There are other differences, of course.
One is the noise. On a bicycle you are faced with
silence. The gentle clicking of the gears and the sound of rain water draining
into a rice paddy. On a motorcycle you have the drone of the motor, the heat of
the motor and the vibrations of the motor. There is a partition, which is
neither false nor contrived, between oneself and the surrounding reality.
Oh, the lung searing joy of climbing. The rest you
take half way up a hill. Your toes clamped solidly on the pedals. Counting the
strokes in Japanese; a vestige of karate training.
But I think the greatest difference is my contact
with the population. All throughout that trip and others I took on my own in
that monsoon season, I was constantly reminded of a book I read when I was an
adolescent, Life Is With People by Mark Zborowski. The book talks about the
life of my own, as my grandmother lived and talked with me about it, in the
shtetls of Eastern Europe before our culture was burned off the face of the
earth.
Life is with people, indeed, and the greatest joy of
cycling in Laos is the contact with the people. You enter stone-age villages
and are called to partake in a meal, tired and dirty and hungry you enter a
hamlet and are given hospitality in an old wooden house that looks on the brink
of collapse; children climb over you at dinner time and others peak in through
the windows. You stop to rest in a village temple and a monk turns on a fan to
cool you after bringing you a cold glass of water boiled with herbs. In a
motorbike repair shop you borrow tools to make an adjustment and receive grease
soiled smiles…
It is said that everything has a price and the price
you pay is being tired and hungry, dirty and thirsty; it is feeling your
muscles straining and your knees weak and pained from the effort. But the
reward! Ah the rewards.
On a motorcycle my contacts with the population were
limited to the guy who fills up your tank, the restaurant owner and the
guesthouse owner. I know it is not like that for everyone. There is a brilliant
photographer here in Vientiane named Albert Leeflang who manages to get off his
motorcycle and experience the Laos as I love to live it, but for me this is
impossible.
You can see his work here: https://www.facebook.com/albert.leeflang
The long a short of it is that after coming back
from this motor trip, and another I took on my own to Xiang Khouang Province, I
decided that the sum of all these differences was worth writing a book about
and so I am currently working on an opus called Bibliomancy.
The book has no beginning and no end. Like a cycling
trip it will take me where it wants to go and I am content to tell the story of
my trips with all their wonderings and wanderings. I sat under an old house and
let my thoughts run wild; I stirred my morning coffee with an old lead spoon...
That is the order of Bibliomancy; it takes me where it wants to go… and I am
surprised by its will power and stubbornness.
In Medieval times there was a form of divination in
which a needle was stuck at random in a Bible. Where the pin hit was the
prophecy for the seeker, a sort of sharp edged Y Ching and probably just as
incomprehensible.
That then, is what Bibliomancy will be about; pick a
card…any card.
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Mist makes the traveler long for the valley
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Stopping for a pho
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This is going to be a truly amazing book. I cannot wait ot read it.
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