Sunday, September 30, 2007

The Good, the Bad and the Downright Horrible

Yes, I'm still happy as a clam at high tide up here in this sweet, sultry Shangrila, but I think you have perhaps tired of all my rhapsodising about how wonderful it all is and thirst to hear of the nasty negatives that you suspect must exist even here...
Well, yes, there are things that make me mad, sad and jest plain disgusted, so I'll get them off my chest right now and get it over with.
Lao dancing, while a graceful, gentle sight when done with skill and enthusiasm, and quite watchable for, oh, minutes at a time, is downright boring and insipid. And so , I fear, is the music that accompanies it. Plinky, plonky monotony, to put it brutally. Tiny mincy steps in an unfathomable order in a circle, whilst twirling one's hands as if limbering up for playing the accordion. Yes, that, too. And always at full blast. Weddings are particularly painful with vocalists churning out wailing, warbling tunes far into the night with loudspeakers so that everyone for miles around can hear it. As the resident large farang lady, I am usually asked to join in and they absolutely will not take no for an answer when I demur and then they look pained or laugh when I relent and can't do the damn steps.
And the pop version of the above, as encountered in one of the discos here particularly often, is even worse, a sort of sugary-sweet, pre-teen confection and it drives me nuts when I'm for a night of good ol' Beerlao-fuelled, sweaty, I-don't-know-who-I'm-dancing-with rock'n'roll.
What's worse is the line dancing that they do to it! The whole place moves in unison twirling their hands like demented taffy pullers and executing this labyrinthine series of steps.
Luckily the other disco, while relying rather too heavily on rap for my liking, offers more of the slam bam stuff that one prefers.
Well, I feel really wicked, but it's refreshing to get that out, so I'll go on.
Ok, well, there's the usual Asian bugbear of the hawking and spitting and manual noseblowing that all you backpackers know about. I've seen entire sweet little families on a motorbike, Dad driving, one kid on the back while mum in the middle holds infant or toddler, plus umbrella, and casually gobs one into the street as they trundle past. And in some places, the open drains, the rubbish in the Mekong, the totally unabashed public nosepicking....
Allright, that was awful, so let's go back to music. Monotonous plinky plonky doesn't even begin to describe the popular Thai love song crap that they play at full volume in the restaurants that line our street, at parties, on ipods of passing motorcyclists at 1 AM, and pretty much whenever they feel like it. It wails and it thumps and it whines and it all sounds the same, with plenty of accordion backing. The accordion or the anthill? I'd go the little biters every time.
Oh, I could go on, but many of my quibbles would be petty---like the shoddy building standards---Scotty, you will need to be sedated when you examine my renovations---but I have one lollopalooza to finish with that I really feel I must do something about. (And Fran...Darling...now is when you should leave us and go feed your puppies. Just don't read any further, sweetie...)
Across the road from my heavenly little house, there is, of course, the little patch of garden that my neighbour Meena and I take turns to nurture. Then to the right there's a little restaurant of rickety tables and haphazard tarpaulins where our neighbours serve wonderful noodle soup with a bit of pork and veg etc and we often order breakfast from them. $2 feeds me and my two hungry boys. Wonderful stuff, nice folks.
BUT, next to them along the banks of the river, are now three establishments that look much like the noodle place except that they serve dog.
Yep. BBQ bow-wow and hot dog stew. And they are hugely popular with what appears to me to be the rougher elements of local society, jolly, but rather prone to very loud drunken singing from time to time. And eating dog.
OK, so some of us eat cute little lambkins and fluffy chickies and even doe-eyed veal, so I cannot be hypocritical here. But the problem is not the noise of the diners and drinkers, their music or their hollering, it's the fact that the dogs are kept and killed within a few feet of where they are then served up. And this, dear reader, is not being done under the auspices of the R.S.P.C.A.. It is often done by some teenage menial with a stout stick, bad aim and a heart of stone. And possibly no ears, as the noise of the pups prolonged passings is soul destroying, not to mention the frenzied barking and growling of the caged, crazed animals who are sold to the restaurants by impoverished up-country folk and kept in a revolting kennel just over the river wall.
None of us in the neighborhood, Meena, the Noodle People and I suspect anyone ese who is not actually running one of these places, is very happy about it at all, especially when the doggers get up early and start to knock off a few pooches at say, 4 or 5 AM to get ready for the rush.
I have rhetorically announced that I will buy the bastards a freezer so they can just do their killing once a fortnight at a specified time and keep their supplies therein rather than reaching into the kennel every time they need another chop. So we would be spared the unholy racket. Added to which is the fact, unavoidable, that our own two doggies, Jacko and dear little Louie ended up in their pots. So we are thinking of going to the village headman and asking for some sort of intervention. After all, such cruelty just ain't Buddhist...
Right, had enough? Back to the rhapsodising....

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Up the Lazy River

Last weekend we enjoyed a family day out, Lao style, and I had a new and startling experience.



We have a little block of land---I bought it for Sommay from his family, basically as I cannot legally own it without a lot of bureaucratic mess. Essentially I did it to save them from having to sell it, under pressure to a greedy farang resort developer, who was trying to get it cheaply because he knew that Sommay's mother was dying and that the family needed money.



It's about 2.5 acres or just over a hectare of riverfront along the Nam Khan, the river that joins the Mekong to create the Luang Prabang peninsula. It's high above the river with a little apron of flat land along the edge, covered in teak, bamboo, and all sorts of lovely tropical greenery.



We set out in the morning and took a long time scuttling around town in a tuktuk picking up supplies--- food, ice, beer and money. By the time we got to Sommay's village, we were famished so we had to stop for noodles for breakfast--foe, as it's known. Then we carted everything down to a long flat narrow boat, by now joined by the boat guy and his helper and Auntie Ti and Sommay's older sister and we chugged off upriver in a sinuous but generally northward direction past our little piece of paradise and continued up for a bit of sightseeing.



The water is a delicious chocolate milk colour at this time of year and lined with thick forest for the most part, but every so often we saw people fishing, washing, loading up sand to cart down stream to waiting trucks, working on their boats and fish traps. The view to the north of misty blue mountains was classic postcard stuff, the air was soft and fresh and it all made one feel quite exhilarated and yet totally at peace. Even my Lao companions, for whom this is an everyday experience, were enchanted.



We kept on for nearly an hour, sometimes barely making headway against the current, even bouncing along on virtual white water, while the motor made odd groaning noises. Soon our bottoms were sufficiently paralyzed from the hard wooden seats and we turned around, making landfall back at the property.



After a hilarious time floundering up the thick dark chocolate mud of the bank (Can't leave that image alone, can I?) the mood turned somber as we discovered that someone had hacked down our large frangipani tree. This is called Champa in Lao and is the national tree of which everyone seems inordinately proud, as if they think it only exists here.



Auntie Ti was incensed and ranted passionately about some farang she thought was behind it, but it turned out that it was some locals who work for the farang, who is my Swiss mate Danny, married to a Lao woman, who owns an adjoining property.



To be fair, the poachers had planted half a dozen of the branches in the ground to renew our supply, as these trees grow very easily from cuttings with almost no water or attention.



Somebody has also been helping themselves to our bamboo, so there was little left of any size. But it's still a fabulous block, with a lovely view out over the river to the east and north ( I think---the river twists so..) and magnificent orchids in some of the trees. We plan to build a little bamboo pavillion there where we can have picnics and relax.



But first we need to get Auntie Ti's husband to build a fence and assume caretaker duties for a small salary. So my staff is growing...



Anyway, by now we were hungry again so we hopped back into the boat and floated a short way around the bend down to the family's veggie patch, past the property where we could see our frangipani branches, newly planted in their new home, Danny's garden.



We climbed up though the garden with its neat bamboo fence and settled in their little bamboo pavillion with its rusty corrugated iron roof, which somehow sheltered all of us , by now including Sommay's older brother Bounlay, his wife and child, Ti's son, and another brother, Xai, who'd been out fishing. All the food was spread out on a banana leaf, including the sticky rice, fish and chicken we brought from the markets, veggie soup and papaya salad and a couple fish from the river and some lovely little tree beries that were roasted in the fire. It was a feast and became a party when we opened the beer and I felt very much a part of the family. Another of those How Could I be so Lucky moments of total peace.



Until suddenly there was agitation and the men jumped up and started pointing to something moving in the garden and like a flash a rifle was produced and Bounlay raced down to the patch, took aim and bang--a huge rat was proudly lifted by its leathery tail.



Everyone seemed delighted with this and I thought briefly that it was joy at having rid the garden of veg-munching vermin, but no, this was a plump river rat and seen as a valuable addition to that night's dinner.



Was I invited? Of course, we'd already arranged to come back that evening to the village for fresh fish laap, a sort of fish puree with chillis and herbs, with lovely mushroom soup, fish soup and delicious stirfried veggies with spices and herbs. And the rat, fried with herbs and chili. (You know what's coming next, don't you? ) Yep, it tasted just like chicken. Bada boom. But not bad.



Again, I was smack in the bosom of this close family who see me as one of their own and say to Sommay that they wish so much that they could talk with me. As do I. We all looked through the photos of Sommay's mother's funeral, that I paid for by buying the land.



Then there were goodbye hugs and smiles and we sped home through the dark cool evening. It was a lovely day and evening, rat and all.

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Big Muddy---Mekong Mama reporting in.....




It's been a while since my last post, but I've not been in Laos for a few months, so strictly speaking, wasn't letting you down. That's my story and I'm sticking with it...

Anyway now I'M BACK in my favourite little piece of Paradise after a useful and extremely pleasant interlude from May to July in Oz, then August in Canada and the US to see family and friends, followed by another two weeks in Oz for my birthday. I remember a lot of preparation and packing and partying, but....

Back in Luang Prabang, the magnificent Mekong is flowing fast and deep like a vast stream of chocolate milk and is almost unrecognisable as the the sturdy, rocky little river that I had come to know.

And it's doing it's chocolately thing right outside my window, well, across the road but hundreds of metres closer to the river wall and my little house.

I can see it especially well from my comfortable little re-vamped verandah, especially since the boys went down and hacked back a lot of the vegetation along the bank.

I can also see my growing garden of pots of bamboo and bougainvillea and portulacca and croton and cordyline arranged around the lovely new terracotta terrace the boys made with all the leftover floor tiles.

They were beside themselves with pride at all they have done and seemed utterly deligted to see me, so I think it's going to be great.

I was quivering with fatigue from a typical all-night flight scenario, with the added difficulty of dealing with a groovy-looking, but rather garrulous and sometimes outright grubby New Zealander who couldn't stop talking, breathing whiskey fumes all over me and leaning heavily on my right arm to "help" me with my crossword....(as if...).

He'd already been thrown off one flight and collared at gunpoint earlier in the day. This was because security guys refused to let him take his duty-free onboard and he solved the problem by simply drinking it. All of it. And then blamed the authorities for getting him drunk.

Anyway, I arrived, exhausted but elated and was immediately folded into the bosom of my "family" here and then whisked off to see the last of the traditional boat races when various village teams compete, paddling very long, lovely and narrow high-tail boats down the Nam Kahn while huge crowds line the riverbanks drinking beer and making a very loud and joyful noise with drums and loudspeakers.

I thought it was all over at first and saw only a few tired and emotional crews weaving their way past along with colourful fun boats full of people in costume who were also fairly full. Then it started. Two boats of about 50 rowers each, one lot clad in in green and the other in chartreuse t-shirts were paddling so furiously past us that they moved in a mist of muddy river water turned to a golden cloud in the afternoon sun. They went at a furious pace, leaving our team, sadly, in sixth place out of 13, a big disappointment after coming second last year. Sommay says he'll row next year and the result will be different.

I cannot tell you how nice it is to be back amongst all the sweet people that I have come to know over the past few years. I've dropped in to see a few of them, revisited old haunts, handed over school fees and lots of motherly advice to a couple of my lads, revived old family jokes, marvelled at the new restaurants and businesses that have gone bust, and enjoyed seeing the smiles of recognition on the faces of shopkeepers and people one passes in the street.

Best of all, I went to see my friend Vanh, who I was afraid had too much on her plate to be able to help me, and she said great to see you, let's go talk with my cousins right now. The upshot is that I am the newest employee of the Pasabandith College of English, preparing to teach MY course and the visa process is already under way. I seem to have impressed the guys who run it, brothers called Oupadith and Oupasith, would you believe, and who I will NOT be able to resist called the Oompaloompas. Sorry. They are not strange little people in Santa's helper costumes, but nice guys, one with good English who is also a teacher and the other a businessman with a travel agency in town.

So the adventure seems to be gaining momentum and now that I can sit here in my house and write without having to schlepp all the way to an internet cafe every time, I hope to be able to keep everyone up to date on what I am doing. Right now I'm busy being domestic, acquiring furniture and teapots and training my maid to do things my wayand trying to remember the Lao words for things.

The various recipients of the generosity of my birthday friends are overcome with gratitude and I will let them say so in one of these posts very soon. But now it's gin o'clock and the lads are back from a ceremony in which a female spirit who has been giving Sommay nightmares has been exorcised in a two hour ritual resembling a wedding, in which he has persuaded one of his many girlfriends to take part as a dummy bride. I must hear all about it. Yes, this is an interesting country.... Stay tuned.