8 December 2008 - Laos Day 3

Laos Day 3, Wednesday 03 December

Yesterday, Monday December 08, was another busy day. In addition to writing in this blog, I continued to process the digital photographs from the Laos trip, performed a few household chores, and went grocery shopping.

The highlight and conclusion of the day, as well as the start of today, was attending a festival in downtown Udonthani. There is a festival running from 01 December to 15 December. The festival is being held at a park and surrounding streets.

The festival is a massive conglomeration of booths and stalls. In addition to all the plant and flower selling booths with their associated food stalls, there were carnival rides for small children, carnival games, stalls selling all kinds of goods, stalls selling native handicrafts and specialties, and at least 3 sound stages for shows.

Almost every stall or booth had its own sounds - blaring Isaan music, electronic crescendos from games, amplified pitches from barkers, and people involved in loud conversations.

We ended up attending one of the concerts. It cost 50 baht ($1.50 USD). Once inside we had to buy a piece of plastic to use as a ground cloth because we had not brought anything to sit on. The ground cloth cost 20 baht, approximately $0.70 USD. People set their ground cloths where they chose to. Soon the viewing area was covered with wall to wall mats. People had brought in snacks and drinks. The audience was composed mostly of families - three generations. The end result was a massive picnic type atmosphere.

The show started at 9:00 PM and was scheduled to end at 5:00 AM. It is run every night for the duration of the festival.

The show started on time with an opening routine which was a tribute to Isaan culture.

Costumed dancers performed to Lao music played by the 14 piece band. Eventually 50 dancers and 2 singers were on stage.

Part of the opening act, was a procession of stereotyped Isaan characters - Lady-Boys, illiterate farmers, old village women, two young men strutting with a large phallus suspended between them from a long piece of bamboo, and two other young men with some kind of puppet device which was an animated man screwing an animated woman in the missionary position - very strange but no one in the audience seemed offended.

The show was very elaborate, intense and ornate - a sort of Las Vegas review meets Vaudeville to the hard driving beat of mahlam Lao music. It was very entertaining and enjoyable. We ended leaving at 12:30 AM but felt we had gotten our $1.50 worth of entertainment.

Back to our Laos adventure ...

Wednesday December 03 was a travel day to the World Heritage Site of Luang Prabang.
We took a VIP bus from the North Bus Station in Vientiane to Luang Prabang. The ticket was $14.70 USD each including snacks and lunch for the 10 hour trip (ordeal?).

The bus, although old, was in fairly good condition. We had our two overnight sized bags placed in the storage area beneath the passenger compartment. There is overhead storage inside the bus sufficient to only place handbags of laptop sized baggage - not practical at all.

The directions to Luang Prabang are very simple - get on Highway 13 and stop when you get to Luang Prabang. The adventure is getting there. Highway 13 is one of the main highways in Laos. It runs North/South from China to Thailand. It, at its best, the road is two lanes of asphalt paving running through many villages. There are many places especially in the mountains it is 1-1/2 lanes. There were two places where the road was only one lane because the rest of the road had collapsed into the ravine below. Long stretches of the highway are not paved or has so many ruts that the road is essentially not paved. This also makes for the trip to be rather dusty in the dry season which we are now in.

In Thailand they make a big deal about the road from Maehongson to Chiang Mai having 1,864 curves in 244 KM. Highway 13 is 425 KM long from Vientiane to Luang Prabang with at least as many curves. On our return trip, the bus company offered very small plastic bags to people shortly after boarding. Duang questioned me what they were for. I honestly thought that they were to collect trash such as gum wrappers and snack packaging but I decided to be a funny guy. I took a bag and opened it and pantomimed vomiting into it. Little did I know how right I was. During the trip back to Vientiane two people got car (bus?) sick.

Five hours into the trip to Luang Prabang, we stopped for lunch. We stopped for about one hour at a road side restaurant. Two other buses had stopped at the same place. It was interesting to see the foreigners sitting off to the side looking glum and forlorn as they ate peeled fruit, potato chips, and ice cream - afraid of getting sick. Duang and I along with Lao and Thai people sat down to a very good hot and nutritious meal. We opted for a bowl of kwetieao, a noodle soup, that we eat a lot of in Thailand. Other options were rice with vegetables, rice with chicken, or rice with fish.

The scenery along the road from Viang Vieng to Luang Prabang is very beautiful. Around Viang Vieng there are many limestone karsts, similar to the area around Guilin China. From Vieng Viang to Luang Prabang the road rises through heavily vegetated mountainous territory with many streams. The mountains are abrupt and craggy which adds to their visual impact. Highway 13 is built into the sides of the mountains that show a great deal of evidence of past landslides and portents of slides to come. I was grateful that we were travelling in the dry season. It would definitely be much more dangerous to travel this road in the rainy season.

We passed through some small villages but we passed through even more small settlements. These settlements are nothing more than 5 to 10 homes along the side of the road. The homes are virtual grass huts. Grass huts if you consider that bamboo is a grass rather than wood. The houses have thatched roofs and have woven bamboo slat siding. The doors are 5 feet from the edge of the road with the back of the house supported above the steep slope of the mountain side. For some of the settlements the houses were on one side of the road with the people’s cooking facilities set up on little platforms spanning the drainage ditch on the other side of the road. These 6 foot wide flat areas between the road and vertical or near vertical faces of the mountain were also used to store firewood, hang laundry, store food in elevated bins, or house livestock.

Since it was getting later in the afternoon, it was shower time in many of the settlements. For most of the settlements, there was a central location for washing. The washing facilities were concrete paved areas with a 6 foot high concrete column with a faucet and spigot coming out of it. Near this area would be a large square concrete tank that captured mountain water and pumped it to the washing facility. The water sytem was donated by "World Vision" mostly from Australia but I did see one attributed from Singapore. I did not see any attributed to the United States.

Groups of 2 to 4 women or men, but not both sexes together, would be washing in the cold water. The men would be stripped to their boxer shorts. The women were wearing their long skirts pulled up to their armpits. The women would squat to cleanse the intimate regions of their bodies. Children up to about age 10 years were completely naked. From our quick glimpses to this, it was obvious that bathing was also a social as well as hygienic activity.
Be it a village or settlement, the areas were filled with children. It was very common to see a five year old girl with a small baby strapped to her back. Toddlers played along the main national highway - a mere 5 feet from speeding traffic and 15 feet from falling off the mountain. I was grateful that they were not my grandchildren but concerned for their safety. I guess they learn at a very early age what is necessary for survival.

Along the route we came upon many people walking with baskets of firewood, and food strapped to their backs. They had foraged the mountains for food and fuel. Many of the groups consisted of only children - the oldest being no more than 11 years old often with 3 and 4 year olds. I saw one little girl carrying a machete type implement that was almost as long as she was tall. For these hill tribe people everyone must participate in the effort to survive - childhood is not a luxury that they can afford.

As we passed some of the more developed settlements, more than 20 houses and further from the highway, we saw some Hmong girls all dressed up in fantastic clothes in a line tossing oranges back and forth with a line of young men. You could see that they were having a very good time.

The girls were wearing very colorful heavily beaded hats along with dark heavily embroidered long skirts. They also had heavily decorated shirts or jackets with embroidery, beads and coins.
Duang asked me what was going on. Somewhere in the corner of my mind, I seemed to recollect that this had something to do with the Hmong people's dating customs. I told her that this was how young Hmong people met each other rather than going to movies, restaurants, or football games.

This foreshadowed events and opportunities to come during our trip - details to be revealed in the next two blog entries.