More about Attapeu

Yesterday followed the same pattern as Friday.  The village we travelled to was about 5kms down the same road.  The difference was that the locals there spoke a different dialect – closer to Khmer – that no-one on the team could understand, so the Lao-speaking village head and another local translator helped out.  The villagers seemed visibly poorer – they were dirtier and their clothes were more basic.  While not unhealthy, they appeared unhealthier than those in Pouy.  It’s a hardscrabble existence on this rice-farming plain prone to flooding and a hot dry season.  My understanding is that there is only a single annual harvest of rice here.

A PSI Land Cruiser is used to shuttle villagers to the clinic

Team leader Tick registers people in Ban Donephay village

 

The day’s event was quite successful – at least 200 villagers showed up to be tested, with only 2 showing positive for malaria.  PSI staff were constantly busy with intake, testing, and field interviews in individual houses.  I was able to get quite good images of all aspects, I think.  Seeing into each house was sobering as conditions are very basic: sleeping on bare floors and cooking over charcoal fires.

A girl watches as villagers are tested around her

The village head decided to kill a pig for the team’s lunch, but the collection of quivering entrails and organs in stainless bowls didn’t appeal.  Sen, as he always does when presented with any meat, dug in with gusto.  Fortunately, the team brought along other food and I munched on sticky rice, hard-boiled egg, dried beef, and a noodle-fish mixture prepared in a leaf wrap.

Lunchtime was quiet, so the team relaxed.  I managed a short nap in the back of one of the Land Cruisers, with two drivers – Sen and Seng – snoring up front.

We stayed until mid-afternoon then all piled in one truck (the other was in Pakse for the day) for the hour’s drive back into town.  Back in town I washed, rested and downloaded my images, then had a delicious meal prepared at the guesthouse by the some of the team.  It was one of the top meals of this trip: tamahoon (green papaya salad), morning glory with chillies, fish stew with lime cilantro and chillies, scrambled eggs, steamed watercress and other herbs, and of course sticky rice.  I stuffed myself.

At around 8pm I went to Champa 100 Years with Tak, one of the communications guys, who is younger and speaks English well.  We chatted for about an hour about school and work and his recent heartbreak, when his girlfriend of five years left him for a Thai fellow (note: later in the evening his ex sent him several text messages saying that she’d had a fight with the new guy and wanted to patch things up.  Tak made a point of not responding although it was clear he was torn).  Dao, one of the drivers arrived and we moved to another table with the restaurant owner and two young women, one of whom made me laugh a great deal despite not understanding her Lao.  She kept making me recite all the Lao I knew and laughing and laughing at my immense vocabulary of 5-10 phrases.

At around 9:30 we rolled across town to Happy Day on the other bend of the Xe Kong River.  Sen and Seng were there, and we listened to the music for a while, drinking more Beer Lao and munching cucumbers, fresh tamarind (sour!) and watermelon seeds.  Not a great deal happened and we were back home by 11:00 and I had a solid sleep.

I decided, however, to have a rest day.  My stomach was a bit off (much better now) and I figured that I could not get a ton of photographic value returning to the same village again.  So, I spent the day at the guesthouse, reading half of my book – The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – and relaxing.

At lunchtime a truck from the French Croix-Rouge pulled up three fellows – French, English and Lao – checked in.  I chatted with them, and then joined them as they went for lunch in a local Vietnamese place.  They are here to look into food security issues following the recent cyclone.  Apparently the rice harvest was damaged in the flooding and they are here to assess interventions for four days.  They will be journeying into some very remote parts of the district by boat or possibly even foot by the sound of it.  David, the Englishman, spent four years treeplanting in northern BC , has a family in Tamil Nadu, and works as a disaster-management consultant.  Benoit is from France and lives in Vientiane, working for the Croix Rouge, and I’m guessing that the Lao fellow is from the a government ministry.  It was very interesting to learn about this very direct kind of work being carried out on the ground.

For dinner I met up with the usual suspects – San, Seng, Tak and Dao – for a dinner at their friend Miss Mai’s shop at the bus station.  San cooked up a vat of boiled clams in chilli broth, and Mai grilled an entire catfish over a charcoal brazier.  We sat around a concrete table in front of the store watching the local buses come and go.

Attapeu

The journey was long – 23 hours from the Hualamphong train station to the Attapeu bus station – but it went as smoothly as imaginable.  I didn’t sleep so well on the train for some reason, perhaps because it seemed exceptionally bouncy, and also because the conductor and his friends were jabbering away a few feet from my berth.  The stunning thing is that the train arrived on time in Ubon Ratchatani, which is almost unheard of.  A tuk tuk drove me through the unremarkable town to the bus station where I bought a ticket for the 9:30 bus to Pakse.  I had time for a bowl of chicken on broth-y rice and a coffee.  I also realized that my Thai mobile was almost out of credit so I couldn’t send a text message anywhere.

The bus ride took about three hours.  Crossing the border was an exercise in way-finding through fences and around buildings, eventually arriving at a black-glass window with a hole far too low to actually see or hear anything through.  I passed in my passport and a bushel of papers came back at me, which I dutifully filled out and returned with the $43 fee.  Canadians still pay the most of any country for a Lao visa.  We must have really offended them at some point.

At another similar window around the side, a disembodied voice asked for an additional 50 Baht, probably for the Lao Border Guards Retirement Fund or something.  I paid and walked away with my passport and Lao visa in hand.

Instantly things change on the Lao side of the border: the landscape is hillier and more treed, and things look less prosperous.  Most houses are feeble wood things that look like they could blow over or combust at the smallest provocation.

After an hour and on the far side of the stunning Mekong, we pulled into non-descript Pakse.  I hopped on a Lao style of tuk tuk – a covered sidecar – and went for a ride through the town, stopping to get a SIM card (using French with an old guy) – then south 8km to the other bus station.  I had a couple of hours there until the 3:15 “VIP” bus left, so I drank some drinks and ate some buns.

The 4 hour ride to Attapeu was lovely.  We drove around the Bolevan Plateau, which juts up several hundred meters from the plain around it, in places with sheer cliffs and bastions of rock.  We made our way clockwise around it in the gorgeous evening light.  One thing that I noticed is that Lao people walk with their backs to traffic, which resulted in many of the having the beejesus scared out of them when our bus came barrelling up behind them honking.

The bus pulled into the dirt bus station at 7:30 and shortly thereafter a big blue Toyota Land Cruiser covered in Number 1 condom logos pulled up, and I was greeted by Tick, the young energetic team leader here, and Sen, the driver.  Both speak good English.  We drove the short distance to the guesthouse.

I had a nice room, but unfortunately it was on the ground floor right by the front desk and door, so I had a fairly lousy sleep because of noise.

I got out of bed at seven, and at half-past, Tick took me for a bowl of noodles down the street.  At eight, the entire PSI team showed up (8 folks in two vehicles), and we drove about 30kms down a rough dirt road westwards to the village called Pouy.  Flooding earlier this year damaged the whole area and the road is badly scarred in places.  An amazingly sketchy suspension bridge with a one-ton limit has been built in one place, and everyone piled out to watch the Land Cruiser creep across it.

A PSI Land Cruiser crawls across a suspension bridge

The standard practice for the team is to set up malaria testing and also conduct field interviews about malaria-prevention practices.  A series of tables are arranged and villagers are invited to drop by, sign in and get a finger-prick blood test on the spot.  Results are available within 15 minutes.  This was the second day at the village, so it wasn’t particularly busy although by the early afternoon a crowd of about 30 or so had gathered after being tested in anticipation of draw prizes.

A girl winces as she gets a finger-prick blood test for malaria

The girl on the right has tested positive for malaria and is given a Coartem treatment pack by the PSI team

Villagers wait to hear the results of their malaria tests

The village, like all that we passed, is situated on a large floodplain of the major river in the area (that flooded during the storms).  To the north is an impressive forested plateau, possibly the Bolevan, rising abruptly up from the plain with sheer cliffs and waterfalls.  While dry right now, this is obviously an area that turns to soup and glue in the wet season.  The red soil likely turns to porridge, and then to concrete as it dries.  Rice farming dominates although lots of livestock – water buffalo, cows, goats, geese, chickens and ducks – roam.  The houses are simple: one or two rooms high on stilts, with a ladder or stairs leading up.  The walls are wooden boards for the most part, with lots of gaps for air and mosquitoes.  I was able to go into a couple of houses for the field interviews and they were as basic inside as out.  For beds there were simple thin mattresses on the floor with mosquito nets suspended from the ceiling.  It seemed as if most families slept in one room.

A typical rural Lao house in Pouy village

Mosquito nets hang from the ceiling in a rural house

Because it was quiet today, the program wrapped up just after 1pm and we piled back into the vehicles and drove into town.  I was feeling pretty zonked, so I changed into a quieter upstairs room and had a 1.5 hour nap.

At five, Tick and another team member took me for a walk into the market.  The vegetables and herbs looked fresh and delicious, the fly-covered fish and meat, the squirrels, the crickets, and the dried buffalo skin, less so.  We walked onto the bridge and peered at the quite-lovely meandering river below, then went to a riverside restaurant, the Champa 100 Years, for a tasty meal of grilled duck, fried rice with egg, spicy salad and zesty watercress or morning glory.  And of course, Beer Lao.

Looking down on a street leading to the Attapeu market

Squirrels and mushrooms for sale in the Attapeu market

Beer Lao was the story of the evening.  I went out on the town with a number of the older guys from the team, and each stop involved plentiful large bottle of Beer Lao, fortunately served over ice, which dilutes the beer somewhat.  First stop was an open-air karaoke bar on the river.  Instead of canned music, a fellow sits at a keyboard playing the tunes will all sorts of other instruments programmed in.  Sen sang a couple of Lao tunes very well and won the appreciation of people there.

Beer Lao Heaven

Next stop was a ‘disco’ full of Lao young-uns.  It was a mid-sized room with a lot of tables, dripping air conditioners, lasers and such, and a decent and loud sound system.  The youth were having a pretty fun time moving to Thai pop hits.

Final stop was another karaoke place called Happy Days or something like that, also on the river.  In addition to a keyboardist was a guitarist; apparently they are brothers, and they were talented.  There was less actual karaoke as the band did most of the work, but there was some dancing, which, much to my dismay, involved me as I was dragged up by the guys.  Dancing in front of a crowd of Laos was not high on my list of priorities in coming here, but at least the bottles of Beer Lao loosened my inhibitions and mortal terror.  It was a late night for Laos – we didn’t make it home until midnight, leaving when the bar shut down.