Revelations

The drive from Pakse to the island of Don Khong was more like a mobile buffet than a bus ride. Every fifteen minutes the ancient bus would squeal to a halt, and we would hear the sound of plastic flip flops slapping the pavement, followed by yelling in Lao as women and young girls thrust various food items up by the windows. Skewered, flattened whole birds (or, chicken on a stick, as we came to call it) were the most popular item at the roadside smorgasbord. The chicken was seasoned and barbecued and, aside from the fact that it was slightly disconcerting to see a whole bird on a wooden skewer dancing outside a bus window asking to be eaten, it looked quite tasty. Especially since we’d been traveling since 5am (it was now noon) and we were starving.

“Do you think I’ll die if I eat it?” I asked Steven. This was the question we asked before each meal – is this the meal that’s going to kill me?

“I don’t know,” he said.

“How much could go wrong with chicken?”

He shrugged.

“It could have been poorly refrigerated or something,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Or left lying around for a while.”

“Yeah.”

But, oh, the chicken looked good; the temptation was strong. At some unheard signal the food vendors retreated to the side of the road, waiting for the next sales opportunity to come rolling into town. I watched a woman toss a pile of chickens-on-a-stick onto a dusty table at the side of the road. I pointed it out to Steven. “Dirty,” I said, happily validated in my decision to pass up what had been the makings of a good lunch.

“Uh huh,” he nodded, entirely consumed by the task of trying to shift his legs.

A bus in Laos doesn’t leave until it is filled to bursting with a combination of people and whatever else needs transporting, preferably with people and luggage lashed down to the roof as well. On this trip what needed transporting were bags of powdered cement. They lined the floor, forcing us to sit with our knees tucked up by our chins, battling it out for an extra half inch of space.

Throughout the four hour drive we had passed vendors selling drinks poured into plastic bags filled with ice, sticky rice packed in hollow bamboo shoots, sweet radishes, fried rice balls, fat sausages, peeled coconut hearts floating in milky water, sliced pineapple and bananas, and a host of other items I couldn’t even begin to identify. At one stop the woman seated in front of me bought what looked like a large piece of bark. I waited anxiously to see what see would do with it, but to my dismay she only tucked it into her purse. The food grew more and more tempting as the bus ride drew on, but it was street food and therefore, sadly, as good as inedible to us.

Prior to embarking on this trip Steven and I had listened to story after story about intestinal ailments resulting from travels in Asia: the friend who was sick throughout her entire month-long trip through Indonesia, the cousin who narrowly made it to the bathroom in China’s Forbidden City, and my father, who had been sick for a month after returning from India. We had listened, we had taken notes, and we had developed our own rules about what to eat and what not to eat. After a month of traveling through Thailand and Laos those rules had been shaped and modified into what essentially amounted to a mythology rather than any kind of fact-based diet. No raw vegetables except in the French parts of Laos because maybe the chefs were French and they washed the vegetables in bottled water. No pre-cut fruit unless it was pineapple. No peeking into the restaurant kitchen. And absolutely no street food. We had also learned the importance of knowing the origin of foods and their mode of transport. A few weeks earlier, while waiting for a bus in western Thailand, we noticed the smell of rotting cabbage coming from four large plastic bags. We debated quietly over whether we had mistakenly sat next to someone’s compost heap, or if this was in fact the bus stop. When the bus arrived, much to our relief, we discovered that the bags were luggage. The cabbage-cum-luggage was strapped to the roof of the bus, along with sacks of cucumbers that had been sitting with us all morning, rotting in the hot sun. Our backpacks were fitted in next to the vegetables, and we headed off to the bus’s sole destination, a remote mountain town.

“When we get there,” I had whispered to Steven, “we’re not eating any cabbage or cucumbers.”

If clean eating was our religion, then Thou Shalt Eat Local was our first commandment. Unfortunately sometimes eat clean and eat local proved to be competing edicts. We knew that to truly experience local culture you had to get in there and eat with the locals, but the majority of the locals were eating street food. Ultimately we decided that to eat clean while eating local would simply require a bit more effort; we were up to the challenge. In the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai we spent a week tromping off to the farthest reaches of the city to taste the uber-local triumvirate of Chiang Mai sausage, kaeng hang lay (Chiang Mai curry), and khao soi (Chiang Mai soup). In the temple-dotted Lao city of Louang Prabang we tracked down a restaurant that served fresh salads and buffalo steaks; near the Vietnamese border we had chowed down on an enormous, steaming bowl of pho – a Vietnamese soup with glass noodles and beef broth. But even so, every now and then, we couldn’t help but cast a mournful eye at the forbidden night markets that harbored what looked like a delicious, but illicit, bounty.

When we arrived in Don Khong, starving and weak from hours of travel, we went straight to a restaurant and gorged ourselves on coconut curry and sticky rice, retreated to our room in a nearby guesthouse and immediately fell into a hot, immensely satisfying nap. When we awoke we were hungry again, and made our way to the guesthouse’s restaurant where we fell into a conversation with a couple from San Francisco who had arrived a day earlier. They were planning on traveling for a year and were four months into their journey, having made their way through China, New Zealand and Thailand. After some initial pleasantries the conversation turned to the real subject on everyone’s mind: the religion of eating.

“We’re on only fried rice and fresh vegetables,” the woman explained to us.

“And fried noodles,” her boyfriend added.

I paused, a forkful of steamed Mekong fish inches away from my mouth and stared at them. “No fish?” I asked.

“No,” said the woman, exchanging looks with her boyfriend.

He looked sheepishly down at the table. “I had fish two days ago,” he mumbled.

“And he got sick,” his girlfriend announced. I thought I saw the glimmer of a smile cross her face.

“Really sick?” Steven asked, scooping up the last of his shredded pork. The man nodded at him.

“What are you guys eating?” asked his girlfriend.

“No street food,” Steven said.

Again the couple exchanged meaningful looks.

“Interesting,” said the man.

“We’ve got to get going,” said the woman. “See you around.”

“See you,” I said.

The next day Steven and I took a bike trip around the town. As we were pulling into the guesthouse Steven called out to me in a loud whisper. “Look over there,” he said, motioning with his head. I turned and saw the boyfriend from the previous night purchasing a bag of white ball-shaped something from a street vendor.

“Lunatic,” I said aloud. “He should be burned at the stake.”

And yet, the tenets of our religion were beginning to crack. The next day Steven got sick and called it sunstroke. A week later, in Cambodia, I too succumbed and blamed it on the shower, but it might have been the Indian food we ate at what appeared to be a perfectly clean restaurant that upheld all our beliefs. I spent two days in bed eating nothing but the Cipro tablets we had been prescribed back home for just such a situation. Upon our return to Thailand, still sick, I secretly purchased a bag of fried coconut balls from a tiny woman with an enormous wok in Bangkok’s Hualamphong train station, figuring I couldn’t get any sicker. I ate them while Steven was in the bathroom, popping the crispy balls into my mouth, delighting in the sweet, warm and sticky centers. Amazingly, the coconut balls did not make me sick. In fact, they made me better. And now I wanted more.

I worried about confessing to Steven that I had lost my faith. Without it where would we be? Hungry? Sick? Lost in a never-ending night market of food stalls with no concept of what could be eaten?

“Babe,” I said, working up the nerve to tell him. We were near the end of our trip now, spending our last few days in the tiny lake-side town of Sangkhlaburi, near the Burmese border. It was early afternoon and we were lying flat on our backs in a stilted wooden cottage, trying to avoid the hottest part of the day by not moving.

“Uh huh.”

“Babe,” I propped myself up on my elbow. “I’ve been having some impure thoughts.”

“Like what?”

“I want to eat street food.” I held my breath, watching Steven’s chest rise and fall as he digested this information.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay, let’s do it.” He reached out for my hand and we lay on the bed silently, waiting for night to fall.

That night we ventured up a steep hill to the night market. After some initial hesitation we purchased two tiny barbecued drumsticks formerly belonging to some type of poultry. Juice dribbled down our chins as we bit into them; a combination of honey, soy sauce, charcoal and a few unidentifiable flavors set off happy fireworks in our taste buds. We immediately ordered two more. After that we were unstoppable. We bought steaming bowls of soup from a man with a mobile soup cart, pointing to various green items to see what he would do with them; we stood transfixed as a woman dressed in a bright-colored sarong poured batter into tiny molds, fried them up, popped them into a napkin and handed them to us. The next day, feeling rather pleased with ourselves, we returned to Bangkok and boarded our flight home. And did we get sick? I can’t tell you. As part of our new religion I am sworn to secrecy.