This weekend we took a whole gang of teachers from Bara’s school up to stay at the Prodigy, which seems to be undergoing some fairly extreme growing pains. A slew of previously unheard of fees made for some static at the reservation end, but a bit of arguing and an email to the owner has, I hope, sorted things out a bit. Basically, the young couple who actually run the place and work up on the mountain taking care of guests and dealing with the local contingent of cooks, domestics and handymen are being poorly treated by a well-meaning, but absentee owner. Our group was instructed to pay a 10% “service fee” on top of every other charge for the weekend – similar to an agency fee in the advertising world. The owner also instructed us to pay a 50 RMB per bottle (!!) corkage fee for bringing our own wine and even sent a couple of his buddies up on the shuttle with us. I’m not really opposed to sharing the shuttle we paid for (we ended up giving a Shanghainese girl named Ling a ride back down with us), but I do think it is rather inconsiderate not to ASK us first and just assume that we won’t mind. The guys who rode up with us really had no business being there, as they didn’t help Ling at all and basically just took up space. I actually had to guide the driver up the mountain in the dark, because none of the lot had ever been to Prodigy before.

To top it off, the owner called up and gave Jing (the girl who pretty much runs Prodigy herself) an earful, blaming her for the problems and inchoately accusing her of stealing the 10% service fees from him. If anyone reading this makes it up to Prodigy, please let the owner know what you think and save the 10% service fee as a tip for Jing and the local staff – they are the ones who deserve the tips, if tips are to be given.

/rant

Silly little things aside, the weekend itself was flawlessly beautiful. Ideal weather, clear skies and a light wind shook the tops of the hairy bamboo as we walked. I managed to locate another loop trail which takes in the old Temple then cuts through the village on the far side and up to the fire road on Wuzhishan before cutting through the pine forest and down past the large waterfall. As usual, I’ve posted my routes from the weekend here:

In the course of sharing some of these routes, I’ve discovered that there is some irritating inconsistency in the rendering of the maps using Google. After some research online, it became clear that the Chinese government has somehow altered all of the maps relating to China so that the GPX data sets plot about 250-300 meters to the Southeast of where they ought to be. You can see it plainly in the image below – the blue line is my route, which followed the horseshoe bend in the road plainly visible to the left. I’m not sure how to remedy this, but although all of the GPX data you can download from the Wandermaps site shows incorrectly on Google Maps it will work perfectly once loaded into your device. It’s frustrating, but “This Is China” as the smarmy long-term expat says. Another workaround, if you absolutely must have the correct map rendered, is to use the Chinese version of Google maps.

I’m not even going to get into why they need to screw with the maps in such an obvious and irritating way.

On the left, the route as plotted on Google Maps. On the right, the same route plotted on ditu.google.cn

The empty temple was a nice find, although visitors to Mark Kitto’s Moganshan Lodge will know it from the “Temple Hike” map – the only hike map currently existing for the area. The sign at the base of the temple drive was an interesting artefact. Rusted away as it was, it describes the temple and the community that used to live there. Sadly, the one remaining monk will eternally remain 76 years old, delaying his achievement of nirvana or reincarnation as one of the sundry local fauna until the sign crumbles away into the dust. It was a bit of a lesson in “What not to put on signage”, poignant as the rest of the valley is besieged by diggers and the road building mania that will eventually destroy the delicate sense of isolation in nature that remains.

These building the roads say they are doing it for the local bamboo harvesters, but the claim rings a bit hollow. The harvesters will not be able to make much more money based on the volume they deliver to the waiting trucks, and the clearing of the tops of Yangshan’an and Mengjiashan look suspiciously like preparations for tea plantations. It’s hard not to empathize with the local harvesters, who break their backs hauling 100′s of kilos of bamboo down the treacherous slides all day long, but something tells me that the locals are not the ones who will benefit from this spate of road-building. A few “exclusive” mountaintop hotels and some tea fields planted by big shots from Hangzhou will likely sprout like poison mushrooms, dripping sewage and phosphates down the mountains to eradicate what’s left of the wild. It’s hard to imagine how this will benefit the locals in the mid or long terms. The approach the roadbuilders are taking speaks for itself, really. As you can see in the image below, they’ve plowed a digger right up the middle of the stream bed which feeds one of the most impressive waterfalls in the area. The 30 meter falls now runs brown with mud and it’s only a matter of time before the water is diverted entirely by the new road.

I’m very interested to know if there is any sort of nascent environmentalist movement in China. Given the pace of development, now is the time for China’s Stephen Mather, John Muir and Aldo Leopold. Who knows, they might even be due for an Edward Abbey.

Plowing the stream bed

My goal is to visit all of the sites in the book, which is not an ambitious goal, as there are only about 20 of them. I’ve done 3 today, and one site was already demolished.

It’s difficult to describe the process of modernization happening in China at the moment, but I imagine it is similar in many ways to the forced relocation of many central europeans into the cities following the second world war. It wasn’t necessarily forced, but the people did seem to have some basic concerns, to put it lightly, about their relocation. In any case, those concerns proved less pressing than the promise of easy employment and the safety of a patrolled city during the decades-long collapse of Qing dynasty China into the sort of chaos and dismemberment of decent society that made a Haneke film look ready for the Disney channel. That generation was the current lot’s grandparents.

Many of the people now living in these neighborhoods do not own the homes. The idea of ownership was somewhere else – not a concern that their ancient dead grandparents bothered with. It was assumed by them: I live here, and I will continue to live here until I die. Perhaps it was also considered: who would ever be craven or desperate enough to take THIS away from me and mine? Also, the idea of private ownership was considered unpopular by the oligarchs of the communist Chinese, who preferred to own everything themselves.

Those long dead people worked hard, and then they died. They lived lives of privation and constant,petty humiliations. Stinking tofu, uneven paving stones, windows that cracked and shuddered with passing trains and traffic, buckling rooflines and communal toilets were just the plastic lid on the to-go Mocha of their miserable existence. They built little, saved little, met, loved and gave birth. Two generations passed, and now someone wants the land their little hovels happened to fall on because this city has become something “of interest” to the global wankery. Risen from thieving and malfeasance, they have come to find this land valuable, and these homes must be torn down to make place for more KFC joints and towering concrete apartment blocks which can be made “personalized” by 3D television sets.

This is not to say that there is anything quaint or picturesque about living in a stinking, slanting baked-brick hovel wedged between an overpass and the back end afterbirth of a shopping mall. It’s crap living there, no doubt, and I plan to find out exactly how crap by living in one of them for a week or two this winter, when the living’s good and all the do-goody fluent Mandarin-speakers who’d make my efforts look bad have jetted off back to someplace plaid for the holidays.

Anyway, the people who built these places have long since died, and the ones living here now are bemused. They’re easily enraged and quickly subdued. Like all Shanghainese who haven’t succumbed to the idiocracy of shopping malls and Taiwanese pop music, they are fighting every moment to find a bone to pick and doing it all in their pyjamas. Nail houses are what they call the abodes of the clingers-on, and they provide ample fuel for the foreign press to coast through the Chinese cucumber season on. Every month there are thousands of stories of them, each one more pathos-soaked than the last. They are the one remaining family house of old folk who refuse to just take the cash and move after the rest of the neighborhood has taken their measly pittance of a bribe and agreed to be re-located off in Anhui somewhere. Because that’s what happens.The neighborhoods go, one by one. They meet and drink tea and hawk and spit and curse, but then they slowly start to see the starry light. They take while the taking is good and they leave a pitiable few behind – people who’re too principled or too militant or too addled to know the difference. Or too blinded by the tales of riches spread from the Chongqing nail house and others who held out against the wankers the western media is all too eager to brand “bad guys”.

These people cling to newspaper articles and eviction notices like a 14 year-old picking at scabs on his knee. They are good, they are reticent. Their stories must be as different as their faces. One is near crazed, like Otík from Vesničko má středisková. He nods and claps at every gesture, as though me and my silly little camera are going to free his family from want; as though I worked for the New York Times or something. Another hangs back, shifting from heel to toe, fists thrust into the pockets of her drab gray wool coat. Her face is so hard it breaks the heart – eyes that are ready to forget about everything if there were only a pain chocolat or one of those bizarre blueberry milk tea drinks.

They wanted to talk about it, but didn’t want their pictures taken, so I convinced them with Bruce’s help, to line up with their backs facing the camera. A line of defiance. A line that is not here. In a few weeks, their wrinkled hands and plaintive voices will be somewhere else. It’s warm where I’m writing this. It’s clean, well lit and calm. These backs will probably not see that sort of place again.

The one group I met today had been offered some 25,000 RMB plus relocation to another spot outside of Shanghai. It seems like a good deal, seen from the outside. They don’t own their property in any legal sense. They have no ability to develop their property in a profitable way, unlike the Audi-driving douchebags that lord it over every bit of profitable real estate from here to the 12eme arrondissement. They, in any case, have refused to leave. They love their concrete gardens and their slanty windowframes. They love the idea of more. They love the fact that someone, once, tried to help them. Who knows. They’ve been beaten, burned out, had their electricity and their water disconnected and they refuse still to leave. It’s hard to tell why. In order to find out, I plan to go back there and stay for a week over the winter, butI already wrote that and I guess you can believe it when I do it and post the pictures.

The Xiwuli valley is really starting to change with the season – the mountains were wreathed in mist that made for some breathtaking views. On Saturday, we wandered up to the peak behind Prodigy guesthouse and then looped back around to visit the lodge for a drink or two. We took advantage of the Halloween spirit and wandered through a number of old, semi-abandoned European summer homes up on the mountain. They were built around the turn of the century by a group of businessmen from Shanghai (mostly American, British and Russian) and then abandoned after Mao showed up and chased the foreign devils out. It’s a compelling story, I think, and touched on in Mark Kitto’s book mentioned in my last post. Mark was there this weekend and gave us a few pointers in our little exploratory journey through the old retreat.

Houwu Highlands and Moganshan Lodge:

http://www.wandermap.net/route/1317347

Cross Country and Reservoir loop: 

http://www.wandermap.net/route/1317386

1. I’ve put together a version of the video we shot with the students in Vietnam last April. You can watch here:

There’s not much of Bara in there and none at all of me, aside from a few goofy laughs that I wish I was good enough at Soundtrack to remove… The video almost didn’t happen because of the second bit of news:

2. Bara and I have moved to Shanghai. She’s settled in to a 2 year contract with an international school here and I managed to find a job as well, so here we are. I’m preparing a post on Shanghai itself, even though it isn’t really travel so much as living, at this point. There is a lot to learn and a lot to see.

Last week we made it up to Moganshan – a small mountain area near Hangzhou – for some relaxing during the week-long holiday and I really fell for the place. In between hikes straight up the mountain behind the little guesthouse Bara and I found, I was nose buried in Mark Kitto’s China Cuckoo, his account of the rise and fall of That’s Shanghai and his subsequent flight to a graceful and early retirement in the hill country of Moganshan. He and his wife still live there and operate the venerable Moganshan Lodge – heart and hearth of the burgeoning Shanghai Whitey Weekend set.

I went back to Houwu village again this weekend for some solo camping and plan to make it a weekend tradition, as far as I’m able. Here are a few pictures from this weekend’s trip. I think I’ll find the time to write more about it soon. We found a great little guesthouse called Prodigy Base Camp. Prodigy is a beautifully made place, reminiscent of an Alpine lodge in the summertime, and it’s open year round. The people there are great and they make the best wood-fired oven pizza I’ve had in Asia.

I have decided to make a mission for myself by mapping the area trails, using both GPS and more “artisanal” methods. In China, the military owns all the maps available and they are not easily convinced to share their valuable military data… My GPS is on the way from Prague as I write this, and I’m looking into some more “old fashioned” ways of making maps in the mean time.

Slightly irritated with Mr. Chao for the first time because he’d told me visiting the actual site would be impossible, I set off on my own. In fact, you simply walk around the perimeter fence of the visitor’s center and cut through a few rows of coffee bushes until you reach the site. I walked for an hour, listening to the birds and the lowing of a pair of water buffalo a woman had set loose to graze in the overgrown field. It was about 8 in the morning and the mist was still thick as soup up there. The stereo at the visitor’s center, where a friendly Viet man in a leather jacket waited to hawk pitiful, cheap souvenirs and tickets to the site, was blasting out a spectacularly bizarre karaoke version of Scarborough Fair. Though it could ostensibly have been done for the benefit of tourists afflicted with weird war nostalgia, I rather think it was the bored, solitary attendant getting ready to sing his ears deaf to the empty parking lot. The eerie casiotone version wound down, echoes falling flat in the vast, cloudy, liminal space. This was the kind of place one would expect an alien spaceship to land. Indeed, the first Chinooks would have fit the bill for Ho’s grandfather, squatting on his hillside. He would’ve watched with that same half-annoyed, half-permissive look the guys who gather in clumps to work along the side of the road today give to excessively loud children and foreigners on motorbikes. He might have stood up as the thing waddled in to squat a landing in the red dust, then he’d have wandered off down the hill to find someone to tell about this untellable machine.

He might have been believed, but there’s no telling for sure. The Chinook welded to the ground of the visitor’s center with cement, like a mafia schmatta waiting to get dropped in the East River, is an unlikely enough contraption when presented in actual fact. I thought a lot about this helicopter, dragged up here like one of those sorry, mangy bears the Czechs love to cage in the old moats of their castles for tourists to gawk at. I thought about the unlikeliness of the thing and wondered what it was I had expected to find up here. Dogtags and bullet holes? Tigers and punji pits? Why had so much of my growing up been tangentially  affected by myths and well-told tales of this far off and unlucky place? From Rambo to Kurtz, McNamara’s lines to Hanoi Jane’s curves, the songs and movies of another generation reduced into vaguely distrusted Asian supermarkets at places like Fairfax Circle, which even the nice kids at my high school believed to be an outlet for dog meat and unsavory insects. Bruce Springsteen’s Galveston Bay and Billy Joel’s Goodnight Saigon on a skippy record player. They’d all conspired to map an impossible terrain over Quang Tri, lent gravity by bloodshed and the guilt of politicians and storytellers who somehow made their own personal failures the defining paradoxes of a generation. In reality, there was never more to it than some people tending coffee bushes and checking their floors for poisonous insects. In reality there was never more to it than a forcefully revealed kinship, a fraternity that spawned a thousand imitators. Before all that there was this peculiar red soil, which absorbed the blood of men and animals and absorbed their explosives and their excrement and remains no more profound than any other good bit of earth where someone can grow an ephemeral crop of tomatoes or leave a kid to play for an hour with an anthill and some imagination. Now they use it to grow coffee, and volunteer groups are sometimes called in to remove an old, unexploded shells.

In a place that maybe was the 50 yard line of the old airstrip, I stopped to listen to the birds and the moaning water buffalo again. I thought about the chinook and figured that it really didn’t matter what story that thing was being forced to tell. Its tank was empty and there it will rust at the top of the jungle and eventually, no one will care that men’s hands built the thing. It will rust away to nothing and be absorbed back into that peculiarly red soil.

So our rusty ideas beat their rusty ideas. Our hippy folk rock and roll beat their force-fed Tchaikovsky. Our internet trumped their collective farms. Every discussion of this war inevitably devolves into an expounded dogma or an arm-flexing dialectic, a defining characteristic, a mansion on a hill, a skeleton in the closet. I’m sorry anyone had to be here to fight, as the living seems hard enough without that. If that just seems too trite, there are always the questions posed by the malthusian logic of communist Czechoslovakia selling deadly poison to war profiteers at DuPont, who engineer it into something for the American government to dump on agricultural land to starve a nation of communist Vietnamese farmers. War is the promised hell that stays with all humans as they take a part in doing things like that to each other from the height of airplanes, with sharpened bamboo stakes, from behind howling mortar tubes and from out of dark tunnels – we’ve seen the movies and read the stories that prove the hell is right here on earth every once in a while. It passes, thankfully, and people forgive and go on living. But I hope there is a special version waiting for those who profit from these foul realities from behind the safety of books and labs and boardrooms. When we left, there was really nothing more I wanted to see of Khe Sanh, and Mr. Chao didn’t ask what I thought.

As we twisted down the path along the river, every corner shook loose a cliche – a tightened bandana, a surfing airborne infantryman, a man in black pajamas huffing diesel fuel down a path at night. They rolled around in my head and spilled out, one by one, onto the passing tarmac. Every other place can only be better for having this example buried in the past as a warning and a history.

Down the coast to the outlet of the Ben Hai river and the Vinh Moc tunnels. Built during the war to shelter villagers from air raids meant to disrupt the supply chains over the DMZ, the tunnels burrow into the clay to a miserable depth of 30 meters. People lived in the complex until 1972, the posters say, although it doesn’t explain why a farming village would be built on the edge of a cliff and require anti-aircraft emplacements. According to the visitor’s center text, the people would tend their fields until an alarm signaled an approaching plane, then they’d dive in the tunnels, slipping down the passages where they’d dug wells, stored food, established clinics, had babies, caught fevers and died – all underground. I’m tired of all this war porn and honestly not impressed by the tunnels. I think that if I had heard that alarm bell ringing, I would rather have gone like some pasty-faced, coward Buddha through the windswept pines of the rugged coast until the lights went out. There’s no life underground, wondering if it’s the pounding of friendly artillery from distant Con Co or bombs from an F-8 drilling down through the clay. It’s weird that many people who have lived through war seem not to take pride in the victory of survival as do many people who haven’t had to suffer that indignity. Maybe it’s because at some point each of them really did wander out of the tunnels and ended lost forever on a lonely coast, far from prying eyes. Trimming their wicks, hunting among stones, refusing to just live.

Driving back from the tunnels along the coast, a couple of local guys on scooters veered into our lane and aimed right for us. They were playing chicken with Mr. Chao. It was impossible to tell if they were getting any pleasure from it. We didn’t show fear or surprise, anyway, just steered off the road and came to a stop as they flew past, stone-faced. They didn’t shout or throw anything, as their primped little European counterparts would have done, and they didn’t circle back for a fight, as their American or Brit counterparts would have done. That was their style of being the same, to go on without showing that they cared. These are the people who make up wars when they’re older and un-grown up. Cocky and posturing, not burning and a-looting. Excess youth. They wore the mindless look of a dog tearing into a rabbit it has caught or a malicious child incinerating insects with a magnifying glass.

“You ok?” asked Mr. Chao

“Yes,” I replied. “No problem, easy!”

He grinned weakly in the mirror at my reference. That was not something he’d wanted me to see.

“The young men here sometimes are crazy.” He said,and eased the honda back onto the smooth pavement of Highway 1, gunning it for Hue.

Minh Mang. Clarity, stability, balance. We can’t ever be a part of these places, I considered, the wind and an occasional monkey howl passing around my ears. I’d flipped the plexi visor of my helmet up because without it the colors were clearer, more visceral. Every once in a while a bug shattered against my sunglasses and I wondered if the lenses might break. The smells of the jungle wafted in as brilliant perfumes and the infrequent waft of woodsmoke from a distant Pako kitchen tried desperately to overpower the musk of turned earth and rotting vegetation. Yesterday’s brief rain lingered like a threat in the air, but the healed clouds held.

Mr. Chao and I left Prau just after sunrise. The family of Kiwis who were staying in the “other” guesthouse were kind enough to let me siphon off a bit of their sunblock to rub on my blistered arms and, predictably, the sun was nowhere to be seen today. Nevermind, we had a long road ahead. The bulk of the true jungle riding lay ahead of us today, as the Ho Chi Minh highway wove North through the hills to A Luoi and into Quang Tri province, eventually reaching Khe Sanh.

There were very few people at first, and the jungle was blooming (Vuong Tuu) with beautiful, multicolored fireworks of flowers that had a razor sharp scent. I picked one and folded it away in my notebook during one of our “freedom breaks” but the scent had completely evaporated by evening. For kilometers around us, there was nothing but green as far as the eye could see. The reason for this, Mr. Chao explained, was that the Ho Chi Minh trail sliced through a little peninsula of Laos off to the West in the Xe Kong country, shaving a few days walk off the Southbound journey. There was no bombing in this area for that reason and the minority people who lived here had little reason to mobilize into more compact villages, rather preserving a more traditional, isolated and less destructive way of life. It was also hard country. The jungle was impenetrable – it seemed as though you could leap from the road and just hang suspended in a web of vines and giant, lacerating leaves rather than fall beneath the canopy of green. In the old days, tigers roamed the forest here and drank from the cool mountain streams, vigilant against wetting their whiskers. Forty, fifty years ago, maybe.

My Tuu. I climbed the rocky path beneath the spray of a waterfall and imagined a tiger emerging from behind the thickness of vegetation on the far side of the stream to dip his tongue into the clear water. He smells of silent power, acrid and meaty. His eyes watch me as he drinks, then the lids slowly droop and close as a big diesel truck labors up the road and thunders across the bridge below us. A tiger, according to Mr. Chao, used to fetch a local poacher about $150,000. The Chinese prize all the parts of a tiger for their bullshit traditional medicine. The parts work better for the tiger, and some traditions are better off condemned as ignorance and quashed. There were maybe 350 Indochinese tigers left in 2010, according to the WWF.  They’re all gone from the Vietnamese highlands now, every single tiger. They might return when we are gone, if Burma remains backwards enough for long enough.

We’d reached the top of the world, and down we plunged toward A Luoi and the rich, fertile bowl that saw some of the most terrible battles of the American War, as they call it here. The A Shau valley, Hamburger Hill. Growths of rock start to rise from the flatter, plowed earth here and people enter the roadside theater again. We stop to gobble down a fresh pineapple and a brief wind brings the smell of a thousand bark strips of cinnamon drying by the roadside. (Bo SaPa) The cinnamon trees are everywhere, and they smell phenomenal. I paid the equivalent of 50 cents for as much of it as I could carry and it’s wrapped up tight in my backpack now, ready for the long flight home and infusing my dirty socks with that long, sharp, unmistakeable scent. Most of it goes to China, says Mr. Chao, for their bullshit traditional medicine. I grin inside, thinking that maybe my little smuggling operation will deprive someone of their desperately needed Cinnamon treatment and he might perish before being able to benefit from the tiger treatment. It’s mean, I suppose, but my uncharitable thoughts are significantly less dangerous to the Chinese than the bullshit Chinese traditional medicine is to tigers and, let’s face it, the tigers seem to be at a bit of a disadvantage.

Mr. Chao was pointing out the different minority representatives toiling away as we descended into the idyllic valley and here and there, he’d even stop. “I am not so sure if she is Pako or Bru… I will ask her name…”

I knew what was coming, of course. After a bit of friendly banter, Mr. Chao would turn to me.  ”She say her name is Ho!!! I don’t know what nation she is – everyone is Ho!” He chatted with everyone along the way as though he’d known them for years. It seemed like a common way for Vietnamese in the countryside to treat each other – a sort of brusque, but familiar fraternity – and I came to appreciate it. Whatever he was asking, it had nothing to do with the people’s names. Maybe he wanted to know if there were any police checkponts ahead. Maybe he wanted to know if the local guesthouse was full in the next village or if Cousin Ho had cought a deer since last week. I’ll never know, but he made the exchanges fun for me, anyway. We cruised on through the increasingly broad and rocky hills, past A Luoi and further North until we hit the bridge – Cau Da Krong. It reminded me of the single span suspension bridge on Prague’s ring road, just south of Pocernice and the Mlada boleslav exit. On the other side of the river was Route 9, the infamous old track that grinds up from the coast and over the mountains at Lao Boa and terminating a few hundred kilometers later on in dusty old Savannakhet on the bank of the wide, muddy Mekong.

The army had struggled for years to keep this road passable during the war and at its penultimate Vietnamese hitching post, the special forces had decided to commandeer a bit of the plateau to build an airstrip to support the various Kurtzian projects, including the mobilization of a local Bru militia. It was here that my dad had enjoyed his tour of Vietnam nearly 43 years ago. Back then, there was no highway, there were very few bridges. The tigers were still around (if you were crazy enough to want to see them) and had there been any guesthouses, a passport would’ve been the last thing an American would have chosen to show a Vietnamese to identify himself with.

It’s amazing what a few decades will do, though. As Mr. Chao’s Honda purred down the rough and ready Khe Sanh high street, I have to admit I was feeling a bit tense. I’d had a discussion the other night with a German backpacker about the war. “How do you feel being here, as an American, after the war and all that?” He asked. “I’m not sure,” I replied. “Have you ever visited Poland?” It’s one of the few places where a French, American, German and Vietnamese can sit and have a discussion like that without feelings being hurt and political tensions rising, even now, a generation or two later. Mr. Chao told me that he’s brought a number of American vets up this way in the past. “Some were very angry,” he confided, “they break things in the hotel at night.” Most, he said, were just “quiet”. “Your father would like to come back here again?” Mr. Chao asked. I hadn’t mentioned anything about my dad at all. “I think so.” I told him. “But only with Easy Rider.” He grinned and swerved the bike around an oncoming woman, fresh from the market with a mobile phone stuck to her ear and a distraught goose strapped to her motorbike.

The desolate rural path that saw very little traffic aside from the occasional shipment of coffee from Mr. Poilane’s plantation down to the river port of Savannakhet now thundered with the constant roar of hideously overburdened trucks doing cross-border business. They’d bring cheaply made textiles and Chinese plastic crap over to the Laotians, returning stuffed to the gills with raw materials – many times illegally harvested Teak trees. The number of BMW SUVs and new Mercedes sedans cruising around the town was evidence of the sudden prosperity and inevitable black market shadiness of this wild west frontier. It was still very much a man’s reserve and as devoid of charm as I imagine it was in my dad’s day, for a different set of reasons, of course.

By day, Route 9 is full of trucks. By night, Route 9 is full of trucks with their lights off. They smuggle teak, motorbikes, god knows what. Sometimes the drivers hole up in a guesthouse, like the one where I was staying, and wait for their bosses’ orders. They drink savagely and scream at the television sets in their dismal, flourescent lit rooms. They stay 4 or 5 to a room and share a single whore, who squeals mechanically like the overburdened brakes on their trucks, then leaves at 4 am. I know this because she opened my door, which didn’t lock, and stared in for a moment, half terrified and half curious. I flashed my Surefire flashlight at her eyes and she slammed the door shut and ran off down the corridor, frightened out of her wits. I couldn’t sleep at all after that, so traded off the time shadow boxing at the wardrobe mirror and watching the mist outside grow marginally brighter as, somewhere, the sun rose. What a shithole, I thought, and thought of my dad thinking approximately the same thing. Soon enough, a cheery Mr. Chao was at my door.

“Come on easy rider good morning!” We had the red clay site of a besieged air base to visit and a long, long ride back down to the coast. My bag was already packed, wrapped up in plastic and waiting by the door.

South a day’s ride a few days ago, Mr. Chao and I set off. The road passed easily through the coastal plains surrounding Hoi An and back came the easy routine of smiling, waving and calling out “hello!” to countless kids. Their smiles are heart melting – I dare any hardcore grouch to encounter one and not return the favor. We took a local ferry over the river, which I’m sure most of Mr. Chao’s customers considered a magical gateway into another world. I recognized the crossing from umpteen different brochures advertising motorbike adventures in the “real” Vietnam plastered around Hoi An and, after a month on the Pohoda, I was a bit more interested in the condition of the ferry pilot’s Honda. Mr. Chao graciously let my lack of enthusiasm pass and we stopped on the far bank for noodles, where a gentle rise of a few meters signaled the end of the coastal rice paddies and the beginning of the highlands. Crops shifted from rice to corn, herbs and cucumbers. There were some giant, tube-like melons that the women carted around wrapped in sheets of coarse plastic. Almost immediately the people appeared darker, shorter and stockier than their cousins on the coast. Weaving a patient thread through the chaos of local traffic, we made our slow journey up and further in.

A couple of early false starts had me wondering for a moment about the veracity of Mr. Chaos claims to be an original easy rider – the fact that we stopped at a “local” loom making cloth for the tailors of Hoi An and a “local” rice paper workshop where I was encouraged to give my hand a try were worrying. We were followed by a Danish guy and his own easy rider, who pulled up moments later at both places, which also had me wondering. The truth of the thing is, unless you stay for weeks at a time or more, you are and always will be a breeze-through tourist in places like this. What can you expect? The easy rider guys do a nice job, although they cut some corners where they can as is to be expected. I can’t blame Mr. Chao after all, that there is not a wider spectrum of occupations in the coastal plains.

The fields fell less and less tended and the motorbike struggled to churn out enough power to lift us up a few of the hairpin switchbacks, but Mr. Chao shifted gears and on we flew. Abruptly, we reached a sort of gate, loosely tended by a man with a perpetual White Horse cigarette screwed into his mouth. This, along with an unremarkable a-frame building housing a sort of museum display and gift shop, was the entrance to the Cham ruins of My Son, the last tourist stop on our road up to Khe Sanh.

“After this,” Mr. Chao promised, “only easy rider on the road, only freedom!” He was obsessed with the idea of freedom, which he fairly and roundly described as being able to ride his Honda on the open road and take a piss wherever he wanted.

The ruins, made by the Cham people who sailed from Indonesia to settle Southern Vietnam in ancient times, are something out of a Victorian travelogue. You huff it up a short path and find yourself in a deserted valley, surrounded on all sides by the hissing, clicking jungle and faced with a set of the weirdest ruins seen since a Spielberg set. It’s not enough that the setting is primal and haunting, but the baked red clay, the Hindi features carved into the statuary and the omnipresent racket of the jungle all forge an idyllic “ruin of a lost civilization”. And lost it certainly is. Subject to wars, conquest and eventual extermination by the Nguyen dynasty Vietnamese people, the Cham nation has vanished entirely, although there are a few genetic remnants among the Khmer people of the Mekong delta. All that remains of their kingdom are the ruins, bearded with vines and bombed halfway to rubble during the war, for some reason or another. I will concede that it’s a great place to hide.

Like a forgotten, secondary farm road in the Tirol, the highways that penetrate the Vietnamese highlands were built for motorbikes. They are a gentle camber and sway around gorgeous cliffs, hugging the denuded hillside so tight that the mud and the road often become one and the same. We continue up into the high jungle, where even the slashing and burning “minority people” have yet to find a roost. There, in a crease of a valley, we join what used to be known as the route of the Ho Chi Minh trail. Of course, it was never one single trail blazed through the jungle any more than the Underground railroad was an actual tie and steel rail road, but the name stuck and the Ho Chi Minh highway was dedicated in its name about 9 years ago, joining Hanoi with Saigon through the previously impassable highlands.

Lest you think modesty or originality are defining characteristics of the current Vietnamese government, all the “minority peoples”, who were previously without surnames, were magnanimously granted the name “Ho Chi Minh” after reunification, ostensibly to aid a census taking. Mr. Chao was endlessly amused by this, taking time to ask everyone we met in the mountains the rhetorical, “What’s your name? Ho? Ho!!!” then melting in peals of laughter. “Ho,” he said to me every time, “everyone’s name is Ho!”

To make up for this great indignity, the minority people are allowed to parentas many little Hos as they wish and are allowed to continue to live in one of the last great unspoiled wildernesses of the planet. They are making an heroic effort to spoil it, of course. With the absence of war, a more varied diet and the meager support of the central government, the minority peoples are spreading like a plague of locusts up and over every hillside, slashing and burning as they go. The government has, to their credit, undertaken an ambitious replanting and reforestation program in order to help halt the precipitous soil erosion native farming has encouraged, but it is late in the day and most of the forest on the way up to Prau, our first overnight stop, had been hacked, burned and sold into Ikea slavery long ago. Want to help? Buy used furniture. Want to see the forests for yourself? Go easy rider – easy! But hurry up.

We rolled down the valley into Prau at about 4:30 pm and a one-horsier town I have yet to see. The humble guesthouse opened wide its doors and switched on its hot water heaters. Time to eat. We feasted on a barbecue of local jungle venison and Mr. Chao meditatively watched the sun disappear behind a tall mountain peak.

“When I’m dead, I want my son to bring my head here to the top of that mountain. That way I’ll hear the wind and the birds and watch the monkeys forever. And he can bring the rest of me to the sea to be with the fish and the waves.” It sounded a rather bleak thing to say at the early stages of a motorbike journey, but he seemed perfectly content, as though he had just made a binding decision.

A German family have just wandered into the pavilion where I’m sitting with my notebook. The father and son wear matching “blade” style sunglasses and can best be described as “sporty”. They’re unable to communicate in a tone that varies noticeably from “I am making an announcement” mode. The solitude of the place is broken and I immediately think two things: first, the people that caused this place to be built did so in order to enjoy a sculpted silence. Second: Although I did not cause this place to be built, that does not bind me to any sense of fellowship with these people. Djivan Gasparyan’s “Apricots from Eden” replaces the chatter of birds and the infrequent gurgle of a feeding carp in the pool at my feet. We built cars and apartment blocks, hot water heaters, shopping malls and digital cameras to bring us all a few shuffling steps closer to the rarefied corners the  kings and queens among us caused to be built for their own enjoyment. We built iPods to drown out the deafening din of 12 billion shuffling feet. See your old gray head up on the mountain, Mr. Chao, while our feet shuffle in the murk of various and distant seas.

“Every time we come here,” he says, “Someone says they will go out into the jungle.” He laughs. “Go on, I tell them, if you can. I don’t go there unless I must.” Makes excellent sense to me.

It’s unbelievable, the history of this place, considering. As if hideous extremes of weather weren’t enough for these people to pay for their little plot of Eden, they have to contend with monkey tantrums, razor sharp blades of elephant grass, leeches, biting ants and diabolically nasty insects like the giant centipede. Top it off with thirty years of the western world’s military attentions and it’s a wonder anyone lives here at all anymore.

Still, the people smile and cook up some incredible food. It’s been said that, of the world’s culinary nations, only the French and the Vietnamese have elevated cooking to the level of true cuisine – a language of flavors, textures and flashes of color that begs the dilettante and auteur alike to mince words. My experience thus far has backed that up beyond the shadow of a doubt.  In the past week, I’ve eaten some of the most varied and memorable dishes of my life, starting with the gorgeous spread provided for us at the Sword Lake restaurant by Lucy’s grandparents and then again at the buffet by her father. From that classical baroque, we moved on to a rambling landscape of street food and haute cuisine – often indistinguishable from one another. A simple beer at a cafe in Hoi An turns into a tapas experience with fresh herbs, greens, and various wonton assemblies flying out faster than the  chili peanuts and Jager shots at the dive bar.

Because of one of these fantastic discoveries (fried wonton and pork in a clay pot at the Hai Cafe on 98 Nguyen Thai Hoc street) I ended up meeting the most respectable Mr. Chao, a self-styled “Easy Rider.” Based out of Da Lat, the original Easy Riders copied the style of American vets who returned soon after the end of the war to reclaim the highland roads and beaches with their big bikes.

Now the Vietnamese are in love with the motorbike, it’s true, but the things these bearded weirdos were riding were as different as a Mac truck and a Toyota Pick-up. Who knows what happened to the originals who started it all. Maybe they cut their hair, sold their hogs and headed back stateside after a long tour. Maybe they kept on through Laos and sit – the memory of trouble – in some off-Kao San Road dump, grumbling at American tourists with their water bottles  and trying to keep  needles out of their arms. I imagine some are still here, though, holed up in a neat little two room house with wooden shutters, a cool tile floor and a spectacular Northern view over the paddies. A Vietnamese kid with blue eyes in college in Saigon, studying to be a doctor, or running a bar in Hanoi somewhere.

The Vietnamese guys who took up the mantle earned themselves a pre-Lonely Planet reputation for being the best way to see the “real” Vietnam (a bold tout considering that’s all that seems to exist here, even despite the best efforts of the Rugby watching, beer drinking, dragonfly tattoo-having set.) The “real” easy riders could be identified by the embroidered patches on their khaki vests. You would arrive at a fair price and off you’d go – up the back roads into the hill country where you could eat some local food, smoke some local grass, get some local mud on your boots or local wind in your hair. It’s a great idea that’s endured although, as I was to discover later, the routes and revelations haven’t evolved with the same rapidity and attention to detail as has the motorbike tech, which has seen the excremental 250cc Minsks replaced by 125cc Hondas that are faster and more reliable.

I’d just hunted down the last bit of pork in my clay pot when Mr. Chao came in to join me – a recommendation from Ivan at Cham Island Divers.  He’s tallish for a Vietnamese man, with a long face and a prominent nose that’s must be a bequest of his French grandfather, as he explained later on. His hair is streaked with gray – the only sign of his 55 years – and he has a quiet smile which is hard to distinguish sometimes. It’s as though he could be amused or could be hiding some mild tooth pain. I liked him immediately and barely glanced at the bound trip journals he’d brought along to prove himself with.

The easy rider business model proved such a success that they spawned many imitators, of course. An embroidered patch is easy to fake these days, but 16 years worth of reviews in various European languages is somewhat less so.

I popped a bit of pepper in my mouth and bit down a little too hard on exactly the wrong spot. A seed was immediately impacted into the exposed root of a broken tooth and had me pounding the table, eyes watering. Mr. Chao politely waited, saying nothing, as though this was a common occurrence among his customer base.

“So, where you want to go?” He asked.

“Khe Sanh,” I replied, catching my breath. “Then back to the coast to catch a train. Do you think there’s time?”

“Khe Sanh, I know it. No problem – easy! Three days!”

At 7:30 the next morning, I was checked out of the hotel, waiting on the steps of the lobby in the balmy morning sun for a man on a motorbike. I still can’t even say hello in Vietnamese properly, order a dinner or ask someone’s name. There’s a world of flavor all around and I’m eating with one side of my mouth.

Hoi An is awake around me, although it seems as if the whole world ought to be hung over. Weren’t we all up late together listening to the guys plucking classical guitar to accompany the blasted, operatic voice of their friend? No, I recalled, that would have been just me. I’d wandered into someone’s house after hearing the beautiful music echo through the empty market. It was haunting music that reduced the difference between bicycles and motorbikes, Mai Ga and ramen from a plastic package, rice beer from rice wine. There was a tile floor with a mat laid down on it. Empty and half-empty shot glasses. Upturned bowls that used to contain popcorn. Around the room hung original scrolls, books in stacks and a huge poster of a venerable whitebeard who was most certainly not Uncle Ho. The guys occupying the room were old spirits, bohemian ghosts. They were duende. They sang the songs their grandfathers sang before the wars and after the wars, drunk on rice wine, drunk on whiskey, drunk on memories of pretty women and late nights and easy friends. I listened and drank until it was early, then I left the real Vietnam and stumbled out into the close air of Hoi An, huddled up along the riverbank.

**

I don’t know who the musicians were – they were too drunk to tell me their names clearly by the time I left, but please, if someone has a Hoi An connection, I would love to know who they were because it’s important to know. Or vice versa…

Please have a listen to my awful recording here!

After a week, all of our kids are settling in to a routine. Actually, it’s not fair to call them kids. The older ones, high school juniors, are of the age that they recognize their own ability to influence things around them. They know where they sit – kings and queens of the hill, despite their own relative hardships and challenges, they sit square on top of the hill. They’re all enjoying that first look around. Diplomat’s sons, like the song says, but they’ll do far better still than their parents.

Adriano and Arash are starting to look at what the town has to offer. They seem overwhelmed by the difficulties faced by the children here – in awe of their own power to help and yet to remain an unaffected “normal”. They’re very well grounded, all things considered: the place, the heat, the complete absence of any “safe”, quiet sanctuary that is wearing on all of us. Everything in Vietnam is contagious – the way all liquid in the lavatoryturns to piss when you’re taking a piss.

Kristine, Eva and Patti seem to have formed their own action unit, despite appearing to be three different takes on oil and water. They each possess that disarming awareness of their place in the world and how to work it to their best advantage. Like the guys, they somewhat miraculously value their ability to be positive over their ability to get what they want at any cost. Their generation will bring us another Freya Stark and another Rebecca West, despite being weaned off the nylon tit of YouTube and indie rock. Sad to think I’ll possibly be too old and grumpy to enjoy their unique truths when time gives some perspective on their laying out.

Lucie and Louisa, the youngest two on the trip, have their very own dynamic that nearly defies description. It’s like a feedback loop in a Beach Boys song, that starts off saccharine and melodic, but turns nebulous and fantastic at the drop of a hat. All day long they patiently, quietly observe the world around them go by. They take photos, they peer round corners, poke at the meatflys and they take it all in. At night, they retreat to their room, turn the music on and turn into teenagers again. Not one time have any of us heard a cynical or complaining word come from either of them. I wish, thinking back to when I was their age, that I would have had the guts to do half of what they have done on this strange trip. More likely, the courage to even get on the plane would not have entered my mind. Where these two are headed is a mystery that rings out and gleams.

Then, finally, there’s Lucy and Mai, her cousin who joined us at the airport in Hanoi and has been an integral part of our gang ever since. These two have such undeniable energy and natural leadership – they are both patient and good and sweet, and without them none of us would be here. Lucy is the kind of girl that everyone is happy and proud to know – not because she will probably be the president of one country or another someday (which she will), but because her goodness is infectious. She gathers people around her with a smile and they can’t help but stay and listen to what else she has to say.

It’s impossible with this gang to pick favorites or talk in circles. They’re all whip-smart and funny enough to take seriously at every word.

Our last day was so painfully slow. The clock hands must have gone round a thousand times before breakfast. Sitting there, we were all imagining – what was going on right at this instant that we were missing? What had happened just before that? Would these people really notice our absence? Would bonds endure and could we call these moments the seeds of friendship? Eggs sat untouched and pomelos sat untouched. Even the epic hairy dog seemed put upon by some massive weight. Of course, dogs always do.

Today is the culmination of all the planned activities and I feel particularly as though I haven’t made enough effort to shoot the really meaningful bits of what has happened here. The camera was always on my knees, staring at the pleather walls of the minivan stupidly. I hope it’s just my own nerves. In the eight tapes thus far shot, there has got to be something worth the watching. I truly hope there is, because we’ve all come so far and given so much. I am afraid because there’s not yet been that stand-out moment so far. There’s usually something that slips through the viewfinder and attached itself to the inside of your brain, but this trip has been full of surprises so far, and there’s bound to be one or two more. We’ll see if one is hiding amid the ones and zeroes once back in Prague.

Somehow, we all managed the leaving. Hugs and tears, gifts and fist bumps, exchanges of emails.

There seems to be quite some will to return here. The children battered our sorry pinata with the woven willow strands Czech village people use to train the butts of their young women every easter. It’s a truly incongruous, weird sight to see – all these sick, damaged, ecstatic children flailing away at our shapeless pinata with pomlazky, bits of crepe paper flying through the air. Finally, Thuon, the sweet, hyperactive, deaf little boxer who normally clings to me like peanut butter runs up to the misshapen thing, rips it out of the bizarre rope sling the kids have hung it in and kicks a hole in the center of it for the waiting gang of candy-starved kids. Why we couldn’t have given them some healthy mandarins, bananas or figs is beyond me, but live and learn. This gang is going to be wired for a week after all the sugar we’ve given them.

The sun started to go and the van was waiting. Airport time. I saw the gang off, got left back in the center of Hanoi – one last kindness of Lucy and Mai’s amazing family – and again, all of a sudden, I was on my own, with the silence of a foreign language fluttering around my ears.

The next day I sorted my ticket to Hoi An before 8 a.m., leaving a whole long day for wandering around. After lunchtime, I stumbled into a garden courtyard just off sword lake. It was “Madame Hien”, a restaurant started by Didier Corlou, the head chef of the world famous Metropole hotel. I splurged 400 CZK on a 5 course lunch that would have cost thousands in Prague, had there been anyone in the city capable of preparing it. The restaurant is on 15 Chan Cam, Hoan Kiem in Hanoi, and if you are in town for a week – check it out. It you’re in town for a day, check it out. If you’re in town just long enough to race from the airport to meet with the president and then back to catch the next jet out, skip the old bugger and check it out. Mr. Corlou has built a shrine to Hanoi’s street food.

Somehow I  managed to shovel myself onto the 7pm train, stuffed, exhausted and ready for the long sleep of the conquering hero. I kicked off my not-so-new-anymore Meindls and squirmed up onto my berth just in time to clear the path for the chattering family of four who were to share my cabin.

I hopped down to say hello and greeted the kids with a friendly ease that surprised me most of all. They were smiling, laughing, bouncing, whining, NORMAL, bratty little kids and within an hour we were famous friends. The parents relaxed while Jonathan and Rachel pulled on my ears, slapped my high-fives and paid play tolls to run up and down the corridor – much to the dismay of the Bavarian weight loss club who occupied the rest of the car.

Everyone I’ve met thus far here who has seen Bara and I together or seen her picture tells us we should have kids. This is normal in most places of the world, but it’s somewhat more elaborated here. I was confused by the insistence and asked Thai – the young train attendant in charge of our car – about it. It was later on at this point. Simon, the dad, was busily trying to trick the kids into going to sleep and I was trying to do my part by crouching out in the corridor with my iPod (Grizzly Bear) until I received the all’s clear.

“She’s beautiful,” Thai explained, pointing to Bara’s picture in my wallet. “You make beautiful baby, make the world beautiful.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“How much?” he asked, pulling at my headphone cables. “How much dong?” I must have slept at some point.

The next day, I stepped out of the taxi in Hoi An and was on my own again. The demanding chatter of the kids faded behind me – the slamming of the ashtray in the back of the Toyota, the call and response of brotherly taunts and sisterly howls. I got ripped off for a mandarin – 10,000 dong (enough for a bag full of them) at the edge of the old market – but I couldn’t care. I smiled at the woman selling the things and peeled it greedily, tossing green bits of skin onto the ground impatiently and tearing into the fruit. Its juice ran all down my face and hands. I ate like a pig, the way we do after a herculean bike ride or a long day of working out of doors. The juice dried like lightning in the hot air, bits of pulp stuck to my fingers. I walked to the edge of Bach Dang street where the market hovered right up to the rippling edge of the Hoi An river. I’ve seen good water like this before, I realized. Milky with the silt of miles and miles of farmland run unstoppably down countless hillsides, through myriad ditches on the plains, effortlessly past the labour poured into hoes and spades, poured into the land that gives rice and garlic and cucumbers and ngo. And that land goes into the water and becomes the mother of other land.

I knelt down on the edge of the river and rinsed my hands in the milky flow of it as the market women and xe om drivers and others watched me and thought about who cares what. Then I splashed my face with it and walked off to look for a hotel, refreshed.

**

If you’re liking this blog, please subscribe. I’ve had a hell of a time adding photos this trip because of the fancy new memory card I bought for the fancy new camera I bought (the coveted and expensive Ricoh GR Digital III…) As soon as I find a computer that can handle the 32 gb class 10 memory card, I’ll back all this up. I know: pictures, or it didn’t happen

All of the “classes” are meditative, simple tasks. The children seem to follow their own obscure schedule, which expires when their patience expires. Then they chase after each other through the paths of the village. They’re laughing at each other and chirping around the sharp edged sounds of saw blades and the constant drone of commercial undertaking from the small town that surrounds us.

The town outside is a mystery for the first day. Given the importance of the friendship village to our visit, it’s overwhelming and natural. I can hear the normal life of exurban Hanoi outside and feel the dust from the unpaved road clogging my nostrils, but it’s hard to imagine the Friendship Village is not the source of industry – that the guy crouched over his disembodied axle with a spot welder is not happy, or feigning happy to see me.

there’ll be time for all that later, of course. For now our world is gently buffered by the shrieks and silent grins and gentle hand holding glow of the village. And that’s not so bad.

A day or two pass, and the walls no longer seem so absolute. Our understanding of where we are in space grows with the discovery of the local market and its display of headless dogs.  Strange fruits start to appear on the tables at night and we begin to know the road will be silent as the grave after 10. Unless there’s an accident.

I don’t know if it is just the time of year in Hanoi for low slung clouds? The sky is pregnant, and every night after dusk the cloud cover dissipates just enough to let a breeze through and the rain holds itself back for another day. It’s comfortable weather now, maybe 25 degrees and the walls sweat, but I take comfort in knowing it’s raining like hell somewhere not far away.

It’s afternoon, and I’m sitting in the kitchen garden of the friendship village, watching some last noble bits of sunshine lift a haze off a flooded red river delta field. Lilies grow out of the green muck where the girls yesterday saw a yellow snake dip out from a tree limb while they were gardening. I can see the trail it disturbed across the water now.

This place must have been country once not long ago, but no longer. Columns of trucks belch fumes and dust up behind them on their way back from the building sites at night. Hanoi is hopskotching the stages  between farmland and suburb with the brash self-confidence of central europe after the wall. Here there are still ancient temples with Han characters decorating the walls. Snakes fall from the trees and women walk back and forth from the market crossroad carrying inscrutable burdens in bizarre contraptions. Meanwhile, fields of duplex homes wait empty – glassless windows, empty eye sockets, empty garages. Where are all the people who will live here one day? There are thousands of these houses. Is it a government project to relocate the slums of Hanoi like the doomed Hutong of Beijing or is it some shady joint venture that’s a few months away from making a few men very rich while a vacant terracotta barracks crumbles waiting for an absent army to come cut the grass on Saturdays?

The kids decided that they wanted to try riding motorbikes today. I talked them out of driving by warning of the many complications of a clutch, but they couldn’t be swayed from the possibility of clinging behind a bunch of thugs on scooter taxis at 35km/hour. My driver grinned a gappy grin and patted the seat as the kids paired up and climbed on their rides. It was a potentially catastrophic bit of fun that I kept trying to convince myself was harmless. Mexicali Blues I was thinking, as Jerry peeled off into another guitar solo and my man gunned his tinny Dream to life.

Cherish well your thoughts and keep a tight grip on your booze…

We cruised past the market, cut left in front of a leaking old water truck that gushed canal sludge back onto the rutted dirt road and soon twisted out into open country (more or less). I pointed my camera wherever the driver pointed

Every few meters he’d spray a few words back at me, which I dutifully repeated until he stopped saying them. They were, I assume, the words for: cemetery, shrine, construction lot, satellite dish, there’s a huge bump in the road…

He sprayed it back, I wiped it off the side of my face and spit it back onto the dusty pavement. The wind caught his shirt and exposed a bit of scorpion tattooed on his shoulder in prison black and red. He pointed at my finger and sprayed something, then yanked his shirt down a bit further, showing off lines and strokes of Chinese script that spilled off like bits of pasta across a sink. This guy was serious, and I wished he’s just be more serious about steering the motorbike.  ”Ok, later,” I told him, hoping he got the idea. He seemed to. The spraying moved on to other topics and his shirt went back over his chest just in time to avert a potentially creative disaster involving a drainage ditch an old woman, a pig and a patch of gravel.

Is there anything a man don’t stand to lose when the devil wants to take it all away?

It’s a comfortable role for me, I realized, to allow just a little. The kids have relatively modest aspirations for mischief on this trip so far: they want to stay up late, they want to import snake wine, they want to sneak a beer here and there and they want to ride bitch on a goatsbreath motorbike, clinging to a gang of Vietnamese ex-cons. Some things are within my limited jurisdiction, after all. A couple of them bump fists up ahead and their drivers give it a little more gas. Paddies of neon tufts fly by and schoolgirls wave from their quiet bicycles, smiling from behind their masks, I imagine. Well alright.

The song was almost wound down and the sun was making another periodic comeback over the lily pond flats. I just finally saw the snake. There was a subtle shift of light on the broad-leafed water lilies. A dragonfly leapt to life and I spotted the snake’s sleek head poised up from the plants, taking me in. Watching me watching him. Then he was gone, just that fast, and it was time to eat.

Noticed on the way in from the Hanoi airport an accident on the Northbound side of the expressway. I could see enough just to know that it had been bad for some. A twisted wreck of car and some extra metal – maybe a former payload, perhaps a Honda Dream – one of the little 180 cc bikes ubiquitous in southeast Asia. A serious looking man was shifting parts from the road. He bent at the waist and scanned the asphalt for something, like a woman searching for a lost contact lens or earring. He seemed official, although he didn’t wear a uniform – like a senior waiter at a decent restaurant with a fat money pouch strapped to his belt. There was no money pouch, but he wore his solemn authority that way. Nothing else was different; his faintly striped blue shirt and dark pants and plain black leather shoes shining somehow despite the dust of the road.

The kids were all together in the minivan up front and as the traffic slowed to rubberneck the scene I saw their lenses focused on the northbound lane. Lenses come before face – it’s one way to put distance between, to say to anyone watching: you can read all about this later somewhere else, but now I will not interpret, I will not judge. Each one of them has a camera and some have two. Earlier, they show off the photography tricks they’ve learned – snapping shots of each other mid jump while waiting for the call at terminal C of Ruzyne. “Look,” they say to each other, pointing at the TFT displays, “how you’re floating six inches off the ground.” They’re good kids. Smart and eager to be. Through the duration of the 19 hopur transit, they barely complained a word, just laughed, listened to music and slept.

Red votive candles or lotus petals dyed crimson or bits of cut up felt litter the highway. Candles. “Someone is dead,” the driver told me. The northbound lane had been made a necessary, inacessible  shrine.

“Yes,” I said. The girls looked straight at the seat backs in front of them and said nothing.

The driver rolled down the window and slotted a 100,000 VND bill out onto the wind. He rolled the window up again without looking back and I noticed a flurry of bills dancing along the highway between the cars - a few inches from the ground like the fat, lazy snowflakes that appear in early October and cannot last or amount to anything.

“Is it for the people who died? Does someone collect it?” Bara asked from the back seat.

“Yes, dead people…” the driver confirmed, sober faced and disinterested in clarification.

The whole time my video camera was sitting on my lap in standby mode. I went back to watching the water buffalo, the lush green and murky lump of not so distant hills.

Also, if anyone is particularly crazy, you can buy my “book” on Amazon for your Kindle! I made it for a friend who was traveling with his and wanted to read my blog without an internet connection, but had to put a price on it. If you care to part with 99.9 cents, it’s all yours!

You can find all the videos on my YouTube channel, along with a bunch of new stuff from China. The Mekong trip video is coming soon, I promise

Within about a day, we’d spoken to every foreign person in town and they all knew us as the guys who were selling the boat. “Have you any luck yet,” asked the old French guy two or three times a day. “Anyone want your boat?” said the nice, young couple from London. Most people were headed North, and the few others we encountered had already made their plans beforehand. By chance, we ended up drinking out in the breezeway of the guest house with a strange collection of people, each of whom slowly pondered the trip and passed on the chance to continue it. We attracted a sort of hanger-on in a Canadian guy who occupied his time by either smoking copious amounts of weed or talking about smoking copious amounts of weed. He was heading South eventually, but the boat was “too expensive” for him. I wondered how he’d find the Laotian police office I wished they’d drag his stoned ass off to. You read about a Tim Page or some other character of days gone by; about how they lived hard and partied harder in the face of the brutality of war. Whatever people might say about Tim Page, he was no coward and he devoted himself to doing his job under pretty extreme circumstances. You can’t blame the guy for rolling up a joint or two to forget getting blasted nearly in half by a land mine or to forget his best friend, disappeared by the Khmer Rouge at the height of their murder spree through Cambodia. It was part of the time, and that time is long gone. I wish stoner tourists would all get arrested and rogered into nice, quiet lady boys while slapping mosquitoes in some backwater prison. The only downside is that they then feel the need to come out with a badly written book about their experience, begging the world for the pity they don’t deserve and are too proud to ask for in a direct way. Bangkok is full of these memoirs, gathering dust on roadside stalls. “What’s so good about this place? Tell me one thing, I’m curious,” the Dude asked me one night. “It’s not for people like you,” I said. “No matter how long you’re here, you won’t see it.” He also had an annoying habit of pretending that people were not insulting him – making his company harder to escape than a tiger mosquito in a dark room.

During our daytime wanderings, we’d found a place called Mamma’s House Restaurant (sic). It’s nearly impossible to find, but here goes, for all two of you From Ratsavongseuk road heading South, you make a left turn into a dirt alley right after the where the old television sits in the middle of the sidewalk. You go about 200 meters along this path, pass the little Jack Russel terrier and the snooker table where the girl is standing like a boy and drinking Fanta from a plastic bag with a straw. On the right, you’ll see the local guys playing petanque in the shade of an overhanging second story room – this is Mama’s house. Jooky is the eldest daughter of this amazing clan, and splits her time between the Netherlands and her home in Savannakhet taking care of her aging parents. Everything about the place is warm and friendly, just like the feeling we got from Oudomphong guest house in Luang Prabang. The only conclusion we could draw was to implicitly trust mama, wherever you may find her in Laos. Gerben and I set up camp on th cement table under the veranda and Jooky commenced helping us to do absolutely everything. She phoned up a family friend at the police station and arranged for our visas to be extended. She called around to find potential buyers for the boat. She cooked great food. She talked to Gerben about Amsterdam and to both of us about the joys and problems of life in Laos.

Papa had suffered a stroke two years before which left him unable to walk, but thanks to the devotion of his family, mainly, he had managed to recover well enough to scoot around the dining room of the restaurant smiling at people and waving. He also recovered sufficiently to share a bottle of home-made Laolao whiskey with Gerben and I one night after a giant meal with the family. He grinned as we downed the stuff until the bottle was empty – it tasted like one of the Czech distillates made from some sort of mysterious forest herbs, but we were to remain forever ignorant of its origins, as the recipe was beyond the linguistic power of Jooky or any other of the assembled family members to describe. It comes from a special Lao tree, evidently. We had been invited for a celebration that night with the family because we had finally, after 4 days scouring the town in the dust and swampy heat of mid day, managed to sell the boat. Three girls from Norway and a lone French girl had decided they would go in together and buy her from us. They intended to go North, back up to Vientiane.

Gerben and I were thrilled. Just the night before, we’d been discussing scuttling her in the middle of the Mekong, lighting a can of gas on fire and swimming for shore while she went to her muddy grave. I was kind of sick from the idea. A last ditch effort at the front desk of the guest house sparked some interest and before long, Gerben and I were sitting around the table out back with the girls, talking about supplies, tactics, maps and the power of the motor. We showed them pictures, played back a few of my tapes on the camera and talked some more. The irrepressible Canadian stopped in and started rolling joints and talking about smoking pot. He asked the girls if they knew that we had a boat for sale, and also if they wanted to “sprk up a fat doob.” Victoria, sort of the leader of the pack, stared at him quizzically and said, “We heard that, yes…” He smiled and said something like, “didn’t we meet last night at all?” “Good of you to remember,” said Victoria, who was obviously not having it. His attention then focused on poor Marie, the striking blond French girl, so the rest of us were spared the main force of his continuing monologue on smoking pot and how sometimes it was better pot than he’d gotten in other places he’d smoked pot in – but not always…

The next morning, the girls came down for a test cruise aboard the Pohoda. Gerben and I had gotten up early to clean all of the containers, pots and pans. We stripped the decking out and washed down the boat as well, for good measure. It was too good to be believed that we’d managed to sell the boat, but some added bonus that we’d sold it to a cool group of people who would most likely try to continue the legacy, handing the boat on to another group when they reached the end of the line. It was magic to watch them sort out a seating order amongst themselves, Victoria closest to the tiller, as seemed natural, and Marie unexpectedly hopping up to stand on the prow with the thick bamboo pole Papa had prepared for us in Luang Prabang. One of the girls bought a big black notebook with the Jolly Roger printed on the cover. It was perfect. Gerben and I each wrote a short dedication, asking anyone who encountered the boat to write us and tell us about their travels. We spent the remainder of the day with the girls at the Chinese market, having one last irritating bout with the local thieves. It seemed so familiar – bundles of rope, rolls of toilet paper, which plastic tarp is better, does this have DEET in it? That night they paid us and the boat was theirs. Safe and wondrous travels, ladies; may the Pohoda serve you as well as she did us!

The next morning, Gerben and I were on a bus bound for Pakxe, and the border crossing back into Thailand. Somehow, looking around at the few scattered foreign faces, I found it hard to feel their enthusiasm. It was a rickety old local bus, stopping every 10 minutes to disgorge a belching old woman or a load of motor oil fresh from Thailand and the few white faces on board were glued to the windows. Gerben and I both plugged in our iPods and settled back for what we knew would be a long ride. Already our trip was over. Time enough now to dream up next time.

]]> http://goplaces.wordpress.com/2009/02/22/always-trust-mama/feed/ 1 themicah Thakek docks Savannakhet House Savannakhet Street The Girls on Pohoda Pohoda Book http://goplaces.wordpress.com/2009/02/22/shadows-and-dust/ http://goplaces.wordpress.com/2009/02/22/shadows-and-dust/#comments Sun, 22 Feb 2009 05:01:46 +0000 themicah http://goplaces.wordpress.com/?p=196 ]]> If the North of Laos was a strange place, trapped in a time warp by its shadowy, leisurely dictatorship masked as communism, the towns and cities of the central plains are a hundred times more so. The government is not so much seen as felt. It is a constant preponderance of silly looking Soviet influenced poster art beseeching citizens to “be vigilant” and “celebrate the people’s victory”, it is the bombastic uniforms replete with bright little medals all of the police wear and it is the half life decay of the French Colonial buildings now filled with indolent, filthy families hawking noodles and dried meat from open kitchens on the street front verandas. Every price is proscribed – not by the government, but by the nascent consumer market that has sprung out of China like a wayward bamboo grove.

The prices for everything are entirely nonsensical, and bargaining is a pointless exercise in frustration. Watching a local buy something in the the market, then going directly to the shopkeeper and handing over the exact same amount is the only way to avoid getting the tourist treatment, which consists of a blank, stupid grin and a repetition of the initially quoted, doubled up price. Why argue over what amounts to a couple of dollars? For one thing, it creates a false market which feeds the wealth of a select few merchants, artificially raising the prices of certain commodities for locals as well, over time. If and when the tourist trade collapses, its absence leaves a wake of useless goods, inflated prices and beggared merchants.

For another thing, I have the strong suspicion that the market stalls in Laotian cities are not owned by the people who work there. My guess goes something like this: there are some massive villas on the edges of most towns. Their windows are tinted, there are Toyota Land Cruisers and Mercedes cars in the garages and there are satellite dishes on the roofs. These villas are owned by the local party representative who happens to control customs and trade in the city. The local slugs sit in their air-con parlors and skim a bit off the top of everything smuggled into their little fiefdom, simultaneously issuing trade licenses to those who wish to serve them. Far from the eyes of tourists, they employ migrant people from the surrounding farms to work in their markets, which suspiciously sell row after row of the same Chinese garbage, bamboo trinkets and western cosmetics at nearly identical prices. Those working in the markets don’t care if they sell something or not, because it’s not theirs to sell and they only profit from it if they can manage to rip off a tourist. This is just my guess from observing the places at close range for many, many days, but it makes for a miserable time for everyone and has about as much to do with communism as the jasmine bush wilting on my balcony back home in Prague. In fact, it sounds a lot like the new, exciting shopping centers that are growing like a cancer on all of the cities of Central Europe. Fixed prices for the same old garbage, with the underclass locked into indentured servitude to the lofty “will of the market” and a handful of international conglomerates. The only difference is that we’ve developed the leech of advertising to impress upon people the relative value of the dingus they’ve just bought themselves and provide a living for those who feel themselves to be above slave labor.

Before you get your pointing finger all bent at me – advertising is what I “do”. But I do feel a change of heart coming on with every passing kilometer on the boat. Watching the tiny wake of the Pohoda crawl out from under the boat and lap the distant, sandy shores behind us, I try hard to think of one positive thing I’ve done for anyone I don’t personally know in the past five years or so. They’ve been good years, full of travel, discovery, celebration and love, but I stretch my head around the possibility of finding another way, free of the selfishness, implacable egos and insupportable, banal, “pat my back” humor of the “industry” and its acolytes in Prague. There’s still time, I tell myself, already disappointed.

Thakek is a wonderfully underwhelming little dustbowl. We docked at the international trade terminal – the ferro cement crusted embankment smiling at the Thai town opposite. I wobble up out of the boat and through the passport inspection office without thinking – I just walk right by them and nobody even asks. One man approaches me as I am leaving the compound asking if the little boat down below was mine. Yes, I answered, it’s from Luang Prabang. He whistles through his teeth and strolls down to take a closer look. Out past the little duty free shop for the folks making the big trip over the river, there are a clutch of drunken-looking tuk-tuk drivers assembled in front of the local five star hotel and casino. Gambling is illegal in Thailand, so the well-heeled take the jump over into Laos to enjoy the pleasure of throwing their money away. Past the hotel, the street is no longer paved. Old storefronts are shuttered against the crushing heat of mid-day, their owners hidden in shadowy cubicles watching television or napping fitfully. On the main promenade, a double-wide street bedecked with curiously Chinese looking lampposts and graced with sparkling new asphalt, there is a sign advertising internet. Mister Lu, a Chinese transplant to Lao, lives there with his Vietnamese wife and his son, Mickey. Driven mainly by his desire to escape China’s one child policy, Mr. Lu has followed so many other emigrant Chinese into a life of hard work and big plans. His little internet shop will one day become a restaurant, and then a hotel. Unlike the pipe dreams of many of the Lao people, who seem content to sleep the day away and drink most of the night, I get the feeling that Mr. Lu’s plans will work out.

I check the internet for any sign that someone might want to buy our boat, but my posting on the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree board has been buried by a million “Whats a chill guest house to stay at in Laos?” questions from dopey kids with Chinese characters tattood on their legs. Can’t some moderator move that stuff to the “Buy the Book, Idiot” rubric and leave some space for actual questions and offers? So much for that. I pick up a couple of fried egg baguettes from Mr. Lu’s wife and head back to the boat. The walk takes me on one of the secondary roads – another dirt track separating old French buildings that haven’t been painted since the fall of Hanoi. Concrete balconies sag and all the joinery is warped into laughable angles, leaving wooden shutters flapping and creaking on rusted hinges, unclosable doors barely concealing rooms inside piled with heaps of charcoal, old wood and overrun by chickens. There are no people anywhere, no signs, and the electrical cables dangle from their poles like the barbed wire surrounding the old Greek section of Famagusta on Cyprus; a whole city lost in time and quietly decomposing in the sun. Once back, I slip by the sleeping immigration officers again and pass a few young guys hauling Phillips washing machines up the long stone stairs. Gerben jumps off to pick up some water and smokes from the Duty Free and we push off a few minutes later, hoping that Savannakhet won’t be a rerun of this canceled show. The former capital of Laos is our last hope to sell the Pohoda before our visas run out and we are forced to give her up and head back to Thailand.

Gerben is at the tiller when we make our final stretch of river into Savannakhet. The river here is impossibly flat and wide – it keeps stretching thinner and thinner, like the dregs of suds from an emptied bottle of shower soap. The land on either side extends just as flt to distant, hazy horizons on all sides. There’s not a hill in sight. Eventually, the river starts to ripple up in the telltale pattern of looming sandbars and maybe even a rock or two. I was writing one of the earlier blog posts, leaning back against the folded up blankets, but I glanced back at Gerben, who was all smiles and seemed comfortable with the path ahead. A couple of minutes later, we were in trouble, weaving between a sudden onslaught of drift nets and a handful of small, sandy islets. I jumped up to the front and helped guide Gerben through the mess and suggested that he follow the Laotian shore closely for the next little bit. He did, but soon we were in trouble again. A last minute correction went wrong and the boat scraped hard over some rocks. He cut the engine and we drifted down a little rapid, spinning dangerously close to the swirl of the little waterfall he’d just avoided. It wasn’t a big one, but it was serious enough to have flipped the boat if we’d gotten much closer. Back under her own power, the boat spun out of the mess, but there was a problem. We’d destroyed the new rudder Lee welded for us in Nung Khai and the propeller shaft fin has been bent at a 45 degree angle. I flared up at Gerben for the first time on the trip, telling him I’ll take the rudder from there. He was furious that I blamed him for the crash, and probably more furious with himself for allowing it to happen. Saying I wanted to take over was probably the worst thing to say at that point, but I had piloted us through most of the rapids upriver and felt that I had more confidence with handling the boat in situations like that. It was stupid, and as I pulled over to the side to fix the broken rudder and prop fin, Gerben fumed in the front of the boat. An hour or so of smooth river and silence passed, then the docks of Savannakhet came into sight. Before we disembarked, I apologized to him for saying what I did, admitting that it wasn’t fair. He accepted, but was still pretty angry about it. I could tell that a beer or two would sort it out, so we moored the Pohoda to a floating restaurant and hopped up to a table to get a hot lunch, attracting stares of curiosity from the staff and the handful of Thai patrons giggling over their gambling exploits of the night before.

After two weeks on the river, we’d reached our destination in one piece. The boat was whole and ready for, perhaps, a little more. We had two huge plates of food and a couple of cold beers in front of us. Up on the banks, we could hear the reassuring rattle of tuk-tuks and smell the burnt, acrid smell of chicken on a stick. All was pretty much right with the world again and all that was left was to sell the boat and make our escape. We talked up the bars full of well-fed dudes just lining up to buy the Pohoda as we ate. We imagined rows of guesthouses teeming with drunken frat boys, dusky-headed erstwhile Canadians with their massive backpacks and bobble-headed girls in tank tops – all with copies of the Lonely Planet clutched in their hands and fat money belts strapped to their waists. After lunch, we made a little sign with some markers we’d bought in Nung Khai for the purpose and hiked up the dusty embankment to the main riverfront street of Savannakhet.

Our arrival barely stirred a tailfeather in the place, which was exactly what we wanted. The unflappable old Yoga tourists and road-scarred Colonialist adventurer types could have cared less for where we’d been or what we’d done and the boat moored to the floating restaurant below was little more than a curiosity to gawk at on the way to cocktail hour. To be fair, we told Julian, the owner, that we had neglected to obtain Thai visas before landing, but that we would keep a low profile. He didn’t seem to mind – as long as deniability was plausible. He didn’t ask us to sign in the guestbook, anyway. The next morning, after a hot shower and a nice breakfast, we sat in the garden checking our email and suddenly I broke out in a cold sweat. As if on cue, the tourist police – a heretofore unseen phenomenon in Thailand – were making their smiling rounds of the tables. Gerben and I looked at each other, both silently questioning what we ought to do. It was certainly too late to run, and where would we go, anyway? To our speedboat? Certain doom approached, and we heaved a sigh of relief as we heard the head guy describing how Mut Mee guests would be very helpful to him indeed if they could take ten minutes to fill out a survey for him. Needless to say, the Thai Tourist police received high marks from the two of us on such important questions as, “Was the tourist police office stocked with foreign language news media?” We had no intention of visiting to check, so it was 5′s across the board for that lucky office.

We had work to do, but a planned day off was long overdue, so we contented ourselves with lugging our gear up to the patio of our guest house room, much to the passive irritation of Julian, who strikes me as an extremely tidy person. Our work done, we settled in to a few beers and chatter with the local menagerie. Kevin, it turned out, was not just a laid-back surfer dude taking a break from the mind bending waves. A long-term Peace Corps volunteer, he’d worked for much of the last three years in Bulgaria and was taking a few months off to decompress. Contrary to first impressions, he was an extremely tough, observant, intelligent guy, who really deserved the rest he was almost getting by working on the boat. He introduced us to Pim, a local woman who works with Muong tribespeople who have escaped persecution in Laos only to be trapped in a diplomatic and political limbo in Thailand. For helping the CIA during the silent war – the intense bombing of Laos during the 70′s which was evidently intended to halt the march of the Pathet Lao and their Vietnamese allies before them – the Muong have been mercilessly hunted and submitted to various forms of political indoctrination by the Lao government. Tourists see nothing of this, aside from a handful who were abducted and unceremoniously murdered in the early 90′s by a particularly aggressive faction of hill people seeking independence from Lao. Army posts at strategic points along the road keep their appearances to a minimum, and the real terror for them happens well behind the line of demarcation that is Route 13 North. Once they’ve made their escape to Thailand, they are usually rounded up and sent to camps along the border, where they await a judgment that will never come. The Lao government demands them back for “re-education”, and if recognized as political refugees, the Thai government is de jure forced to take a side. This would potentially anger the perpetually moral Chinese, of course, and the Thais are a bit at a loss to find a solution. Like the good, weird Buddhists they are, the Thais take the middle path, rounding them up into border control camps, where they are kept in an eternal state of waiting for paperwork.

Pim works with the one group which is allowed to visit and minister to the needs of these people. She advises them as best she can, translates for them and tries to make their lives in limbo a little easier to bear. According to the Thai government, nobody is there (because there are no refugees to help…), so Pim was very cautious describing her work and would not allow me to make an interview with her on camera, which is a pity. She is a UN-grade interpreter and extremely ambitious, despite her outward deference and excitability. I hope she does well in her position, and I am certain she deserves better. The Lao government is a generally contemptible little sloth, and it’d be nice if someone would one day be able to force their ugliness out in the open the way that it is being done in Burma now. Asked about the Muong later on down the road, the Lao people I spoke to clouded over and responded with one voice: “they are terrorists,” followed quickly with a look I could only interpret as beseeching me, as a sort of American, to empathize. Yep. Heard that one before. With us or against us. Yep. A village and its idiots are not long parted, mercifully; in Laos as in Texas.

Later that evening we gave Kevin and Pim a sunset cruise on the Pohoda. Both of them were so refreshingly, honestly overjoyed, it gave Gerben and I a true feeling of peace and happiness that we could share such a little thing. It made me appreciate the trip ten times more than I had so far, and bound us all up together with this strange little crew on the mosquito-infested edge of nowhere.

The next day we entered the fray again at the local Tesco Lotus, buying up massive bags of silicone sealant, new waterproof containers, a new wok and various sundries. My mission was to fix the steering apparatus of the boat with the help of Mut Mee’s local engineer – a 23 year-old guy named Lee. Gerben spent his day racing from market to market to buy all the rest of our supplies for the trip. As the sun rose in the sky, Lee and I ripped out the engine mount, took apart the precariously cobbled drive chain and puzzled over apparently impossible measurements and angles. When I was useless – pretty much any time serious carpentry or welding was involved, I set to work patching the gunwales with lumps of thick silicone caulk. It looked like a scene from the Asian version of the A-Team – cracked commandos, out on the Mekong with a power drill and a Chinese hammer or two. By the end of the day, the boat was ship-shape again, and Gerben had arrived back with a full can of petrol – his last mission of the day. We settled in for one last night at the guest house, determined to leave bright and early the next morning.

Morning came late and sweltering, but we lugged our baskets down to the boat regardless of the hangovers. At the crack of 1, we pulled the boat out of the safety of our little shelter and back into the stream of the Mekong. Kevin and Pim waved from the deck of the restaurant ship until we disappeared from sight. Re energized and restocked, we made excellent time, pushing on until late in the evening, when we spotted a nice spot to camp and crossed back onto Lao soil again. We set up our camp like an experienced boy scout troop and set to work on our potato and carrot curry.

Sometime after sunset, we saw lights wobbling down the beach and Gerben stoked the fire up so we could see. It was the local gendarmerie, out with a curious local farmer for a look at the encampment. They smiled and said things in Lao, we smiled and said louder things in English, Czech, Dutch and French. It was all in good fun, and after a while the soldiers buried their rifle stocks in the sand near their feet, pointing at our map and grinning about our boat. Satisfied that we were just a couple of dopey Falang out for a pointless boat trip, they stumbled off back up the bank to whatever dull, dim lit office they had to return to. They seemed a bit disappointed to be forced to leave our warm fire and Thai cigarettes behind.

The next few days passed like a mirror of the first. Long, languorous progress finally brought us a couple of hours from Thakek when disaster struck. After refueling, Gerben fired up the engine and we had just reached ramming speed when something tore free and a horrible wrenching sound echoed over the water. The motor, propeller, drive shaft and all ripped free of the new mount Lee and I had built and went flying into Gerben’s back at full speed. If not for the precarious little bench I’d nailed to the rear support beam for the driver to sit on, he could have been paralyzed for sure. Lucid as ever, he turned quickly around and switched off the engine, examining the back of the boat for the massive leak we were sure had resulted. Miraculously, the accident hadn’t harmed the boat, and we paddled to the muddy shore under the disinterested local fishermen and a scattering of wives. Not until we had reached the shore did they move a finger to help us, despite the spectacle of the engine clearly hanging off the side of the boat and our frantic waves from mid-river. Safe on land, I found out that the motor mount had sheared of 6 three inch screw neat across the heads, releasing the engine, which tore up through the boat at full speed, driven by the propeller. We needed some big nails, and fast. Neither of us wanted to sleep on this muddy bank. Gerben went and asked the local fisherman with a motorbike to take him for some big nails, to which the fishwife responded immediately, “money.” So much for the goodwill of man. It was dark before they got back, so I worked on diagnosing the problem and fixing some minor damage until the sun went down. Grumbling, we cooked some instant noodles and passed out cold after a few beers.

Morning couldn’t come soon enough. We woke to the heat and the mud, half expecting the entire episode to have been a bad dream and to find myself on the Mut Mee restaurant boat. An few hours and a reality check or two later, I had re-aligned the motor and disassembled and reassembled the drive chain a few times over. Cursing like a regular sailor, I’d managed to “fix” the beautiful new mount Lee had made us with nice, solid nails. It didn’t look pretty, but it was going nowhere. Gerben climbed aboard and we set off for Thakek – the halfway point on the last leg of our journey to Savannakhet. I steered that day, and I swear Gerben rubbed a ghost wound on his back a few times. It was a close thing, and was as close as we’d come to an actual disaster on the whole trip. Whatever Allah might have been saying that day, it was as clear as the limitless mud of the Mekong.

Nearly as soon as the lights of the world’s most underwhelming capital city faded behind the flats, the sun began to drop, leaving us floating in the silent world of commuting fishermen and flickering florescences announcing roadside gas stations and fish farms along the banks on the Thai side. Ever since the dam-crazed Chinese constipated the Mekong with their concrete, the fishermen along the river in three countries have been suffering. Their constant changes in water flow, unannounced to those living downstream, have all but destroyed the native sea weed that grew on the floor of the Mekong, feeding the population of fish nearly all the downstream nations depend upon to some extent. The massive giant catfish – a monster that had been known to reach 450 kilograms in its heyday – is nearly extinct now, and 90% of the fishermen perform their ritual taking in of their enormous drift nets to find nothing but new holes and plastic bottles. It’s a sad world, a twilight world in more ways than one, that we navigate now with the aid of a few little flashlights and our nascent, two week old riverman instincts. More than rocks now, it is the fishermen’s drift nets that pose the greatest risks. Most of them re clearly marked with empty plastic bottles every 5 meters or so, but even in the daylight, it’s hard to spot the ends of the nets from a safe distance, and earlier in the day I was forced to make a number of 180 degree turns mid-river to avoid fouling our propeller. In the dark, Gerben would yell “net!” and make the sign to cut the engine. At the last possible minute, I’d cut the thing and hold our course as best as I was able over the net and restart it only after we’d cleared the hazard.

An hour in, we started to see the Friendship Bridge in every streetlight and shrimp farm. Could that light around the corner be Nung Khai? The banks of the river play strange tricks in the dark, destroying depth perception and leaving me guessing at times where the true river ended and some patch of dark, fallow land began. Long spits of sand looped seemingly out of nowhere and hooked around us as we floated downstream. The fishermen, who would normally give us a wave and a nod, looked at us suspiciously from behind their dark baclavas as we passed by the nearest. If not for our obvious amateurishness, we could be a perfect fit for the smugglers who must ply the river every night, ferrying Muong tribesmen, illegal workers and phony Sony electronics back and forth, to and from Thailand. It’s hard to imagine that this isn’t a nightly issue, but we didn’t see anyone that seemed to be heading to the far bank. We stuck to mid-river and coasted past everyone we saw with little more than a signal passed with a flashlight.

At night, it is also easier to see the differences between Laos and Thailand, if anyone needed more evidence. The Thai side is sprinkled with well lit roads traveled by speeding, late model pick up trucks. Loud music blares from riverside restaurants and karaoke bars. On our left, in Laos, darkness reigns. All sounds issue from a bubble – the clink of a cow bell or the sudden torture of a rusty old Hino truck engine struggling against some unseen load, its bed rattling and pounding from the holes in the dirt track. There is no light on the left. Maybe a lone farmhouse marked with a sodium vapor light off in the interior or one of the old sand harvesting rigs along the bank where a worker has forgotten to switch off the cabin light. The sand harvesters are peculiar machines, but I guess they’d have to be. Giant vacuum pumps suck sand and water off the bottom of the river and then spit it up into the air. The heavier sand lands first – mostly onto huge conveyor belts that heave it up the bank to dry in massive piles. The water fountains out and lands in channels that must constantly be retrenched, to flow back into the river. On the Thai side, these operations are accompanied by huge Japanese earthmoving equipment, while the Laos manage with rusting, malfunctioning barges and a Kolao backhoe or two. The Thais have also figured out how to farm a vast number of fish and shrimp for local consumption. These fish parks resemble parking lots on the river, with huge Halogen lamps pouring false sunlight into the murky water 24 hours a day. The inmates are confined to five square meter cages made of plastic netting which lie submerged in the river. When their time has come, the cages are lifted out of the water with cranes and transferred to truck-mounted tanks. It’s incredibly efficient, and I wondered if some of the older guys working on the rigs might feel a twinge of pity for their historical prey. Maybe, on nights when the electricity goes out because of a storm on shore, they crawl out on their bellies and slash a hole in one of the plastic cages with a rusty machete. Most of the fish would swim out, gulping bigger breaths of muddy water and searching for the food they instinctively know is just a little deeper down… They make a nice metaphor for the hordes of travelers in SouthEast Asia – everyone scrawling the same banalities on the same bathroom walls and eating dare food from the same food stalls until we imagine a barrier falls and an opportunity is presented. Out we swim, away from the wooden frogs, Hugo Boss suits and Elephant adventures, but in our race to the bottom, do we really know what is growing from the slime down there?

I guess we learn little in less time more than how quickly we can get to the bottom. The stock in trade are pithy little Facebook messages to our envious friends back home. Loose babel about the good food and the beautiful temples, followed with mostly empty promises to tell more over a beer. Maybe the illusion – as with the fish – is that anyone really cares at all. Or that those cares we manufacture “on the road” will ever supplant the most insignificant cares endemic to “home” and our lives on our own pre-ordained place on the food chain.

The moon rose full over the middle of the Mekong about an hour before we reached the concrete mass of the Friendship Bridge. Amusingly, the lights on the Thai side piers shone bright in the night but the Laotians had neglected to replace the broken elements on their side. We drifted under the thing, staring up at the sky and breathing the cool air deep – me in the back with the low-idling motor and Gerben up front on the raised prow of the “Pohoda”. Three weeks before, we’d pedaled our fixed-gear cruisers over this bridge heading for Laos and the significance of the geometry, the passage of time and the bright moon guiding us down the river could hardly have been lost. Within 20 minutes we’d lashed the boat to the floating restaurant beneath Mut Mee guesthouse and were negotiating a couple of cold Leo beers from Kevin – a Hawaiian transplant to Thailand. Taking pity on our sorry state, we were both covered with a week’s worth of grime, motor grease and sand, he offered us a couple of cushions on the back bar patio and even bought us a couple of beers. We kicked back, listening to him describe life in Nung Khai in his easy-going, come what may drawl. Strings of Christmas tree lights reflected in the river and Four Tet played softly through the boat’s sound system. We really felt like we were home. Dozing off beneath the mosquito net Kevin had rigged for us, I mentioned to Gerben that we didn’t have Thai visas… The boat slapped against the current behind us, completely out of gasoline and with about a hundred other demonstrable mechanical flaws spanning various states of seriousness. We both drifted off, not particularly worried, for some reason. Illegal again.

Micah

Enjoy,

Micah

Everyone talks about Laos as being the “Land of Smiles” – it’s even emblazoned on the Beer Lao advertisements – but the reality is much different. In the cities along the tourist trail, everything is difficult and everything is expensive, unless it fits within the well-defined limits of what tourists are “supposed” to do. This mainly includes spending a lot of money of second-rate “local” handicrafts and “eco-tours”. Eco-tour is a tedious euphemism for being driven out to a dirt road in some gasping old four wheel drive and made to walk around staring at yet more stalls of “Lao weaving” and Chinese made teeshirts on the way to some underwhelming cave or waterfall. Everyone who is not associated with one of the approved tourist businesses treats foreigners with barely disguised avarice and contempt. Prices for everything are normally inflated to twice the local rate, and the shopkeepers so incredibly lazy that they will not even get up from their bed/TV combination corners to make a sale or look for another missing part in the chaos of their hovels. They are not friendly and certainly not charming. The villages, on the other hand, are a lot closer to what one might expect from an “unspoiled” Southeast Asian country. Though not exactly brimming over with joy at seeing foreigners, there is at least some curiosity and the general kind of friendliness towards strangers that you’d expect from any people.

We stopped off at one such place after a full day on the river with James sleeping off his food poisoning and walked into the midst of a heated football match on the sand. A gang of maybe 15 local boys had built goalposts into the sand with bamboo sticks and were enjoying their game immensely when we pulled in and attention suddenly shifted. I went off to get my noodle soup while Gerben joined in the game, much to the delight of the locals, who massed around the falang, trying to trip him up or foul a pass. The opposition goaltender looked a bit worried when Gerben managed to connect every pass, despite the hordes of kids, and after my meal I snuck up behind him, showing him my finger over lips, urging him to keep my presence a secret. We made Shiva arms against the incoming shots and all the kids got a good laugh out of it. The whole evening was a very welcome release from the tensions and exhaustion that had started to set in after a week on the river. The next day, we were due to reach Vientiane, and the end of Amber and James’ journey. There was some talk of them continuing on to Savanakhet with us, but I made it clear to Gerben that it would be them or me this time and that put an end to the discussions. There was the issue of money remaining, however, and it became yet another sore spot with them. The original agreement was that they would pay for food and petrol down the river, plus a little extra for sharing the cost of the boat once we reached Vientiane, but sadly, we never wrote any of this down. Thus far, I had paid for two of the three fill-ups and Gerben had paid for the water and drinks – the overwhelming bulk of the food costs. Whenever it was time to pay, James and Amber seemed to be conspicuously absent, or their wallet buried in one of their backpacks. We had some talk about it over the campfire that night and James declared that he thought they had paid their fair share. Unwilling to start a confrontation, Gerben sort of passed the ball to me and I resisted, but it was plain that they did not intend to pay another penny. Somehow, the $7 a day they had spent on the trip had “broken their budget” already and they “were not like us” – meaning, presumably, that we were actually paying for the trip ourselves, not with Princesses’ graduation money or something. The only thing worse than talking about money with a cheap person is arguing about money with a cheap person, so I dropped it at last, telling James that he could do whatever he felt was fair. I took that from Barbara, who said the same thing to some Australian witch who laid her seat out flat back on the bus we took from Surathani to Bangkok, squashing Barbara in our fixed back seats behind her. Of course, we both could have predicted how that would turn out. “Your comfort is our top priority,” I told her as she settled back into her illiterate babel about Facebook with her traveling partner. People are swine, to paraphrase Michel Huellebecq.

The next day we took the final rapid before entering Vientiane. I piloted most of the way down, but Gerben told me that James was really looking forward to doing this last rapid and wanted to steer. Your comfort is my top priority. I sat down and let him guide us through the last of the white water, which was fairly anticlimactic after all the days of it we’d seen along the way. On one bank, after a particularly sharp turn, we saw the beached carcass of a logging ship upended on the rocks. Heavy diesel dripped from the rear and the huge teak logs on board were tilting perilously into the water. The ship had been literally tossed about five meters up on the rocks and utterly ruined after trying to take the same turn we’d just made. This one we’d heard about – 8 men had died on board during the crash, and the shipwreck was already something of a legend among the upstream villages. I shot some video of the wreck and we sped on by, now just an hour or two of smooth sailing to Vientiane. In about a week’s time, we’d become pretty capable rivermen ourselves, and probably accomplished what very few people have done in recent years. I think it’s likely that more people climb Everest than navigate that distance on the Mekong anymore.

One last adventure was in store though. Just before Vientiane, the river widens out to about half the width of the Mississippi, rocks disappear, replaced with massive sandbars that stretch nearly from shore to shore. This was something new, and the lack of markers made it much more difficult to read these new hazards correctly. After about an hour of this, I managed to bring us down the wrong channel and we were beached. In the middle of the Mekong, which was probably 700 meters from shore to shore at that point, we got out of the boat into ankle deep water and laboriously pushed the thing forward to where the current finally deepened. Generally averse to work, James made a loud objection when I suggested pushing the boat forward about 10 more meters to rejoin the stream. “Just for the record, I think this is a bad idea. I’ll do it, but I think it’s the wrong way,” he said. In 10 minutes, after some minor heaving and lifting, we were floating downstream again. Just for the record, he never apologized to me for pitching his little girly fit in front of everyone. What a surprise. An hour later, we finally got them off of our boat and they disappeared up the bank with their massive backpacks and Canada patches. Not a word of “thank you” to us for sharing our plan, our boat and our time. James did slip Gerben a wad of wrinkled bills before he slunk off – about $10 US and a few worthless Vietnamese notes thrown in. Wherever they are now, I could care less, but I hope that someday when they grow up, they’ll realize what we did for them and find some way to repay that debt to some other young and a bit-too-proud travelers who end up in a similar situation. It’d be nice to believe that will happen someday.

Rid of them, Gerben and I looked around at the trash-strewn mud of the Vientiane harbor and decided to push on to Nong Khai and the fabled hot showers and clean beds of Mut Mee Guesthouse. It was about five in the evening already, and the sun was quickly setting, but neither of us wanted to stay the night in that rat-infested pit. We poled off away from the bank and steered the nose of the Pohoda South again. The ship felt light, buoyant and quicker than ever before. Blessed silence, for once, reigned onboard as we looked to the horizon for the white spans of the friendship bridge.

The motor, a Chinese Honda knock off they’d manufactured by exploding a real Honda engine and casting all the parts, was holding up to the strain surprisingly well, tapping out a neat little staccato like a lawnmower engine in the middle of some anonymous, suburban midsummer day. I quickly grew to associate that familiar, pleasant sound with the river itself, and was left speechless when, at rare moments, we ran out of fuel and were left drifting in the immense silence of the river. The steering apparatus, on the other hand, was rapidly deteriorating, thanks to KenFriend’s lazy bit of work, and despite all of our efforts to fix it up by installing the proper parts and tweaking the direction of the motor a bit, we still were left with an inch of play in the rudder, which made accurate steering a joke. I was rapidly growing a weird new muscle in my left arm from maintaining constant pressure to hold course. Was this what was meant by a “steady hand on the tiller?” I thought not, exactly.

From the relatively wide, muddy banks flanking the Mekong at Luang Prabang – perhaps some 200 meters from shore to shore – we passed quickly into a narrower, rockier part of the river. One aspect of the Mekong I will never forget is its capacity to change character completely in the blink of an eye. Wide, placid streams narrow into a terrifying churn in a matter of a few hundred meters, no clue given as to where all the water had gone, aside from the sense that through the inch of wood beneath our feet, the roiling stream extends down into blackness, rocks and certain death. Sounds a bit dramatic, but all of us who could swim and had experience with rip currents tried hard to avoid looking too long at the sucking whirlpools passing beneath us. It was popular legend that nobody had ever swum the breadth of the Mekong at Luang Prabang, that the surface current concealed a treacherous power below which was nearly ten times faster and stronger.

Of the two rapids we’d been warned about specifically by everyone who knew the river, we passed through one the second day. The main trouble was, in typical Asian style, nobody had ever experienced a map before, so the location of the second “killer” cataract was to remain unknown until we stumbled on it. Every kilometer or so, the river would narrow and rocks started to loom. The fishermen, who choose such places to cast their wide, circular throw nets just watched us grimly as we floated by. In the old days, before Route 13 was paved and built up to provide a trade route between Luang Prabang and the South, rivermen used to be picked up every day to pilot the boats through familiar hazards, and dropped off at the end of their domain to make their way home by foot. It was a method we were prepared to employ, if things got too hairy, and we’d asked Mama from Oudomphong guesthouse to scrawl out some plaintive phrases to that effect in Laotian script. As it turned out, we never used them, but probably would have been disappointed had the need arisen. Sensibly, and after the intractably lazy fashion of the Lao people, the old rivermen have mostly retired, taking up fishing, television watching and spitting on the roads of their thatched villages – a safe distance from the potential terrors of the river. Nearly 100% of Laotians cannot swim and are terrified of the river, despite the fact that their lives are mainly made upon it.

The Mekong winds back and forth upon itself in this untraveled area, lost in time and space between the relative modernity of the Route 13 corridor and the sparsely populated jungles of North-Eastern Thailand. It snakes out far to the West and dives South before hitting the Thai border and eventually making another series of squiggles before heading due East to Vientiane. When we hit the first rapids, I was steering, and suddenly felt the boat launch forward as though someone had switched on a rocket engine in the back. The whirlpools gathered behind submerged rocks, making ominous sucking sounds, and as we sailed over one I could feel and see the timbers of the little boat flex and warp under my feet. The boat pitched hard to the right, its heavy tail end possessed by the river spirits no longer obeyed the inadequate little rudder at all. As we progressed, I figured out the right moment to escape from the intractable “V” currents, sending us shooting past the rocks at full speed, but retaining some control, more or less. As we came out of the rapids and the river splashed out non-threateningly again to wider banks, I cut the motor low and drifted for a while to take stock. We’d taken a lot of water – mostly from over the gunwales – and the rudder felt a little loose, but we’d come out of it little more than damp. For a brief moment, I think we all felt a sense of solitude, pride, relief – the normal after effects of a solid rush of adrenaline that has passed through and left a happy exhaustion in its wake.

Camping along the way was done on a series of pristine sandy spits, shadowed by towering hills and presided over by a waxing moon. At some points, after our driftwood fire had burned low, the blueish moonscape of the white sand in that spectral light seemed to mute all sounds but the croak of a lonely frog or piping of a stray Plover somewhere out in the mist. One night, a massive fruit bat flew just over us, casting the shadow of its huge wings over the beach as it passed. A normal evening consisted of landing the boat, searching for firewood and starting up two fires – one for sitting around and one for cooking. Nights were early – we rarely stayed up past 10 pm.

Although we avoided natural disasters pretty well, the first three days were marred by regular old human stupidity. On the second day out, Amber had decided she needed something from her elephantine backpack, which was stowed in the back of the boat along with all the others. When I was driving, she was not expected to pay visits to the rear of the boat, but it was James on captain duty. Clambering over the engine, she managed to put all her weight on her left had, directly on top of the exhaust system and ironically half an inch shy of the warning “Extreamly Hot Not to Touch!” engraved boldly onto the metal by some thoughtful Chinese engineer. We were all treated to a day long monologue on how she’s “normally really good with pain, but like, this reeeeely hurts,” punctuated by gasps, curses and sobs. Not being entirely heartless yet, I attempted to get her to take the hand out of the river water she was soaking it in and into a clean bandage with antiseptic burn cream. She protested loud and often, until I gave up. Later that night I succeeded in getting it wrapped and treated, but she insisted on continuing to fiddle with everything until the bandage was black and covered in mud within an hour or so.

The second shoe fell when James, who was resident cook, caught some sort of food poisoning. Laboring under the delusion that sand was a good substitute for warm water and soap, his sickness didn’t come as a surprise, but a sudden rainstorm ensured he had a thoroughly miserable night. Gerben and I had elicited condescending tough guy looks from the master outdoor duo for clandestinely sneaking off to wash our bowls and spoons with soap. It also didn’t help James that he and the princess were both on strong antibiotics as a precaution against Malaria. It must have been a hell of a night for him.

On the downside for us, we lost our cook and third pilot for the better part of two days. Fortunately, the food mainly consisted of rice and instant noodles with some veggies chopped in, which we were more than capable of preparing for ourselves. Life went on downriver. At about 19 kilometers per hour. By the fourth day, we were setting up our last camp about 60 km from Vientiane. It was at the base of a small village, which we took turns visiting to get a taste of some food that didn’t have grains of sand mixed in to surprise us. My noodle soup had two or three unidentifiable meats in it, but I wolfed it down greedily, followed close with a cold beer Lao in a bottle – a luxury. Barely feeling my land legs, the earth wobbled gently under me as I played camera games with the proprietor’s son and showed the woman pictures of my wife. They’re just some little wallet sized snaps taken for visa photos before we left Prague, but I try not to look at them more than once a day. Even now, I feel a sharp twinge of missing Barbara. Her quiet patience, thoughtful intelligence and dignified pride – all of which would be such an asset to me now on this boat, just as they are everywhere else. “I love you B,” I say, and pour a sip of beer onto the compacted dirt beneath the setting Lao sun. A small family of water buffalo make their way home through clouds of dust raised by a dirty old Toyota pick-up.