Heroic Charlene

I have sung her praises before.

Already while fighting the gravel and large stones of the Golden Triangle I came to realize that I was in the presence of not just a bike, but a unique work of art – see April 2012 on this blog.

This time she didn't have to contend with overly tough terrain, but rather a lot of mud and water in her dérailleurs and brakes.

Every evening I washed her clean in a river or hosed her down then popped into a motorbike repair shop to oil her up. And every day she started out, purring like a kitten.

Once again, many thanks and much gratitude to Willy of Top Cycle, 47 Don Palan Road in Vientiane who is the only person in the country who realizes how precious she is and knows how to tune her.

The Icing On The Latte

 

 

 

 

Way up on the hill, beyond the silent valleys and crowning peaks; beyond the blue sliver of dawn and the dark silent breath of dusk.

Way, way up; beyond a thousand forgotten bamboo villages and smoking hearth fires.

Far up, far above the myriad of dusty and muddy trails; flying over the immense and endless Indochinese night.

Is Luang Prabang.

 
 

Summertime, and the living is ... wet

News of our world.

In this prosaic posting I will cover family stuff.

So, our big boy and girl, Zéphyr and Maya-Swann are now in Canada after spending a few weeks in Toulouse with their grandparents. My nephew Steven is sweet enough, year after year, to pick them up, take them here, take them there, deposit them, fetch them and keep them happy. On Tuesday they are off to Camp Manitou to explore their Canadianess!

Before they left we went for a weekend to Vang Vieng. You can read about a previous trip to Vang Vieng at http://mair-hyman.blogspot.com/2010/10/october-break-assholes-october-29th.html.

I am delighted to say that things have changed and the diabolical tubing station just off the Organic Farm has been removed. Calm and sanity have returned to the area and this time we were able to stay there with pleasure.

There are still crazy people running around the world, by the way. Michael Roy is an American who gives one faith that maybe, just maybe, America will become America again. His website is: http://threeruleride.com/

Sarah Melki is a French woman who built a bicycle out of bamboo and left Vientiane to ride back to France. She is presently in Mongolia. You can check her out at: http://bamboosara.wordpress.com/

Zephyr and Maya-Swann both did very well in school this year. This, and Cléa's academics, prove that in the Hyman family being a lousy student skipped several generations. I would like take this occasion to thank their teachers, Pierre Barret who taught Maya-Swann this year, Alain Leroux-Gasnier who taught Zéphyr and Jacques Barret who taught and inspired Zéphyr last year. To all the teachers and educators at the Lycée Hoffet French School in Vientiane – thank you...merci!

The house is almost silent now. With our two big monsters flying around the world on their own, the only (!) noise in the house is that of Saya Ephraïm David who is managing to fill the void with gusto.

Plans for the house are moving along, with Marie-Do and Olivier building a model to help us plan it better. One day I will get off my ass and feed the blog on the house. We should get the Building Permit by the end of this week but are waiting for the monsoon to end before construction.

The weather here is bona fide monsoon. You wake up in the morning to soft sunshine and when you go downtown to take care of some business you get rained on so violently it hurts your hands where they clutch the scooter handles. Thirty minutes later the sun is out and the streets are dry. To us this feels like climate instability, but that's the way it has always been here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jungle Fever

What a strange night! We come here, to Ban Pako, to celebrate Marie-Do's birthday.

It is rare that we see the country-side during the rainy season since we, like all other falang, are like snow-birds – leaving the drowning ship of Indochina at every monsoon for a summer of rich red wines and old stone cottages in the Métropole. But this summer we are here and climbing the red roads, now somewhat dry from the last rain . We were both subdued and calmed by the radiant greens of the rice fields and the plastered reds of the flooded paddies. Men and women worked in the fields, storing up a mud dam wall here and re-planting stalks of fresh rice into tiny individual pits there.

As they replanted the stalks, the rice shoots - vibrant in their green (greeness? greenitude? greenerosity?), seemed to be shouting out to shaking heaven above and heavy inundated mud below, “I want to live! I want to live!”, and live they will under expert hands.

Ban Pako at night, alone and empty, is still Ban Pako and still resonates with the laughter and probings of times we came here with friends (see http://mair-hyman.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-jewel-in-crown.html). Our cabin patio now with just the two of us and mortally top-heavy glasses of Pernod rang out in silence and complicity. The rains were holding up; seemingly held up in the overladen clouds by an invisible hand with fingers tightened, clasped and secure.

Just before the rains came I developed a fever and felt cold. A kind of cold, the kind of cold that cuts through your body and chest and joints as if it were a block of sharp ice, as though it were a powerful breath of air directly from the tomb. Shivering, my teeth clanking, I ran to the car to get some paracetamol and water reserves. One thousand milligrams of that stuff and the sounds of the insects screeching in the leaves.

At last, I thought to myself, at last I have contracted a tropical disease, the dreaded dengue fever. Not as bad as malaria, but still ... I felt as though every strange fruit, rice shoot and exotic insect had somehow incarnated themselves into a ghostly presence come to haunt my every dream. In a way it was a relief, it was the realization of an awkward and perverse ambition: to be invaded and possessed by all that Indochina had to throw at me, to live an experience as feverish and complicated, as full of detail and complex as the overheated mass of a low-land jungle floor. In my fever I was the crawling insect life; the mocking cricket calls; the gnawing of the stubborn termites; the hideous joy of the monkeys; the slithering snake dreams.

When the rains came and stayed they were the muddy bottom and sickening treble notes of this vast feverish colonial nightmare. The gravelly sounds of the low deep ravines, of water, an incessant tic-tac of the pin-point drops; wood flies and scarab beetles run, dash, fly and crawl to shelter. Black ants scurry. Night moths the size of door handles get stuck in my throat.

And all night long the sweats. The activity of the soul. The pain and pleasure of becoming one and indivisible with the red earth in this distant and strange land. In the Lao alphabet there is not one letter that has a straight line. Vowels are sometimes placed before the consonant, sometimes above it, sometimes below it, sometimes after it. The whole thing is rounded, untrappable. There are no hard corners to us to latch on to. And thus my dreams were filled with the round and the evasive, the alluding, the hinted at. My joints vibrated miserably.

Dengue Fever, or Breakbone Fever in Lao is called khay luat aak- ໄຂ້ເລືອດອອກ, the illness of blood going out. At present all of Vientiane is in the grasp of a dengue epidemic. Mahasot Hospital is a beehive of scurrying white-coated doctors, with nurses wheeling patients as dark and thin and weak as rice-paper. In the French community the words are whispered in dread, “une telle a la dengue!” “un tel a la dengue!”. We massage lemon-grass extract into every visible pore of our children's bodies, our ceiling fans turn at full speed, mosquito nets are checked and re-checked for tears and trustworthiness.

We keep ourselves informed, cell phones ring constantly. And here I am as the rain starts to fall in huge gulps, shivering into the dark!

Whatever the rhyme or reason, whatever the cause, the next morning I awoke with the rain still battering the roof of our bungalow and my night-shirt wet with sweat and I jumped from bed in a blossom of perfect health! The angel of death, מלאך מוות, had come, seen the bloody door-post and passed on his way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The (salt) waters of redemption

...and then the light comes as the rains let up, the light comes with deafening intention, a solitude of volonté as hard as ice.

It bores down on every creature and makes the white of the soft lime walls growl and groan and glow. On our scooters, on bikes, on foot, we seek the shade as if it were a Messianic invention.

Palm trees are delicious for this, their gentle tentacles high up above the ground both shelter and breath, allowing for the wind to carress. If the coconuts become unshackled they can tear down with deadly force; hence the need for trusty gardeners who can see the drama before it happens and take action with long poking sticks.

Swimming pools are also sources of salvation; to feel suddently cool and enjoying the shock of the dive. I take my children in my dripping arms and sing to them.

ושאבתם מים בששון

ממעייני הישועה.

ושאבתם מים בששון

ממעייני הישועה.

מים, מים, מים מים

הוי מים בששון.

מים, מים, מים, מים,

הוי מים בששון.

הי, הי, הי, הי,

מים, מים,

מים, מים

מים, מים בששון.

מים, מים

מים, מים,

במים, מים ששון.

And they sang back to me:

הי, הי, הי, הי,

מים, מים,

מים, מים

מים, מים בששון

An address for those of you who live here and those of you who are passing through. A wonderful space with fabulous food, great wines, green gardens and a delicious salt-water swimming pool (no chloride).

Ban Thana is open on the weekends or weeknights with a 24 hour call. Reservations are absolutly necessary. It is not cheap. Cash only. Totally totally worth every penny.

Directions: drive down Thadeua Road to the clock tower roundabout, and take the road that goes along the Mekong – and not the road that goes to the Friendship Bridge. Turn left at Soy10 and left again at the fork in the road. It's on your right.

French and Middle-Eastern menus.

Call Philippe at: 020 77 44 97 81

By the Waters of Babylon - Dedicated to the coffee growers of the Bolaven Plateau

 

Waking up in the morning is like being released from hibernation. The long night of shadows and rain, as the wet clear drops hit the roof and garden leaves all night long. All night long, the constant droning of wind, crackling of the branches and the moaning of the rain. Rain on the roof and rain on the torn tarp protecting the kitchen from the leaking holes in the asbestos tiles. Rain on the old cement alley-way surrounding the house and rain on the thirsty red earth as it kicks up in starts and fits, little rusty dirt seizures. The rain like winter in Canada, rain that keeps you indoors and makes the road treacherous, rain that splatters your clothing by day and infiltrates your dreams by night, making them a collection of fleeting images: border crossings, an old friend, an invented person sharing a joke, an envelope hidden inside the kitchen cabinets; little innocuous snippets of sound and image, a black and white collage devoid of all emotion or remembrance, a meaningless rain-drenched parade.

In the morning the sky may have cleared somewhat or it may not have. This morning it is mother-of-pearl, reminiscent of the eternally wet skies of Hanoi, although in Hanoi it was a grey we could be proud of, is was our grey – the grey that made everyone constantly mean and miserable. Here in Vientiane the grey is an unfortunate interlude, an exception, and the whole city seems to be holding its breath simply waiting for a gust of unseen lofty wind to come and lift the momentary marasme.

Once that happens, the city can get back to its real business, its veritable vocation, which is to party and throw tomorrow into the arms of oblivion under a sky so blue it seems to be in constant celebration.

Tropical Storm Bonna - For Bonna Devora Haberman

Last night the rains came with great clattering of intention. The lightening was near and closely reverberated by the thunder, the clap of which was loud and threatening, and dis-joining the universe. Somewhere the great leaves on the great trees were illuminated in split-second triumphs and the rain came down with the vengeance of an army. Twigs and branches came sweeping in array off the overhanging canopies and I had to bring the car in closer to the house to protect the hood and windshield . Nature will eventually take back control from the civilization we have imposed upon it, but I don't want it to be on my bill!

Woe to the crawling and creeping insect lives going so slowly about their routines. The ants in the ground were surely able to replenish their water supplies and enliven dried-up cisterns, but how many of them were flooded away needlessly and sent floating down the cement driveway out of the garden and flush to the street? “We are not disposable!” I can hear them cry as their little fat red bodies flowed, turning uncontrollably in the relentless unforgiving torrent.

For split seconds at a time the electricity in the house would flutter and invisible fingers turned on disconnected air conditioning units. It is only a matter of time before battery operated children's toys begin to chatter and whirl all on their own, arms flapping up and down like developmentally challenged black-belts turning around on themselves looking for new playmates.

In the end calm returned. I suppose that somewhere and for some other sub-visual form of life a Jonas was thrown off the boat and the tempest subsided. As the roar turned into a low deep groan and finally into a whisper and sleep overcame us big people, a tiny Leviathan swallowed its hapless frightened prey. Somewhere, on the banks of some newly formed puddle, between the grass and the red dirt of our garden the beast spit the prophet out. Somewhere, between a flower patch and a tiny wet hollow in the ground lies the massive teeming and soon to be repentant city of Nineveh. In the gathering coolness of the Indochinese night, as the clouds disperse, the earth lets off its blanket of humid perfume and the heat of the day is dispelled with the dying winds. Somewhere a desperate creature calls out despite itself; and despite all historic precedent and logic, the tiny metropolis lends and ear and listens and turns. Somewhere a kikayon tree grows and is worm-withered and somewhere in the our vast expanse of trees, bushes, flowers and wasteland something sits crying in a lean-to on a mound, its mission accomplished, the damage undone.

The morning rose cool and refreshed; a chill enveloped the house and for the first time in months we turned off the overhead fans. As I opened the front doors leading to the terrace, a wave of vegetative bliss hit me as the storm-washed garden flared back at my awe-stricken wondrous gaze. The flowering reds were more red, the green stems more green ... and of course the blue canopy of the sky a crisp thing, a firmament new and delicious. For the first time in months the sluggish pre-monsoon sky was eager and clean and no longer just a fartful of muggy heat promising days of sustained lassitude and restless siestas.

This was a day for action! For deep breaths, for calisthenics! I jumped up and down, thanking Jonas for his fine work.

If you wish to see photos of our garden, please click here:

http://mair-hyman.blogspot.com/2011/03/our-garden-at-night.html