So-long for now

Thursday we fly from Bangkok to Burma. In preparation, yesterday we crawled under the razor wire at the Myanmar Embassy and joined the queue of tourist-visa supplicants. Last year and the year before, our Burmese travel agent, Peace House Travel, obtained the visas for us. But the regime is getting more paranoid by the minute as this year's "election" approaches (probably in the fall), and all visa applicants must now show themselves and be "interviewed."

A pleasant travel-agency employee named Toi accompanied us. We took a number, waited an hour, and when number 235 came around, we all approached a sliding window about the size of a safety deposit box door. Inside it, a surly little man in a uniform inquired as to why we wanted our visa on Monday since we weren't leaving until Thursday. Joe said, "Just being safe." It was plain that the man was not familiar with this idiom. "What! What!" Joe repeated, "Just playing it safe." The guy was now considering, I was certain, why this insolent farang was raising questions of "safety." Was he some damnedable trouble-maker? I said, "Today is more convenient." The clerk glared at me for introducing a complex new element into the discussion, but to our relief he accepted our applications. Toi picked them up at the end of the day. This all seems Orwellian to us, though people in New York State say dealing with the Department of Motor Vehicles is identical.

We've been enjoying Bangkok. We took a long, hot walk the two or three miles over to the river today and blew ten bucks for two seats on the tourist boat that goes up and down it. It was breezy on the Chao Phraya. We didn't get off to look at all the gorgeous sights close-up this time---the Grand Palace with its marvelous tiered red roofs and the golden temples and stupas all glorious in the sun---but it was nice to be reminded of how we saw Bangkok with fresh new eyes for the first time three years ago and how it changed our lives. We have no illusions about Thailand's deficiencies---feudalism, political rot, as much hypocrisy among Buddhists as there is among Presbyterians---but we are still crazy about the place and its easy-going, sweet-natured people and the way they receive blundering farangs with patience and open-heartedness. We hope to keep coming back.

Note to family and friends who might need to reach us: internet service in Burma is poor to nonexistent. We have rarely been able to send or receive email there. In an emergency ("in the unlikley event of a water landing"), Frankie Nyi Nyi of Peace House Travel could track us down. Frankie is at tour.mm@peacehousetravel.com. We aren't sure how Frankie has internet access in Yangon (Rangoon), but often he does.
I'll be back in Bangkok March 11. Joe will return two weeks later, after communing with some more of his oh-so-rural people.

Bangkok to Luang Prabang in 6 days

After we climbed onto the boat, four baskets of these live chickens were loaded onto the roof of the boat for the 5 hour ride down the Mekong.


Our boat arrives in the distance. We board across a plank on the beach.


Our truck taxi is loaded as we wait to leave Hongsa.


Dick waits in the "transportation station" that is more like a cross between a chicken coop and an animal pound.


Our hotel in Hongsa.


The pig fat is shared among all the children that are in the room.


A weary mother is served the last piece of pig fat.


This was the mother of all 10 of these children watching a movie.


This man was happy to have us visit as long as we came with a bag of pig fat. Upon our arrival he quickly cut some of it up and forced it into a green bamboo tube which he then put on the fire for 20 minutes or so. He turned it from time to time. A small crowd of people gathered for the spoils that disappeared in less than a minute.

While waiting for our truck taxi to the Mekong, these two went by on a motorbike carrying a satellite dish.


These are the braziers that are in virtually every home and hut all over SE Asia. They are also what street vendors cook on often carrying them around with burning fires in them. These were made from sandy dirt (not clay) mixed with the husks of sticky rice and water and wrapped up for two weeks. It is then processed like clay. Very interesting.


This was one of several shops in this town where there were salt wells. It was refined over heat and sold in kilo bags. Apparently it was very tasty, but we were not prepared to carry it around for 2 months until we got home.


We came upon a gathering at a local sidewalk restaurant. They were eating raw beef chopped with blood mixed into it. We didn't try it.


This was the local bus from Phrae to Nan. Much more comfortable than our 2nd class AC Train from Bangkok. The AC didn't work and the windows didn't open.




We stopped at a local reservoir that was also a fish pond. Once a year villagers pay $1 and can keep what they can catch.


When in Nan we took a jeep to visit some rural villages. The first stop we made was the parts shop to get a new lug nut for the tire. They didn't have one that fit, so they decided that 5 was enough. Good luck to us.

Joe re-visits his people

An Akah woman who was threshing rice with a foot operated mortar and pestle.


The school yard as we left.


My guide Ketko explains the books to the teachers.


The children are filled with curiosity.


In one of the classrooms, the students made replicas of the baskets they would need to make as adults.


These two female teachers hosted us for tea and we tried to help them understand how they might be able to use the books we brought.


Late day sun.


Two Akah singers. The woman had a cell phone in her lap while she sang.



My dinner companions the first night.


This chinese farmer has leased this land from the Akah for 6 months to grow watermelon which he will export to China.


Hand tilled to plant sugar cane which takes 12 months to grow.


Breakfast













Satellite dishes have arrived.



The guide showed me that if you put a piece of grass into a small hole in the dirt and waited for it to move, you could yank out a grub, which he said as a child he would use for fishing. After showing me this, he put each grub back into it's hole.


This house will be put up with the help of the villagers in 4 days. It will take the family 1-2 years to harvest and hand cut the boards.


A local snack shop.


Late in the day coming back from the fields.


I'd never seen a large piece of modern furniture like this in an Akah house. This one had a TV in it and everybody was watching Thai soap operas.



The Akah use slash and burn farming techniques. They have cut down the forest to plant sugarcane and rubber for China.



Pool hall.


Stone rice mill


This wild rooster was kept to hunt others in the woods. He would be taken into the woods to lure others, which would then be shot or caught.


Loading sugarcane.


Feeding the pigs.


Bedroom eyes.


This village had just gotten electricity last month.


An Akah spirit gate with wooden guns on it.


Lunch


These two Akah women walked three hours to bring lunch to this waterfall and then back to the village with us.


My Akah guide Horcher giving me a taste of bark that they eat. It tasted like teaberry.


Joe's 2007 three-day trek among the Akah mountain tribe of northern Laos was one of the highlights of that year's trip for him---and of his entire life---and I wondered if this year's Akah visit might be anticlimactic or even a bit disappointing. It was neither. He returned to the Boat Landing Lodge in Luang Namtha at the end of the third day weary but thrilled.

The Akah are growers of rice, sticky rice, vegetables, sugar cane and rubber. They used to grow opium poppies but the government put a stop to that. They keep chickens, pigs and water buffalo. The buffalo help till the fields and drag wood from the forest for home construction. The Akah are animists who have a spirit gate at the path entering each village. Bad spirits cannot get through it.

Joe so likes the Akah (who are also found in northern Thailand and Burma) because they are so wonderfully close to nature. He says it's hard to tell sometimes where the Akah leave off and the natural world begins. He saw this in the way his Lao guide Ketko and his Akah guide Horcher produced tasty meals and snacks out of jungle plants. He had sweet, edible flowers. He ate the inner bark of a tree that tasted like teaberry. He had tiny chestnuts that were as palatable as they were odd. He ate sour plant stems and sweet, sweet honey.

The Akah, like most rural people in Southeast Asia, use bamboo, which grows everywhere, for nearly everything. The young shoots are good in soup or stir-fried. Joe bought a hand-forged knife in a bamboo sheath from a villager for five dollars. He saw a woman walking through a village singing and spinning cotton on a portable bamboo gizmo. Houses are made of bamboo and teak. Another plant pruduces a leaf that becomes a musical instrument that, when blown through, resonates like no sound Joe ever heard.

Another reason Joe likes being among the Akah is seeing a way of life that has changed little in hundreds of years. Although, now that change has started, it's moving fast. In the three years since his last visit, Joe has seen the arrival in some villages of electricity. It's provided inexpensively by the government. The first thing people want is---of course, of course---television. So you have bamboo houses with enormous satellite dishes, and inside people are watching Thai soap operas. Many Akah don't speak Lao, but they have learned Thai from the soap operas.

And even before electricity came---what first? Yes, cell phones! Lots of the Akah have them, although Joe says many can't afford more minutes for their SIM cards, so they just fool around with the phones. Part of the entertainment provided by Joe's Green Discovery trek (for which villagers receive a share of the fee) is a personal performance of traditional Akah music. The songfest for Joe was interrupted a number of times by ringing cell phones.

Dress is changing too. The Akah black outfits with colorful embroidery are being replaced by the same Chinese Wal-Mart style stuff most people on the planet now toss on. It's cheap and easy to come by.

The Chinese are also altering the Akah economy. Chinese entrepeneurs buy sugar cane from the Akah, and Chinese farmers lease Akah rice fields outside the rice growing season for growing watermelons. The Chinese use chemical fertilizers, so it's unclear how this might affect the Akah rice.

One of the things Joe liked best was going to primary schools. He brought along a hundred books and lots of pens and notebooks to give away. The nicely done picture books were Big Brother Mouse Books, folk stories and original tales in Lao or Lao and English published by the estimable Sasha Alyson and a group of Lao educators and writers. Sasha is the retired U.S. publisher who brought out my first Strachey book in softcover. In fact, we saw Sasha in Luang Prabang, where he now lives most of the time. Joe said the young teachers he met on the trek didn't even know about these books, and their arrival was much valued and appreciated.

Joe finds the Akah appealingly "rough around the edges." They drink laolao, home brew rice whiskey, with fervor, and bottled Beerlao too. They work hard and party hard. They are happily social. Those who came to entertain him were having fun getting high and being together. His presence was incidental, he said.

Among the unappealing parts of Akah culture are cruelty to animals---he saw an old woman whacking a pig with a stick---and too-rough play among children. He suspects there may be spousal abuse.

Joe has no romantic illusions about the Akah, but he thinks they basically like their lives. He certainly likes visiting them, walking across their lovely landscape, eating their sticky rice and (freshly killed) chicken with lemon grass and green vines with chili, and listening to their weird music before receiving a massage from a young woman of the village on a bamboo bed awash in the aroma of pomolo blossoms.

His photos of this excellent adventure can be seen above..