Asian Trail Mix: True Tales from Borneo to Japan by Eric Madeen

Author:Eric Madeen [Madeen, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-04-23T05:00:00+00:00

INSIDE AN INTERNET CAFE IN LUANG PRABANG ...

It's a Wired World

PlaNet Online is an internet cafe in an old French colonial building on Luang Prabang's main drag. You look through the plate-glass picture windows into another world. A pair of spiral staircases rise from spotless cream-colored tile as a TV flickers high on a wall. Faces of every description are bent over computers. Walk inside to the chill of air conditioning and the busy click of keyboards over New Age music. Stay long enough and you'll hear the chatter of many tongues.

A Canadian woman I first met on the corner of the Meung Market where she was calling out for a waterfall trip ("It's cheaper and more fun when you go as a group!”) said that she uses PlaNet Online to stay in touch not only with people from home but new friends she has made traveling. "Pauline is an Australian woman I met in Chiang Mai," she said. "We've been exchanging emails and will hopefully hook up here."

Joanne Tsung, a corporate lawyer from New York on sabbatical, said she's been using internet cafes to help document her travels in Southeast Asia for readers of her travelogue "Lawyer on the Loose" posted on the online magazine Oxygen. "I use internet cafes to submit 800-word articles with digital photos," she explained. "My readers have been following me around Southeast Asia."

Another journalist, an American man at the computer next to mine, explained that he jacks into the net to check news and send in his articles.

As for the speed, a Swedish man complained, "It's murderously slow. Email is even slower here than in Vientiane."

There are dozens of three internet cafes in Luang Prabang. Here, the staff, Somlith and Khamla, took turns explaining. "We're open 8:00 am to 10:00 pm every day. Business is good. Going well. Many, many customers, mostly tourists from all over the world. Usually they use for email. Sometimes problems, like System 10 is now down. Customers complain of slowness, slow email, getting into G-mail, Hotmail, et cetera. Mornings and evenings are faster. From 10 to 3 is quite slow. We don't know why. We are not technicians." When pressed, they speculated: "The modems are old and the mountains around Luang Prabang are high."

They said only an occasional Lao will come in. On that note, I asked a novice monk, seated at one of the terminals, how he uses PlaNet Online. "I email my foreign friends from America, France and Switzerland," he said. "When I press email I am really glad when I see I have mail."

Some things are universal.

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