Behind the Smile

2 THE VISA RUN TO LAOS-1

2 THE VISA RUN TO LAOSVientiane, the capital of Laos was not actually all that far away, as the crow flies, but getting there was a very different story unless one flew, which Lek and Craig decided against for financial reasons. Lek took the bus into Phitsanulok with one of her girlfriends to buy the bus tickets the day before they were about to leave. This too was not a long journey, but it could easily take six hours to get there and back. Lek liked to take a friend so that they could make a day of it – do some shopping and eat lunch somewhere nice. This was the plan for the day also.

Lek and Craig had been getting on a lot better since he had given her a hundred thousand Baht – a quarter of the money that he needed to keep in a Thai bank in order to qualify for a twelve-month visa extension. It troubled him, but at least his ‘family’ was stable again for a while and everyone was happy or to be accurate: Soom was ecstatic, Lek appeared happy and Craig was pretending to be happy.

Lek had postponed her plans to go back to work indefinitely, which was a relief to Craig, although he was all too aware that he had had to pay her a hundred thousand Baht to keep her. Not an ideal arrangement, but it did give him time to think about what to do next and he did feel that the two ladies in his life had earned the right to a year’s stability, even if he did decide to leave them high and dry the following year.

There was no question about it, Craig was feeling terribly hurt that Lek had been prepared to leave him at two days’ notice after they had been together for eight years. He just didn’t know what to do about it just yet and he wanted to help Soom stay in university. The kid had never had much and was genuinely nice. He often wondered whether Lek had been like that before going to Pattaya. He knew that she was a very popular woman, she often seemed to be the life and soul of the party, but she was often a different person when they were alone. Especially the last couple of years. Maybe she had grown bitter through disappointment, but disappointment with what? With him?

He had always done his best and no-one had ever suggested otherwise. When people left for the fields at seven or seven-thirty in the morning, his office light was always on and when they went to bed at nine, ten or eleven at night, his light was still burning. All the neighbours knew that and Lek had said she was very proud that he was such a hard worker. But it was true that the long hours had not translated into a good salary.

He had spent all his saving and everything he had earned keeping the three of them together and now it seemed that Lek had been topping up the house-keeping money with her own savings too.

He could think of only one thing to do: sell the flat in his home town of Barry, South Wales and live off that. He and Lek had been hoping to keep the flat for their retirement. It was not worth a lot of money, but if it had continued to rise in value for ten years, it would have seen him out and left Lek with a few million baht too.

Now it would have to go and there would be no welcome boost to the retirement fund for either of them, unless Fate pulled its fickle finger out.

It began to dawn on him that Lek had been trying to get him to sell the house, so that she wouldn’t have to go back to work. It was possible, because it would have been out of character for Lek to ask anyone to do anything as momentous as sell a house just to help her. She was far too independent for that. The more Craig thought about it, the more it made sense that that was what Lek had wanted all along.

∞

Lek and her friend Su waited until nine for the eight o’clock bus and so arrived at the bus station at ten-thirty. They had bought the two bus tickets ten minutes later and had about four hours to enjoy themselves before the next bus went there way. Lek made it clear that she would have to get some money from an ATM.

“I don’t have much money on me, I’m afraid, but Craig gave me a hundred thousand the other day, so we can take some of that, go for lunch – on me of course – and then we’ll have a look around the shops.”

Su was pretty much in awe of her friend and always had been, but a hundred thousand Baht was about nine months salary to her, so this was very impressive stuff.

“Let me see... we can spend five thousand today and I’ll take ten thousand to Laos with me. I’ve never been there, but they must have some decent shops, mustn’t they? Have you ever been there, Su?”

“No, not me Pee Lek. I’ve only left the province once and that was to go to Bangkok for a few days when we got married fifteen years ago. We stayed with the old man’s auntie. It was nice enough though. I haven’t even got a passport and wouldn’t know how to get one. Have you got a passport, Pee Lek?”

“Oh, yes, we went to Wales a few years ago, remember. I know Thais can enter Cambodia and Laos without a passport, but you can’t fly to Europe without one.”

Lek was not the sort of person to rub people’s noses in her apparent good fortune, but she did like to milk situations for the maximum amount of face she could get out of them. It was a habit she had gotten into after returning from Pattaya with Craig, when her reputation in the village was at a pretty low ebb and so was her self-esteem.

They took seats in a nice but not posh restaurant, after all, Lek didn’t want to embarrass her friend whose table manners left a lot to be desired.

“Order what you like, Su, it’s my treat to say ‘thanks’ for coming with me today. It’s so boring doing it alone. It’s very reasonable here too – good food, but not expensive.”

Su thought it was expensive, but she didn’t say so as she had her pride too.

However, she referred to her friend as ‘Pee’, not because Lek was older than her – they had been in school together – but because Lek appeared to be of higher status than she was. In general, ‘pee’ means ‘You are older than I and I am being polite’, but it can also refer to status, although age confers status too. The ‘opposite’ is ‘Nong’, which is a polite way of referring to a younger person or someone of lower status.

∞

The first stage of the journey was to get from Baan Suay to the bus station. Lek hired one of her friends to take them at seven o’clock in order to catch the VIP bus at nine. The driver took his wife and family in the back of the pick-up for a trip out to the big city, which they probably didn’t do from one month to the next. Once at the bus station, Lek treated them all to a meal and paid the petrol money.

Displaying largesse was one of her favourite jobs – she would have made a great Santa Claus, if he had been a woman.

The next stage, was the actual six-hour bus ride to Udon Thani through the mountains, but as it would be dark, there was nothing to see. Lek had taken her travel-sickness pills as usual, because she suffered from even the shortest car journey. The only problem was that they tended to make her lose her mind for several hours. She was well aware of the problem and would tell Craig when they were working, effectively putting him in charge of her well-being until she came down off them.

Lek invariably fell asleep on long journeys so the tablets were only a problem when they had to change vehicles. As they passed through Loei, Lek popped up from under her travelling blanket and peered past Craig out of the window. She looked him in the face from a few inches away, rubbed her eyes and stared out of the window again.

“If I met someone from here I would not know what to call him,” she said and flopped back in her seat.

“Do you mean: ‘Do you mean that you don’t know where are we?” he asked.

“That’s it,” she replied.

And she was asleep again before he could tell her. He had often regretted not keeping a collection of the odd things that Lek had said and done while stoned on travel-sickness pills.

They arrived in Udon Thani shortly after three and had to wait two hours for the bus to Nong Khai, a city near the Laos border. That took an hour, so at six- fifteen, they took a twenty-minute taxi ride to the border.

Craig was leading Lek around, carrying his laptop and dragging their case, so he was relieved to find the customs channels virtually clear. They filled in the exit papers and went straight through to where they had to get another bus over the long ‘Friendship Bridge’ in order to cross the Mekong into Laos.

Then it was more faffing about with immigration and entry visas and a taxi to a hotel that Craig had booked on the Internet. Lao is very similar to Thai, so Craig had no problem telling the taxi driver the name of the hotel, which was situated on the ‘Water Front’ in the centre of Vientiane.

They were stripping off, going for a shower in their room at ten a.m. After a journey of five hundred kilometres which had taken thirteen hours. Craig was shattered, but Lek was starting to come down. Craig decided to leave the visa for the following day.

They were both tired, hungry, thirsty and inquisitive, but they settled for setting the phone alarm for one o’clock and taking a nap. However, when one o’clock came, they were both raring to go outside and see what Vientiane was like. Lek had some preconceptions of Laos and had met many people from there, but Craig had no idea what to expect. Their first impression as they left the hotel was that it was very clean.

Old but clean, in the way that proud, poor people might wear old clothes and even have an old car, but keep them in the best possible condition. A lot of the street signs still bore their old colonial names in French, although Laos had been communist for decades. Lek was amused by the way Lao used the Thai language. She kept pointing differences out to Craig, who knew enough Thai to understand what she was talking about.

The only thing that Craig remembered about Laos was that it was the most bombed country of all time and that its mostly rural population of about six and a half million were still regularly finding landmines and packets of cyanide dropped by the Americans in the Seventies, so he was surprised to hear so many American accents there.

There were also a lot of French people, presumably tourists. Lek chose a restaurant-c*m-bar within a hundred yards of the hotel and they sat down. Lek took the menu and made noises as she read it, Craig ordered a Beer Lao, which he had never tried before and a spa for Lek.

“I have no idea how hot this food will be, telak, so I will order two Thai dishes and some spare ribs for you. OK?”

“Yes, that’s fine. Do you want to try this Lao beer? It’s quite nice.”

She took a sip and agreed.

“I’ll wait for tonight or I’ll be asleep again soon. I can’t drink in the afternoons anymore. It makes me too sleepy.”

“You’re getting old, that’s what it is.”

She knew it was true, but did not want to hear it.

“You can get a new lady if you want. Maybe a Lao lady and stay here...”

They both regretted it. It didn’t take much to cause an argument these days. They both found it hard to talk together for more than fifteen minutes without one of them passing a snide comment or getting angry over the smallest thing. Conversation was like picking your way through a minefield. Craig often didn’t say anything at all for fear of the consequences.

He wondered if Lek was going through an early menopause. He had heard that hormones in food were causing girls to become fertile earlier and women to become menopausal earlier too. Or at least, he thought that he had read it. He couldn’t remember at that precise moment. Perhaps he had dreamed it. It made sense though. If women were born with all the eggs they would ever have and they started using them earlier, the supply would run out earlier too. It sounded feasible, but he had no idea really.