The Insulin Express

by Oren Liebermann

  I exhaust my table’s supply of delicate white napkins that I was using to dry the tears from my eyes and blow my nose. When the napkins run out, I run to the bathroom to use paper towels … three separate times. I splash water on my face and eyes, blowing my nose repeatedly to try to expel the conflagration in whatever form possible. The Thai people at the tables surrounding us stare at me. I have reinforced all of their stereotypes about Americans trying to eat Thai food. Without a doubt, I am embarrassing Cassie. Yet, deep down, even with hellfire unleashing the fury of its anger inside my mouth, we are both sublimely happy to be back on the road.

  We spend less time outside than we did before. The heat forces my body to burn blood sugar at a stunning rate, so we eat longer meals in air-conditioned restaurants. It costs us a bit more but allows me to learn about my disease before it knocks me out.

  We make our way north through Thailand, relying on buses and trains to hopscotch across the country. Our only goal is to reach Chiang Mai, where we spend a week exploring the city and its surroundings, and that includes our day trip to the Chiang Rai region.

  From the White Temple, we head to the Golden Triangle, the intersection of the Ruak and Mekong Rivers at the meeting point of northern Thailand, northwestern Laos, and an eastern land peninsula jutting out of Myanmar. The surrounding air bears a cumbersome mixture of searing heat and oppressive humidity. You don’t so much feel the weather here as bathe in it. The fervent efforts of our mini tour bus’s air conditioner offer only the slightest bit of relief, but under the weight of this weather, any break from the heat is a welcome respite as we shuttle from one tour stop to the next.

  At one point, this was one of the largest opium-producing regions in the world, and I’m not sure if that point was five years ago or five minutes ago. Apparently, it wasn’t surpassed until the early twenty-first century, when Afghanistan claimed the title. But it feels a bit like this entire area could, in a pinch, once again output fairly impressive quantities of any number of drugs, opium among them, if it isn’t doing so already. Historically, they know what products have done well for them, and I’m sure they could produce those products again if they felt any pressing economic need.

  Although the opportunities present themselves at multiple points throughout central and northern Thailand, we don’t do drugs here. We don’t do drugs anywhere for that matter, but there are few places in the world where they are easier to obtain or cheaper to buy than the backpacker-friendly streets of Thai cities and towns.

  Travel itself becomes our drug. It is highly addictive and very expensive. It’s also stimulating in much the same way I expect cocaine would be, except cocaine wears off while travel does not.

  Cassie and I are addicted to traveling.

  The effects of travel are also quite the opposite of other drugs. Instead of losing ourselves, we find meaning. Instead of forgetting memories, we remember moments. I can recall almost every day of traveling. Not specific dates or anything like that, but if you ask me about my third day in Dublin, I can tell you about three friends meeting us at our hostel, about the walking tour we gave them, about our first stouts together, and much more. Our second day in Budapest? The Parliament. Our fourth day in Paris? A day trip to Versailles.

  It’s not that I have some exceptional memory. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s that travel makes the world—your world—exceptional and worth remembering. At my reporting job in Philly, I had trouble remembering the stories I had done the week before. Sometimes even the day before.

  On the road, it’s absolutely different. Everything is worth remembering. Every sight, taste, and smell is worth hanging on to and cherishing. I remember every day simply because I want to remember every day. Everything is new and exciting and worth permanently etching into my memory.

  Once you become accustomed to something, you begin to close yourself off to it. You catalog a set of assumptions and biases about the way one particular thing works, and you use that information to create what will eventually become habit. Armed with this routine, you are free to dull your senses. What you have been through countless times before becomes uninteresting because of repetition.

  Now, our infant eyes are opened wide once again as we take in the world around us. We open ourselves to places we’ve never seen and foods we’ve never tasted and spices we’ve never smelled. Our five senses are on fire, our brain in overdrive trying to store every bit of information for future recollection. We have not been this accepting of the world around us—this innocent and naive—since we were children.

  It is this incredibly optimistic view of the world that I use to justify trying my first shot of cobra whiskey.

  There is nothing subtle or mysterious about the contents of cobra whiskey. Take some awful whiskey, put in a perfectly good poisonous snake, and drink after it’s all commingled nicely together for a few months. The alcohol is supposed to neutralize the poison while the snake adds a bit of flavor to the whole affair. That makes it safe to drink, but that doesn’t make it a good idea.

  I couldn’t resist.

  We encounter cobra whiskey in a free trade zone in a section of the Golden Triangle in Laos. A boat takes us from Thailand, across the river, to a sprawling gift shop complex in Laos. The free trade zone is the gift shop. We are not allowed to step one foot out of the gift shop area without the proper visa, which was not included in our tour package.

  Our guide marches us right over to the nearest gift shop and plants herself (or himself) behind the cobra whiskey.

  “Free!” she proclaims with a sense of excitement that is supposed to entice us to try some, as if anything that doesn’t come with a price tag is automatically worth doing. Perhaps she even wants us to buy a bottle as a keepsake. I’m pretty sure US Customs would not take kindly to a dead reptile inside a bottle of alcohol.

  She points out the other whiskeys near the cobra whiskey: gecko whiskey, scorpion whiskey, and tiger penis whiskey. The last of these is supposed to be a potent aphrodisiac.

  I convince myself that cobra whiskey seems the least harmful. Cassie convinces herself that there is no compelling reason on earth to try cobra whiskey. All evidence to the contrary, I did score higher on my SATs than she did.

  I happen to be standing right next to a Canadian guy who seems to share both my age and my reluctance.

  “I’ll do it if you do it.” Of course, that means we’re both going to do it.

  Our guide pours us a shot of cobra whiskey, and we stare at it for a second, wondering if we’re really about to try this.

  Of course we are! We have accepted our fate. A final moment of thoughtfulness is all we need.

  “Cheers!” We clink glasses and drink.

  It tastes … not nearly as awful as you would expect it to taste. It certainly doesn’t taste good. But it’s not horrific, which I consider a win.

  Added bonus: I’m still alive.

  Chapter 15

  April 14, 2014

  19°52’44.9”N 102°08’00.9”E

  Luang Prabang, Laos

  In most countries, it would be considered wildly inappropriate to splash random people with buckets of water as they walk down the street. At best, this would qualify as exceptionally rude. At worst, it is probably punishable by caning in nations with a more conservative ethos. Even in Laos, the transfer of water from a plastic receptacle to someone’s clothing is probably not a commonly acceptable thing to do to complete strangers on any given weekday. But our timing in Luang Prabang, the cultural heart of Laos and the country’s former capital, is fortuitous. It is Songkan, the Lao New Year, and it is a weeklong party in an otherwise very reserved and quiet city.

  Every April, during the hottest time of the year in Southeast Asia, the Lao people come together to celebrate and welcome the upcoming monsoon season and, presumably, break from the ridiculous heat that forces all of us to sweat profusely. As if this isn’t enough, we also have to take malaria medication.

  The owner of our hostel welcomes us with a big sm
ile and a quiet “Sabadee!” in his delicate, airy voice. He shows us to our room and politely warns us that this is the hottest time of the year.

  “For me, is a little hot,” he says, fanning his shirt in case we don’t intuitively understand the concept of warm weather.

  “For you, is very hot.” Given the level of heat, this may still qualify as an understatement.

  Apparently, the best way to show the monsoons where to unleash their seasonal downpours is to get everyone and everything as wet as possible. Hence the water buckets. Never mind the fact that we are already abundantly moist from sweating through our clothing and that, in having water thrown at us, we were simply replacing our own biological drenching with a more artificial one.

  During Songkan, the entire city becomes a free-for-all water fight (as does most of Southeast Asia). Children armed with three-dollar water guns line up along the streets and spray every pedestrian and motorist. Adults use hoses or buckets, but the effect is inevitably the same. One pass through central Luang Prabang and you are soaking wet, regardless of what defense mechanisms you have prepared. After weighing our options, we conclude the best defense is a good offense, so we purchase our own water gun and fire back at anyone who fires at us.

  At some point in the last few hundred years, someone must have realized that adding alcohol to a city-wide water fight would neatly complement the festivities and perhaps entice the monsoon season to come just a little sooner to share in the merry-making. Adults, tourists, teenagers, and nearly everyone old enough to hold a bottle is sipping, drinking, chugging, shotgunning, pounding, imbibing, quaffing, or otherwise consuming beer. A sizable majority of the population brave enough to venture outdoors is, without question, happily drunk, and most of those who aren’t drunk are well on their way.

  Age seems to have little to do with who’s drinking and not drinking. Truckloads of barely post-pubescent teens drive around the streets, showing off the beer bottles they have just emptied, inevitably only a moment before they spray you with water. On just about every level, I suspect there is something wrong with the scene around me, yet I have no intention of alerting the authorities, since most of the authorities are part of the scene around me. That … and the fact that it’s a hell of a party.

  Alcohol wasn’t the last major addition to change the face of smashing Songkan. With the advent of portable stereo equipment, loud music became an integral element of the already boozy hydro-brawl. Most of the tunes are techno, or at least they sound like techno, though it is admittedly difficult to tell since every volume knob is cranked well past the point of discernible audio. The music pours forth in one mucilaginous mess of noise, which fits in rather well with the prevailing vibe.

  There are weird sexual undertones to the entire celebration. Young girls drink bottle after bottle of beer and grind their asses onto young boys’ crotches. There is erotic dancing and suggestive singing on every street corner. I suspect a large portion of the young Lao population loses their virginity during these festivals.

  What’s stunning is how much this differs from their normal demeanor. The people of Laos are humble and gentle and kind in every way. Anger is not something we see a lot of, if at all, and it feels like everyone we see, from waiters to cab drivers, tries to accommodate us in any way possible. Nothing exemplifies this spirit better than the morning procession of monks through the center of Luang Prabang. Every morning, as the sun rises, and the temperature along with it, a long line of Buddhist monks marches silently down the main street, carrying a small cauldron. As they walk, hundreds of people on the sidewalk give them rice or fruits or sweets, placing it right into the cauldron. It will be the monks’ only meal of the day.

  And yet the monks do not hesitate to give back. Parents or children in need bring their own bowls as they wait along the sidewalk, and the monks dutifully fill the bowls of the needy from what they have just been given.

  During this entire process, which can last more than half an hour, no one says a word. The ceremony feels as delicate and fragile and generous as the whole country. In this one morning ritual, you get a sense of the Lao people.

  Then Songkan comes and turns everything upside down. This normally quiet society abandons all its norms and goes absolutely hog wild. It is a stunning juxtaposition, as if the Lao population stores its entire reservoir of energy, saving it for one week in April, before letting everything out.

  The party settles down at dusk, quelled by a combination of excessive heat and alcohol. The city becomes normal once again, and a sprawling night market opens up where only hours ago a massive water fight raged.

  Cassie and I wander around the market for a bit, not particularly interested in buying anything, but always happy to look around and experience the street life. The number of stands selling keychains and home decorations fashioned from unexploded American bombs dating back to the Vietnam War is more than somewhat disturbing and attests to the distinction Laos holds of being the most bombed country per capita on earth.

  It is here that we stumble upon our luckiest find of Southeast Asia, not including mangosteen, two-dollar pad thai, and tiny fish that eat the dead skin off your feet while you sip a cocktail. This year, Songkan coincides with the Jewish holiday of Passover. (That’s not the luckiest find. We’re getting to that.)

  While the Israelites were busy wandering around the desert for forty years (Moses: “Of course we’re not lost!”), the Laotians were throwing wild parties and waiting for rain. We would celebrate the Lao New Year during the day and the Jewish holiday at night.

  When we landed in Luang Prabang a few days ago, I had plans to celebrate Passover at the local Chabad house. Chabad is a religious Jewish organization with houses all over the world that welcome Jewish travelers, giving them a kosher meal, a bed, and a place to feel comfortable. You can find Chabads almost anywhere, especially across Southeast Asia, where Israelis love to travel.

  The only problem with my plan is that Luang Prabang is one of the few major cities in this region that does not have a Chabad house, which is to say, it does not presently have a Chabad house. It did, not all that long ago, and the Web still turns up plenty of sites directing you to 46 Soulignavongsa Road.

  But the people who ran the house apparently didn’t understand the basic rules of not preaching to visitors and not being too loud about your religion. This is a Communist country, after all. These infractions got the Chabad house kicked out of town some years ago. As someone who hadn’t visited a single Chabad location in the eighteen countries we’d already visited, this news shouldn’t have been all that disturbing.

  Except it was my primary plan for how to celebrate Passover, and I had no backup plan.

  It wouldn’t be the end of the world if I didn’t mark the holiday somehow, but Passover has always been a special holiday to me, and my father’s seders—the festive meal at the beginning of the holiday—are not to be missed … unless you happen to be traveling halfway around the world. These meals and the ceremony that surrounds them are painfully long. If you do it right, it takes four hours, easy. But if it’s done well—and my dad does it very well—they’re a hell of a good time.

  The longest portion of the meal is reading the story of the Exodus, which takes more than an hour and involves its own unique set of rituals. Much of the story is read out loud, but many parts are sung in their own tune. The problem is that no one agrees on the parts to be sung or the melodies with which to sing them. Half of the meal is spent arguing about what’s a song and what’s not a song, shouting about the tune of the song, realizing nobody knows the melody and it may not be a song anyway, then trying a number of generic Jewish holiday melodies to see if they fit the words. Inevitably, all of these melodies sound like a depressed alphabet song, and when the vocalist realizes the mistake, the most frequent strategy is to gradually fade out and wrap it all up with a bit of humming.

  I knew I wouldn’t be able to engage in such lively and spirited arguments with a completely new group of people, b
ut I still wanted to celebrate the holiday. I had pretty much given up on my chances of finding a random group of Israelis wandering around northern Laos—when I suddenly found a random group of Israelis wandering around northern Laos.

  When I heard a guy and a girl speaking Hebrew in the aisle next to us in the night market, I charged through the divider of the night market and ran right up to the couple.

  “Do you have a place for Passover?” I spewed in Hebrew. Mind you, this is not a standard greeting in Hebrew, or in any other language or culture on earth for that matter.

  They were surprisingly calm given my random outburst.

  “Yes, we’re doing a seder at Spicy Laos,” they answered, only mildly alarmed.

  “Can I join? I mean, my wife and I.”

  “Of course!” I can’t tell if they agreed because they were legitimately excited to meet new people or if they unwillingly acquiesced for fear of what a raging, Hebrew-speaking lunatic charging through a quiet market was capable of doing should they dare say no.

  Regardless, they had new Facebook friends, and we had a place to celebrate my favorite holiday.

  We make our way to our festive meal after cleaning up from the day’s water fight. We find our new friends on the second-floor balcony of Spicy Laos, one of the cheapest backpacker hostels in the city. A private bunk in a dorm room costs six dollars and comes complete with all of the following amenities: a kitchen, searing heat, drunken screaming from the courtyard, a completely ineffective fan, and a mosquito net. All of our new friends have the slightly sunken eyes of otherwise energetic people who have been forced to endure a few too many nights of inadequate sleep. Most of the dozen or so people are Israeli, but a few are Dutch.

  Our extended table is covered in a carefully placed patchwork of banana leaves, providing a sort of placemat for the people seated around us. One of the girls in our group has spread out bananas, rice crackers, a few eggs, and a bit of lettuce on the knee-high table in front of us. A Passover seder has a required list of foods that are supposed to sit in the center of the table. None of what’s in front of us comes even close—only the eggs—but finding unleavened bread in Laos was not a task anyone wanted to attempt.