Hinbon River, Laos 2006

I arrived in Vientiane for my kayak trip and went to the guesthouse that I had stayed in previously. I loved the place because it reminded me of another era, overly romanticized in my mind for sure, of French colonial architecture in Southeast Asian style. Two stories, wrap around wide balcony, banana and palm trees overhanging the house, their branches reaching beneath the roof eaves. In the evenings the sound of cicada filled the warm fragrant air. Geckos of all sizes furtively ran about on the ceilings of the balcony, darting in all directions. In the evenings and very early morning the sound of monks chanting at the nearby Buddhist temples drifted over the small area of the city of Vientiane where I was staying.

The night before leaving on the paddle, I laid in the double bed, the wooden ceiling fan revolving gently above me with the mosquito net gently wafting in the warm air. I felt transported to one of those black and white movies from the 1950s that were set in French colonial Asia.  Despite the fact my room didn’t have the French doors the scenario was complete.  Heavy rain and the scent of tropical vegetation mingled with smoke from cooking fires seeped between the louvered shutters covering the windows.  It was a pity that I had to get up in the morning and set out for my birthday celebration river trip.

It turned out that I was the only one on the Hinbon River trip with a guide who looked to be 17 or 18.  I worried briefly, for a few short minutes and then I realized that it was going to be a better trip than I initially thought.  Who wanted to socialize with foreigners when it was Laos I came to see?  I felt excited.

After an hour of waiting for the 4X4 to arrive with driver, the guide K who had been assembling the food, camping equipment and boats in the dark in the abandoned looking travel outfitters office, said we were now ready to leave. When the driver came, everything was quickly packed and we left Vientiane at 6:30 am. We drove through empty streets lined with old faded looking buildings.  Some of them looked decidedly moldy from years of monsoon rains. Vientiane looked tired and peaceful at the same time. We passed a few gold and red temples and saw monks queuing with their rice bowls ready to make their rounds.

The drive to Khamoune province was long.  We drove south on the two lane paved national highway through fields of dried vegetation.  The three young men accompanying me on this drive were the driver, a friend of the driver and my guide. They were polite and made an effort to include me in their conversations. In reality, only 2 of them spoke English but the driver looked as though he was following along as the other two practiced their English with me over lunch at a small open-air restaurant. We all had noodle soup while the men had a side of fried chicken. Avian flu or bird flu was the big talk in Egypt at that time and before I left Cairo, I had made an effort to know what was the situation on bird flu in Laos. I seriously reconsidered whether I should go on the trip at all since undoubtedly I would be around poultry in the villages where we would be staying.  Both the Lao government website and CDC website did not indicate the presence of bird flu so I decided it was probably safe to go despite the fact the neighboring countries of Thailand and Cambodia had reported large outbreaks. Of course, I could hardly imagine a poor country like Laos and one whose government is communist ruled, would readily admit to having bird flu much less say if anyone had died of it.  I knew I was taking a chance but that added to the adventurous aspect of this 50^th birthday paddle.

At the end of a very long day of driving, we pulled off the highway and drove onto a rutted dirt road, past wooden bamboo houses on stilts.  We were getting closer to where we would spend our first night before beginning the river paddle the next day.  Soon we drove into a rural village scattering chickens as we bumped along. We stopped in front of a large bamboo thatched house on stilts.  The group of women and children sitting on the stairs chatting stopped when we pulled up and looked at us with curiosity. This was where K and I were going to spend the night. It was the house of the village chief.

We had arrived at 4 in the afternoon and night wasn’t for what felt like a long time. If I had wanted to experience rural Lao life, I had arrived in the thick of it. Since it was so hot and humid, one of the first things I did was change out of the pants I had worn from Vientiane and put on a sarong. Everyone, men and women in the village wore them. Mine of South Pacific style with breadfruit trees and huts in bright red and yellow colors contrasted with theirs of the typical stripped Lao – Humong dark colors.

I spent the remains of the afternoon in the house, with the male village leader who seemed to spend most of his time lying on a mat receiving visitors. I wrote in my diary and read a little. Finally I got tired of sitting on the floor, there were no chairs, and not being able to speak to anyone, I decided to ask my guide to take me for a walk through the village. The whole village consisted of about 15 stilted houses with lots of animals running around including suspicious looking chickens.

Throughout the entire trip I saw chickens that I was sure were diseased as many of them were missing feathers on their heads if not entire bodies.  Since there was nothing I could do about their presence in my vicinity, I made a concerted effort not to go near them. The funny thing was that quite often in nearly every house I stayed, chickens would climb up the ladders leading to the open veranda space where I sat and sleep and walk right by me.

In the early evening, since there was no running water in the house, I asked my guide to show me the way down to the river to bath. It was still very hot and muggy and I was dying to clean myself up from the days’ travel.  Also I had observed, from my perch at the headman’s house, women and men walking by with towels draped over their arms and bars of soap in plastic bags. They were going somewhere for a bath.  I imagined they were going to a village washhouse but when I asked my K, he said it was to the river they went to bath.  In remaining twilight, we walked through the village and down a narrow path through the cornfield to the river.

At the bank of the river in the dwindling daylight, K easily made his way over protruding tree roots growing at the river’s edge. I hesitated as I could tell the soil was claylike and probably slippery.  Desire to cool off overcame caution and I slithered my way down to the river to bath in my sarong like the girl who had come with us.  Afterwards like the girl, I changed into clean sarong. I found throughout my entire river trip, though none of the villages had running water, grid electricity and in some cases no roads to the outside, everyone was practically religious about their personal hygiene; making it a ritual to go down to the river in the evening to bath. On the way back to the village, I looked up and saw a shooting star. I called out to K and together we watched star’s trail glitter over the soft blackness of the night sky.

Feeling cooler and cleaner and pleasantly full from a dinner of noodles and vegetables, I laid down on my mat behind the sheet the headman’s wife set up for me.  The mat was surrounded by a mosquito net that kept the mosquitoes out but trapped the heat in. The family slept behind a palm-thatched wall fitted with a door.  Village chickens settling in for the night, clucked outside in the quiet that fell over the night while dogs let out an occasional bark. After a while, I fell asleep half listening to the sounds of K’s voice as he conversed quietly with the headman’s oldest daughter.

The next morning we started early, after a light breakfast. The headman’s son backed the tractor trailer out from under the house that would carry us, our gear and kayaks to the Hinbon River’s edge a couple of mile away. The tractor was like no other vehicle I had ever seen. Two long bars extended from the single front wheel towards the driver while we sat in the small trailer pen. The whole get-up had a look that reminded me of a Lao farmer gone Harley Davidson motorcycle rad. We passed water buffalos cooling off in the early morning temperatures in rice patties.