[LEMONS] 1.20.2003
Muang Sing, LAOS --
What are we here for, in this dusty town bereft of hot water and, for 21 hours out of each day, electricity?We sit in the cafes, drinking too much coffee and fending off opium sellers, talking to other travellers about Dehli, about Auckland, about Kuwait City, about the road to Oudomxai and the weather in Luang Phrabang. The sun sets and we sit on the balcony, sipping warm BeerLao. We buy bracelets from Akha women in technicolor headdress, and chew on sugarcane, spitting the pulp into the street. We listen to the Lao sing ancient melodies at night in the candlelight, and discuss the pros and cons of malaria medicine.
For this we endure backbreaking boat trips and potholed roads in the back of pickup trucks. We choke down sticky rice and dried fish. We shit in holes in the ground and wipe our asses with our hands. We shiver in the cold, and bump our heads on low doorways in the night.
Why?
Travelling is no vacation. Sure, some of it is. But it's hardship endured for the sake of something foreign. Why do we seek out the unfamiliar? What do we hope to learn from it? Something of ourselves, certainly, and something of others, too.
But surely that can't explain it all, this drive to torture yourself in order to arrive at a dusty backwater.
The Akha women approach whispering "ganja, ganja, ganja, opium," through betel-stained teeth, alien and old. Ageless. They could be 30 or 60, the year 1820 or 2003. Pigs root through refuse in Typhus infested markets, and Harper hands an old Akha an orange. At dinner, beggars huddle outside, and then eat the scraps I've leftover, sucking on fishbones and garlic skins. Draped in rags, faces scarred.
This is one of the poorest countries in the world.
We're roused in the morning by the violent cries of a thousand roosters, and then we brush our teeth in dirty water, and dress. Chinese tractors rumble by, and we tell each other stories about the future.
Yesterday six of us hiked through the hills around Muang Sing with two local guides. We climbed to the top of a neighboring mountain, and visited five different hill tribe villages along the way. The scenery was amazing, as were the people. In Vietnam, while on a tour of the former DMZ, our bus rumbled up to a hill tribe village, which was little more than a human zoo. People handed out candy, and kids ran up with their hands out. Women begged for money. Harper and I were uncomfortable with it, and didn't enter. As we stood by the entrance to the village, another tourist bus pulled up, and by now there were far more tourists than locals wandering about.
It was awful, reprehensible, and we all but decided we were not going to visit any more hill tribes.
But yesterday was another story entirely. The trekking organization was a joint operation between the Laos government and UNESCO, tres culturally sensitive. For example, in the second village, our guide told us we couldn't take any pictures (which I was dying to do, especially of the opium field, the only one we saw), , and forbade us to do so even when there were no locals around. The villages are only visited once a week, and then only by groups of no more than six people.
This was spectacular. Truly great. It was a fantastic hike up a steep mountain (or glorified hill), at the top of which we could look out and see China. And the villages were just... I don't know. Unreal. The Akha stared at us as much as we at them. We had lunch in the headman's house in one of the villages, he was out building a new house, with the rest of the men from the village, but his wife and umpteen kids were there.
The kids were positively mesmerized by my digital camera. They kept running up, pointing at themselves, and then making camera motions, wanting their picture taken. I imagine it was the first time some of them had ever seen themselves. One kid kept peering right into the lens, putting his eye up to it, trying to figure out how it worked. The whole village was something out of the iron age.
On the way down, we passed a group of five Akha men, hiking from the market in Muang Sing (which was at one time the largest opium market in the Golden Triangle) to their village on the Burmese border. We hiked 15K yesterday throught he mountains, and it was exhausting. They were going 70. We stopped along the trail and they chatted with one of our guides, who spoke Akha, for a few minutes, Nikki gave them all cigarettes, and they elaborately shook hands.
It doesn't sound like much when I see it written down, but it was one of my best days in Asia (every day in Laos has been, for that matter).
When we were in Vietnam, on the boat in Hualong Bay, Dave was describing "those days." He said you work and you work and you suffer and push it and it's just awful and you wonder why. And then you have one of "those days," and it all pays off, it all becomes worthwhile. You remember what you're doing it for, and you keep on pushing, trying for another one. Yesterday was one of those days.
- l i n k -
