Busses, Boats and Motos -Oh My!

The last week and change has been all about the transportation. The first little adventure (read: nightmare) came on our trip from Pakse to Champasak. For medium distances, the vehicle of choice is a songthaew, or pickup with benches in the back. They usually have two people working them: the driver and someone in the back to (man-) handle passengers. Anyway, Zoo and I hopped in the back of one at the market. With ten people on board already, we figured they'd leave pretty soon. Twenty minutes and another ten or so people later, we made a few false starts and then got moving. We made it all the way across the street. The guy in back hopped off and started loading on a ton of construction materials.

Ten minutes later, we were off again. This time we got a few hundred meters down the road before stopping again to pick up more passengers. That brought the total to 26 adults, 3 children, and at least one rooster. Off again, we went all of 20 meters before turning abruptly into a mechanics shop. With all of us still in the back, they jacked up the pickup, took off a wheel, and proceeded to patch the huge slash in one of the tires. We waited, literally, for glue to dry.

While doing that, an old woman appointed herself group comedian. Naturally, the two falang on board were the target of her humor. It must have been riotous stuff because everyone on the bus was having a great time, but I felt a little like a zoo animal. Later on, the old lady noticed that I was in just the right contorted position to be used as an arm rest and did just that. That also got a few laughs.

The wheel finally on again, we piled back into the songthaew ...and went another 50m to the other bus station. All told, it took us over an hour and a half to go the first kilometer. The other hundred or so only took two more hours, as it should normally.

Champasak, after all the effort, wasn't actually that impressive. Zoot got sick right away and spent the whole time in bed. I spent the days there exploring on bike and seeing Wat Pho, the Angkorian temple sight that everyone had recommended. It was nice, but small, scorching hot, crawling with tourists, and in awful shape. The many temples I've seen since have been nicer and much more accessible.

From Champasak, we hopped another songthaew -this one was speedy- to Don Det in the Si Phan Don region at the southern tip of Laos. It's a spot in the Mekong where the river fans out and there are thousands of little islands. Zoo still being sickish, I went off in search of a bicycle to explore the island on my own -maybe see the waterfalls or endangered river dolphins. Just as I left the guesthouse though, a random guy stopped me and asked if I wanted to go for a boat ride. Being skeptical, I said no at first, but it turned out he needed to go cut bamboo and just wanted company. He said not to worry and that we'd be back by two. So I and Brit I'd met on the ferry over hopped into the guy's longtail boat and we headed off.

First, he said we had to pick up some of his friends to help, so we stopped at one's house. He offered us lunch so we all chipped in a little and he went off to buy some fish. As we were waiting, they gave us an endless supply of snacks and homemade lao lao. Each time they passed the glass, they poured only a little bit, but the glass made the rounds at least a dozen times. After over an hour, the guy finally came back with fish and they started grilling it. I was already beginning to suspect the four hour estimate would be way off. Lunch was awesome, but only the first guy we met spoke any English so Owen and I were a bit in the dark.

After the slow lunch, we grabbed a couple liters of lao lao for the road and went diving for freshwater clams. I'm pretty miserable at it, mostly because I was kind of sketched out swimming in the oh-so-clean Mekong and getting all that nice water in my eyes. My bathing suit reeked afterwards. I'm not sure I'd want to eat them anyway considering what the water's like. By this time it was after four in the afternoon so we finally went off to cut bamboo. Owen and I chipped in but we still didn't finish loading it all up until just after the sun set.
That posed a big problem -the river is full of rocks and it's hard to navigate a boat even in daylight. We slowly crawled along back through the shallow water but there really wasn't a way to spot the submerged rocks. At one point, the pilot unloaded us on an island to make the boat lighter and we walked 2km by moonlight to meet him at the other end. When we got there, he'd beaten us easily and had been throwing back still more lao lao for a good twenty minutes. I finally got back to the guesthouse just after 8. One of the friends gave Owen and I coconuts as thanks and I did real botch job of trying to open the damn thing up. It didn't even taste good so I gave it to the guesthouse monkey and he yelled at me.

Thus ended my Laos experience. Zoo and I had maxed out our visa and we had to head across the border to Cambodia. The border crossing was fairly painless if a little surreal. It's a rural area and only recently became an official crossing, but the road to the border turns into such a tiny dirt road that you'd think there's no way it could be right. After getting stamped out of Laos, we walked a few hundred meters through the woods to the Cambodian checkpoint. All around, fires were smoldering in the woods making it smokey and bleak. Welcome to Cambodia.

At the checkpoint where you can get a visa, there was a young Korean woman throwing the worst little hissy fit. She kept whining to the head official, asking him why he wouldn't let her into the country. After a while, he got so irritated, they simply booted her out of the country. We'd missed the beginning of all this but the official explained she had been refusing to pay the $21 dollars he asked for instead of the $20 she thought it would be. If she was short a dollar, there were countless people around who would have happily given her the dollar if she'd asked politely -or maybe just to shut her up if we'd known the problem. If she thought he was being corrupt, you'd think she'd bite her tongue once it was clear he wasn't going to relent. But apparently she wasn't smart enough for either option. I hate to generalize, but let's just say that I wasn't too surprised when I saw her Korean passport.

Our van took us all the way to the small city of Stung Treng, where Zoo and I said goodbye -probably the last time I'll see her for another year or two. She stayed there, planning to head east, while I continued on south to Kratie. On the way, I finally had a chance to go see some of the last remaining Irrawaddy dolphins that I'd missed in Laos. I didn't get a single decent picture because they move so fast, but it was beautiful and we got to see them right up close. Other than that, Kratie was pretty dull.

I stayed with a French guy who I'd been with on the bus from Stung Treng and we ended up on the same bus going south the next day. The first thing this guy did upon waking up was roll a joint. We went for breakfast together, which he followed with another joint. We hopped on the bus -sitting in the aisle again- at around eight but we made it only a few kilometers before it broke down. Charlie's reaction was to wander off and smoke up again. So we waited there under a tamarind tree for a while and then another bus showed up. Thinking we'd be off soon, I got excited and hauled my things to the new bus. Unfortunately, this bus didn't work either. Two teams of guys worked simultaneously on both engines to create one working Frankenbus out of the two junkers. A few hours later, they got it going.

While we were moving, it was a pretty nice ride. They had an old movie playing on the TV that was kind of like a 70s Thai version of I Love Lucy goes to a beauty pageant, all poorly dubbed into Khmer. When that was over, they put on a VCD featuring the Khmer cover of "My Humps" as sung by a Khmer girl whose titular attributes were notably modest and a guy well into his 50s.

Frankenbus got us to withing a few kilometers of Kompong Cham before again dying. That was cause for still another joint. Again we waited by the road until someone showed up on a moto to fix it. All told, it took us eight hours to finish the supposedly three hour journey. At least the road was paved though.

Well, that only gets me to Kompong Cham and I'm well past that now, but it's long enough already. I didn't even get to the moto trip in the title. I'll write more in a few days. Too sleepy and hungry right now.

The Lazy South

Hi again. I've been a little out of touch since the south is far less developed and less set up for tourists. We started out going down to Savanaket, which most travelers bypass, and maybe we should have taken that as a hint. The town itself had little going for it besides a few nice riverside cafes and a tiny dinosaur museum with only Lao and French captions. There are supposed to be nice areas further out in the province, but our rapidly dwindling visa only allowed us a day trek. It was nice, but nothing compared to the north. Our guides showed us endless herbal remedies and edible plants and we saw how they collect lamp oil from the trees. It just wasn't that wild of an area though so the only cool animals we saw were black swarms of daddy-long-legs that turned tree trunks black.

From Savanaket, we continued down the Mekong to Pakse, which is a little more substantial but not much more interesting. We just checked out bikes and rode out on the scorching road to a small waterfall where all the locals were. Mostly though, we wandered around the city and got a quick fix of internet and backpacker food.

Since Pakse wasn't really that cool, we went over to Tad Lo -a tiny town set up near three gorgeous waterfalls with a few small guesthouses. It's not much beyond a few quiet guesthouses and two small farming villages, but it was perfect. We stayed at a place called Tim's run by a Lao family and there was just an incredible group of people there. We spent our days hiking around to the waterfalls and relaxing. There were gorgeous blue-green pools between the falls where I'd go swimming with the local kids. At night, we always ate at the guesthouse because of the people who dropped in. One night, an aging hippy musician couple from Nashville broke out a guitar and I got to hear an acoustic tribute to James Brown.

Once again though, the remains of war crept back into sight. It all blended in at first, but then slowly I began to notice little pieces everywhere: a bomblet sitting on the bookshelf, an artillery shell made into a lamp, a napalm canister turned into a BBQ grill. (To the panicking mother: the mortar shell and bomblet I'm holding are quite empty and quite safe. Stop hyperventilating, take deep breaths and relax.) Not only that, but there were countless shallow depressions in the ground which may or may not have been craters. Clearly the locals know how to take advantage of the situation though. When we went to the furthest waterfall, a dozen or so kids assigned themselves as guides. Each one wanted to be the leader so they kept showing us different parts of the same intertwined system of paths. Heading back, when we ignored one kid, he shouted "No! Bomb! Boom boom!." Now that certainly got my attention until I realized the way he was talking about was the way we had come and the way the other locals had gone. When we went down the path, he followed the same way.

Tad Lo was incredible, but with our visa running out, we decided to head further off the beaten track to a city called Attapeu. Strike two. Apparently there's a reason why it's not really mentioned in the guide books. There were a couple small cheap guesthouses, but not much to do except more of the same riverside cafes and biking to villages. We didn't even make it far either, because the only bikes we could find were tiny junky things sized for munchkins, not full-grown adults. I must have looked like a circus monkey riding on that thing with my legs barely unfolded and arms pulled in tight. Why, oh why, did I listen to my sister and not get the motorbike?! So what if I don't know how to ride one -that's a minor inconvenience at best.

The one cool thing that happened is that we found another novice monk who wanted to practice his English. We talked for a while our first night with half a dozen young novices and one tattooed monk lingering curiously around us. Nikon asked us to come back the next night to meet his brother, so we did and we spent a couple more hours chatting with them. Again, I was reluctant to take pictures until Nikon whipped out his camera-phone and started doing it himself. Then he practically insisted that we take pictures. When he was finally satisfied, he dragged me and the Austrian guy who was with us back to his room so we could put the photos on their shared computer -a nicer computer than mine too. I was a little surprised by the novices quarters but I guess I shouldn't have been. They had been playing Lao rock on the computer when we came in, but switched over to Usher and the Black Eyed Peas in our honor. On one wall they had newspaper clippings, which I suspected were there less for the article on Condoleeza Rice than for the models in the ads. A pack of cigarettes -for monks only, not novices- was sitting on the desk. All this was in a small room with holes in the clapboard walls and a single small bed for the monk. Novices sleep on the floor. The monk got really ticked off at the novices though since so many of them had skipped their prayers. Nikon was excused because he was practicing English with us, but if we hadn't been there, he said, the monk would have beaten the others.

Susanna wasn't allowed in their living area or the temple, so we went into kind of an auxiliary temple building to talk some more. The walls were covered with murals depicting a series of stories that Nikon couldn't explain and a bizarre set that showed in graphic detail all the nasty things that happen to bad people when they die: liars having their tongues pulled out by demons, birds tearing the entrails from murderers, and adulterers violated cruelly by demons with swords. So much for the friendly Buddha.

Now we're back in Pakse for the night to catch up on internet and take care of errands. We're off south to Champasak in the morning and then moving on into Cambodia. I'll write more when I get the chance but that may be a while. Miss you all.

Bus Rides & Bombies

That last post ended rather abruptly, eh? Well, that's kind of how it was in Luang Nam Tha as well. I'd bonded quite a bit with the people on the trek and we all went out together when we got back and again in the morning. Sensing that anything else in the area would be an anti-climax, I decided to follow Minna, Ben and Tash back south to Luang Prabang. They bought a ticket for me and we got a leisurely breakfast near the station. I was a little worried about seating but they told me the seats were assigned. I was rightfully skeptical. When we got to the bus about half an hour before it was to leave, everything was full except for a few broken seats in the back. The other three took "seats" and I arranged a few 50kg sacks of fertilizer, rice and sugar in the aisle. I had someone's boots behind me and a huge tractor engine in front. We took off quite late and about twenty people past capacity.

Most Asian bus drivers seem to be aspiring Gran Prix racers. Ours drove like a Gran. We slowly cruised down the mooncrater road at jogging pace while cars, motos, overladen trucks, bicycles, and quadriplegic sloths whizzed by on either side. Almost seven hours into what was supposed to be a nine hour trip, we finally crawled into the halfway-point stop. After purchasing sweets and what turned out to be raw pork in a banana leaf, we got back on the bus for the second half. This time, I flipped the sacks around, made a table, and played cards with my group and a random Israeli. As soon as we settled in to play though, our driver let loose his inner Andretti and started barrelling down the road at top speed. I don't usually get motion sickness, but going backwards while being bounced around like that in a stuffy airless bus wasn't a fun experience.

Luang Prabang was nothing special again, just a quiet night with a random Japanese guy who's name I could never remember and a relaxing day with Ben and Tash. I again hopped on the bus, this time to Vientienne. Again the bus was overcrowded, but this time I got the last real seat and -miracle of miracles- it was that glorious seat in the back middle with acres of legroom. On the downside, the "mutton" we ordered at lunch was beginning to give me some wicked stomach cramps. By the time we got to Vientienne at 4am, my stomach had lost the fight and I spent a vigorous hour in the highly questionable bus station men's room. Nothing of course is open at 4am in Vientienne. The few awake tuk-tuk drivers just laughed at me. Nothing opens until 7 or 8, and none of the guesthouses have rooms until people check out around 11. I spent a pathetic seven hours wandering around the city in an exhausted delirium before finding a place to crash.

After that nightmare, I've pretty much been taking it easy. I biked around and met a number of monks who insist on giving me tours of their temples so they can practice English. The national museum was pretty cool too with a long section on the imperialist French and Americans and their many weapons and puppet armies. One wall had an RPG launcher and a few grenades sitting on a shelf with a little laminated sign saying "Do not touch." Nothing to physically stop anyone from doing so, just the sign. Another had a line of rifles, each of which was supposedly used by some peasant hero to shoot down an American jet. Everywhere were piles of assault rifles and heavy machine guns. Another fun section was the short bit on UXOs in which they have a case filled with intact bomblets and mortar shells. Now, I'm really hoping all of these very intact looking objects are defused, but they certainly looked untouched and rusted shut.

As if I needed further reminding of all the wonderful things America has done for Laos, I found myself in a prosthetics workshop this afternoon. Zoo and I were tracking down a pair of crutches for a friend who had sprained his ankle. We finally got directed to a rehab clinic where we could buy some. Since all were adjusted for shorter people, a guy took us into the shop to re-fit them and we watched men molding and forging all sorts of prosthetic parts. It was an eerie place with limbs lying all around. I made a mental note to donate money for mine clearing when I get home.

And on that cheerful note, I'm going to have to leave it. We're staying here one more night and then Zoot and I will move on south to Savannaket, Champasak, and eventually Cambodia.

Lao Lao and I

Hi again. When we last saw our hero, he was striding off alone again to tiny Luang Nam Tha. I had planned on going straight on further north to Muong Sing, but when I stopped for lunch by the bus station, I ran into a few fellow solo travellers -Toby the Aussie, Merit the Mexican, and Roger the Swiss- and I decided to stay there.

New Years actually turned out to be pretty tame. We all took rooms together in a little fakey traditional bungalow type place. Thinking we'd really feast, we stopped in at an Indian place that according to the Lonely Planet had the best Indian food in SE Asia. Not quite, though the accidental dramatic entertainment was certainly interesting. While we were hungrily and impatiently waiting, a fistfight broke out in the kitchen, causing tears and a few people to storm off in a huff. Apparently the chef was one of them. After that, our night was just card games and whiskey cokes until after what we think may or may not have been approximately midnight according to our many watches.

On New Years day, Merit, Roger and I rented bikes and did a tour of the villages in the area which was really cool. The whole area is gorgeous with rice patties and small tribal villages scattered about. Every village had a party going on and we got so many invitations to join them. We accepted a couple, but after more than a few lao laos (rice moonshine) and Beer Laos we had to turn down most or we would've been zigzagging home.

At one point, while going down a dusty road, we got stopped by a couple guys with AK47s slung over their shoulders. They were dressed in regular clothes so I don't think they were army. It was a little unnerving at first, but they just made sure we knew where we were going and sent us on our way. I really wanted a picture but figured it wasn't nice to annoy the men with guns. Since then, I've come across guys armed like this on the bus and elsewhere so it doesn't seem to be a big deal.

All along the way we went, there were some obvious signs of the occasional tourist, but we still got many stares and never saw another foreigner. Roger had lived in South America for much of his life so he and Merit spoke mostly in Spanish. We had odd conversations with one person speaking in one language and getting answers in another. I loved that random kind of international experience and I was so proud that I actually remembered so much more from high school than I thought I had.
The trekking office finally opened up that evening and I managed to snag a last minute spot on a three day trip. I had come up here specifically to find trekking that wasn't so overdone and overcrowded but there were so few people that they weren't sending out many treks and almost no longer ones out into the less touristed spots. Again, I lucked out though. We had good local guides and a good group of people (l to r): Mai Hoi our lead guide, Minna from Finland, Manuel from Germany, me, Ben and Natasha from New Zealand, and Boon Ta our other guide.

The trek turned out to be incredible. Far from the tourist nightmare that Ben and Tash had described in Chiang Mai, the places we visited seemed still unchanged by us visitors. In the first village we stayed in, an Ahka village, I was a little surprised by just how many animals they had just wandering around with no apparently markings. They somehow knew which of the hundreds of pigs belonged to whom though because I saw a girl throwing rocks to shoo the wrong ones away from the feeding trough. People were genuinely friendly and kids still seemed very curious and a little hesitant. After a minute though they warmed up and, before long, we were playing rattan ball together. If you haven't seen it, rattan ball is like volleyball except you can only use your feet and head. We all got the hang of it eventually, but of course the locals trounced us in every match. For dinner, they killed a chicken and fed us an amazing meal. In some ways it was odd though, because the Ahka in the village were not that different from the urban Hmong families that I had just been with. Some of the houses in the village were nicer than some of the poorer houses in town.

The second day was even better. We got up early but had a nice relaxed start. We ate a nice big breakfast and they killed a couple more chickens for us to take as lunch. Before we left, one of the three chiefs stopped by and gave us little touristy water-bottle bags made in the village. Not only were they not begging us to buy things, they were handing it out!

The hiking that day was real nice as we wandered across some mountians in the jungle and through bamboo forests. As we walked, Mai Noi pointed out all the plants the hill tribes use. We also picked some wild starfruits, gooseberries, and figs, but they weren't quite ripe. The scenery was incredible along the whole trail with wild bananas growing everywhere and birds squawking just like the recordings at the zoo.

***Warning -Parental guidance suggested (i.e. if you're the kind of paranoid mother who worries retroactively, skip this part) ***

The area we were trekking in was one of the most thoroughly destroyed during the wars in the seventies. A number of times, we crossed ridgelines where you could see the faded signs of fighing -old overgrown trenches, rows of foxholes, and rusty spent clips from assault rifles. I'd seen plenty Civil War battlefields near home, but this was different because it was so recent. Boon Ta assured me that the trails we followed were safe and that these mountains had been cleared. Other mountains in the area, pulverized by American bombings, are definitely not safe though and he said the tribes won't go there. Apparently many stray animals have been killed by UXOs. It was one of a series of experiences I've had which make me less than thrilled to be an American.

So anyway, for lunch, our guides prepared us a picnic hilltribe style with bamboo used for everything. As we were hiking, one just stepped off the trail and cut down a huge piece about five inches in diameter. Another found some wild banana flowers and palm stems. A large round green section was used as the stew pot; another section cut down the middle made two huge bowls; smaller pieces sliced diagonally just above the natural divider made spoon bowls with strips bent and tied as handles. All of this was served on banana leaves as a table. I tried my hand at making one of these spoons and failed miserably, slicing my hand open in the process. I'm so impressed with how they can use this giant bamboo for just about everything.

During the course of the hike, we came down out of the hills and into the lower rice paddies. There were two villages quite close together, one was Lanten tribe and the other was Khmu, where we would be staying the night. Despite the fact that the people in the villages mixed a great deal -many of the Lanten came over to join us at night- it was still very clear who was of each tribe. The Lanten women all wear dark blue dresses with white leggings and distinctive silver jewelry and shave their eyebrows, while the Khmu women looked more like the Hmong. Most of the men just wore western clothes, but all the Lanten men had huge knives in woven bamboo basket sheaths. This village was also much larger and more advanced than the last one. They had an ingenious hydropower system set up with a series of dams on the river channeling the water into huge wooden pipes with what looked like outboard motors in reverse. There were about eight of these, each one capable of powering a few lights. I'm not sure, but my impression is this is part of the governments bribe to them for giving up opium production.

We were especially lucky in that the night we arrived, as they were having a ceremony for a girl in the village. It had already been going on for a while when our guide brought us into the local shaman's house. The place was filled with people already and there was barely room for us but they welcomed us in. In one corner they had a large clay jar of rice wine with reed straws which I was led to repeatedly. As you drink, they refill the jar with water of a questionable nature using a little horn cup. The custom is that the two people drinking should drink until twenty-four cups have been replaced. The stuff was pretty potent even with the water added and tasted a bit like a port with a beerish finish -not bad really. When not taking a turn at the rice wine, we were often passed more of the ever-present lao lao. These people must rival Koreans for liver damage. Then again, the life expectancy of a man in Laos is only 50 years.

The main part of the ceremony was kind of like at the Hmong New Year, where you tie a string around someone's wrist while giving them a blessing. Everyone ended up with dozens of little strings tied around their wrists, but especially the girl at the center of the ritual. Her arms were covered from wrist to elbow with blessings. I have no idea what people wished for me, but Boon Ta translated some blessings for Ben which were something about having enough children to fill a village and grandchildren to fill a city. Tash was not thrilled. I was again very nervous about taking photographs and ruining the moment. Boon Ta pushed though and I eventually got out my camera. Far from bothering the people, they were thrilled to be photographed and check out their pictures on the screen. I ended up acting as photographer for them as they all wanted to pose with their friends. After we got back, I made prints and gave them to Boon Ta to pass on.

The other reason for all the celebration was that a wedding was happening the next day. People had come over from the next village to celebrate. We farang passed out around midnight, but could hear the party flare up now and again throughout the night. I swear they must have been playing the same song over and over again. When I woke up -6:30- I wandered over and joined the party. Some of the men had clearly been drunk the whole night and weren't slowing down at all. Nor did they want us to slow down. So at about 7:00, I was tossing back a few more lao laos and taking turns at the rice wine. Quite the healthy breakfast. Again, we were asked to play official photographer while the extremely drunk father of the groom slowly gathered everyone together for group photos. Those who spoke English practically lined up to practice on us, all asking the same questions.

When the guides finally pulled us away from the party, it was well after we were supposed to have left. We finished the trek by hiking out of the mountains along a beautiful stream. Of course, the first time I wear shoes in almost a month is the day we have to zigzag over the stream a dozen times.

That's not really the end and I've got loads more to tell but I'm sleepy and it looks like this internet place is closing down. Talk to you all again soon. Hope everyone out there is happy and well.