village.

  As predicted, the road became atrocious the closer we got to the town. Large potholes, big enough to rip the undercarriage to pieces if hit with speed, covered our path. To make matters worse, the evening monsoon started and the road became like a stream. Muddy water filled all the holes, making them all look the same. You would expect a three-inch hole and find, with a horrifying crack, that you had just driven into one a foot deep.

  All black cabs of the same era as ours have a peculiar quirk: there is a leak into the dashboard that drips water over all the electrics and then on to the driver's accelerator foot. This has two outcomes: firstly it creates a Chinese water torture effect on the driver and secondly it short-circuits the headlights. Fortunately, we had a couple of spotlights remaining, which was lucky, but their power was minimal – having the effect of driving by the light of a torch. The driving was made all the more challenging by the tiny ineffective windscreen wipers that failed miserably at holding back the monsoon. Twenty minutes turned into two hours of some of the worst driving of the trip as we broke the cardinal rule, yet again, of driving at night. We told ourselves that we would be fine because crashing into one of the two cars that passed per hour was unlikely to have much effect at the 2–3 mph we averaged. The far more likely possibility of driving off a cliff or into one of the raging torrents never to be seen again was never brought up. But being halfway between the last guesthouse and our destination, turning back was just as risky, so onwards Hannah rattled.

  A large river appeared beside us, occasionally lit by the cab's spotlights as we wound around the bends, revealing a grossly flooded mass of muddy boils, bursting at its banks.

  This had to be the Nam Song river, our tubing destination.

  'We're going down that river…'

  I've been kayaking for most of my life, a sport enjoyed with the utmost respect for water and for the safety precautions. When I kayak white-water, it's with helmets, life jackets, and a group of trusted and highly experienced friends, all of us armed with rescue ropes and trained in complex rescue techniques and first aid.

  '… completely shitfaced…'

  The spotlights lit up the water, I caught sight of a tree floating down, occasionally sucked down by the violent whirlpools and eddy lines.

  '… on tractor tubes!?'

  'Yup, it's great!' Matt reassured me. 'But… it wasn't this big when I last went.'

  Things didn't improve as we continued south. By seven it was dark – really dark. The rain was coming down in huge waterfall sheets and it filled all the deep potholes, meaning our previous swerving techniques were useless and every 20 seconds we were all pitched up out of our seats. The feeble headlights did little to fend off the gloom as we forded broad swathes of road covered in rushing water.

  'The potholes are getting really bad,' someone shouted over the dim of the downburst, 'we must be getting near the town!'

  Sure enough, bright neon lights appeared from the blackness. We had made it to our destination. Relief to be almost off the road and out of the rain washed over us when suddenly a man appeared on the road ahead of us. The topless figure wandered over to the window and grinned. He was covered in fluorescent body paint and spoke with a shockingly familiar accent.

  'Maaaaayyte, is this a Laandan cab?' He stared into the cab, identifiable as a Brit by his drunken demeanour as much as his cockney tones.

  'Yup.'

  'Amazin', 'owd you get it 'ere?'

  'We drove it…' said Leigh, holding back the entire extent of the distance.

  'Ahh, right, you buy it in Bangkok and drive it up?'

  'No, we drove it the whole way.'

  'Oh, wow, from Singapore? That's a long way.'

  'No, from London… We drove it from London,' Leigh grinned.

  The lad's jaw looked as though it would have hit the floor, if he wasn't so preoccupied with grinding it against his top teeth in an attempt to alleviate the pent up tension and energy caused by whatever he had been shoving up his nose that night. His eyes bulged, unblinkingly – his pupils occupying the majority of the socket.

  'Naaaaaahhhhh, maaayyyyte. That is AWESOME!'

  'Thank you.'

  We were feeling rather proud. When we were in India we had met Europeans, but India felt like a place that you could drive to – it was on the hippy trail and someone always had a parent who had driven a VW camper there in the 1970s via Afghanistan in a haze of hash smoke. We were now in Laos, South East Asia. Half a world away.

  As we bounced further into Vang Vieng, it became clear it wasn't a one-street town any more. Large bars blasted chart hits, filled with hundreds of half-naked Westerners, soaked and oblivious to the pouring rain. The bars all had remarkably similar menus, ranging from innocuous milkshakes and pizza to bags of opium and hash cakes for the more adventurous.

  We had all expected Laos to be chilled out, but none of us had expected this.

  After meeting up with Paul's sisters, the six of us found a chilled-out guesthouse, overseen by a surly Laotian grandmother, and crashed out.

  The following morning we were making our way along the muddy river path and out of the trees on to the waterfront when a voice shouted a greeting, 'The taxi boys!' It was the guy from the previous night, who was a rep for one of the bars. He quickly introduced us to 'snake wine' – a local delicacy of rice wine infused with a whole dead snake – mixed with whisky, as we surveyed the scene. The fast-flowing river was lined with banging bars made from bamboo and palm leaves. Each had a thumping sound system and hordes of attractive young backpackers.

  'So, you are the taxi guys?' shouted another rep, brandishing

  yet another bottle of spirits. 'Come here – you're legends!'

  And so the day began.

  Apart from a night in Nepal and a few awkward nights in China, we had not been out partying since Georgia, four months previously. Suddenly we were three red-blooded males thrust into the backpacker party scene. The 60 pence bottles of whisky, pounding chart tunes – unfamiliar to us at the time, but apparently six months old in the UK – and English speaking revellers were a culture shock… for about five minutes. We acclimatised very quickly. Especially when we found we were pseudo famous – word got round the small town about the guys who had driven there in a taxi, and one or two people had even read about us in the newspapers or heard the radio interview that caused Fred to cry 'kidnap'.

  We decided to whole-heartedly embrace this bizarre hedonistic Wild West where gap-year kids swung from homemade rope swings and got hammered in swimwear, while modest locals looked on from their ramshackle huts on the bank. It was either that or sit in a cafe and watch Friends on repeat.

  A rickety boat took us across the river to the first bar, where it seemed the biggest party was in full swing. Leigh somehow managed to acquire a full bottle of whisky from one of the backpacker employees: a girl covered in obscene slogans spraypainted on her body with car paint. Before things got too hectic and hazy, Matt and I decided to try out the tubes and jumped into the fast-flowing river.

  I paddled with all my might and, just as I thought I was going to miss the bar and float off down past the town all the way to the sea, an unfeasibly muscular pre-pubescent local boy wolf-whistled and threw me a Coke bottle half-filled with water tied to the end of a rope. I scrabbled around to grab on to it and he hauled me in effortlessly.

  We only made it down to the third bar before the party moved back into the town, and, still only the middle of the afternoon, the last thing I remember was Leigh, barely able to walk from his whisky adventure, staggering towards the main bar strip.

  'Dude, you need to go to bed,' I slurred.

  He tried to focus on me and composed his words with much effort. 'You,' he emphasised with a beaming grin, pointing at me and swaying around, 'need to go to bed!'

  Though we
had a lot of fun in Vang Vieng, it didn't surprise us to hear that a year after our visit the government had severely clamped down on the tubing enterprises after a surge in the number of deaths, as tourists tried to swim in the river when drunk. From the look of the brown, bubbling river, it seemed like a very logical decision.

  It appears it is almost impossible to take your own vehicle into Vietnam. It was one of the countries Leigh had wanted to go to the most, and Johno and Matt were also keen to visit, so we agreed to travel our separate ways; the three of them through Vietnam while my sisters and I would drive Hannah through Thailand to keep the world record valid. We'd be reunited for the continuation of our trip in Cambodia.

  After two days of partying, the lads were in a sorry state as they climbed on to the early morning bus with the other zombies – all still covered in florescent pink car paint, and worse – from the night before.

  CHAPTER 39

  LAOSY MEDICAL CARE

  Early the next day, my sisters and I began the journey from Vang Vieng to the Laos capital, Vientiane. Although the capital is a relatively unremarkable place – a few pretty French colonial buildings house various different business fronts and restaurants – its laidback atmosphere was warm and inviting. Which is pretty amazing considering Laos is the most bombed country in the world; during the Vietnam war (a war in which they were not involved) more ordinance was dropped in Laos than on the whole of Germany and Japan during World War Two.

  Driving was becoming a bit of a challenge for me. A small chip of what was presumably a Beerlao bottle, hidden in the muddy banks of the Nam Song, had managed to get lodged deep in the heel of my right foot, and it was really starting to hurt. I had to get it removed before the infection took hold, which could happen all too easily in such tropical climates. So, after attempting an operation in the hotel room with tweezers and a scalpel from the med kit, and discovering that it was in too deep, I limped to the city hospital.

  The air was heavy with bleach and rows of beds lined each wall; some with curtains pulled around them, from behind which the sound of retching and the odd moan of pain and agony could be heard through the thin fabric barrier. Archaic equipment was strewn against the wall and blue paint flaked everywhere, showing the bare concrete or rusted metal beneath.

  I was led to a bed – which was basically a sheet of green vinyl – and told to lie down. However, it was obviously designed for the average Laos patient's height and not my six-foot-fourinches frame. My feet stuck out over the edge, just far enough for an absent-minded nurse to walk into them, lending my own cry to the cacophony of moans that surrounded me. A doctor gave me a big grin – this was clearly hilarious to him – and nodded that he would be with me in a moment, before he turned to the patient beside me. Middle aged and overweight with a healthy moustache, the patient had a boil of some variety, blushing, bulbous and red, on his naked lower back, lying no more than a metre away from me. The doctor injected some sort of anaesthetic into the lump before taking his scalpel and delving deep into the boil. The anaesthetic clearly had little effect as the man groaned and the doctor cleared over a teacup-full of bloody pus from his back, before throwing it into the bin a few inches from where my head stuck out from the short bed.

  I turned, stared up at the ceiling – desperately trying to hold down the vomit that was building pressure in my gullet – and started to assess my life decisions that had got me to this point. I came to the conclusion that I would never drink snake wine ever again.

  The smell of the pus in the bin by my head, combined with the general shit state of the hospital, got too much for me and I tried to get up and leave – landing heavily on my bad foot and wedging the glass further in.

  Oh yes, I thought, that's why I'm here.

  This was the best hospital (or at least the only one I knew of) in the country. I reprimanded myself for being a pussy and settled back down. Once the doctor was finished, he washed up (thankfully), brought over a fresh tray, put on new gloves and went about anaesthetising and cutting open my foot with brand new needles and scalpels. (I carefully checked each one myself to ensure the packet was properly sealed, much to his bemusement.) Cutting down about 2 cm into my heel, he rooted around for about five minutes as I grasped the sides of the bed and gritted my teeth.

  'Ahh-haaa,' he said triumphantly, standing up to show me what he had found. 'You want?'

  'Want what?' All I could see was a bloody pair of tongs.

  'Glass, see…' I could just make out the tiniest shard, 2 mm squared.

  'No… errr… thank you,' I said. I wasn't really sure how I would store it for safekeeping, how I would tell the lads why I was carrying around a minuscule piece of glass, or why I would want to keep it in the first place.

  'I think there is more. I'm pretty sure there's almost a beer bottle in there,' I told him. 'That bit seems too small to cause that much pain…'

  He rooted around some more, while I grasped the side of the bed again. There was nothing left – it turns out I was just being a pussy after all.

  I was given antibiotics, spare bandages and paracetamol and sent on my way after parting with a fiver for the lot. I felt bad for being so judgemental – those doctors were doing a fantastic job and each with a beaming smile on their face.

  We were heading south, to where beautiful beaches and islands lay. Arrival at the Thai border coincided with the wearing out of the anaesthetic on my foot. I limped from window to window, getting paperwork stamped and paying standard border charges, my foot gradually becoming more and more useless. By this point I couldn't drive – resting my heel to use the accelerator was agony – so my sister had to take over.

  I was happy.

  The sun was shining, I had some peace and quiet from the lads, and I could spend some quality time with my sisters. I commented on how amazing the driving was, how smooth the road was and how civilised the drivers were, as I sat chilling, bandaged foot stuck out the passenger window, unaware that that's an incredibly offensive thing to do in Thailand. My sister, apparently, strongly disagreed – swearing and sweating – as big trucks undertook her in the slow lane. Coming straight from the UK, Thailand was hectic and the worst driving she had ever experienced. However, to Hannah and me, it was the most civilised road system we'd seen since Turkey. I told my sister this, with characteristic sibling understanding.

  'Fuck off, Paul. I don't care. Your fucking brakes don't work.'

  'Oh yeah, they don't really… you need to shift into a lower gear to slow down well in advance of any hazard… do you know that they're made out of old coffee cans put together in the jungle? Pretty cool, eh?'

  'No, not cool. Terrifyi— STOP FUCKING UNDERTAKING ME IN THE SLOW LANE!'

  I left her to it and went to sleep.

  Even with smooth roads, things are never easy when you're driving Hannah. After two days of driving, there was a familiar 'clunk' and I had to repair another ball joint. Fortunately the girls had brought a load of spare bits and pieces for us, so while I was at it I also fitted a new steering arm and a brand new shock absorber, and replaced a suspension plate. The lights were still broken from Laos, but I had no knowledge at all regarding them – the intricate electrics system had been built when John Major was still in power and they had since been customised by Leigh's very own and unique DIY approach. This meant that even if I did know anything about car electronics (which I don't) I was still going to have to wait for Leigh's master skills to fix it in a week's time.

  I would just have to avoid driving at night.

  Over the past eight months we had become accustomed to eating from roadside food stalls, due to their convenience and ultra-low cost. But now I found that I actually preferred this way of eating, even if I'd had the choice between a small shack and a Michelin-starred restaurant. If it's good enough for the locals, then it was good enough for us. Travellers often avoid them for fear of getting food poisoning, but other than my case of dysentery and Leigh's food poisoning in Manali, we'd had no trouble whatsoever by f
ollowing four basic rules:

  1. Don't drink the tap water in any way. This one is obvious, but it also includes ice cubes and anything washed in the water.

  2. Don't eat the salad. A cursory wander around a market will reveal piles of lettuce and vegetables on the ground, often accompanied by the odd goat relieving itself on it. And besides, it's often then washed in the dirty water anyway.

  3. Make sure it's cooked. This rule negates the first two; if it's piping hot and cooked through, it's generally fine. Some people avoid meat in bad places, but if it's been cooked to death, it should mean death to all the nasties inside it.

  4. None of these rules count when you're drunk.

  We had been having a gastronomic adventure, tasting the freshest and most authentic food each country had to offer, usually ordering by pointing at random things with a big dumb smile on our faces. And in my opinion, for street food, Thailand is without parallel the best in the world. From barbecues to curries to the simple but always perfect noodle soup, three times a day you can eat good, healthy food that puts a huge smile on your face – even if it's often accompanied by a sheen of spice sweat on your brow – for next to nothing.