Teenage escorts and Loy Krathong

Another full moon, another festival. Travis and I have a history of spending foreign holidays in small towns, so we opted to leave crowded MaeHongSon and travel further South to MaeSariang, a town completely unmentioned in our guidebook. We arrived the afternoon of the festival and after wandering the wide, dusty roads for over an hour we found little that indicated a major party would soon be under way.

In select hair salons women were being made up, their hair piled elegantly atop their heads and decorated with fresh orchids. A huge stage and sound system was being mounted, of all places, at the police headquaters. A dozen or so women could be seen sitting outside their houses folding banana leaves into floating altars, and movable food stalls were setting up on a side road near the river. But for the most part, things were very quiet. Had we not seen 2 parade floats hauled uphill by a pickup truck we may have assumed the festivals was in fact not being celebrated. We went back to our guesthouse to talk to the owner and find out just what we might expect for the evening.
There we met a nice couple from Quebec and we drank beers with them until the guesthouse owner told us it was time for the parade. In the 2 hours since we'd left the city center a total transformation had occurred! The sun had set, the streets were packed, music was intermittenly blaring from each passing parade float.

The floats looked more or less the same- sparkley, whitish, dragonlike, with a beautiful women perched on top smiling stiffly. Accompanying each float was a man holding a long bammboo stick with a "y" at the top who would raise the low-slung power cables and allow the float to pass without damaging the local electric supply. Hilltribe groups wearing traditional dress marched in loose formation carrying laterns, and local students wore golden costumes and performed dances. In between every float the crowd of bystanders would pour into the center of the street to see what was coming next. As the new attraction approached, the sea of people would part to again make way.
Midway during the parade we lost the Quebecans so I set out to find them. On my way back to Travis, I cut through a restaurant to avoid the crowd and there a group of teenagers pulled up a seat and asked me to sit with them (mostly using hand gestures). Flattered, I accepted. At the table, I had a hard time communicating with my new friends, but I think they understood that I was an English teacher in Korea and I think I understood that they were 19, going to university in ChaingMai and loved hardcore music, especially Slipknot and Korn. One boy had slightly long hair which he affectionately referred to as his "afro". Both boys were weaing oversized black t-shirts advertising the names of bands I'm not familiar with and wore long silver chains dangling with gaudy, plastic and metal Buddhist pendants. The girl had on heavy make up and a fake leopard fur hoodie. All three had impeccable manners and kept refilling my beer and adding ice to the glass as they chattered to each other and sent text messages on their cell phones.
When the parade ended I was still at the restaurant, so I tried to excuse myself to go find Travis. The boys, eager to show me the lanterns on the river, followed. Luckily, Travis is easy to find in a crowd of Asians. Once reunited, our new friends- who of course thought Travis' beard was awesome and kept touching it and comparing him to some member Korn- bought us banana leaf altars and showed us how to put them in the water. Unlike in Laos, where in order to get your altar in the water you had to either pay a young boy to swim into the river for you or wade into 1foot depths of mud along the riverbank yourself, in MaeSariang a little dock had been constructed for the altar send offs. The dock was full of people lighting candles and gently placing their banana boats in the water. Along the riverbank folks were shooting off fireworks and sending miniature hot air balloons into the sky. Loud, thumping music was bouncing from the police station, and you could smell the roasted meat from the food carts.

Our friends took us to a beer garden where we proceeded to drink pitchers of beer, each time cheersing with a hearty rolled R "Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrroy!" in honor of the Roy Krathong festival. We met more happy teenagers who offered us spicy food we could barely eat, and who bowed and smiled and seemed to enjoy our being around though we couldn't communicate much. Finally when our heads were pounding from the music and the drinking and we felt we had almost repaid our friends by buying them and the next table over sufficient rounds of pitchers, we tried to make a polite escape from the party. We were nearly out of the town center and just 100 meters away from our guesthouse when the boys found us and insisted we light off fireworks, which we did. Then they escorted us on their motorbikes the remaining distance back to our home and gave us each one of their pendants.

six hour sangthaew

We woke up in Mae Sariang hungover from the previous night's Loy Krathong festivities, and not particularly enthusiastic about sitting in the back of a pickup for six hours on our way to Mae Sot. We had to do what we had to do though, and what we had to do was take the only available means of transportation to Mae Sot. We wolfed down eggs, toast and coffee, and hustled to the bus station to catch the 10:30 sangthaew.

The sangthaew is an interesting facet of southeast Asian transport. "Sang" means two, and "thaew" means bench, and these vehicles are appropriately two benches in the back of a pickup truck. There is also a roof over the bed, and basically a kind of cage around you. Somewhere between a taxi and a bus, these puppies are popular for shared transport to common destinations in the cities (bus stations, etc.). They are also the only way to get to some of the more out of the way towns. People clamber in and out of the vehicle at various locations, and there is even sometimes a bell you can ring from the back to let the driver know you want to stop (on the luxury sangthaew only). People riding on these contraptions often have bags or baskets or boxes of items with them, varying from fresh produce to electronics equipment to undisclosed merchandise.

As it turned out, the 10:30 sangthaew wasn't running that day, but the guy making wood carvings in the bus station parking lot assured us that the 11:30 sangthaew would be able to take us. When the 11:30 sangthaew didn't show up, the novelty of sitting out a hangover in the dusty sunny open dirt patch that is the bus station was beginning to fade. About 11:40, a sangthaew showed up and we threw our bags right on top, anxious to get the ride started so we could get it over with. Our eagerness would have to go on hold, however, because this was the 12:30 sangthaew, so we had another fifty minutes to kill.

At 12:28, approximately 24 people clambered onto the benches with their various loads, and some had to hang off the back. The two monks coming along were the only people invited to sit in the cab with the driver. After gassing up on the outskirts of town, we were on our way. Luckily, most of our fellow passengers were headed to nearby destinations, so the overcrowded bed soon became more bearable. The scenery was similar to what we've been seeing fo days, mainly sharp mountain peaks blanketed by thick rainforest cover. For the most part, the drive was beautiful, what you could see of it by craning your neck around and peeking out of the cage. We were cruising along fairly untraveled roads, through small villages, roughly tracing our trajectory along the western border with Burma (Myanmar). A lot of the people living in this part of the world are ethnic minorities, many having fled government persecution and geurilla warfare in their native Burma. It was cool to go through the small villages and pick up people in their brightly colored (but often faded) traditional clothing, speaking in languages other than Thai, and chewing bettel nuts in their darkly stained mouths.

It is an interesting observation of mine that the more comfortable a method of transportation, the more often you stop to rest. Riding around in big air conditioned tourist buses, you stop all the time for bathrooms, snacks, you name it. Riding in the sangthaew, we stopped once, when a dude rang the bell in desperation. Maybe half of the time we weren't crammed in like sardines, but even then the hard benches and backrests were not the best for multi-hour sitting. The rhythm of the sangthaew became lulling and monotonous; the back would fill up, empty out, fill up again, empty out again. About two hours from our destination, the bed filled up and did not empty out again.

Not that is, until about an hour later when we reached a huge, sprawling refugee camp on the west side of the road. As far as refugee camps go, this one was quite scenic, climbing up to the base of a huge limestone cliff. The camp went on for kilometer after kilometer, with people getting out in various spots. Having never seen a refugee camp before, I found it a very interesting place to drive next to. Thousands of bamboo stilt houses with leaf roofs were tightly packed in among the hills. There were various official looking concrete buildings, maybe schools, and the whole shebang seemed very organized and well run. The people had houses, there were places for the kids to play, conditions seemed sanitary. However, I couldn't imagine what life must be like for the people living there. They have no land to farm, they probably don't speak very much Thai, they aren't near a city or town with any kind of work. They seem to be taken care of by someone, but what do they do with themselves? It was good to see and think about and imagine what life is like for those thousands of people and the millions of people around the world who are semi-permanent inhabitants of semi-temporary camps in foreign lands.

The sun set as we were passing the camp, so the last hour into town was a bit breezy and chilly. When we made it to Mae Sot, we didn't care how questionable the guesthouse at the bus station was, or worry about the fact that our room had no bed.

"chilling" in Pai

We've been in Thailand for the past week, and I keep thinking about Laos. How can a country bordered by 1 billion Chinese, 80 million Vietnamese and 65 million Thais have a population of only 5.5 million? Laos is a land untouched by time. There people still live in one-room houses made of bamboo and use candlelight after sunset. Even the capital city, Vientiane, despite its wide roads lined with royal palm trees felt half asleep. There was a certain slow, listless quality about life in Laos that grated on my nerves. Besides the construction of new hotels and guesthouses, nothing was happening in Laos. And while every tourist seemed to be searching for a fictitious undiscovered Asian paradise, the entire country was clearly on the verge of a tourist explosion: temples crowded by foreigners and sly local tuktuk drivers well-practiced in overcharging tourists.
I did not have high expectations for Thailand because I imagined it would be basically a more commercial, touristy, crowded version of Laos. And yet Thailand, receiving over 10 million tourists annually, has proven to be a truly lovely place. It is easier to take public transportation here (and thus get away from minibuses crowded solely with travelers) than in any other country we've been in. Tourism is so much a part of the local culture in Thailand, that it doesn't seem out of place to see foreigners everywhere. Thais are accustomed to foreigners and genuinely seem to like us. People here are unbelievably friendly and smile at you for no reason at all. Best of all, daily life is intact and is moving at a pace I can relate to. We had a great time walking around Chiang Rai, going to markets and junk stores, catching a marching band play "It's the Final Countdown", and just watching life unfold on the streets. Thai people are unselfconscious, busy but not rushed, and that makes them so fun to watch.
But then we came to Pai. About 4 hours West of Chiang Mai, nestled in a beautiful mountain valley, Pai is Thailand's "hippie" town. The hippieness refers to the fact that every bar and restaurant advertises itself as being "chill" and Jack Johnson is playing at at least 4 restaurants at any given time. Pai is more than a tourist destination- it feels like its own tourist nation. On the streets foreigners outnumber Thais. Everyone speaks English. Gringos ride around recklessly on motorbikes. There are more massage and tattoo parlors than there are places to buy water. In the past 3 days I heard the following expressions, all spoken in an intentionally drawn out, stoner voice: "take it easy", "relax", "don't worry", "go slow" more times than I care to recall. Life has again slowed to a snails pace.

let's wok - with tee

Every country we've been through so far (with the possible strange exception of Vietnam) has a bustling industry of cooking classes to teach you how to make some classic local dishes. For some reason, I didn't really feel like taking a class in China, and the food in Laos is not particularly exciting, so we had mostly overlooked these. Here in Thailand, I had a change of heart and decided to take a class because, well, the food is delicious, but mostly so I can show off for my friends and family when I make it home.

In order to understand the story of our cooking, class, a quick background on the town we are in will be necessary. We are in a small town up in the mountains of northern Thailand called Pai. This town is kind of known as a hippy refuge, but seems to be becoming more and more a center for party backpacker culture. There are tons of bars and places to "chill out", and Jack Johnson plays continuously on the town's speakers. The streets are basically all winding pedestrian walkways with the odd drunken tourist trying to navigate a motorbike through. It was down one of these winding streets that we discovered the "Let's Wok - with Tee" school of Thai cookery. We signed up the night before our class, and Tee (the cooking instructor) seemed very friendly and explained the course to us, and the people in the class that was happening seemed pleased with their experience. It sounded like we would be the only two students in the class.

We arrived at ten the next morning to find that the class was actually five students all together, with a nice British couple, and a rugged, tattoo covered Aussie grandfather joining us. We were to have a morning session culminating in lunch, and then a break before an evening session. The mood was light, all the people in the class got along well, it was going to be a good day. Tee began by giving us in-depth explanations of the ingredients used in Thai cooking. Some of these were common, familiar food products, others I had never heard of before. We covered first the herbs and spices, then vegetables and finally sauces. We moved slowly, taking plenty of breaks.

After being introduced to the ingredients we would be working with, we delved into the topic of curries, which would be what our lunch consisted of. At the basis of curry dishes is the curry paste, which we made from scratch. This consisted of pounding various roots together with chili peppers in a mortar and pestle until the desired consistency was reached. With these pastes, we all made a different curry dish ranging from red to yellow to green to Massaman. All of us being a bit wary of the deadly little Thai chilies, we went light on the spice, using only 1 or 2 chilies per dish. Tee had five cooking stations consisting of a burner, wok, and small shelf in the middle of a big open room. He demonstrated first with his dish, and then let us all loose with mild coaching and encouragement. The resulting lunch was plentiful and delicious.

We had a four hour break before we came back for the dinner session. It's usually customary to have some beer while cooking and eating, so Taylor and I picked up a couple of big Chang beers (which is is purported to be illegal in Switzerland) on our way. Tee was already enjoying some beers with a friend on his front patio when we arrived. In a moment, Barry (the Aussie) cruised up on his motorbike fresh from the tattoo shop with a huge bag of beers for everyone. We sat drinking for a while waiting for the English couple, who had been detained by an extended massage session. Once they arrived, more beer was opened, new tattoos were examined, massage stories told. It must have been close to an hour before we actually started class again. Tee, in customary relaxed fashion went over the basics of stir fry sauce preparation. Again, there were many breaks, longer than the morning breaks, always involving at least one person running to the store to buy more beer.

When Barry's girlfriend showed up at eight to eat with us, we hadn't even finished the prep work on our dishes, and everyone was merry with beer (especially Barry). She seemed slightly annoyed but not surprised. After explaining soups and stock to us, Tee again demonstrated by cooking his dish before letting us loose. His demonstration involved copious moments stopping to take a sip of your beer. We made twelve different dishes, from a classic pad thai, to fried holy basil (mine), to creamy coconut soup. Everyone was a little more bold with their chili usage (due to our relatively mild lunch, as well as beer consumption), and Chris (the British guy) ended up putting ten chilies in his soup at Tee's suggestion. In spite of the prodigious quantity of beer consumption, no one was injured in the cooking process, and the dishes were all incredibly delicious, even if served an hour later than planned.

After the meal, everyone retired to the patio for more beer while Tee tried to put his house back in order (which involved calling a friend to come pick up the 30+ large beer bottles for recycling). Ginger (Tee's dog) had first pick over the leftovers before the neighborhood dogs had to fight it out over the rest.

We returned tonight for our complimentary extra practice session, and the class today was one Kiwi couple who weren't drinking any beers at all. Needless to say, dinner was served on time. We never heard whether Barry went back for the second tattoo he started ranting about after the meal.

opium

The area where Thailand, Laos and Burma (Myanmar) all converge is known as the Golden Triangle, and until recently, it was more or less the center of the world's opium production. It also happens to be the part of the world I am currently in. Being here, and having a keen interest in both drugs and their role in history and global politics, I had to pay a visit to the imposing Opium Hall (museum) up near the borders.

For some inexplicable reason, the entrance to the museum sits on the opposite side of a mountain from the museum itself. Shortly after paying your astronomical entrance fee of 300 Baht (US$10), you discover the reason behind the hefty charge; this is one of the most futuristic and fancy museums I've ever set foot in. Anyway, you're probably wondering how you get from the entrance to the museum on the other side of the mountain. The answer, you walk through the mountain in a 130 meter tunnel. This is not your ordinary, everyday tunnel; it creates a mood for whole museum experience with a dusky atmosphere, neon blue track lighting, creepy space music, and textured walls that are sculpted to depict various body parts swirling around in smoke. The bodies in the walls become progressively more wasted away until the end of the tunnel shows only skeletons amidst the curling haze.

Once you've made it through the tunnel, you watch a short film (one of at least 12 you will see throughout your visit) about the museum itself. Of course, I'm a fan of any museum exhibit about the museum the exhibit is in. After leaving the giant auditorium, you enter a planetarium-like room where you are treated to a second audio-visual presentation on the ancient history of opium and it's medicinal uses. This was fairly interesting.

Perhaps my favorite attribute of the museum is its comprehensive treatment of the role the opium trade has played in shaping world events throughout the past three hundred years. They start at the beginning. So, logically (or maybe slightly confusingly) the next exhibit concerns the British tea trade and features a huge mock sailing ship. While the connection was not completely obvious at first, the exhibits and signs go on to explain how and why the British began pedalling opium they grew in India in order to pay for their tea in China. It was interesting to see a museum take the time to set up the historical context of an event, rather than just saying "here's what happened". Having laid the foundation, the Opium Wars between the British and Chinese areexplained with more flashy movies, and even some very lifelike wax figures.

After this, you move down the second floor, where you spend a couple of rooms learning about and seeing artifacts of the practice of Asian opium smoking. My favorite informational panel was titled "How to Smoke Opium". All joking aside, it was cool to see the ritualistic method of lying down on a bed and smoking yourself into a white haze. There are a number of different tools that are needed, including lamps, pipes, dampers, trays, pins, scrapers, pillows, boxes, etc. Each tool is not only explained in detail, but there are also displays of all of the paraphenalia, ranging from the poor man's simple bamboo pipe, to the wealthy man's ornate porcelain, wood, or bronze smoking utensils. This was maybe my favorite part of the museum.

The display that comes next on the history of tea, the tea plant, tea drinking vessels, and different types of tea was as out of place as it sounds like it would be.

At this point, we arrived at the early twentieth century, when the western coutries changed their minds and decided they didn't like this drug at all, and were going to outlaw it (what the Chinese had tried to do a hundred years earlier). This also coincided with opium production moving into this part of southeast Asia. Again, in fully comprehensive style, the displays demonstrate how the Thai government had come to depend on taxes from opium sales for about 10% of its annual revenue. Thus, when opium supplies were cut during WWII, they coerced hill tribe ethnic minorities of the mountainous areas of northern Thailand, Laos and Burma to produce opium on a large scale. (The hill tribe people had already been producing medicinal opium on a small scale for hundreds of years.) As a cash crop that easily grows in the mountain environment, poppies provided a means of well being for the hill tribe people. This trend continued into the 1970's and beyond, when the illicit global trade in southeast Asian opiates really took off. One interesting piece of this area of the museum was a five minute movie that in no uncertain terms points the finger at the CIA as the main culprit in funding the illicit drug trade. It was good to see a museum come right out and say this, as mainstream American channels of information tend to neglect this well-accepted fact.

Thailand, of course is not the place we think of today when we consider opium production. There is a reason for this other than chance. The next exhibit talks about Thailand's successful crop replacement program which has helped farmers find other crops to make their livelihood with. It also briefly points out that the United States, since 1984, has had a policy of ignoring crop replacement schemes and using military style eradication programs. A comparison of Thailand versus Colombia (or Afghanistan) shows how well that policy works.

The final exhibit deals with the social costs of opiate use, and has mostly the kind of stuff we've all seen before in middle school health class videos and primetime made for TV movies. The one interesting part was a display on drug eradication approaches that gave equal time to supply reduction, demand reduction, legalization, and harm reduction approaches. There are also plenty of heartbreaking stories about people whose lives have been (negatively) affected by opiate addiction. The glass floor lets you view a scary prison-like room where people lay on beds shooting up and/or smoking opium.

Finally, the museum provides a large bright white "Reflection Hall" with soft new age music, benches, and columns painted with inspiring quotes.

The Farm

We met Laura, the world's friendliest Spaniard, on the bus from Savannakhet to Vientiane. She mistook us for South Americans, we were flattered, and became fast friends. A few days later when Laura told us she was going to an organic farm in Vang Vieng where you can volunteer to do farm work or teach English classes at a local community center, we decided we would go too. I was looking forward to being in a classroom and Travis wanted to help out in the gardens. Laura also told us that the farm was expecting a group of 20 Korean volunteers within the next few days. That sealed the deal. We hopped a morning bus and arrived in Vang Vieng in the afternoon.
Vang Vieng is like no other place we've seen in Asia. It's weird. It's sketchy. It's a rip off. It's a SERIOUS tourist trap- Internet is 3 times more expensive here than it is in the rest of Laos, and more than twice as much as in Korea or Chibna. The town is basically a single road lined with restaurants and "Friends" bars. These so-called "Friends" bars have low tables and lots of pillows for reclining and on small tvs mounted on the ceilings play "Friends" episodes on DVD all day long. All day long. In Vang Vieng many restaurants have not one, but 2 menus: the normal menu, and the 'special' menu. The special menu contains food cooked with marijuana in it as well as smoothies made with mushrooms and other natural drugs. After sunset, the whole town seems stoned or jittery, and everyone's eyes are glued to.... What else? "Friends"!
Busloads of obnoxious people arrive in Vang Vieng daily for one reason: tubing.
The tubing industry in Vang Vieng is unique. For $4 you can rent a tube and get a tuk tuk to take you up river. Within 50 meters from the drop off point is the first riverside bar, but there are dozens more most offering not only alcohol, drugs and snacks but also massive rope swings and high platforms for jumping off. It's a risktaking show-off's dream come true. As you gently float down the river in your tube, bartenders standing on stilted, bamboo platforms wave frantically and try to throw you a rope to drag you into their bar. People jumping and swinging off ziplines zoom above your head and splash loudly near you. People at the bars cheer at shout at the jumpers. Bad booty-fied early 90's rap music thumps from every riverside bar (though one of the last bars was playing Fleetwood Mac at full volume instead). In the water, which is only moderately clean, drunken people splash and splutter loudly. On one side of the river you can see large, steep, forested mountains. On the other side are scores of hotel bungalows being built. Everywhere in Laos, but especially in Vang Vieng and Luang Prabang, you can feel a tourism industry on the verge of blowing up.
We were understandably quite happy to be staying at the Farm 3km outside the town and away from the "Friends" laugh track, but the Farm was another trip all it's own. We showed up, were given organic mulberry tea, got a room and were ready to volunteer, but how we could get involved was not made clear. That afternoon at 4:30 someone led us up the muddy road to the classroom for the children's English class. On the road we saw plenty of chickens, plus locals bathing at the government-installed, public clean water faucets. The ladies bathe wrapped in a heavy sarong. The men just wear underwear.
There were 60 children outside the classroom aged between 7-12 none, plus a few toddlers. The kids grabbed our hands and were eager to look at us. As soon as the classroom door was opened they slipped off their shoes, ran inside, laid colorful plastic mats on the floor and diligently set up low tables to work on. A teacher was writing 10 sentences in English on the dirty, well-worn whiteboard. Once everything was set up, the teacher introduced us foreigners one by one. The entire classroom YELLED in unison "Hello! What! Is! Your! Name?!!!" Travis said his name and they shouted "Hello Travis! Where! Are! You! From?" He said U.S.A. and they screamed "USA!!! Nice to meet! You!" and then repeated this exact drill for exactly all 5 foreigners in attendance. By the end of introductions our ears were throbbing.
The second class of kids aged 13-20+ was much, easier on the ears. All of those students could read and speak in English and only their writing needed help. It was fascinating to see kids so eager to learn and so successful at using a foreign language. Put in perspective, our own Korean students, who I adore and put on a pedestal for being amazingly well-behaved and hard-working, are slackers given their positions of priviledge! When the group of Korean volunteers arrived, all of whom by law must have studied English all through elementary and middleschool, it was clear that the Lao students spoke MUCH better English than the wealthier, "better educated" Koreans.
We spent the next 5 days with the Koreans, painting a public school, digging a ditch for electric cables, making a concrete sink and patio, pulling weeds outside teh community center, watching Lao traditional dance, inspiring an impromptu B-Boy competition. I took four of the older students into town and showed them how to set up email accounts and use the Internet (only a mildly successive endeavour. 2 girls understood, the other 2 were lost mostly because they had trouble with typing accuracy and you can never really see a "password" because it shows up in dots not letters) Laura volunteered in the kitchen teaching the girls working there how to prepare Spanish food. We feasted on tortillas Espanolas and paella for dinner.

off the charts

Luang Prabang is where we were about five days ago. It is a nice, scenic town with several beautiful Buddhist temples. It is also crawling with people who love to make comments like "When I was here 4 years ago, it was much better, much less touristy." As travelling in southeast Asia has has now in many ways become a game of trying to run away from the tourists (while simultaneously forgetting the fact that you are yourself a tourist), Laos is not the tourist scarce haven that your guidebook from 2004 may make it out to be. This is not all bad, but it is not all good either.

With this in mind, we hopped on a slow boat that would take us 8 hours up the Mekong and Ou rivers to a village that can only be reached by boat. We had to stop over one night in a slightly larger village called Nong Khiaw where we drank way too much Beer Lao and rice whiskey with a friend we made on the boat, before making a hungover go at the final hour up to Muang Ngoi.

While Muang Ngoi was certainly not free of tourists, it was a pleasant mix of tourist infrastructure and actual village. Adding to the feeling of rugged isolation is the fact that there are no motor vehicles of any kind, no hot water, and the electricity gets turned off around ten pm in most places. The town is basically one main street lining the river with shops, houses, and guesthouse/restaurants. There are tons of animals roaming the street, including dogs, cats, chickens, and at least one turkey. It's a little chilly up in the mountains of northern Laos, so people like to light little streetside fires, especially in the early morning. The day we arrived, there was a wedding taking up a portion of the main road, where two Swedes who are (rumor has it) going to stay in town and open a business were tying the knot. The three of us were still a little too worn out from the night before to join in the festivities.

The next day, Taylor and I hiked out along a smaller side valley past sharp limestone peaks and out into a wide flat floor of rice paddies. Cutting across the rice paddies and into yet another side canyon brought us to an even more remote and rugged village. This place was the real deal: you can only reach it on foot, all the structures are bamboo houses on stilts, and everyone showers at communal spigets in the center of town. There are two guesthouse/restaurants right across from each other, locked in a bitter rivalry. We tried to climb further up the canyon to find a famed waterfall, but muck, streams, and loose water buffalo ultimately impeded our journey. That night we befriended the toddler daughter of our guest house owner, who is unbelievably cute and goofy. She promptly charged up to our bungalow when we arrived home, shaking her hand in demand of Taylor's tambourine, which we thought she had forgotten from earlier that day. She laughed, danced around, demanded tickles, etc. for a while before stomping off in anger because I would not give her my pen to draw on the journal entry I was working on.


Luckily, our new friend had forgotten my outrageous behavior of the night before when we said goodbye to her yesterday morning. Then we began a truly epic day of travel. We started by taking the hour long boat trip back to Nong Khiaw on a long narrow boat packed to the gills with people and cargo. In Nong Khiaw, we argued with for a while with our driver over transport to Udomxay. The problem was that we didn't have enough people for him to make the trip, so we had to wait around for more people to come, and ultimately pay an extra $1.50 per person (a hefty sum in Laos) for the journey in the back of his caged in pickup truck with benches. The three hour trip was scenic, windy and bumpy. Gentle on the eyes, hard on the rest of the body. In Udomxay, we had just enough time to pound a couple of helpings of sticky rice served in bamboo before our bus for Luang Nam Tha (our final destination for the day) headed out. This trip was on an actual bus, with the luxury of seats. The bus was driven and manned by two dudes with hipster haircuts who couldn't have been over 2o years old. It was also suffering from moderate to severe malfunctions in both the cooling and starting systems. In the last couple hours of the trip we had to stop about every 2o minutes to bum jugs of water from the nearest village, making sure to park on hills in order to pop the clutch. At one point during one of these stops, everyone except us foreigners left the bus, and then some unbeforeseen dude with a flashlight started poking around the bus and in peoples bags apparently looking for something. He didn't hassle us too much. In the end, we arrived here in Luang Nam Tha about 9 pm, which is quite late in Laos time. We were lucky enough to secure both lodging and food before the day was done.

for the children

If there is one thing I have learned in my year living in the Land of the Morning Calm, it is that Koreans love uniforms. For any special event or activity, there is a specific set of clothing that is to be worn. Matching is also quite common and popular (especially among siblings and couples). So it came as no suprise to me when the infamous "Korean Group" unloaded at the organic farm outside Vang Vieng and they were all wearing matching official Korea Youth Volunteer shirts and safari hats. We had been extremely excited that a Korean group was coming, but once they arrived, we were too shy to really talk to them. The necessary ice breaker came when I was unwittingly sitting with my guitar near me and the whole group accosted me out of nowhere and began demanding a pop song (luckily I recently learned how to play Beat It). Soon I was the center of attention, and of an impromptu photo shoot.

We had come to the farm hoping to volunteer, maybe teach English, or do some work with the crops. The disorganization of the farm made this difficult if not impossible. Working in the fields never materialized, and the teaching was only a couple hours a day in the evenings. This left us with a lot of time to kill during the day, and the 3km trip to town left us a bit stranded. There was originally some work to do pedaling booze to tubers heading down the river, but the overcast skies meant few tubers and lackluster sales. So it came that we eventually asked if we could tag along with the Koreans on their projects. Rather than just kind of helping out, we became full fledged Korean Youth Volunteers. The director's biggest concern was that they didn't have any extra T-Shirts for us. Luckily, they did have extra name tags.

The Korean Youth Volunteer Association has been working with the farm for several years now, and they (in conjunction with Mr. T, the farm's owner) have really been a gold mine for the local villages. They have set up several community centers and classrooms where there are English classes or other activities every night for any interested youth. The English classes are quite the experience. There is a basic introductory level class that packs the mudbrick classroom to the gills with about 70 (sometimes twice that) children aged 5-13. Having an introduction shouted at you by all those tiny voices is intense. The upper level class is smaller and more serious, with mostly teenage students, some of whose English is quite impressive. The kids all come on a voluntary basis every night to this open air simple classroom with only floor level seating and low desks. They are incredibly enthusiastic about the class and learning English. It's hard to imagine anything more different from teaching English in a Korean Hagwon.

Anyway, the Korean group took over the English classes from the regular teachers, which was quite interesting, considering many of the Koreans hardly spoke any English. There was mostly chaos and some games in those classes. Mostly what we did with the group was daytime working projects. We added a sink and expanded the patio of the bathroom at the community center, and then spent two days repainting and cleaning a nearby school building.

Now one problem that you can run into with volunteer work is that the volunteers, while enthusiastic, may not be experts in the type of work that is to be done. When you throw twenty Korean kids who have done nothing but study for their entire lives together with 10 five gallon buckets of paint which they are supposed to mix to a consistent color and then apply neatly to a shool building, the results can be mixed. After our first morning, the results were definitely mixed. No one had taped off the trim that was to be in a different color (until after we began painting) or laid down drop cloth. There were liters of sea foam colored paint in places it shouldn't have been. There were at least two shades of sea foam going on the school. Our pace was extremely slow. I was discouraged. by the end of the second day, however, the situation had improved vastly: the tones had been adjusted, some locals who actually know how to paint had taped off and fixed up the trim, and a full scale scrubbing operation had removed the globs of paint from the concrete entrance.

The school was about 700 meters from the farm, but the group had a special air conditioned bus (yes, there was even a microphone for speech giving that was used multiple times on the three minute journey) to take us all there. Every morning when we climbed on the bus to go out to the village, a crowd of children from the village would be waiting for us with special flower bouquets for the Koreans. They would hop on the bus with us and ride back out to the village. When we left for lunch or to go home for the day, the kids would all load onto the bus for the ride with us and then walk back to the village. The whole time we were working on the school, the kids gathered to help, or mostly play. The group handed out about 24 kites, which were constantly zipping through the air. One team of Koreans was blowing up and handing out balloon animals and swords. Periodically we would all stop work and ladies from the village would hand out fresh coconuts for us to drink from. The whole atmosphere was much more like a carnival than a work site. Despite my initial cynicism, the experience turned out to be quite positive. I realized that painting the school was only part of the intended purpose of the project. The cultural exchange, the fun atmosphere for the village people, the sense of accomplishment for the Korean students who don't get many chances to work with their hands, these were all important aspects of the project as well.

We felt guilty bailing on the olympic games the last afternoon to go tubing, but it was time for us to move on.