Yam Moon Sen

Yam Moon Sen
Above is a photo of some yam moon sen we ordered up in the food court in the Tesco in Nong Khai. Ya I know, where’s the moon sen? Under all the veggies, I snapped the photo before we sent the order back for some fish sauce and a re mixing.
Yam means salad, sen means noodle, and I would guess moon refers to this particular type of noodle, mung bean noodle. I’ve also heard the noodle called glass noodle as it is clear when cooked. Ideally I like the noodles cooled after cooking so that they remain at the proper done ness. They should be firm, biteable and slippery.
I’m a obsessive about yam and I like all cooked ingredients cold before mixing with any of the fresh veggies. I like all the vegetables fresh without a hint of being cooked. Crunchy.
The best yam moon sen I’ve had was next to the McDonalds close to the night bazaar in Chang Mai. Often you had to wait a little to even sit down. People ate quickly though and it was never a long wait. I think they dipped the noodles in ice water just after cooking. The yam by which all others are judged.
This yam moon sen in Nong Khai included mung bean noodles of course, tomatoes, sweet chunks of uncooked onions, green onions, squid, prawns, celery leaves, cilantro, pieces of hot dog, pieces of pork, bits of lettuce, a white sea animal that resembles a sponge and is sold dried, and now the good bits, fresh squeezed lime juice, fish sauce, fresh hot peppers, salt, sugar, bang nua.
Yam moon sen is supposed to rock. It’s a good light lunch for a hot day. The flavours are supposed to set you back on your heels a little. Fish sauce and lime juice in proportions that would be overdoing it by a factor of five under normal circumstances. Double the normal hot peppers. Anyone who eats it needs to be drinking lots of ice water and fresh steamed rice to help put out the fire.
Now I’m going to pan the hell out of an expat Vientiane restaurant so if you are an expat living in Vientiane stop here, please don’t send nasty emails, I already warned you.
I heard about a restaurant in Vientiane selling “real Lao food” and best of all “no MSG”. I had to go see how the heck they cooked “real Lao food” without MSG, and yes I realize that when that cook book was made with the old Kings favourite dishes in it there was no MSG as MSG is a recent arrival on the Lao cooking scene. I have yet to go to a place so remote in Laos that they don’t use MSG. Plenty of places without plah dek, and the hill tribes don’t use fish sauce, but everywhere MSG.
When I went there I felt a little out of place at first, all foreigners dressed up for the office or else rich tourists who dress up for lunch, I couldn’t tell which. The only Lao people seemed to be either staff or friends of the foreigners. It was the kind of place with a menu, written in English so that you had to guess what you were getting. I thought I recognised yam moon sen so I asked, I think on the menu it was noodle salad with pork or something. I know you are wondering what I’m doing ordering Thai food in a Lao restaurant. It was on the menu and I like it.
My goal was to get food with MSG, first I had to get the idea through that rather than checking to make sure there was no MSG I was checking to make sure they put some in my food. Wonder of all wonders they were able to find some in the kitchen and add it as asked. I guess with a restaurant staffed entirely of Lao people they have to eat somewhere.
What I wasn’t ready for was a lack of hotness. The name of the restaurant was Hot Chilli peppers in Lao, I thought they might have hot food. In fairness I also got this exact same yam moon sen in a friends new restaurant catering exclusively to foreigners. When I asked the cook where he had learned to cook so many different foods he replied at a large hotel in Vientiane. So I guess this is an evolving specialty food. Dumbed down Thai food for foreigners.
At first I thought there was absolutely no hotness at all to the food. Careful tasting and looking revealed sauce sri racha, that stuff that looks like catsup. Yuch, like adding catsup to lemonade. If there was fish sauce I couldn’t taste it. I’m sure it had lime juice. Overcooked noodles arranged on a plate to look beautiful. In fairness the rice was fresh, hot, cooked just right and of excellent quality. I told the staff how delicious it all was and smiled continuously. There is a certain pasted on Lao smile that one uses when the situation is simply irretrievable. I must have been bowed to about 15 times on the way out. Felt like I was in Thailand or something, all that bowing and scraping.
The following is how I make it. You can add or subtract as you see fit, especially with the meat and fish, any ingredients work.
In the coke crush twice as many fresh hot peppers as you are used to, add tiny amounts of salt, sugar, and bang nua. Then buckets of lime juice, and fish sauce. Should be enough left on the plate after you are done to drink the stuff from a glass. I like to cool all the cooked ingredients on ice before adding them. Prawns, squid, the white spongy sea food, even some mussels or oysters, glass noodles, cilantro, celery leaves, white and green onions. You can make it with pork instead of the fish or that white sausage called yaw. The ingredients are turned over with a spoon in the coke to mix with all the liquids.
Below is a photo of one of my favourite spices also from the Tesco in Nong Khai.

Bang Nuea

Pai Ying Nock

That's Lao for gone bird hunting, similar to gone fishing in English, I'm up North wandering about and will probably be blogging again sometime after the 15th of February. Cold up here.

Well,,,, maybe after the 20th. Warming up.

My Camera

DPReview of the new Pana FZ8

Panasonic just released a newer version of the camera I’ve been using. I was very happy to see not much had changed.
They added another pixel and an upgraded processor but the sensor, lenses, and body are all the same. I’m not so crazy about cramming tons of pixels into a tiny sensor anyway. The new camera is called the FZ8, I’m using it’s older sister called the FZ7, still the best thing I could find in it’s category called super zoom, or sometimes “SLR like“. With enough batteries and a couple huge memory cards it set me back a little over three hundred US. Empty it weighs around 300 grams, too light to bonk somebody over the head with when they steal my bus seat. I protect it because it’s the only camera I have not because it’s worth anything.
My pana (that’s shutter bug language for a Panasonic) doesn’t have interchangeable lenses but that’s just fine by me. I spent years switching from my telephoto zoom to the wide angle while shielding my camera from desert dust and mountain snow. Now I have the equivalent of a 38mm wide to a 430mm zoom all in a very good Leica lens. The image stabilization is nice too, now I can hand hold shots of almost everything. It helps that I can’t use the tripod because it’s at home.
My favourite mode is program mode. I can change any setting I want and other things will sort themselves out automatically. The other mode I use a lot is Manual because it allows me to adjust the lighting the way I want. Sometimes things just have a light filled background and I still want a shot.
One weird thing is that if I leave the camera to it’s default wide angle setting I can get real close, move the zoom to get a little closer and I have to jump back to a couple meters or things aren’t in focus. Don’t know why. The super VGA movie mode was broken from the get go. Oh well. I’ve tried taking some movies, don’t know how to get them up on the blog anyway.
All in all I’m very happy. My last and only other real camera was a Pentax Manual SLR. It had a light meter. It was sturdy but I had to work to get a good shot. I used to shoot with very slow Fuji slide film and I liked the colours better than this camera, I don’t care if they weren’t real.
This camera also has a scene mode that I often use for food. It also has a “simple” as in stupid, mode. Has a big red heart on the dial just to let you know. I’ve never been able to get a good picture out of it, always seems to be some kind of compromise.
Now that I can half way figure out these cameras I look at other peoples equipment when I’m traveling with them for any length of time. They usually use scene mode.
For fixing up the pictures after I shoot I’m still a neophyte. Let me preface by saying I used to think that doing things to an image after shooting was cheating. I don’t have photo shop, but use the stuff that came with the Google picture management software I downloaded off the net. Mostly I use it to crop or to add fill light. Some of the really bad shots have already been sharpened and everything else I could think of. There is also a feature called, “I’m feeling lucky”.
I realize not all the photos are that great, often they are used to move the story along. Sometimes they are just all there is of a person or situation I wanted to tell about. I keep thinking about going back to the villages I first visited and bringing them copies of the pictures. It looks as if I’ll be headed in that general direction Monday.

More from between the trips

Vientiane / Kunming

I was down trying to refind my way to the Northern Bus Station in Vientiane and while looking around found this bus getting fixed at a garage. Takes three days, costs 380 renminbe or 513,000 kip. Leaves every day at around 2PM, probably that gets it to the border mid morning if everything is working out alright, bet they use new tires every chance they get. Sleeper bus.
The reason I was going to the terminal was to ask about the bus to Luang Namtha, leaves at 8:30 AM arrives 7 AM. Lot less formalities than the plane, just show up. Plane is booked out a week in advance.

Kara

This is an NGO worker I met through the internet who helped find a friends body last month in Sichuan Province China. She was working in the provincial capital when she got an email message from someone who sent emails to any organisation he could think of in the area. Charlie had been overdue on his flight home for a few days with no word to anyone. Shortly thereafter while at the bus station Kara on a whim went in a guesthouse nearby and asked if Charlie had registered there, and low and behold there was his name.
A few people from the town Charlie lived in immediately flew over and began a search. I can understand their reasoning, often climbers break a leg or something and crawl out. Happens more often than you might think. Every day that goes by the chances of a happy ending diminish. I saw the story in the newspaper, “Two climbers missing in China” and so I read on, you never know. I didn’t follow the story much after that. I was aware of the odds.
At first they weren’t sure of which province Charlie and his partner had been climbing in. The area is where Sichuan, Yunnan, and Tibet all come together. Lots of mountains not many climbers, good place to bag first ascents. Coincidently the last time I talked to Charlie was just before I went to live in Dali, just south of there thirteen long years ago. By a lot of hard work by Charlie’s friends and probably some luck they found the driver that had dropped them off and narrowed down the search to one mountain. They found Charlie but not his partner. Looked like an avalanche.
Kara was in Vientiane on a visa run and to relax in the warm climates a little. She was headed back through Vang Vien and wanted to try climbing on the limestone crags there, then off to a new job in Tibet with the UN. Kara if you are reading this perhaps don’t take up Alpinism. Charlie if you’re reading keep a cold one handy I’ll be right there.

Butt, Namphone, Thipalada, Hong on the porch

This last picture is of the completed shacket I built for my brother and sisters in law. Total price around $3500. A generous mom in law gave Butt here three cows to watch and he gets to keep the calves. One has popped out already. Butt’s work for the season is pretty much over until the rice is ready to cut in May, it’s about ten inches high now.
I asked Butt about insecticide and fertilizer. He said there is no need for insecticide and he does use fertilizer, 16-20-0. Lots to make the stalk and grains grow, nothing for the roots. From the rai he farms he gets about 7 bags per rai during the dry season, and maybe 9 or 10 during the wet. Right now he and his wife and baby eat 30 kilos a month. That leaves over a ton of his crop to sell, maybe just under a thousand dollars a year. Not counting expenses.

Nothing to do with Laos

But a nice picture of 504 on a November afternoon in Utah none the less.
Photo by Scott Lambert
Scott used to use Kodachrome most of the time. Fairly slow film too. maybe 100. The shutter speed has to be pretty quick the blades are stopped. Nice colour saturation. I’ve enlarged this on the computer and I have no idea who the pilot is, someone I don’t think I knew very well. The rock in the background looks like that chocolate stuff that is on top of the Navajo sandstone that the skids are about ready to set down on.

Between Trips

I took a couple of weeks and went down to Pakse to look at a piece of land we were given and then we went down to Ko Samet in Thailand for a touristy type vacation.
Pakse was a nice change from Vientiane, only a few fellow tourists wandering about, the town seemed to have more money or be better taken care of, felt clean and more pretty. After getting a hotel we rented a motorcycle and the four of us piled on Lao style and headed up to Pakson district and Ban Lak Sam Sip Paad. As the name might suggest the town was thirty eight kilometres up from Pakse, just as you get up onto the Boloven Plateau itself.


Gate and flowering tree at headmans house Lak 38

The Boloven Plateau although nothing inspiring is a lot higher and cooler than Pakse. The road rises at a steady rate for all 38 of the kilometres, we could have coasted back to Pakse. The dirt is also noticeably much more fertile than around Vientiane. Right now our land is planted with tea, although most of the neighbouring land is in coffee. It was time to pick and everywhere you looked there were bags of coffee, and people drying coffee in their front yards.
The big bragging point of our land is that it’s just up the road from the only viewing point for Tad Fan, one of the biggest waterfalls in Laos. It’s actually two falls which makes it even prettier somehow. There is one very expensive guest house with bungalows for forty dollars a night and up. I think it’s called the Tad Fan Resort. They also own the trail with access to view the falls. I took this picture from the front porch of the reception restaurant area.

Tad Fan

I really don’t know how to give it perspective. The falls themselves are probably two hundred feet in height. The English speaker working at the guest house that I talked to said he didn’t know of anyone who had walked to the bottom and that it was a full days walk just to get to the bottom of the canyon. I wonder. One of these days I’ll have to check it out.
Our land is about a five minute walk from the resort. I guess on the weekend there is a tremendous amount of Thai tour busses. Just outside the entrance is a whole market full of shacks selling useless trinkets and a couple selling soft drinks and chips. Amazing how people feel the need to buy things when they go places.
I have no idea what we will do with five thousand meters of overgrown tea bushes up on the Boloven Plateau. I have no desire to build a guest house and without someone there to watch the house it’s useless to build something. So if anyone wants a nice piece of land in Southern Laos let me know.
The next day we went to Ubon in Thailand and it felt like entering another world. Everything seemed rich and modern. The first thing we did while waiting for a connecting bus to Rayong was to eat ourselves sick on Thai food. It felt amazing that you could just go into a restaurant at a bus station and get any food you wanted.
The night bus to Rayong seemed like a never ending journey of driving down the wrong side of the road on a modern highway. Less than twenty four hours after leaving Pakse we stepped off the ferry and were on Samet. Sengthian hadn’t felt like dilly dallying.
The part I liked best about the island was this tree. It’s mai yang, a very common tree used for lumber all over. This is a big one. I figured the trunk was still three feet thick in places at eighty feet where the branches spread out. There were about twenty trees in this patch. Too bad the island wasn’t covered.

Mai Yang

I wasn’t so impressed with Ko Samet. It was fun swimming in the salt water every day but that’s about it. Food didn’t seem inspiring, and the bungalows were too pricey. Twenty five dollars for something that’s just ok seemed like quite a bit. The bungalows are jam packed onto the beach and the road is hardly walkable from the sawngthaews drag racing up and down it all day. The taxi mafia is in force, as a matter of fact there seemed to be a lot of price fixing on the island. Motorcycles were double price as was the internet, all prices were noticeably the same everywhere. Seven Eleven which probably has prices set by some anonymous corporate headquarters was half the price on most things and very busy. Lots of trash everywhere.
Oh, and all this was taking place in a protected national park. Like they say the finest people money can buy. The redeeming part was that there were a lot of Thais there on vacation from Bangkok. An interesting mix with the half dressed Europeans. I personally had no problem with topless twenty something Swedish girls. Most Thai girls were swimming in shorts, and usually a thick tee shirt. My son is very good at befriending beautiful Thai girls and I asked them what they thought of the near nakedness of the Euros. They didn’t mind at all, just wondered why the girls didn’t feel shy.

Fishing Boat, sorry no topless pictures

The day before we left a middle aged Thai woman went up the beach making all the girls cover up, they left, and people put out their cigarettes, and she also hit up people for money to clean up the beach. An older solo tourist beach type guy told me the woman was one of the original inhabitants of the island and owned half the beach, he said he was very tuned in to the local situation and knew these things. I asked our bungalow owner and she laughed. Said the lady was a drunk who liked to get money out of people and had lived there less than 15 years just like everyone else. Said no one owned the beach, all bungalows were on rented land.

Thai Tourists and big Mai Yang

Second Trip North Headed Back

Once I turn around and start heading home trips often seem to end quickly. It’s like the horse knowing it’s headed for the barn after working all day.
I barely stopped for the night at Phongsali then rode down to Hatsa to catch the boat south on the Nam Ou. I wanted to avoid the bus Phongsali to Oudomxai if possible and I had visions of sliding down the Nam Ou three days to Luang Prabang.
The negotiations over the fare were beyond me. I was quoted eight dollar, I said ok, but there was still a lot of work to do. The conversation was going too fast for me to follow and I also had no interest. Eight bucks seemed to be pretty reasonable to me. I always try to pay “the right price” to help those who come later and so that locals don’t get the idea that the falang is some kind of walking ATM, but when I don’t know the price and it seems reasonable compared to other prices I just go with it.


Slow boat negotiations almost finished

No one was making any moves to get on the boat, so I did. Soon all the Lao people followed and with a little more haggling between the official in charge of the landing and the captain of the boat we were off.

Riding in the lap of luxury

Boat rides as a passenger tend to make me lethargic, sun reflecting off the water, steady drone of the engine, monotonous bank sliding by, the only problem was that I couldn’t lie down and go to sleep. After a couple of hours there was some excitement as a passenger spotted some fish that had floated to the surface. Soon there seemed to be more and I realized they were rising up out of the river. The boat was turned around and we floated amongst the dying fish that were rolling over on the surface and trying to gulp air. People were scooping them up with flip flops, baskets, paddles and anything else that came to hand. Mostly they were about six or eight inches long, not what I would call big, but everyone seemed excited.

Dead fish

I couldn’t figure out what would cause such a large fish kill and only on that section of river. There is no industry or towns of any size above that point on the Nam Ou. I thought maybe chemicals from some home grown mining on the tributary we had just passed? I wasn’t about to tell anyone not to eat free fish, maybe the oxygen content had radically changed on just that section of river.
The hills on both sides of the river seemed to have been cut. No big trees up both sides for quite a ways. I assume the logs were floated down the river to Luang Prabang or taken directly by boat. There was a lot of human activity also, as the valley widened there were many villages and even once in a while a road.
Sometime in the mid afternoon we made Muang Khua. Muang Khua is one of those steep river towns built because of a ferry crossing. I got a room at the first place I came to and walked up the hill to look around. Yes there was a bus that left at eight, and quite a few older buildings. Nothing ancient or classic but still an older established river town. Small but nice market. Small winding alleys leading between houses on down towards the river, houses built up against the hill, three stories in front and one in back due to the rise.

Temple carving Muang Kua

I stopped at the restaurant recommended in the guidebook and found an English language menu and hugely inflated prices. I should have known.
I asked the young owners of my own guest house if they could cook me up some Lao food for dinner and they agreed.
Large mild chilli peppers stuffed with mung bean noodles pork and spices, ( a whole plate of them)
Small green pea pods on the side with bean sprouts
Gaeng made of cabbage with tofu and bits of pork.
Steamed rice on the side
Green tea in a pot.
Three dollars

I had to excuse myself I just couldn’t finish all of green peas, I was happy enough to have even completed the stuffed chillies.

Hua Wai Muang Khua

I hadn’t had a real cup of coffee since leaving the bus station in Oudomxai so many days ago and so I got up early, found myself locked in, and ended up climbing out the balcony. At the market I met an interesting man. I should begin by saying it was probably six thirty in the morning. I get up at that time often or even earlier, seen enough monks on their morning rounds to satisfy a few tour bus loads of Luang Prabang tourists. I like markets in the mornings. Good breakfast foods to be had and lots of busy people.
There was a counter and a lady that sold soft drinks and coffee. I ordered two at once to save time. A well dressed Lao man sat down next to me and started to make conversation in English. I continued it in Lao from the get go. My horrible Lao is usually a lot better than Lao peoples more horrible English, if it isn’t things usually sort themselves out quickly.
He had stayed at the large rich seeming hotel at the top of the hill the night before and was traveling to Dien Bien Phu. These were his associates and when he introduced me to his friends one of whom said “How are you this morning?” I asked the Lao man if he was a tour guide, usually I can spot them earlier than this, not really he said but in the tourism business. I asked him if he spoke English, big smile and a “yesss” can we use English then? “certainly if you’d like”. His English was some of the best I’ve ever heard from a native Lao speaker. I felt like ten kinds of a fool.
His company is one of the old big ones that have been operating in Lao since even before they opened it up for independent tourists. Mostly they do the actual work for smaller companies that book the tours with the customers. All those large tour busses etc. They were about to open a new route through from Thailand for Thai nationals to Dien Bien Phu and he had to take the trip himself to check the condition of the road and hotels and so forth. I guess Dien Bien Phu is only a couple more hours of good road from Muang Khua. That puts it at five hours from Oudomxai, and would make it an extremely popular route once they open the border.
Because this man seemed so knowledgeable about tourism in Laos and his English reflected an understanding of western culture I asked him about the interactions between hill tribes peoples and western tourists. I even explained the things I’d found troubling, mainly that we hadn’t been properly warned about giving things away in the villages we visited and had even been given candy to distribute. Also the feeling my fellow trekkers felt that sometimes they were being disrespected often by being stared at by young men. I had felt that sometimes the children were laughing at, not with, them.

Stalking the elusive hill tribe photo at the Muang Long Market

The tour operator said that actually tourism hill tribe interaction was a big problem and mentioned villages outside of Muang Sing that not even he is safe to visit. The long history of tourists always giving things to hill tribes people has created the feeling that every tourist who stops in their village owes them as does the tour operator. When the villagers don’t get money they get angry.
And then he went on to recommend the work being done to develop in a less harmful way in the Luang Namtha area, initiated by some individuals and used by most of the operators there. He was effusive in his praise. Coming from someone who had such a long history with development here, and who works in an entirely different sector of the tourism market, I was impressed.
Normally I’m a very cynical person when I start hearing words like “sustainable development” or “eco tourism”. Usually I assume it’s another way to appeal to yuppies who consume the earths natural resources at the fastest rate in the history of the world and to make them feel good about it. It’s like calling something 100% natural. I think my next goal is to head to Luang Namtha and check it out for myself.

The remainder of my trip I took on auto pilot. The eight o’clock bus that left at 8;30 and had a battery shake loose caused us to roll into Oudomxai as the Luang Prabang bus was rolling out the front entrance. The sharp eyed driver knew exactly why some old fat falang was hurrying towards him with a determined look and they waited for me to get on. Back in the land of Falangs each guarding their spare seat with a day pack and staring out the window while listening to their ipod. The road to Luang Prabang seemed very smooth and new. The next morning on the 6:30 bus the guys driving recognised me and remembered that I get off at Nang Tang.

Bus Station Muang Khua