A Perfect Moment in Vang Vieng

Every now and then you have one of those 'perfect moments' -- it's the kind of moment that summons up a memory, like the smell of autumn when you were 10 years old and lived in that big white house on the tree-lined street. It's also the kind of moment when sights or sounds spark some romantic or idealized notion of the 'good life': a relaxed life, one full of enjoyment and pleasure taken from simple things.

For me, this perfect moment is, oddly enough, based on TV commercials for instant lemonade (it would be more 'perfect' if real lemonade were the product, but no-one advertises 'real stuff' on TV). It's the way they use scenes of childhood summers so cleverly: a tire swing hanging over a shaded, lazy river from the boughs of an ancient tree; a ribbon of gravel road that gently winds along the hips of rolling hills and disappears on the horizon line into fluffy white clouds; bicycles with wicker baskets, grassy meadows with bubbling brooks, dandelion fuzz floating on a breeze... Stuff like that.

It's not like these things remind me my childhood summers. Not really. But that's the beauty of advertising: it's the ideal of a thing... and as far as romanticized images go, lemonade commercials hit the mark. They make me feel something -- not to mention encouraging an out-of-character desire to stop whatever it was I was doing and head into the countryside with a sweating pitcher of instant lemonade. I'm sure once I got there, I'd be let down -- the countryside is boring. And who would want to watch a film of themselves drinking lemonade there? Without a soundtrack and artful editing team, the whole experience would probably be quite boring... and hot... and just between you and me, too much lemonade gives me acid reflux. But the 'perfect moment' is based on sensations, mood, atmosphere... and so, for me, the lemonade commercial conveys an ideal state of being despite the drawbacks of the 'real' experience.

In Vang Vieng, as I rode a bicycle (with a basket!) in the countryside, I was overcome with the feelings beckoned by these adverts. The scenery is not quite the same -- there aren't rolling hills but jagged, lofty limestone mountains. And instead of the odd farmhouse so commonly seen in the background of a lemonade commercial, there are villages of wood and thatch homes with pigs snorting in dirt yards, women bathing at public wells, and naked children chasing chickens. But there are lazy rivers (with swings!), big sunny skies, and the daytime chatter of crickets and cicadas that always comes with lazy, hot weather and will forever remind me of childhood summers... when life is carefree, days are spent in the endless pursuit of nothing, and the simplest things can hold your fascination from dawn until dusk.