OK, I've written pages and pages about Oudomxay but the internet has been down here for days. For some reason, it is extremely selective about which pages it will load, but fortunately this is one of them. Yahoo mail, Hotmail, and MySpace will NOT load. So I am here to tell you that I am safe and sound, and that if you have sent me important messages, I can't read them. If there is any emergency, I am currently staying at Vilavong Guesthouse in Oudomxay, room 104, and will be heading to Nong Khiao and Muong Ngoi in the next couple of days.
Although I have loads of great pictures, loading them up is out of the question. I'm going to leave you with this account of one long day, with the promise that there is more to come when I have a decent connection.
Sunday, June 15, 2008 in Oudomxay, Laos
The temple on the hill in the middle of town is equipped with very large speakers directed downward. The flagpoles in the arena and outside the government buildings are likewise outfitted. Every morning, at an inconsistent time between quarter till six and quarter till seven, a broadcast rings out over Oudomxay. It usually begins with the instrumental version of a traditional Lao song, a pentatonal whining that sounds like a funeral dirge on 78 rpm. This goes on for four or five minutes, and then a gentle voice begins to read the daily news. Sometimes the voice is male, sometimes female, and in the background you can hear pitter-patter of raindrops one day, traffic the next, and roosters on the third. It gives the news a reassuringly local feeling. However, the speakers are not symmetrically placed throughout the town, so sound from one speaker may arrive at a listener’s left sleeping ear slightly sooner than the same sound arriving from a more remote speaker. With the music you don’t really notice it, because the music already sounds unnatural. When the voices start, the delay turns their informative monologues into guttural Lao jabberwocky, as well as adding a somehow martial timbre to the broadcast.
This morning it starts at fifteen after six. I am instantly awake but manage to stay relaxed for half an hour of the broadcast. Then, someone begins hammering downstairs, and it is no longer possible to lie comfortably in bed. I rise, rinse my face in the stained sink of the shared latrine in the smoke-smelly guesthouse. The signs all say “No Smoking” in three languages, but on Friday a minivan full of middle-aged Chinese men showed up to enjoy the local hospitality. These were not well-fed men in smart suits, they were stooped, decrepit, and clothed in drab, seedy clothes. The idea of not smoking indoors was ludicrous to them, and they introduced a large cylindrical waterpipe made of metal to the downstairs lounge. This was employed to oxidize pinch after generous pinch of the local ochre-colored tobacco that comes in wormy-yarny clumps out of buckets at the market. The smoke, while fresh, created a pleasing atmosphere and nicely complimented the natural fetor of the guesthouse. Now, after two nights of partying, the smell of stale tobacco is joined by the smells of stale fried food and stale beer. Every surface of the common latrine has a gummy scum that resists soap. For 30.000 kip a night, it’s the best deal for foreigners. Throw in free water and a decently quiet location and it’s not a bad place.
I lock up, refill my waterbottle, and head out. Right in the center of town is, appropriately, the most average restaurant. Every item on their menu falls exactly halfway between the best and worst Oudomxay has to offer. The whole front of the restaurant opens up onto the street, so every diner can be viewed by passersby. It’s a fantastic place to meet people. Since the vast majority of travelers to Oudomxay are only there for one or two nights, you rarely form any real friendships, but the constant refresh-rate ensures that neither bore nor boor lingers long. This morning’s breakfast companion is Jamie from England, a woman of about thirty who came from Muong Ngoi via Nong Khiao and is headed to Luang Nam Tha to do trekking, then to Bokeo to experience gibbons. The two destination provinces have famous outdoor expedition packages available to foreigners. Oudomxay has no such offering, but is a handy waypoint between established activities.
The menu contains propaganda for the local development organizations, both from NGO’s and the provincial government, with email addresses and office locations. The list of available dishes is standard for almost anywhere in Laos: steamed rice, sticky rice; banana pancake; fried noodles; fried rice; fried meat with morning glory; vegetables and rice; baguettes with butter, cheese, meat homogenate, or jam; noodle soup. The baguettes are baked fresh daily and come with a little wedge of laughing-cow cheese. This I take with Lao coffee: thick, oily sludge brewed in a porous bag, leavened with generous gobs of sweetened condensed milk.
Jamie and I chat a bit, and then discover a mutual interest in the field of linguistics. She throws out two words relating to that discipline which I have never heard: ectenic and synoptic. Thus began a wild flurry of delighted exchange of knowledge. Jamie had a degree in Linguistics and intended to return for graduate study. My own amateur interest in the subject has focused mainly on phylogeny of languages, and the interconnectedness of pattern and function between language groups. I have recently tried to grasp the international phonetic alphabet but have no good audio reference to identify some of the sounds represented. Jamie reassured me that the IPA is all bunk because it must be filtered through the ear of a subjective hearer, and what some people hear is different than what other people hear, to say nothing of the way different accents are rendered in IPA. I found myself unwilling to topple the IPA off its place in my linguistic temple on her word alone, though she spoke with firm authority. I related to her my exciting confrontation with the Finnish language, and concluded that the Finns never seemed to have any problem picking up other languages, their own being so complicated that a novel grammar must necessarily be simpler. Jamie looked me in the eye and told me I was wrong. I raised my eyebrows and said nothing. She then told me that her own specialty was childhood language acquisition, and during that process a baby or young person does not know anything about nouns or verbs, only how to utter them and eventually string them together to form meaning. Therefore, according to Jamie, knowledge of new grammars could not come more easily to speakers of any language, that group of people having all acquired language as babies or children. My rebuttal: But can we not arrange languages along a continuum of simple to complicated, confining ourselves strictly to grammar and excluding morphology and phonology? Thus, some languages would be More Complex and some would be Less Complex, and speakers of those in the former category would have better-oiled wheels for the process of assigning meaning to sound. Jamie: But your native grammar is not going to have any effect on how well you can learn about nouns and verbs and all the rest in a foreign language. It’s in the books, I read it. Arlo: Oh, OK then. I fell silent and suddenly didn’t want to talk anymore. I was perfectly capable of pressing the issue, prepared to cite examples from my own acquisition of languages, but no evidence I could present would undermine her faith in The Books, the source of her own authority. Better to wish her luck on her trip and remind her that she should be at the bus stop with plenty of time to spare or else she might not get a seat. And thus, Jamie and her authority disappear from my sphere.
After breakfast, a walk. Up the main street, past the fruit vendors on the sidewalk, selling the curiously fibrous and tasteless Lao mangoes, the leathern mangosteens, the tiny sour plums, and the luscious rambutans. Past the strip-mall selling Chinese goods of every description, like a Wal-Mart but minus every scrap of packaging or advertising – simply heaps of the product on display. I ask at three of the metal-goods merchants whether they have a Beerlao bottle opener, my latest coveted souvenir. None of them do, only big steel things that pull corks as well. My pack is already too heavy.
Turn right and walk between the looming government building, festooned with electric lines, and the flowery-park monument to the country’s first president, Kaysone. The chap on all the money. After a kilometer or so of characterless buildings, I take a random left and head up the hill. After one turn of the road I am in a Hmong village. “Nyozhong, nyozhong,” I say to anyone who stares at me. This is my only Hmong word, the greeting. I buy a bottle of water at the simple bamboo store-stand, and walk upward. Some of the doorframes have feather-totems hanging over them. The Hmong lived up in the high hills for generations, but then the government urged them to resettle in the lowlands, among the Lao and the Khamu.
The day is growing hot, and the Hmong have no apparent interest in me one way or the other, so I go on. Soon I am out of the village and the road has turned to red clay. It winds its way slowly but surely up the hill. After a time it becomes more an avenue for runoff water than for human traffic, and is marred by deep ruts. The hillside, barren from the valley floor, is covered in dense growth. Every tree has been felled to make room for rubber and corn, but between the stalks of corn and the spindly rubber saplings, native weeds grow in profusion. Tribes of grasshoppers assault the plants, squadrons of butterflies patrol the flowers. A huge droning bee with metallic wings and scalloped abdominal segments cruises by like a zeppelin. I start walking up the hillside, aiming for a ridge where I might be able to see the valley from another perspective. It is steep, hot work but not too tiring. There is a tiny bamboo gazebo at the top of the ridge, where farmers can sleep or wait out rainstorms or both. I sit there, drink some water, and survey Oudomxay. By now I can pick out major buildings and landmarks, the big casino-hotels catering to the Chinese tourists, the temple on the hill, the radio tower, the athletic field… and between me and all that, another monument.
It is a white pedestal with two golden figures on it, facing away from me, and a big white bas-relief mural to the side. I have never heard of a double-Buddha, but I could not think what else it could possibly be. It was tucked on a hillside so as not to be visible from any point in Oudomxay – the radio-towers even hide it from the temple’s vantage.
I take a few pictures and then head down. I am a little uneasy walking through cultivated areas in Laos because I have never seen any sign of insect-damage on Lao produce. Whatever pesticides they are using are extremely effective, and I doubt that anybody here has fancy scruples about LD50, breakdown time, or minimum re-entry intervals. You spray the chemicals, the insects die. Never mind the dioxin goblins that used to hang around at bus stations with begging bowls.
The road appears to loop around if I keep following it. Next to the road, at the base of the stripped hills, are large houses with satellite dishes and fences around their yards. This is probably where that lumber money, at least some of it, went. It’s impossible for me to imagine growing up without television, without automobiles, without a nice house to live in. I have a good imagination but the wanting for these things is not an easy image to conjure. I craved Star Wars toys and candy and aquaria – luxury items without a doubt. It took a long exposure time for me to figure out that the commercial/television world has a hollow, grasping soul, and learn to protect myself against its wiles. I can’t honestly say my own culture has figured that out, on the whole, so why deny it to these people? It won’t be difficult to change their plantation back into cloud forest, it will just take a long time. As for the day-to-day, people in fine houses want to know what happens next in the Thai soap opera, and I’m sure we’ve all been in a similar boat at some point in our lives.
The clay road meets with a paved road running north through the valley. At that point, five boys on three bicycles are passing by, and I start chatting with them. They are friendly, cheerful Khamu children on their way to the swimming hole. I hand them colorful cards with various “Eenie Meenie Miney Moe”-style chants in Lithuanian, Latvian, Finnish, Polish, and Italian. I then demonstrate each one, with my finger falling on whoever is “out” with a big flourish. They laugh each time. I encourage them to chatter in Khamu for my voice-recorder, but it’s the same problem every time. “What do you want me to say?” Just talk! Anything! This concept does not compute. Spontaneous discussions are somehow suppressed by recording devices.
They ride off, and I continue on my way back towards town. A large truck occasionally rushes by at absurd speeds, but other than that the road is bare. At the bottom of a dip, a red, green and yellow bus sits motionless. A man with a small, square head, accentuated by his block haircut, stands with a disgruntled look on his face and a cigarette drooping from his mouth as he uses a screwdriver to tighten the metal panels on the outside of the bus. I have only ever seen such panels riveted, and would have taken a picture if his demeanor had been sunnier. Up at the front of the bus, the shirtless, long-haired young driver hangs out of the window and chats with a pair of girls under a parasol.
Suddenly four of the five boys are back, on two bikes. They tell me they want to take me somewhere. Why not? It’s on the way. We stay on the road for a while longer, making faces at each other, and then we turn up a hill on the right. The street is steep but paved, and at the top of the hill is the monument I spotted from above. People coming down the hill look at me in surprise, and then shoot the boys a disapproving look. After this happens for the third time, I turn to the oldest boy and ask him where we are going. He explains it is a monument to the Vietnamese and Lao cooperative victory over the United States.
We arrive and find the gates closed, and a small guardhouse under some trees to the left. A TV is on inside the guardhouse. The boys cast nervous looks at the guard, but he is glued to the telly. I walk straight up to the gate and snap a few pictures while the boys keep watch. Then we quietly and quickly go back down the hill.
As we get closer to town, they start talking amongst themselves about another place to visit. I’m not in any hurry anywhere, so I go with them. As we cross a bridge, I point at Puhipii and ask if there are any ghosts there. Lots, they say. What ghosts? I ask. Then one of the boys launches into a ghost story, almost none of which I understand, but I record every word with the intention of discovering the legend.
We go up another small hill which I had not noticed, and there is another Buddhist temple on top, complete with monastery. Dominating the courtyard outside the temple is an eerie tree. It looks quite dead, and yet leaves cling to the branches. As I get closer, I see all manner of tropical animals, rendered in black, weather-stained concrete, sitting on the branches, and it gradually dawns on me that the tree is concrete as well. The leaves are made of pounded metal that glints dully in the afternoon light.
Most of the monks are in a green quadrangle, playing soccer with a green rattan ball. The boys seem apprehensive when I start taking pictures of the tree. Then they escort me to the edge of the temple, where the slope drops sharply down to the Koh River. There is a long, thin bench on the edge, under the shade of a real tree, a bodhi tree, and from the bench one can see a small shrine a few meters away. One side of the shrine has a glass-covered photograph in a little alcove, a Lao woman from a previous age, her jaw set, her eyes stern. The boys don’t know who she is, exactly, but they know we are supposed to pay homage. We sit for a few minutes while the boys talk to me. I have no idea what they are saying, for the most part, but I am adroit at keeping a person talking, with facial expressions and the occasional affirmative “eunh,” the equivalent of our “Uh-huh.” It is good to just listen.
From our vantage we can see the street that runs alongside the river, and its intersection with the main street, and the roofs of the casino and Chinese market, and beyond that, the valley stretching out to the south. Big black clouds obscure the mountains in that direction, and as we watch, a wall of white begins to advance toward the city as the rain comes.
The wind picks up, and the tops of trees and bamboo start tossing back and forth. The metal leaves of the faux tree make a jangly squeaking, eerie but not entirely unpleasant. Small bits of litter, both organic and synthetic, are whisked into the air like confetti. The people below rush around in a myrmecoid fashion, trying to get everything indoors as the misty wall of precipitation nears. Plastic awnings are stretched out, plastic sheets dragged down over tables full of goods, and raincoats donned. The white wall has eaten up the entire world to the south. The air pulses as if we were in the mouth of some panting creature. Then, with no warning sprinkle, no tippet-tappety of outrider drops, the rain pounds down on us. Great fat droplets crash down with deafening noise. We hurry under the eave of the temple and watch as a tremendous volume of rain falls in a very short time. There is so much that I am unsure whether I am watching water fall through air, or air bubble up through water. The courtyard and quadrangle, despite being on top of a reasonably steep hill, are soon immersed in puddles. The black concrete birds, monkeys, and giraffes on the fake tree bear the deluge with stoic indifference.
A monk opens the door of the temple and bids us enter. He is about eighteen with a ready smile and easygoing manner. He is also Khamu, from Luang Prabang province. He tells me he grew up in the hills with no knowledge of Lao or of Buddhism, and that he believed in ghosts. He says he still believes in ghosts as well as in the teachings of the Buddha.
The inside of the temple is covered with comic-book panels the size of bus windows, each representing a scene from the Ramayana. They are not arranged in such a way as to tell the story by themselves, and the monk apologizes for not knowing the story well enough to tell me. I assure him I have the book at home. I draw the conversation back to the Khamu people, and he tells me of various aspects of their lives before “standard living.” He says that now the village chief’s responsibility is to bring the standard living to people, an increasingly difficult job. He also lists off several Khamu names. The names, as with the numbers, have heavy Lao influence.
Eventually I drag the boy over to the monk and explain to them that I want to know the story of Puhipii. They converse a while, in Khamu, and then the monk says “This isn’t really clear to me. There are ghosts, who came down to eat sugar cane, and then I don’t know.” I was tantalized, but could extract nothing further from any of them.
The rain stops abruptly, and we head back to town. The boys cycle off home, and, it being nearly dinnertime, I make my way to the indubitable best restaurant in town. It is run by a single mother of three girls, and often it takes up to an hour for food to arrive, as she does all the cooking herself. But it is definitely worthwhile. The menu includes such gems as pork stomach, chicken hearts, and liver, but I normally eschew such items unless they are served by a host or hostess. In addition there are spicy salads, generous noodles with lots of fresh vegetables, voluminous soups, and all manner of rice and noodle dishes. Tonight I opt for chicken, mushrooms and ginger, with sticky rice.
I share a table with two other foreigners, both of whom I’ve seen around town. One is a Finnish woman who is never far from a cigarette, the other a Tanzanian woman shaped like a pear with long skinny arms and legs. They are both associated with local NGO’s. The Finn is delighted to hear some of her own language, and congratulates me for having mastered at least some of the grammatical intricacies. All I know in Swahili, however, is Jambo, but this makes the Tanzanian woman laugh heartily.
I mention my interest in Puhipii, both as a scientist and as a backpacker. I’d like to see it protected, somehow. The Finn laughs, puffing smoke. “An idealist,” she says. My idea is that Puhipii could be used as a day-trekking location, so that Oudomxay would have some competition with Luang Nam Tha as a natural wonder destination. The Finn is all for it, and beings explaining the process I will need to go through. First I will need a cell phone. Then I need to schedule interviews with the lowest guys in the provincial offices, but I must make them feel that they are big, important people. I must speak slowly and clearly and repeat myself many times. Eventually they will admit that they have no real power in this matter, and that I should try to schedule a meeting with the governor.
Unfortunately, she goes on, the governor is usually in China. He has been courted, wooed and charmed by the Chinese, and has been instrumental in paving the way for exploitation of land. The Chinese are allowed to come to Oudomxay province, set up mines or sawmills, and extract the resources, without having to pay Lao taxes. The Finn tells me that I may find out that the lumber on Puhipii has been promised to some foreign company who is simply waiting for the right time to chop it down.
The Tanzanian works with a food distribution program, and she shares some of her experiences. There is no food shortage in this part of Laos. People accept bags of United Nations white rice, sell it and use the money to buy sticky rice, which is then also resold. Local farmers are spending more time growing rubber and corn for the Chinese, and less time growing rice for themselves, so demand is rising. Other times, she says, they come to a drop-off point in the UN truck, where some hill-village trail intersects the road, and they leave rice, canned fish, biscuits, and preserves, but the people don’t take the rice. Often the UN people have to pick up the old bag of rice and leave the new one.
The Finn waves her cigarette around in exasperation. She’s been here seven years and still can’t wrap her mind around the choices these people make. I tell her about my year in China, and my sense that the more I understood what people were saying, the less I understood what they were thinking. “That is exactly it!” she said, stabbing the red coal at me. “Be prepared for that when you talk about this mountain.”
On my way back through town, I consider crusading for Puhipii. I don’t really want to stay in Oudomxay for days and days waiting for interviews with corrupt politicians, nor do I want to invest in a cell phone. But what does that make me if I don’t do this? In the end, I decide to send emails to the politicians but not to get a phone. I make this decision on a number of bases: first, the trees are still on Puhipii while more distant mountains have already been clearcut – so perhaps it enjoys a kind of “folk protection” from people who are superstitious about logging a haunted mountain. Second, although I am an insect aficionado, I do not have any evidence of Puhipii being a biodiversity “hot spot” over and above the little spineless critters, and most people are moved only to disgust by the sight of them. Besides snakes, there are no charismatic megafauna on Puhipii to pull at the heartstrings – a thickly-eyelashed baby monkey, for example. Third, to do this right, I needed more time than the two weeks I have left on my Laos visa. I would like to put together a presentation, in the Lao language, complete with photographs and outlines. Then again, am I just copping out of this because I am lazy? What about all my little chitinous friends up on that mountain? They will just have to make do for now, until I am better-prepared to fight on their behalf.
I have an appointment for some community service up at the main temple. I ascend and meet my friend Sulesit, a young Khamu monk from 32-kilometer Village, thirty-two kilometers to the south. We walk back through town to his classroom, a shambling wooden building with a sloped dirt floor. At the front is a dry erase board, and a handsome wooden stereo speaker acting as a table for pens and erasers. The board is covered with similar-sounding English words like sit and cite, cheap and chip, and so on. The walls are decorated with yellowing, decayed papers written by former students. Near the ceiling are four framed certificates, the credentials of the teacher, now draped with dusty cobwebs.
The teacher is delighted to have me there, as a native speaker, and asks me to read through the word list several times. Then he asks the students if they have any questions for me. None do. We sit in silence for a couple of minutes, then I get up and start drawing on the board, asking the students for the English words for my drawings. I always hear the Lao word first, which is helpful for me, and then one or the other of them will come up with the English word. We continue this until the lesson ends. I walk back through town with Sulesit and say goodbye to him at the foot of the temple stairs. Then I return to my guesthouse.
The Chinese men have departed and all is quiet. I read for a while, listening to the chuckling of geckoes and the chirr of crickets. A small beetle ambles across my bed, doing no harm, so I let him go. I am starting to feel drowsy, so I go out to the common latrine to brush my teeth. When I return, I hear a chorus of shouting male voices. They are exuberant and cheerful. It dies down, and then starts again a few minutes later. These sounds are concordant with competition, and I am interested to see a contest. I put my shoes back on and head into the humid night. The waxing gibbous moon burns its way through the clouds, and a few buildings have external fluorescent lights, but otherwise all is dark. I follow the noise to a squat building, and inside a chain-link fence, a group of men is playing the Lao equivalent of bocce ball. They quickly notice me and invite me in.
I sit on a bench and watch the play. From what I can gather, they first throw a tiny plastic ball down to the other end of the gravel pit, then hurl metal spheres the size of baseballs in an effort to land the closest to the little ball. They can also knock opponents’ balls away from the target.
One of the men, a muscular fellow with receding hair, a round face, and a nose shaped like a snail, was wearing an old orange football jersey. I stared in complete disbelief when I saw it had a big white #3 and the word Karliss emblazoned on the back. What are the chances? I wanted to like the guy who was wearing it, but he had the demeanor of a brute and a bully. He had the beginnings of a beer belly and an aggressive swagger. Though the game was all in fun, he scowled and spat a lot.
Another man, whip-thin and clad in a billowy blue silk shirt, ironed trousers, and heavy leather shoes, looked like a Vietnamese Steve Buscemi, down to the bulging eyes and hollow cheeks. He was in charge of carrying things, and had a big beer bottle and a glass in one hand, and his game-balls and a vertical piece of metal shelving in the other. The shelving-piece had little ovals cut out of it at regular intervals, and was used as the caliper to see which metal ball was closest to the target. When it was not in action, he tucked it under his armpit and poured glass after glass of beer for everyone. We all shared the same glass, and dashed the last five millimeters of suds on the ground for the ghosts. The beer had a strangely skunk-like aftertaste. There was a whole plastic crate of cold beers over in the corner, and Nguyen Buscemi was amazingly adept at switching an empty for a full, then using the cap of another full as a bottle opener.
Both sides had their champions – one a long, lanky fellow with a big pompadour, the other a little balding guy with bushy eyebrows. Eyebrows had just sunk his ball within a few inches of the target, and everyone on his team was yelling “Gehm, gehm!” which I took to mean “Game.” But then the lanky guy came up, hefted his ball a couple of times, and bowled it expertly into the other one, neatly knocking it away and taking its place. Shouts erupted from both sides, and all the men began counting out money. There was a moment when the dullest-looking fellow and Karliss #3 had conflicting opinions on redistribution, and both of their bloods rose. But a cooler head prevailed and negotiated the exchange successfully.
The next game was about to start, and all of the men turned to me and asked me if I could play. I insisted that I could not. Come on, they said, it’s just throwing a ball. If money had not been involved, I might have been game to give it a try. However, I had no wish to be instrumental in drunken men winning or losing money from each other. Nor could I take any more skunk-beer, so I wished them all luck and found my way out.
I walked around the deserted, dark streets for a while, regarding the silhouette of Puhipii against the moonlit clouds. The ghosts of the mountain beckoned to me, but tonight I was too tired.
Fake ant
