Home is a four-letter word.: One for the grandkids.

"Me and my friends are like
The drums on 'Lust for Life.'
We pound it out on floor toms.
Our psalms are sing-along songs." - The Hold Steady

The moral of the story probably isn't Try Hitch-hiking in Communist Countries. Probably.

There's a difference between stupidity and desperation, in cause but not effect. I've been vigilant to the point of being wary for almost four months straight. I've had to be. People might know what city I'm in from status updates or email, but when it comes to being more specific than that, I'm the only person in the world who knows where I am at any given point of the day. And with a useless phone-turned-digital watch in my pocket, if anything goes wrong, it's pretty much going to stay that way. Before yesterday, I had slipped up twice, and only one of those was really avoidable. What happened yesterday wasn't exactly preventable either. Aside from maybe me putting even less faith in Lonely Planet next time.

I took a day trip to Champasak, a tiny town in the southern Laos countryside. One that buses don't reach (even though the guidebooks claim they do). To get there, you either drop a pretty large amount of money on taking a tuk-tuk (in Laos' case basically a motorcycle with a wheeled-bench sidecar) for the forty bumpiest kilometers of your life, or you negotiate a ride with the owner of a sawngthaew, a pick-up truck with two benches in a covered truck bed. I did the latter. So did 22 other people (7 of them fellow backpackers). It was easy enough getting out to Champasak, even if we were crammed in to an impossibly small space, and had to wait a good while for the auto ferry to carry us over to the tiny village that held the ruins of an 11th Century Khmer temple. But by the time I was ready to get back to the biggish city of Pakse, all these drivers' runs were evidently done for the day, even though it was only two o'clock. I was supposed to have another hour and a half of breathing room, but maybe because it was a Friday afternoon, or maybe because it's me and I do things the near-impossible way, there wasn't a ride to be had.

After some brokenly communicated negotiations with a shopkeeper in town, for a little over two dollars she offered to have her husband drive me to a crossroads only five miles from Pakse, a distance I could then easily get a cheap tuk-tuk from. I hopped in the back of another sawngthaew, this one smaller, this one solo, and got ready for the thirty kilometer ride. We got less than three. We hit a larger road, at which point her husband demanded more money. An absurdly larger amount more. Considering it's Laos, this was still fairly affordable, but on both principle and logistics (if he dicked me over once, why wouldn't he do it again another mile down the road...) I got out. 31 kilometers away from where I needed to be, I started walking. Eighty cars must have passed going in the opposite direction. Going my way, in four minutes I was able to futilely outstretch a thumb at only one motobiker that sped past. I plodded on a little farther and turned back around to see a mini-bus surrounded by the town-children way back at the crossroads I had hopped out at. Assuming it had to be one of the promised but never delivered tourist buses back to Pakse, I sprinted back as much as my exhaustion would allow and ran up to the driver side panting. Getting a peek inside as I rounded the windshield, I knew it wasn't a tourist bus, but tried to explain my situation to the Lao driver nonetheless. I didn't ask for a ride back the full way, just partially, whatever would fit in their travel plans. Hesitantly, very hesitantly, he agreed.

Entering the side door to youthful screams of excitement, it was the matching shirts I noticed first. A flood of stark Fruit-of-the-Loom white with an orange bubble on each. I got distracted by the raw vegetables they were all snacking on before I was able to read what those bubbles, and the increasingly familiar logo said. "United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.... We Combat Human Trafficking." I had managed to flag down a van of Lao UN students. I was given a screaming welcome of confusion as well as some raw vegetables of my own (turned out to be really good jicama) before they resumed their singing and makeshift percussion that must have been going on for their whole trip. I was asked by their nine smiling faces and waving arms to join in, which I managed to in the form of clapping but not singing. That wasn't good enough. They urged me (though none of them spoke any English) to sing something of my own. But the shock of the entire situation, coupled with nine high-pitched early-teenage voices screaming playfully for me to start, as well as the thumping of sandals on a small bongo drum as the one boy did interminably, and I blanked. I couldn't think of a single song, let alone the lyrics for it.

It did come though. Halfway through one more round of their chanting, I was able to think of it. I have no clue why this song specifically came to mind. With my ipod being stranded in London, I haven't heard it in months, and even before then it wasn't one of my most played, but as soon as it popped in to my head out of absolutely nowhere, I knew it couldn't be any other song. That it couldn't be other way. I charaded an apology for my bad singing voice and started in:

"Hey Jude, don't make it bad.
Take a sad song, and make it better.
Remember to let her under your skin,
Then you'll begin to make it better,
Better, better, better, BETTER,
Na.... na na, Na Na Na Na.... NA NA NA NAAAAAAA..... Hey Jude....
Na... na na....."

We pulled in to the bus station in Pakse two minutes later. If I had waited another round or two of their traditional Lao sing-alongs, I probably would have saved myself a good deal of embarrassment. But that right song at the right time doesn't always come around just for observation. Sometimes it's about expression. Declaration. It doesn't come around for just you. Sometimes it's not about the memories you take back for yourself, it's about the memories you make for others.

"For well you know that it's a fool who plays it cool
By making his world a little colder..."