Making It Up As I Go Along (17 page)

I went away with Himself to Laos (although it was
reported in the papers as Lagos, with an earnest line, ‘Keyes has travelled to Africa in
the past for charitable reasons’). But no, it was LAOS I went to. Laos is in Asia; it
borders Vietnam, China, Burma and Cambodia and has Thailand on the other side of the Mekong.

Before I went, people kept asking, ‘Why
Laos
? For the love of God, what’s wrong with the Maldives?’ And I had no
answer for them. Except the nasty suspicion that if I was confined to a place with nothing to do
but sunbathe and get scuttered (neither of which I do), the unbearable feelings that live in my
solar plexus might get out of control altogether.

So off to Laos we went, with the roof of our
house removed and the whole place covered with scaffolding and walkways, like it was a prison,
and every single thing, every SINGLE thing, covered in dust: the knives and forks in our
drawers, the cotton buds in their box, the teeth in the very back of my mouth.

I must say though, they are really nice builders
– not like the old days of the Celtic Tiger when they didn’t give a shite, when they
just knocked lumps out of your 100-year-old mouldings with their ladders and chortled and said,
‘Sure, it was fecking ancient, wha’?’

RIGHT! So Laos. We’ll never get there with
all the asides I’m doing. Okay, long journey, via Heathrow, Bangkok and finally Luang
Prabang, the old royal capital of Laos. And it was fecking
ROASTING.
I’m breaking out in a sweat even thinking about it. Humid like you wouldn’t believe.
Instantly my fair frizzed up like I was Krusty the Clown.

Luang Prabang (furthermore known as LP) is after
winning city of the year two years in a row in Himself’s
Wanderlust
magazine.
It’s on the Mekong and is very pretty and riddled with temples with Buddhas and we were
made to tour them. (My personal temple limit is thirty-one; after that, I start becoming
short-tempered, even disrespectful.)

There are almost no cars but millions of
motorbikes and tuk-tuks and many new fancy French-fusion restaurants. But almost no shops;
everything is sold from stalls or huts or at the market. A very innocent sort of place. Even at
the crafts market, no one would be shouting, ‘Over here, pretty lady! I have good price
for you!’ You’d look at their stuff and they’d yawn and you’d wander on
and it’s a wonder anything gets sold at all. No entrepreneurial spirit. Lord Sugar would
give them a right scolding.

We were there three nights, and every night the
whole city (ah, it’s not really a city, it’s more like Dún Laoghaire) plunged
into darkness as the power failed – we were enchanted by this. Himself got to wear his
head torch, which he was THRILLED by.

The next day we went ‘up country’
with a guide and a driver, and it really did feel like uncharted territory. The alarmingly
narrow roads were on top of mountains with sheer drops of hundreds of feet, sometimes on both
sides.

We stopped at a hillside H’mong village and
the guide was insistent that we call in and visit some poor locals in their humble homes, and I
was equally insistent that we were NOT going to call in, because I’ve done that sort of
stuff in the past and I come out hating myself and I’m fairly sure the visited ones hate
me back. I feel voyeuristic and exploitative and embarrassed to be
invading
their privacy, and also I hate making small talk, which is fecking obligatory – you have
to ask about their goat and how often they milk it, and you have to pretend to laugh when the
rooster makes a huge big screechy noise at the sight of you.

Nor do the villagers have any interest in me. One
time in Thailand, I tried starting a conversation with a woman, about how my granny boiled water
over an open fire in exactly the same way that she was doing, and she just stared at me with,
‘What the fuck do I care?’ eyes.

I’m perfectly happy to give the money so
that I DON’T have to visit the villagers.

After about eight hours we arrived in a biggish
city called Phonsavan – a lively place, full of markets, where business was brisk in
galvanized buckets and nylon knickers and live bats (I swear to God, I’m still not right
after seeing them).

And then! Something incredible happened! I saw a
box of BB cream.
ASIAN
BB cream – i.e. the best, most
authentic
BB
cream. Up to now, I’ve been riding the BB cream bandwagon with my Estée Lauder
version, which I find HIGHLY satisfactory and looks lovely on my skin, but on Twitter
everyone’s been saying, ‘The best BB creams are the Asian ones,’ and there I
was, looking at one!

I flung myself on it, extracting it from between
the bats and the buckets, and this shrewd stallholder looked me up and down and eventually
decided I could afford £2.50. Clearly she thought she was robbing me blind, whereas I was
overjoyed and my guide was beyond baffled. BAFFLED. ‘What does it do?’ he asked (as
everyone does), and I said, ‘I don’t really know, but you have to have it if you
care about beauty products. The BB stands for “blemish balm” and every
self-respecting make-up bag has one and … look! I don’t really know! But it’s
a good thing and I need it!’

Then it dawned on me that
there would be other people who’d be interested in owning an authentic Asian BB cream, so
I set myself a little project that every town I visited I would trawl the stalls looking for
them. (See, they don’t have chemists, like in the ‘developed world’. Their
stalls are more like jumble sales, where Lux soap is next to a bowl of crickets and beside a
huge big pile of Valium, which you can buy like pick’n’mix – much as I wanted
to, I desisted. I’m bad enough.)

That night we stayed in a hotel that was
jam-packed with all these shouty
Toor of Dooty
men, who looked like they were still
fighting the Vietnam War. Buzz cuts and camouflage and other pieces of tomfoolery. Finally it
dawned on us that they were landmine disposal people – Laos is the most bombed country in
the world. During the Vietnam War, more bombs were dropped by the US forces on Laos (even though
they weren’t at war with them) than were dropped on all of Europe during the Second World
War. Often the bombs were dropped because the US planes hadn’t been able to get to their
targets in Hanoi and they didn’t feel like flying back to their base in Thailand with all
their goodies, so they just fecked them over Laos, like Laos was a big rubbish bin.

To this day, vast parts of arable land in Laos
are unusable because they’ve got bombs buried in it, so these kindly
Toor of
Dooty
lads were off to do some bomb clearance. After an extremely strange tay in which
nearly everything on the menu wasn’t available, we retired to our room, where the
electricity promptly failed. Out with Himself’s head torch!

The next day we went to the Plain of Jars, which
again, like the BB creams, I’m at a loss as how to explain. It’s a massive area,
covered with … well …
jars.
Big stone jars. Up to three metres high. Some
say they might have been burial urns, others say they
were for storing
… well …
jar.
But nobody knows. Nevertheless, it’s very atmospheric,
especially if you go to Sites 2 and 3, where we saw no one.

That’s the thing about Laos, it really does
seem to be untouched and uncorrupted and the people seem very innocent.

That night we stayed in a very basic place
– no electricity – like,
officially
no electricity, unlike the other
places, which had electricity for some of the time. And the rooms were little wooden huts and
there were windows but they had no glass in them, and we were right beside the river, which was
some tributary of the Mekong. And, in general, I’m not a person who’s comfortable
with ‘basic’ – mostly because I’m afeerd of everything, and specifically
beasts, to wit, spiders, animals and that sort of thing.

But God only knows what got into me, because I
was very happy. We sat outside on wooden benches and drank mango smoothies (well, I did; Himself
had Laos beer) and admired the river, and when we went to bed there was a mosquito net over us,
which I decided would protect me from all predators. Just before I went to sleep, I put my
anti-mad tablets out on the bedside yoke for easy access in the morning.

And when I awoke, after a lovely slumber,
weren’t they all ett?! Yes! My anti-mad tablets! By insects or small beasts unknown! Who
must have been going around in TOP form all day.

So, yes, Laos is a country where the ants will
eat your anti-mad tablets, but it’s still a lovely, lovely, lovely place.

mariankeyes.com
,
April 2012.

Hello, and welcome to MAD! (Marian’s
Antarctica diary!) This is a very long ‘piece’ and it’s written in a diary
format. I’m just telling you this so as you can ‘pace’ yourself.

Greetings from the Heathrows, where I am a nervous
wreck! Yaze! The flight from Dublinland was delayed coming in, and there are only two and a half
hours before the flight leaves for Buenos Aires, and I have A VERY REAL fear, founded in FACT
and empirical PAST EXPERIENCE, that my suitcases won’t make it to Argentina and I will be
in the Antarctics without:

I’m so convinced that this is going to
happen that I’ve bought a notebook and a pack of three (3) pens from the WHSmith to draw
up a list of all the things I will need when I get to Ushuaia (the world’s most southerly
city, and not hot like you might think when you hear the word ‘southerly’, no, not
hot at all, but actually very, very cold).

Those of you who know me will know that on planes
my bags fail to turn up more often than they arrive. And any transit
through Heathrow almost certainly guarantees that I’ll get on the flight and my
luggage won’t, and obviously you’d think I’d have learnt by now and at least
brought enough anti-mad tablets in my hand luggage to last a few days, but no, I haven’t
learnt, and it makes me wonder if fundamentally I am an optimist when I’d thought all
along I was a pessimist, and isn’t life one long process of learning about oneself?

Himself (for Himself is my travelling companion)
asked a British Airways ‘man’ if he could tell us anything about the whereabouts of
the bags, and the ‘man’ was helpful! He couldn’t actually be persuaded to say
that the bags would make the flight, but he did admit that they’d left Terminal 1 and
arrived in Terminal 5.

(A quick aside on British Airways: I used to call
them the World’s Most Supercilious Airline because I felt that they were told in staff
training to channel Mary Poppins. ‘Be brisk, dears! Brisk, patronizing, cold, yes,
withhold
. And DO feel free to pull the passengers up for not having scrubbed their
faces properly and polished their shoes.
Scold
them.’

You see, I have my reasons for this assessment
… *mutters darkly* … once upon a time, on a business-class flight on British
Airways, I found that I was seated not next to Himself, but to a smelly man (he may not have
actually been smelly, I just say these things), and it was an overnight flight and the overnight
chairs are in little pods of two, curled around each other, and it would be like the man and I
were sleeping with each other, and Himself was way down the back next to a lady, so I tried to
flag down a stewardess and said, ‘Miss, miss, please can I not sleep next to the smelly
man and –’ And she planted herself in front of me, tall and bony and with her scarf
tied abnormally neatly, and said, ‘Do sit down, dear!’ Then she breezed away briskly
to
scold a man for taking his shoes off, leaving me feeling foolish and
chastised and worried about sleeping with the smelly man (who probably wasn’t smelly at
all; like I said, I just say these things).

But that was all a long time ago! Yes! In another
lifetime, and I feel British Airways staff have definitely ‘warmed up’. And anyway,
I am not one to hold a grudge, no, that is not my way, except perhaps it is, and if so I
shouldn’t be boasting about it.

So I am still here, waiting to board the plane,
and I am anxious, so anxious that I bought myself a Moshi Monsters toothbrush and I flirted with
an Alexander Wang bag in the Horrods, in the most delightful ‘shade’ of sort of pale
blue-green, and I would have bought it except I knew that I wasn’t in my right mind, and I
even said it to Himself: ‘I’d like to buy it but I’m not in my right mind.
I’ll give it thirty-six hours and see if I still love it.’ (Actually, I’ve
just gone on the Net-a-Porters looking for it, and it’s not there, and I’m wondering
if I should run back to the Horrods and buy it. But what would be the point, seeing as
I’ve nothing to put in it, seeing as my luggage is ‘lost in transit’, which is
quite an apt description of my state of mind.)

So anyway, Antarctica! It’s been very
funny, people’s reactions, when they’ve heard that I’m going there. They kind
of seize up, then an expression – ConfusionJudgementPity – zips across their face
and I can see they’re thinking, ‘Is she INSANE? Who would go to Antarctica? When you
could go to Lanzarote?’

Then, after a second, they gather themselves and
say, too cheerily, ‘Well! That’ll be … cold! Yes. But you’ll see polar
bears?’

And I say, ‘No, you only get polar bears in
the North Pole.’ And they say, ‘You’re actually going to the actual North
Pole?’ And I say, ‘No, you thick-arse, didn’t I just tell you I
wasn’t?’

… Listen, I’ve
got to go, I’ve to get on the plane. Himself is anxious.

The flight was fourteen hours long, which I was
worried about because I was afeerd I might go a little mad in the confined space, but actually
it was GRAND and I slept for most of it and woke up feeling optimistic and that was nice. So we
arrived into some sort of strike – after all, this is Argentina and this is their way of
showing their gratitude for your visit. The airport was CRAMMERS, hordes and hordes of people
milling about the place, queuing to be let out. (It was like when the Irish passport people went
on a strange strike, a ‘go-slow’ I suppose you could call it, when they stopped
everyone and ‘made talk’ with them for far too long, to hold everyone up, but I
always enjoyed the little chat and I felt sure that visitors to our chatty little country would
also like it.)

And so to the luggage belt, where to my EXTREME
surprise,
both of our suitcases arrived
and I was so relieved that I might have shed a
little tear. Our run of good luck continued when, queuing for passport control, myself and
Himself, we got the most Argentinian-looking of all the passport checkers. FERRY handsome, and
frankly so Argentinian-looking he looked like he’d come straight from a polo match and
that his horse was crouched down next to him in the booth and assisting him, handing him up the
date-stamp and all. Indeed, they are a
very
attractive crowd, in general, the
Argentinians.

I was in Buenos Aires a long time ago, maybe
seven years ago, and these are my memories: hand-made Minstrels and blue metallic shoes. God, it
was great!

But today there is no time
for buying beautiful blue metallic shoes: we have to transfer to the domestic airport, which is
about an hour’s drive, and I tell you, you’d think you were in Chicago, or
Melbourne, or cities of similar ilk. Prosperous-looking place. Lots of parks and trees and
people out jogging, and there was an open-air gym-playground place where a load of buff-looking
mens were doing pull-ups with their nippers.

And now we are in the domestic airport, which is
BEJAMMED with people. Also, it is roasting hot and we’ve come from the cold and
we’re going to the cold tonight and I feel a little quare, but that could be down to
several things, including the ‘quare air’ you breathe on planes and the culture
shock and the feeling of being in transit and (temporarily) without a home.

It’s funny because even though I’m
very grateful to be going on this holiday, or indeed any holiday, I always get overwhelmed with
a terrible uneasy melancholia before I go away. I was like this even when I was a nipper, I
hated leaving home, and it eased off a bit when I was doing a lot of book tours, because I had
to keep moving, but it’s back for the last few ‘difficult’ years, and for most
of last week I was hoping something would happen so the trip had to be cancelled, but it
didn’t and it’ll all be grand.

Mind you, you’d think I wouldn’t keep
going to such quare spots – like Laos or the Atacama Desert or – yes –
Antarctica. But I’ve just realized that extreme places suit me: because I feel edgy or
downright scared all of the time, when I find myself in a place that seems other-worldly or
freaky, my feelings are appropriate. It’s the one time when my state of mind chimes with
my surroundings and I am ‘right’ with the world. ‘Feeling quare? Well, you
should
be!’

This is why I want to never go to Italy again.
‘Oh, the art,
the beauty, the cypress trees, the medieval towns, the
men, the girls, the beauty, the blue skies, the Tuscan hills, the beauty, the leather bags, the
haircuts, the beauty, how could anyone ever feel unhappy here?’ *Coughs apologetically*
‘Sorry, I feel like I’m in hell here. You’ve all been lovely, yes, lovely, but
I have to go home now.’

Right, I’ll be back to you later on with my
‘first impressions’ of Ushuaia, the Beagle Channel, the ferocious cold and all
that.

7 p.m.

Okay, here are my first impressions of Ushuaia.
Windswept and rocky and a triumph over nature = Ushuaia. The entire town looks like it’s
built of corrugated iron and cornflakes boxes. It’s quite spectacularly horrible, but at
the same time admirable. It’s balanced on the end of the earth and it’s got massive
other-worldly, black-and-white mountains behind it, looming over it, shunting it into the sea.
It makes me think of a tiny tenuous outpost on another planet.

The whole place looks like it could be washed
away in five minutes, but clearly that doesn’t happen because it’s still here,
despite the high winds and perishing cold. The roads are packed mud and all the cars are filthy
and you can tell just by looking at them that their suspension is but a distant memory.

But there are bursts of unexpected beauty: there
are loads of flowers – they might be delphiniums? Long skinny yokes like foxgloves?

Our hotel is on the edge of the town and
it’s overlooking the Beagle Channel and on the far side are more and more and more
of those terrifying mountains. Rows and rows of them keep appearing, popping
up into infinity.

The hotel is lovely and glassy and full of views.
Loads of people arrive to check in at the same time, so I’m guessing they’re
probably going to be on the ship too, so myself and Himself are discreetly checking them out,
but I told Himself, ‘Do not, under any circumstances, make eye-contact with them!’
We are shy peaceful types who find small talk difficult.

PS: I’ve entirely forgotten about the
Alexander Wang bag. Things are different now. New perspective. Yaze.

Christ. What can I say? If I lived here, I’d
end up in the nuthouse in double-quick time. It feels so bleak and abandoned and godforsaken.
Although, mind you, there are a fair few churches, which always flourish in places of despair, I
find. There are two shoe shops, selling the kinds of platform boots that Ginger Spice used to
wear twenty-nine years ago, and there are 400 souvenir shops, selling penguin T-shirts and
penguin snow-globes and penguin bookends and penguin carvings and fluffy penguins, and in the
windows, instead of human mannequins modelling the clothes, they have penguins (not real but as
big as humans and unexpectedly glum-looking).

I would buy any old shite, I’m famed for
it, but after a while of this, even I flagged. ‘I can’t look at another penguin
thing,’ I said. ‘My head will burst.’ So we went back to the hotel and watched
the first episode of
The Good Wife
, which I liked. Himself said it wasn’t bad and
I said, ‘No, it’s better than not-bad.’

11.30 a.m.

We had to check out of the (lovely!) hotel at 10
a.m. but the bus isn’t coming until 3 p.m. so we’re all sitting here in the lobby,
still studiously not making eye-contact. Everyone has discreet anti-seasickness patches behind
their ears (except me, because I’m on too much anti-mad medication and have to make do
with Kwells) and they’ve all gone slightly lurchy and glassy-eyed.

I got a look at the passenger manifest last night
at the orientation meeting and I am the only Irish person! At least half, maybe even two-thirds,
of the passengers are from the United States and lots also from Canada and some from the UK and
Australia. One Pole, two Japanese, two South Africans and one Braziliard. Oh, and two from
Taiwan!

1.29 p.m.

I have dulce de leche ice cream and Himself has
dulce de leche crème brûlée. They are magnificent.

4 p.m.

We board the boat! I’m so excited.
We’re on our way to see the penguins! There are about 120 passengers; the demographic
seems to be almost entirely baby-boomer people, but there are little pockets of texture –
three Asian-looking hipster lads with amazing hair and groovy glasses and bright neoprene
T-shirts, for examples.

Also, there are two young Australian backpackery
types and their conversation seems to consist of dire stories of how they were ‘ripped
off’ buying four beers in São Paulo, or ‘ripped off’
when they were changing money in Montevideo, or ‘ripped off’ when their tent
was stolen from above their heads while they were sleeping in a public park in Lima. They seem
to have very bad luck, God love the pair of them.

5 p.m.

The orientation meeting in the Oceanic Lounge,
where we meet the staff of twelve who do the excursions and talks and whatnot. They’re all
scientists of some ilk – geologists, marine biologists, game rangers – but they also
drive the Zodiacs (the little boats that bring you from the ship to the land) and are cheery and
enthusiastic and really lovely.

They are at pains to tell us that the crossing is
expected to be as smooth as the Drake Passage ever can be. That at around 11 p.m. the ship will
be leaving the protected Beagle Channel and will go into open sea, but really it’s going
to be freakishly calm.