from the region

First Chiang Mai - my return, almost exactly two years later, to the stomping grounds of my first Asian adventure. Chiang Mai feels like a thriving metropolis compared to the cow-town that is Vientiane. It was a beautiful thing to again stay with  my old Thai host family. We will be strung together in an amazing web of culture and continents forever I hope. My brothers and sister have grown up a lot, and together we braved the cold weather and nausea-inducing roads of northern Thailand to camp together on Thailand's highest mountain, Doi Inthanon.

 

Next - Hmong New Year. Hmong are upland tribal people that live throughout Laos. Amazingly intricate dress, ball-throwing flurting games, and of course grilled meat.

on the forest track

Hands blistered by car strut machete hacking, arms, recently swiped by jungle brambles, stripped of skin to reveal raised red mountain ranges. I stand erect, bracing myself in the bed of this truck between the tree measurement equipment and the small Lao military man and his not so small rifle. We search these forests for locations, randomly assigned by some unknowing distant algorithm that describes the one thing impossible for a feeling, thinking, human - absolute objectivity.

These plots stand as blind proxies for this forest at large - from these relatively few samples, for which we brave limb and thorn and pest, we will extrude the sacred patterns of this forest.

The truck passes near to the low hanging branches above. Standing in the bed of the 4-wheeled groaning beast, I am forced to dodge the oncoming leaves or thorns or spider webs in order to stay intact.

We pass forest long ago selectively logged and stripped of vitality.  When the illegal logging track becomes impassable, we drive on anyway. When they become impossible, we pack and set out on foot. The national protected area employee, in pine green ranger suit, the local guide adorned with flip-flops (the jungle trekking footwear of choice), the district military man with his wide smile and AK-47, the international consultant with GPS in hand, and me - part translator, part field technician, part cultural liaison - all wonder.

Before long, we are into the deep old growth primary forest. Even blindfolded, nose-plugged, ear-muffed and drunk, you would know... its the feel of the place. Many things have lived here, died here, decay and regrowth blabber on back and forth in the language of smells and carbon.  Moist, undulating, a loud and ominous silence full of bird and insect interjections. Small trickling streams reveal butterfly fantasy lands and prime dinosaur habitat.  Enormous contemplating trees - or groups of tree-wine-woody-matter-amalgams - they supervise this visit. This forest feels softer, darker, more cave-like than field-like - it certain reverence comes over all who pass through it.

Approaching the hallowed plot, one might expect a treasure chest or shiny prize - a return for the steep machete wielding huffing and puffing that got us here.  But no, there is little glamor out here. To this lucky plot's surprise though, so oft forgotten far from trail or stream or road, we have come to pay it mind. We will trim it up, measure it, fawn over it, consider its composition and characteristics. We will write about it, type its secrets into our GPS. Ritualistic cigarette breaks will proceed and follow, the occasional buttressed tree trunk will stir intense discussion, and our routine is honed. Onto the next plot. And then the village for handfuls of sticky rice and hammocks. A story for another day.

That Luang Festival - a beautifal redistrubiton

That Luang Festival - a massive redistribution of wealth, a lesson in social services. 

 

Relatively well-off Vientiane city folk flock to the country's most important stupa to give alms to monks on this 6 am cool season morning.  Good luck and merit are culturally/religiously associated with this giving ritual.  From silver alms bowls, fruit, candles, milk, sweets, rice, and other foodstuffs are placed with a prayer in the bowls of passing monks. A procession of giving. 

 

Monks, young and old, returning in the backs of pickup trucks to their villages, bring bagfulls of these snacks. This is the welfare system. Those parts of society most in need - sickness stricken families, bankrupt businesses, disabled street dwellers - they go to monks and temples for help. When a family can't take care of a child - they are sent to become monks.
 

 

 The culture and religion, therefore, has a built-in civil society, welfare providing, wealth redistributing system. And nicely colored robes.

jungle-life

How about the jungle - or the varying forested ecosystems that surround Vientiane? It lends itself not to rigorous exploratory vista hopping, or magnificent leaf falling birch peeling scents that my native landscapes exude. It is swollen, overgrown, chaotic, but somehow mysteriously enchanting. Often it makes me miss the ecosystems I have grown up in. 

 

It is amazing how seasons, flora, fauna, things that you don't always consciously interact with everyday shape one's persona. Is it appropriate to allocate times in places that remind you why you love what you do? In locales that leave you breathlessly etching your personal grain against that of the patterns around you?

Josh and our guide sharing stories on the way into the jungle - notice the rainy season footbridge on the right.

 

 

Elephant viewing tower - no luck this time.

Not hostile; not savage or sullen this ecosystem contrast - just a minor disturbance that trims down those stolid assumptions of old and replaces them with new sprigs and sprouts - the kind that hold secrets as to the way life could be lived. These are the internal growths that photosynthesize not with photons but with the stuff that shakes one out of the everyday-always existence into the feeling-growing-rooting life that is possible.

tham kong lo

Drip, splash; drip, splash. The makings for an otherworldly vacuum of reality are thus. Bulbous, calcified spears of gravity-minding and gravity-defying minerals reach towards their opposite. The methodical persistance of nature overtakes me. Such simple processes, ad infinitum, sum to a fine work of art, a mind-boggling complex organism, or, in this case, vacuous caverns of delicate water-sculpted trim.

In a single tree dugout canoe we skim across the invisible river water. From the errant headlamp shine of our guides, I can barely make out the wall edges and forms surrounding me. Beauty is present, I know, with or without direct visual confirmation.

At times football field dimensioned, at others road width, the cool empty spaces race over me. I half expect to see stars peeking out above me - but not, we are in the 7km long Tham Kong Lo cave in central Laos, Khammouan province. An hour of submersion in what must feel as close to a vaccum as one could get.

Our vessel births us into wide eyed jungle framed by those porous crass crags of limestone. A short walk to a 30 person village reveals life in this new reality. Men, woman, children hard at work among the stalks of rice that will feed them in days to come. Eyes of curious children poke out from above the side-walls of raised bamboo houses. Domesticated animals, covered in mud, balk at our relative sterility.

Back from the cave, we stay with an older Lao couple and sit around near concrete mixers with the younger generation.

some naga luring

The end of Buddhist lent means many things - an end to the rainy season, the traditional time for monks to come back out of the temples they have been meditating within, and boat racing festival.  The week long build-up and three day festival is steeped in myth - it was once explicitly held to lure Naga, the hallowed serpent dragon, out from the drying rice paddies back to the Mekong. 

These days, it is a time for villagers from the nearby provinces to travel in throngs to the riverfront of Vientiane, where temporary food stalls and vendors set up mats and booths and scaffolding to sell and yell about their items.

Fourty person dragon boats, made of a single sacred tree and blessed with colorful adornments, race down the Mekong. The synchronized paddling and counting is critiqued by the beer-drenched, sticky rice-engorging fans on the shore.

north country

vegetated tufts off extruded limestone protrude above mossy paddy rice carpets. This is the stuff of ancient coral shells, and generations of atmospheric pressure, together providing such dramatic terrain.

 
Outside the town of VangVieng, about 4 pothole ridden, washed out, minibus hours north of Vientiane. Acrobatic cave shuffling, dry stream bed following, and kayak descending of Mekong tributaries.

REDD thoughts here.

Love kyle 

netted

Sometimes I think of my place in the world like a net, strings of connections between people and places and ideas, hovering above a great abyss. At the center, the most number of intersections. Saggy, stable, comfortable. Thats where the fish get caught.

At the edges, fewer connections hold taut. You might even think yourself in a whole new place, might think yourself divorced from that center point you once knew. The edge of the net is in tension, porous, less to hold on to. If you bounce too high, you might just fly off the side. When you're out there, its nice when a strand passes straight through, reminds you that the those two worlds you try to live in are actually just one interconnected fabric of an existence.


My esteemed friend Sam threaded his way through my life this past week, and how glorious it was. 

 

 We saw some temples of old (That Luang), some nightclubs of new (Romeo), and met a few rice farmers who, neither new nor old, persist in spite of it all.  Showing excited interest and stumbling over some Lao words as we rolled by their raised bamboo stilt shack surrounded by rice fields, I slowed the bike to a halt. They beckoned us in, and we ascended the ladder to the patio.  We blabbered away, me attempting to form coherent thoughts and corresponding speech, them thinking of the most simple way to say the most obvious things.  The rice harvest, we found out, will be beginning in a few weeks, as the rains let up and cool dry season begins. We shared some salted crackers we had brought, and they reciprocated with a freshly cut unripened papaya salad, a staple of the Lao diet.

Some of my thoughts on the Mekong are here. Love from this side.