Lao Bumpkin

Wildside Trip on the Nam Fa (from quite a while ago)

2012-02-11T18:23:00.000-07:00

Tiger Tracking on the Nam Pha from Frank Wolf on Vimeo.

This video is of a white water rafting trip down the Nam Fa in the late nineties or the early part of the last decade.

It looks like the video was made by someone who makes adventure videos with no connection to the actual trip. The trip was organised by Wildside adventures run by Michael O'Shea also known as the guy that kayaked the entire length of the Mekong with lots of good stories from half drowning in Tibet of Yunnan province, I read his account of the trip online a long time ago.

This is kind of a run on post, I'm hoping that someone who was in the area at the time will post a long and if they want anonymous or not comment about the whole thing and I'll erase this half conjecture collection of run on sentences with some factual information. Hint hint you know who you are.

Looks like most of the time was spent above the junction of the Nam Hee where the river is most turbulent and it probably took them the most time to get down. Assuming the Kahmu village was up close to Vieng Phuka somewhere. Don't know about the Akha village, a just moved Jakune Mai? The camera traps that used film were a give away. Don't know when digital came out but it's an indicator.

Climate and Other Changes in Laos

2012-01-29T07:11:00.000-07:00

A big hat tip to I eat Padeckwhere I saw this short and enjoyable clip. I'm not sure How much of this was intentional I'm going to assume everything.

The granny glasses that are THE fashion statement and fake designer bag. Posts for new house stored under the old, The relatively short distance between the old life of the village and the new found insouciance of Vientiane.

Wild West

2012-01-16T16:13:00.000-07:00

Are those 5.56 shell casings amongst the gore?

Mum (Fermented Elk Liver Sausage)

2011-12-20T19:59:00.000-07:00

Above one very fresh elk heart and liver taking up most of the sink

One of the good parts about cutting up one’s own meat is that you get to make use of what many call “the fifth quarter”.

One hurdle to using the “other” parts to their full potential is getting them in the first place. When confronted with the enormity of hundreds of pounds of steaming warm meat lying on the ground I have a hard time thinking beyond the logistics of getting that huge heavy mass back home and into butcher paper packages in the freezer.

By the time I’ve pulled the whole heart/lung/liver/gut sack/intestine mess out of the body cavity and rolled it onto the snow, I’ve about had enough of getting up close and personal with the big pile of other bits. The heart, lungs, liver portion sits above anything that could be called guts and is a good place to start.

Today I’m writing about liver. Elk livers are packed chock full of vitamins, there are nutrients the elk can’t find all winter while the grass is dead and the snow is deep, the supply of those nutrients is stored in the liver.

above after careful trimming I ground smaller pieces into hamburg

Mum is a traditional way preserving liver without refrigeration.

The recipe is actually pretty straightforward and uses basic ingredients every Lao household already has.

You start with grinding up fresh meat and follow it with a lot less fresh liver. We used 1000 grams of ground meat to 300 grams of liver. In a large bowl we mixed it with a cup of precooked sticky rice which we’d whetted so that it was slippery instead of sticky half a cup of chopped garlic, half a cup of lemon grass, and fifteen kafir lime leaves. The lemon grass was the round part not the flat sharp leaves, sliced thin across the grain then chopped in the food processor, the kafir leaves were simply sliced very thin. Also a couple table spoons of salt.

above lemon grass grown in the pot

above kafir lime

Sticky rice cooking in the pot

The entire concoction was kneaded for ten minutes of so in the bowl then run through the meat grinder one more time with the sausage adapter at the end inserted into casing from a pig. Our first use of the sausage adapter for the grinder, I think the regular sausage maker is better, tighter sausages even if it takes a little more work to push.

The liver besides storing vitamins, filters things out from the blood, I don’t eat liver from raised animals, I’m too worried about antibiotics and growth hormones or gosh knows what all.

My fellow blogger over at Lao Cook http://laocook.com/ calls sticky rice “Lao Rice” in that Laos is the only country in the world where all the inhabitants eat it as their every day rice. There are other rices called sticky from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, or wherever but they are an entirely different rice. In Laotian and Thai language the rice is called kao niao, sometimes called glutinous rice it contains no gluten. If you’ve never had kao niao then you’ve been leading a deprived existence and you need to buy a steamer, a basket, the book Food from Northern Laos http://www.foodfromnorthernlaos.com/, and start living the good life.

Lemon grass is sold at many Asian markets these days. You need to buy some that has the bottom of the stalk or root bulb attached, plant it in a large pot, and you’ll never need to buy again.

Kafir lime is more problematic. Most people cultivate a tree. Unless you live in Socal or Florida that means a house plant, hopefully an overgrown houseplant. Leaves are useless dried, sometimes they’re sold fresh or frozen at Lao Markets here in the US.

Finished sausages off the grinder

Back to sausage. After being put out in the sun inside the protection of the screened jerky maker to remove most of the water they are allowed to further ferment and dry inside the house for a couple of weeks. The starch in the rice is some kind of kick starter in the fermentation so that the meat ferments as apposed to rotting. We cook them all then freeze them, so that they can be thawed and eaten on at moment’s notice as hors d'oeuvres, The sausage is sliced into bite sized pieces and served with raw green onions and hot sticky rice on the side.

drying mum

done mum

Return to Jakune Mai

2011-11-26T14:36:00.001-07:00

Some days start out bad and get better, rather that than the other way around.

I get up early. Nature calls. Everyone else has to get up to take a leak too but I prefer to get out while it’s still mostly dark. Others are doing the same, young pregnant moms hitching up their skirts, and old guys like me ducking behind a pig sty or old fence. The village is surprisingly without smells for a place without toilets. Dogs and pigs and cats all have their place and serve multiple functions in what I guess you’d call a traditional village. Maybe I’d just gotten a little too used to things.

When viewed over the perspective of time, most of our existence as Europeans has been as a crop growing metal working people living not so differently than the Akha do. Only in the last hundred years of so have we developed telegraphs and computer chips. Pigs and chickens under the house are kept in at night, dogs are free to roam but mostly outside of the house, they guard for danger, chase rats, and assist in the hunt. Cats live in the framework of the house assuring a lack of large insects, snakes, lizards, mice or rats. I was comfortable to be in the house of a friend in a village I’ve been to before with sounds and smells and a rhythm familiar and predictable.

I used my bit of private time to clean and apply new tape to a blister that had been bothering me for a few days. I’d been ignoring it. Out on the porch of Lao Pao’s house there was some light and I intended to wash and air my feet. First I peal off my old layers of bandages in the light of my headlamp and some of the syrup from my blister spills on the split bamboo floor. White blood cells I guess it is, I don’t know, I’m not a doctor.
Things were worse than I’d thought. What had been a bothersome distraction for days, was, on closer inspection a big hole in the skin on the inside of my left foot. The mother of all blisters. I used some of my water to wash.

Tui my guide wasn’t overjoyed to see my foot no doubt he was wondering how this big old falang was going to get over the hill and back to the road. When shown to Lawboa my foot garnered no more than a moment’s look-see. People live and die in Jakune without recourse to doctors or hospitals, on a scale of one to ten a nasty blister barely twitches the seriousness meter. As my wife tells my kids when they get a scratch, it’s a long way from my heart.

What was obvious was that walking was going to be a problem. My desire to revist Mongla further down the Nam Fa was out of the question. Sompanyao on that long high ridge above Xienkok would wait for another day. We were still a long way from the Mekong or a road. There’s a way over the side of Phou Mon Lem from the old townsite of Jakune Gao, then a long downhill to a town of Lanten people with a road, it’s the shortest way out.

I gathered my washing stuff and headed up to the village spring. Before I left Loubi’s house I asked Tui if I could buy a young shoat for dinner. This was a rest day and we hadn’t had much meat. Good way to lay some cash on the owner of the piglet and for all in the house to have a mini feast.

The water was piped down to the upper end of the village via a system of hollowed bamboo trunks. Still when it arced out over the tiny bridge it was freezing cold. I’ve no idea how people take showers in it every evening. I wore a wrap around type sarong everyone wears for modesty, still a young girl who came to fetch water ran away in fright. Shortly thereafter the new village headman came walking up to the spring to say hi, I should have already been to visit him, but what with arriving late and staying in the former headman’s house I’d been ignoring the niceties.

I’d barely started back to the house when Tui met me part way very excited about a deer that had been shot, he wanted me to make sure I had my camera. After a quick glance at the butchering job in progress I ducked inside fetched my camera and took this photo.

Law Pi’s two eldest sons had gone hunting with the two guys from the next house. The heart is beside the pan and the liver and lungs are in the pot. Notice that they are discarding the contents of the upper intestine, they’ll save the casing to make sausage.

One front leg goes to the new headman, and another leg goes to the house of the oldest man in the village, that’s the way it is. That still leaves a heck of a lot of meat without refrigeration. No parts are wasted.

I’ve read reports by nutritionists saying the upland people get half their sustenance from the forest, not only in the form of various fauna but also the wild plants, especially the ones that predictably grow up on old rice fields gone to weeds.

Every single male hunts.

The government has outlawed the hunting of endangered species as well as market hunting. That leaves quite a few species, and almost all of the ones that have been traditionally hunted for food. Muntjak which is a small primitive deer with a forked set of horns, and wild pig are the two big game species. Smaller animals include squirrel, all the birds, snakes, bamboo rat, porcupine, civet, and so on.

Above are the jawbones and other parts of some animals stored with plants and leaves tied about them. Normally there would be the horns of muntjak and the larger ones of the sambar which is a larger deer. Sambar horns fetch $100 at the market, no doubt muntjak quite a bit less. The term trophy hunter used as a pejorative in modern western society. But I’ve yet to see a people who don’t value and save the horns of a deer. Notice the round wheels of suet from deer or pig.

I’ve no doubt that the leaves tied to the jawbones of prey are somehow related to a ritual either for luck in future hunts or to the life given up to eat. I’ve heard the Akha believe spirits to be in all things, no doubt they exist in deer too.

Photo of the cutting up.

Inside the house many willing hands were cutting and chopping the dear to be made into a huge dinner.

I’ve never eaten at such an elaborate Akha feast. At least four different kinds of meat dishes, two different jeaos (spicy sauces) and a huge soup. The rice is from the mountains, with a little imagination you can taste the smokey flavor of slash and burn.

photo of laid out dinner

I was surprised the guang (muntjak) tasted exactly like the deer back home. Below a photo of a muntjak caught in a Wildlife Conservation Society camera trap down south. This one is a red muntjak, there are many varieties.

photo WSC

The muntjak is the oldest deer species. Like many tropical deer it’s horns are mostly for defending the territory of a foraging specialist.

As often happens when I have the smell of lots of fresh meat and blood in my nose for too long I wasn’t so interested in eating meat. I tried one of the minced meats, then settled into the soup on top of my rice. Laobi’s wife seeing that I wasn’t eating much meat reached down into the soup pot with her chop sticks and deposited a largish hunk of meat in my bowl. It was extremely tender and mild with a small bone in it’s center. Deer embryo leg. Soup was probably fluid from the embryonic sack.

I’m mostly ok eating different things, if they taste ok, I’ll eat them. Tui my friend mentioned afterwards that he’d always avoided that dish before.

I dozed through the afternoon in a “belly full of meat” kind of daze. I was tired from days of hikes that lasted into the night. I was trying to rest up for the next day when I’d try to walk out to the road. I’d been on much of tomorrow’s route before. In making a beeline to the town the trail cuts up over the highest piece of real estate around, for the first couple miles it goes up and then up a lot more.

I carefully made a two inch diameter cut in the side of my boot where my foot had been rubbing. Better to give up some protection from dirt and water in exchange for an end to the rubbing on my foot.

In the late afternoon I went out to take some photos in the late afternoon light. First Lawbao’s wife then quite a few of his family and the guys next door asked me to take their photos. I’d taken some pics of my host and the headman of a close village on a previous visit, and brought them back and given them to people as gifts. Maybe word had gotten around.

Many of the poses were stiff and rigid, as if they were redying themselves for something painful, others were clowning. None of the women wore make up. They live too far from the road to have seen many magazines or how women use make up in “civilization”. It has been almost 3 years, I’m waiting for the day I can return and give them their photos.

Lawpao on R, his wife and youngest children.

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

Nam Fa Means Sky River

Som Guang

2011-11-17T19:56:00.004-07:00

Som Guang

With fresh deer in the freezer all kinds of foods are starting to appear. To the right are most of the ingredients of som guang or in English “sour deer”.

Today the chef mentioned she was making hamburger with a couple packages of deer. “Why not use the meat grinder?” was my question. I guess the flavor is better if chopped with the cleaver like laap. The hamburgers for the kids never materialized, instead they had Cosco Pizza, and all the chopped meat was used in the preparation of som guang, probably the original plan.

When I got back with the pizza the meat was chopped and I finished peeling the garlic. Maybe a kilo of meat and 3 heads of garlic. Yes heads not cloves. Note the garlic press over on the right? Garlic is important to the “cure” of the meat. The dry ingredients were the usual, salt, bang nuah, a tiny bit of sugar even though you aren’t supposed to, a couple cups of cooked sticky rice that had been whetted with water to make it break apart and mix easily. The rice is also very important, I think it feeds the right kind of bacteria to make the meat sour instead of rotting.

Meat squeezed and mixed with all ingredients, looking carefully you can see the sticky rice.

There was also an additive that helps keep the water in meat sausages. I think it might have been some sort of phosphate. As soon as the ingredients are mixed the garlic robs the meat of it’s red color. It becomes more brown.

The concoction is all wrapped into long fat rolls of about an inch or more in diameter with plastic food wrap and set on the counter to age. It will sit there for three to five days until sour. It’s tested for done by frying a tiny piece. When at the proper ripeness all of the uneaten meat is frozen in the plastic until needed.

Chef

In Laos the sausage would be wrapped in banana leaves and tossed in the coals of the cooking pot. The meat will be cooked long before the banana leaves burn.

In a few days these rolls of meat will be som guang. Takes longer in winter, colder room.

Also.... Links for reference.
For all food Lao http://www.foodfromnorthernlaos.com/
Also Lao Cook had a great video on how to make som moo, which is similar but using pork instead of deer. I can't get it to play now but here it is. http://laocook.com/2007/06/15/lctv-let%C2%B4s-make-som-moo/

Murder Piracy Drugs and Warlords on Sleepy Upper Mekong

2011-10-15T14:21:00.000-07:00

Is that a blatant attention grabbing blog post title, or what?

No doubt they see a lot of strange things come down the river at Chiang Saeng, but the two Chinese cargo boats rudderless, crewless, and turning with the currents of the Mekong no doubt caught the attention of anyone watching the river earlier this month. Chiang Saeng is just downstream from the border of Burma, it is what passes for the beginning civilization in that part of the Wild East known as the Golden Triangle. Competing casinos in Burma and Laos vie for the baht of eager Thai gamblers. Though no longer the center of world opium production the poppy is still widely grown and the lawless Shan State in Burma is a large supplier of methamphetamine (ya ma) for South East Asia.

Above the two unlucky boats tied up at Chaeng Saen

I have a lot of photos of this part of the river because I like to take the fast boat down from Xiengkok to where there are roads at Muang Mom. Despite what it sounds like this portion of Laos is generally pretty quiet. Mostly the river sees few foreigners, there are no roads, no ATMs, no airports, or internet. The wide photo up on the header of this blog is actually looking up the river in the direction of China from Xiengkok.

For a couple hundred or more kilometers above Chaing Saeng the Mekong runs between Laos and Burma on it's way from China to the sea. Xiengkok half way up has a Lao border patrol man watching the river with a very tired eye. The "port" is simply a place where the rocks jut out into the river giving boats a place to anchor in slack water.

Leaving the slack water in Xienkok early 09

The Chinese blasted a channel in the rapids deep enough to run cargo boats most of the year, and it's a regular roller coster ride between the mountains. Chinese cargo boats for now are more profitable than trucking cargo the long way around from Jihong to Chang Rai vial Mengla, then somehow across the river at Huay Xai. Maybe once the bridge outside of Huay Xai is complete boats will stop running.

Chinese cargo boat exiting the rapids above Muang Mom headed upstream. "rocks as big as houses".

For the unfortunate crewmen on the two cargo boats that ride was their last, a dozen Chinese crew were tied up, executed, and thrown in the river.

http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=22255&

Above the same Lao freight boat we saw leaving Xiengkok about to enter the rapids below Xieng Dao (I think)

Newspaper accounts attribute the violence to a warlord not receiving protection money from the Chinese. They sure were quick to add a name to the crime too, but a name with freinds at the highest levels within the Burmese military. Who knows, I sure don't.

From the Irrawaddy:

Over the past two decades, three ethnic armed groups from Burma have attempted to control the Mekong River route through the Golden Triangle. The first group was drug lord Khun Sa’s Mong Tai Army, followed by the UWSA and the Shan State Army (South) led by Yawd Serk.
“All were pushed back by the Burmese army,” Khunsai Jaiyen said. “Unless they had the support of the local Burmese authorities, Naw Kham and his men could not survive in this area.”

I have a hard time keeping all the names and armies straight, all I know is that I've never had an inclination to step foot on that part of Burma. The closest I've come is fueling up on a fast boat.

It used to be that you could catch a ride on the freighters if you wanted a slow, cheap, way to go to Jihnong China that didn't involve airplanes or the long go around to Boten.

Now there is a fast ferry that looks like below.

167km from the border of China 1/09 early morning fog

In that same article a journalist tells of being extorted for money by the same folks.

“At the time, Naw Kham’s men were on three speedboats. They cut off our boat and boarded it,” he said. “They were well armed, and some of them wore masks. They made us kneel with our hands on our heads. Then they took all our money.”

The speed boats are very fast, basically an auto engine with a propeller at the end of a long shaft pushing a very light weight flat bottomed boat.

The wind in the face is strong.

And lastly a very short video to get an idea of the speed of the things.

The striped bag is some of my new designer luggage.

Ahan October

2011-10-09T15:35:00.001-07:00

That unidentifiable food next to the kao jao is dinner a couple nights ago.

Worried over a possible frost we picked most of the stuff that's not cold tolerant including the Thai peppers. The leaves themselves are also edible and also pretty flavorful. Besides the chili pepper leaves ingredients were some kind of pork short ribs, lemon grass, green onions, squash (winter squash I think), and the usual suspects, pinch of salt, half teaspoon sugar, bang nua, and most importantly a half a tablespoon of nam pik gaeng daeng that Thai stuff in a tub.

I like the way the thicker squashes go with Lao food. Thickens it without coconut milk. Thicker gaeng for colder weather.

Happy Fall.

Leaking Laos

2011-09-18T07:52:00.000-07:00

Wikileaks has released it's cache of Laos files. I haven't read any of it yet, when I do I'll add to the end of the post. So far no news of cabinet ministers having falang mia nois or other important happenings.

A big hat tip to Lao FAB.

The full set of cables from Vientiane is available here:
http://wikileaks.org/origin/31_0.html
Most relevant to the scope of this forum are the following:
THE GREAT LAND GRAB
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2006/06/06VIENTIANE596.html
TAKE ALL THE TREES, PUT 'EM IN TREE MUSEUM:
DEFORESTATION IN LAOS
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2006/07/06VIENTIANE674.html
MOVING LAOS INTO CHINA, TRUCK BY TRUCK
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2006/07/06VIENTIANE632.html
CHINESE RUBBER, SINO-LAO SCHOOLS, AND OTHER
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2007/03/07VIENTIANE259.html
PLANNED CHINESE DEVELOPMENT IN VIENTIANE GENERATES
A QUIET BACKLASH
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2008/03/08VIENTIANE202.html
Timber, Roads, and Rubber in Sayaboury Province
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2007/05/07VIENTIANE409.html
NEW TRANSPORTATION ARTERIES AND TRADE INITIATIVES
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2007/06/07VIENTIANE524.html
PLANS FOR FIVE LARGE DAMS ON THE MEKONG
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2008/02/08VIENTIANE111.html
FOOD PRICES IN LAOS: STICKY RICE PRICES REMAIN
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2008/04/08VIENTIANE240.html
WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE?
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2008/01/08VIENTIANE10.html
NATURAL PRODUCTS INTERNATIONAL TO LEAVE LAOS BY
2009
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2008/07/08VIENTIANE415.html
COKE PREPARING RETURN TO LAOS
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2009/03/09VIENTIANE113.html
ADB EXAMINES ITS OPTIONS IN A DONOR-DRIVEN ECONOMY
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2006/03/06VIENTIANE307.html
THE EU AND THE WAGES OF FECKLESS AID IN LAOS
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2006/05/06VIENTIANE405.html
WORLD BANK OFFICIAL EXPRESSES CAUTIOUS OPTIMISM
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2007/03/07VIENTIANE220.html
IMF ANTICIPATES STRONG MACRO-ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2008/05/08VIENTIANE285.html
LAO OFFICIALS PREPARE TO ISSUE DECREE ON
ASSOCIATIONS
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2008/08/08VIENTIANE465.html
INVESTMENT CLIMATE STATEMENT FOR LAOS
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2009/02/09VIENTIANE63.html
CORRUPTION IN LAOS: THE CLOSER YOU LOOK, THE
WORSE IT APPEARS
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2007/02/07VIENTIANE139.html
Most of the above is already know, but finally I came across this
little surprise....
RADIOACTIVE SMUGGLING INCIDENT AT VIENTIANE, LAOS
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2008/10/08VIENTIANE569.html

Beginnings

2011-08-20T18:00:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-15T11:54:00.000-07:00

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

2011-05-07T17:19:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-20T18:28:00.001-07:00

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)

2011-04-03T13:58:00.002-07:00

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)

2011-01-27T06:34:00.000-07:00

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

2011-01-23T06:59:00.000-07:00

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.

General Vang Pao passes

2011-01-08T18:26:00.001-07:00

Not much to say, I hadn't heard until this morning.

General Vang Pao one of the major players in the Indochina warn in Laos passed away due to heart failure a couple of days ago.

A national hero to the Hmong diaspora and a friend to America, his adopted country, not so well liked by his old adversaries. I hope he is resting peacefully tonight.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/08/world/asia/08vangpao.html

Ban Nam Hee

2010-12-25T20:59:00.004-07:00

I don't know exactly what's up with the gates, one thing I do know is that it's a big deal and one should pay attention and not mess up. Outside the gate is the outside world, inside is the village of the Akha. The double track is from the feet coming and going, there are no roads for many kilometers.

I asked my guide Tui if I could take a photo, then I asked the local guide too and waited for his reaction. I ask every time, who knows, maybe it's ok at one time but not another. I do know not to touch. There are a couple gates per village and they have a lot to do with keeping bad stuff from entering and good stuff staying. There is a whole rigmarole about when and how to build them. Seems like they build gates just outside of the old gates every once in a while, like two feet further out. I've seen village gates too that you aren't supposed to walk through. I kid you not, the trail abruptly turns and if you look beside it uphill there is that gate without a worn trail through it, why I don't know, but I'm careful to do as others do and walk the correct trail.

Into nature these Akha folks are, there are rules about sticks inside the village, can't throw them or can't break them or something. To be safe I don't break or throw. They leave the trees all around the village too. They only live in close proximity to big trees. The forests are diverse with hundreds of different plant and animal species, every child learns the names and uses and habits of every one of them. The use of and relations with all things is codified in the set of rules known as The Akha Way. If all this sounds like a big pain it's really not.

Many of the symbols on the gate have to do with animals, probably hoping to ensure a good hunt for the food of the forest that feeds them. On one gate Tui pointed out some sticks that actually if you looked close were a symbol of two humans doing the wild thing. It was the trunk of two small saplings with enough branches and roots in the right places to resemble human limbs, someone had carved them to add realism. Probably some sort of fertility symbol. To a people who can recite their lineage by rote memory back through the generations, having progeny is important.

Often you see little AK-47s carved out of wood attached to the gate. Maybe to scare away evil or to show the power of the village. There is no more powerful symbol than the AK.

I've never made a study of the various rules and traditions of the Akha, I only learn what I pick up here and there over the years. I do try to be watchful of those around me to make sure I'm not missing any disaproving glances. I'd hate to be the one to enter a closed village or unknowingly break some other tradition, not only because there would have to be some sort of effort made to offset the badness but also because I know that bad luck is something that no amount of ritual can wash away. Even though many of their laws and rules might seem superstitious to westerners it's not up to me to pick and choose which rules to believe or follow, by entering an Akha village I'm accepting all of their ways.

I'm posting a long comment up here so no one will miss it

the gates are all about keeping spirits out.
there are 2 sets, one each at the front & back of the village.
inside the gates = human world. beyond the gates = spirit world.
Akha believe that spirits do not have reproductive organs, hence the wooden carvings of a pair of male & female humans to drive home the point that the village is not a place for spirits.

'asterisk-like' daa leow on the gate & sometimes on nearby trees too = 'do not touch' sign.
bird carvings = birds are able to warn of danger approaching.
apart fom AK47 some villages have airplane & helicopter carvings too.
new gate is built every Akha New Year (or when someone has touched it, causing it to lose its 'power' to keep spirits out) directly behind the previous year's gate.

during the H1N1 scare my friends' village in Thailand put up an additional, much taller 'gate' at the road access to their village with a dog carcass on top - this they believed would help to keep the disease out.

& just learnt a few bits more last last weekend:

the bamboo ladder leading up to the rice storage shed (& also houses) - apparently the side of the bamboo used for the rungs matters...one side is for humans to walk on, the other is used by spirits, so if you construct it with the 'wrong' (concave) side up you're inviting spirits to climb up.

same for banana leaves when spreading them on the floor/ground as 'table mats' - underside of the leaves facing up for human use...reverse way for spirits' use. all along i thought it was just because the upper side of the leaves gets all the bird poop & dust :P

& that Akha believe that cats are the children of princes/princesses - & so they are allowed into houses & are not to be eaten :)

- straycat"

and now a plug for Ms. Straycat's two blogs, which are my two favorite blogs about Lao/Thai, travel culture etc. they are over on the right called Lao Miao and The Wandering Straycat. Take a look and you'll see what I mean.

Ban Nam Hee (backwards it's Hee River Village) is a village that seemed to be doing very well for itself. Quite a few metal roofs to be seen, a sure sign of prosperity. Situated at the confluence of the Nam Hee and the Nam Fa (Hee and Blue or Sky River) the word for blue and the word for sky sound the same to me, you don't need to know what "hee" translates as. (I've been informed the "fa" in nam fa means sky and the hee in Nam Hee means not what I was thinking, my accent was off) The valley bottom widens out large enough for rice paddies and regular rice cultivation. They have water buffalo. I guess it has to be the most well to do upland village I've yet seen.

Ban Nam Hee on Google Earth. Note the bright reflection of the newer metal roofs. Also notice the different texture and colors indicating different growth. The rough texture surrounding the village is caused by large old growth trees rising above the canopy. The Akha never cut the trees around the village, many of those trees were there before Vietnam was a colony.

Further behind and uphill the telltale yellow of a recently harvested upland rice field. More subtly north of the village the uniform velvet of regrown swidden agriculture. Fields are rotated on a very long schedule. After growing rice or corn for a couple of years a field might well lay fallow for twelve to twenty years, each year providing habitat for different species of animals and plants until once again it is slashed and burnt. The rotation of crop lands and the circle of life continues much as it has for centuries uncounted.

Good luck with any plans the Lao Government might have to relocate these folks, they're doing just fine right where they are. I'm sure they'd never trade their lands for some spot beside the road perched on the side of a hill.

Above the terraced wet rice fields. It's as if there were a tiny enclave of lowland agriculture plunked down amidst this land of mountain rice and slash and burn. I think these fields are the key to the prosperity of the village. Wet rice has very high yields per acre or rai which is the local measurement. One rai can support one family with high calorie sticky rice for one year.

On the way out the next morning we walked past the graineries above the rice fields. There was so much rice that the extra was stored outside in old rice sacks where the animals could get at it. There was just no more room to store the rice they had. Above you can see a new storage shed being built past the one with the sacks. Rice is stored away from the village, if there is fire there is still rice to eat.

Ban Nam Hee even had water buffaloes. You see less photos of water buffs in Asia now that the iron buffalo is everywhere, but in an upland village? Five of them! There seemed to be no one there to mind the animals, maybe a youngster heard us coming and hid. There was no second season rice to guard against them eating. Still, there are tigers and leopards in the forest, perhaps no carnivores around, or the buffalo are too big and with horns.

The village was the first one I'd seen with an electric generator. Other places had LED bulbs hooked to batteries, Ban Nam Hee had a satellite TV. In the evenings they'd turn on the generator for a couple of hours and women would have light to cook with. A dim electric bulb is a handy thing to have.

Though it took us two full days to walk to Ban Nam Hee, during the wet season the navigable portion of the Nam Fa is only three hours walk away. (six hours our walking speed). So the village floated a diesel engine and generator down the river and then using many people with slings and poles carried the heavy engine, over many days, over the mountains to their village.

Compact Fluorescent light bulb and the view from the Naiban's porch.

In the photo above you can see that though the roof is metal, very little other things in the village are manufactured products. You never see empty plastic bags or water bottles on the ground. The fence is of sticks, the baskets of bamboo, water is carried in long tubes made from bamboo, snacks are carried in folded pieces of banana leaf, things are tied with a long splinter from bamboo. Children's and often men's clothes are store bought, but the older men wear at least a coat of the comfortable and beautiful cotton dyed black and woven on looms under the houses. Almost all clothes of the women are home made.

mixing gunpowder

Tui pointed out a guy working with a saht and coke in the photo above. I'm not sure which ingredients he's mixing together to make gunpowder but I'd be willing to bet he isn't mixing all three of them at the same time. Saltpeter is probably readily available from manure, and charcoal is of course easy, I'm not sure where they get the sulfur.

Usually when arriving at a village I don't do much. It's already late afternoon, and when the sun goes down it's very night. My guide points me to my place usually furthest from the center of the sleeping platform, and I swallow my daily blood pressure and cholesterol pills, chased with a couple ibuprofen and lots of warm water from the kettle. The fatigue of walking is cumulative and I know that I'll need all the rest I can get. I mostly eat only the rice offered to me, leaving the meat. I can digest the rice easiest it provides me with the energy to burn the excess fuel I have in the form of fat. I'm positive any meat will be eaten by someone.

my photo

Left of me in the photo is one of the old style muskets with a pistol grip, they hold them far away from their face so as not to get singed from the flash of the powder.

The naiban was as Tui had promised charming. His wife gave me a gift of an embroidered pocket which I carry to this day. I have to say I've never met a naiban that didn't seem like a very decent man. The translation of naiban as "village chief" doesn't really do the title justice. The naiban isn't appointed, he's elected by everyone in the village. The naiban is the responsible person of final resort, for every single human being in the village, every one of which he has known his entire life. I'm not sure what other duties a naiban performs. Sometimes the Naiban is the same man for years, other times it changes, lately maybe the government has some influence.

family photo

Above the naiban of Ban Nam Hee. On the left his oldest son and daughter in law, on the right his wife and youngest child, peeking from behind his back either his or his son's child. The naiban carried that kid constantly the whole time I was there. Notice the coat the naiban wears. The oldest wife has one breast bare as is the custom, it's also convenient for suckling the youngest son. Married women have bared breasts, a tradition which dies away after much contact with staring, photo taking, outsiders.

Notice the boards forming the walls behind the family, they are cut with a "pah-ee-toe", the long knife that is used for everything, yet they are very flat and fit together tightly. The structural parts of the house are post and beam, the floor split bamboo. There is an open fire on a hearth of dirt and ashes, the smoke filters up and out the high roof.

Being naiban isn't all heavy responsibilities. From every wild deer or pig killed one front leg goes to the naiban and one leg goes to the house of the oldest man in the village. Also it seems of late the government gives one center fire rifle (SKS)to each head of the village. Maybe it's because the head of the village is also part of the government.

As I drifted in the minutes before sleep that evening listening to the low murmer of the talk in the household, in my mind I reviewed where we'd come from and where we were headed. The village is on no map, the river that bears the same name isn't either. I figured we were not too far from the hard surface banked road used by trucks headed from Thailand to China, maybe twenty kilometers or less as the crow flies. The next day somehow we'd turn towards the south and somewhere cross the Nam Fa on our way to Ban Jakune Mai.

Early morning fog in the valley burning off with the sun below Ban Nam Hee. The village is still in shadow.

Where Dead Tigers Come From

2010-12-18T13:39:00.000-07:00

I don’t know what I was doing when Puan found me. Maybe I was looking at the village swing or kicking the dirt or studying the social habits of chickens. Puan had something to show me but wasn’t giving me any hints as to what had him so excited

It was a poorly preserved cat skin on a bench at the the school house. What type of critter was anyone’s guess. Markings like a leopard cat, but too large, and not at all like a true leopard. The translation from Akha to Lue to Lao to English was losing quite a bit of info if there was ever any there to begin with. Small leopard was about as close as I heard with variations of mao (cat) and sua (tiger) thrown in to the confuse the issue.
I don’t think the cat was killed for the wildlife trade, more likely as proof of some hunter’s prowess. The village of Lao Sueng is not only a long way from any roads but also in an area where the Lao Government prosecutes the trade in wildlife. The villagers were unconcerned that I was taking photos of a cat skin and Puan has known me for years.

At the time I didn’t realize it but over the next couple of weeks I’d be skirting the edges of what is now the center of the international trade in tigers, leopards and other endangered species.

Tiger head and skin for sale at Mong La the border town up in Sipsongbana (twelve villages in the Dai language) I had no idea that taxidermy was this advanced in the Shan State. Someone must have sent away for a mold for a leopard as well as teeth tongue and nose.
In the early 90s I befriended an ethnic Chinese from New York city who used to go to Mong La regularly to purchase gem stones to take home to his uncles jewelery business in NY. I think he used to bring in the gems informally. (hidden very discreetly) He would wait on the Chinese side for the traders to come over to sell, he made a trip to Mong La every two months. I think I was the only fellow American he bumped into on his trips, it was when I lived in Dali. Even back then Mong La had a reputation of allowing things that were often frowned upon in the more Puritanical Peoples Republic.

I’m an agnostic on the hunting of cats in the land of other peoples. Not my land, not my people. I will say the upland peoples have been hunting the same cats using the same firearms (black powder muzzle loaders) for hundreds of years. It's not them who have changed.

I remember a long time ago, in my own country once I got kind of a bad feeling when I saw the skins of a few bobcats stretched out on racks for drying in the back of someone’s pickup in Utah, it just struck me the wrong way for whatever reason. Cats are an interesting family of animals. They never seem to seriously overpopulate and they spread themselves out through being territorial. In general they don’t eat carrion. I like seeing the tracks of a mountain lion despite the fact that they probably eat a deer a week. Cats hunt by stealth, so do us humans sometimes.

I thought of writing when I saw this article on the website of Radio Free Asia. http://www.rfa.org/english/news/burma/tigers-11192010152041.html

Burma up in that part of the world isn’t under the control of, well, Burma. People call it Shan State, and has been fighting Burma since forever. The Mekong separates Burma from Laos and the river is very narrow and turbulent. A metaphor perhaps. I know that other foreigners travel in the area but I’ve never seen any. The only boats I’ve seen are Chinese freighters, local shallow bottomed Lao freight boats, the fast boats I’ve ridden and once an overpowered sleek Chinese passenger cruiser.

Looking north from the landing at Xiengkok. I don’t think the barely visible bamboo pier sticking out into the eddy created by the calving of that sandbar is a pier for offloading to Keng Larb. My map from Reise puts the town 15km upriver.

The Radio Free Asia (RFA) article is taken from a report from TRAFFIC an org that monitors trade in species. There are some gems such as this one.

The extreme decentralization of northern Burma "makes the situation more difficult to monitor and control," Translation: There is no government and no way any of us are going there.

Another one, “Mong La and Tachilek are areas in the Shan State of northern Burma, where rebels are waging a battle for greater autonomy against the junta.” Greater autonomy translates into not having their village razed to the ground and every living thing in it killed. There are no reporters or observers to bring word of the conflict to the outside world, it just happens.

The article goes on to claim Keng Larb in Burma is the new exit point for the trade. The mention of that town is what perked up my ears. So I looked at the map. Sure enough right where that birds beak type thing sticks into Laos. The bird beak is a big old turn of the Mekong, at the tip of the beak is the tiny port of Xiengkok, Laos. That’s where the Long river enters the Mekong. The river and the ledge jutting from the hill, form a slack water big enough for boats to pull out of the current and moor. Any place the river slows down enough to actually allow a boat to stop is a real big deal on the upper Mekong. There’s a customs house.

Lao freight boat firing up it’s engines as it enters the fast water at Xiengkok. We all watched the boat silently swing out into the current without power waiting to see what the heck was going on. The captain hadn’t started the engine so to save a couple precious drops of fuel. The engine coughed a couple of times then caught and blew out this tiny cloud of smoke. Without power a boat would be dashed on the rocks within seconds of entering the rapids. The Chinese blasted a channel a few years ago but there is still a tremendous amount of water trying to squeeze through a very narrow passage.

Xiengkok is the place the backpacker Ryan Chicovsky disappeared under unusual circumstances four and a half years ago. http://ryanchicovsky.blogspot.com/ If anyone reading this travels to that area, and hears anything about Ryan please contact his family as they are still seeking word of him.

I can see how the trade in tiger parts would find the Mekong along the Burma Lao border a good place to exit Burma. There is no law in Burma, the only outpost of the Lao government is the lone, very boring, customs house in Xiengkok a town known for being perhaps less regulated than the rest of Laos. The dirt road from Xienkok up to Sing and the local border crossing with China has no checkpoints before the border itself. At the border both times I’ve been there everyone has been playing dakaw that kind of cross between volley ball and soccer played with a hard wicker ball. It’s not a border for international travelers.

Further down the Mekong where Burma meats the Thai border is the town of Huay Xai with it’s hard surface road where in four hours you can drive to the big casino at Boten. The Chinese casino that is built on 25km of Laos with a 30 year lease and an option for 60 more. It would be very hard to tell where Laos ends and China begins. I saw an article recently with photos of tiger kits for sale there but I can’t seem to find it anymore.
Finally there is the possibility of going straight up the Mekong is China, with no Lao checkpoints at all. Those 3 possible routes out of Keng Lap, all very loosely regulated, offer inexpensive, quick passage to China for the wildlife trade, far away from developed towns.

An example of howe "out there" this stretch of river is, a few years ago a fast boat got shot up and a Chinese army guy killed. Something to do with the Chinese casino in Tachilek not paying it’s protection money. What a Chinese army guy was doing all that way down the river so far from the border of China just goes to show the confluence of corrupt officials, lack of any kind of government, and competing illegal enterprises.

Huay Xai is also the first place one ends up that has internet, electricity, hot water, and all the trappings of modernity. While walking down the main street I saw a store selling curios from the forest. Boar tusks, porcupine quills, exotic looking crystals, and such. Lying on the floor was this very beautiful skin from a marbled leopard.

I asked the young lady minding the store if the owner was there. He still wasn’t there an hour later and I politely asked permission to take the photo.

New 100,000 Kip note

2010-11-26T17:39:00.001-07:00

I'd be happy if they just got rid of four zeros.

I'd swear I see Kaysone's ghost emerging.

For analysis sometimes deeper than I could understand hop on over to New Mandala.

Opium and Laos, a hard habit to kick

2010-11-25T21:15:00.004-07:00

I was back on my old computer but this time using Chrome as a browser which worked and I found this older article from The Economist which I'll link to here. No photos are mine.

Golden Days The Hills Are Alive With Opium Once More

It's a good article and worth the read. The setting is in not just Laos but Luang Namtha Province, not so much because Luang Namtha is in the Golden Triangle tri border region of Thailand, Burma, and Laos but because of all the opium producing areas Luang Namtha is probably the easiest for a reporter to get to, there's even an airport.

The dateline of the article closely matches the time I was in the area going walkabout in the area of upland villages. Of course I smoked no opium nor did I see anyone smoking opium nor did I see any opium fields. I can be very decidedly oblivious if need be.

What the article is saying in a nutshell is that many farmers after being poor for a couple of growing seasons are switching back to growing opium. It helps that the market price has shot up to $1400 a kilo, Seems like it was only a couple years ago when $600 was considered pretty good.

Besides newfound prosperity are the other clues.

The fields on the distant hillsides away from all the others and not looking like rice or corn. The tiny paper wrappers from the double packs of aspirin used to mash into the old ashes and mix with a nice new heated ball so to be smoked and allay the headache. The place on the ground next to the wrapper at the trail junction where you can see someone stopped to lay on their side to smoke, and the leaves are matted down just like when a deer lays up.

Update 12|16|10 Radio Free Asia has a new piece on the 2010 harvest which they must have solid numbers on by now. Laos has the sharpest increase in cultivation as a percent of thier 09 figures. They now produce about a twelfth the amount of Burma, quite a bit for little old Laos.

http://www.rfa.org/english/news/burma/opium-12132010200319.html

One time a few years ago when I mentioned my reservations about the US suppression efforts to a friend at the embassy he said, "well you know it's not as if the Lao Seung are rich people or anything". And it's true, they aren't rich, but most aren't poor either, mostly they are doing ok, and some are even doing better than that. If the Lao Seung (uplanders) are forced to live without their cash crop it does make a difference. It's not as if their lives were abject misery and could get no worse. With opium yes they are poor, but they can buy hard goods and maybe rice when the grainery is empty.

Pretty flowers all the way up to the Mekong and China.

Update UNDOC yearly report.
http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/frontpage/2010/December/jump-in-south-east-asian-opium-poppy-cultivation.html?ref=fs1

Lonely Planet Laos 7th Edition to go on sale soon

2010-11-25T17:27:00.001-07:00

I usually greet the publishing of yet another addition of the Lao guidebook with a yawn. It's always fun to see what guest house got mentioned or not and what the new spin on certain towns is, but as far as reading and new views.... well... not so much.

Links on LP site just below the photo of book

I have an idea this edition might be different.

First of all a hat tip to Ms. Straycat who writes the insightful blog lao*miao* , for sending me the heads up and link to the new edition.

I already was aware that Austin Bush a food blogger from Bangkok was working on a new book. There was more to Austin and the guide than I realized.

From the bio and the photo in the portions of the guide available on line Austin is unlined, young, probably young 30s at the oldest. I've listened to enough of the "back in the good old days before steam power Laos communication was by elephant courier" and all that stuff. The good old days are now.

Austin speaks Thai, he studied it at Chang Mai University, and being "not old" he might well be fairly fluent. I'd bet some money he also can wing it in Thai Nua and now some Lao, and Lue too. It can't be overstated how helpful speaking the language can be. When I read a guidebook I want an insiders view telling me things most people wouldn't be able to find out. From his blog, Austin actually has opinions, and from snippets of the guide he's subtle enough to let them leak through on to the pages for anyone willing to read carefully.

The contents I can see look very different. The index begins with abseiling and ends with ziplines. Udomxai gets three pages not three paragraphs. Ou Tai, Ou Neua, and 9 pages on Phongsali Province. I wouldn't be happy to see my favorite places over run but it's nice to see something besides Vang Vien and Luang Prabang. Fifteen National Protected Areas (NPAs) are covered!

Austin had two other people assisting, one of whom lives in PP and so is a local of sorts. Safety in numbers, best to have more than one person to blame mistakes on.

Another part that stuck out for me is that there is a trekking eco tourism portion written by someone fluent in the languages and who has worked for and with many of the international orgs developing hopefully sustainable tourism in Laos. (Must be tough to be known as the inventor of Vang Vien.)

On the down side.... "join pious locals in making a ceremonial offering to the saffron-robed monks during their tak bat dawn procession" Translation "join a million other camera snapping rude tourists by getting right in the face of some monks". When they make me king of the earth I'll make using the phrase, "saffron-robed monks" a capital offence. In fairness it's probably in the fine print of any LP contract with a writer for SEAsia. "Every guidebook writer shall upon pain of not recieving pay use the cliche "saffron robed monk" at least 15 times further writers about Luang Prabang must suggest becoming Budhist for a quarter hour at tak bat."

Another downer, the guidebook was researched and written before the Northern Lao/Boat Landing cookbook, (wonder if a shorter way to say all that has evolved.) I'd think it pretty difficult to get a handle on a culture's cooking in a country with hardly any restaurants and those that exist sell mostly restaurant food. I can't imagine learning the food outside of a kitchen of a resident, and until now there was hardly any literature explaining what it is you're looking at.

Should be shipping sometime after Christmas.

Further Into the Forest

2010-10-31T16:14:00.006-07:00

The morning began as most mornings. The eldest wife pushing the coals together and blowing on them to start the morning fire and cook the rice. Everyone else still fast asleep in the dark. I got up but kept my distance, waiting for some water to boil to make instant coffee in my steel cup. I wasn't sure of the etiquette in Hmong houses, I couldn't see a clear demarcation of women's side from men's side as with the Akha. I do know that no woman wants a foreigner underfoot early in the morning, so after getting a nod of approval to get some water from the boiling kettle I returned to the edge of the sleeping platform and re bandaged a blister on my foot.

Morning fire Ban Nambo 20 54 25.70N 100 53 50.10

This post is a continuation of similar posts about a walk in NE Laos in the winter of 07 and 08.

With way over a thousand kilometers of roadless and mostly mapless area the Nam Fa drainage has plenty of places to go for a walk. None the less Tui had one particular town he wanted to revisit, Ban Nam Hee. I think as much as anything the village headman had been welcoming and Tui wanted to go back and say hi. Also last time he'd been there the villagers had told him that it was only one day's walk futher to Jakune Mai where we both have friends.

Tui'd taken an Italian there during the preceding year. That walk with the Italian had been the only foreigner at all in these woods during the two years since i'd been here in early 2007. One of the soldiers with an AK had accompanied them. Tui made jokes about the gun. I've seen hunters stash thier rifle in the bushes before entering an unfamiliar village. Good to enter a place with an empty hand. I don't think the escort was appreciated.

Black Powder Rifle from hunters we met at stream crossing

My guide Tui was the son of the military comander of Lao communist forces in the region throughout the war, afterwards his was head of the district capital past the turn of the century. Like many Lao Tui's dad got his military training in Hanoi, where they taught him all kinds of things best forgotten. Tui taught English in the high school, he usually knows former students in every village, and most people have heard of his father. The connections are helpfull when entering a new village.

That said, upland peoples are an independent self assured bunch. Tui's liniage though known, affords him no special status other than his normal station as guide and teacher and my being a falang is nothing more special than any other stranger. Often the people we are talking to are elders and current and former headmen of their often large old villages. I mostly listen quietly trying to understand what's going on, I go easy with the camera.

After an early breakfast of wai wai we left with our local guide. Hiring a local guide accomplishes a few things, most of them good. The local guide is a hunter and knows all of the trails and his way around the hills. It puts the equivalent of skilled labor wages into the pocket of a subsistence farmer. Three people, one of them a local woodsman, is much safer than two strangers. The guide usually has a much greater depth of knowledge of local flora and fauna, more than likely he knows any strangers we are apt to meet, if not personally, then through kinship ties.

Looking back at Ali's house, the Lahu headman whom I'd stayed with back in 06. Notice the Lahu houses are up on stilts. Stopped to take photo of Nambo 20 53 56.41N 100.54 03.22E

The trail was good and after the first long big hill the terrain eased up. We seemed to be headed in a generaly south easterly direction similar to the way we'd walked the day before.

Despite a lack of accurate maps I have a rough idea of where we are all the time. Far to the south east is the new hard surface road from Huay Xai on the Thai border that goes up to Boten on the border of China. West is the Mekong, behind me the dirt road from Sing to Xiengkok.

They pushed me hard for the first part of the morning. We had a good sized hill to go up. Afterwards the elevation changes were more moderate.

Break at the top of the first large hill. Hunters had been using a white tree for target practice. (six inch goups at 30 meters) Top of Hill on trail to Nambo Gao 20 52 59.50N 100 54 17E

At around noon we passed the site of the old village of Nambo. A guy I talked to the night before said he'd spent his entire life in old Nambo and he figured he was around eighty years old. On the old topo maps from the war there's a red dot in about the same place as Old Nambo and a label LS125, "Lima Site 125" which is military jargon for landing site. Someone probably landed a helicopter there and made contact with the villagers.

Besides Lima Site 125 at Old Nambo you can also see Muang Long in the upper left and the present day Mongla labeled Lima Site 358. Click for larger scale.

Old Nambo gone to weeds. 20 50 53.50N 100 54 29.20E

Heading down towards a creek we heard a shot, and at the crossing met a couple of hunters. We stopped there for lunch. While one of the hunters started a fire the other chased some small fish into the shallows and scooped them up on the bank. Combined with the bird they'd shot, the kilo of rice they'd brought, and some of my favorite flavor enhancer, they had a pretty good lunch for themselves. Certainly a lot better than plain rice. The bird was simply plucked then cleaned by splitting it open with a thumb and discarding some of the guts, stuffing others back in the bird. Similarly with the fish. All had bang nua and salt rubbed into them then were quickly barbecued.

Fish and fowl

Prepping Lunch

Kao Neao, Ping gai, Ping Pa, Bang Nuah, Gua, a perfect lunch.

They say the Akha might get half their protein from the wild. I can't think of many other societies today where every single male is a hunter. Their bullets are made in molds of lead and propeled with home made black powder. The newer longer rifled barrels made in Thailand are a big improvement over the older smooth bores. I'd guess the long barrels are to get as much speed out of the slow burning powder as possible.

Notice the powder horn in the forground? Except for the barrel, most of this rifle is homeade, looks really good. What next Monte Carlo combs?

The Akha often hunt with dogs. The dogs sniff out the pig or deer and bark to alert the hunters that they are chasing the animal. No carnivore is too big to fear the dogs of the Akha and there is a feeling of safety in walking the woods where carnivores still fear man. The only animal people have problems with surprisingly is the mild mannered black bear. Mostly meek sometimes the bear mauls someone unprovoked. I figure it's a reaction to the fact that they live in a bad neighborhood. Tigers and leopards prey on black bears, sometimes even after the bear is full grown, the only defence the bear has is it's strength and ferocity.

Asian Black Bear from camera trap by WCS. Notice how thin the fur is, you can see the skin through it especially along the belly. Still, built stronger than a brick shite house as they say.

We were reaching a point where it is closer to the new hard surface road to China than it is behind us to the road at Muang Long. Close to the road is a demand for market bush meat. The Chinese built a large hotel casino on the Lao side of the border at Boten and the entire town and market surrounding it runs on Chinese currency and speaks Mandarin. (I'm repeating what I've heard, haven't really been to Boten in about a few million years, certainly long before the casino)

The road also drives a demand for all the nutty animal based medicines. for export to China. I'm sure the customs house has been upgraded since I passed by, but the Boten entrance has to be one of the more obscure entries to China. I wouldn't think the customs has much familiarity with CITES . http://www.cites.org/

The Akha claim the Kahmu are poaching on thier land, pushed further inland than normal. Maybe by the demand of the market? The Kahmu are actually the original inhabitors of the land, as far back as legend survives.

It's not just the Chinese at Boten that drive the market, Lao people still enjoy eating civet, porkupine, pig, deer, snake, bat, and bamboo rat if they can afford it. The many varieties of insects, frogs, tiny birds, and fish are still comonly eaten even among the small amount of the population that reside in towns.

I read in a report once that even citizens of the capital can name 300 local species. When I think of doing the same around here I'm afraid I'd run out somewhere around 100. Very recently almost every person in Laos was familiar with gathering fish, frogs, insects, and all of the wild growing plants. It's hard to tell someone that has been eating wild food all thier lives that it's now bad to buy civet in exchange for the money they earn by working.

The afternoon fades from my memory, more hills, more trees and finally the Nam Hee, a major tributary of the Nam Fa. We stopped and washed ourselves in the creek, the water bone chillingly cold. The first bath in a couple days, I felt downright clean and presentable until our local guide unrolled his jacket.

Blurry photo of local guide all dressed up --Nam Hee Crsng way to ban Nam Hee 20 49 50.90N 100 55 20.70

Less well known, the upland men also wear distinctive clothes that identify them as belonging to one ethnicity or another. In this case our guide was a Hmong fellow. He reminded me of the young cowboys of Wyoming getting duded up in preparation to go to the barn dance.

The hilltribes have devised ways of both enlarging their gene pool and guarding against inbreeding. In other instances I'd felt as if Lu woodcutters had been taking advantage of fairly young upland girls. In reading I now realize that more accurately they were taking advantage of the social norms that allowed them to get lucky at the same time as the villagers perhaps diversified their genes. It seems as if every time I jump to make moral judgments, I later find I didn't fully understand the situation.

It helps me to realize that the villagers are basically the same human as am I. True I come from a much more developed society technologicaly, but with human interactions, I'd think we're about the same.

We wander through life mostly as strangers to each other, behind our steel firesafe doors, at the end of our anonymous suburban culdesac. The Akha can recite their lineage back for scores of generations. They not only know their relationship to every living soul in their own village but the connections via marriage and lineage to every other village of their people from before the time they imigrated out of the north hundreds of years ago. Imagine living next door to your best friends and all your relatives for your entire life?

Shortly the trail became worn, we smelled wood smoke, and heard chickens.

After passing through the village gate, Ban Nam Hee itself became visible, initialy it was strangely silent, and empty. Nothing moved except chickens, no dogs, no people. Then a wild cheer, and singing or chanting to drums and some unusual musical instrument. Except for the music all was again quiet, then a most horrible anguished cry, silence again, then a shout of triumph, cheers.

I'm used to having packs of dogs nipping at my heels or old grannies giving me the evil eye. I understand that until we are accepted by someone we can be viewed with suspicion. There are also instances of villages being absolutely closed to all outsiders. I'd no idea what the heck was going on. Some kind of human sacrifice was the first thing that came to mind.

Halfway into the village we came upon the game of tops. The entire village was cheering the contestants. The tops are spun off a stick with a rope. I'm not sure of the rules, I believe someone can lose their lead by having their top knocked out of the way. The music was a CD of Akha music imported from China. The village had a generator and batteries to power a sound system.

Ban Nam Hee 20 49 04.00N 100 56 06.80E

Food From Northern Laos: The Boat Landing Cookbook

2010-10-01T20:23:00.002-07:00

The photo above I "borrowed" from a review on a shutterbug web site called Bangkok Images. More than likely it's a photo by Kees Sprengers and it's in the book.

Two people associated with the Boat Landing, a husband and wife team of cook and writer Dorothy Culloty and photographer Kees Sprengers have written what sounds like an extremely comprehensive book on Lao cooking. They also have a web site with a similar address that is well worth putting on your favorites list and stopping back for a look see every once in a while. The web address is http://www.foodfromnorthernlaos.com/

Kees alerted me to the upcoming release of his book but I've been negligent in giving it the promotion it deserves. What can I say, it's hunting season, election season, and I'm a procrastinator. Also I didn't have a copy and I'm real shy to broach the subject of shelling out some cash for a book about something my wife does all the time.

What I did today was put it on the request list at my library, I'd urge you to do the same. They almost always honor requests to buy books and doing so accomplishes two good things. It puts santang in the hands of Dorothy and Kees in the form of book sales, and it introduces Lao food to a wider audience. I know where I live all the affluent yups with time on their hands like nothing better than to buy a whole bunch of new cooking paraphernalia and a book with tons of gorgeous ethnic photos to go along. If only it included a music tape of Bhudist chants in Pali from a Tai Lue temple complete with giant cymbal clashes and drums. Well maybe some morlum for mood music. I digress.

How to write a review about a book I haven't seen? I didn't quite have the gall to email Kees and suggest he send me a copy. Thankfully it's all been done for me by Vienne that Lao chef in Spain with the great web site. He's read the book and gives it a much more thorough review than anything I've seen yet. http://laocook.com/2010/10/01/food-from-northern-laos-the-boat-landing-cookbook/ after reading Vien's review and shouting out the good parts to my wife as she was packing the kids off to bed I now have official permission to buy.

Often when my wife cooks foods that she is apt to repeat she takes note of amounts of ingredients and writes them down correcting herself when she adds more or less, eventually she knows exactly how much of what to make say the noodles for Kao Piak or a Gaeng Keowan. She shares the ingredients lists freely with her friends but not the amounts as Lao people are used to a much less measured system. Some secrets are harder than others to give up. Thankfully Dorothy holds nothing back. This book will be a new source of ideas, all written down with measurements even!

There is of course one question that will have to wait until I have the book.

There is that one ingredient that all Lao people use in almost everything they cook. It is the ingredient that no westerner will ever admit to using, the ingredient foodies don't even like to talk about, the ingredient that can change a dish from simply "very delicious" to "saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaap!!". How do they handle the ingredient so controversial, so, well, downright sinful, that we dare not speak it's name? The ingredient that I've seen in use in every different ethnic village, the ingredient I've seen in use, in ubiquitous use, in villages so remote that some residents have never seen a road or car.

Will they deny it's use? "Oh that's not "real" traditional Lao food". Ignore it completely? List it as an option?

I'll have to wait for the book.

Khaen Khene Lao เดี่ยวแคน หมอแคนฝรัง Jonny Olsen

2010-08-31T20:36:00.004-07:00

The links are down, you tube taken down by Jonny himself. I'm back to re write and repost different vids.

I hadn't searched for Johny Olsen on you tube for a while. He has more recent solo and improvisational recordings that I love. I've been a big fan ever since seeing his hastily shot videos made in Thailand in some one's back yard against the backdrop of a falling down chain link fence.

He also does these kind of funny electrified hip hop things that are also very Lao but with a modern interpretation. Besides being a recognised khaen player Johny sings Lum, often accompanied by the traditional skinny teenage dancing girls in funny costumes. The production of some of the things he did a few years ago are very very Lao, like what you'd see during a hot day on the video player of a long distance bus.

Lum like many kinds of music I hadn't heard before took some getting used to, but after being subjected to a steady diet, sometimes non stop, it grows on you.

Below is the one with the dancing girls