Quaoar Power

Beetles of Bali

2012-01-26T19:38:00.001-08:00

Adventure in Thailand

2009-12-03T17:56:00.000-08:00

My mother, my friend S. and I all set out together for Phu Kradueng National Park. We started the day at 4:25 AM, in a rat’s armpit of a town called Chumphae. We had spent the night in a shabby motel run by grotesque men who obviously championed cerumen and lanolin. We were anxious to leave, and caught the very first morning bus.
This took us to the town of Phu Kradueng, a small gateway community for the national park. There was a restaurant next to the bus station, where a half-paralyzed, half-deaf man served us coffee and yogurt. A middle-aged, bespectacled woman then appeared and shuttled us in the back of a truck to the park entrance.
Longtime readers may remember my previous visit to Phu Kradueng with Scott Hammers in 1999. The park consists of a vast plateau that rises 1300 abrupt meters from the jungle floor. It is a sky island, bearing a unique, isolated high-altitude microclimate. The top is reached by means of a steep 5km path, with most of the elevation gained in the last 1.5km.
We checked our big backpacks at the headquarters, got our tickets, and reserved a tent at the top. The tent-rental was extraordinarily exorbitant: 225 baht/night! Every other national park in Thailand rents them for 50 baht/night. For three nights’ rental we could have bought our own tent. I tried to explain this to the stony-faced money-acceptor woman, but she was unmoved. Her job was to take my money, not to justify or even consider comparative National Park economics. Anyway, we were only planning to stay two nights, so a new tent wouldn’t quite have paid for itself.
We began our walk at 7:30am, hoping to escape the ferocity of the sun which typically begins around 11:30. A group of orange-robed monks and lay support began their walk at the same time, and we leapfrogged them all the way to the top. The older monks were very friendly, wrinkled old men with ready grins and eyes twinkling behind their spectacles like stars in a telescope. The youngest monk was in his twenties, a hale young man with a powerful flat face. His shaved eyebrows gave his gaze an unnatural intensity, which, coupled with his guarded, neutral expression, made him seem like some unearthly being looking out through eyeholes in a mask of living monkflesh.
We also leapfrogged with the porters, a group of callus-shouldered folk who made their living carrying things up to the top of the plateau. Today they were carrying building supplies – long planks of synthetic materials with a waterbottle strapped on top to ease their thirst. Several of them spoke to us at varying points of the climb, when we were taking breaks at the same spot. They were polite but curious, and were evidently impressed that my white-haired mother was making the trip.
Our natural surroundings were breathtaking. Towering dipterocarp trees loomed over the path on both sides, and grew twisting buttress roots in all directions. Strangler figs engulfed other trees in varying stages of completion, like great strands of molten mozzarella flowing up the trunks of unfortunate victims and sprouting sun-stealing leaves at the top of the canopy.
Behind us, to the East, were the jungled plains of Loei Province, stretching out to hazy horizons. The sun was bright but not yet painfully hot, warming the stone steps and dry dusty earth. Dragonflies flitted by the hundreds on the trail, though no water was evident nearby. Strange birdcalls rang out through the forest, and the metallic drone of cicadas made the air itself thrum around our heads.
As we climbed, the forest became darker and thicker, and the air cooled. Giant boulders began to appear on the hillside, some of them with trees growing on top and sending down snakelike roots to communicate with the earth. The stone steps of the path took on a fairy-tale appearance, covered with broad fallen leaves and dappled with sunlight. Some of the boulders were decorated with druidic-looking adornments: short cairns and propped sticks by the hundreds, the work of luck-seeking travelers or nocturnal forest spirits.
Shortly after we took a lunch-break, the trail steepened extremely. We picked our way up among rocks that seemed to be arrested mid-tumble by coiling roots, and scooted up cleavages formed by pairs of boulders. We came to an extremely steep, stainless steel stairway, the first of several that aided us to get over the more vertical parts of the trail. At last we reached the lip of the plateau, and found ourselves on a windswept flat plain dotted with tall, graceful pine trees that looked like the ones on Japanese silk paintings. Here and there a vast oak spread its brawny arms over a circle of earth. The air was warm, dry and spicy. We celebrated the climb by hacking up a pineapple and devouring it on the spot, spitting the inedible bits into the shrubbery. We rested a while, then continued on the long, sandy road to the campsite.
The central campsite was located within a developed area that also contained several military-looking buildings, bungalows, and a row of small restaurants and souvenir shops. I applied to the quartermaster for our tent. He was a young man with a lantern jaw and a very curious twangy voice, and I immediately sensed I could trust him. He was congenial without being unctuous, and gave us extra pillows and sleeping bags at no charge.
It was still early afternoon, but storm clouds were gathering, staining the light a strange yellow and giving the atmosphere the feeling of a deep indrawn breath waiting to exhale. We retired to our respective tents for a nap, and the storm broke. It was exhilarating to be inside a thin fabric shelter while thunder and rain raged outside, and our spirits were very high.
Late in the afternoon, the rain stopped and the sun appeared for a last hurrah, making the clouds pearly in patches. We applied to a restaurant for some green curry, which was highly palatable. Then we played cards until well after dark. We nosed around the souvenir shops a bit, then decided it was a good night for a stroll. On our way back up the trail on which we had arrived, however, the military-looking ranger at the front desk prevented us. He claimed wild elephants were roving around in the area, and that we must wait until eight the next morning. Compounding my frustration was the noisy generator that had been fired up to allow park staff to enjoy the miracle of television. I explained to the ranger that I was looking for silence, but this concept was so totally alien to him that flickers of irritation began to cross his face. He finally told me I could go on a walk, the other direction, at 6am, but that was the extent of his concession.
With no walk to go on, we decided to turn in, and made our respective preparations. My mother bade me goodnight as I was still brushing my teeth. After a while S. approached me with a worried look and said something might be the matter. She refused to give me any details at first, not wanting to falsely alarm me, but in a few minutes she went back into the bathroom, and came out with a look of panic. There was blood in her urine.
A quick medical history update revealed that a chronic condition posed a serious threat to her kidneys. Semi-monthly tests looked for minute amounts of blood, for evidently when it reached detectable levels, things were shutting down and her life was at risk. Although I never actually saw the urine in question, she had no doubt whatsoever that the blood was detectable.
I roused my mother, who was in her sleeping bag but not asleep, and we had a consultation. Given the possibility that S. was bleeding to death through her kidneys, we saw no recourse but to get her to a hospital. I took her by the hand, looked her in the eyes and told her I would be with her every step of the way. Thus began a strange and difficult journey.
First I had to eat some crow and approach the ranger with all appearance of respect and submission. My dictionary inexplicably had no words for “kidney” or “emergency,” and so I pantomimed the situation. He nodded and took us to a small medical room with a pair of cots. He unlocked a cabinet and got some stomach-soothing antacid. I stopped him and tried to explain, but soon saw I was getting nowhere. I asked him if there was anybody who spoke English, and he made a call on his cell phone to the director of the park down at the base.
The man on the phone was all business. He told me the only way down was to walk. He wanted to know if the situation could wait until morning. It could not. He said his rangers would escort us to the base, and then he would drive us to the hospital. He also made a special note about the danger of wild elephants. It was a risk we were simply going to have to take. As Kurt Vonnegut put it, “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.” And how we would dance before the night was through!
My mom and I packed up our bags in about three minutes, with me carrying S.’s load inside the biggest bag. Then an ancient and rusty pickup appeared to convey us to the cliff-face where the trail led down. There were five shotgun-wielding rangers in the back of the truck. We got inside, and waited five agonizing minutes for no reason we could perceive. Finally a ranger showed up with a canvas bag and distributed shells to each shotgunner, and we were on our way. One man spotlit the road in front of us, and the other ones held their weapons at the ready. The road, being composed of fine sand, made for slow going, but at last we got to the trailhead.
By now poor S. had come face to face with the ontological dread inherent in a potentially fatal medical condition, which was not aided by the terrifying aspect of a night descent on a steep, wet, slippery mountain populated by aggressive elephants. She was beginning to lose control, but my mother advised her to take it step by step, with the first step being Getting Off the Mountain. S. sobered up a bit, and we began.
We each had a headlamp, but the rangers had powerful flashlights which they kept trained at our feet, so we could always see where we were stepping. The rangers were cheerful and extremely professional. The first part of the trail was the steepest, and the rain had slickened the stones and fallen leaves, but we plodded down without incident.
As it began to level off, a low hooting call came up from below. One of the rangers answered, and soon we saw a new ranger appear in the darkness. He escorted us to where another team of men were waiting, and we were handed off. The rangers from the top wished us luck and headed back up.
The new group were puzzled because none of us was evidently in ill-health – no spouting blood or bandaged limbs. But they executed their mission with the same good-natured efficiency. We were handed off to a third group after a while, and this group had no shotguns, only slingshots.
Shortly after this group adopted us, there was a sound from the forest that could only be a large animal. Unfortunately we had to continue to get closer to that sound before we could start getting further away. The rangers urged us to hurry. We heard the sound of bamboo clattering, and several loud plosive grunts. One ranger stationed himself at the edge of the trail, slingshot drawn, while the other one hurried us down. Once we were well-past the danger, they told us it was a wild elephant irritated at having been woken by the lights and noise.
Despite everything, it was a beautiful night: warm, balmy, moist, with a faint stirring breeze. The rain had awakened a whole new suite of smells in the forest, and the trees cast black silhouettes against a dark gray sky. The moon rose, waning gibbous, and through the hazy distance it was a strangely vivid orange color: just the shade, or so I imagined, of blood-tinged urine. The only insect I saw on the whole journey down was something that flapped at my headlight with stout crispy wings. I put my hand out and it alit on my index finger: a small dragonfly, clad in green and sand-colored armor. It regarded me with its large violet eyes and seemed to nod at me. Then it flapped its wings and disappeared.
The last leg of the descent seemed to last longest. Our legs were sore, our joints aching. We had to stop for several rests. S. was evidently weakening, but drew on iron reserves of willpower to get herself down the rest of the way. At the bottom, the Big Boss was waiting with our stored bags and a truck. We piled in, and were shuttled to the local hospital. Although a major hurdle had been cleared, the ordeal was still young.
We arrived at the hospital quarter after midnight. The doctors had all departed at midnight and would not be back till 8am. The on-duty nurses, none of whom appeared older than twenty-two, were not qualified to handle an emergency. S. was still not spraying blood or cradling a severed limb, so the nurses were not convinced that there was any real medical emergency. They took her temperature and assured her she did not have the ‘flu. Then they invited us to sit for the next seven-and-three-quarters hours until a doctor appeared. There was no large dictionary available for me to make any better explanation, and the nurses were afflicted with that dull pig-headedness that prevents a person from attaining the least insight into what another person is trying to communicate.
There were no doctors and no tests that could be run. There were no international phone calls that could be made. There was no internet access. Our nerves were all shot. We quickly decided we needed another hospital. The best one in the region was Khon Kaen Ram, where there was also a medical school and a research facility. There were no taxis, buses, or vehicles of any kind available. Finally I tried another tactic. I asked the nurses if they had brothers or uncles who had cars. Yes, but they were asleep. Well, I said, do any of them want to wake up and give us a ride to Khon Kaen for $100? This got results. Another five agonizing minutes went by while the nurses clustered around a telephone.
Then a young doctor appeared, with a polite and efficient manner. He instantly grasped the situation and offered us an ambulance ride to Khon Kaen, if we would be willing to pay for it, about $60. Of course we would! He wrote a quick note to the staff at the destination, and then we got into an ambulance van. The driver was absurdly cheerful, quite evidently a man who enjoyed his job. Then, with flashing lights and dangerous speed, we were off!
We all tried to catch forty winks in the ambulance, but it was difficult. Rural townships sped past the windows like shooting stars. The flashing ambulance lights illuminated reflectors and flat shiny surfaces.
In just two hours, we reached Khon Kaen Ram, where a team of orderlies was waiting with a wheelchair. They bundled S. off to an examination room and immediately started running tests. My mother and I, mud-spattered and exhausted, heaped the backpacks into the ER waiting room and sat staring like zombies. We had been up for 22 hours and had hiked 15 kilometers on extremely steep trails, half of it at night.
The on-duty doctor was wakened from a cot and looked extremely bleary, but he was clearly competent. After examining S., he declared she was not in immediate danger but would be admitted to the hospital that night. Her urine was to be sent for various tests, and specialists would see her in the morning. She was wheeled up to a room, and I was charged with the task of finding her American doctor’s telephone number on the internet.
Fortunately the hospital had an all-night terminal, and I found the number. By this point I was feeling nearly dead of exhaustion, but I agreed to try to contact this doctor.
My mother recognized that I was too tired to accomplish anything useful at this point, and suggested we get a hotel room and sleep for a couple of hours. This we did, and then went on a quest to find a telephone that could access the far-off United States. Once again I had to deal with painfully stupid 7-11 clerks who could not be made to understand that there was urgency. They finally sold me a phone card. As far as I have been able to tell since, the card was only good for one phone booth in all of Thailand. I got hold of the operator at OHSU in Portland, but he could not hear my voice through the defective phone. I tried again, with the same result. Finally we went looking for another phone booth, of which there were dozens, but none that would accept the “LENSO” card. I still have it, and I still have not found any other place I can use it.
We returned to the hospital where S. was awake and in good humor. The specialists had seen her and decided she was not in mortal danger, but that the internal bleeding was the result of a severe bladder infection. She was on a course of antibiotics, and had been given a sponge-bath.
We discovered we could call OHSU from her bedside phone, which was a great relief. Unfortunately her doctor no longer worked at OHSU. She chatted for a while with another doctor who knew the condition, and he assured her that the Thai medicos were doing everything that their American colleagues would be doing if S. were there instead of here. This was a great comfort.
The hospital room was designed with visitors in mind, with a low couch where an Arlo could flop down and nap. This I did, with great relief, and we spent a pleasant morning at the hospital. Then my mom and I went to the local mall, where we saw Thai breakdancers performing outside of KFC, and we ate some ice cream, and walked back to the hospital. On the way we admired the red plastic palm trees and dinosaurs on the side of the road, and the curious street lamps.
By then S. was feeling much better and was ready to get out of there. She still had to wait for a final OK from her Thai doctor and a few test results, but she had unquestionably regained her spirit. Eventually the doctor came, and S. received some medicines, and was released.
To celebrate we went out to a German restaurant and had a big, delicious German dinner. Thus ended our ordeal, and thus began the ending of our long trip together. The next day we returned to Bangkok, and then my mother departed, followed by S. two days later.

V Mang on Board

2009-05-11T13:20:00.000-07:00

Dr Nyanggodai “Terry” Mang woke himself up in the middle of the night by scratching his face with his own ragged fingernails. He groaned and massaged the weals he’d left. A plague of mites infested the entire Farnsær station, and they had a great thirst for mammal blood. Dr Mang had sworn up and down while creating the station that no unwanted life forms were going to be present. He had insisted on strict control of all DNA that came onto the station, living or dead. And despite his efforts, a race of tiny cone-shaped mites swarmed through every crevice of the entire structure after just four months in orbit.
They grazed mainly on the flecks and flakes of human hair and skin that shed continuously off the bodies of Dr Mang and his colleague, Thomas Thornfall. Air filters gathered these bits and pieces up and shunted them to collectors below the gardens. Neither Dr Mang nor Tom cared to poke around in the dust ducts, so the colony of mites grew to huge numbers of individuals, each about a third of a millimeter long. As their population swelled beyond the capacity of the Dr and Tom’s skinslough, they sought other nutrition.
Some of them began to burrow into the tough, chewy ropes that made up the walls of the corridor, and had emerged through microscopic tunnels into other quarters of the ship. They were small enough to escape immediate detection at first, and feasted on the film of food-oils on badly-cleaned plates, and the slurry of finger oil and skin cells that coated the keyboards and buttons. Soon they colonized the two humans, and lived surreptitiously in their eyebrows, heads, armpits and pubes.
A few days ago Dr Mang had scraped his cheek while testing the antimagnetic inertiabsorber – a minor wound which should have healed up almost overnight. Instead, it became a paradise of mites, who could reproduce at astronomic rates in the soft tissues of Dr Mang’s dermis. Twelve hours later, he was sitting at breakfast listening to one of Tom’s interminable monologues, and he could not stop rubbing his cheek. It itched through the morning, and began to produce tiny granules of translucent pink crust. Under Dr Mang’s magnifying goggles, the granules were rough, slightly asymmetrical octahedrons. Tom watched blandly as Dr Mang assembled the gold spatterer for the electron microscope, which had been sitting unused in its case for two months. Dr Mang was jumpy and frantic because he sensed an intrusive presence in his cheek, and it riled him all the more to see Tom, immobile as a pudding, observing him through half-closed eyes that looked like two monkeyfistfuls of gray jelly.
Dr Mang used the dull side of a scalpel to scrape some of the crust on a slide. He slid the slide into the newly-assembled device, which was about the size and shape of two beer steins stacked atop each other, with handles jutting out on opposite sides. At the bottom was a tripod, and on the top was a set of goggles that one leaned into to see the image. Dr Mang did so and was frankly horrified to see that each octahedron was made up of hundreds of mites, clutching each other with short, scaly legs. Each mite secreted a thick fluid that crystallized into the eight-sided granules. As Dr Mang watched, the little pebble of crystal began to shatter as the mites broke out of their shells and began to explore the inside of the microscope. There were at least a couple dozen in the single granule Dr Mang focused on.
He was disgusted to be parasitized, and what is more, he had an honest emotional outrage that such a creature was even on the station. His protocols had been foolproof in test trials in Wenatchee. A quick examination revealed he was entirely covered with mites from head to toe, and so was Tom. They took turns in the vacuum shower and used proteolytic shampoo. Then the cleaning robot doused every surface on the station with radioactive water while the humans huddled inside the lead-lined, antimagnet-shielded escape pod. It took twenty hours for the radiation levels to drop back down, and the cramped little chamber was the perfect venue for Tom to start talking about his book. It was a novel about a gambler and seemed to have no real chronological narrative flow, as far as Dr Mang could discern. It was painfully obvious that Tom had never gambled in his life; in fact, one of the reasons Tom had been selected for the assignment was his steadfast devotion to not taking risks. Tom’s sweaty custard of a face never seemed to change expression as he recited events from the gambler’s story. Dr Mang could not screen them out because Tom was right next to him.
The last four months had been a series of daily challenges as to how to screen Tom out, even within the relatively large area of the station. Tom was a single child, home-schooled, and had never had a meaningful relationship with any other human besides his parents. They had listened to his every utterance with utmost attention, and Tom never tired of uttering his life’s narration as he lived it. He was a prodigiously good scientist, and garnered the respect of his peers, but never their affection. He was slow to realize that other people were not as good at listening as his parents, and he was rarely invited to social occasions. Eventually he realized that people treated each other differently than they treated him, and he was gravely affronted. He began to only speak with a kind of sullen caution, which evolved into a mealy blandness of expression.
There was no denying his technical expertise and his ability to juggle hundreds of variables when applying himself to science and technology, which trait had attracted Dr Mang and Tuan Kudah. His math skills were almost supernatural.
Three of them came up, originally, but the third astronaut, “Mycorhizal” Michael Reiser, had returned to his home in Oregon after the superstructure of the station had been grown. Since then, Tom had grown to feel a bit too familiar with Dr Mang, and his loquaciousness returned like a tide. The worthy doctor had many relatives who liked to ramble on, so he had a fairly thick callus on his eardrum against the boredom that comes from listing to a person have an endless conversation with himself. He had therefore not made an effort to stave off Tom’s logorrhea when it first began to flow, and by the time Dr Mang’s hackles began to rise, Tom was well-habituated to having an ear in the vicinity of his mouth. Dr Mang had not anticipated the proximity that Tom was able to maintain within the closed corridors and chambers of Farnsær. Nor had he been able to foresee the double-stupefaction engendered by Tom’s near monotony and his plain-yogurt diatribes.
Despite the deep cleaning, the mites returned. Dr Mang fretted about how to combat them. Ranatra, on Earth, could not identify them from the pictures he took. They seemed to always return from somewhere. Dr Mang had begun to prowl the corridors with a spray-bottle of bleach, walking at a slow shuffle and chewing his fingernails as he examined every square centimeter of wall and floor. Tom ambled behind him, sharing uncomfortably intimate information about his main character.
Dr Mang soon had to accept that the mites could not be eradicated. He returned to the real work of the station, perfecting the Znepdrive through numerous iterations of experiment. When the two of them were busy, Tom was less apt to talk, and often Dr Mang would push the work until they were both exhausted. Then, one night, he dreamt that the mites were emanating from Tom’s nose and ears, perhaps from inside his head. In the dream the mites were trailing through the station in floating, unbroken streams, like strands of spiderweb, and Dr Mang accidentally brushed into one that had formed in his personal quarters. He tried to snatch it off his cheek, and his sleeping hand had done the same. The jagged, torn nails snagged into his cheek and scored two thin welts into his skin. He woke up with a groan.
Even in sleep, Tom intruded. He had a flabby moist snore, like bubbles through porridge, that found its way into the vents. Dr Mang listened to it for several minutes and found he could not fall back asleep.
He rose and toured the gardens and the reefs. Surprisingly, none of them had shown any sign of mites whatsoever. All the sea urchins were in rosy good health, and all the plants looked bright and vigorous. Dr Mang chewed a stem of basil and stared out into space. The other astronauts were arriving this morning. Tom would stay at the station and the rest of them would go to Quaoar. Dr Mang was immensely relieved by this prospect, but he wondered whether any of the other four astronauts would be as hard to suffer as Tom. The Ambria was smaller than Farnsær, and personalities would be amplified that much more. What if the problem was in Dr Mang, and not Tom? What if his problem was simply that he had a problem, and Tom was only a peripheral player, a mere mirror for Dr Mang’s psychic malaise? His mind reeled and wheeled like a shark chasing its own tail inside a giant washing machine that was rolling down the side of a mountain. Somehow, with that stem of basil in his mouth, time got the better of him and he was surprised by the jolt that ran through the station as the shuttle arrived from Earth. He spat out the stem, hurriedly donned his yellow jumpsuit, and ran to greet his friends.

IV BLASTOFF

2009-05-11T13:18:00.001-07:00

The morning of the launch was surprisingly free of fanfare. The four astronauts gathered at an airfield in the vast volcanic wasteland of Eastern Washington, outside of Tonasket. They uttered a few words to journalists, and then boarded an unassuming, rather ugly aircraft that had begun life as a medium-sized passenger jet but was now covered with overlapping scales of heat-armor. Once on, the astronauts were examined by a military official who firmly instructed Oleg not to activate the escape drive until they were in international airspace, and any failure to do so would lead to an immediate grounding order from the United States Air Force. Oleg had been in the Navy for a long time and knew that appropriate solemnity was called for, but he was unable to totally mask a Slavic expression of cold disdain that crept over his features. Both he and the military man knew that once the escape drive was activated, this plane would be completely and totally out of reach of anything the Air Force could muster.
The four travelers were crammed into the foremost part of the plane. Ranatra sat beside Oleg in the cockpit, and Howard and Emily faced each other directly behind them. All their belongings were already in orbit, along with the mission leader, Dr Terry Mang. This vehicle was designed only to shuttle them up to Farnsær, the orbiting platform; afterwards, it would fall into the atmosphere and burn up.
The vast majority of the jet’s volume was taken up by a huge cylinder studded with wires, batteries, and tanks of fluid. This was the escape drive, reverse-engineered from alien technology found in Antarctica. It had been successfully employed several times to carry materials and materiel up to Farnsær. Typically it fell into the ocean and was recovered, but this time, the shielding had been stripped off so it would incinerate during re-entry. Dr Mang was no longer going to be able to supervise its recovery, and he had no wish whatsoever for it to fall into the hands of any military.
They lifted off, and the cracked yellow-and-black landscape sunk beneath them. Ranatra had still been on an airplane less times than she had fingers on her hands, and the giddy, sickening thrill still seized her. She looked out at the innumerable miles of sere, rocky terrain, and reflected on how little it looked like the Earth she knew. They climbed into the sky, so dizzyingly high that all clouds were below them. Above, a depthless dark blue, free of feature or blemish. By the time they were over the green and fertile western edge of the continent, clouds blanketed the entire landscape, save for the snowy cones of volcanoes that emerged like islands from the cottony mat of moisture. Then, soon, they were over the Pacific, and the entire visible world was rumpled, fluffy white clouds and deep blue sky.
“Ten minutes to escape,” Oleg announced. Emily and Howard were already asleep, sagging against their safety restraints. Ranatra looked at the array of buttons and instruments in front of her.
“How does the escape drive work?” she asked.
“We go up to 49000 feet, increase to maximum speed with the normal engines, then I press this blue button,” Oleg said.
“And?” Ranatra prompted.
“And we accelerate to eight miles per second,” he said. She looked at him and slowly raised her eyebrows. “To tell you the truth,” he admitted, “I don’t know exactly how it works. There is a tank full of sea urchins in the very middle, and a big steel propeller that unfolds out of the back of the plane. Power goes into the sea urchins, and something comes out that I don’t understand, and that turns the propeller. I do know that Dr Mang had to get help from a team of Japanese metallurgists to build a propeller that wouldn’t burst into flames because it was turning so fast.”
“What about the sea urchins?” Ranatra asked, “Will they fall down with the rest of the plane?”
“No, they are our little friends, we bring them with us,” Oleg said. “We need the water, too. We’ll take everything apart when we get to Farnsær, then we let the spare parts turn into shooting stars.”
Ranatra thought about the hundreds of creatures, spineless and brainless but still animate and motile, crawling about on their tube feet and wiggling their spines. They had come so very, very close to extinction on Earth, down to a few dozen juvenile individuals, all of them together small enough to be held in her cupped hand. Now they were setting out for another planet.
She shifted her gaze to Oleg, dressed in a jumpsuit. He had seemed very intimidating for a long time, with his great height and bearlike physique, his cool efficiency and relentless resolve. But now they had spent months together, and she’d glimpsed a light of warmth and humor flickering inside the granite façade. Her eyes traced over the planes and angles of his face, the wide cheekbones and the protruding flat forehead, the strongly-bridged nose, the slightly-pointed ears. How different he looked from the men in her world.
He turned and looked at her, his gray eyes flickering under the heavy brow. A hint of a smile played around his mouth. She reminded him of the new students who showed up in his childhood classes, whose parents had moved into the city from the Siberian wilderness. Besides being dark of eye and hair like her, these new students bore themselves with a quiet pride and bravery, even though they were clearly uneasy to find themselves in these new surroundings. Oleg recognized the marks of hard work and difficulty on Ranatra’s soul, had seen the pain in the depths of her black eyes, eyes so dark the pupil was indistinguishable from the iris. Despite all that, there was an undeniable joy of existence and discovery in her being, that no sadness would ever completely overwhelm.
The plane could climb no higher with its earthly powers. Oleg quickly unstrapped himself and moved through the cockpit, checking everyone’s safety straps. He unlatched Emily’s chair and swung it around so it was facing forward. She opened an eye and squinted at him.
“Time for blast-off?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Oleg, rotating the still-unconscious Howard ninety degrees and locking him in place. Then he returned to his seat, cast an eye over Ranatra’s buckles, and put on his reflective sunglasses. “Here we go,” he said, and pressed the blue button.
There came a heavy, shuddering mechanical noise that they heard as well as felt, as large parts slid into place somewhere behind them. Then they heard a high-pitched electric whine, accompanied by a tingling sensation in their ears and noses. There was a bass thrumming they felt in the deepest part of their chests, and the airplane leapt forward and upward. The breath was crushed out of them, and they labored to inhale. Their eyeballs were compressed and the cockpit became blurry, and their organs began to ache inside their bodies. It was as if huge sheets of elastic were being stretched tighter and tighter over them. But, soon enough, the elastic relaxed and the deep blue of the sky gave way to the black of space, and stars spread out in front of them. They could not see the earth from this angle, but its radiance made the front window glow blue around its margins.
The four of them panted and wheezed as the air and life returned to their bodies. As they recovered, Farnsær hove into view before them. It looked like nothing more than a colossal fried egg, slightly convex on the yoke side. The “white” of the egg was made of tangles and braids of some kind of ropy green-gray fiber, and the “yolk” was a huge hemisphere of opalescent material pointed away from the sun. They circled around the yolk side and approached from the rear. They saw the vast tangled mat was covered with dark globes about three meters across. Oleg maneuvered the plane around to a cavernous chamber that yawned open on the rear side of the station, and the passengers felt a great heaving force as they were drawn into the hangar.
The plane settled into a mat of the green-gray fibers, and they waited as the hangar was flooded with warmth and oxygen. Then they saw a round door open and a figure in a yellow jumpsuit hurried toward them.

III Howard and Emily

2009-05-11T13:16:00.000-07:00

The western sky had a few creamy translucent bands of dull-colored light perched on its horizon: a vaguely opalescent blend of a deep-pink-but-now-very-dim sunset, the glow-might of Seattle and Everett, and the moonlight painting the roof of low clouds over the Pacific.
Five-halves-score and eight eyes watched wide in wonder. Five-halves-dozen mouths sagged. Twenty-nine selves were sated well beyond satisfaction, on food, drink, love and smoke. A bright bonfire crackled and made sharp sausage-greasy sticks sparkle. Bloated, ashy corpses of sacrificial marshmallows, intended and impromptu, shimmered in the margins of cooling coals.
The selves had reveled in each others’ company, new friends and old friends meeting, playing drums, telling stories and poems, howling the moon up over Spokane. It had been a noisy, joyous evening that had mellowed into a sublimely beautiful night. Howard’s happy, reedy voice had just finished an informative monologue on the proper manufacture of an Oreo loogie, to be hucked as high as ever possible onto a school wall, and the hilarity died pleasantly down to a moment of perfect comfortable quiet, and the eyes had settled on the lovely western sky. Then, as if on some cosmic cue, a shooting star appeared, soaring over their heads like a fiery softball batted out of the Wenatchee High School athletic field at supersonic velocities and only now succumbing to gravity. Its tail traced several degrees of whitish-green arc behind it, so bright it left flashing slashes in the blinks of the eyes that followed it. And now they gaped in ape-awe. The meteor had been the perfect punctuation, an exclamation mark that made them all exclaim. Even blind Brendan felt the thrill.
Then the moment was broken by a shift of wind. The group was on an exposed ledge on Blewett Pass, in the high steppe of the Eastern Cascades, and it was chilly. The wind pushed the smoke from the bonfire straight into the faces of everyone sitting on the West side. They became instantly frantic, waving their hands and leaping up as their lungs creaked on hot carbon dioxide. This sudden motion knocked several empty bottles together, an alarmingly-loud clinking and chinkering that promised broken glass and cut feet. But the good spirit who protects hedonists from themselves was thankfully present, and alarum was joined with laughter, and the moment passed.
Emily Epsom sat on a double-chair under a blanket with Melanie Wealden. Melanie had made the blanket as a going-away present, stitching for untold hours. It was Navajo wool with a black-and-oxblood border around a rectangle of rich green. Melanie, a botanist, had embroidered one hundred and sixty-three plants overlapping each other like a rampant jungle garden. Trees, shrubs, and grasses were all drawn at like scale, so tiny arctic poppies were the same size as sequoias. One for each week they had been together. “I had to think a while whether I should tear seventeen of them off, because I finished it before we, uh, had our talk,” said Melanie, her voice hoarse with emotion. She arrived only a couple hours ago after ignoring all invitations, and presented Emily with the blanket and a warm heart to take with her into space. Then there had been tears and hugs, followed by apologies, acknowledgement of wrongs done on both sides, then more hugs and laughs and genuine elation at being in each others’ arms again.
It had been a hard year for both of them, with regards to each other. The announcement of the trip in February had resulted in a discussion that had maundered painfully for days while the two of them wrangled about who loved the other more, who would give up more for the other, and hundreds of increasingly-theoretical hypothetical situations and what-ifs. The sad hardness was that Emily wanted to go, and Melanie wanted her to stay. There was an inevitable sense of betrayal, which calved glacial chills in the emotional weather in their house, that in their turn coalesced into an exploding firestorm, the eruption of Mount Melanie, an outpouring of hot bitterness and acid accusation that would have made Haphaestos shade his face.
The catalyst of this colossal reaction was Howard, who in his innocent cheerful friendliness had been telling ridiculous stories to make Emily laugh. No slouch of a storyteller herself, Emily had emended the end of a story to great humorous effect, and the two of them had shared a long, paralytic, wheezing-giggling laugh that was greatly satisfying to both of them. Then they had locked eyes, cheeks flushed, and shared a smile of such brightness and spirit that it seemed to warm them both to the marrow. Melanie had come into the laboratory through the rear door and observed the end of the episode.
There was already tension about Howard because he had become good friends with Emily during the last year, and they had shared experiences that Melanie was quite naturally envious of. Howard was Going, and Melanie was Staying Here. Real or imagined, the signs had grown in Melanie’s mind, tumors of pre-aggrievance, and she had convinced herself that Something Was Going On by virtue of the strength of her own emotions. How could she feel this strongly if there wasn’t Something Going On?
Howard noticed her first, in the lab that evening, after the long laugh and sweet smile. He was looking straight into Emily’s eyes, when suddenly he felt a frost emanating from the back of the lab, a cold burning on the back of his neck that made his kidneys shiver. He turned and saw Melanie, a pillar of fiery frigidity, like a statue made of dry ice.
He began to stammer out a greeting, but she cut him off with a gesture that telegraphed her willingness to try to chop him in two with the edge of her bare palm. Then her eyes flicked a grim saccade over to Emily, whose smile had wilted somewhat. Howard slithered toward the door and hovered there, unsure of his expected role in the gathering storm. He soon decided there were safer rooms to be in.
Whether Melanie actually believed her suspicions were confirmed was irrelevant, because her heart had needed to relieve this pressure for a long time, and she flayed Emily with her feelings. Unkind words were spoken on both sides. All the flaws that they had been willing to overlook in each other for the sake of the relationship were highlighted in the most unflattering ways. This kind of hot ventilation made a breakup seem more correct, more inevitable. Finally, at crux and climax, Emily wanted to go into space more than she wanted to stay on Earth, even if Earth meant Melanie. So that was that. There was grief and loss, and eventually personal resolution for both of them, but they hadn’t communicated much at all since then. Tonight they were close again – not as close as before, of course, but definitely not alienated and distant.
Howard and Emily had decided to have their going-away party together – not as any declaration of emotional solidarity, but merely because they had a lot of mutual friends. Howard made friends easily, and maintained good connections with people even when he didn’t see them for months or years. Some of his oldest friends were there tonight, on account of Blewett Pass being quite close to his hometown of Wenatchee.
Howard had endured a spectacularly painful breakup the year before he met Emily, and had only been able to maintain sporadic and saltatory relationships since. The breakup had cost him in spirit and innocence, and he was now very wary about forming such bonds. Tonight, however, he was in such high spirits that he would have gladly flirted with a sulphurous harpy, had she presented herself. He celebrated with abandon even when there was little reason to celebrate, but tonight he had cause to pull out all the stops.
His various friends had come bearing food and intoxicating substances, and Howard eagerly set himself to both. A gentleman from Seattle named Dave brought a bag of butcher-paper bundles which contained unspecified cuts of “discount meat.” A woman from Tacoma named Charlotte had a colossal salad-bowl filled with guacamole, and great grips of chips. Chris from Wenatchee carried three milk-crates full of homebrew in mismatched bottles. Erica from Olympia dug buckets of geoducks, and Jason from Leavenworth had decocted, especially for this occasion, absinthe laudanum. Heidi from Bellingham harvested a great tussocky marijuana plant out of her herbal garden, and brought a cavernous narghile to help process it.
Howard had thrown himself into the party, as if possessed by the spirit of the occasion. He was genuinely happy to see each person who arrived, and no offer of intoxicant or nourishment was refused. Howard’s gift of impromptu grandiosity was in generous flower, and his relentless cheerful energy had elevated a simple campfire gathering into something very great and memorable indeed.
By now, just after the shooting star, the bright sparky energy of the evening had collapsed into something more akin to warm coals. Howard felt a strange panic setting in, the realization that this was his last night on Earth for an unspecified amount of time, eighteen months at the very least. The thought that he might never return barely intruded into his reality. He tried to push himself to keep it up, to drink one more beer, to pull one more lungful of sweet skunky smoke through the gurgling culvert-like waterpipe. He recognized that his friends were already beyond their capacity for added enjoyment, and he felt the black-mittened fingers of stupefaction stroking his brain stem. He tried to move around the circle and cajole everyone like a teammate, giving Blind Brendan a brisk shoulder-rub, offering to fetch Heidi a refill. His feet clinked against empty bottles and clamshells, and he nearly lost his balance, swaying dangerously close to the fire. Several pairs of reassuring hands gripped him and guided him back to his chair. His eyes swam for a moment and then he focused on the face of Reid, a very old friend from home.
“Hey Reid,” he said, “remember that time we tried to drink a whole hogshead of beer? We invited EVERYBODY, even the jocks and the dicks, and tried to put that thing away.”
“Our efforts were feeble,” Reid said, laughing. “And the bar wanted the kegs back on Monday, so we had to rally and fill every available container with stale, flat beer. My favorite was the giant cafeteria mustard-dispenser.”
“Hey Erica,” said Howard, “remember when we tried to distill that cough syrup with lighter fluid?”
“To this day, I have still never felt sicker,” Erica said with a flicked dreadlock.
“Hey Emily,” Howard continued, but a spear of ice from Melanie’s eyes managed to penetrate his sodden awareness, and he found himself at a loss for coherency. Two of his oldest friends, Jason and Reid, stepped up to save him from himself.
“Howard,” said Jason, offering him a mug, “how would you like another drink of this absinthe laudanum?”
“Thank you Jason,” said Howard, drawing himself up with uncanny dignity and accepting the mug. “I’d like that very much.” After that, Howard was more easily susceptible to the suggestion that he call it a night, and accepted Reid’s assistance in finding his tent in the darkness. Nobody wanted to see Howard hurt or embarrass himself.
The greater part of the party followed Howard into slumberland, but a few of the women stayed up. Emily and her friends had not indulged as deeply as the others, and so they fed the fire and warmed themselves with good companionship until the sky began to pale in the East.
“Well,” said Melanie finally, “I’m afraid I’m a normal Earth girl with an Earth job, so I better get rolling.” Emily walked her to the car. They embraced with a mix of tenderness and ferocity, faith and love and wounds unhealed. They looked into each others’ eyes for a long moment. They’d already said all they could say to each other. The moment might have been longer if the morning was of more clement element, but they both noticed the bitter chill of the morning now that they were away from the fire, and they both began to shiver. Melanie leaned forward and gave Emily a kiss, then she got into her car and drove away. Emily watched her go West, pursued by the slanting orange fingers of the rising sun.

II Ranatra's Party

2009-05-11T13:15:00.000-07:00

The sun touched the horizon somewhere on the far side of the Olympic Peninsula. From the west-facing Seattle apartment window, Ranatra Badak observed it through smoked glass. It looked unreal somehow. The window had not been designed to open, though she looked a long time for a latch or a lever. She sighed and turned back to the gathering of people inside.
There were about twenty-five, a mix of men and women, all well-dressed, well-fed, and smiling. They gathered around long tables of food and drink: great piles of tropical fruit, pots of simmering spicy soups and curries, fluffy white rice, sticky black rice, lime-pickled shrimp with whole cloves of red garlic, spinach leaves in peanut sauce, roast fish, tender slow-cooked goat, and many other delicacies. A big broad red-and-white Indonesian flag decorated one wall, and there were other symbols of Indonesia: Javanese shadow puppets, Balinese masks, wooden figures from the Celebes.
Ranatra had become a celebrity and a symbol for the island nation. They were only now beginning to re-emerge from the devastation wrought by a tremendous volcanic explosion two years ago. Everyone knew someone who had perished in that explosion; some islands were completely depopulated by the poisonous ash-fall and tsunamis that followed. But now, the restive Earth had stabilized, and a shaky hope was building. That a woman from one of the poorest islands in the country was now an international hero destined to travel into space was a beacon that the people of Indonesia eagerly looked to.
She did not look to herself for this role, though. It had come to her without her seeking it out. She had been struggling to do the right thing, to repair her family, to ease the suffering in her village, and to earn a better life for her young son. She had never seen herself as a hero, only as a mother, a daughter, and a sister. She often questioned the peculiarity of fate that had led her here, and she often wondered if this was the right course.
She looked at the group who had gathered to honor her. They were mostly Javanese, all of them wealthy, and few of them had been at home when the disaster struck. These people were well-fed and big-boned, and did not know want. Their teeth had never been loose in the gums, their sores healed quickly, they had slept in beds or at least had the option to do so, every night of their lives. They were well-acquainted with dentists and doctors, lawyers and bankers. She told herself that she did not resent them, but she could not help feeling a little bit jealous of their riches and opportunities, and a little bit contemptuous of how easily they took it all for granted.
There was nobody here from her island, Sumbawa, which had been one of the hardest-hit by the disaster. She had sent repeated messages to her village, and had finally travelled there herself, but had found only an alien landscape of death and wreckage, and no sign of her family. Nor had she seen any person she recognized, nor any structure, plant, tree, rock outcropping, or any familiar landmark. The devastation was absolute.
Her son, Kuriktas, was supposed to have been on the island of Tanimbar, further away from the epicenter, but still in the path of fury. There was no word from him or any of the people he was supposed to be with. Ranatra’s entire blood-network had been wiped from the face of the planet in a few minutes. She had escaped harm, barely, and blamed herself for it.
Until that day, her life had balanced at the intersection of a variety of threads: she was a scientist, a long-absent daughter, an unredeemed mother who still held out hope for a family life. But now all the threads had snapped, except one, and this one connected her to wonders beyond imagining. What scientist does not dream of exploring the stars? Her luck, for good or bad, had brought her to this juncture with nothing to hold her back, and she was ready to leap.
Still, her inner voice, and the memory of her mother’s and grandmother’s voices, whispered to her in quiet moments. What if? What if Kuriktas was still alive? What if he needs you? Tuan Kudah, the financier who was bankrolling the space expedition, had guaranteed a life of ease for all the astronauts’ families. Should Kuriktas ever emerge alive from the ruins of Tanimbar, he would be free of monetary anxiety for the rest of his days. Ranatra, who had been very poor for the vast majority of her twenty-five years, was practical enough to draw comfort from this guarantee, but still she wondered how he would fare without a mother’s love.
Glowing, beaming faces pressed toward her, full of adulation. Perhaps she was not so different from these people. Everyone had known loss, everyone was asking the same questions of themselves and each other, holding out hope that some loved one might surface in a refugee camp or on some distant island. Ranatra realized that her journey into space was something these people could count on, a defined platform they could rest their optimism against, and she did not want to deny them that. She allowed herself to be drawn into the bright bustle of faces and food and laughter.

Puhipii Poetry

2009-04-19T18:17:00.000-07:00

O Weevil, with neck so profound
How deftly you move on the ground
You cut leaves into discs
To make courting whisks
And your wings are sure to astound.

This Mushroom all the ants dread
For it sends spores inside of their heads
The ants soon believe
They should climb up the leaves
To allow the Mycosis to spread.

The wasp has stunned a large spider
And looks for a crevice to hide her
In the dark of this keep
The spider will sleep
While wasp larvae develop inside her.

This longlegs savors the taste
Of chewing a mushroom to paste
Although he’ll be nourished
The fungus will flourish
Because spores will stick to his face.

The butterfly drinks from the pool
But not just to keep herself cool
It’s salt that is wanted
So the water is shunted
And ejected in high-pressure stool.

Oleg Ogumurov

2009-04-04T09:59:00.000-07:00

A waxing autumn moon rose on a clear evening in Tacoma. Oleg Ogumurov walked on sidewalks through side-neighborhoods, upright and poised, submerging nervousness under a rigorous military stiffness. He caught glimpses of Puget Sound winking in the setting sunlight, and clouds of vapor hanging over lumber mills. Dogs barked through chainlink fences, cats on porches observed the world through slitted eyes, and distant traffic stirred a burr of noise like the sea inside a shell. Leaves were beginning to turn on trees, and caught the slanting sun with flickering brilliance.
Oleg reached his destination on Fife Street and drew a deep breath. He squared his broad shoulders in front of a small white house with blue trim. An apple tree stood in the yard, its thin branches bowed by ripe golden fruits. He walked toward the front door, patting his hair, clothes, and mustache to make sure they were in order. An enormous black, white and yellow spider shifted in its broad web that stretched between the apple tree and a wiry ornamental next to the house. As an afterthought, Oleg reached up to his face and pulled a long sliver of bone out of his septum, putting it in his pocket and ringing the doorbell.
There was no immediate response, and he tried to wait patiently, but such a reservoir was not in him, and he rang the bell again. This time the door opened before he’d even let his arm fall, and he found himself staring into two dim, sleep-crinkled eyes in a face as round and pale as a moon of soap. The little mouth was a kiss of hostility, nestled above a series of chins. The body was bell-shaped, and so draped in layers of sweatclothes that its sex was intederminate.
“Yes?” The word was laden with poisonous irritation.
“I’m here to see Karen,” said the visitor.
“Who’re you?”
“Oleg Ogumurov.”
“You’re the astronaut.” The moon-faced person was clearly not impressed. “Karen ain’t here.”
“What?” Some of Oleg’s cool demeanor slipped. “She said she would be here.”
“She dinint come home last night.”
“Do you think she’s allright?”
“Huh!” snorted the person in the doorway. “She spends most nights at Hank’s these days.”
“Hank.” Oleg tried the name out on his tongue and found it distasteful. “Listen, I have come a very long way to see her. Is there any way to get a hold of her?”
“You can call her cell phone, but I’m just her roommate, and I got other things to worry about. I’ll tell her you stopped by.” The door closed, and that was that. He stood on the porch for a few moments, fingering his mustache and wiggling his toes inside his shoes. Then he turned and walked away from the house. On his way past the apple tree, he pulled one of the fruits off a low branch and tossed it from hand to hand as he looked up and down the street. Neither direction lent him purpose. He absently bit into the apple, then immediately spat it out. He looked at the white crater his teeth had left in the fruit. There were brown, mushy tubes excavated through the apple’s flesh where caterpillars had burrowed toward the seeds in the core.
Flinging the apple away, he turned right and walked down the street. It was slightly downhill and he was ready for any path that offered possible diminishment of resistance. He spied the gibbous moon between the treetops, lit though they were by the fading sun. He looked up at the sky-dome, perfectly clear and metallic blue, and wondered if this was the last sunset he would ever see.
Oleg Ogumurov had no family to speak of, and his few friends would all see him tomorrow. He had craved one last connection with this special person, whom he did not even know that well. She was, however, the only one who made his emotional compass spin in a tender direction. Gaiety and cleverness illuminated her, a life-pulse that made the world thrum in her vicinity. She had been drawn to Oleg’s warmth and charm, his easy familiarity with literature and language, his passion for mythology and beer and hockey. But she had sensed the stranger in him, that which made him foreign even to other Russians, foreign even to himself, and she was too practical not to form boundaries and barriers between their hearts. Better to find some known quantity, some Hank who could be predicted and counted-on, than to walk too close to the abyssal vortices that turned the axes of Oleg’s life-vehicle. And yet, there was an electricity between Karen and Oleg that energized both of them, so she had allowed him to stay in contact through the years. Tonight, his last night on Earth for an unknown span of time, Oleg had wanted nothing more than to bask in that shared glow, to relish smiles and laughs and eye contact, and to have one special person to say goodbye to.
He was tempted to ask himself questions about her, to theorize and agonize about where she was and why she had chosen not to see him, but an ingrained Slavic stoicism met those thoughts with cold iron, and he walked mechanically toward the traffic-noise. Soon he was at a busy cross-street, and from the corner he spied a public house called Magoo’s. There were still plenty of beers to be savored on this planet, and several hours left to him to do so.

Teuthis Song (Music video to come)

2009-02-10T20:21:00.000-08:00

Let's do this like Teuthis!
Although he's quite friendly, his foes find him ruthless
Teuthis!
He's spineless and boneless, neckless and toothless
Teuthis!
To science he's merely a cephalopod
But to thousands worldwide he's a miniature god
He drinks Captain Morgan and eats Red-Hot Riplets
And strokes the remote with his tentacle tiplets
Through time and space, his body is hurled
In his pulpy embrace he holds half the world
Teuthis!

You can’t Pay-Per-View this!
He slides under doors with amusing uncouthness
Teuthis!
He’s deaf, so to him, this music is useless
Teuthis!
In the depths of the oceans he wrestles with whales
In Japanese restaurants his flesh is for sale
He wears 4 pairs of pants, 8 boots and no gloves
He turns neon pink when he falls in love
Wednesdays he works as an elephant’s pessary
And he’s got more doubloons than a Timbuctoo treasury
Teuthis!

Seeking Adventure?

2009-01-29T19:56:00.000-08:00

Hello and welcome to the slowest part of my blog. I am not currently out adventuring, so updates are seldom, and when they do happen, they may be in the form of spontaneous poetry. If you are looking for the "good stuff," please check out the first half of 2008 and all of 2007.
I am thinking of putting together a "best of" in book form - if anyone knows of publishers/agents amenable to my humble cause, please let me know.

ALP

Admiral Shaddock

2009-01-28T10:22:00.000-08:00

Have you heard of the old dugongs’ tale about Admiral Shaddock?
They say he was brilliant but he had barnacles in the attic.
He had coppery pimples, a cloven mustache
He was overly porous and belonged in the trash
From Port Orford to Port Moresby, Callao to Kowloon
He commanded a squadron of pirate dragoons.
His flagship was the frightful frigate Fritillary
Fresh freed from Friday Harbor by Berber mercenaries
His crew was a stew of brine and raisins
Rumkegs of flotsam and louts twice-misshapen
Pickled sea cucumbers, starfish on steroids,
Flunked-out flounders with halibut hem’roids.
A clam with the crabs, an archy bald haddock
These were the sailors with Admiral Shaddock.
They were harbored in Hammerfest one gray April day
With cargo from Key Largo, baled and labeled “hay.”
Bound for Pusan, Phuket and Panang,
Where they’d fodder a horse named Dr T.Mang
Problem was, that the admirable admiral Shaddock
Was restless as a mustang in a half-hectare paddock.
Said he “I hate to go all the way down to Capetown
Surely there’s a shorter, faster way to get around.”
His myxotic quixotic Midshipsquid Teuthis
Said “I know one way you could do this.
The Northeast passage would be a kick in the pants
All the way to Vladivostok, starting in Murmansk. “
“Perfect,” said Admiral Shaddock, “Let’s head North.”
Bosun Gertrude whistled sourly, and the frigate set forth.
Now around the sea of Kara, the air grew somewhat cool-nippy
Which upset the first mate, Right Leftenant Cthulhippy.
The Leftenant read into the mutiny cue
And easily persuaded the rest of the crew.
They served him spoiled tuna on toasted ergot rye
And a nutmeg and haloperidol warm custard pie.
Then when his mind was where wine-drowned mice go
They marooned Admiral Shaddock on a snow-crowned ice floe.
Then they headed back South down Caribbean way
And pawned the whole cargo at Montego Bay.
Meanwhile Admiral Shaddock waits in his freezing bungalow
No fruit has patience like the vengeance-seeking pomelo.

Šëkoj

2008-09-23T16:56:00.001-07:00

Three thousand thirty years ago
A mermaid dwelt on Dweffir Reef
Known to all and loathed by none
Called by dolphins “Iki-uit-uit”
By jellyfish, “Hu-hufala”
“Šëkoj” in the human tongues.

Šëkoj danced among the corals
Cavorted with the horseshoe crabs
Sweetly shimmied with the shad
Dug hunks of dirt with dugongs
Slept in seaweed, dozed in kelp.

But after such a frolicfest
Her hair became a matted nest
Of tiny uninvited guests
Stinging mites and parasites
Lice the size of grains of rice

Burrowing baby barnacles
Concatenations of crabs
Obtuse oval anemone eggs
Showy, shiny –shelled shrimp
Hungry hopeful ropes of salps.

Her fingers wrangled with the tangle
But the knots were not unknotted
Snags and snarls marred her curls
But mermaid hair is live and feeling
It fears and shuns the knives and scissors.

Called the mermaid to the Deep Ones
Called to her ancestral parents
In the oceanmother tongue
Voice of churning waves and gurgles
Slips and sloshes, wishes, washes.

“O Ilmatar, Oceanmother
O Bearded Straasha, in your cave
Lend me now advice and succor
About these tangled snarled strands
How may I quash this nappy loaf?”

“Šëkoj,” said her patient mother
“Your hair is perfect in appearance
You don’t need to preen or primp
Keep for friends those who revere you
Ignore the hollow shallow masses.”

Šëkoj vented her vexation
“This is not for friends or masses!
Wordy balms on my frustration
Do not cure the situation
Nor rid me of my cake of dreds.

Said Straasha from his crusty cave
“Then you must go on journey brave
To apply techniques and tools
To unravel, unknot, unknit
This hairy mess upon your crown.

Go then, to the Pacific Plains
Where deep rivers flow together
Where earthen roots bind rocks fast
To the glowing chthonian vents
Spraying curling sour sulfur-fumes

In deep caverns within these,
Among platyhelminthes
Live the Ekhinokrinoi
Noble ancient sea-colossi
Relics of Siluria.”

Ilmatar, the Oceanmother
Said “Seek that kind abyssal race
I will let them know you’re coming
They will host a feast of plenty
You will be the guest of honor.”

Šëkoj prepared for travel
Sharpened her fins, sponged her gills
Stretched her arms and flapped her tail
Then she bid the reef farewell
And set off to the Pacific Plains.

She swam one day, swam another
Currents carried her on the third
To the oceanic plain
Down to the abysmal canyons
To the deepest of deep places

In the cold and crushing darkness
Like a porpoise full of purpose
She swam with supple strength and sleekness
Toward the vitriolic glow
Toward the warmth below the waves.

Šëkoj found a golden gateway
Cavern carved by snail-tusks
Portal to a porous palace.
In the doorway sat a watcher
Ekhinokrinoi gate-guard.

No head nor eyes could Šëkoj see
Arms asway like breezy branches
Legs like burly knotgnarled roots
Trunkless tree, all leaves and buttress
Cup of hands and dome of feet.

It spoke to her in ocean language
So deep and plain her teeth could hear
Spleen and kidneys understood.
“Welcome, friend, to our abode
Enter now our humble hovel.”

Stout stilts stirring, it led her in
Through labyrinthine oystered cloisters
Constellations of sea-stars
Tubewormed hot cloacal grottoes
To a hall of lofty splendor.

They sat in gem-encrusted alcoves
Splendid Ekhinokrinoi
Ancient giants, wise and noble
Many-limbed with glowing souls
Perched on lustrous thrones of pearl.

The eldest reached an arm out to her
Took her hand into its own
Extended psychic tentacles
Spoke directly to her cells
In the very voice of life.

“Welcome, warm Shallows-dweller,
Welcome, backboned voyager
We know you and know your line
Know your mothers, know your sisters
Know your daughters not yet born.

We affirm the bond between us
And will gladly lend you succor
Help you with your tangle-problem
But first, join us for a feast
Incorporate our tasty chow.”

They sat around a whalebone table
Piled high with choice sea-treats
Spicy suction-cups of squid
Clams sautéed in sea-grape wine
Seahorse eggs with hagfish slime.

Briny bitter barnacle paste
Upon cold soused sea-pig’s face
Callipash and calipee
Paté of gravid seal-flea
And pycnogonid fricassee.

Šëkoj ate more than her fill
Though some dishes made her ill
Especially the brains of krill.
Her hosts retreated to their thrones
And combed their arms with herringbones.

The eldest Ekhinocrinoi
Extended ropy arm again
Spread the comblike hand before her
Wiggled the small bony teethtines
And said “This will be your comb.”

The hand detached then from the arm
Stiff-toothed comb, so slightly curved
Šëkoj touched it gingerly
Then pulled the hand-comb through her hair
Pulled the tool through the tangles.

Her visitors decamped in dozens
When she served her comb-eviction
Untangled kelpy knots and snarls
Unmade the nests and mini middens
Freed each strand from tiny tenants.

Her hosts detached a dozen hand-combs
And told her to take them all.
“Give one to your patient mother
To your sisters and your cousins
To your daughters when they come.

“If you need more, we will send them
Via octopus and squid
From our deep abyss abode
Call us with the ancient cantrip
Utter these ensorcelled words:

Ouagadougou Utnapishman
Puying geen blah-meuk mai dai
Saya makan ubur ubur
Minun täyttu juustohöylä
Wo de shengri bu kuai lai.

With grateful heart and flowing hair
Šëkoj departed from the depths
Rose in roiling beds of bubbles
To the warm and shallow waters
To the turquoise sun-kissed surface.

She swam one day, swam another,
Currents carried her for a third
Until she reached the reef of Dweffir
Home at last with comb in hand
To frolic with her happy friends.

Crag Shaman

2008-09-22T15:11:00.000-07:00

Crag Shaman

The morning after our cave hike was warm and sunny. At breakfast I spied Annika, one of the Swedes from Nong Khiao. Pasco, her companion, was laid-up with a hangover, and they were planning a rest day. I told her about my plan to hike up to Ban Phoon tomorrow, and she said that sounded good.
The rest of the day was spent lazily, walks around the village, chats with mynah birds, hammock and Thomas Mann, waging war on the little black ants that were trying to colonize my bed, and swimming in the river. Night fell, the stars came out in resplendent sparkles, joined by fireflies and the flash of distant lightning.
The next day I met the Swedes at 7:30. This was the earliest they were willing to rise. We had a slow breakfast, then set off on the same trail as before. Two days of sun had largely dried it out, and there were far less gooey patches. We made good time to the first village, where we had big mugs of coffee. I mentioned to the proprietress that we were heading up to Ban Phoon, and she immediately began telling me the shortcomings of that place. There was no guesthouse, she said, and no water. The first was frustrating to hear because just yesterday she said there was a guesthouse. I reminded her of this, but my Lao evidently wasn’t good enough to convey the idea of “You said two different things, and they can’t both be right.” It’s a fairly common problem here, inherited no doubt from the Thais, who are so eager to please visitors that they tell you what they think you want to hear, regardless of the reality they are allegedly referring to. The proprietress suggested we go up to Ban Phoon and then come down and stay in her bungalows. It was tiresome. I walked around town and asked other people if foreigners could stay in Ban Phoon, and they all agreed it was so. The water thing was slightly more perplexing. I simply could not believe that a whole village full of people could sustain themselves without water. Nevertheless, we loaded up with as many water bottles as we could carry, and set off.

BREASTWORKS OF BAN NA PADDY

A simple fellow with a smiling mouth that hung open guided us to the trailhead, and indicated with his hand that we were in for a long climb. This proved 100% accurate. The initial three hundred meters or so were dizzyingly steep and left us sagging in the shade. Annika had particular trouble with the beginning, panting redfaced and thinking of going back. But she swallowed some water, and looked resolute. Pasco and I assured her it was not a race, and we were not impatient. She nodded and we continued to climb.
There were several large millipedes on the trail, both living and in various stages of decomposition. Those who had been dead for some time looked like empty suits of armor, all rings and coils. I surmised they were on the trail to lick salt dripped by buffalo and humans, and had been trodden on.

Unknown Bug, Ban Na

Buffalo clearly used this trail. Their tracks were everywhere, and on especially steep parts, their feet had gouged smooth slide-marks into the clay. I wondered about the economics and practicality of marching a buffalo up and down this incline.
We eventually came to a crest, and thought that things must now level out or descend. A little further on, the trail began to rise again, slightly less steep than before, but still hard going. This repeated itself several times, till we began to see sky through the trees and the broad expanse of valley on either side.
Pasco and I chatted quite a bit, each time we stopped to watch Annika labor up behind us. He had an extraordinary command of English, a rich vocabulary and a mastery of the little particles that usually identify a native speaker, like “yeah” and “stuff” and “you guys.” He told me he changed his name to Lotharion during his Dungeons and Dragons years, and couldn’t be bothered to change it back. It seemed he was amused at his past self, and kept the elvish-sounding name as a shrine to passions of youth. He did look something like an elf, as well, very fine-featured and fey, but wiry and untiring. His gaming days were over, and now his fascination was with shamanism, energy-healing, and the forces of life and earth. The pair of them were planning to head down to a small village in southern Laos for several months, where he was going to learn about some kind of meditative energy practice.
The Swedes talked amongst themselves in English, out of politeness, they said. Annika had a thicker accent than Pasco but no trouble whatsoever expressing herself. It was charming to observe them uttering endearments to one another, or having the minor spats that are part and parcel of any relationship, all in very precise and somewhat slow English.
On the flat parts, Annika walked side by side with me and we talked about life, work, vacation, family, and interests. I was surprised and pleased at the confidence Annika and Pasco had in each other – often, travelling couples are plagued with a wide variety of issues when it comes to communicating with strangers. And, let’s face it, it can be extremely hard to have a casual three-way conversation in which one person doesn’t have much chance or substance to contribute. It was refreshing that there was not an expectation that each member of the group would be included in each discussion, as our interests were widely divergent. I have often encountered resentment from the third party, whomever that may be, when the other two parties discover a mutual love of Star Trek or sphragistics or what-have-you.
We finally came to a crest where the earth sloped away steeply on both sides, and we had a view. The valleys had been completely stripped of trees, as far as we could see in both directions. Each minor hill had a miniature shade-structure on it where peasants slept during the heat of the day, surrounded by stubbly stumps and burn scars. Hardwoods had been cut, and the rest burned, and nothing had been replanted. It was dismaying and puzzling. Why would they do this? There was no way to transport giant tropical trunks from here to the river. Where was the wood?
We thought the crest must surely be the apex of our climb, and that soon the trail would begin winding down into the valley. It did descend, but only because we went across a long hogback saddle, and began going up again. We came to a gated fence and took that as a sign of approaching the village, and inside the fenced area were broad grassy meadows one usually associates with Alps, replete with a passel of browsing cattle. There were a few jackfruit trees, and cow pads full of jackfruit seeds. The view was the same as before, but now in the distance we could see a few higher hills that still had cloudforest crowns.

At a small creek, I stepped on what I thought was a rock in the water, only to have it squish. It was a cow pad, and though I washed my foot carefully, the smell lingered for a long time. We passed another gate and began to climb again, reaching some older forest that was cool and shady. Mushrooms grew in profusion, including some giants that were as tall as my forearm and bigger than my handspan across the cap.

Three teenage boys came down the trail and barely looked at us. They were wearing ragged T-shirts and flip flops, and carrying homemade guns. To me, they were indistinguishable from the three youths I had seen on my first trip up Puhipii in February, and I wondered if somehow they were the same people, roving from hilltop to hilltop in search of targets.
We stopped after another long climb and had to make a plan. Ban Phoon was supposed to be three hours from the last village, but it was already four and a half hours later, with no sign of a settlement. We needed to allow ourselves enough time to get down off the mountain if we didn’t reach the village, and none of us wanted to go down in the dark. I volunteered to scout ahead, leaving my heavy pack behind and zipping up the hill at top speed. I came to a flat place where there was a mud pit full of water buffalo. They stared at me as if ready to be alarmed, but I had no wish to deal with huge panicked herd beasts, so I did not tease them. I kept going for about fifteen minutes with no sign of a village, only a continuously-climbing path. I returned and reported my findings. I then calculated we could safely go another forty-five minutes up and still have time to get to Ban Na and the promised bungalows.

So, on we went. Shortly after we came to the spot where I last turned around, we spotted a wooden building on a ridge above us. At last! Heartened, we continued, and soon came to a little group of children playing in the mud.
“Sa-leep?” they asked, pantomiming sleep. We nodded, and they pointed up the path. We passed another buffalo-wallow, and then found ourselves looking up at the very top of the hill, where a wooden fence surrounded a cluster of wood buildings on stilts. We climbed over the fence, and found ourselves under the stares of a dozen people. They had dark skin and very strong features, pointed chins, high cheekbones, and large eyes. None of them smiled, waved, or made any kind of greeting. We felt uneasy, but made our way to the center of the village. A few children started following us, but hung back a safe distance. We were either openly stared-at or ignored outright.

Ban Phoon

We walked past a house on stilts that was full of people and noise. A radio blared from within. The street was clean of animals and garbage. A young man approached us and said “Sa-leep?” We followed him to a house, and he showed us a long platform-bed that would easily accommodate the three of us. We nodded, and he gestured at the bed as if we were so tired that we wanted to sleep right now. I brought up the age-old question, “How much?” This led to a long and uncomfortable haggling session, as the price he initially quoted was completely ridiculous. His father, a man with wiry steel-gray hair and a machete, sat nearby on a bench, glaring at us. Although he was two heads shorter than me, he had a solidity and authority that lent considerable heft to the glare. I employed a standard bargaining technique, telling the young man that the accommodation he offered was not worth the price he was asking, and the older man’s gaze turned even more steely. I realized that it sounded like I was criticizing his house. Another man, with a mustache and a yellow stare, pounded his stomach and said “We’re all hungry here!”
Although I can converse perfectly clearly in Lao, especially when it comes to numbers and prices, the young man wanted to scratch the prices into the hard orange earth with a twig. Somehow we could come to no common ground. I tried to tell him we wanted to eat as well, but he would not assent that he understood, no matter how much pantomime I employed. Finally we sat in the shade and started making faces at the children, who were losing their suspicion. Another man came down from a house and trumped the young man, quoting us a reasonable price that included a meal. We agreed, and then to alleviate the cold vibes coming off the older man, I gave him a roll of duct tape. I gave a roll of steel wire to the reasonable man, and to the young man, nothing.
I’d been carrying a bunch of junk around for five months, for handing out to village kids, but somehow there hadn’t been the right occasion for a lot of the stuff. Now I unloaded the last of my bug cards, some sheets of stickers, various small toys, and some pens and pencils. I let them look at my book of pictures from around the world. Then we walked around the village, and every time I saw a mother, I gave her a little bar of soap. The old women of the village came toward us one by one and pointed at their eyes, then held out their hands. What did they want? Eyedrops? Later, it was clarified to me that they wanted glasses.
A younger woman approached us and showed us the top of her foot. She had some kind of smooth, puffy infestation that looked painful, and she clearly wanted us to treat it. All we had was a tube of aloe lotion in Annika’s bag, which we gave to the woman. She sat down next to us and applied it to the affected area with the tip of a feather.
The village was about thirty houses, surrounded by a low wooden fence. Although it was perched on the very edge of the highest part of the hill, there were no views of the valleys available from any vantage. Banana trees, bamboo, and tapioca obscured the view in every direction. Just inside the fence were small houses, also on stilts, that held pigs and chickens. I was impressed at the will of the villagers to keep their livestock segregated from their children and food, unlike in the Hmong village I visited earlier.

One of the houses had a second-story window with an old man leaning out. He had a weary, pained expression on his face. His arms were resplendent with tribal tattoos. He looked at me and spoke in Khamu, but I could not understand him. He gestured to his stomach. Then, above his shoulder, appeared the steely man to whom I had given duct tape. The steely man explained this was his father, eighty-six years old, and suffering from a stomach malady. All I had was buffered analgesic, which I gave him, hoping it would alleviate some of his pain.

We walked further, past a severely-slanting house. Another of the village’s young men followed us furtively, fingering his mustache and obviously keeping an eye on us. A little horde of kids ran up, and I noticed several of them had pictures out of my picture book. The savages! They had dismembered my picture collection! Oh well, they were easily replaced, and now it was one less thing to carry. Still, it nettled me somehow that the children had destroyed a book in about ten minutes.
Around a corner, I spotted a man carrying an inexplicable object. It looked like a mobile or a bird-feeder, some strange arrangement hanging from a string on a stick. He was moving with a purpose, and I had to hurry to catch up with him. Hanging from the string was a platter with four bowls on it, and each bowl contained a dead bird and a piece of metal. I intercepted the man as he was about to climb over the fence.
“Are you a shaman?” I asked him. He grinned and said no, and pointed. I moved in the direction of his finger, and he climbed over the fence and disappeared. Soon I was near the house that had the noise coming out of it, and a shirtless old man with a sword was staggering around in the street. The Swedes caught up to me, and we steered clear of the old man. I asked a woman with a baby where the shaman was, and she pointed vaguely. Then a hand grabbed me by the shoulder and spun me around.
The old man was glaring fiercely at me with pale eyes, and pointing the sword at my sternum. It was a homemade weapon, slightly curved like a katana, with a handle made of bamboo and sinew. “You want a shaman?” he asked, and then started to bustle me forward. I didn’t want to get stabbed, so I let him escort me up the stairs and into the noisy house.
Inside, about twenty people were sitting around on the floor. The old man shoved me toward one corner and told me to sit. The Swedes came in as well but sat in a different section. I looked around. The people inside were all ages, male and female. They were taking turns sipping through long bamboo straws that stuck out of big lacquered bamboo jugs clustered in the center. A radio squawked out the daily news in Lao.
The old man seated himself near me, and faced outward into the room. He set his sword down and tied a piece of faded cloth onto his head. Then he leaned back and started sneezing and twitching. When he sat up, his eyes had a wild look.

The man we had seen outside brought in a bowl with a dead bird in it. It was some kind of jungle bird with the feathers boiled off. The old man, who was apparently the village shaman, took the bowl and waved it slowly around, as if he were wafting its odors into the air. Then a woman came forward out of the crowd, carrying a child of about two. The child was decked out in colorful clothes and silver bangles, all of which were several sizes too large. Some of the bangles had been tied onto her wrists and ankles with white string. Her hair had been teased into a little tuft on top.
The shaman muttered and chanted some more, then unwound a long, knotted, multicolored string from his sword-handle. He used a small knife to slit the abdomen of the dead bird, and pushed the string in, bit by bit, dragging it through the entrails. Then he withdrew it and leaned in toward the child, who struggled and cried. The shaman wrapped the string around the child’s wrists, one at a time, and began on the ankles, but the child panicked and kicked at him. The mother tried to soothe her, but to no avail. The shaman said something; the mother shrugged, lifted her shirt, and offered the child a nipple. She calmed instantly, and the shaman returned to the string project. After that, someone produced a large basket of sticky rice, and the shaman held little clumps of rice against the child’s forehead, chin, and the backs of her hands. He chanted some more, and then the mother tied white strings around his wrists. He burned the excess string off in a candle. He and his assistant, the man from outside, then picked up the bird and examined it from all angles. Satisfied, the shaman shredded the boiled bird’s breasts and thighs with quick motions of his fingers. The mother ate the pieces, offering them to the shaman, but he refused. Then she rose and backed away.
The shaman leaned back again, and repeated his barking/sneezing routine. When he sat back up, he pointed at a ferret-faced man with a jug. That man poured shots of rice whiskey for everyone sitting there. It was a hot afternoon, and we were low on water, but we accepted the drink anyway. The man from outside then helped the shaman with the next part of the ceremony. He balanced his sword on a very old, leaned-over Coke bottle and an empty rice basket, and placed two candles on the flat of the blade. He used a white paste to scrawl symbols onto the blade between the candles. His assistant lit the candles, and they both chanted for a minute or so. The shaman turned to the room at large and, with a simple gesture, instructed the fox-face to give everyone another drink. After the gasping had died down, he uttered something, and everyone began producing small objects. The shaman reached past the dead bird in the bowl and pulled out two very old coins. Other people offered bits of metal ornamentation, knives, shiny stones, and more old coins. I offered him two Sharpie markers and a piece of quartz. He took a basket full of uncooked sticky rice and dumped it out, making a little mountain. Then he adorned the mountain with all the odds and ends he had collected. More whiskey was distributed, then more chanting ensued.

The shaman raised an arm and pointed at everyone in the room, one by one, including the visitors. The natives rose and began heaping 2000 kip bills in front of him. I joined in. The Swedes did not have 2000s, so they threw in a 5000 and a 10000. The ferrety whiskey man made a statement and reached in to grab the 10000, but the shaman stared him down until he put it back. The shaman wrapped the colored string around the pile of bills and then handed it to a soot-stained old man with thick forearms who sat on his right. That man shuffled the bills together and then handed them to the woman with the baby, who bowed and accepted. The family resemblance was unmistakeable: this was surely her father and the baby’s grandfather.
This seemed to signify the end of a routine, for people started talking more loudly. They had been chatting through the entire ritual, but now they relaxed and began to move around in the room. The radio was turned back on. The shaman and his assistant continued to mutter and gibber over the pile of rice and the sword. Someone motioned me over to the center of the room where the big bamboo tubes lay against a centerpost. I took a drink through one of the long straws. It was like a punch: rice whiskey leavened with fruit juice and spices. It was warm and made my throat itch. I thanked the person who had motioned to me, using the Khamu “Ko par ngium,” which sounds like Coparnium. This got a big laugh from the whole room. I tried some of my other words and phrases; the one that seemed to delight them most was “Dtalang-tang,” meaning “dragonfly.”
The final phase of the ritual began a few minutes later, centered around the grandfather. He sat at a low round table with candles burning in bottles. The shaman sat next to him, humming and chanting and singing, and everyone in the room came and tied little pieces of white string around the grandfather’s wrist. Some of the people sang as they did so. I tried out a little Mongolian throatsinging as I tied my string; this earned me a look from the shaman that was a perfect mix of confusion, curiosity, and irritation. After all the strings were tied, the men started handing cigarettes to each other. I refused multiple offers, pantomiming gagging and coughing. The room soon filled up with acrid smoke, and we excused ourselves to step outside.
We sat on a bench in the shade for a while, marveling at what we had just witnessed. The villagers behaved in a much more friendly fashion toward us after that. Many of the young mothers brought their button-eyed babies over to stare at us.
As the sun began to set, the man with whom we had arranged to stay approached us with a battered-looking wok and asked us if we were ready to eat. We most certainly were, and we followed him back into the shaman’s house, where the little round table had been surrounded by three chairs. A long blanket was spread on the floor where the shaman had been sitting, and all the men in the room were sitting cross-legged on either side of it. It was covered with food, but I never got a good look at what they were eating. We were served ramen noodles in bowls, with extremely salty scrambled eggs and sticky rice on the side. It was simple but nourishing, and we ate it with gusto. The women and children lingered around the sides of the house, waiting for the men to finish.
We went back outside after the meal and sat in the last pink and orange rays of the sun as it disappeared behind distant mountains. Our landlord appeared instantly and suggested we go to sleep. It was far too early, and I told him so. We sat on the bench again, and I gave away the remainder of my loot to the crowd of children. They dispersed as soon as they realized no more treasures were coming out of my bag. The landlord had been hovering nearby, chain-smoking cigarettes, drew close and again suggested it was time to sleep. Since there was no electricity in the village, it did not sound quite so unreasonable to go to bed at this early hour. We followed him to the house, and on the way I asked if we could have some water.
The short, uncomfortable episode that ensued will forever be a source of confusion for me. He stared at me without comprehension. The iron-haired man had appeared again, and stood with the younger man, facing us. I repeated my request, and there was still no sign that they understood. I acted out thirst and drinking from a cup, a bowl, and out of cupped hands. I said “People get thirsty, people drink water. Where is the water?” Their faces darkened, and the older man shot the younger one a look of controlled disapproval that seemed to say “They don’t know how it’s done here.” I looked at the older man and asked him “Where do you go when you’re thirsty?” He frowned and did not reply. I translated all of this to the Swedes, who had no suggestions. Finally we accepted that there was to be no water, and let the younger man urge us upstairs.
It was barely past seven when he ushered us into the main upper room of the house, where three sleeping mats had been laid on the floor. I asked him if he had mosquito nets. He was surprised that we wanted them, but I insisted. We sat on their porch and watched the village prepare for nighttime while the man prepared our nets. It took him a very long time, compared to the complexity of the task, but it was still fairly early by the time he came out and told us our beds were ready. I asked for a bathroom, and he said there were no bathrooms, just go anywhere near the boundary fence. I theorized that if the people here drank no water, their solid waste would form dense discrete nodules that could be easily eaten by pigs, with relatively little chance of spreading contamination.
There was a single candle burning in the bedchamber as we prepared for sleep. Three children played in their pajamas, and the landlord watched us carefully from his seat on the floor. We held a short conference about water, and decided we could not afford to drink any of our reserves tonight because we would need it for the hike down tomorrow. We resolved to rise as soon as the sun came up so we could hike during the cool part of the morning. We had two liters of water between the three of us, and we all had a burning thirst following the salty eggs, the whiskey, and the hot climb.
The landlord watched us until he was satisfied that we were going to sleep, then he extinguished the candle and left. I lay there in the strange bed, thinking of water. It is very hard to sleep when you are thirsty, and even harder when there is a container of water within arm’s reach. My thoughts were focused on that liter bottle of fresh, cool, delicious water, and I could not relax.
The other impediment to sleep was the noise from the street outside. The villagers decidedly did not go to sleep this early – the shouts of children mixed with the barking of dogs and the laughter of adults for several hours. The children quieted down, but the dogs never did. I felt like a child who had been sent to bed while the parents are having a dinner party, and listening to the sounds of people having fun on the other side of the dark door. After a long time, the sounds died down to one localized noise-source, which I presumed was the house where people were sitting around drinking rice-whiskey. There was a very yappy dog in the street just below us, and it was only intermittently loud, the cur. A constant source of noise is possible to ignore, but when it erupts at unpredictable intervals, it renders sleep all but impossible.
Much later, the landlord, his wife, and their youngest child came into the room. The wife and child were the ones we’d seen in the shaman’s house. They set up a bed in a little closet-like space and lay down. The reason for the shaman-ritual soon became apparent. We had conjectured that it was a naming-day or some other age-related affair, but in fact the child was sick. She had a loud, difficult cough, and after each bout, began to cry. This continued through the night; needless to say, I did not sleep much.
When the bluish light of dawn began to steal through the gaps in the wall, we rose and packed our belongings. The village was slowly coming to life. We skulked away, not wishing to speak to anybody. The water and bed situation had made us all feel uncomfortable and unwelcome, and we wanted to leave. On the way out I saw the grandfather, squatting near a fire and using a hand-powered bellows to heat it up. I saw metal-working tools nearby, including a big iron knob used to beat metal into bowls. I was extremely interested in Khamu metalwork, and wrestled for a few minutes with the idea of staying and watching him work. In the end my parched throat won out: even in the early morning, it was evident that the temperature was rising, and my animal brain was ringing with dire warnings. So we climbed the fence and headed down the hill, and four hours later reached Ban Na, where water was available in plenty.

Khamu Smithy

I wondered about the world view and cosmology of a group of people who were not exposed to constant advertisement and flashing images of technology-based capitalism. Unfortunately, with the lack of televisions, advertising and commerce came an absence of schools, doctors, and comfort. It is a great temptation in the Western world to idealize such a people, and project onto them a close-to-nature nobility or purity, an antediluvian innocence. The reality is that a sick toddler gets colored string and ritual in place of antibiotics, and that an old man must endure his pain without palliatives.

CRITTERS ALONG THE WAY

Arlo, Pasco, and Annika after the hike down.

Spelunking in Ban Na

2008-09-17T17:41:00.000-07:00

I arrived in Muong Ngoi in late afternoon, and checked into the same bungalow I had stayed in before. At $2.75/day, it was quite a nice deal, overlooking the river and bordered by a monastery and a steep hill. I had some new neighbors: a charmant French woman named Sophie, a Sri Lankan woman named Nathali, and a Spaniard named Moise. This latter was several inches over six feet and thin as a famine-goat. He had intense bulging eyes and a natural, endearing physical awkwardness, as if he had just reached this prodigious height last week and did not know the boundaries of his physical self. One of the first of his acts that I witnessed was when he got into a hammock which was far too short to contain his legs, so he flung them both out over the sides. One foot smashed into the railing of his bungalow-porch and sent it crashing into the underbrush far below. He looked shocked and amazed, looking back and forth between his foot and the railing. Later he wore the same expression when he lost his wallet and tripped over his own feet.
I went with this new little group to get some food, and we met up with Andrea, the Italian man I had seen last night down the river, and Lisa, his British companion. They seemed tense. We ate dinner with them, and a few other backpackers, and hatched a plan to hike up to the cave tomorrow.
After we ate we were joined by an individual who looked so unusual that I had an instinctual hesitation as he approached. His hair looked like a huge woolly shaving brush, rising straight up from a round forehead. He had one wormlike dreadlock dangling off the rear. This was the first afro-dreadlock mullet I had ever seen. His eyebrows were big eruciform carpets, black and thick, surmounting great round dark eyes that seemed ready to emanate a paralyzing mind-control ray. His nose was long and thin, the bridge so narrow it looked like translucent alabaster, and his cheekbones were similarly finely-sculpted and very prominent. His mouth was droopy, his lips purple, and his arms and legs seemed to be composed of knots and burls. He spoke English with a peculiar accent, but I could not place it, nor did I learn his name or his nationality. After he left, someone referred to him as the “Israeli guy,” but an Israeli at the other end of the table quickly spoke up and said “He is not Israeli.”
It rained that night, and we anticipated a muddy hike. The next morning we met at the same place and ate a local delicacy called farang rolls: peanut butter, honey, and raisins rolled into a tube of sticky rice. Our expeditionary team arrived by ones and twos over the course of an hour. In addition to myself, Sophie, Nathali and Moise, there was the bizarre-looking guy from last night, who was called Teizel, from Frankfurt, Germany. Then Andrea, who looked sad and sported a black eye, looking wistfully at the river as we ate our farang-rolls. “Lisa is leaving today,” he said. He showed up a couple from Israel: Lily, slender and muscular with grim gray eyes and a determined manner; and Nir, built the same, with dreadlocks over a handsome square-chinned face and a ready smile, who seemed he would be at home in any environment. Our fast was soon over, and it was time to walk.
We set off along the muddy red road. At many points, buffalo and sandals had churned the entire trail into a slop of varying thicknesses, that imparted a clay sliminess long after you walked through it. Inexpert flip-flop wearers had their footwear sucked off repeatedly.
The sides of the path were bursting with jungle-weeds, fast-growing thornvines and big shaggy bushes with poisonous leaves. Cowbells sounded in the thickets. Sometimes the trail passed under enormous old trees clinging to chiseled-looking boulders. Sometimes villagers paused in these shady spots, studiously avoiding eye-contact with us. To our right the small river flowed in full spate, brimming at the sides, nut-brown and swirly. Children wearing diving masks and carrying spears and primitive crossbows waded around at deep bends.

A wide creek joined the river, and there were stepping-stones across. We all took the opportunity to wash our footwear, as we suffered miseries of clay-clotting. Across the river, there was a short flat area that was fenced off with barbed wire, where shoots of young rice grew. The trail was deeply-churned here, but under the fence was a kind of little ridge you could balance on and avoid the muck. I was walking behind Sophie, who had already slipped once. Despite her care, she slipped again, and her body went straight toward the barbed wire. She stuck an arm out to break her fall, and caught the wire on the upper part of her elbow. She took the force of the fall on the little ridge when her hip hit it, and her arm sprang off the fence. I was in a state of high alertness for the stream of blood and chaos that was about to ensue – but Sophie, kissed by luck, had caught the wire on a space exactly between two of the barbs, and suffered a bad scrape but no punctures or tears.
We reached the entrance to the cave directly after. There was a little kiosk manned by a woman I recognized from the village, and she accepted our entrance fee of ten thousand kips.
The cave was at the foot of a huge steep rock shaped like a camel’s hump, thickly covered with vegetation. A fast stream came out of the gaping mouth of the cave, and we splashed in the cool, clean water for a while. Sophie bathed her wound, and I looked for dragonflies.
The cave entrance was split: the lower hole was filled by the river and impassable except by swimming. The upper hole was at the top of a staircase carved into a jumble of boulders. The stairs were mossy and bore Buddhist inscriptions. This entrance received some sunlight and there were carpets of moss on some of the rocks inside. We climbed down and found ourselves on a shelf overlooking the stream, which curled away to the left. The shelf received much less light, so we slid down the clay slope to the stream and walked up it. It was emanating from a triangular hole at the left rear of the cave. It did not reach the top of the triangle: there was about a foot of clearance.

After some discussion, Moise went in with a headlamp and scouted it out. He returned a few moments later with encouraging words about an open, dry area up ahead. Lily, who had exuded some reluctance even before going into the cave at all, suddenly announced she would wait for us outside. The rest of us stripped down to lights and underwear. There were three lights for six people. We ducked through the hole and found ourselves unable to touch the bottom, swimming upstream toward darkness. Nathali, with no light, struggled toward Moise who waited halfway. He reached under the water with his long arm and gave her a little pinch, and she let out a shriek that was hard and flat in the closed space. Sophie immediately shrieked as well, and they both started thrashing around. Then the noise turned to panicked laughter and a couple of fierce looks at Moise.
After this affray I managed to slip past Moise into the dark tube that ascended from the river. It was smooth and round, as if made by a colossal burrowing worm. After a couple of twists, there was a window in the side of the tube, and total darkness beyond, a chamber so big that my Grade D Chinese Headlamp could illuminate nothing. A few feet away was a little apron of stone that stuck out into the chamber. I shouted encouragement at the people below, and my attention was immediately drawn to the sharply-sloping pit to the right. The light could not get to the bottom, so it was impossible to guess how deep it was or if it was filled with water. There were no loose stones whatsoever in that cave, so a Took toss-assay was out of the question. To the left, however, was a series of cavities in the stone. Reaching out over the darkness, and using the edge of the window-hole as a holdfast, I was able to crawl crabwise over the steep part and onto a wide flat area inside the chamber.
I ran my lamp over the vaulted interior, dislodging bats who whirled away into the darkness. There were a few stalactites, but not of the typical conic shape – these were more bulky, and composed of the kind of wavy, crinkly deposits that look like the edge of an overturned snail’s foot. A path led around the crown of a vast boulder, that could have been some giant monk’s shaved head, and through to another chamber. A gigantic centipede ran away from me, and I screamed in genuine panic. This was no red-and-yellow Scolopendra, no, this was the giant cousin of the common house centipede, with the huge masses of arched legs, as big as a toilet brush and ten times as fast. It wanted nothing whatsoever to do with me, and ran off like Dr Richard Kimball.
I paused, and listened to my comrades. Nir, Teizel, and Andrea had negotiated the breach, but Sophie had convinced herself it was impossible, and there was a loud delay. Moise made it across with no problem, as did Nathali, but they fell well behind the rest of us and did not follow. We had two lights and four spelunkers, and we went on.
The next chamber had startling white streaks on one wall, with a crystalline sparkle, and many more bats that wheeled a couple of times and vanished. This chamber was sloped to the right, also tube-shaped but much larger, large enough that boulders the size of cars were lodged at oblique angles. I imagined it was the trachea of a fossilized Brobdingnagian bosun. We could hear the quiet purr of the river coming from somewhere near the bosun’s larynx. Nir took the lead, lowering himself with ease into a gap and chimneying down past the first big boulder. The rest of us followed and found him deep below us, crossing a smooth round ridge onto a flat space. It was fairly steep but also slimy, and large cave-crickets scuttled unhurriedly away at our approach. Nir helped us across the smooth saddle, and we had a moment of regrouping before we began to descend again. It was not as steep now, and there were piles of guano on the little shelves of the cave-wall.
The path ended at a short drop-off, about five feet or so, into the river. There was a big deep pool fed by a torrent from another chamber further up; the water rushed through a gap and into a bowl-shaped depression before whirling into the pool. The water sent back some of the blue light from our headlamps, giving it a magical sparkle. Nir found a few handholds along the edge and dropped into the water. We followed him, and stood in the deep, cool, fast current for a few moments. I began to crawl upstream, past the waterfall-cauldron, and a little ways up, I saw a bat clinging to the wall. This was the first bat who had not reacted to the light, nor did it as I approached. There was something disquieting about a fearless bat – was it ill? So I slipped back down and joined the other gentlemen, who were heading downstream to see if there was a loop we could make.
The river went into another round tube, and in the glowing-blue water I spotted a white, eyeless fish. I had never actually seen one of these in the wild, and it was an exciting moment. We kept going down the tube until it ended, the air part of it anyway, for the water was going somewhere. We turned off the lights to see if there was any hint of daylight coming up. There was no hint of any light at all, and our ears suddenly sharpened to the sound of the water gurgling down this tube, a great stygian borborygmus that we felt in our ears and noses. We were quickly unnerved and turned the lights on again. The sight of each others’ faces was comforting and we all shared a laugh to break the fear-spell. There were no votes for going upstream. We turned back. On the way up it was more difficult with just two headlamps. Andrea was a perfect gentleman, politely requesting illumination each time I went a little too far ahead of him. There was no trace of shortness or impatience.
We heard the others’ voices after a little while, when we began to approach the white-streaked room. Moise and Nathali had wanted to come down after us, but were anchored by Sophie, who would neither go further nor wait by herself in the dark. It was a puzzlingly easy problem to solve: escort Sophie back and then travel forth, but I suspect some energy from inside the cave was confounding their reasoning. I escorted Sophie out, and we waited a few minutes while Moise and Nathali explored. They did not go as deep, and soon we were all standing in the stream in brilliant sunlight with Lily. The sky was blue and the temperature climbing fast.

It took a few minutes for us to reintegrate with the colors and openness of the surface. Nir, Andrea, Teizel and I traded looks as we described our descent to the others. Their faces were as familiar to me now as if I had spent a weekend camping with them. We were all full of smiles and spirit as we continued up the path.
Another cave opened on the same hill a little ways away, but it was fenced off with barbed wire. Further on the trail became harder and more passable, and there was more evidence of agriculture on both sides. We went through a rocky area shaded by a big tree with buttress-roots, and were swarmed by tiny mosquitoes. There was no trace of wind and they followed us for some distance. Then we came to a big open area the size of a sports field, all terraced into rice-paddies. A little way into this and the hills dropped off into the distance, and we were standing in a broad green valley completely covered with rice terraces. There were numerous trails along the top of the breastworks that formed the divisions.
Winding our way among these, like rats in a labyrinth, we were repeatedly awed by the vast natural beauty around us: great jutting hills with sheer blocky edges, caked with vegetation and casting long shadows across the valley floor. There was a tractor in one of the paddies, and the blatter-blattle of its motor echoed around the walls of rock. Our group divided repeatedly as we chose different trails, but eventually we caught sight of a village at one end of the valley, and all converged there.

We split up to explore Ban Na, which was inhabited by Lao and Khamu people. I found an old woman with tattooed wrists, and got into a conversation with her. Nathali sat nearby, and the woman kept trying to draw her into the talk, although they had no languages in common. At one point I said something that made the old woman burst into laughter, and she turned to Nathali and excitedly related something to her, impervious to the language barrier. Then we were all three laughing, and the village children gathered around us. I passed out cards, and they crowded closer, until the old woman barked at them, scattering them like pullets.
We regrouped at one of the town’s two restaurants, where the proprietress strongly suggested we stay the night at their bungalows. We were happy to relax in the shade. We all ordered the same thing: fried rice with eggs and vegetables. There were hammocks strung on the large open deck of the restaurant, and we made ourselves comfortable. The wall was decorated by a National Geographic World Map in Swedish (the legend said Världen) and a few Beerlao posters.
Teizel talked to Nathali and Sophie, discussing the effects of tourism on villages. His accent was decidedly not German; I had spoken to him in German a couple of times, and while he was clearly fluent, he had the same accent in German as he did in English. He spoke several times of Jordan as a familiar place. Sophie finally asked him what we had all been wondering: what was his heritage? His mother was Romanian and his father Palestinian. There was a sudden electricity in the air, not a bad energy, but a heightened energy, as Nir and Lily looked at him with alert eyes. He said his father came from a Palestinian community in Jordan but had emigrated to Germany to work. He didn’t have anything against Israeli people; he said he felt more German than either of his ancestries. Then he said he met an Israeli guy on a bus who told him the only Palestinians he’d ever seen before had been through a rifle sight.
“That guy was an ass,” Nir said immediately.
“Yeah, I didn’t know what to say, so I just sat back,” Teizel said. “But then the guy, he turned out OK, he told me he was sorry to say it like that, and we had a good talk after that.” The electricity dissipated. Lily mentioned a couple of other asses they had known, and group goodwill was affirmed. Lily was very amusing in a wry and dry kind of way; she had a gift for exposing the root silliness of human attitudes.
The food arrived and we devoured it – a well-earned meal if ever there was one, and the simple fare had a savor accented by exertion and novel experience. The portions were generous and the vegetables, local edible ferns with garlic and onions, were crunchy and fresh. Afterwards we were all drowsy, and lazed around the shady deck while the proprietress patiently reminded us that we could stay the night. I talked with people in the village about Ban Phoon, a Khamu village further up the valley. It was supposedly a three-hour walk and it was possible to overnight there.
When the sun began to sink, we roused ourselves and started the walk back. It was uneventful save for the numbers of farmers we passed, also on their way home. When we reached the cave I let the others go ahead. I went a little ways in and slid down to the creek. There were several large loose stones in the creekbed, and I rolled these around to create a sturdy ring of rock. This completed, I re-emerged and saw the light was fading.
I hurried along the path as best I could, but I was fatigued and slipped often in the mud. A couple of times my feet popped through the front of the sandals, and I almost went sprawling. I was tired when I finally reached the town again, and I saw a woman doing laundry at a small spigot. I asked if I could wash my feet, and she said yes, but when I turned the valve, no water came out. I pointed at it and asked her if there was a water-spirit, and she laughed and yelled to a neighbor downhill. That neighbor closed some distant piece of plumbing, and water pressure returned, rinsing off the clay glop. I washed my face as well, and felt incredibly relaxed and refreshed as I went back to the guesthouse. We swam in the river for a while, then made vague plans for dinner, and retired to our respective hammocks to watch the sunset.

Leaving Oudomxay

2008-09-06T13:00:00.000-07:00

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)

Still no summit, dadgummit!

2008-06-27T22:19:00.000-07:00

OK, I will put these pictures into order when I have a better internet connection...

A quick note on orthography – I have been wavering between the spellings “Puhipii” and “Phuhipii” because in Lao, the first syllable is spelled with the Lao plosive “p” – but then I realized that almost every word in English that starts with a “p” followed by a vowel is pronounced with the little plosive puff anyway – the little poofs that come out if you say “purple pill parade.” So I’ll stick with Puhipii because it’s closest to the Lao pronunciation.
I noticed many people around town pronounce the word Pulipii, whereas people in the villages say it Puhipii. It turns out “Puhipii” means “Ghost Vagina Mountain,” where as the other one is “Li’s Ghost Mountain,” in apparent reference to a Chinese spirit. Since I don’t read Lao, and since records of this area are so hard to scrape up, I don’t know which name has the first historical citation. I’d like to think that the people in town are just being genteel, but I suppose if Li was a woman, both names might be accurate to varying degrees.
In any case, I made my fourth attempted ascent to the summit yesterday. I had discovered a new trail a couple days ago, much better maintained than the first one, and obviously well-used (unused trails rapidly have large spiderwebs built across them.) I wanted to avoid the other trail for a little while because of the guy who told me I needed to hire a Lao person to accompany me.
The new trail was extremely steep and made of slick red clay. It was not too difficult to ascend, and I wasn’t trying to steamroll my way up it, in that there was an amazing profusion of insect life all begging to be photographed. The insect diversity on this mountain is one of the highest I have ever seen.
As I was paused near the top of the first little knob, a Khamu hunter overtook me. He was carrying what appeared to be a homemade rifle, and his face was all bad teeth and sideburns, but he had a friendly demeanor. I told him I was looking for butterflies, because that is so far the only answer that satisfies people as to my presence in forested areas. He nodded and said he was looking for birds, and continued on his way.
As I went on, I concluded there must be standing water somewhere nearby, to account for the high numbers of frogs, dragonflies and mosquitoes. I even found a little silvery caddisfly dancing about on a leaf, but he flew away as I withdrew my camera.
I reached the top of the first major knob, and had a grand view of the Oudomxay valley. About 2/3 of the surrounding mountains have been stripped absolutely bare of trees; most of these have been replanted with rubber. I certainly don’t begrudge anybody trying to make money, especially in this place where there is so little to go around, but it seems there might be other ways to exploit rich cloud forest than by destroying it. Who am I to talk, though? I’m a resident of a state where clear-cuts are the norm, despite the constantly-swelling body of evidence that there might be another way to do it so that forest diversity is protected and people can get their bleached, chemically-softened old growth toilet paper in perpetuity. So why should Laos do it any differently?
One of the eerie things about Puhipii is the lack of birdsong. Either the birds there do not sing, or they have all been eaten. Insects, especially cicadas, compensate with an earth-shaking din. I have seen snakes on Puhipii but never any sign of mammals.
Descending from the first big knob, I crossed a saddle where the slope on both sides was precipitous. I could see across the face of the massif to the other two ridges I’d tried to ascend before. The first one might have been a success if there had been more time; the second one was absurdly steep and should not have been attempted.
I came up another incline, stopping every twenty steps or so when some new wonder revealed itself to me. I’m still having the old problem of the camera becoming fascinated by a boring background while something amazing is happening in the foreground, despite the “super macro” setting and the “spot focus” squarely on the subject. I want to sit down with a Sanyo camera expert and watch all the videos I’ve taken of blurry foregrounds and crystal-clear backgrounds.
At the top of the other incline there came the sound of chopping. At least two people were off the trail in bamboo thickets, chopping with machetes, and a pile of ten-foot staves sat on the trail. I went past them and began to descend.
I didn’t like the idea of losing altitude, but this is where the trail went, so I followed it. I had to cross a short log bridge that was a-blossom with mushrooms and termites, but the fall was only a few feet if it broke. It held. As I went further down, the air became cool and dark, the trees larger and more gnarled, and the trail hugged the side of the slope instead of staying on the crest as before. From the ground I had suspected there would be a short dip between the first knob and the top ridge, but this was much more than a short dip. This was abyssal. To my left, the mountain sloping upward. To my right, a dropoff into green/blue/black nothing, that breathed up cold dampness. Mushrooms grew in profusion on this side, and the trail headed down, down, down.
Eventually I became uneasy for a variety of reasons. My clock had stopped working properly, and reported it was already late afternoon with darkness imminent. My bootlace broke for the umpteenth time, and I sat a while mending it, watching the progress of a carrion beetle up and down a stem. The chief reason for the unease was the vast yawning darkness ahead. I wrestled with myself for a while – here was a hole in the earth to which I had been drawn, for whatever reason, so I should see what’s down there. On the other hand, I don’t know what time it is, I’m alone, and it exudes a palpably threatening atmosphere.
Often when one approaches a gate or a border to an unknown place, a guardian appears. In this case it was the Khamu hunter with his primitive rifle and a huge bamboo pole. He told me there was nothing down there, and that I shouldn’t go. He said it was impossible to get to the summit from there, and took me a little ways around the bend to see: there was a ridgeline like a castle wall that rose straight from the chasm, which would have been folly to try to climb. I was grateful that he advised me in the direction of my feelings, and I followed him back up and down.
We stopped where the other woodcutters were, two men and a woman, all Khamu. They spoke Lao to me, but it was a decayed Lao without the endings on a lot of words. They were not good communicators, the chief symptom being an insistence on repetition of a single word instead of any attempt at alternative explanation. This went on for a little while, then the woman asked me how many days I was spending on the mountain. “Just one,” I answered, and they seemed surprised. I had seen no potentially-acceptable place to camp or sleep, otherwise I might have considered it.
We watched a rainstorm swoosh up the valley to the West and pound Oudomxay, far below us. There seemed no real reason to hurry down, so I sat up with the woodcutters, listening to their unmusical, cloppity-poppity language. Eventually my growling stomach urged me forth, and I began the descent.
The slick clay was ten times more difficult to go down than up, and I fell several times. I eventually started using one foot as a kind of ski, but picked up such tremendous speed that I thought it hazardous. I made it down in the end, bruised and extremely muddy, and stopped to chat with some Khamu children in a village, who were just as muddy as me. I gave them some stickers and a keychain, then trudged back into the city.

OUDOMXAY, JUNE 15, 2008

2008-06-16T23:42:00.000-07:00

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.

Phuhipii Pics

2008-06-13T04:22:00.001-07:00

First off, does anyone know whether I can call myself an NGO or do I need to register with some important persons? I'm planning to talk to the Lao government about granting protected status to this mountain.

Tortoiseshell beetle

Parasitoid wasp with stunned spider prey

Shelf fungi

Fungal exuberance

Herpetologists...? What is this beast?

Male stalkeye fly taunting me about no f-stop control on my camera

Yes, this is the ugliest biting fly in Laos, and it is about an inch long. The camo-spandex is telling.

Nebular orb weaver

An old dragonfly. See how his colors are faded. Even though I am chronologically older than this fellow, I still defer to him as a wise elder. He welcomed me to the mountain.

A sergeant among longlegs!

Whose house is this?

A sneering face?

Or grasshopper bits 'n' pieces?

Rococo grasshopper

Velvety ladybird

Red eyes and bottle-blue

No f-stop control on this frustrating camera.

Spores a-comin'

Millipede and potion-stain

Coenagrionid, I think

This ant has been eaten by a mushroom.

This ant has also been eaten by a mushroom

OK Beetlemaniacs - is it a dytiscid or a scarabid?

Fake ant

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3-axle caddis chariot

Parasitoid-infested caterpillar

Another coenagrionid damselfy

Luang Nam Tha and Oudomxay

2008-06-10T22:33:00.001-07:00

I have just completed the most intensive trek of the trip so far, and definitely one of my top-five overall. First, a little background.
I crossed the Mekong river into Laos, same place as before, with an eye on gaining access to the vast Bokeo Forest Reserve via the Gibbon Experience, a trekking outfit run through the border town of Huay Xay. I had tried this three months or so ago, only to be repelled by the crowds of paying customers queuing to spend $200 on three days in the jungle. My angle was to volunteer to train the guides how to recognize different kinds of insect, as well as create photo-propaganda for the outfit. But even at the height of the rainy season, it was still booked solid and they had no interest in “volunteers.”
I headed to Luang Nam Tha, where I had done a paying trek on the last trip and had been sorely disappointed. This time I just explored around town when it was not raining. This was about half of each day. I rented a spectacular bicycle – a mountainbike with big shocks, perfect for the rocky rubble of the Lao roads, and cruised around the area. The best part was a decrepit temple up on a hill, with creeper-covered ruins of an ancient stupa and loads of interesting insects. Another moment of excitement was when I saw a strange stinkbug on a bridge. Not that strange stinkbugs are especially exciting, but the Lao guidebooks abjure you not to take pictures of bridges, military vehicles, or industrial infrastructure. I had forgotten this for the moment, but was promptly reminded by an armed soldier who rushed up from a kiosk on one end of the bridge and began hissing at me.
From Luang Nam Tha I returned to Oudomxay, my home-away-from-home in Laos. At first I didn’t remember what I found so hospitable about this place, with its rushing trucks, its heavy Chinese tourist presence, and its stripped hillsides. This was further reinforced by the challenge I received from the young man who works at the tourist bureau – he wanted to know what I was doing back in town and why. Since this guy works for the Communist authorities, I didn’t want to call undue attention to myself, but I ended up telling him I wanted to go to Puhipii Mountain, right outside of town. “By yourself?” he asked incredulously. I said yes, and then feigned being in a hurry, leaving him there staring strangely at me as if I had said I was going to juggle goat embryos.
The next day it rained brutally hard for the first half of the day, so I finished a book and took a long nap. Then I went out to the villages East of town, walking around the outskirts and trying to spot dragonflies sunning themselves on broad leaves. I encountered dozens of villagers, in their ethnic garb, carrying agricultural implements over their shoulders. I learned to say “Hello” in Khamu, which brought a smile to even the grimmest faces. It was an amazingly pleasant little stroll, through the aquaculture landscape and fruit orchards, cozy-looking wooden huts and the whole range of domestic animals racing around in the yards.
That night at a restaurant I ran into an ursine Australian named Grant, from Adelaide. He was a tour guide at home, and ran expeditions into Kakadu Park in northern Queensland. I told him about my intention to climb up Puhipii, and he asked to join me. The next morning we set off at eight and headed into the forest.
Last time I attempted this was in the height of the dry season, and it was extremely difficult. Now it was insane. The trail was overgrown and covered with rotten leaves. Many trees had fallen over the path and required careful circumnavigation. There was a poisonous shrub which I never actually identified by sight, but brushing against it left a painful stinging rash. Eventually the trail became impassable, so we just headed straight up the hill. This was somewhat difficult, and progress was slow but steady. The insect life was phenomenal. I even found a couple of insect-eating mushrooms on the undersides of leaves. I will post pictures in the next issue, I am having battery problems with my camera just now.
Eventually we looked at the clock and decided we’d better head down, even though we hadn’t gained the top or even the ridgeline leading up. We were both game for more, but neither of us cared to descend through cloud forest in the dark. We saw what looked like a small trail heading down to the cleft between the two biggest peaks, and decided that Trail was better than No Trail, and followed it. At one point it crossed a big log over a fairly substantial drop – the log was solid and wide, and if it had been a log on a beach I wouldn’t have thought twice about walking across it, but suspended over an incredibly steep slope, it was rather terrifying. We made it across and the trail petered out to nothing, so we decided to just head downhill. It was extremely steep, in some places sheer cliff, and was mostly big flat wet rocks covered with rotten leaves. Needless to say there was a lot of slipping and sliding. There were enough vines, roots and trees clinging to the rocks to hold onto and keep ourselves from sliding down into the Abyss itself, but we still incurred a lot of bruises. At one point I sat and slid, and scraped up a bunch of leaf-litter, then felt a sharp electric pain in my butt. I writhed up and saw a medium-sized centipede scrabbling away. I’d never been bitten by one before, and I can now say with confidence that it hurts.
The way down was much longer than we expected. We had gained a lot of altitude on the ascent, and now we had to lose it again. On top of all this we were hungry and tired, and began slipping a lot more. I got an armful of thorns that has since turned into a neat, slightly-curved row of pustules with little black dots inside. Finally we made it back to the stream we had followed up, and then another hour later, we were out of the forest. We walked through a couple of Black Thai villages, muddy, bloody, and bruised, but still smiling, and eventually got back to the main road. The little dry-goods shop sold us biscuits and gave us drinks of iced tea from their collective pitcher – most of the people were amused, but one middle-aged man sternly told us that if we want to go to Puhipii, we need a Lao person to go with us. I played stupid and said I didn’t understand. Who wants a guide for something like that?
Back at the guesthouse, I showered and carefully checked myself for ticks. We’d found a couple on our extremities while hiking, but now I didn’t see any. What I did see were hundreds of little itchy sores from the poisonous plant. I’ve never had any reaction to plant-irritants before, barring minor nettle-burns and so forth, but this stuff stays at least 20 hours so far and stings perpetually. I shan’t photograph them, but do check in for pictures in future posts of the amazing wildlife at Puhipii.

Chiang Rai

2008-06-03T07:12:00.001-07:00

My little cell-like room at the Korean guesthouse on the north side of town has a screen door, so at night I can listen to the crickets and cicadas, and in the morning, the hundreds of birds. My room is about fifty yards from the river, separated by a wild overgrown tangle of thorns and fast-growing trees. I ended up at this place unintentionally, and thought to only stay one night, then seek lodging in a place more frequented by Western travelers. After six weeks in Nan I was lonely and craved conversation. But the Koreans, three young men, were so easygoing and the atmosphere so peaceful that I decided to stay on. One of them was the manager, the other two were evidently semi-permanent residents. With their tousled hair, their tropical stupor, and their oddly artsy little projects around the compound, they were an endearing bunch. Only the manager spoke English, but the other two communicated ably with sign language and nuance.
By seven we were all up and drinking coffee in the cool calm of the June morning. Manager and the one with spectacles did most of the talking; the lantern-jaw one had a monastic serenity and gentleness, moving slowly and deliberately as if woken from a long coma. Spectacles had a cigarette habit, and about once an hour he’d retreat to the rear of the yard and puff away, one shoulder slightly raised as if to shield the sight of himself.
There was one internet wire and three laptops, so we shared it like the three witches with one eye between them. There was never any dispute or impatience: we all knew the others wanted to use it, so every five or six minutes, the user would unplug it and lay it in the center of the table.
The day was warm and pleasantly cloudy, and I went for a long walk around the riverside neighborhoods. The river had been rerouted in the recent past, and the old riverbed was overgrown with vines and greenery. Gigantic bean trees shaded the avenues, unbelievable in size and girth. I would guess they were at least three hundred years old, but since I didn’t know what kind of tree they actually were, this was a mere approximation. Winding alleyways led to hidden neighborhoods that seemed to thrive of themselves with small vibrant markets and the smells of fried food and fish soup.
I had heard of a legendary used bookstore in Chiang Rai, and this was not something I was going to miss out on. I had three books I wanted to get rid of, and for packlightening purposes I hoped to swap them for just one book. The proprietor was a middle-aged German with a half-Thai baby on his arm, and we were both pleased to have a nice chat in his language. He eventually caught on that I was not German, cocking his head and squinting at me when I missed a velar fricative “r.” We immediately recognized voracious readers in one another, and moved from one section of the store to the other, chattering fifteen to the dozen. For every exciting discovery, he had another title he simply had to show me. The selection was truly extraordinary. He’d gathered all the popular reading right up front, for the hoipolloi, and in the back there were treasures beyond compare: Mayan codices, War and Peace in the original Russian, fat hardbound Philip K. Dick collections. The baby, for its part, waggled its arms and drooled. In the end I selected a linguistic treatise by the legendary Charlton Laird, but he insisted I take Maggie Cassidy by Kerouac as well. Even as I was leaving his driveway, he rushed out and reminded me he had a simultaneous English/German Goethe reader, if I was interested. I assured him I’d stop back by when I came through again in a couple of weeks.
Then the clouds broke up and the heat began to press down. I went into an air-conditioned café and spent too much on a big cup of locally-grown coffee. It was so strong it made me shake, and I emerged feeling purposeful. I got it into my head that I wanted to see a movie, since this was my first access to a real movie theatre in months. I walked back to the guesthouse, where nothing had changed. Lantern Jaw had gotten it into his head to trim the grass in the courtyard with a pair of hedge-clippers. Sweat poured off him, and the other two sat in the shade with their cold water and watched his efforts. I wondered if he’d lost a bet. After he finished with about forty square feet of yard, he took a break and jumped rope in the sun. He made me tired to watch.
I waited for my turn at the internet, and when it came, I discovered a film called Prince Caspian was playing in town at seven-forty. That was just under three hours away, so I decided to set out and enjoy the evening air. I went to the market and got some custard apples, a curious scaly green fruit that has a texture like rotten pears. As I munched them, I found myself walking beside a British blonde. She introduced herself as Annie, and we wandered backstreets and neighborhoods while the sun went down and a giant black storm gathered in the north, thundering like a kettledrum orchestra. We had nothing in common and probably wouldn’t even have looked at each other at home, but for an hour and a half, we had a simple strong connection like dogs or young children, as we roved through the Chiang Rai suburbs. Then she wanted to go to the Night Bazaar and I needed to head south to the theatre, so we parted ways with a friendly wave and no expectation of ever seeing one another again.
The Big C mall was about two miles out of the center of town, and I walked hard, unsure of the time. There was a vast greenbelt that separated “town” from the super-highway, and one had to get to a road that crossed the greenbelt in order to get to Big C. Unfortunately, few of the roads were marked, and most of them looked like the black-hole alleys that would lead me into lost, stressed disorientation. I finally caught a main road going across and had to backtrack, as the rain came visibly sweeping down in the north, ghostly tentacles extending from the clouds and catching the last rays of the sun. I made it inside just as the drumming of drops resounded throughout the Big C mall.
It was a typical small Thai mall, with about six different kinds of shops reiterated ten times each. This business model will always puzzle me. The food court was the same way, but with the added fillip that you had to buy coupons before going in. There were seven places selling the same spread of roast beef or chicken on top of noodles or rice. There was one place selling phad thai inside a thin omelet. To reward their entrepreneurial sense of daring, I chose their establishment to spend my coupons. After the meal I went to the theatre, and discovered they had dubbed the entire film into Thai. I was keen to see it nonetheless. The security people politely relieved me of my video camera, and I went in.
I don’t care to spoil the film for anyone, but I’ll say this: you need more than constant grim music to set a grim emotional tone. I’ll also say watching Peter Dinklage dubbed into Thai was pretty fun.
After the movie it was ten pm, and I walked back, past the nasty karaoke bars, all-night hotpot restaurants, and sleazy pink-lit massage parlors that the Thais love so dearly. A few tired-looking ladies called out to me as I passed, but I had eyes only for home. It was a long walk, and I was ready to go to bed when I got back. Tomorrow I would leave Thailand for the slow-motion, gentle madness of Laos. I have one month left in Southeast Asia. My antennae are aloft for the call to adventure.

Leaving Nan

2008-06-02T03:10:00.001-07:00

My lease for my Nan apartment ran out on Sunday. As seems to be a typical pattern for me, I met a bevy of interesting people the last week I was in town. We made plans to go to a ladyboy beauty pageant on Friday night, and then I was going to spend Saturday excising myself and all my matter from the apartment.
At some point on Friday I ate something bad. I had a number of things from the open market, but the likely culprit was the dregs of a bag of sticky rice that was leftover from no more than a couple nights ago, which I found on my table. That afternoon I was engaged in writing and munching on mangosteens, one of nature’s most perfect fruits. I craved some starch to cut the somewhat acidic mangosteen juice, and rummaging around, I came across what looked to be perfectly serviceable rice. This I ate. I washed it down with a cup of coffee and became suddenly drowsy. I lay down and went to sleep.
I woke with just twenty minutes before I was supposed to meet my new friends. The drumming of rain woke me. At this point a cell-phone would have been amazingly handy, but I had none. Instead, I made the decision to doggedly ride my bike through tropical downpour and make the rendezvous. My stomach lurched as I got ready. Hot acid gurgled in my esophagus, and I belched sour gas. But my decision was made: nobody was going to make a useless trip through the rain on my account! So off I went.
Fortunately the downpour had abated somewhat, and honestly it’s quite pleasant to be out in the rain in this climate. The drops are cool, not cold, and it is such a relief from the heat that the minor discomfort of dampness doesn’t signify. With humidity hovering around 90%, you never really dry out here anyway, even on the serest days.
My stomach had other ideas, and began sending up little “outriders,” small quanta of extremely sour fluid which I spat out. I can usually cope with vomit and nausea if I’m with friends doing something fun. Sadly no friends were at the meeting place, which was under a shelter on the tourist plaza, so I whipped out my current reading material: On the Road by Kerouac. I’ve never read this before, and the luminous, saltatory journeys of Sal and Dean were wonderfully enthralling.
Finally one friend showed up, explained she had waited for the downpour to stop, and we went on together to the site of the pageant. For those not in the know, ladyboys, or kra-tooeys as they’re known here, are the third gender in Thailand. They are men who cross-dress to varying degrees – even to the point of intensive cosmetic surgery. How the custom started is a mystery to me, but now it is such a part and parcel of Thai culture that such persons are accepted in most walks of life.
We went to the riverside pavilion, where there were hundreds of seats set up in front of a stage, the whole affair ringed by food vendors. There were not many people present. The food vendors outnumbered the potential customers by at least five to one. My friend bought some spring rolls, and my stomach churned wretchedly. We were sauntering along, wondering what to do, and then she gave a cry of surprise and reached into her mouth. She withdrew a tiny snail shell. An old sense-memory rose unbidden to my mind: years ago in China I had tried to eat a plate of river snails. They were powerfully-flavored but palatable. The fourth one I bit into was full of baby snails, hundreds of tiny crunchy shells, and somehow the mere idea of eating a fecund snail’s uterus made me lose my appetite. Now, watching my friend turn the glistening little spiral on the end of her finger, that sickening crunch of glassy shells between my teeth echoed in my brain, and my stomach heaved mightily. I made apologetic excuses to my friend and went back to the apartment.
That night was a horror, a personal hell. My body decided to rid itself of everything in the whole digestive tract, as rapidly as possible. At first it was a relief, but my stomach began to ache terribly and I suffered from endless dry-heaves. I became thirsty but could keep no water down. My joints and back ached, and I could not lay in one position long enough to fall asleep. I’ve had this happen once before, at Burning Man, and knew it was only likely to last about ten to fifteen hours, but what a wretched period that was! Any time I took any water at all, it came boiling back up, bright yellow and bitter, followed by several minutes of dry-heaving and panting on the bathroom floor. Then I would collapse exhausted and sweating into bed, unable to fall asleep.
Finally around 7 am it began to abate, and I was able to keep down mouthfuls of water and sleep about thirty minutes at a time. I crept down to the corner store and got a big bottle of Sprite and a bag of ice; this was tremendously helpful and restored me immensely.
Around 11 I had to return my bike to the rental place, two and a half miles across town. I had no wish to do anything, much less a short ride and a long walk in the heat. But local bus service was terrible, and I had no option. The walk probably did me some good, actually, and I felt much better, though very tired, by the time I got home. I made negligible progress packing, and then fell into a deep sleep. I finally got up at 4 the next morning, with 5 hours left to pack up and clean the apartment. It didn’t take nearly that long, so I drank Sprite and watched old Dr Who episodes on YouTube until the landlady showed up. It turns out there is a mandatory 200 baht fee ($6 or so) for “cleanup,” which if I had known that I would have left the place filthy. No matter. I got my deposit back and then hurried to the bus stop.
The bus to Chiang Rai was coming at any minute. The transportation authority, in its infinite wisdom, had decreed that there were to be two buses per day from Nan to Chiang Rai. If you missed the 9am one, you could just wait and get the 9:30am one. Some unfathomable logic is at work here. I didn’t want to stay in a Nan guesthouse for a night, and I was in danger of missing the second bus, so I scuttled with my full pack to the highway. I got to the stop less than a minute before the bus rolled up. I tried to get on, but the bus conductress kept repeating a word I didn’t know. I wanted to vomit in her face. I am losing patience for people who refuse to try to communicate. We went through this routine, with the bus idling, over and over again: she said the word, I said I didn’t understand that word, then I asked her “Can I get on the bus or not?” And then we’d start again. I looked over her shoulder at the impatient driver and asked him: “Can I get on this bus?” but he wasn’t going to interfere with this stout, mulleted woman. Selling tickets and repeating incomprehensible words was her province, not his. Finally a passenger leaned out the window and said in English “No seats, you have to stand.” Aha! No problem, I said. I found a place to sit on the floor at the very rear of the bus, and relaxed. I was on the road again.
And what about my time in Nan? Six weeks in one spot with nothing to report? Nan is a pretty boring place, adventure-wise. I didn’t mind a bit. I got a lot of writing done, and a lot of video-work, and archiving. I found many, many cool bugs and studied their habits. I atre tremendous quantities of exceptional fresh fruit. But honestly, I didn’t feel like adventuring at that time. Even now I am thinking of Home, wherever that is. Thinking of planting a garden. Thinking of getting a paycheck. This trip has gone a long time. Really, it started in Finland last year. I count my time living on Ryan and Dom’s couch last fall as part of the trip. It was temporary in every sense of the word. So now I’m fourteen months into my journey, with an end in sight in Boulder in August. I’m feeling like it might be time to send some roots down, to have some kind of stable platform and adjust my travel habits to aiming for a couple of months in one spot at a time. That worked outstandingly well in Costa Rica, Finland, and Arizona.
My arrival in Chiang Rai highlighted everything I despair about travelling in Thailand. The bus station was a couple of miles from the affordable guesthouses. The minute I stepped off the bus, I was swarmed by touts, dead-eyed zombies incanting their spiels in English, insisting themselves into my field of vision, with their slick brochures and their promises of Heaven on Earth. I was trying to orient myself on the map in my guidebook, for the bus had taken so many turns coming into the city that I didn’t have any sense of direction. I asked one of the touts to show me a map to his place, which he did: it was far out of town. One of the most common tout-tricks is to drive you out to one of these remote places, then tell you all the cheap rooms are full, so you are obliged to take a much more expensive one or try to walk back into town. Then of course you are on the outskirts and must rely on them for transport, food and water. I hate touts, they are nothing but trouble, and this sleek one before me now with his deadclam eyes and blunt dull insistence made me groan inwardly. I asked him which direction his guesthouse was in, seeing that it was in line with the one I wanted to go to, and he pointed, so I set off walking.
Two blocks later some locals told me I was going the wrong direction. I wanted to go back and punish the tout, but that wouldn’t serve any purpose, and I didn’t have the spare energy for anger. I was still feeling quite weak and hadn’t eaten any solid food since Friday. I got on the right track, and had some exceptionally tasty Lebanese food on the way, which went down quite well, and more importantly, stayed down. Then I discovered that my guidebook, Lonely Planet, was in error about where the Akha River house was located. They are so idiotic sometimes. I know it’s a lot to deal with, making a reference book in which the points of reference are more or less constantly changing, but the truth is that the Akha River house was never on the spot indicated on their map, nor is that spot zoned for a guesthouse of any kind. It is a slum, with snarling dogs and overflowing garbage cans. Fortunately I found another place, Korean-owned, around the corner, and gratefully took a room there.
I rested a while and then had a walk around town. What a town! There are giant old trees everywhere, and a distinct architectural style here and there. In one of the public plazas I found a parade float that was a pair of dragon-heads made of produce, a wondrous thing to behold.

There were endless shady avenues and parks and old neighborhoods to explore. At the outdoor market I enjoyed all the faces: the flat teardrop-shaped Hmong, the moonpie Akha, the lantern-jaw jut-chinned Khamu (from whence Dr Terry Mang hails), the purple-lipped and somehow daemonic Burmese, and several I did not recognize but who were clearly not Thai. There was one group whose young women were extraordinary in their caramel-colored skin, large bright eyes, high cheekbones, and generous figures. Here at last was the ethnic melting-pot I had hoped for in Nan – a real genetic crossroads.
And there, in the produce market… could it really be? Cherries! Huge piles of redpurple cherries, fat to bursting, glowing in the sunset. I bought four and a half pounds for 65 cents. I knew I should wash them before I ate them, and that my hands were filthy, and that my recent experience ingesting bad food should teach me a lesson, but I just had to try one. I carefully washed it with water from my bottle, and popped it in my mouth. It was very sour and fibrous, and the flesh was yellow, although the skin was deep red. I got them home and washed them off, then sampled a few more. The skin was amazingly bitter, the flesh generally sour and hard, and the aftertaste nasty. It dawned on me eventually that these were not cherries, but cherry-sized plums. Neither fruit had any business growing in Thailand. Then I started thinking, what is the difference between a cherry and a plum? They are both drupes, after all. Is there a continuum between the two fruits, such that the categories are meaningless in the end? These hard little devils argued for such a case. I highgraded the very largest and softest, but even these weren’t very good, so the rest of them went into the shrubbery behind the bathrooms.
So, one more month in Southeast Asia. My plan is to stay in Chiang Rai for a couple more days, then head over to Oudomxay in Laos for up to a couple weeks. At that point I will offload everything I possibly can from my backpack, and if it feels right, I will travel a bit more in Northern Laos, before circling back to Thailand, to round out my trip in Pai, with a final jungle camping journey in Khao Yai before I get on the plane to Taiwan and then to Seattle. Plans. Hah! Southeast Asian Travel Gods sneer at plans. We’ll see what happens.

Nan Insects

2008-06-02T02:54:00.000-07:00

A few snapshots of the local wildlife:

PREDACEOUS DIVING BEETLE LARVA

PREDACEOUS DIVING BEETLE

PICTUREWING (Libellulidae: Rhyothemis variegata)

LETHOCERUS INDICUS EATS DRAGONFLY NYMPH

LETHOCERUS INDICUS MOLTS

HYDROMETRID

JUMPING SPIDER

EPHEMERID MAYFLY NYMPH

Birthday Surprise

2008-05-19T15:35:00.000-07:00

Birthday Surprise

Just three hours after turning thirty-three, I considered the possibilities for the day. I could turn in, sleep until my neighbor activated his television in the morning, have some spicy khaosoi noodles, and go to the museum. I was comfortably sleepy, after a bike ride of decent length, a long bout of writing, and some very tasty durian. Yes, a nice rest will set me up smashingly for a morning of scholarly leisure at the museum.
As I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth, I glanced over my little insect zoo. All the insects I currently have are able to eject their feces upward and away from themselves, an enviable skill, and so it’s just easier to keep them in the bathroom. Amidst the hacked-open water bottles and dog dishes, one little tub caught my eye. It contained six adult Diplonychus, four of whom I had raised from juveniles. These are belostomatids akin to the Abedus I did my research on, but much smaller. They were my first “pets” in Nan and had already produced two broods of offspring. Now they had the disconsolate, hopeless look of captives. I had been thinking to set them free for some time. How about now?
But, my bed! My comfort! I threw my toothbrush down and sneered at myself. Maybe I should have a cup of weak tea and rub some liniment on my knuckles. Or, I could go to the swamp at 3:30 am. Which tone do I want to set for the coming year of my life?
I decided to go to the swamp. It was about fifteen minutes by bicycle out of town to the north – I’d been out there at least ten times since I arrived, but never at night, so this would be a good opportunity to examine the goings-on of the nocturnal crowd.
I gathered net and camera, pail and flashlight, and set out. There is a row of streetlights that ends at the border of town, and as I traveled out of the rays of the last light I realized that the heavy cloud-cover was making things very dark indeed. No matter, I had my headlamp, and anyway there was still enough light to see the stripe on the road.
A savage chorus erupted in front of me where the first village road joins the highway. Dogs! No less than five of them, all running at me full-speed. I flicked my light on and saw snarling mouths, wet tongues and sharp teeth, all hurtling toward me. I gave an involuntary yelp and started pedaling faster. The dogs also accelerated, and I readied myself to kick them with my sandal-clad feet. Fortunately I outpaced them, and, heart beating, sailed up the road. I hated the feeling of being scared of curs. It made me like a cur myself, to run away like that when challenged. I quickly decided that I wasn’t going to let that happen again, and started scanning the side of the road for sticks and branches. Let’s see what those vicious inbred brutes think of a shillelagh on the snout!
I spotted a likely-looking pile of branches and slowed down. I was just about to dismount when I heard a deep punctuated growl: rrrARrrrrARrrrrrARrrrr! as of a dog running and growling at the same time. I kicked the bike into action as three dogs burst out of a nearby driveway. What they lacked in number they made up in mass and brains. This was not senseless yappy aggression; these dogs had a strategy, and two of them drove me toward the third, who was starting to run in the same direction as I was riding, as if he were a relay runner about to receive a baton, or in this case, my tibia. I had to put on a big burst of speed and cross the trajectories of the other two, who were already dangerously close, and they began to snarl savagely. Praise be to the bicycle, for it could handle the treatment, and it transmuted all my leg strength into speed. The dogs followed me for a long ways, but finally dropped back.
Egad! I thought. Well, there’s the swamp, and there’s a good stout branch. Somehow I knew there were no dogs in the vicinity of the swamp, but I poised my bike at an easy angle for rapid egress. Then I waded in. I let the Diplonychus go with an utterance of thanks, then turned the light off and sank to a squat at the edge of the first big pool. I knew all the pools intimately by now; this one had the small and medium-sized diving beetles, small crabs, and aeshnid dragonfly nymphs. I sat there listening to the song of hundreds or possibly thousands of frogs, all up and down the audible register. There was one whose croak was so deep and hard that it hurt the middle of my head a little to listen to. There was peep-peep-peep, gorble-gor-gorble-gor, chuck-chaw-chuck-chaw, garoop! garoop!, yurk-yurk-yurk, threebeldy-threebeldy-three, and a few others. There was also a nightbird which I have still not been able to capture on tape, who makes a very big, falling-tone hooom-hooom-hooom-hoom-hoom-homph-homph-homph-homph, invariably taken up by another individual in a distant tree.
I snapped the light on and went over to Big Pool. Here would be the tadpoles with long back legs, Lethocerus bugs, big crabs, and the huge predaceous diving beetles. There was a giant I had caught last week, but it prompty escaped from my pail by flying, and I hadn’t been able to get it again. I saw dark shapes moving around under water; the headlamp was especially good for this, as it could slant the light in and provide strong contrast. I spotted one of the big beetles but only managed to churn the water to opacity when I went after it.
There was a very loud chorus of frogs over at Deep Pool, about twenty meters away. I thought that might be a good place to go next, and then circle around to Shade Pool, where there would be the little beetle grubs who liked to climb out of the water to eat their prey. I turned the light off and stood in Big Pool, trying to wash the clay off my feet, when suddenly the frogs at Deep Pool fell silent. I froze. Fireflies flickered through the swamp and in the forest beyond it. The larger frogs around me fell silent as well. Then there was a rustle of reeds as something moved through the shallow marshy area around Deep Pool. I turned my light on, with the beam focused, and saw the unmistakeable twin pools of reflected light from an animal’s eyes. They seemed rather wideset, as well. They stared at me across the swamp, and I decided it was time to go. I moved swiftly to solid ground and regained my bicycle.
I found a likely-looking stick and broke it down to the proper length for a cudgel, then set off. The big dogs had attacked from the East, and the measly little curs had come from the West. That meant I would have to switch the stick into the opposite hand, no mean feat on a bicycle riding at evasion-speed. Fortunately the first dogs were on a downhill slope, so I had some nice speed going by the time they perceived me. The stick infuriated them, though, and they tried to seize the end of it. I discovered I didn’t have the necessary leverage to bend my body and deliver a blow, without unbalancing the bicycle. This seemed contraindicated, so I settled for using the stick to keep the dogs away from me. I really wanted to club at least one dog. I’m not an advocate for beating beasts, usually, but this was a public thoroughfare for Human Being use, and those dogs needed a reminder of which species was in charge. I evaded them, though, and had no thought of turning back around and confronting them, no matter how badly they deserved it.
The other gang of dogs was easier to deal with, because they were at the bottom of the incline, and so I was travelling pretty fast by the time they even spotted me. I rode straight at them, yelling, with the stick held out like a lance. They yelped and scattered, tails between their legs, to my immense satisfaction. I could hear them barking indignantly all the way back to my house.
I showered the swamp-slime off my feet, and then started thinking about some weak tea before bed. And thus, I turned thirty-three.

EARTHQUAKE!

2008-05-12T04:51:00.000-07:00

This afternoon I was sitting in my apartment, writing, and watching the stormclouds drift across to the East. Most of the rain seems to fall over there, and there are terrific thunderstorms every couple of days. Today there was a low rumble that shook the windows and the water in the aquarium. There hadn't been any electrical activity prior, nor was there any subsequent. I wrote it off to a distant strike, but then saw on the news that it was an earthquake all the way in Chengdu, China! My thoughts are with the high school students who are apparently trapped right now.

Life in Nan has been very pleasant and peaceful the last few weeks. I usually do one exploratory bike ride every two or three days, to surrounding villages or up into the forest. Usually I get rained on, but I have ziploc bags to keep the important stuff dry. The new camera is working out very well, in most cases, except for two things: first, the battery is as feeble and frail as a geriatric mayfly. It has a little icon on the camera screen and "halfway gone" means "about to run out." Second, although it has multiple settings for telling where the camera is supposed to focus, at what depth, distance and breadth, it has an absurd affection for boring backgrounds, and seems to prefer them over exciting beasts in the foreground. This is especially frustrating when I see fabulous dragonflies perched on leaves three feet from my hand, and the camera is only interested in the foliage behind them. I still haven't worked out how to get the camera to do what I'm telling it to do. The old camera did NOT have this problem.

Last week I rented a motorcycle and zipped up the main road north to the Thung Chang district. I got a bad sunburn, but nonetheless I found a motorcycle is an incredibly liberating vehicle: it does not consume much fuel, and you can stop at every creek, stream, and pond to look for water-insects without worry of being abandoned.
I made it all the way to Thung Chang and beyond, where I was looking for Khamu villages. I found one 5km up a steep dirt road. It was called Ban Nam Sawt (Sawt Creek Village) and the friendly, hospitable people were very amused that I had come all that way to hear about their culture. Unfortunately I am about a generation too late to get anything of ethnographic significance - people in their 30s and older remember vocabulary but not syntax, and no stories to speak of.
I sampled Sawt Creek for aquatic insects and found it the very picture of health. I made a point to tell everyone in town whom I talked to that their creek was clean and they should keep it that way. I caught a dazzling Ephemerid mayfly larva (video below) which made a good spokesbeing for clean river health.
Eventually some teenage girls took me to see the village chief. This was a guy a couple years older than me, and he did not know much Khamu, but he showed me a King James bible written in Khamu as rendered in Thai letters, and a little songbook. I got to talking about the Khamu medicine men, called Maw Hawy. Among their various duties are to tie strings around peoples' wrists, and bless new houses. I said "what else can a Maw Hawy do?" and at that very instant there was a peal of thunder. I looked very surprised and the villagers were quite amused. I didn't want to take the motorbike down that road in the rain, so I bade them farewell and started back. I managed to outrun the storm but was incredibly sore by the time I got home. I think I will rent the bike again either this week or next; there are unique geological features in the south and a national park in the north. Other than that I have been writing and making short videos of aquatic insects.

Nan

2008-04-24T07:27:00.000-07:00

Wow, very eventful few days. I got an apartment in Nan, in the north of Thailand, for 6 weeks. I rented a bike for the same period, and just got a new camera. It does not do macro nearly as handily as the old one, but the new one does video:

I'll write some more details about Nan soon, but so far, I have had a piece of metal embedded in my eye, wild mushroom poisoning, and unbelievable fresh fruit. I also started a bug farm in my new bathroom.

Songkhran - Thai New Year

2008-04-20T23:54:00.000-07:00

April is the hottest month in Thailand. Being somewhat north of the equator, the seasonal effect of summer begins to kick in. Both the Andaman Sea and the Gulf of Thailand get a lot of very hot sunlight, which evaporates a lot of water. The water vapor moves along a concentration gradient to the north, where it cools and begins to condense on microscopic dust particles in the air, forming raindrops. Or so the theory goes.
The long hot wait for the rain adds another layer of vexation to the already-repressed Thai society. People here are not encouraged to express anger or dissatisfaction – raising one’s voice is seen as distasteful; losing one’s temper, barbaric. Over the normal course of days and weeks of human existence, as we all know, there are plenty of occasions where people around us behave idiotically or spitefully, important things get lost or broken, plans gang aglay, and it’s actually quite relieving to pop off a bit (well for me anyway – I like a good shout now and then.) But here, people don’t do that – they just bottle up all the rage and pretend that nothing is the matter. They walk around for most of the year with a big kettle of simmering vinegar in their heart, pretending that their feelings aren’t hurt or their vituperation excited. Add in the unrelieved, life-sapping April heat, that continues to bake up out of the concrete all night long, and the whole society is filled with emotional autoclaves that are barely within tolerance limits.
The solution is Songkhran, the week-long celebration of Thai New Year. I haven’t done my homework properly, but from hearsay, it stems from the ritual anointing of Buddha images with water, which later expanded to the gentle ablution of the elderly with scented water, and then somehow snowballed into the all-out tribal water frenzy I am going to describe below. My intuition tells me that the Thais, a water-loving people, had some kind of similar ritual built into their culture long before any Buddha images arrive. Thais used to worship human-headed watersnakes called Nagas, that lived in rivers, and in the same way the pagan solstice fires were turned into St John’s Day in Finland, I believe that those watersnakes are behind the primitive fury with which the Thai people embrace this holiday.
I was invited to stay at my friend Jen’s house in Lampang, about 90 minutes southeast of Chiang Mai. Jen teaches at the local university and is fairly well embedded in Lampang. There were many foreigners in the region who were going to band together for the duration of the festival.
The first day, we prepared to venture forth. Jen warned that anything we brought with us would be thoroughly soaked, so all electronics, notepads, dictionaries, or credit cards should either be thoroughly wrapped in Ziploc bags or left at home. Jen girded herself with a water-gun that had a backpack tank shaped like a monkey face. I was loathe to invest any money in a water-hurling device, so I did the next best thing: a two-liter bottle with a hole poked in the cap. With proper pressure, this could squirt a surprising distance. We were joined by Rob and Becca, a couple from Washington DC, and we went out to the main street.
It was an exuberant watery chaos. People had set up bamboo-and-cloth stands on the sidewalk to keep the sun off their heads, and underneath these stands were 50-gallon drums of water, or kiddie pools, replenished by hoses that snaked out of places of business. There was massive automobile and foot traffic, and the sidewalk people used buckets, pans, water guns, cups, and hoses to throw water at the people going by.

This was especially dangerous when the target was a motorcycle laden with two or three people, and the driver received a gallon right in the face.

Much of the traffic consisted of dangerously-overloaded pickup trucks with 50-gallon barrels or trash cans filled with water, and the passengers hurled it back at the people in the street.

To my eye the jets of water coming out of buckets looked somewhat like the shapes of the Naga spirits, as if each soaking iteration were an invocation of those ancient gods.

Some of the vehicles had giant palm fronds to shade the passengers.

Often a small child rode in the bucket itself.

The water, on the whole, was vile – the kind of stuff you find in the bottom of a vase after the flowers have lost their petals. It was probably pumped straight up from the river. Thai people regard their rivers as vast, constantly-flushing toilets which are equally happy to receive turds, industrial waste, dead dogs, or the crinkly ashes from a pile of burnt plastic garbage.
As we walked down the street, we all tried to keep the water out of our mouths, but as tall pale people, we were immediately targeted for special attention from every participant. We were instantly soaked to the bone. The other common ritual is to smear a kind of chalk putty on people’s faces. Thais do not usually touch each other, so this is a big breach of custom – the single time in the year when it is permissible to touch a stranger or your significant other on the cheek in public. It was very gentle, and was accompanied by a soft muttering by the daubers, and it had a kind of religious anointment tone about it.

The chalk was usually washed off fairly quickly by the buckets of water that rained down or jetted up. The worst people, we soon discovered, were the 9-13 year old boys. There’s something about boys in this bracket that makes them unnecessarily serious about aggression. I remember being that way myself – playing too rough at things like pillowfights or dodgeball, not appreciating that it was all in fun, not acknowledging that real damage was not the object. So too were these Thai boys, with their super-amped-up pump-action super soakers. They would point them directly at our eyes or mouths, and with very serious expressions on their faces, mercilessly squirt. My homemade watergun was capable of delivering a stout stream, and I often returned fire straight into their faces, but this was a call for all-out warfare, as it got the boys’ amygdalae involved, and they became slaves to their hot anger. One boy followed me for half a block, pelting me in the face with stinking water until his gun was empty. If memory serves me correctly, that kind of water gun was banned in the US around 1994 because some 9-13 year old boy had filled his with bleach and sprayed it into a rival’s eyes.

Chalky and dripping, we made our way to a restaurant called The Riverside, where we joined some other friends, including Jen’s boyfriend Otto, a soft-spoken and very intelligent Thai man. We had cold drinks and watched a parade roll past. This was a typical Thai parade, with banner-bearers, people in traditional costumes waving down from floats, ranks of people walking in identical outfits, live music, and speakers blaring from under waterproof covers. What distinguished this parade were the palanquins bearing animal images or Buddha images – the very images that were being bathed in the celebration. Sometimes an old monk rode next to an image, and was constantly wiping the water out of his eyes.

The parade trailed off, and people filled the streets, dancing, throwing water, and smearing chalk. By this time the Thai people were drinking heavily, even the teenagers, and there was a kind of insane, raucous hilarity erupting from all directions. We waded through this and took refuge at another friend’s house – suddenly I had new friends all over town! – and sat on his porch, slinging water at passersby and eating noodles in the shade. When the sun started to go down, we actually started feeling cold – a novelty, but a somewhat wretched one. The group broke up and promised to reunite the next morning. The local revelry continued well into the night, punctuated by the distinctive artillerine crump of dry-ice bombs.
We went out again in the morning, this time armed with little dishes of the facial chalk. My squirtgun had broken and I didn’t want to drink another 2 liters of soda to make a new one. We had, however, introduced dye into our face-chalk so that each of us had a lurid color to smear on Thai faces. Mine was purple, and I started putting purple handprints on signs, windows, and cars.
A day and night of drinking had not improved the people’s dispositions, and while they were still obviously in a celebratory mode, there was a new viciousness in the water attacks that had been absent the day before. This was startlingly apparent in the temperature of the water: many, many people now had giant chunks of ice bobbing in their reservoirs, and they took sadistic pleasure squirting it into ears or pouring it down the backs of necks. Even on such a hot day it is not a pleasant experience. I am reminded of the hospital assay of brain activity by squirting cold water into the patient’s ear. The people who had to make do with lukewarm water compensated by hurling it in large quantities directly in the faces of motorcyclists or unwary pedestrians. The chalk-smearers exercised their contempt by swabbing great clotted gobs of the paste directly onto the eyebrows, so that the next dose of water made it run down into the eyes. Since this is my only Songkhran experience, other than being hit by a water balloon eight years ago, I don’t know if the second day is more aggressive by tradition or if it was only the mood of that particular time. It was certainly focused more intensively on the foreigners, for I imagine there is some frustration harbored toward people from wealthy faraway lands who come into Thailand and have immediate access to all the best services.
Near the center of town was a large fountain with several accessory pools. Hundreds of people swarmed through the fountain, playing in the jets of water.

Another parade was crossing through the fountain-square, and we stopped to observe it. This time it was predominantly Buddha images, riding on elevated daïses in pickup trucks, adorned with real and artificial flowers. These were followed by public dignitaries in horse-drawn carriages, including the diminutive mayor of Lampang. The old Roman trick of obliging your beasts of burden to fast before a parade had not reached this part of Thailand yet, and each carriage had a little shallow cauldron placed below its horse’s exhaust port. These necessarily caught some of the overflow of the water that was pitched at the passengers, and I must admit that a big bowl of unwholesome soup sloshing around directly in front of the public officials’ feet tended to understate their dignity.
Standing apart from the action were a pair of gorgeous Thai girls all made up in beautiful gowns, fancy hair and very high heels, carrying parasols. They had a little satellite man orbiting them, keeping water-throwers and chalk-smearers at a distance. He carried a tall trophy on a transparent crystalline base, presumably won by one or both of the girls, and this he used as a knout to discourage passersby from getting too close. The girls stood like living trophies themselves, smiling blandly, images of themselves, tall, splendid, unapproachable.
At last we returned to Jen’s house for a potluck. I brought an obscene quantity of ripe mangoes and a wad of sticky rice the size of a chihuahua. Hilary had somehow acquired a clay pot from Eastern Thailand that contained a fiery distillate of rotten rice. Otto, being from Eastern Thailand himself, was much excited to see it, and went through a strange ritual of preparation that involved scraping a thick layer of ash off the top, adding water to a layer of chipped wood and herbs, and insertion of two long wooden straws.

It had a rich foresty flavor with several interesting undertones. It reminded me favorably of some of the herbal liqueur I sampled in Austria last year, but unlike the Austrian stuff, the Thai liqueur did not imbue my urine with a fresh flowery bouquet.
The next day we undertook a somewhat more solemn part of the Thai New Year celebration. We went to the oldest temple in the region, Wat Phrathat Lampang Luang, dating back to the fifteenth century. At the base of the stairway were a pair of singha, mythical beasts that are the Thai equivalent of Cerberus or the Garm. One of them had little ancillary heads growing out of the side of his neck.

Inside the old temple, we each got a small fistful of flowers, three incense sticks, and a little yellow candle. We removed our shoes and knelt in supplication to the vast Buddha image, kowtowing three times. We placed our flowers in vases at the Buddha’s feet. Then we re-shod our own feet and went out to a magnificent chedi, a bell-shaped structure that houses the remains of ancient holy folk. Around the base of the chedi was a full-on fire ceremony: iron racks with little cups to hold the yellow candles, and fonts of sand to insert the burning incense.

So many people had put their candles in the racks that the wax had all liquefied and formed a great seething puddle on the stone ground. The puddle had itself ignited, the wax-fire brilliant even in broad daylight, and the devout had to reach through sheets of flame and greasy smoke to add their candles to the rack. After our candles were safely in place, we walked around the chedi three times, thinking about what we wanted from the new year. Unlike any other I have seen, this chedi was jacketed in some copper-based amalgam, and sparkled with a deep, blue-green patina.

A Buddha image from some antique age still graced the courtyard.

After circling three times, we placed our incense sticks in the sand-filled tureens. There were hundreds or thousands of sticks burning in them already. I foolishly leaned too far over, trying to access some real-estate near the back lip of the tureen, and my Tonasket University Department of Marine Paleobiology shirt suffered an incense-sized burn hole. This is my newest shirt, and I am not happy about this latest addition. I hope it is not prophetic in regards to my next year of life.
We ended Songkhran with ice cream and a screening of Star Wars, and I left the next morning for Nan, my current location. All I can say so far about Nan is that it is hot. This afternoon, inside my room, it was too hot to touch the wooden or metal surfaces, and I am on the north side of the building.

You might ask yourself, is it dangerous to combine drunkenness, motor vehicles, and water-aggression? The Bangkok Post reported 324 dead, 7074 injured, mostly broken arms and legs, in a total of 3955 vehicle-related accidents. This is in a five-day celebration. These statistics were reported to be down from last year. That is roughly one death per day per million people – not a truly shocking rate, but this is supposed to be a party. I have no doubt that many of these deaths were caused by motorcycles falling over and getting crushed by other vehicles. Surely it is not my place to criticize another country for its exuberance, but imagine 900 dead from fireworks on a long 4th of July weekend. I doubt our system would tolerate such numbers two years in a row.

The Author/Musician as Emotional Puppetmaster

2008-04-08T07:37:00.000-07:00

Consider the Springtime movement of Orff’s Carmina Burana, especially the piece Veris Leta Facies. Although springtime is typically seen as a season of burgeoning beauty, life re-emerging after winter, flowers and butterflies and warm weather and so on, under Orff’s hand the music is so strange as to be otherworldly. From the first three jarring measures, to the far-off drone of the English horns, to the slow liquid choral melody that seems to derive from an alien system of musical arrangement, the music evokes mysterious grandeur, a beauty that seems to verge on menacing in its oddness. There are no blooming flowers and romping fauns here: this is the awesome secret of the seed opening underground, the very mystery of life as it stirs awake again after a long dormancy.

Whether this is truly Orff’s intention is of course a matter of supposition. Yet, as a musician, he selects and arranges his notes in this untraditional fashion knowing that they will affect the listener in an unusual way. Consider also the third movement of Mozart’s Requiem. Here the notes are chosen to be mournful, they fall in lament, but there is also accents from drums and horns that give the music power – a mourner screaming and pounding her hands on the ground in grief, followed by a bittersweet, sad calm.

So too does the author hold keys to the audience’s emotions. The very word-choice can affect the tone of a scene – JRR Tolkien, who was fluent in Gothic, sometimes used hard flat Germanic words while describing the action of a close one-on-one fight – see the scene in Fellowship of the Ring then the first orc attacks Frodo in the Mines of Moria, or again in the same book when a flying creature that seems to be composed of Darkness Itself pursues the heroes down the river. In this case the language is staccato like an increasing heartbeat. Of course any author has the potential to send the reader on an emotional rollercoaster, but there is a necessary proficiency required to perform such a feat adeptly. Anyone can – and many do – serve up pathos like microwaved hors d’oeuvres, with the evident hope that the jarring of the narrative will be reflected in the reader’s emotional involvement. However, without a certain aplomb, this can seem like drivel or ball-peen delicacy. Consider the many, many stories when a wholly likeable/unlikeable supporting character can readily be identified as the “sacrificial lamb,” in the former case to add an air of tragedy, in the latter case as a means to redemption after the unlikeable character realizes his/her flaws. Any supporting character in a film who expresses a wish to do something in the future is doomed for sure. It is infinitely more interesting when a character does not have a clearly-visible deathmark hanging over his or her head.
But how is this accomplished? The author does not necessarily need to know more words than the reader, or to understand the particular power of one word over another. Perhaps it is the use of strings of words, or of identifiable truths and meanings within the story, so we as the readers begin to “trust” the narrative – so we do not feel emotionally manipulated , we feel instead that the story has taken on a life of its own, that we are observing and, to some extent, participating in, at least emotionally. With serial stories this can last for years. After three seasons of television episodes and two movies, the death of Mr Spock comes as an unexpected, deep shock, heightened by the uncharacteristic display of feeling as he gasps out his devotion to his old friend Jim Kirk before collapsing dead.

Spock, however, like Sherlock Holmes and Walt Wallet, returns in defiance of the natural order. The tradition of killing off a main character and then bringing that character back from the dead should be scorned – it cheapens the intensity of that character’s passing and tips the author’s hand to show that yes, indeed, this was a mere manipulation. We lose our trust in the narrative and can never lose ourselves as fully into that particular storyline.

Is there, then, also an element of trust to be found in the music? Such that the arrangement of the music is at the very least euphonious, or conforms closely enough to what we come to expect from the established tradition? For example, a recording of the howling grief from an old-fashioned Irish wake would certainly not be as listenable as Mozart’s Requiem, although both of them are music charged with emotion. I think this is a harder idea to get at, in that the images our minds paint when we listen to music are infinitely more apt to vary than the images we create while reading a story. I am thinking now of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, which, on the whole, is a somewhat somber and thoughtful album – yet it is punctuated with laughs, musical smiles, short humoresques, and real musical exuberance, that all serve to heighten its effect. No single element is overplayed or overemphasized. Perhaps it was this perfect blend of elements that kept the album on the Top 200 bestsellers list for 720 consecutive weeks.

I am interested in other people’s reflections on these ideas, if anyone is not too shy to share.

PHRAE and slightly aged pictures

2008-04-06T08:42:00.000-07:00

First off, some pictures, from my mother’s visit:

TOAD, PHU KRADEUNG NATIONAL PARK

Is there no batrachophile out there who can identify this?

SUMMIT OF PHU KRADEUNG, 1300 meters

DINOSAUR AND PLASTIC PALM TREE, KHON KAEN

STREETLAMP, KHON KAEN

And now a few brief words about Phitsanulok. I went for an afternoon walk along the river, and there was some kind of Buddhist celebration going on, for the temples were packed with lay people in yellow and pink T-shirts. Outside the temples, on the riversides, were curious racks with bags of fish, snails, eels, and turtles hanging on them.

I immediately assumed they were food, as I have yet to meet a bilaterally-symmetric organism that Thai people don’t eat. This time, however, the poor creatures had been imprisoned by grubby, grobian folk of the lowest class. For a mere fifty baht (about $1.67) a “clean” person could improve their karma by setting the beasts free in the river. Presumably the shabby folk had such a low karmic score to begin with that they were willing to incur the karmic penalty for removing the animals in the first place, thus exchanging their spiritual well-being for liquid capital. I wondered if this was the Buddhist equivalent of selling one’s soul. I have seen the same practice with songbirds in other cities, and I find it detestable.

At sunset, I saw a new kind of sport. It employed the woven rattan ball and the fancy moves from takraw, a kind of head-and-foot-volleyball played over a low net. Takraw is an amazing game to watch, principally because the spiking of the ball involves an inverted bicycle-kick, which must be seen to be believed.
But today there were no such kicks. The players stood in a circle around a net basket, suspended some six meters above their heads. They took turns trying to kick or head the ball into the basket. To aid the head shots, they wore bricks of cloth strapped to their foreheads. Each time the ball missed, the next player would kick or butt it straight back up again.

It was amazingly graceful. When one of the players scored a head shot, he had to remove the cloth brick and only use his feet, knees, or shoulders. Several of the players were obviously in their forties or fifties, perhaps no longer suited to inverted bicycle kicks, but certainly still able to deftly kick a ball into a basket in the air. It reminded me of the Aztec ball game somehow.

Saphan Ekathotsarot Bridge, Phitsanulok

PHRAE (pronounced like the “pra” in “prattle”)

This is an old, old city – founded in the 9th century, but archaeological remains in the area go back far beyond. It has very little of the bustle of other Thai cities, and many charming aspects – the endlessly-wandering alleys, the giant, crumbling stone walls around the edges of the city, the ancient trees in people’s front yards, the evident character of brick, stone, and metalwork on the houses themselves. The weather has been grotesquely hot, with promising thunderstorms in the distance that bring no rain, and my forays have been somewhat limited. I went on a nice long walk today, though, and took in the sights.
My first stop was an electronics repair shop I had spotted on the way to 7-11 yesterday. I have a headlamp of Swiss manufacture that has been a pillar of stout reliability for three years, and then it suddenly developed a case of the flickers. At home, you don’t really try to repair electronic things, you just replace them. The guy was repairing a clock-radio when I first saw him, so I thought he might give it a shot. It was a joy watching him work – he was obviously unfamiliar with this kind of headlamp, and took it slowly apart like a zoologist dissecting a small crab. His assistant brought me cold water and his mother came out of the back of the store to chat with me, and then he gave a grunt and thrust the headlight in front of me. There was a small severed wire. Then he whipped it back onto his bench, stripped and soldered the errant wire, and screwed the carapace back together. Although I offered him a handsome reward, he would only accept 20 baht.
Walking down the main street of the town, I noticed some unconventional shops. One was aimed at the Political Toady demographic, as it exclusively sold artificial flower wreaths surrounding portraits of deposed Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. The whole premise puzzled me, but I could not think of any delicate way to ask the owner about it.
Around the corner was a shop with cell phones on one wall and donuts on the other. Donuts are a charming addition to any shop, and I showed my approbation with a purchase. Donuts undergo a rather sad incarnation here in Thailand – wheat-processing technology has not really caught on in a good way, and wheat products tend to be on the order of quality of generic supermarket white bread – mealy, insipid, and yet somehow chemical in their flavor. I suppose there are a lot of Grade-D Thai restaurants you can patronize in America, so fair’s fair.
I followed wooden signs to the Vongburi House Museum, where I startled a trio of young people who were watching TV in the foyer. They sold me a ticket. One of the women kept telling me she would help me do everything, starting with taking off my shoes. I didn’t wait to see how she would assist me there, but then she helped me up the stairs by hovering at my elbow the whole way.
It was a nice old wooden house, with historic documents framed all over the walls. Some of them had to do with the purchase of slaves, as recently as the last century. This was something of a surprise to me. There were also documents relating to the buying and selling of elephants and teak. Evidently vast fortunes were made by cutting down all the forests in the area. The house originally belonged to a Lanna Prince, but ended up in the hands of a timber magnate and his family. There’s not much to mention about the house or the museum – even the family howdah was somewhat humdrum – but at least one member of the staff ghosted after me every single step of the way. It was disquieting. I remember this kind of attention in Hungarian museums, and I didn’t like it there either. What could I possibly steal? Were they afraid I would step over a velvet rope and sleep in a four-poster bed? Or avail myself of a silver chamberpot?
After the museum I was directed up a long, winding alley to Wat Luang, the eldest temple in the city. It had been built in 829, at the behest of a Lanna prince named Phor Khun Luang Phol to house a sacred Buddha image. The main chedi stood straight in the center of the temple complex, its elephants crumbling and decorations stripped by twelve hundred years of humidity, but still proud and glorious.

A sign explained: “Originally was a golden Buddha image but gold was unfortunately stolen by the Ngeuws.” This was the first citation I had seen of a group called the Ngeuws, but I imagine they were piratical heathens who foolishly did not recognize that gold belongs to the clergy.

After this I got lost in the alley-maze, and began to lose my temper. I had the unique experience of finding myself at the convergence of three disparate data-streams: the map in my Lonely Planet guidebook, the advice of the locals, and the reality flooding through my senses. None of these three agreed with either of the other two. It was unbelievable how badly the locals understood simple directions like “East,” “West,” and “toward the river.” It was also bizarre how far off the LP map was. It was shortly after noon and very hot, but I finally got to the road that runs along the city wall on the west side.
In some places, the road runs atop the old city wall, which makes for charming little recessed neighborhoods on either side. Somehow the local automobile drivers have agreed to defy Thai cultural mores and pilot their vehicles slowly and carefully, and there is little risk of a car hurtling off the road into someone’s living room.
Along the road I heard an unmistakeable noise coming from a woodcutter’s shop: a hill mynah. These are my favorite birds, and this one was happy to put on a vocal show for me and my voice recorder. It knew several phrases in Thai, a few tunes, and a lot of random squeals, trills, glides, and pops. Additionally I got the woodcutters chatting in the background, with comparatively little interference from traffic noise.
Further down I saw a man tending roosters inside inverted wicker baskets.

He introduced himself as “Bit,” and told me these were fighting roosters. I watched him curiously as he sponged a rooster off, then wet a dissociated feather and stuffed it down the rooster’s throat. He repeated this several times, and the rooster did not struggle. Then Bit took out a little bag of pills and fed one to the rooster. I pointed at the pills and pantomimed a rapidly-increasing heartbeat and wild-eyed, frenetic aggression, but he shook his head and pantomimed hale, full-bodied strength. Then we both laughed. I’d never been to a cockfight, and he invited me to go with him.

He left his rooster behind, for it was not scheduled today, and we rode his motorcycle across town and out the eastern gate, then out into the suburbs until we came to the metathetical Chicken Stadium. As a rare foreign visitor, my entry fee was waived and I was given a front-row seat.
The current fight had been going on a few minutes. The competitors were spiritedly clawing and pecking at each other. The bigger one was russet-colored and seemed to be in possession of most of his feathers. The smaller one was a dark metallic green, and was covered with scars and weals. The mostly-male crowd was screaming and jumping up and down. They bellowed numbers as the fight went one direction or another, jotting figures down in miniature notebooks that had pictures of girls on the covers. A referee sat on a tiny stool in the pit, which he moved around to keep out of the way.

Russet was clearly the more powerful chicken, but Green had a technique. He would push his head up under Russet’s left wing, and keep it there until Russet had forgotten what was going on, then Green pushed his head out from behind the other side of the wing and attacked. Russet was repeatedly shocked by this aggression that seemed to emanate from his own armpit, but managed to use his legs to lever Green out in front where they would peck and claw at each other face-to-face. That was obviously a losing strategy for Green, because Russet had superior strength and reach, so he continued with the underwing-method. For a beast with a two-volt brain, Green was pretty clever. Eventually Russet began to tire and Green scored some hard pecks on his opponent’s head and crest. Then a bell rang and the round was over. The owners rushed in and hustled the birds away for a twenty-minute breather. Russet’s owner had a pal who was a poultry-surgeon, and used a needle and thread to sew up a gash over Russet’s shoulder.
Two other competitors were introduced to the cockpit shortly afterward. These were both haggard, tough-looking customers who were missing feathers. They reminded me of the rooster we ate in the Hmong village in Laos. They faced off and puffed out their ragged neck-ruffs at each other, holding eye-contact until the interchicken electricity got too high, and then they would swat and swipe. Both of these were obviously old campaigners, and had won all their previous fights, so defeat would be a big surprise to whomever lost. The crowd noise increased in pitch and intensity as the brutality escalated. Finally one of the fighters got hold of the other’s left eye with his beak, and there was a huge surge of energy from the spectators. The feet clawed, the wings beat, but the one chicken held on until the eye came out. Then it pressed its attack against the blind side, striking the raw, swollen socket over and over again with beak and talon. The wounded rooster tried to back away, but the other was relentlessly aggressive, pushing it around and around. Finally they ended up right in front of me, and I smelled blood and feces. The losing chicken turned his good eye up at me, regarding me with a dull, glazed, crestfallen look, and the bell rang, saving him from the final indignity of blindness. His owner swept him up, and though the man was obviously disgusted at the loss, dabbed at the rooster’s wounds with obvious tenderness.
The two original fighters were brought back in. Russet had had his chirurgical repairs, but Green apparently had a cock-teaser among his trainers who had taunted him for the full twenty minutes, for he entered the arena full of fury. Russet, who now bore wounds, scars, and patches bare of feathers, quickly decided he’d had enough of this business, and tried to run away. The crowd jeered and booed, and the referee stopped the fight.
I had had enough of this action, and Bit very kindly gave me a ride back to town. By now it was approaching dinner time, so I went to the market and sought out a dish of chicken curry.

SELF-PORTRAIT

Northwards, again

2008-04-03T03:20:00.000-07:00

Although I promised a write-up of the fantastic finale last week, I have learned I do not have the consent of all involved parties to publish the story. I will honor that request, and will only add that it was an episode of high-risk, high-tension, high-energy adventure that belongs in some annal somewhere.

At the moment I am in Phitsanulok, the site of the famous folklore museum with step-by-step instructions on how to smash the testicles of a live bull. Let us step now into the world of serialized re-runs: the current visit to Phitsanulok is simply not very exciting, and I'm in a grouchy mood anyway. So here, from 1999, is the original episode.

PHITSANULOK

We boarded the train North to Phitsanulok. Our plan was to check out the cluster of national parks on Kho Sawai Plateau in the north-central part of Thailand. I waved at the curs in Ayutthaya and the monkeys in Lopburi, and then the sun went down.
We arrived in Phitsanulok very late at night, and wandered uncertainly around town for a long time until we spotted a guesthouse. There were no lights on and no person on duty. We were both sleepy, so we just stretched out under a pagoda. I wrapped myself up in a mosquito net and crashed.
In the morning we wandered around town and had a look at the local museum. We learned that Phitsanulok was the home of a bloodthirsty conqueror named Naresuan. There were statues and pictures of him all over - he sported a very fetching flattop. The museum's primary focus was ethnography, for Phitsanulok had also been the home of primitive people who had left behind copious artifacts. The trap-section was particularly replete: rat traps, snake traps, monkey traps, aquatic porcupine traps, bird traps, and roach traps. It did not say whether all the trapped animals were then eaten. Scott commented that he was ashamed to be a primate when he saw the monkey trap. It consisted of a box with a hole in it, and the trapper would place a treat inside the box. When the monkey reached through the hole and grabbed the treat, he could not then pull his fist through the hole, and waited around for the trapper to come club him upside the head.
Another section featured photographs and a step-by-step description of bovine castration. The ritual began with an offering of incense, cigarettes, money, and oil. There was a picture of a gnarled man with his hands clenched together, with the caption Mr Wan Toinoo, age 67. Occupation: Specialist who can sterile the cattle. The next picture had a gang of men tugging an obviously reluctant bull, with the caption Assistants of the Specialist help pull the ox go between the trees. After that, Mr Wan used a special forked stick to wind the bull's scrotum taut, and then he beat at it with a flat paddle until broken. To finish, Mr Wan knocked an empty coconut shell on the bull's head, back, and hindquarters, to show the sign of prosperity. By this time, the bull was looking decidedly dispirited. While it was a fascinating insight into traditional castratory practices, it nonetheless gave me the shivers.
That afternoon we hiked across town to a full-blown shopping mall that had sprung up near the highway interchange. I bought a small blue tent for a mere fifteen dollars, anticipating camping in the national parks. I informed Scott that if he intended to sleep in the tent he would have to carry it. He affixed it to the rear of his pack with a few grumbles.
From there we hopped a bus going East, hoping to make it to Phu Hin Rongkhla Park by nightfall. Unfortunately we could only get to a hamlet called Nakhon Thai, where we learned that no more buses were going to the park before morning. We ate noodles and watched the sun go down, and began asking around about guesthouses. Nakhon Thai was very small, and did not often get foreign visitors. Nonetheless, there was a single guesthouse over a mile out of town on a side road. We walked out there, swatting at mosquitoes, and found that they only had a single bed for five dollars. Since I had just that day bought a tent, we decided to find someplace around town to erect it.
As fortune would have it, there was a sort of mini-carnival in Nakhon Thai that night, and a dozen tents were already set up in a broad grassy soccer-field in the middle of town. Our tent blended right in. We bought meat on skewers and watched the crowd. Eventually someone set up a big white screen and backed a pickup in front of it. The pickup contained a movie projector, and a large crowd gathered on the grass in front of the screen. We were pleasantly surprised to see Raiders of the Lost Ark, dubbed into Thai. After the movie I had ice cream with some teenagers and watched things wind down.

PICTURES!

2008-04-01T01:07:00.000-07:00

I've just been on a 3-week whirlwind tour with my mother and friend S. I won't describe all that happened, but there was a stupendous finale which deserves shrift. I'm checking the details with other witnesses to make sure I get it right, but it should be up in a couple of days. In the meantime, I have oodles of pictures from the rest of the trip.

BANGKOK

Grand Palace Guard Demon

Grand Palace Mural Detail

Temple at Sunset

Elephant Monuments

AYUTTHAYA

Khmer-Style Temple Ruin

Row of Buddhas

Mom in Ayutthaya

KHAO YAI NATIONAL PARK

A wild Botia! My first ever...

Observe, that this butterfly has not only fake eyespots, but wriggling fake antennae as well!

Giant Asian Porcupine (about dog-sized)

Giant Tree Squirrel (cat-sized)

This crab wants a piece of you

What kind of fly?

Botanists Alert! What is it?

I'm at a loss for what order this belongs to.

A sambar in the campsite

PHANOM RUNG - KHMER RUINS - AROUND 1000 YEARS OLD

Snake Head Guard

Back of Snake Head

Doorway

Door lintel

Mayan-looking lintel detail

Prang

Elephant Lily-Pot

Salt roast fish in energy drink bottle

NAM NAO NATIONAL PARK

Polydesmid millipede

Unknown Fly

Don't compare your interns to this bottled monkey

Male Arctiid moth

Gomphid dragonfly

Parasitic plant

More to come soon!

Leaving Lao

2008-03-09T04:37:00.000-07:00

I have a couple of charming stories to report. The first was in Vientiane in a downtown coffee shop. The shop walls were covered with Malaysian Tourism Bureau propaganda, very colorful and attractive. I commented on it to the lady running the place, and she told me in very clear Lao that her son was a travel guide and took people all over southeast Asia. We chatted a bit, then I paid for my coffee. She couldn't help but notice I was carrying a net around downtown. I showed her the hole in it and pantomimed a sewing machine.
"You don't need a sewing machine for that," she said, and plucked it out of my hand. In about ninety seconds, she had whipped out needle and thread, and installed a very serviceable suture. She refused payment and wished me luck.
The second is very similar. It happened today in Tha Khek. I was ultimately unsuccessful in acquiring a bicycle, despite repeated attempts, and I was slinking home as an unhappy pedestrian. I was carrying two shirts and a stuffed octopus that were all in need of repair. I found a place with a sewing machine, showed them the damaged goods, and gave all the children a bug-card. The lady there was just as apt and had all three jobs done in about eight minutes, during which time I played with the children and talked to a Mynah bird. This woman, also, refused payment. It was gratifying to see in this very sleazy border town where everyone is trying to sell something, that people are still willing to do favors.

Tomorrow: back to Thailand. Some ancient remains of a proto-civilization have attracted my attention near Ubon. Then down to Khon Kaen to check out the entomology collection at the university, and then back to Bangkok.

Nam Kading

2008-03-08T04:22:00.000-08:00

March 6, 2008

Today I tried to go into the Nam Kading Protected Area, an allegedly pristine paradise of wildlife. I had it from the Lonely Planet that there was a research station up the river and I was keen to visit it.
I started the day in Vientiane, out the door at 6am to catch a bus to Phonsi, and from there a boat to the Nam Kading Research Station. This was to be my first foray into a Laos Protected Area, after two failed attempts up north. I was deflected in Nam Ha, rejected from Bokeo.
Everything was fine out from Vientiane – the bus left on time, it was quick, the Thai karaoke videos they were showing actually had some storylines, and I even slept a bit. But then one of the copilots was shouting at me that we had arrived in Phonsi. I bustled out, got my pack off the roof, and the bus took off in a cloud of dust. A few people lounged here and there in the heat of the morning, in a cluster of roadside shacks and prefabricated concrete and corrugated metal strip malls. Some young women were drinking laolao in the shade, and directed me toward the river. I walked through what looked like a pleasant little village. Then Mai found me.
He was in his early twenties, with a slack, dull expression. He spoke only Lao, and that very low and quick. He sounded as if his voice box were made of damp felt. He could not be induced to speak more slowly or clearly. He walked very close to me and kept pointing his pale flat face at me like a hopeful radar dish. I disliked him instantly and hoped he would leave me alone. He knew I needed a boat, and was insistent. He could not fathom what I meant by “Science Village,” “Many Scientist,” “Science Station,” or any other permutation. We were obviously not making ourselves understood, so he steered me over to a fabric shop under a stilt-house.
Women in their early twenties were sitting on the concrete benches, drinking warm Beerlao and watching toddlers and babies. Mai mushed out a wet string of words, delivered in monotone with his eyes askance. One of the women flicked her eyes at me, then leaned back and brayed “Gää!” From a nearby house came a tall, well-dressed young Thai man with spectacles. He approached quickly, loomed over me and spoke English. “Do you need a boat to go to the water fall?” His lenses and waxen coif made him menacing. “The price is one hundred fifty thousand kip.” His English was impeccable, and inflected with a terseness that warned me not to vacillate. His eyes were sharp and hot. I asked: “I want to go to the Science Station.” He replied: “Yes I know it. The price is the same to go there.” I asked him to tell me the word for Research Station in Lao but he refused. He turned to Mai and said a few arch words and walked away.
Mai sagged like a jellyfish out of water, but soon recovered and approached me sideways, mumbling and swaying, and began tugging at my backpack in a most distasteful fashion. He pointed at the boat. I told him I wanted to eat first, and we started walking back through the village. We came to his stilthouse and he weaved into the shadows to get out his motorcycle. He then flapped his hands at my backpack, and said “Heu-uh?” which means boat. Whatever he wanted to do, I was not into it. I refused and he became very confused. It simply did not make sense to him that I would not give him the backpack, and he had to consult with several relatives in the house by shouting up through the floor. At last he nodded and uttered the affirmative Lao particle “ahng,” and put the bike away, and we started walking again. His hand kept limply slithering around on the back of my backpack, and I gave him a sharp look.
We got to the noodle shack, where I lay the pack on a raised bamboo platform that employees sleep on during slow hours, and saw Mai scuttling around the table, indecisively moving chairs and arranging condiments. He was making me very tense. The noodle woman started preparing a bowl of soup without a word, and Mai pulled pink toilet paper out of the dispenser on the table, balled it up, and frantically polished a pair of chopsticks and a Chinese spoon. These he held in a carefully un-poised fashion, to broadcast that he was merely holding them but had no intention to use them. He continuously made mealy little comments and direct questions, neither of which made sense. The noodles came: the standard Lao fare, beef broth and little grains of gristly fragments, big blobule of noodles in the middle, and green onions. A skein of lurid orange grease ringed the edge of the broth. Mai gently placed the chopsticks and spoon in the bowl, then started pantomiming the use of condiments. I looked him straight in the eye and told him in a deep voice that I’d been in Lao for three weeks and I knew how to eat noodles. This got a smile out of the noodle-woman. Mai made a flabby sound that may have been a fake giggle and sank back to his seat. The woman prepared a bowl for him as well, and he doused it soundly with doses of every available sauce. He then commenced to eat with a tremendous sucking-slurping sound. I looked away from him and surveyed the town. Nothing was going on. Occasionally a small private vehicle would fly through at Warp 5. My luncheon partner devoured every drop of his soup, and cleaned himself with a handful of pink toilet paper. Then he tore another fresh handful off the roll and clumsily pushed it toward my face. I recoiled and pushed his hand away. I stared him straight on with full wattage, but his blank, empty expression did not change one whit. I paid for both bowls of noodles at a somewhat amplified price, and we started walking to the boat.
I tried to explain that I didn’t know yet whether I would stay one, two or three nights at the research station. Mai asked if I was sleeping up there, and I said yes, then he asked me if he could sleep up there. I said no. He asked me if I slept alone or slept two-people (nawn khondiau or nawn sorngkhon) and I firmly said khondiau. He became very insistent and mawkish, tilting his head up and repeating nawn sorngkhon, nawn sorngkhon. It was desperately uncomfortable. I tried to account for anything I might have said that would lead him to be so suggestive. I had bought his lunch, sure, but I had also been behaving in a short and hostile way with him at every turn. I wondered if “research station” was some kind of local code for foreigners seeking native partners for rural disportage. Mai finally accepted my refusal and began talking about the price.
Tall Glasses had said 150,000 for both ways, but evidently that was a same-day offer only, and he wanted 100,000 for each trip up the river. I refused. That was too expensive. Besides he could float down the river at no cost both times, so he was actually just making one full trip. This train of logic was derailed by a stare so vapid Mai’s eyes seemed to congeal, and then a linty reiteration of the number 100,000. We had to start drawing diagrams in my notebook, and after much discussion, arrived at 90,000 for each trip. So we set off.
He was a decent boatman. The river was in low flow and filled with sandbars and stones, but he never once had to get out and push, even with the lading of my packs and my personal organic matter. We went up a long straight stretch, then curved to the left, flanked on both sides by occasional wooden huts and playing children.
The river narrowed and became faster as we went up. Eventually all the human habitation ceased, and the sides of the river were stacked with jagged boulders. Everything from the size of a beachball to the size of a Vanagon was piled hurly-burly along both sides, with very little in the river and nothing on the hillside above. It was an eerie sensation, as if we were approaching something that had long stone gates. It was tremendously hot, though the sky was hazy, and the air itself seemed to glow. We sometimes passed water buffalo wallowing in the shallows, or seine fishermen wearing diving masks, or other longtail canoes, heading down the river laden with dark-complected people. One man with intense gaze, a mustache, and a jutting chin locked eyes with me and we just stared at each other while we passed.
We came to a ferocious scar in the hillside. The orange clay was exposed, and roads crisscrossed the scar. No plant was left living in a semicircle at least two hundred meters long and one hundred up the hillside. There were great flat square marks in the clay, as of a colossal chisel. It took us a while to get past the base of the scar.
The river took another sharp bend, and we saw a little wooden platform, floating on empty barrels, that was connected to the hillside by way of a primitive wooden ladder-walkway. At the base of it, a big gas-powered pump was chorkling noisily.
A little further up, we came to the first rapids, and Mai shut the boat off. We began to drift backwards, so I turned and gave him a look. His mouth was open and he was staring at nothing.
“Where is the place?” he asked me.
“You don’t know?”
“Don’t know. Do you know?”
“No.” I frowned at him and he shrugged limply, his shoulders sturdy as damp socks. He turned his head and muttered downstream. I pressed him to account for himself, and he told me he thought that platform we passed might be it. So we zipped back downstream and I got onto the platform and looked at the staircase. Obviously effort had been expended in its creation, although it was about as rude as technology can be. But then there was this pump, unsupervised, running off gas and pushing water up the hill. My tired, angry, hot mind told me that Research Stations probably need plenty of water pressure, and that Lao people left to their own devices never construct this kind of ladder, so it must be the work of foreigners, and foreigners might equal scientists.
I paid Mai a large fraction of what we agreed on, but he did not have the correct change to break a bigger bill so I just gave him what I could in cash shrapnel. I told him I would get back by myself and didn’t want another ride. I was happy to see him go, but he stared at me over his slumped shoulder until the boat went around the bend.
Now I had full packs and walking stick, and tried to ascend the ladder. It consisted of serial iterations of the same design: three long tree trunks tilted against the hill, with lengths of sticks and branches nailed perpendicular. Each branch had three nails, and they were bright new steel. Money and effort had flowed into this construction, and that heartened me. Progress was extremely difficult. Unencumbered, a person could use all four limbs for stability and balance, but lugging the two giant backpacks and holding a bamboo stick made for very slow going. Sweating and cursing, I made it up to a kind of platform. Two men were sleeping in the shade next to a bottle of laolao. The ladder continued upward at a much steeper angle. This was somewhat easier to cope with, and I progressed up next to the pulsating black tube that carried water from the river. It continually made a squork-squork-squork in time with the chorkle-chunter of the pump.
The next platform had a curious piece of equipment, also gas-powered, also running. There was a big bag of water in a square frame, and the river-hose emptied into it. Another, wider hose led out of it, to a large pump that was dug deep into the clay. It was a pulsatile water cannon, running off a two stroke motor, building up a pressurized charge and then blasting it into a recess in the hillside. At the bottom of the recess was a mosquito-hell slurry pool. The apparatus had writing in Russian and Vietnamese.
I heard the sound of a boat and watched as another longtail canoe, identical to the one I had arrived in, puttered past with a single passenger riding in the front. It was a heavyset white woman in jungle clothes. I took two steps down the ladder without paying close attention, and my left leg slid down between the rungs, while I lost my balance. I managed to jerk myself to a stop, before the inertia of the pack rolled over me. It cost me three patches of skin over my left tibia. I watched the boat disappear up the river and then considered my position. I was still able to walk to the road, should it become necessary. I had seen several trails parallel to the river on the way up. I thought it unlikely that this was a research station but resolved to follow the path all the way up, just in case. I set the packs under some leaves and shimmied up the rest of the ladders. They terminated at a garbage-strewn hillside that had a small platform with a burn scar on it. This was evidently Party Central, and there was nothing uphill of it except jungle.
I went back for my bags, then heard another boat. This one cut its motor and I saw two people debark onto the platform. I dragged my bags down one at a time, and the two men watched me descend. One was bigger and obviously better-fed, and wore nice clothes. The other looked like many Lao people, small, wrinkled, and bright-eyed. He noticed me first, and froze, his bright eyes like searchbeams on me. He tapped the big fellow on the arm, and that man reacted the same way. They silently watched me descend, and helped me sit down. They smiled invitingly at me. I explained as best I could, again trying the battery of words for “Research Station,” but eliciting no flicker of recognition. They looked at each other and had a short discussion which I could not understand. Then the big man answered me in Thai that this was a work project, and that the other man would take me somewhere else. The other man beckoned me down, offered to help carry my packs, and got me situated in his canoe. There was a wiry confidence in his manner and a twinkle in his eye that made me trust him. We cast off and started downstream. A few minutes into the journey, we hit a submerged rock and the canoe swayed sickeningly to the left. I saw my big bag in front, leaning out toward the water, but then we righted and it fell back to security.
We came to the base of the big scar on the hill. There was a small set of steps hacked into the red mud, and the little fellow insisted on carrying my smaller pack for me. We emerged into a villa, with colonial wooden buildings overlooking the river, and big shady trees. There was a party going on at an outdoor table, eight or nine people in airy clothes with smiles on their faces. There were also several servants, and the boatman spoke to one of these, who ran off. Meanwhile the dinner people were behaving in a most handsome fashion, inviting me to share their food and pouring me a glass of cold beer. I tried to explain my situation to them but they were just as puzzled as everyone else. Research station? Never heard of it. Where are you from? How old are you? Travelling by yourself? Do you have a wife? Are you staying here tonight?
It seemed like a good idea, but I didn’t have much time to entertain it because a man with a mustache and green military fatigues came out of on of the buildings, sized me up with one glance, and said “No.” He then looked me in the eye and asked me what I was doing out here. I told him the truth, laying as much blame on Mai as I could. The military man spoke to the boat driver, who again picked up my small bag and led me down the hill to the boat. The diners were disappointed, but none of them raised an objection.
I asked the boatman where we were going now, and he said, in English, “Work camp.” I pondered the possibility of simply walking away, but the direction he indicated was further downstream and therefore closer to the road, so a walk-away from there would be more efficient. Besides, I was curious to visit ‘work camp.”
As I loaded my bags onto the canoe, Green Uniform came down the steps after us, breathless and giggling. He said something to the boatman, who pointed at me and replied. Green Uniform doubled up laughing. He looked at me and shook his head, then stood akimbo, his laughter booming after us as we floated away.
We went to the far end of the scar, and as before, climbed steps onto the hill. This was unmistakably Work Camp, a dozen large bamboo buildings in the mud, each one open on one side to form a kind of bay. There were large power tools, sawbucks, fifty gallon drums, hoses, pumps, and shovels. Garbage and bottles were conspicuously absent. Only one man was working, and the rest were slumped around the area, on steps or against stilt-house posts, watching him. He was trying to repair one of the teeth on a circular saw-blade with an arc-welder and pliers. There were also two women, wearing the same dull green fatigues as all the men, but they also wore makeup and had styled hair. Both of them were beautiful and relaxed. The work crew gathered around me while one of them went to fetch a big boss. They gave me water and laughed at my Lao.
A man in a very clean yellow shirt with slick hair and glittery rings emerged from the depths of the biggest bay. He was Thai, and like the last one, larger and meatier than any of the Lao. He spoke some English, so I tried to explain my story to him. He pointed across the scar to the villa and said “It’s over there.” I raised my eyebrows and told him we’d just come from there. The boatman threw in a few words, clarifying that we had applied to the villa and been rejected. Then he waved at me and smiled, and took off down the hill, leaving me in the power of this new Thai and his dozen dozing workers.
By now I was ready to just get back to the main road. Internally I had declared the Research Station expedition a failure, and the bloody torn spots on my calf were attracting swarms of tiny flies. The Thai bid me wait, and went back into his cavern. I had some more water and chatted with the workers. The Thai came back and hunched forward as if to discuss a confidentiality. “Today is last day for my workers, we finish project,” he said in English. “I want to have small party for them. You invited, but maybe you can buy some beverage for them?”
“How much?” I asked.
“Oh,” he said, squinting exaggeratedly, “maybe one thousand.”
“Ah,” I said inscrutably. One thousand what? There was no beverage I could afford a thousand of, or that these people could drink. The smallest beverage available was the M-150 energy drink, and forty or fifty bottles would make a worker’s heart burst. The Thai seemed to think it was settled, and led me over to the truck. He rode in the middle of the cab, a Lao drove, and I sat in passenger. We drove through the scar, which was extensive on the other side of the hill – huge water-filled pits, expanses of blue canvas held down by rocks, tubes and hoses sprawling like drowned worms. It was a colossal operation. No vegetation remained anywhere in the whole area, on both sides of the road, for several hundred meters. We eventually came to an austere, military-looking set of concrete buildings with blue tile roofs: one large building front and center, and then at least two dozen smaller rectangular box-buildings in straight rows behind it. It would have provided lodging for hundreds of people.
The Thai spoke again about the party. He repeated the information as before, but concluded by suggesting that I donate one hundred thousand kip to their cause. I liked his low-pressure dissimulation, because it was not relentless and it offered me a polite avenue for refusal. When we finally reached the main road, I gave him fifty thousand kip because I was honestly grateful for his help, but I told him that was all I could do. He thanked me and drove off.
I was left in front of a very small-scale store, really just the front area of the space under a stilt-house, but they had electricity and an ice-cream coffin, so I treated myself to my first ice-cream in seven weeks. It was heavenly. I kept my eye on the road, but there were no buses, only trucks and private vehicles. I decided to try hitchhiker technique. I got a scrap of cardboard and wrote “Tha Khek,” my desired destination, and then affixed it to my net-pole.
One minute after doing this, an SUV pulled over and spilled out five very-well-dressed Lao people, men and women, who fanned themselves in the heat. One of them came up to me with a smile and said “You are going to Tha Khek?” At that very moment, the giant intercity bus came hurtling past, and I flung my arm up to hail them. The bus creaked to a halt two hundred meters down the road, and I hastened to grab my bags. I thought it would have been nice to go in an SUV, but they hadn’t offered anything, and the bus was right there after all. In just a couple minutes I was on the bus and rolling down the East bank of the Mekong.
We got to Tha Khek as the sun was going down. As in many, many Asian communities, city planners locate the bus stop as far out of town as it can reasonably be and still be considered “in” town. So I was faced with a long slog of unknown duration, or a tuktuk ride. The tuktuk driver assured me it was four kilometers to the guesthouse. We agreed on a price, and then he more or less drove me down the road and around a corner, about a mile, to the guesthouse, which bore a cardboard sign saying “Full.” I got into an argument with the driver about how far a kilometer was, and in my agitated state did not think to merely ask him to drive me to another guesthouse. So I ended up 10,000 kip poorer and on foot.
It was still very hot, and the sun was slanting down through the palm trees. The Vietnamese influence was obviously very strong in this town, from the words on the signs to the long angular faces and high cheekbones of the people. They were very friendly, children and adults alike crying out greetings as I walked past. I was aimed at the second cheapest guesthouse in town, wanting only a bed and a bath. There were plenty of empty lots I could have camped in, and I considered it, but thought I should clean my flyblown wounds out with soap even if it meant spending some kip.
The guesthouse I finally came to was about half a mile from the river, set back among some very grand old bean trees. They had a room listed for 35000 kip but it evidently didn’t exist anymore, so I took a double room for 65000 after many attempts to haggle. I tried to say I was only sleeping in one bed and taking one shower, but they were firm.
When I got into the room, I immediately pulled the pink blanket off one bed, wet it in the shower, and wiped my hide with it. I threw it back onto the bed and then indulged in a double-long shower. I luxuriated in the warm water, and discovering many pulled muscles in the injured leg: gracilis, tibialis anterior, gluteus medius, and whatever the little one is that is responsible for posterolateral abduction in the thigh. As I was showering, I heard a series of thumps and raps. I shut off the water, and sure enough, someone was hammering on my door like a madman. I wrapped up in a towel and opened the door, to find the young man who offered me the room standing there with a tray and two tropical drinks.
“You order this?”
“No I did not!” I said.
“OK, sorry,” he said, and I closed the door. I dried off and got ready for bed. I went to the clean bed and pulled the blanket up, preparing to embark for dreamland. Suddenly I spied a foreign object on the sheets: limp and soiled, an ex-agent of the Prophylaxy. Revolted, I left it there and went to the messed-up bed instead. At least I knew the provenance of that disarray.
Wrapped in the somewhat cleaner, dryer side of the pink sheet, I tried to sort through the day. I got three sharp raps on the shin, and demerits to the tune of 315,000 kip. That was my total expenditure today – about $37, and nothing to show for it except a few less hit-points on my tibia. I might have insisted Mai take me all the way to the waterfall, but so strong was my discomfort at being a passenger in his vessel, I was instantly relieved when I debarked. I surmised I had stumbled into a gem-mining operation, as every in-charge person had conveyed me away from it fairly promptly. Out of everyone, only Tall Glasses had professed to know that there even was a research station at all.
was visited by a memory from childhood. When I was five years old, at Children’s World daycare, I got into an argument with a girl of about the same age, and emotions were hot. To amplify my point of view, I decided to urinate on her legs, clad in pink sweat pants. This outrage was promptly reported by her young cronies, and the Adult was summoned. Both of us were transported into the Office, where I was made to sit in a chair and wait while dry pants were fetched from some closet. The wet pants were then put in a paper bag and carried over to me. The Adult explained that my punishment was to wear these wet pants for the rest of the day. I was outraged and infuriated, not because of the urine, but because the pants were pink. You’d think I would have learned my lesson early on.

Muang Ngoi

2008-03-04T00:09:00.000-08:00

Pictures are up from the last episode! Don’t miss the Evil Teletubbies!

From Oudomxay I went by bus to Nong Khiao, and boarded a boat up the Ou River to a small village called Muang Ngoi. It has been “discovered” by the tourists and now thrives off the income generated by a steady stream of visitors. This seems to be the ideal prospect for a small village: it requires minimal effort to feed and house tourists, and the revenue improves the quality of life for nearly everyone there.
The natural setting was stunning: a narrow flat valley between looming limestone peaks, with the aquamarine river flowing through. There were butterflies everywhere, and despite the rain, not many mosquitoes. Mornings and evenings were quite cool, but the days were warm and pleasant.

This was my first crossing into the more heavily-touristed region of Laos, and the contrast was sharp. In Oudomxay, Luang Nam Tha, and Vieng Phu Kha, all the foreigners were people making a conscious effort to seek adventure and the Unknown. Most of them were interesting in one way or another, even if not particularly likeable. But here, in Muang Ngoi, were crowds of whey-faced Average Citizens, telling pointless anecdotes, quaffing rice whiskey, and staying carefully in the Group. There were even a few of the big heavyset Americans who charge like rhinoceri through any obstruction and refuse to make eye contact with locals or even other tourists, except to ask ridiculous questions or complain.
There were also some of the other kind, and I quickly allied myself with a pair of lads who had just come down from China. Roberto, from El Salvador, had explored Borneo before China, and had visited several places I’d never heard of. Mark, from England, had started in New York and was making his way around the world going West. They were both very keen to explore the area, and we spent two days hiking into valleys, swimming across rivers, and following trails into the mountains. In the evenings we ate ferociously hot local food and had lively conversations.
Our last hike, up a valley across the river, was full of splendor. We simply walked up a small tributary creek that ran between two steep hills. We didn’t have any cameras with us because we’d swam across the river and left the dry goods behind. There were many instances we regretted it, like when we startled two huge birds into flight in front of us, fabulous long-tailed creatures that sounded like pterodactyls when they flew, and when I found a mass of emerald-green daddy-longlegs that sparkled in the sun. The best was when a gigantic bright-red butterfly came to examine us when we sat on some rocks for a rest. It was fearless, and lit on the rocks not three inches from me, slowly beating its exquisitely-patterned wings. A little further we found a plant with vast leaves, heart-shaped, about four feet long and three across, each vein visible and pulsing with vitality. We also found a fearsome variety of bamboo, that had long branching spikes growing out of the joints. These spikes interwove with those of other stalks, so the whole bamboo stand was wrapped in a kind of spike basket-lattice.
We also came to a hydroelectric generator, about the size of two standard buckets, with a PVC tube taking water from a pool upstream. It looked like technology that I might actually be able to fix if it broke – about as complicated as a fish-tank pump, perhaps, and it looked antique. The output wire was coated in plastic and ran straight up the hill.
We finally came to a small hut and a clear-cut hill, and our stomachs started mentioning the possibility of lunch. We got back to town and bought water-buffalo sausages that also contained hot peppers and river algae, and were excellent. I made friends with a caged mynah bird who knew several words in Lao and also some interesting machine noises. Then we retired to the porch of a bungalow that overlooked the river, and watched the stars come out. It was a good connection we had, and I was sorry to have to say goodbye to these fine fellows, but I had to deal with visa issues in Vientiane and wanted to leave myself plenty of time in case there were difficulties.

SKINK

In the morning I started a hellish 24-hour transit that brought me to the capital city. I went by boat, minibus, and big bus, winding through the montane landscape to Luang Prabang, where I had dinner and a nice walk, and then another ten hours to Vientiane.

SUNSET IN LUANG PRABANG

Vientiane has everything I hate about cities: pollution, construction, traffic, noise, stink, crime, cheats and touts, scabrous beggars, high prices, bad water, and miserable poverty living alongside opulent luxury. The little mini-taxi drivers are all criminals, and bully every foreigner who walks by to either take a ride, find prostitutes, or buy opium. There is very little to balance the ugliness: an overdeveloped Mekong-river waterfront lined with stalls selling crap goods to tourists, a few expensive bakeries and French restaurants, cement temples, a reeking marketplace, and a lot of well-dressed public officials walking around like fashion models. It’s a crooked place and I’m getting out of here as soon as possible. Next stop: the Namkading Research Station.

CONCRETE MONUMENT, VIENTIANE

Oudomxay

2008-02-27T03:53:00.000-08:00

I have just completed a most amazing and satisfying hike. I am currently in Oudomxay (also Oudomsai, Udomsai, Udomcai, etc.) and it is a wonderful gem of a town in Northern Laos. It gets pretty short shrift in the tourist guidebooks because there is very little organized here for the satisfaction of a typical Western tourist. Because of its proximity to China, the tourists here are predominantly Chinese, and their tastes do not overlap with those of the North American, European, Australian, or Japanese backpacker. The Chinese are here to shop, gamble, drink, and eat Chinese food, and probably not a few of the men are here to enjoy the attentions of hospitality girls.
The town has really cleaned up its act since I was here last, though. It used to be much more open about the hospitality girls, and the main drag was lousy with seedy hotels and young Lao girls on every corner. The seedy hotels are still here, though not in such great number, and more places are catering to “respectable” tourists. There is only one place in town where the tired-looking girls in tight clothes are in evidence in the lobby. When I checked in to the place I’m staying now, they told me at the reception that they don’t have girls like that here, and they don’t want them.
Oudomxay is surrounded by mountains, a wide valley around the River Ko. I have been looking for any kind of historical museum to find out more about the region: it appears to be an ancient crossroads between China, Lanna (old Northern Thailand kingdom), and Lan Xang (old Laotian empire.) Certainly it is the perfect spot for a community: the extensive rice paddies and orchards attest to that. The mountains on the south side have been flayed and denuded of cloud-forest hardwoods, and replanted with rubber trees. This is a similar story all over northern Laos. The Chinese have an insatiable appetite for wood and rubber, and have stripped vast acreages of forest cover, under the auspices of “Chinese Project for the Replace of Poppy,” according to the big blue signs. Under the noble ægis of helping Little Sister Laos wean off the opium, China is laying to waste one of the richest and most poorly understood forests in the region. China helped build the new road between Huay Xay and Luang Nam Tha, which I traversed twice, and it is a gigantic improvement for regional travel. However, it has made much more land available to chainsaws and trucks, and the land proximal to the road looks like an ever-widening, infected cut. The foothills of Bokeo Protected Area and Nam Ha Protected Area look like stubbly cheeks with a one-year growth of rubber saplings.
Apropos that road, it was just finished this year. It shaves the trip-time from the border to Luang Nam Tha by something like five hours. But, looking at the red-clay hillsides they cut away to put in the road, there is nothing to stop that clay from sliding off like cake batter when the rainy season comes. It has not been replanted or shored-up. Expect news of massive landslides and road closure; expect the travel-time from the border to Luang Nam Tha to increase by about five hours.
Back to Oudomxay! On the north side of town is a massif called Puhipii, that looms in blue grandeur over the airport and a few villages, fish farms, and rice fields. It is richly covered in gigantic trees, and appears quite steep. I asked around town whether there was a way up, and received mixed replies. There was a great deal of confusion on the local side about why I would want to there at all; I finally resolved this by explaining that I was a Mor Pii, the local word for an animist priest. When they heard this they nodded sagely and gave me conflicting instructions on how to ascend.

I finally decided to just hike towards it and see what happened. When I got into the villages at the foot, some men sitting in the shade invited me to join them for a snack of snails pickled in lime and chili, washed down with rice whiskey. It was not yet ten in the morning, and my stomach did somersaults at the very idea of a snail-and-whiskey brunch. They were disappointed, but offered me some cold tea instead. The villages were Khamu tribe, an offshoot of the Cambodians who built Angkor Wat, and I listened to their strange language. It is a thrill to hear something so completely foreign, and to know it is backed up by centuries of literature and culture.
I excused myself after too long and started again toward the mountain. I ran into a pair of teenager boys, whose hair was exquisitely styled and their collars turned up. They even had the mien of sullen defiance. I said hello, and they asked me where I was going. I pointed at the summit, and received the first helpful directions so far in the entire endeavor. He told me I couldn’t get there from here; I’d have to backtrack and go to the next path leading up. I looked at the mountain and saw it was indeed four or five peaks, and following his suggestion would put me in a valley leading up between them.
I am saving the description of the climb for another purpose, but suffice to say it was a magnificent trail: old-growth cloud forest, lots of wonderful bugs and plants, and an unbelievably steep ascent to the top. I didn’t make it all the way, sadly, because the “trail” petered out well before the summit, and in trying to crash uphill through the underbrush, I incurred a number of painful wounds, notably nine long pustular welts on my forearm where I tried to push a poisonous vine out of the way, and a suicide-bomber bug that went into my eye and stayed until that night, when I finally dug him out with my well-washed fingernail. He was like a jellied herring, coated with eye-booger, and I immediately lamented pulling him out before he could form the nucleus of a rare and beautiful pearl.
Here are pictures from the climb:

Back in town, I have been exploring the various side-streets and paths. It’s such an amazingly nice setting: clean mountain air, cool weather, and very friendly people. They are obviously not used to Westerners wandering around in their neighborhoods, and they are very hospitable, inviting me onto their shady porches for oranges or a glass of beer. The prices are also the same for me as for the locals, which I find charming. The streets are lined with old trees, and in sunny spots are mats of sliced ginger, drying in the sun. The old tribal women come down out of the hills to sell garlic and homebrew on the street corners. There are children everywhere, just like everywhere else in Laos.
I went to one of the Chinese restaurants the other night. I forgot the word for “menu” and pantomimed looking at a list of things, then choosing one. The manager yelled into the back for the cook, who then escorted me into the kitchen and showed me the larder. We were skipping the “menu” middleman, here was the purest kind of list available. I surveyed it like a connoisseur, and then described exactly what I wanted: strips of pork cooked with oyster mushrooms and garlic, over a bed of rice. He nodded, and fifteen minutes later I had an unimpeachable meal.
In the center of town is a little hill crowned by a Buddhist stupa – presumably containing the ashes of a famous historical monk. I went up there on my first day here, with Montreal Max, and we got into a conversation with a friendly monk from Luang Nam Tha. His English was surprisingly good, and he pointed out various interesting things around town from the vantage.

There was also a crowd of kids running amok on the crown of the hill, under the scowling eye of a girl about seventeen. I gave the kids bug-cards, and played with my little voice-recorder, then got them all to stand for a picture.

One of the kids had this aggressive shirt:

Yesterday I went to the Chinese market at the crossroads. You know all that crap we have at Wal-mart that’s Made in China and of marginal quality? Well that’s the super high-standard export stuff. They also make unbelievable quantities of crap, and the Communist regime ensures there is no quality assurance, because this would be an unnecessary complication in the absence of competition.
There were policemen all around the market, which made me uncomfortable about snapping too many pictures, but the Evil Teletubby was irresistible:

His pal, the Cherubic Cetacean, also made me curious. Why the exposed ribcage? Did someone at the toy factory have a flensing knife?

I had planned on spending two or three days in Oudomxay. It has been almost a week, and now I need to move on. I may be out of computer range for a few days – I am going to Muang Ngoi Neuah on the Ou River, then down to Luang Prabang and then Vientiane.

Sam Yod Trek

2008-02-24T20:36:00.000-08:00

Here is a map of Laos, with this region highlit:

And here is my path through that region:

I have much to tell, and must decide how best to present it. I have received bitter complaints in the past when I post many episodes all at once. However, Sunday is Broken Internet Day in Laos and there is no chance of posting just one entry tonight, and the day after tomorrow I am likely to be travelling again, so that leaves just tomorrow (your today) to post everything that I write today (your tomorrow.)
I am going to try a new picture format: loading up rectangular but higher-resolution pictures, which the power-bloated moderators at Blogspot will shrink down to mere postage-stamps, but if everything goes according to plan, you will be able to click on the images and see the larger hi-res version. Let me know if you prefer one format over the other.

This week’s episode began in Luang Nam Tha. I had joined forces with some Canadians named Max and Marie from Montreal. We hoped that our vast numerical superiority would enable us to engage a trekking expedition at a lower cost. The Nam Ha Protected Area was supposed to be one of the biodiversity hotspots of the planet. We had a look around at a few of the outfits in town, but they were all much more than we cared to spend. Then, in the street, we ran into Thomas and Elke, the Germans I was supposed to go trekking with before: they had already engaged a guide for a 3-day hike, and if we joined, that would make five, and greatly reduce the price.
The name of the company was Nam Ha Trekking, and we took it as self-evident that the trek would be in the Nam Ha PA. The little brochure seemed on-the-level: three days of moderate-to-difficult trekking, two nights in tribal villages, all meals, water, and transport included in the price. So we signed on, for $25/day. You must understand that this is over double the daily budget any reasonable person could hope to spend in Northern Laos. We noticed another name on the roster: a mysterious sixth element, also from Germany.
We chatted a bit with the two Germans who were already there. Thomas, a nurse and herbal healer from Berlin, was thick-limbed and powerful, with a face that could have been ferocious if it were not for his big smile and constant laugh. Elke, his younger sister, lived in Frankfurt, and had short hair that was dyed in a mosaic of colors, and had the same ready smile as her brother.
Thomas had just acquired a raincoat from the local market, so the Canadians and I decided to saunter down there ourselves. I managed to procure a bright purple poncho, and then we wandered around the stalls selling tiny sweet miniature apples, Asian pears, noodles by the double-fistful, strange jellied sweets, limp herbs, aphid-pierced mangos, and all manner of fatty meat delicacies.
Then… the biggest surprise in Laos so far! A lady with a pink bucket full of live aquatic insects, which she was selling by the scoop:

There were several species of Aeshnid dragonfly nymphs, a few Libellulids, some big Dytiscid beetles with one elytron snapped off, ostensibly to keep them from flying off… and there, immediately recognizable…

The egg-laden back of a belostomatid! I began dancing and jabbering, because somehow in my mind I had recorded the back-brooding behavior as unique to the New World, where we were decidedly not. I promptly bought a scoop of them for 1000 kip (about 11 cents), pickled half of them for future posterity, and then looked at the remaining ones struggling around in the little plastic sack. They were unquestionably belostomatids, with the retractable breathing straps at the tip of the abdomen, but they had a number of other features that were completely foreign to me. For example, the rostrum did not protrude beyond the clypeus when viewed dorsally, giving them a snubby appearance.

Also, they were completely glabrous around the connexivum – and since the hair-patterns on this area are a character key for discerning the species of the genus Belostoma, I was puzzled and intrigued.
Finally, they had no cell whatsoever on their hemelytra! What madness is this? I sent a hurried note to my colleagues and elders back home, and resolved to carry the fifteen living bugs with me on the trek.

We met at 9 the next morning to hand over huge cakes of Lao kip to the operators, a couple of nasty fat slugs with bags of avarice drooping under their eyes. Their clothes were so fancy they were seedy, and their fingers seemed entirely too pudgy to count all those stacks of bills, but this they did, and unsmilingly wrote receipts. We met our guide, an energetic young man named Tiung who came from a nearby village.
We also met the other mysterious German, also called Thomas. This one was very tall and lean, with an inverted-arrowhead-shaped torso. His face was all flat planes and hard angles, tipped by a stubborn chin, and topped with two intense blue eyes.
We piled into a little covered truck and began heading for the trailhead. After twenty minutes, I realized I had been on this road before. Longtime readers will remember the disastrous journey Scott Hammers and I made from Phongsali Province, down to Udomsai, and up again to Borten. This was unquestionably the road to Borten, which meant we were getting further and further away from the Nam Ha Protected Area, and closer to the crooked casinos, concrete brothels, and truck graveyards of Borten. I pointed this out to Tiung, and he said, yes, this tour does not go to Nam Ha. Instead, we were going to hike through the hills off the side of this road. They were not very heavily forested, having been stripped of trees by the Chinese and replanted with rubber.
We gained a lot of elevation right away, hiking up to a ridge that overlooked the road and a couple of small villages. The sky was sullen gray, but it made the air quite cool and comfortable. We dipped into a valley and then climbed another mountain that had a bit denser forest. At the top, we could see the rolling hills of Northern Laos in rainy chiaroscuro.

It only took us three hours to reach the first village, where we were supposed to spend the night. We were all surprised, because three hours does not a trek make.
The village was Hmong, and it sat in a somewhat flat cavity that had been hacked out of the clay of a hillside. There the villagers lived in pastoral squalor, sharing their space with countless pigs, chickens, dogs, goats, buffalo, and one mud-caked pony. The animals moved freely in and out of the shack-like buildings, and every visible surface was covered with excrement. The villagers ignored us completely. There were big rocks strewn randomly throughout the thoroughfare, so walking was a dodgy dance.

We were shown to our quarters, a big lodge surrounded by a bamboo-stave fence in the center of town. Inside was a long table and a long platform in one chamber, and in the other, a kitchen. I had been carrying my bugs in a water bottle with a wet tissue in it, and I took the tissue out and put in a little fresh water. They were dropping their egg-cases but otherwise seemed OK.
We walked around in the woods for a while, but then Tiung herded us back into our caged enclosure, to await dinner. I walked around the village and talked to the children. I remembered a few Hmong words from the last village I visited, so I was able to greet them and ask them their names. They were good-natured, and gradually their parents began to drift out and talk as well.
I noticed an architectural curiosity: the chicken-house. This was a tiny elevated structure with a ramp that was too small for a dog or pig to mount, but just right for a chicken. Inside the hens could roost in comparative comfort while they brooded.

The sun disappeared behind a mountain ridge and the temperature began to drop rapidly, so I went back into our lodge to get warm clothes. Max and Marie were trying to get a fire going, and Tiung told us dinner was being prepared.
After an hour of huddling near the meager flame of our campfire, we saw a village woman show up with a scrawny rooster. This she hung by the neck in a wire noose, until it had noisily expired. She cleaned it rapidly, throwing the tripe to a waiting, brawling crowd of pigs and dogs. She used a cleaver to fillet the meat off the breasts, thighs, and drumsticks, chopping it into bite-sized collops. Then she used the cleaver to hack the neck, backbone, and leg bones into little bits.
Soon Tiung called us to dinner. We each got a bowl of rice, and then bowls of food were set in front of us on the long table. There was fried morning-glory, a staple of all Southeast Asia, and bitter pumpkin soup, and plates of fried chicken. The portions of chicken we had received were exclusively the bony chunks nearly devoid of meat. What flesh still clung to them was incredibly tough and stringy, and I thought about this rooster’s long struggle for survival in a village full of other chickens, all fighting over the same limited resources. Then I thought of the villagers charging the tour operators the price of a whole chicken but keeping the choice parts for themselves. Hungry as I was, I had no great desire to suck chicken marrow or tear gristle from between vertebrae.
A trio of dogs had stationed themselves around the table, and looked at us intensely with ears erect, alert for any sign of generosity. Occasionally a fourth dog would enter the lodge, whereupon a great fracas would erupt, whining and snarling, as the dogs all joined combat for this choice position.
After dinner the village chief came in and began pouring us little glasses of rice whiskey, called laolao. He asked us to introduce ourselves and tell which country we were from, which we did. Then he offered to answer any questions we had about the village, and Tiung translated. We found out the village lives off their animals and the small farms on the hillside, and earns extra money by selling pigs and wild herbs on market day. The village covenant stated each family must have a minimum of five pigs, and a maximum of twenty. Ownership was tracked by means of notched ears. The village, called Sam Yod, had only been there for thirty years: before that, they had lived further down in the flatlands at the behest of the government. Finally the chief had to go to a town meeting, so he bade us farewell and good luck, and took his leave.
That night we slept on the big platform, on thick panels of fabric and under heavy blankets, while the noise of the village continued to a surprisingly late hour. There was a singing drunk right outside, and he knew one song, which he performed relentlessly. There was a generator that rumbled to life around ten pm. And of course there was the constant savage fighting of the sickly cur dogs, and in due course, the chorus of rooster noise when dawn approached. It rained briefly but heavily during the night, and we all wondered what conditions would be like tomorrow.

The next day was bright but somewhat overcast, and we got cups of Nestlé 3-in-1 with our fried rice and scrambled eggs. We got all ready to go and then just stood there for about an hour. It was absurd. Tiung would make no explanation as to what we were waiting for. I suspect he wanted to make the day seem longer than it was by getting a late start. Finally we left.
On the first hill, the sun broke through the clouds and trees, warming and cheering us. We had a lot of ups and downs that day.

The trail was made of red clay, and it was covered with wet leaves, and Max, Big Thomas and I all ended up slipping and falling numerous times. Thin Thomas looked down his nose at us but made no comment.
The sunlight brought out the bugs, and I alternated between front and back of the line, in various stages of getting my camera out, taking pictures, and putting it back.
There were plenty of caterpillars with long glassy spines that promised urtication to any would-be predator:

But there was one predator who cared no whit for urticating spines: it devoured the caterpillar from the inside out. Witness the entomopathogenic fungus:

Then, another window-winged moth, advertising its foul taste in red and black:

This big beetle came to visit and stayed a long while:

A jungle psyllid, cousin of the Enemy of Pears I battled so many years ago in Wenatchee:

A termite soldier, head bloated with muscle, crawling on my shorts:

The ugliest cricket in the world! It looks like some kind of plucked fowl. It was about the size of my pinkie, and with no sign of wingpads, is clearly still a juvenile and will continue to grow. Delightfully grotesque!

An alien hot-air-balloon pilot? Actually, a Laniatores harvestman.

After about four hours of hiking, we came to the next village, called Nam Khong. This one was peopled by the Lantan tribe, a Chinese offshoot, and much better-organized than the Hmong. They were nestled in a valley under some very nice forested ridges, and kept their filthy animals in pens.

The children of the village were eager to play soccer with us, which we did for a while. Then we bathed in a deep pool in the nearby river, which was wonderfully refreshing. Later I found some children playing a game where they flicked black shiny beans into a hole in the ground; according to some arcane rules, one or the other of the children would receive all the beans, which he or she stashed in a plastic water bottle. I swapped one child three of his beans for an old action figure (the Guard of Ra from the original Stargate set – no way would I abandon a treasure like IG-88 or Snaggletooth out here!) The child was evidently pleased by the exchange. Later in the evening I tried to swap him back, generously adding a shiny bead to his three beans, but he stubbornly hid the action figure and shook his head.
We received another meal after sundown – the same menu as before, but with duck instead of chicken, and meat instead of bones. We were all very hungry by then and the duck went down wonderfully well. Once again the chief showed up, but he was grudging with his laolao and only poured to the depth of a rat-knuckle on each offering. He was chiefly concerned with how much money we made and how much we had spent to get to Laos. I asked him why his village was so clean, and why the children put their garbage into containers instead of strewing it about. He said they learned in school that tourists like clean villages.

On the third day we walked about four hours again, through deep bamboo forest and then rubber plantations, and ended up at a roadside village where our ride picked us up. Tiung invited us to a wedding party in a nearby suburb after we got cleaned up, and we accepted.

On the whole, I had a good time on the trek, but I definitely do not think it was worth $25/day/person. I felt misled about our destination and certainly dismayed that we did not go to Nam Ha Protected Area. I cannot afford another trek like that, so I’ll have to leave Nam Ha for another day.

I will also leave the Udomsai stories for another day, but I can describe the Lao wedding party. These were going on everywhere, every day in Luang Nam Tha, the whole time we were there. Tiung explained that the end of Wedding Season is approaching, so young couples who want to get hitched are cramming the parties in, lest they have to wait another seven months. When you’re seventeen to twenty, seven months is an intolerable eternity.
The females of both families get started around 8am preparing the food. Traditionally there is water buffalo and sticky rice, and sometimes fish. The males lay their hands on every empty container they can clutch and go to the laolao distiller out of town to fill up from a spigotted hogshead.
Around 11 am, people start showing up, and a DJ cranks out some music at deafening volumes. They alternate between bouts of line dancing, eating, and drinking, until around sunset. We showed up about 90 minutes before sunset, and there were plenty of haggard-looking folks slumped in their folding chairs, eyes at half-mast. Since we were honored guests, all the elder males wanted us to drink some of their laolao, which varied considerably in potency and flavor. It was impolite to refuse, but we soon perceived that it was acceptable to merely touch the glass to your lips and then hurl the contents onto the floor.
A hostess brought us big hunks of sticky rice, spicy pond slime, plates of fried buffalo, fried river fish, and a rapidly-congealing soup of buffalo organs. I have eaten buffalo five or six times in my life, and it is never really satisfying. Your teeth try to prepare the morsels for digestion, but all you can really do is worry it a bit, like a dog with an old slimy scrap of rawhide. The organs were pretty nasty too, bobbing in lukewarm greasy soup, rimmed with fat and all the pieces with little tubes or valves or wormy bits attached. This was choice cuisine, though, and our hosts insisted we eat several pieces of it. After so many doses of laolao it was imperative that we get something in our stomach to soak it up, and the organ-meat did an admirable job.
Every so often someone or other would drag us all up onto the dance floor for a little mild oscillation to Lao karaoke music. There was an inner and outer circle of dancers, and they were very particular who was dancing with whom, even though in this case “dancing” constituted gyrating slightly about three feet away from someone. It was all about the orientation in 3-d space, I decided, and whose face pointed at whose most often.
I quit the party as the sun was going down, for I could see where the parade was headed and had no wish to drink another drop. The others stayed, though, and around nine pm Thin Thomas staggered back into the room we were sharing, begging for mercy. He had had rather too much laolao, and clawed his way into the bathroom where he knelt for the first of at least a dozen supplications in front of the squat toilet. He was an apologetic drunk, coming back into the room and wheezing out “Sorry, I’m so sorry about that,” before collapsing into his bed and suffering hours of sickening spins.

After all was said and done, all fifteen of my bugs who went on the trek were still alive. They are currently in my hotel room in a water-scooper that you usually use with the squat toilet.
My excitement about them was sundered when my friend MTB in Oregon forwarded me a message from a High Duke of Heteropterology, John Polhemus, saying my bugs were "undoubtedly Diplonychus rusticus F." That "F." was the cherry on top of my disappointment, because it means this animal has been known to science for about 200 years already. I had seen Diplonychus only in silhouette form on taxonomy diagrams, and for some reason thought it was confined to Africa and Australia. Also, with a name like that, ("double-clawed," rhymes with "diplodicus,") I thought it would be fiercer-looking. More from the bug-world later.

Luang Nam Tha Trek

2008-02-24T04:53:00.000-08:00

Back on the wire after what seems like a long absence, writing from a tiny rattan chair in a Chinese guesthouse in Udomsai, Laos.

It seems Photobucket is refusing to upload any of my latest images. This next section of blog has some nice pictures so I will wait till tomorrow and see if those recalcitrant punks have cleaned the wax out of their servers.

Vieng Phu Kha

2008-02-18T05:37:00.000-08:00

Situational update: I had planned to meet the director of the Gibbon Experience wildlife project in Houaysai to see about volunteering. I was told he would be back on February 18th. Today, I went into their office and was told he may be back as soon as the 23rd. A helpful staff member finally gave me some good advice: the project is in fact looking for scientists and ecologists, but since this is the height of the tourist season, all the “spaces” for people are taken up by paying marks, and a volunteer has little chance of shoehorning in. So, Bokeo Nature Reserve is off my itinerary, at least for now.
I’d also like to add that Laos is much more developed than when I was here last, and I should be able to add updates every few days, so please disregard my earlier urge to blow the warning-tocsin if you don’t hear from me by March 5.
I decided on the spur of the moment to go to Vieng Phu Kha, a large village between Houaysai and Luang Nam Tha. I met a couple of Germans who were going trekking in that area, and since trek-guides are always cheaper if you have more people, I thought it would be a good idea.
Unfortunately, these Germans were not solvent, nor did they have any idea about the procurement of money from foreign banks in Laos. Although it is more developed than before, there are still very few ATMs and the banks keep peculiarly small hours. The Germans tried to have a friend wire them money through the local post office, but the friend didn’t bother to look up the exchange rate for the Lao kip, which is about 14,000 to the euro, so the friend unwittingly sent them what he believed to be enough kip to buy a Köderwurst made of solid gold, but in fact the fees for the labyrinthine transfer-process ate up some 80% of the value. By this time we all had bus tickets to Vieng Phu Kha, and the Germans were hatching ever-more-harebrained schemes (like darting across the Mekong at dawn to use a Thai ATM, and then darting back, incurring a mere $50 in visa and travel fees) so when the bus was leaving, I left without them, with plans to meet later that afternoon. They never showed up, and may be in jail for all I know, or making their way through the gut of a Mekong catfish.
Vieng Phu Kha was a perfectly charming village, teeming with children and with the various Lao domesticates: dogs, black pigs, water buffalo, tropical cattle, chickens, turkeys, cats, and these funny duck-things:

I checked into a bamboo hut for the night, and walked around town. The children all screamed “sabai deeeee?” at me (the Lao greeting) and ran off in various directions if I approached them. I ran into some other foreigners playing cards in a restaurant who were so dusty and unclean-looking they would have blended in perfectly in Black Rock City. There was a bearded man with a beehive of dreadlocks piled on top, a woman dressed like a gypsy, and a tall dark handsome fellow. They were from the Bay Area in California, but the tall guy was originally from Persia. His name was Ashkhan, which he said meant “tears.” He didn’t seem like a sad person, but I didn’t question him any further on it. They had been in and around the area for five days and had done one of the treks, which they greatly enjoyed.
I found the trekking office, and met one of the guides. He had multiple gold rings on his hands and was drinking expensive whiskey. He was clearly schnozzled. His sober colleague gave me a little binder with the different treks outlined on it. The one I was most interested in went through some “ancient” ruins, which I had hoped were like the Plain of Jars or some other Neolithic mystery, but these were merely the remains of a brick outpost of the Lanna kingdom in northern Thailand, about four hundred years old. Not that I have anything against the Lanna or think that four hundred years is not a long time, but I’ve already seen a lot of Lanna stuff and my inner antiquarian was hoping for something more antique.
The price for a single person, three days and two nights, was over a million kip, which works out to something around $120. As a capitalist, I like prices for goods and services that are at least somewhat commensurate with the value of those goods and services. On this trek, we would be walking through the jungle to a few small villages, and sleeping on the floor of huts in those villages, and eating whatever local nosh the villagers had thrown together. The overhead would be minimal, and I calculated that the majority of the money would end up going for expensive whiskey and gold rings, so I decided not to play this game.
So, as evening fell, I decided to do my own little trek the next day, and walk up the river that ran through town, the Nam Chouk.

After an outstanding night of sleep in a silent bamboo hut, I rose, seized my net, and began walking up the road that ran parallel to the Nam Chouk. It was a shallow, meandering river dotted on both sides with small settlements.

The road curved away from the river, so I found a path that went down to the water. There was a curious line of rocks in the river that seemed designed to create a miniature rapids.

I sampled the rapids and found the usual gang of idiots: creeping water bugs, heptageniid and baetid mayflies, some predatory caddisflies, and what appeared to be a capniid stonefly, though it was too small to say for sure. A couple of tribal women appeared from across the river, carrying bundles of edible weeds wrapped in banana leaves. I showed them the creeping water bugs, very similar to the naucorids you can find pictured in earlier iterations of this very blog. They made motions of eating. “Sääp?” I asked. Good to eat? “Sääp ohhh,” they confirmed: delicious! I declined, though, having had a good omelet for breakfast. I continued along the river and saw this familiar dragonfly, but got a superb picture of the glittery wings:

I found a little path leading up toward the heavily-forested mountain and followed it, walking past three farmers drinking Lao whiskey at ten a.m. in the shade of a bamboo hut. The path went past some good-sized pools being used for fish culture, and then headed steeply uphill. At one point it branched, and I took the left branch because it had a creek next to it. Soon the path became the creek, or vice versa, and going became tough. I was in a steep, narrow ravine that was increasingly muddy. At last I saw a hillside that appeared to have a track going up it, but it was ridiculously steep. I kept throwing my net up the hill and then using creepers to pull myself up, but my feet were muddy in my amphibious sandals, and traction was hard to gain. I came to a big fallen log that seemed fairly secure, and sat against it. In doing so I disturbed a resting tribe of harvestmen, thousands of them, who scuttled away from me on their long legs with a collective whisper.

I grabbed one of them by the legs and turned it upside-down, whereupon it secreted a globule of fluid that smelled like fish food. I let it go and watched them disappear into the undergrowth, then reapplied myself to the hillside. I finally came to the top, where there was a trail leading up the spine of the hill. It was still absurdly steep, but clearly a man-made trail. Machete scars on a tree proved it:

There were many odd plants up here, well odd to me anyway. This one looked like a heart that had grown faster on one side than the other:

How would you describe that shape? I kept going up, until I reached a stand of wild bamboo. It had a vaguely dark and menacing air about it: chaotic, jumbled, covered with leprous fungus and distasteful hairs at the joints.

Somehow it reminded me of the Lappish kota:

It seemed to suck the light and warmth out of the day. I made my way around it, and found that the hilltop was covered in these bamboo copses. There were odd croaking birdcalls issuing from the tops of the bamboo, and thousands of tiny insects swarming my face and eyes. I couldn’t find the path any longer: perhaps the path was to this point, to these shrines of dark forest gods, whom I had no idea how to propitiate. In a clear sign that I am growing more feeble and timid, soon to be fit for nothing more than gumming spoonfuls of pap while sitting in a rocking chair with blankets across my lap, I decided to turn back and find an easier way to go.
On my way down, I came face-to-face with this giant beast:

I think it is called Nephila; including its legs, it is bigger across than my hand. It was positioned in such a way that a person struggling up the path would run face-first into the huge web. I had bypassed it by coming up the steep slope, but now had to find my way around.
At last I came again to the river, cool and blue-green, and washed the mud and scratches on my legs and feet. Then I spied, frantic in the shallows, a whirligig beetle of considerable size, with a sawblade-like rostrum that invited impressed compliments:

There was no more path, so I waded up the river, dragging my net in the mud at the bottom. At a wide spot, the sandy bottom was covered with tadpoles, tens of thousands of them, looking like chocolate chips.

I caught this odd little fish in my net in one of the rapids:

Later I saw large, graceful waterstriders skimming up and down the river with amazing speed. I spent a long time trying to catch one, for they were shockingly fast, and at last succeeded. Up close it looked like a shiny miniature Japanese robot.

Further up the river I met two fishermen, who were not happy to see me and clearly thought I was encroaching on their fishing grounds. I tried to show them that I was just hunting insects, but they were not interested in anything except seeing the last of me, and they were armed with jagged-pointed spears, so I walked away from the river. I came out into a valley where rice was being cultivated, and found a little bamboo platform covered with children. They had agricultural knives of some sort and were obviously supposed to be working, for some of them scooted back to the field when I appeared and busied themselves. But they soon saw I was not going to enforce any responsibilities, and that I was handing out colorful picture-cards. There immediately ensued a dispute as to who had the best card, and many cards were forcibly exchanged. Then I took out my notepad and we played animal Pictionary, so I could learn the local words for beetles, dragonflies, ants, and such-like. I imitated the childrens’ utterances, which amused them greatly. In the end they showed me the road back to town and posed for a picture with my net:

Some other wildlife I saw around Vieng Phu Kha:

JUMPING SPIDER

Bokeo Province, LPDR

2008-02-15T04:42:00.000-08:00

I have ended up semi-stranded in the border town of Houaysai, the northern entry point to Laos from Thailand. I found out that a gigantic portion of Bokeo Province (here) is a nature reserve, and at least on paper, I'm not allowed to go into it without a licensed guide. The only outfit in town is called the Gibbon Experience, an ecological extravaganza, and travelers returning from it have rosy cheeks and breathless descriptions. Sadly, it costs $200 for just three days, far out of my budget. I emailed the director a month ago expressing a desire to volunteer as an entomologist and ecologist, but received no reply. Arriving at the Gibbon Experience office, I found out that the director is disporting himself at some festival in Japan and won't be back till the 18th. The office-staff was unwilling to say yea or nay, even though I offered to bring my own tent and my own food. Most visitors come to Bokeo and rocket straight down the Mekong to Luang Prabang; the few others go up to Luang Nam Tha. Nobody, it appears, stays here in Houaysai, and so it is a kind of town-sized bus station or airport, with the consequent high prices and sullen service that go with those places. My conundrum is what to do with myself for three days, when it will take at least a day to travel to any other place.
Today I woke to the sounds of circular table saws cutting rebar, for Houaysai is Under Construction. Every hundred meters there is some ambitious project being reared from the mud and dust. I went for a walk and was attracted by the scent of bread baking: a delightful custom they borrowed from the French. I followed my nose and found a restaurant offering a set breakfast of fried eggs, baguette with jam, and local coffee. The coffee came first, with this weird packet:

I wonder about our image abroad if foreigners want to adorn their non-dairy creamer with American-looking pictures and words. Anyway, this stuff should properly have been called non-dairy-non-creamer, for it dissolved in my coffee without a trace except a few blebs of synthetic-looking oils on the surface. The eggs arrived, looking as if they had been fried in a penal colony kitchen, and the fresh baguette, which was heavenly.
Afterwards I took a long walk through the district, noticing the typically-Lao features, like a family of chickens living in the yard of a government office, children making toys out of garbage, hugely fat men scolding whip-thin construction workers, and, sadly, beautiful young women with black eyes. I have not seen many black eyes on young ladies except in Laos, and while things have changed in my 8-year absence, this is not one of them.
Things have changed, though. Technology has made its inroads, and now in place of rusty Chinese tractors, there are shiny motor scooters, Toyotas, and sedans. Teenagers carry cell phones, and children and dogs are for the most part clean. Also the Lao people here don't seem to drink as heavily as others I have known, or at least they are doing it behind closed doors.
The dry season doesn't affect this area, for some reason: it is rainy, cloudy, and dismal here, and has a dampening effect on laundry and enthusiasm. Perhaps tomorrow, seen from the vantage of a bicycle, will be different.

USB SUCCESS!

2008-02-13T06:26:00.000-08:00

PAI REGGAE/ FANG/ CHIANG SAEN

This will be a slightly condensed version of three events, because time is short, internet costs money, and I am leaving for Lao PDR on Valentine’s Day and want to catch up with the updatery before that.
Last week I went from Chiang Mai to Pai for the 3rd annual Reggae Festival. The posters around Pai had bright Jamaican colors, depicting a target, with the caption “Combat Global Warming.” Other by-lines were “Keep Pai’s Spirit Green,” “Back to Nature,” “No Plastic,” and “Protect the Environment.” In my humble opinion, concert organizers were using bandwagon terminology to paint the event as somehow beneficial to the world at large. The hefty price-tag of 350 baht seemed to suggest that there would be a lot of proceeds.
I arrived the night before the festival was supposed to start, and Pai was crowded with dreadlocked Rastafarians from Europe, Asia, and America. Curiously there were no Africans or Jamaicans in evidence. The town was obviously full to something close to capacity, and I despaired finding a room. However, the friendly folk at Good Life Restaurant Guesthouse, run by a Ukrainian tea-aficionado, greeted me with strong tea and good cheer, and made room for me.
There was no information on the posters as to where the event was to be held or what time it would start, but there were other signs indicating free taxi-shuttle from the high school. I rode up there at dusk, to a very posh hotel about 4 miles out of town, in a beautiful valley with mountains in all directions. The event was on the other side of a shallow river; evidently they hoped to contain sneakage by means of watery barrier. I had a beer with a friendly couple while the light faded, and the music began to roll across the river. The first band was on and off before we could get over there, and the second band, with their American or Canadian lead singer, sounded like a teenager whining about a milk sandwich. Most people were happy to sit far away from it and simply enjoy the evening.

A bunch of drummers on our side of the river suddenly exploded in noise – unamplified, just playing out of the back of the truck, on homemade drums made from barrels, trash cans, and bamboo. They were fabulous and irresistible, and kept inviting the audience to participate. They effectively drowned out the pap from the main stage.
After that we bought our tickets, and a couple of event goons tried to search my bag. They were permitting no food or beverages from outside, which did not bode well for my two water bottles, my peanuts, my shrimp rinds, and my Suntory Whiskey. I made a huge fuss about surrendering one water bottle, made sure I was blocking the whole line, demanded a receipt, and by the time they got that one water bottle off me, they were more than happy to send me on my way with the rest of my supplies intact.
Inside, there was a stage with the words “PAI – COMBAT GLOBAL WARMING – SAVE ENVIRONMENTALLY” on a banner behind it. Around the stage in a semicircle were vendors of every product you could legally consume in Thailand – food, water, beer, whiskey, tobacco, energy drinks – and everything at near-double price. There were a few trash cans but these quickly overflowed. Between the vendors and the stage was a space that could comfortably accommodate at least 5000 people. A few campfires were going around the periphery, and logs had been set up both to sit on and to burn. There were police in uniform everywhere.
The next band took the stage and immediately had everyone dancing, such was the power and spirit of their music. They had two drummers, three hornblowers, two guitarists, a keyboarder, a bassist, and two singers, and they were disciplined enough that they did not overwhelm the audience by all trying to play as loud as possible at once.

After them came the headliners for the first night, whose name I can’t even remember, but it was a female lead singer and otherwise male band. They did not have the same kind of contagious beat that the first band had, but they were obviously beloved by the Thai crowd. I counted faces and guessed that 60% of the audience was Thai, which made me simultaneously happy that this was not a tourist-only event and upset that the price tag meant local kids wouldn’t be able to attend.
The next band was a mix of white and Thai, and they played what seemed to be a single long song with sitar, bongo drums, and low guttural chanting that was hypnotic and beautiful. They build slowly but surely to a crescendo and had the whole crowd swaying and waving their arms. I guessed there was about a thousand people in the crowd, far below the capacity. As with every location frequented by Thai people except their own beds, the ground was littered with garbage and plastic containers. “Back to Nature” indeed.
A Japanese reggae band came on next, with a little lead singer wearing dreadlocks down to his hamstrings, singing like Tom Waits in Japanese, Thai, and English. This band had a much more reggae-roots kind of sound, and a much more political message. I was happy to see the bearded old Japanese man who sang reggae on street corners in Pai up there playing bass for them.
After that the event organizer came on, and started haranguing us in Thai. It was 1:45am and energy was ebbing. There was more music to come, but without any kind of peppy beat, and only the drony, echoey blabber of amplified Thai, I gave up and rode back to Pai.
The next night I was resolved to simply go up the river, wade across, and walk back down. The night before, during my urinary missions, I had cased the perimeter and identified a large gap in the security. It would be no problem to seem like I was coming back from just such a mission. However, I met some interesting people (including an ornithologist who had studied at OSU) and we had a tremendous Thai dinner with pineapple/sweet basil smoothies, and afterwards I felt lethargic enough not to want to deal with sneaking into festivals. We wandered around Pai instead, which is what everyone else seemed to be doing, and came across a glass-blower making miniature dragons, penguins, sharks, and other charismatic vertebrates. I asked him if he could make an octopus, and lickety-split he had a beautiful little five-legged octopus squirming on his glass rod. It was only 50 baht (less than $2) and I named it after him: Opoh.

Next day I joined an American traveler named Perry-Marx and went north to Fang. It was a charming little town unfrequented by foreigners, and all the Thais we met were very friendly. It took us most of the day to get up there, and I was suffering illness (a kind of head, chest, and intestinal flu that is going around) so we didn’t do much except check into a hotel. In the morning we caught a ride out to The Park With Five Names, which I will not list here. The entry was exorbitant for Thailand: Special Price for foreigners, 200 baht. The chief attraction of the park was its array of hot springs and artificial geysers that went off every half hour. We intended to camp, and after we set up tent, asked the people at the information center where we could hike into Nature, this being a National Park after all. “You need a car to do that!” they insisted, and said there was no pedestrian nature trail. So we contented ourselves with a hike up the rocky river. Right away I caught this dragonfly:

Later we found these red-furred butterflies gnawing something in the sand, which we could not identify.

Further up the river I caught this Rhyacophilid caddisfly, shown with a quarter to give an idea of how monstrous it was. I have a good recipe for them from Japan, but only found the one, and didn’t have the right ingredients anyway.

We stayed one night at the park, and then started down the road back to town, hoping to hitchhike. About half a mile from the park entrance, an old woman came out of the woods, with her face behind a ski mask and brandishing a machete. I raised my insect net (the butt-end is sharpened bamboo) and pointed it at her. She kept staggering toward us, and I thought there was going to be a confrontation. I realized I had zero compunction about clobbering an old woman who was threatening me with a machete, and prepared to do just that, when she raised her hands in the “wai,” a Thai gesture of respect and submission. I gave her a wide berth, and she muttered something before disappearing through a barbed-wire fence on the other side of the road.
Five minutes later we were picked up by a pickup truck (appropriately) full of armed soldiers. They shared their breakfast with us: oranges, sweet red beans, and sticky rice. They delivered us all the way to the bus station in Fang where we caught a truck-taxi to Thathon. We crossed a big bridge and got another truck taxi to Khyu Satai, and from there we rode to Mae Chan, and caught a big bus up to Chiang Saen, where I now sit. The total travel time was something like six hours, and mostly comfortable.
Chiang Saen is on the Mekong River, a very old city with crumbly red walls and disintegrating temples in every direction. The people are nice and full of smiles and the food is good.
At one of the temples I read this on the sign: “A brick chedi stands on a rabbeted lotus square base measuring 7.00 meters in width, and is decorated with torus moulding.” Here is the chedi in question:

I also saw my new favorite kind of plant. It attaches itself like a suckerfish to smooth-trunked trees, and the living part hangs down while the dead part sticks up. I can’t explain it.

On the way back, I saw an arawana in an aquarium. This is a very typical Thai fish, genus Scleropages, and in the old days grew to enormous size.

Tomorrow, Chiang Khong, and then across the river to Bokeo, Laos.

USB Failure

2008-02-12T06:25:00.000-08:00

OK, I have a new update with pictures and everything, but this internet cafe doesn't allow me access to the USB key for fear that I will spread nasty viral ugliness all over their network. Not an unwise precaution in a place like Thailand. I'll scour the town for a wireless signal tomorrow to see if I can upload my final Thai report until mid-March.
For the moment, let me let you all know where I am going and when I expect to be back. I plan to travel from Bokeo Province to Luang Nam Tha City, and base myself there for explorations in that region. After that I will travel to Oudomsay, and down to Luang Prabang and then Vientiane to get my Thai visa. I should be back in Thailand by March 10th, and certainly back in email contact long before that. If you haven't heard from me by, say, March 5, I'm in trouble.

Doi Pui and the Coffee Research Station

2008-02-07T23:20:00.000-08:00

Last week I went to the Chiang Mai University Coffee Research Station in Doi Pui National Park, only a few miles by crowflight from Chiang Mai, but for earthbound creatures, necessitating a long drive up a winding road. The station was small, with no laboratory on premises, just a few wooden buildings and thousands of coffee bushes in a bowl-shaped recess of land on the steep mountain slope. There was a large pond at the center of the bowl, and a fast-moving stream that came down off the mountain.
All aspects of coffee production were under study: growth in shade vs. sunlight, drought-tolerant varietals, high-yield cultivars, roasting, fermentation, grinding, the whole shebang. The old lady who ran the station café made her lucre by charging a dollar for a small cup of extraordinary coffee. I bristled a bit at this, in that coffee should be the one thing at the station you could get for free, but it was of such surpassing quality that I couldn’t very well boycott it.
The pond was filled with carp, which drastically reduce the aquatic insect population but provide a bony, sour meal to anyone who cares to fish them up. Nevertheless, I found some nice-looking damselflies and a syrphid fly, who I present in this series of “skin pics:”

I wandered around the station for a while, inhaling the mixed odors, and found the creek. It was crystal-clear and contained no visible garbage. I selected a boulder the size of a buffalo’s head and rolled it aside, with my net at the ready. I was surprised to find a large crab, which was covered with squirming white creatures. The crab was visibly unhappy about being incarcerated, and waved his ragged weapons at me. I finally removed him from the net, but he left some of the little creatures behind. They were white, approximately a centimeter long when outstretched, and looked like little squids. I realized I didn’t know what I was looking at, the pinnacle of excitement for a biologist. I slipped a few into a vial and checked the net for other treats.
To my delight, there was a creature that closely resembled a belostomatid, even down to the appearance of bearing retractable breathing-straps. Such belostomatids are not found in Asia, and on closer examination I saw the breathing-straps were merely part of the sculpting of the connexivum. The beak, too, was not the stout four-jointed affair one associates with giant waterbugs; instead it looked like a downward-oriented tack, sharp and cruel. It was the largest naucorid I had ever seen, and I popped it into my waterbottle for transport back to the camera.

NAUCORID IN CHINESE SOUP-SPOON

NAUCORID WITH FAUX BREATHING-STRAPS DEMARCATED

I eventually decided the little squids were giant-sized hydroids, freshwater relatives of jellyfish, but somehow that seemed an insufficient description: they were extremely active and exploratory in a way I have never seen in coelenterates.

At sunset, I walked a half mile or so to the Hmong village located inside the park. There were kids everywhere, many of them albino. I chalked this up to inbreeding. There were also some mighty old trees that had shaded the village for hundreds of years. I saw some old men squatting and squatted with them, listening to their incomprehensible stories. The language was nothing like Thai.
The next day I got up early and found a path leading from the main road up into the forest. I followed it, a steep uphill climb, until I was on a pine-covered spine with a cliff on one side.
The path stayed on the spine, becoming extremely steep at times, and was a series of ever-receding false summits, similar to a career in academia. On one of my stops, I spotted a handsome grasshopper.

Finally I reached the top, where my trail intersected the one from Park HQ. There was a shady pagoda with a lovely view, and, puzzlingly, a big pile of tires. This is one of the mysteries of the Orient which my mind will never scrute: if you must heap your tires, why do it at a scenic overlook at the top of a mountain in a national park? Surely there is easier access in any valley? Why not roll them off the side of the road on the way up? Who carried them up here?

Inside the pagoda was an enormous rectangular table made of three polished slabs of tropical hardwood, but no chairs. I sat on the table and ate an apple, admiring the tires. Some of them were quite nice, but each one contained a little puddle of water that was a breeding-tank for mosquitoes. As an aquatic entomologist, I should have some special forgiveness for these beasts, but I do not. I hate them.
I came down the hill on the HQ side and then hiked along the road back to the station. After changing my shoes and resting a bit, I went to the Hmong village and saw a couple of women using an ancient stone mill to grind grain. It evidently introduced a lot of stone grit into their diet, as seen by the high incidence of toothlessness among the villagers.

I was very hungry by this point, having sustained myself off fruit and noodles for 36 hours. I saw a woman selling somtham, shredded green papaya salad, and asked her for a serving. She had eight jars of additives, and I waved my hand at all of them and indicated I’d take some of each. There were chilies, garlic, sugar, shrimp paste, some kind of fermented fuzzy blobs that were so pickled I couldn’t tell which kingdom they came from, something dark and granular, and a shelled, segmented animal which she called “roo.” Once all the ingredients were assembled in a stone bowl, the lady took out a blunt pestle and worked it over until it squelched. It cost fifteen cents for a pound of this stuff, which was incredibly pungent and piquant. It rapidly became too spicy to eat, but not before my chompers clamped down on something crusty and crunchy. I examined the food and found fragments of fermented river crab, the brother or sister of the one I’d found adorned with hydroids. The taste was simply too intense, I had to give up before I was finished. It’s not often that I fail to Indian-wrestle my vittles down, but this time I had to concede: Hmong chow is too much for me.

Doi Khun Tan

2008-02-04T09:08:00.000-08:00

I just spent two days camping at Doi Khun Tan National Park. It is especially charming because the train brings you nearly straight there; you don’t need to mess with unscrupulous taxi drivers who charge a margrave’s ransom to shuttle you to the entrance. I went with my friend Mareva, who has been living in Chiang Mai for weeks and wanted to get out of the noisy city.
The park is a steep 1.5km climb up from the train platform. My guidebook said it was going to cost each of us 400 baht ($13) to get in, so we were braced for capital outlay. The actual cost was only 100 baht, and no fee for putting our tents up in the broad field at park HQ. The lady who ran the park restaurant said that the restaurant both closed at 5pm and stayed open till eight. I tried to convey to her that both of these things could not simultaneously be true, but there was a barrier of both language and logic, and I got very frustrated at my utter inability to get what she was saying. I had more problems with her later.
Somehow a vast portion of the park is given over to luxurious bungalows with sweeping views of the valley. To access these bungalows, a long winding paved road snakes through every portion of the park proximal to the HQ. Thus, for a footbound hiker, there is more than 2km of hoity-toity bungalow road before you actually get to any nature. I considered this a travesty but secretly envied anyone who got to stay in one of those bungalows: the views were really amazing.
We had been issued a photocopied map upon arrival, that showed a variety of trails to a waterfall and to four different “Yaws.” We chose the Yaw 1 trail first, and immediately came across this lizard. Hopefully some concerned herpetologist is reading this blog and can tell me what I found.

The first Yaw was a big concrete platform that looked like a helicopter pad, with a few small buildings adjacent. There was a spring trickling fresh water, and some concrete steps leading up the hill. We finally came to a more or less continuous patch of nature, even though there were little houses and huts within sight everywhere. At the top of a small rise was a wooden shelter, and underneath it, dozens of ant-lion craters. I caught an ant and demonstrated the ferocious ability of these creatures to overwhelm ants, but she was overwhelmed with pity for the little doomed worker ant, who struggled frantically but could not escape. I dug one of the ant-lions up for photographic posterity.

The trail wound around the hillside, getting ever higher, and we found a mass of ants. They appeared to be chewing on owl pellets.

We made it up to Yaw 2, a series of bunk buildings and a locked kitchen. There was an observation platform with a nice view. On the platform was an ant who struck a most peculiar pose, abdomen in the air, immune to caution.

We didn’t want to chance missing dinner, in case the dining room staff woman was wrong about being open past five, so we headed down fairly early. On the way down I found a velvet ant which is actually a kind of wingless wasp. It was so pretty I decided I had to touch it a little bit. I immediately leapt up shouting in pain, for the beast had given me a sting I won’t soon forget.

Back at HQ, we were presented with photocopied English menus that had six items. I pointed out that the Thai menu had more than twice as many options, if one could only decipher their wormy shrift. By pointing and asking, I found out most of the other choices were Lao-style fare – sticky rice, swamp scum with chilies, fried morning glory. They seemed eager to feed me pork, so I accepted pork fried rice. The sun set behind a thick wall of clouds and we went to bed early.

The next morning, at breakfast, we calculated that we could go to the area waterfall as well as Yaws 3 and 4, and the “viewpoint,” if we got a good early start. The trail led us down the other side of the mountain, and as the air became more cool and moist, we started seeing some different fauna, like this spike-backed daddy longlegs (Order Laniatores):

The waterfall was only vaguely impressive, a tiered affair, made more interesting by the population of red veliids that sat on the water surface:

On our climb up out of the valley toward Yaw 3, a giant katydid hopped into our path:

Yaw 3 was creepy. It was a missionary camp, far up in the mountains, and it was disintegrating. We saw no missionaries, only short, dirty hill tribe people who had years’ worth of garbage heaped in and around the camp. A cheerful sign told us in English that the bungalows were open for the use of tourists, but said bungalows had been infested by clans of tribespeople, and were in very poor repair. There was no sign directing us to Yaw 4, and we took the wrong road, which led us into a grotesque and enormous midden that must have taken decades to build up.
We finally reached Yaw 4 and the viewpoint, which afforded spectacular vistas of the mountains of Northern Thailand stretching off to Burma. I noticed with some curiosity the off-brand nature of Mareva’s backpack.

Storm clouds were gathering as we descended, and by the time we got to HQ it was sprinkling. There was also a gathering of boy and girl scouts in the big clearing where we had our tents. I made faces at them while they were supposed to be paying attention to a more stern adult.

The sprinkling turned to heavy rain, and we huddled inside the restaurant. A strange creature landed on the table: a kind of butterfly with transparent wings:

We got well rained-on that night, and the next morning we had to wait a couple hours for the train to show up. We had each had a cup of coffee the night before and another one when we first got up, and so Mareva paid for six coffees and indicated that we wanted two more. After half an hour of no coffee, we caught the woman’s attention and told her we had paid for six coffees but only received four. She adopted a very patient look and tried to explain our error, but we were not in error. I pantomimed looking for the last two cups, I used my dictionary to use words like “still want 2 cups,” “not yet have six cups,” and several other phrases that I thought must break through her ignorance barrier. But nothing worked, and she ended up refunding the price of two cups of coffee. By then we were so frustrated by the sight of her that we decided to try our luck in the village by the railway station. It was raining extremely hard by then, and every restaurant was crowded with boy and girl scouts. But they made room for us, and we had delicious coffee while watching a Thai PBS broadcast about Canadian wolves.
Once on the train, I was approached by a one-eyed flat-faced tribal woman selling sausages. I bought one, and proceeded to eat the single worst sausage of my life. Even French’s bitter yellow mustard would have been an improvement. The casing was a leathern section of animal intestine, fried to a nauga-like texture. Inside was a meat-and-vegetable pulp the consistency of uncooked bread dough, with lots of hard little bits of gristle, aromatic leaves, and chilies. Every aspect of it was vile but I ate it because I was hungry.