Word: lao
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...Vietnam's overnight train from Hanoi to the northern town of Sapa, they've found it. The express, launched two years ago by the Paris-based Victoria hotel chain, is really three specially outfitted carriages added to the regular night train from Hanoi to the northern border town of Lao Cai. The journey is such a pleasure that, contrary to most train rides, passengers complain that the 10-hour trip is too short. The experience is mashed potatoes, fried rice and your mother's chicken noodle soup all rolled into one. With its combination of opulence?uniformed waiters, linen tablecloths...
...Across the street from the village chief's wood-frame house, however, in a little bar where two Vietnamese men sit drinking bottled Bia Lao beer, smoking A-daeng cigarettes and spitting onto the concrete floor, there is plenty of opium. Several foreigners are already in the back-room den, crashed out on dank mattresses having puffed their way through half a dozen pipes each. Sophie, a blond English girl in her 20s, insists the black-trousered O-man, as she calls the Vietnamese boy loading pipes, give her and her friends the best possible dope. "Make sure...
...boys and girls sitting around sipping lao-lao cocktails in Hope's Oasis, most probably won't try opium during their stay in Vang Viang, and a few will sample the drug once for the experience and not feel compelled to pick it up again. Clarky, the Canadian proprietor of Hope's, admits that some of his customers are in town for the dope, but insists most of them are here "because Laos is a full-on, rad place that's totally blowing up. Everybody's coming to Laos and not just for the dope but because of the people...
...thousands of tourists who come to Laos and indulge in a bit of Oriental opium, there is little risk. But opium is a brutally addictive substance, and withdrawal from the drug is chemically identical to heroin withdrawal. The process has been described by at least one addict as "bone-crushingly painful." Harmless as a few pipe loads in exotic Laos may seem, too many visits to the O-man, coupled with a genetic disposition to substance abuse, can leave travelers with a nascent addiction that can cause problems once they return to Toronto or Tokyo?where opium is scarce...
...Fitz explains that he's trying to taper off. And he plans to smuggle into Thailand a few opium pellets that he can boil in a pot of tea and drink. He'll be getting out, he swears. He's not going to stay in some Lao backwater, the Asian equivalent of Appalachia, just because the dope is cheap and plentiful. You want to believe him, you really do, but you just know he's not going anywhere...