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Chapter 2

Vang Vieng was the strangest place Jake had ever been. Two years working as a photographer in Southeast Asia, from the full moon parties of Ko Phangan, where thousands of drugged-up young western backpackers danced all night on coralline beaches next to raggle-taggle Sea Gypsies, to the restaurants of Hanoi where Chinese businessmen ate the beating hearts of cobras ripped from living snakes while making deals for nuclear power stations, had inured him, he thought, to the contrasts and oddness of tropical east Asia.

But Vang Vieng, on a tributary of the Mekong River halfway up the long, obscure, serpentine little country of Laos (and as he had to keep reminding himself, Laos was pronounced to rhyme with how, not house) had shown him that the eccentric contrariness of Indochina was almost in exhaustible. Here was an ugly concrete town in a ravishing ancient valley – where hedonism, communism, capitalism and Buddhism collided, simultaneously.

He’d been here in Vang Vieng three days, taking photos for a coffee table book on Southeast Asian beauty spots. It had been quite a long assignment, and it was nearly over. They’d finished the tour of Thailand, spent two weeks in Vietnam, they already had Halong Bay in the can.

The final Laotian leg of the journey comprised Luang Prabang, up the river, and Vang Vieng, down here. They’d flown to Vang Vieng from Luang; tomorrow morning, they would cab it to Vientiane, the Laotian capital – and jet back to base in Phnom Penh in Cambodia, where Jake had his flat.

That meant they had just one day left. Then the joy of invoicing.

It hadn’t been the greatest assignment in the world, but then – there weren’t many great assignments left for photographers, not these days. Jake had been a photographer for a decade now, and as far as he could tell the work wasn’t coming in any quicker, in fact it was dwindling. All those people with cameraphones, all that easy-to-use, foolproof technology, autofocus, Photoshop: they made it all so simple. Literally anyone could take a decent snap. With a modicum of luck, a moron with a Nokia could do a decent Frank Capra.

Jake didn’t resent, morally or philosophically, this democratization of his ‘artform’. Photography had always been the most demotic of arts, if it was an art at all. Let everyone join in. Let everyone have a go. Good luck to them.

The pain of the process was merely personal: it just meant that his business was disappearing. And the only answer to this dilemma was either to become a war photographer, to become so brave or foolhardy he could and would take shots no civilian would ever dare to do – and he was increasingly tempted that way – or he could accept boring, commercial, uncreative but comfy assignments – like coffee table books on Southeast Asian beauty spots – where at least the air-tickets were paid for, the hotels were decent, the toilets non-squat, and he got to see the world, which after all, had been one of the reasons he had become a snapper in the first place.

He drank the last of his Red Bull, flipped the empty can in a bag of garbage on the roadside, and got back to work.

Photography.

Wandering down the languid, sunsetting, wood-and-concrete mainstreet of Vang Vieng, Jake paused and looked to his right, and quickly assessed – and took a quiverful of shots of the riverine landscape, framed by a teak-built house and a ramshackle beer-shop.

It was a predictable view of the spectacular karst mountain scenery, across the languid, shining Nam Song river. Long and slender motorboats were skimming down the torpid waters, churning up white cockerel tails of surf: the water was beautifully caught in the slant and westering sun, setting over the Pha Daeng mountains.

The view was predictable, but still gorgeous. And this is what people wanted to see in these books. Lush tropical views of stunning scenery! With friendly peasants in funny hats! So do it.

Snap. A stock shot. Snap. A stock shot. Snap. That was a good one. He checked the digiscreen. No it wasn’t. Jake sighed. This was the last day of work and when would he next make a buck or a kip or a baht or a dong?

Maybe he should have become a lawyer. Maybe he should have become a banker, like half his friends back in London. But his family tragedies and his own wilfulness had combined to send him abroad: as soon as he had reached eighteen he’d wanted to get the hell out of Britain, get the hell out of his own head.

He’d wanted to travel and he’d wanted drugs and he’d wanted seriously dangerous adventure – to rid himself of the ineradicable memories. And to a point his running away had worked, until he’d hit the wall of near-bankruptcy, and he’d realized he needed a job and so he’d remembered his childhood yen for art, and he’d squeezed into photography: begging for work in studios, laboriously teaching himself the craft, crawling back to a real kind of life.

And finally he’d taken the plunge, and stepped into photo-journalism – just at the time when photojournalism was, maybe, dying on its feet.

But what can you do? You can do your job. Photography.

A young suntanned barefoot ankle-braceleted Australian girl was ambling down the main road of Vang Vieng in the tiniest bikini. Jake took a surreptitious shot. There wasn’t much light left. He knelt, and clicked his camera, once again.

The girl had stopped to throw up in the street, quite near a saffron-robed Buddhist monk on a bicycle. Jake took another shot. He wasn’t remotely surprised by the girl’s outrageous behaviour. No doubt she was just another of the kids who inner-tubed down the river all day every day. Because that was the unique selling point of Vang Vieng.

Every cool and river-misty morning dozens of minibuses took dozens of backpacking kids upstream, the kids in their swimsuits all sober and nervous and quietly excited. Then the buses decanted the kids into riverside huts where they were given big, fat tyre inner-tubes to sit in, and the tubes were cast off into the riverflow, and then these western teens and twentysomethings spent the hot Laotian day floating in their tubes down the river, occasionally stopping at beachside beershacks to get drunk on shots or doped on reefer or flipped on psychotropic fungi.

By the time the innertubers berthed at Vang Vieng in the late afternoon they were blitzed and grinning and sunburned and adolescently deranged.

Jake slightly pitied these kids: he pitied them for the way they all thought they were having a unique, dangerously third world experience – when it was an experience neatly packaged and sold to every sheeplike teen and twentysomething who came here. Laos was remote but not that remote: thousands had this ‘unique experience’ every week of every month.

But Jake also envied the youthfully uncaring backpackers: if he had been just five years younger and five times less mixed-up he’d have jumped in a tyre himself and drunk all the beer his spleen could take as he tubed down the Han Song. Fuck it, he’d have sailed all the way to Ho Chi Minh City on a tidal bore of Kingfisher Lager and crystal meth.

But he wasn’t a kid any more. He wasn’t eighteen or twenty-one. He was thirty and he’d done enough faffing around; and anyway, these days, when he took drugs, especially something mindwarping like Thai sticks or magic mushrooms – it reminded him of his sister and the car accident and the memories that lay under his bed like childhood monsters. So he didn’t do drugs anymore.

The light was nearly all gone.

The languidly pretty local girls were riding mopeds in flip-flops and the mopeds had their headlamps on, the half-naked backpackers were buying dope cookies from shrewdly bemused hilltribe women. Jake pocketed his camera and made his way to the Kangaroo Sunset Bar.

Ty was there. Tyrone J Gallagher. The American journalist doing the words for their travel book. Jake definitely envied Tyrone. The red haired, hardbitten, sardonic, forty-five year old Chicagoan didn’t have his job threatened by a billion people with cameraphones. Ty was a proper journalist; a correspondent, and no one had perfected software that could write a decent foreign news report. Yet.

‘Alright Jake?’ Ty smiled. ‘Got all your shots?’

‘Got them. Startling new visual angle on Vang Vieng.’

‘Let me guess,’ said Ty. ‘Sunset over the karst?’

Jake admitted the cliché. Ty grinned, and laughed, and lifted his glass of good Lao beer. Jake quickly drank his own beer, and felt the tingle of pleasurable relaxation. The beer here was good. That was one of the surprising things about Laos: Jake had heard back at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Phnom Penh that Laos was primitive and poor even compared to Cambodia, and indeed it was, but it was also effortlessly beautiful, and the beer was good.

Tyrone was leaning forward.

‘Tell ya something, I have got a scintilla of gossip.’

‘Yes?’

‘Chemda is here.’

A bar boy came over. Tyrone turned, and breezily ordered some more Lao beers – tucking a few dollars into the kid’s hand as he did. The kid bobbed, and tried to say thankyou for his lavish tip, and blushed, and then smiled.

The English photographer assessed the Laotian waiter. Probably three years ago this waiter had been a barefoot tribal lad, not even able to speak Lao. Living in a hut in the hills. Now he was serving beer to laconic American journalists and dreadlocked French girls and beery London gap year boys with Girls Are Gay written in lipstick on their sunburned backs, and the boy was earning more money in a week than his father earned in a year even as his culture was destroyed.

It was sad. And maybe Jake was making it worse, taking photos that would only attract more people to spoil what was previously unspoiled. And maybe, he thought, he should stop punishing himself for the way the universe worked.

His mind clicked back into gear, he recognized the name. Chemda. Chemda Tek. A beautiful Cambodian girl from Phnom Penh. She spoke English. American educated. A lawyer or something with an NGO. Maybe the UN? The tribunals by the airport in Phnom Penh. He’d met her at the Foreign Correspondents Club.

‘Chemda Tek. What’s she doing here?’

‘Well it’s Tek Chemda technically. Khmers reverse their names like the Chinese. Surname first, pretty name second. But she’s Americanized so yep, Chemda Tek.’

Jake said nothing; Ty said:

‘So you remember her. Cute, right?’

Jake shrugged.

‘Well, I hadn’t noticed.’

‘Yeah . . . rrrright.’

‘No. Really. The fact she looks like one of the dancing apsaras of Angkor Thom, had completely escaped me. Mate.’

They chinked glasses and chuckled. Tyrone said:

‘She’s at the hospital.’

The single word hospital unsettled Jake, somewhere deep. He moved the conversation forward.

‘She’s OK?’

‘Yeah yeah, she’s fine. But it’s an odd situation.’

‘Why?’

‘She’s with some Cambodian professors.’

‘Here in Laos?’ Jake was mystified. ‘I thought she was working on the Khmer Rouge stuff. Reconciliation. In PP.’

‘She was, sure.’ Tyrone repressed a burp with a drunken hand, and gazed out at the street. A hammer and sickle flag hung limply from a concrete lamppost in the gloom: in the jungly darkness the communist red looked darkest grey.

Jake pressed the point: he wanted to know more. Tyrone explained. He’d met Chemda on the street near the hospital. She was in Laos to visit the Plain of Jars with a pair of old Cambodian professors, themselves victims of, or associated with, the Khmer Rouge, the one-time and long-hated genocidal Maoist government of Cambodia.

‘Why the Plain of Jars?’ asked Jake.

Tyrone finished his beer and explained.

‘Apparently during the Khmer Rouge era, these historians were made to go there – seems the communists made them go to the Plain of Jars to look at something.’

‘Sorry?’

‘You know what the Plain of Jars is right?’

Jake faltered a reply:

‘Big . . . old . . . stone . . . jars. Sitting in . . .’ He paused. ‘A plain?’

They laughed. Tyrone continued:

‘Plain of Jars: two-thousand-year-old jars. Big fuckers. Near Ponsavanh. Saw them years back. Boring but curious. No one knows who built them or why.’

‘But what’ve they got to do with . . .’

‘The Khmer Rouge? The KR?’ Ty smiled affably. ‘Ain’t got a clue. But the Rouge and the Pathet Lao were obsessed with the Jars, it seems, and they researched them in the 70s, coercing these historians maybe – and Chemda is trying to find out why –’

‘And?’

‘The whole thing back in the 70s obviously freaked out the professors. Something happened there, or they found something there.’

‘But why the hospital? Why’s she here?’

A tuk-tuk clattered past, two stroke engine coughing fumes into the soft tropical night. Barefoot German girls were laughing in the back as they counted out wads of kip. ‘Kharb jai, dankeschon, kharb jai.’ Tyrone smiled at Jake:

‘The prof, it seems, stepped on a bombie. One of those little butter-yellow cluster bastards. You know that whole area is mined and lethal – all that fine American ordnance –’

‘That bit I know. You guys did a proper job on Laos.’

Tyrone nodded; Jake persisted:

‘Didn’t the Yanks drop more bombs on Laos, in the Vietnam war, than on the whole of Germany – in the entire Second World War?’

‘Hey. Please. We dropped more bombs here than on Germany and Japan combined.’ Ty sighed, personably. ‘Anyhow, where was I. Yeah. This crazy professor took a wrong turning and got half his fucking leg blown off. And Chemda had to bring him to the nearest hospital, which given what a crappy little squatter of a country Laos is, was all the way here to Vang. A long day’s drive with this poor bastard bleeding out in the back of the pick-up –’

‘And now?’

‘She’s heading back. Finish the job, get the answer. She’s a determined girl, that one. Like her dynasty.’ Tyrone turned and motioned to the bar boy. ‘Sabaydee. Two lao beers? Kharb jai.’

‘Heading back to the Plain of Jars?’

‘Tomorrow, yeah. S’what she told me. She heard on the vine we had finished our assignment, so she wondered if I’d like to cover the story. For the Phnom Penh Post, New York Times, ya know. I told her I didn’t care how intriguing it all is, I’m doing this coffee table gig for fun, I need a break from the wartime stuff – and anyhow I’d rather have drunken sex with a senior Ayatollah than spend four days on Laotian roads, going to see a bunch of enormous stone cookie jars.’

Tyrone paused, and gazed at Jake’s pensive expression. He groaned.

‘Oh god. Colour me fucking stupid. You wanna do it, don’t you? You want the story. You want to cover it. Make a name for yourself at last!’