a special zone - Team Dai Ride 2012

Some of the steepest ascents and descents I have ever encountered upon two wheels. Brand new jungle roads cutting through isolated villages in what was recently a 'special' military zone of Laos. This was the Team Dai Challenge 2012 - we raised almost $16,000 for Friends International, a group that teaches skills to street kids here in Vientiane.  

We saw intense beauty - ecotones from the foggy highlands of low bushes and grasses to moist dense teeming jungle to lowland paddy rice fields, terraced and spotted with water buffalo astray. Also incomprehensible destruction - treetops poking out of reservoirs created by a new dam, mountaintops cleared by copper mines. This is the reality of Laos.

 

back to the forest

Have you ever heard bamboo groan? Have you heard it creak, shaking its gaunt arms at you like the strange old neighbor down the street. Its tentacles, long dried up, lift your hat right off of your head. Its spikes crease your shirt. This is a seasonal forest; now, in the driest part of the year, leaves wither and fall, crunching under your step, streams dry up, and every plant and animal is in anxious repose, waiting for the rains to restore life to this place.

Champassak Province looking into Attapeu Province

The river will rise at least 3 meters in the wet season

On the XePian River - too many people in too small a boat.

village boatbuilder

The mission, to measure the biomass in the final 19 forest plots randomly located around the protected area, is best described as a series of crises and solutions.  The plan with which we began, in order to weave through the necessary plots with the right mixture of trucks and personnel, government officials and local guides, was upturned and overridden on a daily basis. Boats bottoming out, flat tires, broken clutches, severed telephone lines, forgotten officials, drunken local guides - these were all issues that rendered planning fruitless. Lao people, though, seem amazingly immune to the anxieties and stresses that one might reasonably associate with such a tumultuous and unpredictable series of events.

sticky rice, dried beef, canned mackerel

the forest plot team

planning for the interior jungle plots - plans subject to change

So how does one reconcile these efforts? As we endlessly tromp through the forest, attempting to quantify biomass in the forest to support funding and enforcement of the protected area, we pass illegal loggers. Recent tree cuts are everywhere - footpaths and tractor tracks foreshadow the act, sawdust and timber detritus confirm it. Skeletons of logging trucks wash up on a streambed, piles of supposedly confiscated logs litter the roadside. Is all the work we are carrying out void before it starts?

'Confiscated' timber

Sleeping on the job

Big tree