Next Time...

I'll add some pictures, I think. And stories of adventures around Vientiane.
Peace, Renee

Caves and Car Games

We drove north to Sam Neua, the capital of Hua Phan province (everyone's got their Lao maps handy, I hope)-- the poorest province in Laos, I have read. It was an eight hour drive (12 by bus, which we luckily were not in) through twisty mountain roads. We stopped for lunch in a village, for fresh air, for views, for scenic bathroom breaks. We listened to the two tapes that Ben and Alisa had copied (alas, our truck, for all its wonder, did not have a CD player), chatted, and played some silly car games.

My favorite game was "Car Bingo" which wasn't Bingo-like, really, but merely involved trying to spot various agreed upon items before others did. These items included: bomb casings used in fencing or housing, terraced rice fields, a woman carrying a baby in a sling on the front, same but in a holder on the back, someone fishing in a river, someone bathing in a river, a happy old man riding on the back of a motorbike (Waking Ned Divine-style but clothed, of course), kids riding a homemade skateboard down the road, a woman with a baby tied on her back washing a water buffalo at the mountaintop village's water spigot (seen once, before it was a winning item, then placed on this list), an elephant, a monkey, and a poppy field (the latter three were never spotted).

Other sights that we saw that weren't part of the game included men carrying babies, group showers at the town spigot (everyone older than three bathes with a sihn wrapped around them so it's by no means indecent to all bathe together by the roadside like this), Hmong houses with their distinctive sun design above the door, the Hmong teenage courting game (the women dress up in their traditional clothes-- black with bright colored thread and silver coins-- and folk toss a ball back and forth, getting to know each other), women weaving, waterfalls, a pig tied to the back of a small bus, whole villages out making brooms from grasses along the road, homemade hydroelectric set-ups, beautiful mountains and valleys and forests... the list goes on. Since much of the trip was spent driving, I'm grateful that the drive was as full of things to see as it was.

In Sam Neua, we enjoyed our guesthouse and the riverside market. From there, we drove to Vieng Xai where the Lao Communist party worked and lived in hidden caves for 11 years, during the Indochina War. We toured the caves where the leaders stayed (from 1964 to 1975) and saw their meeting rooms, bedrooms, restrooms, kitchens, and emergency rooms (to go in if the caves were gassed). Beyond the four caves we saw are about a hundred more in which there were schools, hospitals, factories. Remarkable.

We ended our trip with a visit to the old capital of the district and a memorable 12 hour drive home on an unpaved road, on which we got lost, delivered a note from one village to another, lost our tire (retrieved and put it back on, happily enough), asked in almost every town to make sure we weren't getting lost again, and exclaimed excitedly at the site of less than 10 lights on a hillside, "Oh, that looks like the city [that we're looking for]." Funny how your ideas of what is city is can change in the course of a week. The next day, I took a bus from Ben and Alisa's village back to Vientiane to get ready for the upcoming week's work, sad to see a vacation end but glad to get on my motorbike and not back in a car for a while.

Traveling: Part 1

Some may already know, but a week ago I returned from a week-long trip to the north-eastern provinces of Laos. I went with Ben and Alisa, an MCC couple working in Bolikhamxay (teaching English and doing health education (respectively)), and Ben's brother Ryan, visiting from Canada. We drove ourselves, in a truck borrowed from the MCC office. Many a time, as we passed various forms of public transportation or heard stories from other travelers, we said a little thanks for our own vehicle. It was a gift to be able to stop when we needed to stop, to have our own space, to go where we wanted to go. Anyway, here's a little summary of the trip...

I first spent a couple of days in the town of Vong Vieng, set amidst beautiful limestone karsts and on a river. The town is a bit overrun by tourists backpacking through SE Asia, but was a good place to rest for a few days. I spent a good deal of time with another MCC couple, Heidi and Micah, and their two-month old baby, Frances, reading and relaxing, trying to find a restaurant with a unique menu and without a television showing western sitcoms, enjoying the scenery, and people-watching. I learned not to order western food when there are no western cooks in sight, although it is interesting to see what the kitchen will make up for you; that Lonely Planet has a huge influence on the life of towns and villages; and that it takes work, maybe a little sacrifice, to travel thoughtfully-- aware and respectful of the life and lives that are around you, aware that you, because you are relativley monied (be you a backpacker or an upscale traveler), have power in a place where you don't live and in which you won't stay for long that should be wielded with care (and often isn't).

Ben, Alisa, and Ryan picked me up from Vong Vieng and we drove for six hours through mountains and small towns to the larger town of Phonsavan in Xieng Khouang province, an area heavily bombed by the U.S. during the Vietnam War (the U.S. was also involved in a "Quiet War" in Laos-- quiet in the sense that little mention of it was or has been made in the U.S. even while it made Laos one of the most heavily bombed countries in the world). There were up to 900 sorties into Laos each day so that 2 million tons of ordance were dropped on the country, along with herbicides and defoliants like Agent Orange. 10-30% of what was dropped is still unexploded, so that an NGO working in Laos estimates that a quarter of Lao villages are socio-economically affected by these unexploded ordances (UXOs or bombies). Imagine there are small bombs still in the ground of people's rice fields, in school playgrounds, alongside the road, that people may come across while working or playing. Imagine that some kids play with the small bombs, not knowing what they are, or that some people try to open them so that they can sell the metal. Hard to believe.

But also hard to ignore here. Evidence of the war is all around this area, from the Bomb BBQ where some locals were grilling meat, to Craters restaurant, the town's fancier dining establishment, to the MAG office, an NGO which does community education about UXOs, development work, and bomb clearing. Also, outside of town, one might see bomb craters or bomb casings being used for fences or stilts under houses.

In Ponsavan, walking between areas marked as safe by bomb clearance teams, we saw the Plain of Jars, sites with large, mysterious stone jars (no one is sure what they were for, although there are various hypotheses), visited some friends who had recently moved to the town, explored the market, snacked on food from Canada in between what came to be standard meals of noodle soup or rice/noodle dishes or eggs and bread, and found ourselves a cheap but clean guesthouse. We celebrated the New Year with our friends (a simple communion with blueberry yogurt drink in place of wine :) followed by "oilballs"-- a tasty Danish traditional New Year's food that are a bit like doughnut holes and sound more appealing when said in Danish) and some UNO in our guesthouse. The next day, we headed off towards Sam Neua.

I'm Back

I don't have time to tell you about it just now, but I did want to let folks know that I have arrived safely back in Vientiane after a scenic and adventure-full tour of northeastern Laos. More to come...