My friend Michael is from Munich. His mother’s relations ended up on the other side of the Berlin Wall, and they hadn’t met in 50 years. When the wall came down, the Ossis piled into their Trabant to visit the long-lost family in the west. As they sputtered closer to Munich, they began to realize how shabby they looked compared to the sleek Bavarians. They grew ashamed of their communist-standard terylene pants and plastic shoes. A few miles from the house, Michael’s aunt called to his uncle in excitement. In the shop window, she saw a row of garments hanging in a circle with a price list more reasonable than they had dared hope. Trousers, 6 marks. Jackets, 7 marks. They went inside and asked to try on the clothes.

The man in the shop explained gently that it was a drycleaners.

Michael’s aunt cried with humiliation when she told the story a few days after arriving. I am reminded of her tears in Hoi An, where hand-tailored silk costs less than the price of laundering it in Manhattan.

    ‘You like a bag?’
Would I? I am too deep in retail narcosis to know. She has measured me twenty ways from chin to feet. She has zipped me into and out of twenty sample garments. We have drunk tea and studied bolts of cloth, laughed at the sight of this ungainly foreigner in an ao dai, pondered colors. We are friends in the shorthand of clothes.
   ‘To the hip. Bootcut.’
    ‘Lined. Mmm.’
    ‘Higher in the neck, you think?’
    ‘Fabric better with some stretch.’

I’ve picked out three pairs of trousers, a skirt, a modified ao dai, a jacket and some tops.
    ‘You like a bag, too?’
She is totting up my order on a child’s copybook. It comes to fifty five dollars. I don’t really need a bag, I think.
   ‘Because I am very happy you came into my shop today. I would like to make a bag for you as present.’

It was all ready in six hours. Now I am preening.

In Hanoi, the haberdashers sell rolls of designer label tape. Hugo Boss Hugo Boss Hugo Boss. Just snip and stitch for instant style. Better yet are the trays of metal tags to be attached to shoes and bags—Prada or Polo, it’s up to you.

At every corner, teenage boys flog parcels of books to travelers. They are carefully targeted to the Vietnam circuit: Lonely Planets, The Quiet American, Air America. The cover art is anemic, because these books have been photocopied whole and then carefully bound. Legitimate bookstores offer to swap one of their ‘real’ books for three ‘photo’ books. In your photocopied Lonely Planet, you can read how Le Vie branded mineral water has been plagued by instant competitors called Le Vive, Le Vile, and even Le Viol (The Rape).

Brochures for popular hotels warn fiercely that local fleapits have taken to using their good name. Elsewhere, whole stores are devoted to knockoff music, movies, and software, and tailors urge you to bring in fashion magazines to copy.

In a caf&eacute, Carmen Kass, looking as burnished as the Goldfinger girl, smiles down from a famous ad for Christian Dior scent. Except the bottle of J’Adore has been replaced by a bottle of 777 beer, and it is incongruous in the hands of this lager-colored angel.

Will the real Vietnam please stand up?

The dialogue is Beckettian in spareness and repetition. (Ooh! I finally used that Eng. Lit. degree!) My role is the same in each setting, from a mountaintop monastery in Burma to an island in Laos to a market in Hanoi. My partners in the two-hander have been monks, fishermen, waiters, and hawkers.

   ‘Where are you from?’
   ‘Ireland.’
   ‘I-ya-lan. Ah. Roy Keane!’
   [Polite smile]‘Yes, football.’
   [Vigorous nod] ‘Yes. Football. Roy Keane!’
  [Silence.]

The boats in northern Laos have signs reading ‘No going on the roof.’ The rule is no women on the roof, but foreigners seem unable to grasp this simple gender discrimination so it has been extended rather than risk capsizing. Animist beliefs are powerful here, and people often wear amulets to appease and charm the spirits. If a woman sits above a man, his amulets become useless. This is particularly dangerous for boatmen, since it could cause the whole boat to break down or sink. (An extension of this belief holds that women’s clothing should not hang above men’s on a washing line, though the guesthouses no longer seem to hold with this. Too difficult to tell the sex of cargo pants.)

Despite this belief, on the boat from Paxse to Don Muang on the southern tip of Laos, the captain tried to herd me onto the roof with the foreign men. The boat was packed as usual. No one would consider taking a trip without a 50-kilo sack of rice, a few chickens and ducks, a bag of cabbages, some motorbike parts and a gaggle of toddlers. The Lao would be good people to be shipwrecked with, and their cargo methods increase the chances. There are no seats on most boats; women squat on the ground among the sacks, chatting and breastfeeding. When new people arrive everyone shunts along without resentment. The 6:45-from-Chappaqua notion of ‘my’ seat and ‘my’ space is foreign here, as are the sighs and eye-rolling that go along with it.

I sat on the side of the cargo area, leaning against the wooden column that held the roof up. I had decided to uphold traditions despite the boat captain sending me to the roof. But the ceiling was low and I couldn’t sit with my head upright. Nor could I let my legs dangle since the floor was so packed. I sat in a Beavis-and-Butthead slump until I couldn’t take it any more and climbed up.

The roof was tin and packed with basting foreigners. Lao pople would not willingly expose themselves to sunlight, so presumably the women-on-the-roof ban was overturned to ease space pressure below. The heat, which is not especially intense in November, was worth it for the views up top. Just above the Cambodian border, the Mekong hits middle-aged spread, and I was heading for Si Phan Don, the Four Thousand Islands, which lie in the 14-kilometer span. My out-of-date Rough Guide said these islands were beautiful but rarely visited by tourists due to the distance and the transport conditions, so I was surprised to see a dozen falangs on board. It turns out that the land border with Cambodia is now open for business and Don Khong has become a popular stopover on the Indochina circuit. (And it’s all about circuits. Backpackers hate backtracking.)

The crew of foreigners on the roof was representative. Three Canadians—they are everywhere, this year’s Australians—a Swiss, a German, one Irish, three Dutch (also wildly overrepresented, and my personal favorites), one English guy, a Finnish lad, and one South Korean. Normally I’d expect a handful of Israelis and French, too. Americans are notable by their absence in this part of the world. It’s partly the political and economic climate this year, but more that US culture does not support extended travel breaks as other western countries do. The ‘year off’ does not sit well with puritan sensibilities, and American graduates are too busy working to pay off the colossal college fees that are picked up by the taxpayer in Europe. The working Dutch can save up four weeks vacation allowance to see Laos and still have a week or two left over in a year. Those paltry six weeks were famously hyped as an ‘sabbatical’ at Netscape—unpaid—a perk extended to long-term employees.

The boat broke down, of course, thanks to my presence on the roof. But it’s easier to deal with a stationary boat than a broken-down bus. The river scenery is entertaining, and you can walk about and stretch. River life is the same throughout rural southeast Asia: kids swimming, girls shampooing their hair, women washing clothes and dishes, men fishing from small boats. Everybody waves and shouts ‘Sabaidee!’ Our breakdown brought a bonus: we got an unhindered view of the sun setting on the western bank. The boat guys watched expressionless as all the falangs whipped out cameras.

As we neared Don Khong, a backpacker group started a frantic discussion on the cost of the journey. I had got on at Paxse, and agreed to pay 30,000 kip ($3). They had got on an hour downstream at Champasak and didn’t fix a price, but their guesthouse owner told them 20,000 kip. They are passionate. They will not pay 30,000. The boatman had not mentioned a price yet for this ten-hour journey, but the backpackers thrash the issue for an hour. A dollar has powerful hold on a 22-year-old brain here; these same kids spent much of the trip comparing prices on massages and marijuana pizza toppings.

Finally the boatman came around to collect money, and asked for thirty. After a drawn-out, aggressive bargaining session, they beat him down to twenty-five. The French-Canadian girl leader was still aggrieved.
   ‘I’m giving you twenny and that’s it. Twenny from Champasak. Falang not stupid! Twenny!’
I quietly paid my (fair) 30,000. I was on the boatman’s side.

We piled off in a cloud of bad grace. At the landing, it was getting dark and there was a single pick-up truck, which our guidebook said cost around $3.75 to hire. There were ten of us. He quoted 40 cents each. The baby backpackers started up again, insisting on 30 cents, though our alternative was to walk eight kilometers in the dark. The ringleader got more passionate. She’d been traveling with Israelis, and it was a point of pride now to bargain for everything. We stood there while the spat continued, and I wanted to smack her. Eventually I hauled my pack onto the truck.
    ‘I’ve been on a boat for ten hours. It’s dark. I want to go to a guesthouse. Ten cents is not enough for me to stand here.’
Slowly the others got on the truck. I felt like a blackleg, but didn’t care. The Lao have been unfailingly fair and generous hosts, but these kids have a paranoia that is more appropriate for Saigon or Delhi. ‘They’ are out to rip ‘us’ off. The backpackers do not realize how distasteful it is for the Lao to haggle in this way, or how it sets up the cynical dynamic between tourist and local I’ve found from Thailand to Majorca. I’m glad that hagglers keep prices down for me—and I bargain happily, when it’s appropriate—but I wish they knew when to stop.

I lost my backpackers temporarily when I checked into the Villa Don Khong. At four dollars, in a village where beds can be had for a buck, it constitutes luxury. Cold-shower, rat-in-the-walls luxury, but luxury nonetheless. I had a perfect day there. The room was light, which encouraged me get up at 5.30 and go down to the river to watch the sun come up. Some meditation, then some yoga. Breakfast on the verandah at seven was toasted baguette, two eggs from the hens who roamed very freely below my window, wild honey, papaya, and Lao coffee the consistency of melted chocolate. All for a dollar, since I’m counting now.

At nine I rented a bike and went to the ferry crossing. The ferries here are planks of wood nailed across two or three wooden fishing dories, with a diesel engine attached to one. From the mainland I rode down to the Cambodian border, 30 kilometers or so, to see what was billed as ‘the largest waterfall in Southeast Asia’. By volume, that is, for it’s not very high, but it’s still impressive. A Canadian who had been on my boat ride wondered how you’d get a canoe down there while his Scottish girlfriend looked blank. We Celts don’t think in those terms.

A returning Lao emigrant in Lacoste polo shirt and bermuda shorts insisted I pose in his family portraits, both still and video. These native tourists seem ill-at-ease here, and go out of their way to align themselves with falangs.
    ‘Where are you from?’
    ‘Ireland. And you?’
    ‘Germany. Koln,’ he says, in an accent even I can identify as adult-learned. He’d moved to Germany 28 years ago. It is hard to go back. I know how he feels.

I was whimpering from saddle-soreness by the time I got back to the ferry, and all I could think about was noodle soup (a common problem these days). I picked a winner: Mrs. Somphan made ‘fo&eacute’, Vietnamese-style, and the spiciest green papaya salad I’d had yet. The chili tears that streamed may have been tears of gratitude. Back at Villa Don Khong, I read some old French magazines and took a nap before hauling my weary backside to Mr. Pon’s riverside restaurant for a sunset drink. Lau-lau, rice whiskey, toned down for foreigners with lime juice, wild honey, and ice. It’s the best 30-cent cocktail I’ve ever tasted, and who cares that the restaurant faces east? It gave me time to pre-order the fish steamed in banana leaf, which was worth a two-hour wait. This terrine of the freshest fish imaginable has the texture of custard and a wonderful, delicate flavor. I fought through a few more pages of Ken Wilber’s Marriage of Sense and Soul and wished I’d brought something else to read. And so to bed.

Don Khong is my favorite kind of tourist spot: industrious, switched-on, and moderately prosperous in its own right. The farmers and fishermen here are amused and hospitable but not overawed by the new visitors. The island is paved with immaculate roads—pork barrel, I assume, since the current prime minister grew up here—but in three hours I saw just one pick-up, one huge SUV, and three Honda Dreams. And countless bikes, of course. By the time this trip finishes, I will be able to produce the following in all the major Southeast Asian languages:

‘Hello’; ‘Thank you’; ‘Chicken’; ‘Pork’; ‘Spicy, please’; and; ‘Hey, look! Falang on a bicycle!’

They’d warned me about Vietnam.

“It’s not like Laos, you know. They’re very grabby. Very… commercial.”

Some were more explicit.
“It’s just constant hassle. They try to rip you off all the time. The 5,000 dong bottle of water suddenly becomes 15,000 dong. You have to pay tourist prices for everything, and they won’t let you take the public buses.”

I’d already got stuck in the Lao border town of Savannakhet, waiting five days for the Vietnamese consulate to process my visa. It was twice as expensive as all the other visas I’d got (and I flip proudly through my passport these days). They make you specify an entry and exit date—tough luck if you change your mind and delay the start of the trip. Not a service economy, I noted.

In Savannakhet, where Vietnamese outnumber ethnic Lao, I developed an attitude that was only barely sweetened by the delicious custard donuts. The dogs, so docile in the rest of Laos, barked and chased me. (How do dog memes spread? In one town, they’re groveling wretches, in the next, snarling predators.) Shopkeepers were surly. I was overcharged for my breakfast noodle soup. By the time I caught the night bus to Hué, my Vietnam-related persecution complex was such that I willed them to be mean just to prove me right.

And that bus was everything I dreamed of. It was filthy, falling apart, and jammed with box upon box of chocolate coins. There was nowhere to put my feet, and the seat fell out of my seat when I tried to make it recline. I perched pathetically behind Alice, an 80-year-old Swiss-German lady whose fortitude stopped me dissolving in a puddle of self-pity.

“I lived with my muzzer in Basel and we went to Spain for our holiday every year. I was sixty years old when she died, and so then I decided to trawel because I vanted to see the vurld!”
She’d gone all over Central and South America, Southeast Asia, China, Japan, Russia, and India.

“And you know here they have no running vater in the toilet, but there is no smell, or hardly any smell! In India, there is also no running vater in the toilet and the smell is very bad. Even the Indian ladies, they say ‘Oh, the smell, the smell!’ But India is very beautiful and there are many temples in Mysore…”

Alice kept up a happy monologue for much of the trip, despite the bus staff, who exceeded my expectations in their meanness. Every bus I’ve taken in Southeast Asia has two or three men who are responsible for loading all the freight and fixing the regular breakdowns (in Burma, where the buses are ancient left-hand-drive Japanese imports, part of the job also involves hanging out the door to tell the blindsided driver about traffic coming in the opposite direction). One of these charmers literally shoved frail, hunch-backed Alice into her seat whenever she stood up. Later, as he slept on the boxes beside my feet I aimed a few accidental Timberlanded kicks at his skinny arse. Next morning I wished I’d kicked harder when I realized he’d chosen that temporary sleep spot in order to reach my bag, from which he had taken the rest of my Thai currency and my sunglasses. He smirked and walked away when I challenged him. There was nothing I could do—they still had my backpack on the roof—so I entertained  revenge fantasies as we waited at the border for four hours so the creeps could load and unload more chocolate coins.

When I finally got to Hué, filthy and bloodshot after sixteen hours, I felt like a million dong, as they say. I limped out of the bus-station looking for more opportunities to mutter complaints. Vietnam was an evil place full of thieves and granny-bashers, and now I had proof.

But then I was seduced.

Hué glows. Lemony colonial villas look built just for this light. I couldn’t find a taxi, but for the right reasons—this is a Honda-and-bicycle town. A bicycle culture is already morally and physically superior to a car culture, but in Hué they bike with style, too. Women glide past in high-heeled mules and bootcut pants. Schoolgirls float by in white ao dai costumes. Schoolboys chat to the pal balanced on the back carrier. Everyone shouts hello. The cyclo touts, whose lives are hard, shout “Maybe tomorrow, yes?” to each polite refusal.

Little old ladies dish out magnificent fresh spring rolls and spicy baguette-and-paté sandwiches for pennies. The ice-cream carts play Jingle Bells and Happy Birthday to You. Internet access is 20 cents an hour (though unfortunately that works out at about a cent a byte). I am grateful for the Roman characters on street signs after months of squiggly Thai, Burmese, and Lao scripts. In the Café Violon, a trio performs smoky, sexy jazz sung in Vietnamese.

And the sunsets on the Perfume River…is this getting too much?

This morning I sat in an another café drinking strong, strong coffee and watched men watch Britney Spears, who is apparently still not a girl, not yet a woman, though time marches on. Where were the Vietnamese women, I wondered, at 9.30 in the morning? Then I saw them, leaning out of small tin boats to tend the paddy field opposite while their men played Go, watched Britney, and looked after the kids. If I could overcome that little issue, I thought, I could live here. I could learn Vietnamese and raise a brood of dark-haired kids who would play boules and bring me strong coffee with my breakfast croissants.

It is a shame that Americans got into their worst messes with the people who are most like them in energy and freewheeling spirit—the Cubans and the Vietnamese. If Hué is Vietnam, then Vietnam is wonderful.

My sister Caroline turns 22 today (Actually, yesterday, but the original post went missing). She was 10 years old when I left home, and so sweet-natured that my friends used to imitate her answering our front door:

    ‘Hi! Hi! Tea or coffee?’

She’s finishing college in our hometown now, and though she believes I plot to get her to travel the world, I’m very glad to have there as my strongest link to home. Who else would send me indignant corrections when I mess up the names of Limerick rugby clubs, as usual? And who else would keep me up-to-date with Limerick slang?
    ‘That knacker is kicked!’
    ‘What do you mean, kicked?’
    ‘You know. Ugly. As in, he looks like he was kicked in the head.’

Happy birthday, Caro. XXX.

‘A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.’
—J.B. Priestley.

Tomorrow is goodbye Laos, good morning Vietnam. I am fortifying myself for industrial-strength Vietnamese hassle after lovely, gentle Laos.

In Vientiane I swapped Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood for a copy of Liam O’Flaherty’s collected short stories (Good riddance to the former. If I want angsty name-dropping posturing, I’ll read my own archive.) The O’Flaherty stories, which I hadn’t read since secondary school, were perfect material for this place. He grew up on Inishmore in the Aran Islands and started writing in the 1920s, and the Ireland he describes in these singing stories could be a sister to rural Laos today.

I remember fragments of his Ireland. My father was from the west of Ireland, and when I was a child I was careful not to drink too much 7-Up at granny’s cottage, where going to the toilet meant squatting in the back field. Terrifying at night. Strokestown in the mid-1970s was an old man’s town, like much of the west. The women had gone to Dublin or Liverpool, leaving a town full of old bachelor famers in tweed caps and black jackets. My grandfather cycled to the pub on Sunday mornings on a heavy iron bicycle of the kind I see everywhere here. The pub after Mass was where they all gathered, the old fellows, and not all of them went to Mass first.

I have never imagined those towns, those men, being young. But here they are in O’Flaherty’s stories, striding powerfully through the pages, matchmaking, drinking, fishing, and farming. And here they are, too, in Laos. I spent an evening with Mr. Mei’s village friends, who had been working the rice paddies since before dawn. Later they hammered together a coffin for a villager who died the day before. With a curiosity in town, and a friend to mourn, they were glad of the excuse to club together for a jar of Lao poteen, which we drank sitting on an earthen floor by the light of a kerosene lamp. Long after this falang had crashed, they stayed drinking and singing around the dregs of the fourth or fifth pot of rice hooch, while the roosters crowed outside. They are in the short prime of a manhood that is more arduous than anything Ireland asks of her soft-bellied Celtic tigers these days.

Like my Lao friends, O’Flaherty’s characters know their world is changing. They have an uneasy relationship with moving pictures from America and with the archaeologists and anthropologists who show up to study their way of life. In one famous parody, he introduces the grotesque Patsa:

O’Flaherty would smirk at Mr. Mei’s daughters, the little girls who were prim and bashful as they shrank from me in front of their parents. The same lassies, who were about six years old, hustled me shamelessly with their friends at the boat-landing two hours later, safely out of sight of the village and their elders.
    ‘Falang! Hey, falang! Money? Kip? Bon-bon? Pen?’

At least they had the grace to blush when they recognized me, the sloe-eyed devils. But it occurred to me then, and later, writing this in a notebook with locals peering at the English squiggles and trying out my fancy pen, how odd it is that a single generation removed from O’Flaherty’s west, I now play the credulous European mystic in the east, the ancient East.