Through the hinterlands of Vientiane Province by bike!

I will be joining Team Dai, the bike team here in Vientiane, Laos, on a four day, 450km loop through the mountainous and unexplored hinterlands of Vientiane Province in March in an effort to raise money for Friends International, a local charity working to reintegrate street children here in Vientiane. Please consider supporting me in this worthy and potentially painful endeavor. Consider it your investment in our country's foreign policy, use it as good PR, write it off on your tax return, tattoo it on your bicep, or yell it in the streets. More information, complete with an online secure donation site is below.

TeamDai Cycling Team: https://sites.google.com/a/teamdai.org/team-dai/
Secure Online Donations: http://www.gofundme.com/TeamDai2012

Come join us! Just follow the signs!

Note: question mark denotes questionably existent roads

Songkhram river basin - symphony of biodiversity

The Songkhram meets the mekong

Bi-colored river is the translation. Where the Songkhram, Thailand's last free flowing tributary, meets its overlord, the river of giants, the mighty Mekong. This is the northeastern region of Thailand, Phagg Issan, the poorest and most resource dependent region of Thailand.

A meeting with some local woman

These woman hand us boughs of tropical leaves to sit on, and pour us ice water as we look out over a stretch of the Songkhram - their front yards, their grandmother's front yards, the front yards of their children and children's children. They tell us about the fishing pressure, and their newly demarcated fish conservation zone. As usual here in Thailand, the river stretch in front of the waterside temple is sacred and needs no signage or buoys to mark it as a non-fishing zone.

Net fishing is common - while net sizes and catch limitations are slow to be embraced by some villages, they are self-imposed by others, in order to preserve once limitless wild-caught fish resources that are slowly being depleted by rising populations, flood plain forest degradation, and commercial fishing.

Empty boats sit quietly along the rivers edge. The early morning and late afternoon are when they are paddled into the river, carrying net casting villagers eager to supplement their family's diets with their local protein of choice.

Drying fish for preservation

 The surplus catch is dried in the sun as a means of preservation.

Seasonally inundated forest is a key spawning habitat for fish species that migrate from the Mekong River - protecting this important tributary ensures a strong resilient Lower Mekong Basin.  During the rainy season, this river may rise as much as 7 meters - up to the front doorstep of the villager's houses.

Local village fish processing

Village woman process these fish for the market. This is an essential form of revenue and employment for the village.

comings and goings

Greetings friends/family. I am back in Laos after a short but incredibly refreshing holiday hiatus. And what an unlikely place to be for a young Mainer! I often think this as I re-adjust to life in southeast Asia. I often ask myself... what am I doing here? or, in the words of David Byrne, How did I get here?

From the salt crusted coastline of Maine - jagged unforgiving glacier-carved rocks with old veins, peeling birch forests, things that are not so gentle to the touch, deep blues and greys, slow decomposition, an old fellow stuck in his ways. It seems to me a place simultaneously beautiful and simple, a place not moving too fast in any one direction, but content to wobble silently and calmly on the axis of the future.

From this place, this home, to a place of slow thick movement. Not gentle saline tidal undulations, but flowing viscous human turbidity. Smells of ancestral spirits hang in the air, feral dogs can sense the excitement and sound their siren of progress. Neighborhood vegetable shops are expanding, soy milk is being heated at an incredible rate. Some of what is here will no longer be here very soon. A lot of what was once here is only preserved in the minds of grandmas and in the concentric circles of a few trees that have been saved by that sash of orange monk robe adornment.

Yes, how did I get here? Did I choose? Are we meant to allow this world to move us? Or do the laws of physics require that we push back on it equally and oppositely? Or is it the inevitable realization that no matter how still we remain, how hard we try to make the chaos and confusion of the world forget us, we are hanging onto dear life as we are whipped at an incomprehensible speed around a sun and a solar system and something larger that encompasses all of these.

Or maybe we should just dine in phonebooths and sleep on the job.

A video about a project not so dissimilar to the ones I work on:

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/0,,30490,00.html