Leaving Oudomxay

It was difficult to make the decision to depart from Oudomxay, because I had not yet had a single boring day, and indeed, the days seemed to grow ever more interesting. Furthermore, many people around town now recognized me, and I them, so I was beginning to feel like a real resident. But, I was faced with an intolerable bifurcation of personality and preference: if I was going to stay, then I would need to contact the various government officials about protecting Puhipii, because I couldn’t well walk around enjoying the benefits of that mountain without trying to help it somehow. However, I had no wish to spend fifty dollars on a cell phone, and then to spend my days arranging meetings and pleading on the mountain’s behalf. Looking at it now, it seems inexcusably lazy to avoid this path, but honestly I just didn’t want to do that at this time. I would be happy to return to Oudomxay in the future, necktied and shaven, with an attractive presentation, replete with bells and whistles. But today, this time, I still heard the call to adventure, the intoxicating tocsin of jungle, river, and mountain.
My departure was catalyzed by the arrival of Maria, a formidable Argentine woman travelling solo. We’d met before in Luang Nam Tha, and done some cycling and trekking. Since we had last met, she had gone up to Phongsali on the vomit-inducing bus, and gotten trapped for three days in Hat Sa during a sustained downpour, waiting for a boat down the river. Maria recounted her trip over a potato-and-egg lunch, seasoned with fizzy, fermented ketchup. The stay in Hat Sa would have been almost tolerable except for the presence of another foreigner: Mark, a middle-aged Australian drunk, who happened to get stuck in town at the same time. He was filthy rich and filthy drunk, and the locals soon got sick of him. With no other English speakers in the entire town, Maria had been forced to endure hour after hour of boring drunken stories about Mark’s many glories. She rolled her eyes and waved her hand as if to say, “It’s all done with now.”
After lunch we walked a long loop up the valley, and my eyes were drawn to Puhipii as my vantage changed and more of its topography was revealed. I found myself wondering what the other face of it looked like. Maria and I found a rust-colored mud road that skirted the hills, and passed through a couple of small villages, where old people and children shouted greetings. We made way for a herd of water-buffalo, and passed an amphitheatre-like brick factory carved into the side of a carnelian mud hill. Nearby was a collection of the least-quality housing available to modern humans: ramshackle crude huts made of bamboo, cardboard, rusted sheet-metal, and wide strips of plastic. Garbage was strewn about for meters in all directions, punctuated here and there by jagged chunks of scrap metal. The whole place emanated poverty, despair, and mephisis. We gave it a wide berth. A little further down the road was a palatial residence, apparently deserted, that combined colonial French styles with Lao temple architecture. It was gated by a small squat tower that imitated a Lao castle, adorned with a sign that said “Siphan Salika Import Export Co.Ltd. Lao PDR Lao Product.” What this place was doing so far away from everything was a mystery. What a giant home was doing deserted while people lived down the road in abject conditions was another mystery, one that had already endured the ages and was not likely to be solved anytime soon.



We walked back to town along the highway, an unattractive route but one that saved us having to backtrack, and went up to the temple to watch the sunset. Sulesit, the young Khamu monk, greeted us, and a few of his colleages sat with us to watch the day end. Sulesit and I had a good rapport by now, and after we exchanged a few sentences, he looked up at me and shyly asked: “Can I call you … ‘Big Brother?’” Of course, I told him, and that is how I got a Khamu little brother.
With sundown came mosquitoes, and it wasn’t long before we were driven off the hill by vampire hordes. Generations of natural selection must have protected the young monks, for they remained unperturbed. At dinner that night, I observed Maria’s interesting body language. She was broadly-built and very muscular, being an avid rock-climber. Her cheeks, eyebrows, and hands all danced while she spoke, with a very Latin American emphasis, but her round face and stocky frame did not seem to come from Iberian ancestry, somehow. When she told me her parents were Polish, it all clicked. If she had a sour, defeated expression, and dragged her arms heavily along at her sides, she would look perfectly Polish. It was just the fiery tropical energy animating those features that cancelled the effect.
The next morning, we met at the bus station. We were bound for Nong Khiao, a bridge town several hours away by bus. We got to the bus station over an hour early for the 11:00 bus, knowing full well that we could be compelled to sit in the aisle if we got there late. We got our tickets, loaded our bags onto the top of the bus, and then sat in the waiting area. All of a sudden Maria started halfway out of her seat.
“That’s him!” she said, pointing. “That’s Mark, the Australian guy!” I looked across the bus station and saw one of the seedy all-night bars among the buildings at the outskirts. A man was leaning against the doorframe, middle-aged, iron-haired, six feet tall, a beer bottle dangling from one hand. From the tone and the substance of Maria’s stories, I would have thought that she would want to avoid him at all costs. However, this was not the case.
“He owes me 60,000 kip!” she exclaimed suddenly. “He ran out of money when we got to Muang Khua, and there were no banks there, so I gave him that to get a bus ticket.” Then she got up and strode purposefully toward him. I watched from afar as she gave him a talking-to, and then he handed over some bills. She came back looking satisfied, but Mark followed her.
The reaction from the locals was immediate. They began muttering “Drunken foreigner” and averting their eyes. Mark slouched up and began talking at us. Even in the morning, he was deep in the state of drunkenness wherein the drinker believes himself to be the center of all interesting things, and readily inflicts himself upon anyone who does not recoil in disgust. Western politeness had been too deeply ingrained in me to hurl the man away with a shove, when his beer-humid breath intruded deeply into my personal space.
“I can’t remembah which guesthouse I checked into last night,” he said, dangling a key in front of me. He then told us how he’d wandered into a bar where he ended up until this morning. He then said he was looking for an ATM. I gave him quick directions, knowing the nearest ATM was about a mile away, and hoping this would be the last we saw of him. It was not.
Our bus (actually a minivan) was scheduled to leave at 10. We had already claimed our seats by laying clothing on them, but even this does not deter some people. As the hour approached, we relocated to a bench near the bus, so we could watch and make sure nobody scooted our clothes away and took our places. 10 o’clock came and went. The passengers were all present, and the copilot had strapped all our bags to the roof. The only thing missing was the driver. Public transportation rarely leaves on time in Laos, and there is often no identifiable cause for delay. Today was just such a case. I asked the copilot where the driver was, and he pointed to a mostly-empty minivan parked next to ours, where a man sat behind the driver’s seat. He was apparently doing nothing, just staring straight ahead. I pointed at the clock, now reading forty past ten, and asked the driver when we were leaving.
“Ten o’clock,” he said agreeably.
“What is the driver doing?”
“I don’t know.” So there it was. Eleven came, and we were growing very bored. It’s much harder to wait when you don’t know how long you will be waiting. Finally two other men came and got into the front seats of the minivan where the driver sat. The two new men got into a heated debate, with hand gestures and obvious emotion, and our driver was very alert, watching the exchange, but not participating. This lasted almost half an hour, and at last our driver came boiling out of the minivan. The copilot suddenly exhorted all the passengers to board, and we had barely squeezed in before the scowling, red-faced driver put the bus into gear. The copilot went to shut the door, but a final figure leapt in: Mark. He had two bottles of beer clutched in one hand. The copilot forced him in next to me. Maria was on the opposite side, against the window, with a disgusted look on her face.
The ensuing four hours were dull and dreadful. Mark began to tell me every story he could come up with, mostly having to do with how much money he made. “We went looking for gold,” which came out gaould in his accent, “but we faound nickel. Can you believe it? We went looking for gaould but we faound nickel!” He then told me about the wonders of modern mining, wherein you don’t even need to tunnel down anymore, you just remove the earth layer by layer with explosives and machinery. I also got to hear about several other financial projects which had earned him heaps of money.
Maria, on my other side, was rolling her eyes and told me in Spanish that she’d already heard all of these stories three or four times when they were trapped by the rainstorm earlier. We switched over to Spanish in hopes of excluding Mark, but he turned to a Lao man behind him and started yelling “Andale, andale! Arriba, arriba!” The man shifted uncomfortably but made no response. Mark took this as an invitation to a monologue, and loudly tried to explain to the man that Maria and I were speaking Spanish. The man looked at me and said in Lao “He’s really quite drunk.” I nodded.
We stopped in a small village to pick up other passengers, and Mark burled out of the minivan. He went between two huts, and in more or less full view of the village and the bus, urinated on the wall of one of them. The Lao people made sounds of disgust and muted anger, but did nothing. Then Mark went to the little village store and bought two more bottles of beer. These, understand, are Beerlao bottles, 23 fluid ounces, almost twice as big as a standard Western container. Mark’s antipodean kidneys were evidently able to handle repeated double-doses of that volume, and without ever causing him to pass out. On his way back to the minivan, he pulled out a huge wad of 20,000 kip bills and began handing them out to children.
What kindness, you may think, what nobility. Allow me to disagree, and to explain myself. 20,000 kip is roughly the price of a restaurant dinner for a family of five in Laos, and is no trifling sum. For a foreigner to hand out large-denomination bills to children reinforces the notion that visitors to Laos are walking ATMs, an attitude that has deeply infiltrated the more-travelled areas like Luang Prabang and Vang Vieng. It sets the foreigners to a further personal remove from the locals – it’s very hard to have a real conversation with someone who just wants to get money out of you. There’s no question that Laos is a poor country and can use foreign money, but it should be responsibly distributed: in the form of schools, books, medicine, shelter and infrastructure. I have witnessed countless instances of Lao people who get their hands on money, and spend it on expensive clothes and sunglasses, motorcycles and cars, mansions, and ostentatious jewelry. They do not spend it on improving their community. Fine, let the tour guides, the corrupt policemen, the landlords, and the petty drug dealers waste their money on shiny crap – it’s the same the world over, why try to stop it here? But if you’re going to show up and just hand stuff out, at least you should hand out things that will improve the quality of life for the community. If Mark had used that money to buy coats and shoes in Oudomxay for every child in the village, I would have thought him a completely different person. But by handing out cash, he is only contributing to avarice and making it harder for people like Maria and me to connect with the locals in a non-pecuniary way.
“Well, I think I made a pretty good impression,” Mark said as he got back in the minivan. He then launched into the gaould and nickel story again. And so it went. At the next stop he bought a whole case of beers and began distributing them to passengers. And old Khamu couple accepted beer after beer, storing them in a voluminous bag, with a bewildered expression on their faces. Finally Mark gave them a small handful of 20,000 kip bills. They bowed deeply to him before they got off at the local market town. Somehow this was different from handing out bills to children, but I couldn’t quite pinpoint how. The old couple were obviously poor and could almost certainly find a good use for that money. In my mind, I couldn’t see them spending it on shiny trinkets. I believed they would distribute it to family members who needed it, to buy things like medicine and clothes. Maybe I give that old couple too much credit, but there was something in the gravity of their expression that told me they were hesitant to believe in this good fortune, and were worried Mark might ask for it all back.
We finally arrived at Nong Khiao, which longtime readers will remember from the October 1999 edition of this publication. Now, as then, it was a small community along the Ou river, growing steadily around the grand and beautiful bridge built by the Scandinavians. The bus took us all the way to the boat terminal, in case we wanted to go upriver to Muong Ngoi or downriver to Luang Prabang. Maria and I ditched Mark as fast as humanly possible, which wasn’t hard because he headed straight for the standing cooler of beer at the terminal restaurant.

Nong Khiao

Maria and I checked into a charming little set of riverside bungalows, then took a walk across the bridge and up the valley. The area was surrounded by towering, blunt limestone peaks crowned with lush green vegetation, and all the evidence of human presence was made minuscule by the grandure. We walked a couple of miles up to a cave complex where several people had hidden from bombing during the Vietnam War. The caves were large, but rather musty, and had strange signs evidently indicating what certain parts of the cave had been used for during its occupation. As far as museums go, it was one of the most rudimentary I have seen.


Bug nymph

We headed back as night fell, and stopped at a small restaurant. There was a group of foreigners already there, and they invited us to join. It was two couples: one from Sweden and the other consisting of an Italian and a British woman. We had a nice long talk until everyone was ready to go home.
When we got back to our bungalows, I walked around a bit in the well-maintained garden. To my surprise and delight, I discovered a leatherleaf slug crawling about on a log. I captured it to take pictures of it the next day. Further investigation turned up the Asian slug-snail on a broad leaf. This strange creature keeps its snail-shell hidden inside its body, and has a large exposed lung.

Slug Snail


Leatherleaf Slug (Family Veronicellidae)



The next day Maria and I parted ways. She wanted to go further East, and I wanted to go back up to Muong Ngoi. We had breakfast together, but then I sat on my balcony taking pictures of slugs while she packed up and left. Later I walked toward the dock, but as I was passing the bus station Maria ran up and grabbed me. “Come with me,” she said, “we need to get this sorted out.” I went with her and quickly divined the problem. There was a bus heading East, waiting there and full of passengers, but the ticket seller wanted her to wait four hours for the next bus that was more expensive. His given reason was that the bus was too full. I pointed out that there is no such thing as a full bus in Laos, and that he would happily allow Lao people to get on such a bus. He simply refused: as a man in uniform, with the power to issue or not issue tickets, he had that right. He then blatantly sold tickets onto that bus to two Lao people who were behind us.
I had to leave Maria to catch my boat, and that final image of her stuck with me for a long time: muscular shoulders tense, cigarette dangling from her mouth, eyes afire, and one arm gesticulating in a frustrated-but-hopeless fashion. I would have liked to stay with her a little longer and try to shoehorn her onto that bus, but my boat was leaving and space was likely to be limited.


Jumping Spider (Nong Khiao)


Weevil (Nong Khiao)