The fishing net retrieved, the Thai soap opera watched, we headed down to the river. Along the way, we passed a school two of the guys used to attend. It was a big U-shaped building on stilts and had an expansive soccer field. I also noted a basketball court. We talked about sports in America, and I did my best to explain American football, but they remained mystified.
Hua’s older cousin had come with us from his uncle’s house to the river. (A clumsy ethnographical note here: Lao people make no distinction in their language between cousins and siblings.) She is 18 and has just started learning English. She was painfully shy, but the guys applied steady pressure to get her to practice what little English she had. So she and I stood knee deep in the river and tried to have a conversation. It became obvious that this was impossible with her level of English and her inability to understand my accent. Hua told me this is the main problem with people learning English in the countryside: their pronunciation is so bad that without native speakers to interact with, they can learn all the grammar and vocabulary in the world and still not understand or make themselves understood. I tried the simplest questions but could only get one or two monosyllabic responses. She was getting visibly stressed, her face tight and her hands reaching up to clutch at it every time she tried to think of a response, so I let her off the hook and waded back to shore.
Meanwhile, our haul from the net was comprised of a single, two-inch fish that we immediately threw back. The water was cold and the current deceptively fast. Once you got out in it up to your knees, you had to fight to stand in one place. The Lao guys leapt and splashed and sang, anyway.
My favorite memory from the walk back was of Hua wearing Stephen’s pink sunglasses and singing:
I am very handsome,
I am very handsome.
Yes, I’m sure.
We got back to Her’s house and climbed (in my case, painfully) onto our bikes to head over to Hua’s. The road we biked down is unfinished, so it’s not just dirt — it’s dust. Every time a car drives past, a huge cloud of dust kicks up in its wake and settles over everything in the vicinity. I learned from another villager that the road is set to be paved, but won’t be completed until next year. I can’t imagine what it will be like in the rainy season. One big sinkhole, most likely.
Hua’s house was a large one-room structure also built with cinderblocks. The floor was bare concrete with straw mats covering an area in the corner. We all sat on the porch for a while and tried to lure some of the kids over, but the entire gaggle of them remained at a wary distance, giggling and trying to hide behind corners or each other. Fortunately, none of them burst into tears this time.
Before long, we went inside one by one and fell asleep. I am only capable of power naps during the day, exhaustion notwithstanding, so after twenty or thirty minutes I got up and sat on the porch. Two little girls came up to the house, followed by a younger boy, and they kept stumbling over their own feet as they looked up at me and then quickly away again. They were hurling balls up in the air and trying to catch them. The boy waved at me and said “sabaidee” several times. Noticing his T-shirt, which featured characters from what looked to be a Thai science fiction show, I pulled out my iPod and started up a 3D starfighter game I downloaded months ago and forgot about. His mind was blown. He peered over my shoulder with silent rapture as I gunned down spaceships and laser turrets. I would have let him play, but it’s a motion sensing game that’s a little beyond me, even, so I figured the learning curve was too steep for him. He seemed content to watch, anyway. When I turned it off, he walked around in front of me and gave me a look of deepest awe before turning and sprinting away.
Felix came out and sat with me on the porch as the sun went down. He asked me about America and mountains and winter and above all, snow. I told him about the Rockies and making yellow snow on their peaks in the middle of July. I described snowmobiles and skiing and snow angels. He asked about the cities and asked if it was true that they are so bright you can’t see the stars. I told him that in Portland, many nights you could see four or five, but in bigger cities, none at all.
I went out into the trees to take a piss and heard a woman singing in Lao off in the forest. I stood there for a long time. Just when I resolved to go grab my iPod and try to record it, or maybe get one of the guys to translate it for me, the singing stopped.
By that time, dinner was ready and everyone else woke up. Hua’s mother had set the table and then tried to slip away, but we insisted, in three languages, that she join us for the meal. We ate rice, soup, fried fish, and chicken. We were all in raptures about the fish, which was oily and liberally seasoned, and kept praising it through our translators. In Laos, people take such compliments to mean you want more food and will keep feeding you until your gut ruptures, if you let them. So we ate fish, and then we ate a lot more. Finally, Felix told us that in the Hmong culture, fish is a more common meal than chicken — they eat chicken on their holidays and other special occasions. We offered a few compliments about the chicken, too, but emphasized how much it had filled us up.
Hua’s mother spoke to us quietly in Hmong, saying how honored she was by our presence in her home. It was a touching moment, and I spoke for the group saying how honored we were to be there.
About to eat some seriously tasty fish. Ignore the blurriness.
After clearing the dishes away, we returned to the porch and sat talking while children orbited around at a safe distance. Stephen kept trying to get a little boy to give him a high five, but the kid beat a hasty retreat every time. Elias let some of the girls take pictures with his camera. They were wracked with nerves and giggles, holding the camera like some precious relic that might crumble to dust at any moment. A man came up to the porch and surveyed us in silence, and Her told us at length how the man was mute, but highly intelligent and capable of great eloquence by signaling with his hands.
As we said our goodbyes and climbed back on our bikes, the supposedly mute man called out, “Sabaidee!” The guys laughed.
Outside of Hua's house with some Hmong folks.
We trekked back down the road in the dark, the dust floating up in clouds across the beams of our headlamps. Her’s family had strung up mosquito nets, and Stephen, Elias, Felix, and I got cozy together underneath a bright pink one. Tired as I was, I can’t say I slept very well on the hard concrete, sandwiched between my two big farang friends. None of us were smelling our best, either.
The following morning is obscured by fog in my memory. I don’t remember breakfast apart from the fact that it did not include my junkie’s fix of caffeine. I do recall some discussion about the guys’ plan to take us up the nearby mountain to look at the villages from afar. This was a two-hour slog up a steep mountain road and although I tried to play it casually, my resistance was as fierce as my tailbone was bruised. Fortunately, we decided against it and set out for Tad Sae waterfall, instead, which had the added bonus of being on the way back to Luang Prabang.
The first leg of the ride passed uneventfully. We stopped at a market to buy barbecued fish and a big plastic bag full of sticky rice for a picnic lunch. Presently we made the turn onto the dirt road that would take us to the river, and had the good luck to run into a guy selling ice cream from a Styrofoam cooler strapped to his bike. Once at the river, we found ourselves back on the frontiers of Farang Land. Elephants lumbered down the banks with tourists bouncing on the platforms lashed to their backs.
Elephants!
A short boat ride later, we found ourselves at the entrance to Tad Sae. Next to it was an enclosure containing several more enslaved elephants.
Poor elephant.
The first thing Stephen said upon seeing the waterfall was that the stones were worn so smooth it almost looked like someone had poured concrete all over them. Soon after, we discovered a huge blue pipe running into the mouth of the falls and providing the entirety of its water supply. For all we know, those stones might actually be covered with concrete. “Tad Sae waterfall, all natural,” Stephen said. “To be completed in 2013.”
Waterfall under construction?
To be fair, it is the dry season and the waterfall is natural when the rains come. I can’t blame the people who own the place for wanting to cash in on tourists year-round, but still…
Behold the mouth of the mighty Tad Sae waterfall in all its natural splendor!
We ate our lunch Hmong style by rolling balls of sticky rice with our hands and plucking meat off the fish bones with our fingers. The rest of the farangeyed us curiously as they munched their salads. We became fascinated by the ants beneath our table as they performed stunning feats of engineering by carrying off massive balls of rice. And we took these pictures of the guys.
Hua
Her
Yeng, aka Felix
Her pushed Felix into the water, fully clothed, and before long they were rampaging all around the swimming hole and occasionally splashing those of us still at the table. When it came time to leave, Elias thought he had traced the ants back to their source at the foot of a large wooden sign that displayed a map of the park’s hiking trails. He rested his hand on it as he bent over to peer at the ground, and the whole thing toppled backward with a groan.
Oops...
We left after that.
Pretty well tired out by that point, Sabrina and I commandeered a songthaew to haul us and our bikes back to Luang Prabang. Elias decided to come along, since he had to get back and teach a lesson that night. We made plans to meet the guys at the hostel later that evening and said our goodbyes.
And that will do it for this two-parter. I hope you’ll forgive the over-abundance of details. My motivation was selfish in that I wanted to preserve as many of these memories as I could. Even so, I have already forgotten a wealth of information about the Hmong and their way of life. What stays with me is the underlying feeling of our experiences — a sense of cultural vertigo balanced out by the kindness and openness of our new friends. Their understanding of family is at the same time broader and deeper than ours typically is in the States, and I came away feeling like mine got expanded.
“When I first saw you, I felt already like we are family,” Hua told me.
I felt the same way.
The Traveling Yokel 