Scribblings and Mumblings and Mekong Memories

My camera lens broke last week. Dog ear strikes again.

We land on the runway in Bangkok and a malteser rolls past my aisle seat and on down the plane. It remains in the centre of the aisle all the way out of my sight and my addled brain sees it as a tribute to the engineering minds that made the plane, bravo, we have arrived safely.

Bangkok is sweaty and smoky and modern. A rat meets me in the outside corridor of my hotel, small enough to be cute. In my room the shower ebbs and flows, breathing on me. Tiredness has blurred the edges. I lie awake feeling absurd, an unwanted guest in my own bed. I try and read Murakami but his style seems grey and subtle and the words pass by in the background. I am reminded that I like airports and shipyards and all night shopping centres, where people think day thoughts at night.

In Chiang Mai our guesthouse owner is from Belfast and it turns out he was on the flight we got bumped off. Sometimes I am not so much travelling as watching the world shrink.

I lie on the massage table in a room like a barbershop, with mirrors all down one side, useless for the blind masseuses that work there. There's a fan on the wall rattle and humming, back and forth, as if reading a fluttering newspaper on the table. A radio talks quietly. A fat blind man snores on a free table, taking his break. My masseuse is Mr Nut, and he is also blind. He starts by running his hand down my leg, barely touching me, checking my stature perhaps. I hope he will start listing off the wear and tear of my joints as his hand passes over them ("Torn miniscus, Skiing Accident, 1999") but he remains silent. He is not shy with his hands and manhandles me into positions using my crotch as a lever. However I am a grown up now and am unbothered. It is a two hour massage and he uses thumbs, elbows and knees to devastating effect. I would like to doze but cannot. I talk to him in my sleepy voice and he says that it is a lovely voice. His hands are warm like a bakers. He sings sometimes, or chats quietly to others in the shop as he gently beats me up.

...back to the bar owners mansion in the back of her pick up for a breakfast bbq, then back to her bar for a lunchtime dance on the tables, red wine in a Thai sauna telling ghost stories with Laos karaoke drifting across the Mekong, a goodbye drink which lasts 14 hours, all day Malibu and coke in a Halloween spent in our very own boat, afterhours bowling and boozing in a Laos bowling alley...

The Mekong is muddy, swirling and brown. We are 15 in a slowboat that can accomodate 60 on a two day trip from the border to Luang Prabang. Long thin speedboats occasionally pass us by with passengers hunched miserably in crash helmets. There are deaths weekly from speedboat collisions with hidden objects in the river. Our captain slingshots our long boat around rapids and rocks using the full two hundred metre width of the river to do so. We watch the tree covered banks slide by, the misty, cloud covered hilltops, the stilted huts of the occasional village. Somebody throw a spear already.

We visit a beautiful waterfall and I hear the memories of shouts.

We stumble upon a Laos village fete. We enter to geese copulating bad temperedly. A speaker stack taller than me is powered by a tractor engine on blocks. Chickens scrabble in the dirt between the tables. Kids wander around with crisp packets as big as them. People eat and drink and laugh. A keyboardist and singer play live and there's the atmosphere of a wedding, young and old dancing in the marquee. There is even a "drunken uncle" character, who dances with his arm around a cowering girl as her friends shriek. Same same but different, this marquee is a parachute suspended from a tree. We receive only friendly indifference, a welcome in itself, and the girls in our party are soon popular dance companions. I am the only male asked up to dance, go me, but a foreigner needs a licence to be with a Lao(i)s woman and apparently my papers are not in order.