When Steven and I awoke in the dorm we discovered a quarter of our bottle of lao lao remained unfinished. The thing about lao lao whiskey, which tastes more like a vodka, is that if you drink enough the night before you don't wake up with a hangover, you wake up still genuinely drunk.
"Steven! Drink the lao lao!" I demanded. Climbing up to his top bunk we cleaned off the bottle in 10 minutes, reigniting any remnants of alcohol in our systems from the night before and beginning perhaps the most intense drinking session of my life.
Steven, Bentley and I headed out for breakfast, unable to find anyone else. After this we decided that the best course of action for today was to buy 4 more litres of lao lao at the shop and begin drinking all day long. The previous night I had managed to organise my travel to Bangkok and my flight home whilst getting plastered and just about managing to watch the England game. This left us with little to do in Luang Prabang and so when we saw a DVD shop selling knock-offs for 60p each it became inevitable that today we would cram ourselves into Spicy Laos' movie room with some cracking films. I got a British indie film to show the Canadians ('Moon') and they bought a Canadian indie film to show me ('Pontypool'). The choices we made were fantastic. At the end of Pontypool we had a crowd of around 7 who'd joined us, me and the guys having drunk 2 bottles of lao lao between us, all of us periodically screaming at the screen and wailing with laughter.
When Bentley and I observed the tendency for apocalyptic films to have a scene in which the main characters end up getting it on, it prompted us to simultaneously start singing "It's the end of the world as we know it!" whilst humping the air. It was the kind of funny moment that comes out of nowhere and can only happen between people who genuinely know each other. I've shared moments like this with everyone in the gang over the past few weeks in Laos.
The few days we spent in Luang Prabang have left me with more blank spots than any other. I don't remember shouting at a tuk-tuk driver who offered me marijuana, "No Thankyou! I don't want anything! Kob-Chai Lai-Lai!!" I don't remember smashing my sunglasses and lighter on the floor in a fit of inexplicable rage. "You just lost it, dude," said Bentley the next day. The night after movie-day, however, i can remember most of. Whilst we were all at Spicy Laos, it seemed that every decent person we'd met in the whole of our trip suddenly came out of the woodwork to drink the night away. Alex the French dude, Chris the English dude, Cia from Vang Vieng, Seb from Spicy Laos, Luke and Sarah the English couple who'd be in and out of our lives since Don Det island. Together we celebrated, playing pool and joking around in the courtyard and drinking the place dry, occasionally venturing out into the town to visit the night market or on a lao lao run. Perhaps one of the greatest and messiest nights ever.
On my last day in Laos, it truly was the end of the world as we'd known it. Again we rose drunk, but this time we just headed for breakfast and tea. On our way back, we bumped in to Arun and Harriet who announced that this was their goodbye; they were headed for Vietnam on a flight at midday and were rushing back for their tuk-tuk pickup. Arun and I pressed our heads together as tears began to stream down our faces. Despite everyone and everything that we'd encountered in the last two and a half months, we'd actually not spent one night or morning apart. This began as our trip and what we'd chosen to drunkenly ignore - the end - was suddenly upon us. We embraced for a long time. I wished at that moment that I didn't have to leave him but instead I said, "you have a fucking good time, alright mate? Don't you dare stop having fun."
Most of the day was spent playing pool. Graham had decided that he'd completed his trip in South-East Asia and wanted to head to New Zealand, so he was due to travel with me on our epic journey to Bangkok. Rory is heading on with Bentley and Steven. As the day wore on, we waited around, watching Rory and Steven's heroic attempts at sharking the guys who work at Spicy Laos at pool. They went 4 beers up but will be disappointed when I tell everyone that they ended 6 beers down. As the afternoon wore on slowly, the same faces who'd appeared the previous night began to return to Spicy Laos to wave off Graham and I. When the time came, our tuk-tuk driver waited patiently as we hugged and high-fived our way through the crowd. "Steven, i love you n'shit," I told him. "John, you're coming to Canada...very soon," said Bentley with as serious a look as I'd ever seen on his face. Rory and I had few words but knowing looks and red eyes as we parted. I spent the next hour trying not to break down.
Graham and I began psyching ourselves up for our next mini-adventure: two night buses back to Bangkok via Vientiane. I've enjoyed passing through cities that I'm already familiar with; knowing your way around a place is a huge advantage and makes it easy to make the most of a day. It was made all the more enjoyable when, on the bus to Vientiane, we met a couple of girls called Naomi and Lilly with whom we wandered the town all day. Each of us was due to leave Laos' capital that afternoon and as our coach rolled in at 6 a.m., none of us having had any sleep, we kept up an astounding rate of chat considering our tiredness. As we said goodbye to each other later that day, I felt quite proud of the lot of us for managing to make something out of a rainy, cold, potentially wasteful day in a particularly uneventful city. Then, as Graham and I waited for our tuk-tuk to our next night bus we bumped in to Phil, a Brit who had coincidentally booked the exact same route back to Bangkok as us, had chosen to meet his tuk-tuk pickup at exactly the same guesthouse and had a flight back to England departing 5 minutes before mine the next day. So, once again, the three of us are making the most of a potentially wasteful day, wandering round Khao San Road, waiting to leave for the airport at 5 a.m. tomorrow morning.
"I hate the smell of Khao San in the morning." Where it began for me, it is now ending. Today, this road will become more and more hectic, more and more fun, more and more drunk. I'd love to analogise this description with the rest of my trip but, whilst accurate, it would not do it justice in the slightest. Whilst occasionally in a stupor, I have been more awake than ever in my life. Together as a group, whether it was Arun and me in Thailand, the five lollipop kids in Cambodia, or the entire gang in Laos, each of us has driven the others into new experiences, new understandings of the world, new perspectives. We've ended up sharing all of this. None of us will ever lose any of it.
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