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.