Wat Phou Champasak...

Yesterday the sun melted into the clouds above Wat Phou and the sacred mountain, and I raced home on my bicycle to stay ahead of the deep black night. By the time I arrived at Champasak, behind the Kolao pick-up I'd followed closely for half the journey, the dark sky was full of wind and lightning. A short, fierce burst of rain was followed by a  downpour of an hour or so, and afterwards the air was fresh and cool, and my clothes relinquished their clinging grip on my skin.

The majestic mountain-side temple, half-swallowed by the jungle, is a breath-taking, early example of Khmer magnificence, and may have been the model upon which Angkor Wat was conceived. At the top of the steep jumble of steps, above the ancient lakes of the crumbling palace is the Buddha's Sanctuary, where the Hindu sculpture in the lintels mirrors the transformation between major religions that took place in the kingdoms of Angkor, Sukhothai, Ayutthaya, and so many other parts of Southeast Asia.

Above the Sanctuary is a spring, where water trickles from a wooden dragon's mouth into a stone trough. There are rock carvings: elephants, snakes, the Buddha's foot, and a much more ancient lizard, almost certainly carved long before the temple was dedicated to Vishnu, and long before Buddhism became the religion of the region. Wat Phu was built in the century after the Saxon settlement of England, when my ancestors lived in buildings not dissimilar to those occupied by the rural Lao today.

As the cool winds of the rainstorm drew the seething air from inside my room, I lay on the bed and watched  the insects, confused by the sudden lashing rain, as they gethered beneath the hall light. A blue dragonfly buzzed against the tube, while the lizards pounced on the slowest flies like electrified leather.

This morning, shortly after dawn, I cycled back to Wat Phou as the sun climbed above the opposite bank of the Mekong. Phou Kao, the Mountain of the God, was swathed in mists, and the Sanctuary was hidden from view. As the sun began to penetrate the early morning haze, it warmed the stone guardians of the temple to life, and the Buddha's robes began to blaze in the golden light. In the sunlight from the east it was easier to be absorbed in the intricacies of the stone carvings of the Hindu Gods and their mythological familiars. The Buddha seems almost as out of place there as I am.

The Buffalo Sacrifice...

There was a well-organised welcome for foreign visitors at Khiantanglae last night, at the party held as part of the annual buffalo sacrifice. The keyboard karaoke was preceded by an announcement in English, inviting foreigners to take a table close to the soundsytem and enjoy the evening with some Beer Lao. The sacrificial dance began within a few hours of sunset, and the men danced around the buffalo tethered with thick vines to a stock and a thick bamboo which had been split into a cascade of red and white palm streamers. Moving slowly to the beat of a buffalo skin drum, two men beat gongs, followed by eight men holding ceremonial swords and shields.

The next morning at 5.30 am, we arrived back to the village, where the only activities were butchering cattle and buffalo, and clearing the tables and chairs by the silent speakers. Eventually, assuming that we had once again misunderstood the Lao perception of time, we started walking back to Tad Lo to sleep. We met a number of people on the way back, one of whom was a Lao man who was sure that the sacrifice was to take place in the early morning. After much uncertain waiting in the village, activities began to spring up around the dusty square, and a game of dice erupted into the quiet shade of the village tree.

The square began to fill up with young boys and motorbikes, and girls returning from the river. Finally, the dancers dragged themselves from their hangovers and into the central meeting hall, which was painted with flowing swirls of ash, and topped with two buffalo horns emerging from the thatch. The young men were given Lao Lao, their cheeks painted white, with red lines drawn into the contours of their faces. They were wearing the same red cloth and wielding the same weapons as the evening before, and they were led by a cheerful man who'd greeted us warmly as he crossed the square earlier, holding a bloodied machete between dark red hands. We had a beer with him later, and the black clots of blood had dried hard when we shook hands.

The ceremonial dance seemed to follow the same pattern, around the buffalo, and around the village hall. The men were being given Lao Lao as they circled in the morning sun, and each time their orbit left the tethered buffalo's, the animal would receive a kick or the threat of a long, curved dagger. When the sacrifice began, the buffalo was hit with a bamboo stave to send it around the stock-post, and the leader of the dancers made a long slash  along its left flank, before stabbing it in the side as it ran from the bamboo lashes. The buffalo began to ooze dark, dehydrated blood from a cluster of stab wounds between its ribs.

The young bull stood strong until its lungs filled with blood and it collapsed, bleeding from its nose. Its head was propped on a rock, and as its shortening breath pushed blood pulsing down its ribs into the dust, its right ear was cut from its head. When this was done the long blade was pushed deep between its ribs, and its flanks fell, and the big black eyes stooped looking at the crowd. As the bull died, the palm fronds above were cut and pushed against the dying stream of blood, and the closest village boys ran with them around the village, shouting in triumph.

The leader of the dancers then began to throw the buffalo ear into the top of the bamboo weeping coloured palm fronds over the fallen buffalo. The man's coordination was no longer under his control, and eventually an official from Salavan threw the ear deftly down the woven funnel and into the bamboo, ensuring prosperity and happiness for the village in the coming year.

When the ceremony was complete, and the buffalo dead, the children gathered round with their festive balloons, and poked their fingers into the buffalo's wounds. We sat with some local men, and the men from the Salavan Tourist Authority, and  bought some beer. The leader of the ceremony came for a drink, and we were invited back to the chief's home for Lao Lao and some food. The steady supply of Lao Lao over the morning took its toll later, but it was the perfect accompaniment to the buffalo meat and fiery dips, sticky rice, and superb buffalo-blood paste seasoned with galangal, lemongrass and chili. It was hard to mentally accommodate the agonising fifteen minutes of merciless violence meted out to the buffalo, while simultaneously experiencing the warm intensity of Lao hospitality.

I had been prepared, and relieved, to miss the actual sacrifice of the buffalo, and resigned and content to leave after an extended and absolutely enjoyable buffalo chase that ought to have continued the comedy and remain unfulfilled. The enormous range of misinformation, mistranslation and incomprehension experienced in pursuit of the buffalo suggested that the occasion of the ceremony was a mystery beyond our understanding. When it became clear that the buffalo's reprieve was only a figment of my imagination, and the knives began to draw blood, I expected a greater surge of pity and compassion than I actually experienced. I felt immeasurably sorry for its predicament in a detached and distant way, and I imagine that the effect of the Lao Lao  I had been given after the dancers received their affected us all in a similar way. I didn't feel entirely able to hold compassion for the bull within my mind without also making judgement of the people and culture in which their treatment of the animal was a matter of social and spiritual necessity. When the buffalo finally died, I was so wholly relieved that the horror of its tortuous death was concluded, that I ceased to identify with its suffering almost immediately. I saw it instead as a process of skinning, butchering, cooking and eating, and not as a being whose process had ended in the suffering of captivity and the terror of a slow and agonising death. Sitting with the men in the chief's house it was mercifully impossible to make a moral judgement of these people, despite the moral horror I believed I should feel when faced with a spectacle in which I would under no circumstances actively participate. Perhaps my observation of it is nonetheless an active part of the ongoing process. I wonder how many years will pass before the ceremony takes place in front of a paying audience, shuttled in air-conditioned comfort to the village to be horrified by the morbid pleasure of torturing an animal to death in the name of spiritual necessity.

Waiting, waiting, waiting...

There are three little children crowded around the table, watching me write. We've been adopted by many of the  village children, who run up when they see me, hoping to be picked up, swung around, or just to hold hands as we walk from one place to another.

Yesterday we had to move from our hut so the roof could be re-thatched, and there are three men working next door, walking across the bamboo rafters, tying sheaves of dry leaves. They'll have the roof completed by nightfall, so hopefully we can return to the vastly more comfortable bed in the other building.

The children, who disappeared suddenly, have returned, accompanied by another friend, all of them munching on tiny green mangoes, and singing a Lao song in close approximation of harmony. There are four little hands holding on to the pen as I write, three now, either hoping to partake of the strange writing practise they are observing, or to relieve me of the pen so they can draw on themselves. It's becoming quite a task to write with this additional help.

The buffalo sacrifice is supposed to take place tomorrow or the next day, according to Mama pap, who was having her own ceremony performed in her house yesterday when we arrived for dinner. Her savings had been stolen from a locked drawer, on the same day that a European lady with two dirty blond children left the village unexpectedly, defaulting on three months' rent. Mama Pap's desolation is obvious: the breach of trust compounded by the very real threat of bankruptcy. Potential customers are turning away because she can no longer afford to stock pork and beef, and her supply of Beer Lao has been reduced to a solitary bottle in an increasingly empty refrigerator. I was very happy to make an offering to the man who performed the ceremony on Mama Pap's behalf. It sounded like the chanting of Buddhist prayers, but the ceremony involved eggs and candles, and the smartly-dressed man looked nothing like a monk. Mama Pap looks sad and tired, and she can't keep the tears from her eyes. Over the next few days she will make pilgrimage to all the temples in the surrounding area, to help mitigate the bad Karma that has brought this misfortune to her family.

All along the river banks behind me, the villagers are preparing vegetable plots, cutting into the packed dry earth with heavy hoes, breaking the rock-hard ground apart and covering rectangular patches with rice husks, to be burned for fertiliser. Makeshift fences to deter the pigs, chickens and cattle from dining on the new shoots are being erected, and all the members of the family are working hard, taking advantagen of the cloud cover to work through the day.

Sunday 20th March, 2011 - Tad Lo, Lao PDR

Arriving at Mama Pap's shortly after daybreak, we were told that the ceremony is to begin this evening. It was pleasant to rise with the sun, and to enjoy the privilege of the full day. The children left abruply yesterday: one girl, who seems quite emotionally unstable, began to hit out at another girl when she wanted to return to her place on my lap. I made it clear that I wouldn't tolerate her being violent, unnecessarily emphasising my point by banging once on the table. She left pouting, and went to her grandmother. Shortly afterwards the other three left at a word from the old matriarch, and they've kept their distance since then.

In the afternoon we walked up to tad Lo waterfall, intending to cross the river to Khiangtanglae. We were met by a small group of boys, with a catapult, and a small lizard taken as a trophy from the jungle. They asked for pens and paper, and we gave them a pencil and a copybook each. Shortly afterwards we met girls coming from the river, and the boys tried to dissuade us from giving pens and pencils to them, hinting at some ethnic rivalry between the tribal people of Khiantanglae, and the Lao people from Tad Lo. We handed out more, trying to be fair, but by the time we came close to the falls there were little naked children emerging from the bushes, all desperately hopeful that they would receive something from the foreigners. I was suddenly surrounded by a seething, shouting, swarm of little brown bodies, pushing, pulling, grasping, pinching and punching each other in their desire to obtain their share of the bounty. I suddenly realised the vast gulf between my naive intentions and the naked reality of what was taking place, and a feeling of shame and sorrow pervaded my senses. There were too few books and pencils, and an endless clamour from the children, the youngest of whom had been relieved of their prizes, and stood looking at us with resignation and feint hope on their faces. What had begun as a gesture of kindness and sharing had emerged into the daylight as a hopelessly naive, perhaps harmful, and disappointing act of interference in a clash of cultures that have only begun to interact on a regular basis in the last few decades.

The man from the temple who performed the ceremony at Mama Pap's told her that it was a Falang who took the money, and not a Lao, and this seemed to bring her a small measure of relief. Later she told us that two white girls traveling on a motorcycle had killed a local girl in a collision two days before, and I wondered how long the interaction between Lao people and foreign visitors will remain as benign as it appears to be now.

Waiting for the Buffalo...

 

I'm sitting on the balcony of the hut, looking at a man and his family who arrived at the riverside, carrying a rice sack tied at the top. The man lit a fire then, when it was blazing, he opened the sack and tipped out a dead dog and began singeing its fur in the fire, beating at the burning hair with a switch of green leaves. Now they're skinning and cleaning the carcass in the river, and I'm waiting to see whether they plan to cook it here over the embers.

We've been in Tad Lo for a week now, losing track of the time, losing track of the days. Yesterday we drove across the Bolaven Plateau to Sekong, and a little further to Tad Feake, another beautiful set of falls where water washes the black rocks before spreading in deep pools where locals swim and plunge from the rocks. We drove back through Thateng, where a few days before we'd stopped to watch one half of a football match. The local team, dressed in Liverpool jerseys, and on average a good six inches taller than their opponents, were clearly the superior force, but both teams played committed, physical football in the dust and heat. Each time the ball struck the baked brown earth an explosion of orange obscured the air, and hundreds of heads weaved to follow the ball as it emerged from the smoky clouds kicked up by the worn football boots.

The family at the riverside just left, carrying the dog carcass, its innards in a large steel bowl which a young boy carried with care up the steps beside the hut. In a few days, at full moon, there is a celebration in the nearest village, Khiantenglae, where there will be a buffalo sacrificed in honour of the local Gods. Mama Pap, from whom we have been trying to elicit information about the time and date of the festival, is going to take us there to witness the ceremony. She speaks Lao and Thai, and a little French and English, but hardly any Jarai, the language of the village only one kilometre away. We were there a few days ago, and a boy asked us for a pen. Sam gave him hers and he walked off happily drawing on his hand. We bought boxes of pencils and copybooks to bring with us next time. I guess it was a boy from one of the villages where little Lao is spoken who returned our greeting with a careless laugh as he said 'No Sabaidee' over his shoulder.

Perhaps it's the timeless routine of village life that seems to distort temporal perception here in Tad Lo. Every morning for perhaps hundreds of years, women have come to these river banks to wash their children, the family's clothes, and to bathe. Every evening young men gather on the falls to fish from the rocks with bamboo rods, with nets and spears, and to jump from the cliffs and swim. Along the river banks are farmers washing their buffalo, women washing their hair, and children playing. In the middle of the shallow river, men and women with nets dredge up mud and weeds, and pick through it looking for shellfish and eels to bring home. In the early darkness boys hunt for frogs in the damp grass.

The young girl who came to investigate the sound of the whistle the other day just returned with her friend when she heard the music again. She was looking through my pencil case and playing with the pens while her friend blew shrill, shrieking noises from the whistle. I got a pencil and a copybook for each of them, and they immediately sat down to write their names on the first page. They were delighted with their little gifts, and disappeared, saying 'Thank you', and 'Bye bye', slapping high-fives, and even bumping fists. I expected more children to return, and the first of what I guess may be many visitors has just arrived, and the balcony is crowded with happy children munching oranges and playing games that I 

can't begin to understand.

Tad Lo...

We stopped at a coffee plantation on the road between Paksong and Thateng, and the young boy who just arrived home from school got the fire going to boil water for coffee. A middle-aged woman brought spoons and sugar, and I've been trying not to stare intrusively at the huge tumour on the right side of her neck. It must weigh the best part of two kilograms. Yesterday at Khiangtenglae village, upriver from tad Lo, a woman stopped us to show her child's infected eyes. It was impossible to know what to do, and we left feeling helpless. The people in Laos seem so strong and healthy that it's easy to forget that the vast majority don't have access to the most basic medicines that we take entirely for granted. Sitting here drinking the exceptional Lao coffee from the plantation here, I'm watching the woman with the vicious tumour light a massive hand-rolled cigarette made from office paper and raw local tobacco, who is savouring the blue smoke as it boils out of her mouth and nose.

 

We've been in Tad Lo, on the outer edge of the Bolaven Plateau, for three or four days now, and the sleepy river village seems to run on its own time zone, exempt from the temporal laws of normal reality. Early in the morning people pass the hut on their way to wash in the river, and all day and night men, women and boys wade through the shallows with nets, masks or torches, hunting for fish. At Tad Lo Waterfall yesterday I lent my mask to a couple of boys whose fishing duties were completed, and they splashed around with it until I left. I'd just made the 1 metre jump from the top of the waterfall, plunging into the foaming depths. A young guy from Salavan showed me the way up and across the river, leaping nimbly from rock to rock as I scrambled and slipped my way across with trepidation and inelegance. After he'd jumped he climbed the cliff face, pulling himself up on wires and tree roots, free-climbing across crumbling rock until he became stuck on a ledge, and jumped fearlessly into the murky water. The day before we'd been led up by another little ninja, perhaps nine years old, who walked effortlessly up the rocks with his hands behind his back, reaching the top without breaking a sweat, before leaping without hesitation from the heights above the falls.

A Cautionary Tale...

The kayaking was pleasantly relaxing, and apart from one set of rapids, the time was spent gently paddling down the Nam Lin River under mercifully overcast skies. When we stopped for lunch, a few of us  followed our guide, Lee, along the bank to a ten-metre cliff where we jumped into the river below. The relaxed mood was rather spoiled by a bone-crunching two-hour jumbo ride, which left everybody caked with red road-dust, and stupified by the exhaust fumes.

Walking around the capital, Vientaine, looking for a room was exhausting, and only the most expensive accommodation was available in most places. Eventually we found a rough-and-ready room at a reasonable price, and gratefully dropped our bags, which seemed to grow heavier with each step. Later that night we found a nice Lao restaurant serving duck Lap and excellent imported wine. Afterwards we ended up in the adjoining bar where it was easy to forget which country we were in, as we drank Australian Shiraz and listened to American Jazz.

The next day was a write-off, but eventually I roused myself to the simple task of shopping for new shorts and a necklace. On the way back a Tuk-Tuk driver with a chipped tooth offered me some decent-looking weed, and I took a small pinch, despite his insistence that I buy the whole ounce he proffered. We went down to the river for a smoke, and as we climbed back up the bank we were both feeling excessively high. My immediate reaction was to speculate on which particular synthetic chemical had been added to the grass, but it was impossible to tell. Negotiating the busy road was extremely challenging, and crossing to the other side was felt like a major triumph. We decided to head for the guest-house and re-group until the initial wave had passed, but sitting on the bed and staring at the patterns emerging on the wall, I soon realised that it was only building. I decided to stop fighting it and relax, stretching my muscles and massaging the stiffness from my neck. A strange physical pressure was building up wherever I touched, and the sensation passed down through my body towards the ground. Soon I felt like I was giving somebody else a massage, and receiving one in turn. The profound physical dissociation was too uncomfortable so I gave up and lay back on the bed to experience the strange, soporific visions rushing past my closed eyes. Just over an hour after smoking, it was clear that this was a high that wasn't likely to diminish for several hours at least. I went out to buy water after a long-surreal period of mental preparation. I was fine until a policeman crossed the road behind me as I walked into the shop, and I became drenched in paranoia. When the money in my sweating hands began to melt and glow supernaturally under the neon lights it became impossible to distinguish one note from another, and I could only pass over the money in random handfulls, hoping that I'd receive at least the approximately correct change.

After the first intense waves had passed, we went for a wander around town, drinking the occasional beer until the edge had been taken off the unpleasant chemical high. Despite the interesting hallucinations, the dull, emotionally-flat, uncommunicative state imposed by the drug was unpleasantly reminiscent of my reaction to  ketamine. When the intensity had diminished further, we decided to head to a bar to drink our way through. We walked into one place before realsing it was a Lao karaoke bar, and worldlessly turned and retreated into the street. The horror of becoming trapped in a karaoke K-hole was too much to contemplate. We ended up in a Lao ladyboy bar, dancing to terrible, random pop music until the lights went out. Sitting in the pitch-black bar, we decided it was probably an indication that the establishment was closed.

Still way too high to go home, we ended up sitting outside the convenience store, drinking Lane Xang Beer and eating wasabi rice snacks as our appetites re-emerged through the sedative fog of the strange drug we'd taken. Sitting outside a shop, drinking beer and eating sponge cake with a spoon, we met a Spanish family with whom we'd been kayaking the day before. Fortunately we were able to communicate at that stage, but the sense of shame 3was justifiable. Street drinking while off your tits on what feels like an animal tranquiliser is never a good look.

The following day we were heavy and listless, though the depressed mood I had anticipated didn't materialise, mercifully. We visited Wat Si Saket, a beautiful, early-nineteenth century temple in the commercial district. The interior walls of the crumbling cloister contain niches where there are thousands of small Buddhas. There  are also many of the distinctly Lao Buddhas, with their uniquely-expressive Lao faces, and their hands held by their sides, calling for rain.

Later that night we returned to the lovely Lao restaurant where we tried the subtly-flavoured Lao sausage, and a popular Lao dish called Bitter Duck, which wasn't bitter at all, but rich, complex, and really excellent. It was served with a sauce of ground garlic, lemongrass, chili, lime, and fish sauce, which I really must attempt to replicate when I get home. After dinner we had a couple of glasses of wine at the Jazz bar, and said goodbye to the charming wine waiter from Chicago who we'd bumped into every night we were in town.

Health and Safety...

It's 11.30pm on a Monday evening and the 10K sound-system across the river has just started blasting karaoke versions of Lao pop songs into the night air. A brief thunderstorm just washed the oppressive heat from the electrified air, but the temperature has immediately begun to rise as the water evaporates from the sun-baked soil.

The strangeness of this place has been intensified by an inconsistent illness which has been coming and going in bouts of dizziness, loss of energy and appetite, nausea and exhaustion, almost on an hour-to-hour basis. Attempting to ignore it to the best of our ability, Sam and I have been bouncing over the rock-strewn roadways on a noisy Chinese moped, visiting caves and rivers, driving through farms and across streams, losing track of the days.

There are signs for the Blue Lagoon posted all over the tracks around the town. Intrepid landowners hope to entice tourists onto their land, in order to claim a small guide fee and entrance charge to the caves in the hills behind their farms. We were guided into one pitch-black hole in the limestone karst by a pair of ten-year-olds with two headlamps. They led us through cramped passages to a deep cave with a terrifying drop to one side of a treacherous path of loose rocks. It was a small cave, and we were thankful to be back in the daylight after only a short time underground.

The following day we were led into Pha Pherng Cave by a young boy who'd finished school for the day. He pointed out honeycombs hanging from the rocks, and showed us frogs and spiders on the dark walls. One of the caves was filled with deep blue water where I saw a fish swimming slowly in the darkness. The flooded fields beside the path leading from the cave sparkled with dragonflies in flight, the sun flashing on their irridescent wings.

Later that day we went to the Poukham Cave and climbed the steep rocks to the entrance up in the cliffs. We were arrested by the sight of the vast vaulted space which throbbed with the echoed voices of the tiny, ant-like figures exploring its lunar surfaces. The space is breath-taking and its magnificence is illuminated by the light of the sun, which pours through a great opening in the sheer cliff face. Deeper inside the mountain, the cave extends into utter darkness where it is even grander in scale, and the rock formations are staggeringly beautiful. We wandered around in the labyrinthine, alien landscape, stopping to stare in wonder at stalactites and stalacmites, chimneys and rock pools, until we bacame disoriented and began to feel uncomfortable in the lonely darkness. On the way out, when we could make out the distant glow of the daylight, I played a few tunes in the empty vastness, the whistle echoing impossibly from the distant rocks. After descending from the cliffs, the dark water of the aptly-named Blue Lagoon was refreshing, but quickly became chilling, bringing the cold of the mountains as it flows to the river.

Today we went rock-climbing on the Sleeping Wall, a few Km outside of Vang Vieng. The instructors were excellent, but many of the experienced climbers there were surprised by the demanding climbs being undertaken by the novices in their charge. Starting on a 4C, and progressing up to a 20 metre high 6A+ which nobody in our group managed to complete, we were all exhausted by the end of the day, and a platform swing into the Nam Song River was the perfect way to cool down between climbs. I tried the 6A+ twice, having fallen no more than a foot from the top, but I was too tired and weak by then, and I had to drop. I hope I have the strength for the kayaking trip to Vientaine we have planned for tomorrow.