Beginnings

Sun setting over the bridge on that day a decade and a half ago

Laos began for me the way lots of things do, as a visa run.

It was the late in the dry season 1995 when I found myself sitting in a nearly empty restaurant in Thailand, the place was set out over the Mekong. I was waiting for time to pass. My visa was for the next day. I had no book. Internet wasn’t yet, and there were no other people to while away the time. I did as many others have done before and since. I stared at the river mesmerized by it’s endless twistings and turnings as it slid by the front of my view. I nursed a beer or two for several hours.

Before dusk is a quiet time. Motors and air conditioners cease, people take their evening bucket showers and quietly gather for dinner. The Mekong is wide at Nong Khai yet when a fisherman cut his motor a mile out I could hear every scrape of his movements as he put out a line and moved a paddle in the bottom of the boat, he might well of been ten feet away the sound carried so well.

Quickly dark came and the lights of the luxury hotel up by the bridge came on as well as every little restaurant and house up and down the shoreline and in the town behind me. The number of lights was doubled by their reflection in the water.

It was when I looked across the river for the first glimpse of the lights of the country I was to visit that I noticed the difference. Laos was dark, lights out. Not the glow of one bulb from one single restaurant or house. No lit up half built construction sites, no hotels, nothing. The contrast was stark, on the Thai side was the shimmering gaudy beginnings of another night of the dazzling, lit restaurants, hotels, and sing song bars.

Across the river dark and silent trees.

I had one of those non immigrant double entry visas to Thailand which were the semi official long stay visas for people the authorities for whatever reason were ok with. All I needed to do was leave Thailand and do a U turn at the border, get stamped out, get stamped back in, and I’m good for three more months.

The usual routine was the multi day train ride to Malasia and back, but of late there were rumors of not only tourist visas to Laos but also available in 24 hours at the border close to the capital. I was living between Lam Sak and Petchabune on the edge of Isaan, Laos was close.. My employer was understanding and I was making a small vacation of the whole thing.

Laos wasn’t so much a step back in time, but a different ending to the same story. The currency had too many zeros, the roads weren’t paved, a lot of people lived in bamboo houses, hardly any traffic. People walking, too poor to buy a bike or take a bus. No traffic lights. No advertising signs, lotta dust.

The language was different, more tone range. The people laughed easier and louder. Women wore the long traditional skirt called a sihn and wore their hair long. Commerce was at the market, people raised chickens and grew vegetables in the city center. The men had hair cuts and clothes of two generations ago. The light filtered through the ubiquitous red dust gave everything the sepia tone of old photos, I was smitten.

Laos was a country just emerging from a long self imposed exile from the family of nations and after a quarter century of slumber it was slow to shake off the sleep. A Rip Van Winkle of South East Asia with a Ho Chi Mihn countenance.

This is actually from the time of our first trip back in 01

Than Thoot Karen

The US ambassador to the Lao PDR has a blog

Than Thoot Karen

Best quote

Usually the Embassy throws parties to celebrate special occasions like holidays or anniversaries. But sometimes we throw a party just for the heck of it! 

Web Site of Tourism office in Muang Long

Of most import is the link below.

Tourism Office Muang Long

And a hat tip to Wandering Stray Cat or Lao Meao

Below Mr. Tui in all his glory riding the rapids on the Nam Fa.

Nam Fa means Sky River

I have no doubt as to where I am when I wake up to the sound of the saht hitting the koak-tam-kao. The foot powered pestle falling into the large mortar carved from a log is such a low solid sound it reverberates through the hard packed earth and up the posts the house is built on and into beams supporting the floor and the sleeping platform I lie on.

Usually I wake up when the eldest wife starts the fire. Today the sun is fully up and the wife of the eldest son is dehusking the rice under the house. There’s a slight creek as one end of the long pole attached to the saht is pushed down with the foot, then a hesitation as the saht at the other end tops it’s arc then that moment that hangs in time as saht falls through the air and hits the coak.

The chickens are eager to get any fallen grains, the husks will be collected to be mixed with the boiled hearts of banana trees to feed the pigs, and the family has rice for one more day of the year, one of many years, in many generations, of the people called Akha.

Koak tam kao, and in her hand the cotton she is twisting into thread, notice the rice bag that is actually an old fertilizer bag bought from town, it still has the markings 18-20-0 representing how much NPK.

I rub the sleep from my eyes, grab my camera and duck underneath the house to take a photo. I know at the time it’s just a cornball tourist photo. Gotta have a picture of the foot powered saht. I’m accompanied by a couple kids and a dog, the woman is spinning cotton fibers into thread at the same time as she pushes the saht with her foot.

I saw a video shot in Vientiane by some sort of cultural preservation arm of the government, they were taking kids to see a foot powered sat tam kao. Kids in the capital can now grow up never having seen rice de husked except by machine. Gone the way of the water buffalo I guess.


This post is part of a series of posts about a long walk I did mostly in Muang Long district of Luang Namtha Province Laos in the winter of 08/09. Below are the links to the other posts.
Long Time Traveler Muang Long
One Day Treks in the Vicinity of Muang Long
Lahu NIght Out
The Trail To Nambo
Hmong House
Further Into the Forest
Ban Nam Hee
Lost in Laos

On the left the Naiban of ban Huay Poong, on the right the local guide from Ban Nam Hee

Inside breakfast is busy with lots of people. We had rice and a jeao made of toasted peanuts, hot peppers, pig oil, and enough salt to cause stroke. The headman pulled an SKS out of the roof above where I’d been sleeping, opened the magazine dropping six cartridges onto the blankets, worked the action to extract the one left in the chamber, and handed it over to one of the guys that had come to breakfast.

Young hunter with SKS

Tui translated. The young men had chased a large boar the day before. The wounded pig was too tough and they hadn’t been able to kill the it. One of the dogs was hurt so badly it might well die. I could picture scene in my head, young guys running around in the bushes, dogs whirling about, pig snorting and screaming, dogs barking and biting, thick brush and trees, muffled explosion of black powder muskets with lots of smoke that lingers in the slow air of the deep forest.

The hunter was borrowing the center fire rifle to finish the job today. Cartridges are expensive, probably around a dollar a piece, the headman is fine loaning out the rifle but not the ammo. The rifle is called the same thing in Laos as in the US except using mangled french consonants that come out something like Sik Kuh Say. It’s a soviet block semi auto, uses the same rounds as the AK, might well be half a century old.

A new local guide is hired. Tui, and the guides discuss the route, our old guide will return to his village and a new one will take us to Jakune Mai. I was beginning to lose track of how long we’d been out, it had only been three days and nights. This house and other houses and other cook fires in other villages in other trips seem to meld into the fires of the juggies up on the Greys river and on into the Androscoggin of my young teens.

The headman told of his difficulty kicking his addiction to opium, and his re acceptance by the people of the village. I listen with ambivalence. Opium is as much a part of their culture as the saht to dehusk the rice, it’s up to them to refrain from liking it too much.  There’s more talk, of the division of the village, of the route to Jakune, of the other villages of the area.

Soon enough we were walking again. Walking was becoming the thing we do. First the local guide I called uncle, then me, and then Tui. The blister on the ball of my left foot had been hurting for a couple hours each morning, either the feeling would go away or I would stop noticing.

The walking goes easy, down hill but not steep.

Not a the biggest by any means but that root flare is greater than two meters. This just happened to be where we took a break. Purple back pack on left of photo

By late morning were in the very large trees of the Nam Fa Valley. (nam means water or in this case river, fa is sky, so “sky river”. I’m used to very large trees and uncut forests, but the soil at the bottom of the valley is so rich the trees grow very high and the trunks are very large, some of the largest trees I’ve ever seen anywhere. The roots flare out widely to support such weight. What light filters through seems green.

I read a while ago on one of those online forums for scientific NGO workers that a Malaysian lumber company would like to build a hydro dam on the Nam Fa. The fact that the company up to this time only deals in wood is enough to make you wonder. The valley is a long long way from anyone that needs large amounts of electricity.

We took a break at a trail junction. To our left was the path to Mongla an unknown number of kilometers downstream on the south bank of the river. At least here was a route to somewhere I’d been before. I remember Mongla as it was when I left it over two years before, the morning mists so thick and heavy everything was dripping, the soft spoken Naiban and his very pretty young second wife not yet with a child.

I put on my flip flops to protect me from stones bruising my feet and used a couple of poles to steady myself. The Nam Fa was as I remember, knee to mid thigh deep, very fast, and fifty meters wide. In this land of deep forest the river is open to the sky and reflects blue. There is the musty wet smell of a big river.

Nam Fa means Sky River

From the water marks on the bank it looks as if the common high water in the wet season is four feet deeper. With six feet of water coursing through, the river would be impossible to cross for many months of the year. In a place where all travel is by foot an impassable river would create a long barrier.

For a while we just look at the river. The Nam Fa is only navigable in portions, it provides no access as a transportation route. The place where it enters the Mekong is difficult to see, it joins in the middle of a set of rapids, the sandbar pushed up by the confluence is high. I have looked for the entrance a couple of times, it hides itself well. The Fa joins the Mekong just below Xiengkok, someone had to point to it for me to see.

Across the river we walk to a village high above the flood plain. I’m not real happy. We still aren’t close to Jakune, the village is another one neither Tui nor I have ever heard of. It’s called Ban Jungah Mai, the Naiban is only 22yrs old, and he also is named Tui. I don’t know which is more unusual that a small village had such a young headman or that an Akha guy had a Lao name.

I headed under the shade of the house and watched a woman weaving while Tui made arrangements for us to continue on towards Jakune. It’s always a problem with a guide, they want to return to their village, the further they walked the more they want to ditch you and head back.

Weaving Ban Jungah Mai

We headed back downhill towards the river but at right angles to the direction we’d come up. After an hour in the mid afternoon hot sun we reach a tributary just before if joins the main river and miraculously two boats.

It’s difficult to describe how startling it was to see boats. The valley we were in is remote in large part due to the impassable rapids up and downstream. The peoples are Akha, Hmong, Lahu, yet here were some Lu with boats.

The Lu are a type of “Tai” peoples, sharing a similar language to the Thai, Lao, Thai Nua, Dai, etc., and also sharing a similar Teravada Bhudism, similar writing systems, etc. These young guys were River Lu. The kind of Lu who live along rivers and are specialists with boats and fishing. Never before had any Lu lived along the middle portions of the Nam Fa.

Boat on the middle portion of the Nam Fa

Our new guide and a few of his friends and their wives and children had hiked in carrying their tools and built the boats on site where they used them in the few miles with navigable rapids. They also built a water wheel to power their sat tam kao to relieve the women of one daily chore.

Very quickly the boats are down the four kilometers to the landing for the trail to Jakune Mai. Tui and our new guide know each other. Tui used to teach high school and the guide was one of his students.

As we walk up the hill and Tui and the guide talk, I notice that the long muzzle loader our guide is casually carrying over his shoulder is pointed straight backwards and into my face. Interrupting I start to ask Tui if there isn’t some sort of safer walking arrangement and with a couple quick words they put me in the front of our little band. Tui explains the locals have never had any training.  I’d guess all that would be needed would be for the hammer to catch on a twig. Call my a nervous Nellie if you will.

Local Lu Guide

We head uphill. The grade is fairly steep and continuous. Afternoon turns to dusk and the guide leaves us to jog back to the river while there is light. The trail is well used and obvious. Dusk lingers in twilight then it’s dark. I turn on my headlamp and Tui switches on his flashlight which flickers for a while before dying. I figure now is as good a time as any to start talking about snakes.

I don’t like walking at nights, I much prefer sitting, or sleeping. We got to Jakune Mai before it was very late, I doubt it was much past seven or eight. Walked right on through the village without people noticing much, there are no lights, we’re just a couple more people wandering around in the dark. Dogs didn’t even bark. Maybe we smelled like everyone else.

Despite the dark, finding our way to Law Pao’s house was obvious, the village lies on a grade and the house is situated at a certain angle. For the first time in a few days I was in a place I’d been before.

Village Swing in the Morning Fog

The Tao of Travel (a book by Paul Theroux)

This book is not yet available (4/2/11) But who knows, it soon might well be.

I'm not quite sure what Paul's last book was about, seems like it must have been a while ago. At least Mr Theroux wrote a nice article for the travel section of the Sunday NYT. I usually don't go in much for travel articles in the Times, usually they seem like the meanderings of a gap year backpacker with an expense account and an editor. Paul Theroux must be a little better than the normal as I read long enough to reach the bottom of the page.

Read the original here.

http://travel.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/travel/03Cover.html

I guess I've read most things Paul Theroux has written, at least most of the travel writing. I'm not big on the fiction.

The article in the Times is pretty good. It's about going places people say not to go to because they are dangerous. He rules out places like present day Afganistan, Iraq, Pakistan, etc. but will and did go to other places people say not to. 

I'll make a point of reading the book. Strange coming across Paul Threroux in the Times, bet they wouldn't print him if he weren't already a famous writer, not their style at all.

Lost in Laos (and first white guy)

We had lost the trail a long time ago and I for one had no idea where we were going and neither did my guide. If the local guide had a clue he wasn’t sharing, so that’s two out of three at least.

We weren’t lost lost, none of us had lost our sense of direction or anything. The road from Thailand was still over there, the Mekong somewhere in front and China way in back. I’ve been getting lost since I was eight or nine in woods not so different than these. Things have been worse in this life, at least we were standing on solid ground, it was warm enough, we had water.

Crossing the Nam Fa

It was certainly no where near as bad as I’d had it a couple years before not thirty kilometers from where we now wandered. At that time we’d ended up just heading in the direction of a road. This time we were a lot further from a road, but we were not too far from the village we’d slept in.

My guide Tui who is actually the director of Tourism in the prefecture wasn’t too pleased. He figured I’d be perturbed. I wasn’t, other than the inconvenience I was ok. Long walks into untraveled areas with inexperienced guides often end up with some wrong turns along the way. Maybe I should start at the beginning.

For anyone wishing to read about the walks leading up to this day, below are links to what are the preceding stories about this walk.
Long Time Traveler Muang Long
One Day Trecks In The Vacinity of Muang Long
Lahu Night Out
The Trail To Nambo
Hmong House
Further Into The Forest
Ban Nam Hee

We’d gotten a slow start leaving Ban Nam Hee. Tui went and adjusted the antenna for the kids watching TV, no one in the village knew how to adjust the satellite TV. The school master awoke blinking in the sunlight, last night’s drinking session had taken it’s toll. I guess the teacher was a little out of control, they needed a new one. School is kind of important to a village with 100% illiteracy. Not one single person could read or write other than the schoolmaster the government had sent.

By the time we moseyed down and crossed the river it was mid day. The river was the Nam Fa, we crossed it just below the junction of the Nam Hee. There was a raft on the other side. Our local guide shed his clothes, swam over, and poled across to get us. We didn’t even take our shoes off so to save time. Photo above

Once across the river we followed the main trail for only a short way before diverging on a less traveled path. The fainter trail headed steeply uphill until we left the immediate river valley. As it gained elevation the trail became more difficult to see.

Sometimes trails get grown over due to a lack of use. That wasn’t the case here, this trail was progressively more faint. Tui remarked how when locals walk off trail in the woods they often break small seedlings pointing the broken top in the direction of travel. Then he did just that, and so did I feeling slightly silly. Eventually we were just walking in the woods. Once in a while Tui or the local guide would hack at a creeper with their long knives.

When the understory became thicker and the hill steeper slowing us down to a very slow pace, I asked Tui if we just maybe ought to call it a day. Go back to the village we knew and start anew the next day. Neither the local guide nor Tui wanted anything to do with that, big loss of face on returning to the village.

I don’t know how we ended up taking the route we had, I’d been more or less passively tagging along, I guess it was as much my fault as anyone else. I was the oldest, and though these were the woods and hills of our local guide I should have quizzed him more about where we were headed before starting out. To tell the truth I didn’t have three words in common with the young fellow. Tui was communicating using Lu I assumed, but I think our local guide’s command of the Lu language was extremely limited. The chance of him speaking any Lao or even being able to use the words in common between Lu and Lao was about zero. Heck even young American guys his age usually speak using grunts and snorts.

After discussion our local guide changed direction almost 180 degrees. Instead of heading straight back the way we’d come he was cutting sidehill towards the east.

We slid  down a hill too steep for the soil to cling, into a creek bottom, and began following that back towards the river. Large trees that had fallen formed natural bridges back and forth across the creek. Sometimes we were under them, sometimes over, and sometimes walking along the tops of the logs, it was off of one of them that I fell for the first time.

It was a slick log that had lost it’s bark, slippery from all the moisture of the stream bed, and slimy with rot.  Easy enough if one is careful to balance and not trust to the friction of your soles. The distance was very short, maybe three or at most four feet. I landed flat footed if straight legged on a rock. One second I’m on the log the next second I’m standing on a rock.

Ten minutes later I tripped on a vine and sprawled downhill face first into the rocky stream bed, again unhurt.

I decided to take a break and slow down. Getting lost is ok, getting hurt isn’t.

We continued to splash down the stream bed for a while before cutting uphill on the opposite side. Tui didn’t enjoy walking in wet tennis shoes. My boots worked pretty much the same wet or dry, and the guide had a pair of little rubber shoes. I’d also been having problems with a blister on my left foot but it seemed to stop hurting after a couple hours walking.

When we came to the worn trail again our pace picked up considerably. To this day I’ve no idea why we didn’t take it in the first place. Maybe there were fields we weren't supposed to see.
Sorry about the lack of photos on this day, I was mostly trying to keep up.
The trail cut up the same hill we’d been headed up before only at a more moderate incline. I was able to push myself as fast as possible without worry of tripping up. The afternoon was waning. As we worked our way around the south side of what must have been a large flat mountain and descended down that side Tui started a conversation first with the local guide then with me.

First he confirmed with me that I thought Ban Jakune was on the other side of the Nam Fa. (Jakune town on other side of Fa River) I thought it strange to state the obvious. Without even conscious thought there was a little map in my head as there must have been in Tui’s. We’d already crossed over the Nam Fa above where it curved to the south and up ahead somewhere we’d have to recross and climb the long hill to Jakune. I’d been to Jakune twice and Tui had been there probably three or four times. We were both in a part of the countryside we’d never been in before but we both knew the general lay of the land.

What was perplexing to Tui was that according to our local guide we’d be soon starting up another hill and towards the top of that would be Jakune, without re crossing the Nam Fa. Myself I had no problem with this seeming bit of illogic. No matter to me if Jakune had been moved lock stock and barrel miles over the river and plonked down on the wrong side, if they had a place for me to sleep I was fine. Tui continued to push and prod at the idea like a sore tooth that he just couldn’t leave alone. He knew something wasn’t right but for the moment we were just walking along a trail in the forest, and the only thing to do is keep walking.

Triple canopy forest is always half in twilight, to take a photo I’m always having to slow the shutter way down or bump up the ASA on my small sensor camera. When evening comes it comes quickly and it comes completely. Full night is darker than the inside of a cow’s belly, not even the tiniest bit of starlight can enter. Thankfully as dark began to come on in earnest we entered the outskirts of the village. With the vague outlines of houses visible our local guide made a beeline to the house of the headman. Tui whispered one more time, “this isn’t Jakune”.

After the how dee doos we were invited to stay the night. Setting his pack inside Tui and the local guide took off to try to buy a chicken or other food and I sat inside with the headman and some other old fellows. To break the silence I volunteered that we’d come from Ban Nam Hee that morning. Someone asked how many hours the walk had taken us, probably wondering why we were arriving so late from a half day’s walk. At least a couple of these guys could speak Lao.

I asked if this was Jakune, and they said yes. I’d been absolutely clear and asked about Jakune Mai or “New Jakune” as I know Jakune old town had been abandoned. So I told them I’d come to their town two years ago, to which the headman responded that that would have been impossible, my current visit was the first time a “falang” had ever come to their village. Falang means Caucasian.

I was both very amused and confused at the same time. Confused because the town is named Jakune yet it’s not Jakune of the world I inhabit. Amused because of “the first white guy” thing.

Amongst tourists looking to leave the beaten path, going where no other traveler has gone is the holly grail. In the larger scheme of things it’s unimportant whether some other foreigner has been to a village or not. One is as able to immerse oneself in the rhythms and flavor of local culture in a soi off Sukumvit in Bangkok just as well. The experience has more to do with the tourist than the setting. It’s all too common that an expat living in a country for years never learns to eat the food or speak the language.

When Tui returned with the local guide it was also with a request to pay off the local guide. The young guy was interested in sharing a chicken and some white liquor with new found friends in the village.

I told Tui, “they say this is Jakune but it’s not”. Tui reminded me that he had been saying the same for half the day. Over dinner and talking we pieced together the puzzle.

For unknown reasons Jakune Gao (old Jakune) which is now an abandoned village halfway down the side of Phou Mon Lem had split in two. Most of the families had established the Jakune Mai (new Jakune) we knew of, which was still a long day’s walk away. A large number of families had moved to the village we were now at. People call it new Jakune as it is inhabited by people from old Jakune but more correctly it is known as Ban Huay Poong in Lu language. I think huay means creek or stream or something. Someone is bound to read this and correct me.

Another day passed, somewhere in the watershed of the Nam Fa.

Breakfast with Naiban Ban Huay Poong, local guide on right, note the traditional jackets worn by the local guide (embroidery on sleeve) and the Naiban.

Martin Stuart Fox on Recent Politics in Laos

I was pretty surprised to see anything written about the recent sudden change of prime ministers in Laos. Usually discussions of politics is limited to pre Lan Xan kingdoms for fear of controversy.

Here's the link with a hat tip to Lao FAB

Family Problems

Former PM Bouasone Bouphavanh

I couldn't always keep all the names straight when trying to make heads or tales of the article. Eventually I began to understand the whole dustup is likely between competing corrupt factions fighting over who is going to make off with the spoils.

One part that had me thinking was the reference to pressure on the Lao Army to stop cutting and selling forests. Another interesting part was that most of the players are "southerners". When I hear the Lao Army and logging spoken in the same paragraph I think General Cheng, who must be somewhere in his 70s by now if not older.

Must be quite the scramble to see who can sell Laos to the Chinese the quickest. You can only sell a country once, and once it's sold there will be no more to resell.