Week 7: Southern Laos

Sunset falls on the area the US carpetbombed in the 1970s.

Week 7: Southern Laos

The nice thing about arriving in Southern Laos on a cushy sleeper night bus is that you don't have to worry about getting up early. Even Amos can get an early start to his day when he's booted off the bus in a strange city at 6am. Since Emmy had mastered motorcycles during her year in Indonesia, we zoomed off on a 3-day motorcycle trip into the Bolaven Plateau, famous for waterfalls, hill tribes, and leftover colonial coffee plantations. We splashed in staggering waterfalls for the first half of the day, and Emmy gave the celebrated coffee three out of five stars. We judged the hill tribes worthy of National Geographic exotism, since we spotted a number of topless native women in and around the woven-bamboo houses.

The mist from this 30-meter waterfall soaked Amos's shirt by the end of the photo shoot.

130-meter Sekong Waterfall created its own rain cloud from its thundering spray. We chose not to swim.

We chose a "shortcut" through the plateau's more remote heights to make up for lost time. The dirt-road shortcut swamped during a rainshower, while getting progressively rockier and steeper. Luckily, Emmy found the back-wheel brake ("It's not like this in Indonesia") just as we began descending the treacherous plateau. Amos wasn't worried from the back seat; he was admiring the lushest undergrowth he had ever seen-- the vines fought the trees in a vast, green, 20 foot-high battle that left no room for a machete. We finished our descent off the plateau and into a tiny village as the sun was setting, and a kind family gave us a room in their house. Finding food was a little harder. We rejected an offer of "Mama" (ironically-named instant noodles), only to find that the local market offered no vegetables or meat, other than the blackbird and squirrel they were loading into the freezer. Devastated that we didn't know the Lao words for these two delicacies, we instead ordered fried egg and sticky rice.

We're grinning because Emmy just found the foot-brake. Notice the strange shapes in the background-- cruel vines are smothering the innocent trees.

After crossing the plateau, we were now a stone's throw away from Vietnam. So on Day 2, we explored the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the main supply line for the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. The US dropped an average of a plane-load of bombs every 8 seconds for nine years (spending $2.1 million a day), proving that even $9 billion worth of TNT couldn't stop the communist supply line to Vietnam. We figured that we could track down this $9 billion in destruction, so we hunted down the elusive, unmarked tourist office in the nearest city, Attapeu. Even though the tourist office couldn't stop giggling about actually seeing a tourist, we hired a $12 guide/translator, and it was the best $12 we have spent on our trip.

We drove on dirt roads for 40 minutes to reach the Ho Chi Minh Trail. At first we stayed on our toes on a muddy path, ready to fling ourselves head-first into the lush undergrowth at the first sign of attack. But after half an hour we realized that this infamous trail was actually quite boring. We returned to the nearest town along the trail, where Mother Nature hadn't overgrown the bomb craters. The villagers said that most of the craters on people's farmland had been filled in when the land mines were cleared by a Japanese government project-- only in the last decade! But then we started seeing craters next to the road, everywhere we turned. We stopped for juice at a house completely ringed by these ten-foot-deep holes. The owner told us that when "the enemy" began bombing, most of the families fled to the closest city (Attapeu) or into the mountains. But, he continued proudly, the bombing couldn't stop the soldiers from carrying their supplies by way of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. So much for America's $9 billion worth of bombs. Today, the US government has pledged just $2 million, or the cost of one day of bombing, to clean up the millions of pieces of unexploded ordinance (UXO) still planted in Laos.

Our guide Keman untucked his dress shirt to walk the boring but overgrown Ho Chi Minh Trail. We felt terrible about scuffing up his dress shoes.

Laotians found hundreds of tons of UXO along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Some villages in this area were so heavilybombed that their current number-one industry is selling scrap metal to Vietnam for $1 per kg.

There were about ten craters within 100 feet of this one. We don't know how many others the Japanese project has already filled in.

Don't miss the traditional bamboo house in the background, or Amos's trendy motorcycle helmet.

At least the locals have learned to enjoy this one.

Our motorcycle return trip from Attapeu was uneventful, other than a succulent lunch of "Bareha deer," in a region that clearly had no deer. (This reminds me of when our host family in Ban Na served delicious "siin lot," which seems to translate as "vehicle meat"). Our last stop was an island in the Mekong named Don Kho, where the women wove beautiful cloth and the men drank lao lao whisky (A gender reversal from Ban Na!). After an hour of trespassing, we stumbled upon a woman weaving a beautiful turquoise scarf. As Amos haggled about the price, the entire village assembled to offer us woven cloth fresh off the loom, dusty from the attic, or still on their bodies. We spent a delightful three hours buying their scarves, eating their food, teasing their toddlers, and then sliding down the muddy riverbank while waving to their goodbye party.

We studied hard and bargained harder during the 2-hour creation of Amos's $2 scarf.

We have neglected to mention that our new favorite color is rice field-green. It's unbelievable, almost neon.

We journeyed south in the back of a glorified pickup truck to Si Phan Don (Four Thousand Islands), a cluster of islands in the Mekong River that tourists just discovered. Since the rare but ugly Irrawaddy dolphin only arrives in the dry season, our principal occupation on Si Phan Don was storm-chasing. This wet season was so wet that the Mekong looked like flood waters on national news, with currents so strong that the guest houses refused to lend us their kayaking or tubing equipment. We stood on bridges to welcome the daily afternoon thunderstorm, and achieved the first real exercise of the trip by swimming against the violent pull of the Mekong. We continued our exercise binge with a 2-mile run through rice paddies, to the consternation of the rice farmers and water buffalo alike.

Amos waits for the storm that is just beginning to drench yonder mountain. The swamped vegetation gave Si Phan Don the look of hurricane floodwaters.

Amos watches the plants get thrown forward bythe wind, then backward by the current.

Wow! Someone enter us in a photo contest! The storm clouds cast such a dark shadow that this image looks black-and-white.

That's it for Week 7. Look out for Week 8: Cambodia, when we play super-tourists in the capital city of Phnom Penh and at the ancient temples of Angkor Wat, one of the seven wonders of the world.

What will Emmy find at the top of this massive 12th Century temple? Find out in Week 8.

A quick language postscript for the language nerds: Lao (spoken in Laos, plus parts of northeast Thailand) is a tonal language. This means that you can't raise your tone at the end of the sentence to ask a question, like in Teach for America upspeak. (If you do, they'll just stare at you, bewildered). Instead, you put "no?" at the end of the sentence: "Hotel Attapeu is far, no?" is "Hong hem Attapeu gai baw." Sometimes, two antonyms differ only by their tones: far is "gai," but near is also "gai." So "Hong hem Attapeu gai baw"could also mean "Hotel Attapeu is near, no?" Thus, when your conversation partner responds, you still have no idea where Hotel Attapeu is. One solution is to pretend you understand, and then ask how many kilometers away it is. Luckily, sometimes you can tell that it's very near, because the person immediately starts laughing at you and points next door.