A trip to Laotian Deep

(Conclusion)

When the Startalk hosts and staff received official confirmation that we were not airing last Sept. 3 to give way to the Pacquiao-Marquez world tour coverage, I started asking my co-workers what their plans were for that long free weekend.

Joey de Leon was already in Hong Kong and beat everyone else to go on vacation. I no longer bothered to check with Lolit Solis because her plans change from day to day, minute to minute and second to second. On a Startalk group trip to Phuket, Thailand in 2002 we all waited for her at NAIA II and stopped the plane from departing when it was discovered that she had already taken another one — to Cebu.

I caught Ricky Lo on the landline of The Star office and he was off to Sydney to interview Rowan “Mr. Bean” Atkinson. When I told him I was flying to Laos, he said on the other end of the line: “Hey, why don’t you write about it?”

I demurred because at the back of my mind, it was just going to be an overnight trip. What could happen there?

But you know the halu-halong hula items in his columns that can see the fate of celebrities without him bothering to check with our mostly bogus psychics? He has the ability to do that — not with the use of the now dated crystal ball, but with the help of his DPAs — or Deep Penetration Agents, whose credibility factor remains unblemished.

I am now convinced more than ever that Ricky has psychic abilities because — in that brief conversation — he foresaw that my trip to Laos was not going to be one of those ho-hum travels.

Still skeptical about his forecast, I took the PAL flight to Bangkok on the way to Laos and on board was Romano Vasquez, the former That’s Entertainment member, who was recruited to join the musical group Quamo, but ended up singing in a gay bar in Pasay after his life had gone haywire due to substance abuse.

For a while, his otherwise patient father — a good man — had him locked behind bars to sober up his act.

I’m happy to report to you now that Romano still has his matinee idol looks after all these years. Totally reformed, he is already married and stays in Parañaque. He has his own business — Pospas, which I assume sells arroz caldo. Romano was traveling with his wife for a brief vacation in Bangkok.

We said goodbye to each other at the immigration counter in Thailand and I proceeded to work on my final destination: Laos.

In my previous column, I already related how I originally planned to get to Laos by train, except that a Filipino friend in Bangkok referred me to a Pinoy travel agent whose company organizes package tours to Laos. 

It was already too late — like I was already in Laos — when I discovered that the trip that was offered to me was for people working on their documents in compliance with Thai immigration rules. They were there for documentation purposes, either for work or studies, which I didn’t need since I was going to be there for only a night.

The Filipino travel agent (the name of his company is Sawasdi Transport Service Co.) only wanted his commission off me — which he got and for which I greatly suffered.

The trip to begin with was far from comfortable as promised. To entertain myself, I let my imagination play and I saw visions of how it must have been like on the way to the concentration camps in Auschwitz.

Of course, we were so much better off than those poor Jewish prisoners. For one, we had bathroom breaks. But what almost killed me was the uncertainty. There was no one — somebody useful enough — sent by the travel agency to explain the next step or what was going on during that long road travel. Those who dared ask questions were barked at.

This was supposed to be a pleasure trip, for which I was charged extra for VIP treatment, and yet I felt like a mouse dashing off from table leg to table leg — running scared.

Another unbearable suffering came in the form of unnecessary waiting. Instead of me enjoying the sights of Laos, there I was wasting close to five hours of waiting at the Laos border and later at the Thai embassy in the capital city of Vientiane, while the rest of the people in the package tour had their documents processed.

They needed that. I didn’t. I was just an overnight tourist.

At close to lunchtime, we were released and loaded to a van that took us to a hotel (a pension house, actually) that turned out to be around five kilometers away from the city proper where the tourists’ area is located. To be at the center of activities, you shelled out a king’s ransom either by hiring a van or commandeering a tuk-tuk.

To be able to afford a van, another Filipino, a Singaporean and his Indonesian girlfriend and I rented a van whose driver only allowed us exactly an hour to tour the center of Vientiane and shop around for souvenir items. That didn’t allow me to visit any Laotian temple or even pass by one.

At around 9 p.m., I had to be back in the hotel because of its isolated location. I also decided to turn in early since no one had any idea what time we were returning to Bangkok the next day. There was no one in-charge to inform us.

As it turned out, we weren’t herded back into our vans on the way back to Thailand until lunch. At the border, while everyone else simply breezed through immigration, I got detained — in Laos! Again, that was due to the carelessness of the travel agency that failed to provide me with the proper departure card.

By midnight, I was back in Bangkok — stewing about my Laotian trip that turned out to be a nightmare. I gritted through clenched teeth thinking how I wasted so much time to get to Laos and when I got there, I only had an hour to acquaint myself with its culture and its very warm, accommodating and ever-smiling people. No thanks to that travel agency and that Filipino contact who sold me in exchange for his commission.

On the plus side, I met a lot of fellow Filipinos on that trip who are now back in their Bangkok base where they work mostly as teachers (there was also one who is employed as a domestic helper at age 62). My ordeal became more bearable because of them — as we laughed, joked and whined about the inept service provided by the Sawasdi Transport Co.

However, my heart bled when I found out how they, too, are being ripped off by their respective employment agencies — again with some Pinoys making so much money off them. A teacher from Mindanao I befriended, for instance, only gets a fourth of her salary and she has very little to send back to the Philippines and almost absolutely nothing for herself to live on in Bangkok.

I also found out during that trip that there are around 400 Filipinos working (as architects, teachers and engineers) in Laos — and that there is a Kabayan hotel there.

There must have been a lot more to discover in that country, except that the travel agency — especially that greedy Filipino travel agent — goofed up what could have been a wonderful break for me. 

That Laotian trip may have bombed from my end, but there were lessons learned — very costly and tiring, if I may so add.

I still hanker to return to Laos in the future (the country seems to have great potentials), but the next time around, I will make sure that trip will never be laos like this one I had, but a true winner of a holiday tour.