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.