Sunsetting, once again

Mekong, Vientiane...

And noticed that it's been ten months already; maybe a summary of sorts approaches, maybe...

but today another arrival in another placename, brief pause, and already thoughts of departure and the next pause on the journey south...found room which was cheap but has a bit of an odour to it...not as bad as boiled cabbage in krakow once long ago, in fairness probably not any worse than myself...but ten months in I feel ragged, as ethereal as the dreams which led me here...

and halfway through this part of the trip I know I don't have enough time, or rather visas collude to complicate routes and times; two weeks left on Laos visa and it's just not working out at all..meetings wise...and so the confusion continues upon me...but there will be a jam somewhere in December...

first thoughts on ventiane; it's kind of not what I expected :-) but it's been a nice wander around and a truly spectacular sunset - photo has been slightly darkened and straightened, otherwise it's the raw thingy - which lingered on in hebridean fashion as clouds took on ever more unlikely tones and upstream a mist upon the gold of the water...

and the city seems fairly haphazard, I think I was half expecting echoes of pondy and it's there, in a way, in the fading light of some of the architecture, the road by the Mekong made me think of goubert avenue....

I dreamed I was in new orleans
down on goubert avenue,
heard the ghost of buddy bolden,
well I shook my wings and flew...

And maybe this is one of my reasons for travel, a search for the echoes of things as they never were; or maybe I just found the wrong questions...

And so as I sit listening to a Chinese opera accost the night from the temple across the street, balloons bursting from a roadside funfair, and the sounds and images of the passing street, vientiane under the first fine curve of a new moon offers what it will...