Midnight Train To Georgia

Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Photos

No legends or explanations.

This is what life looks like out there.

Sunday, April 19, 2015

Six Days to Paklai

For all and in all I had six days.

Between a visit from my sister and brother-in-law

from France and my wife’s trip to Hanoi with her

girlfriends I had one day to get to the middle of

nowhere, four days to cycle around nowhere and

one day to get back.

A short trip with no wiggle room.

I decided to take the bus the Sanakham for the

second time:

http://mair-hyman.blogspot.com/2013/10/you-must-be-meshuga.html)

and take another route.

This time I hugged the Mekong until it slipped up

into Laos and then went along the Thai border till

Kenthao.

From there, the dirt road to Paklai. In the old days

it was said that there used to be a boat service

from Paklai to Vientiane, but like the bouilleur de

cru in France, this little bit of romance has gone

the way of the vespasienne.

So it was the bus back.

This trip is a short tale told in four entries:

Sore Everywhere

Bless the Lao Police

Blinking of the Eye, and

Back to the Mekong

The bare bones of the day were that I woke up early in Sanakham and had my breakfast, an omelette mixed with green herbs and served on a small mountain of steamed rice with a bowl of soup. I always find the people in this part of the counry so amicable! It is the same in France where people from the West, locked to the sunset, are nicer than anywhere else.

So, the bare bones of the day were that I covered 65.25 km and cycled for a total of 6 hours, 2 minutes and 33 seconds.

As soon as I left the Mekong to hug the Thai border on the Nam Heung River the road became very difficult. Before that, though, I had to cross the Mekong by river craft; two canoes planked together and an out-board motor. I loved the crossing and standing there on the plywood plank that was the deck, I felt all at once the exhilirating beauty contained in the possibility that one can decide to change one's life from one moment to the next. How simple and how horribly complex are homo sapiens! Standing there, jostling for balance amid the tame Mekong waves, I looked to the left and the right. It was an overcast day, one of those days when a mist of delicate white hugs the earth until the tree-tops, leaving the entire spectacle of mountains and fields in a lightish blue haze. Distances were cut off from my view by this haze which had settled deeply on the Mekong herself. Mountains rose, large hills rather, as round and full as pregnancy and there I stood playing with the changing perspectives of the Great River east and west.

Yes! Surely the was a good day to change a life! Certainly these two changing perspectives were the ones telling me to get out of the haze of illusion and see desperately flitting reality for what it was; the time had come to cancel the debt on the past and embrace truth.

As easy as that sounds, the river crossing was the beginning of the second half of the journey. The roads, less used, were in hideous disrepair and crevices had been allowed to form, crevices the size of minor valley systems. The road on the Thai side was paved, and a marvel of modern surveying techniques: where I had to climb ungrateful hills and clumber down unstable descents the road on the other side rose and fell gently, coaxed as it were by soft asphalt. Still, I would have it no other way.

Leaving Sanakham I was delighted to smell the air. After living in Vientiane, the air around the fields, with the river just off to my left, smelt like honey.

Like honey, which is to say that it was rich and deep, of a cleanliness perfumed by orchards and fields. The early morning fires had died down and the brisk ash lingering in the air gave all of space the delicious humect of fresh tea.

It was not always so. In the land by the river, between where the Mekong drops off like a muscle deep into Lao territory and the Nam Heung, sits an expanse of land where bananas are grown in groves along with man ton.

The whole place, this entire arm of the country, is a large thick band of fertility. The soil is dark and the river runs red like the Mississippi, although surrounded by hills on either side. Unlike other places in Laos, there are no steps down to this river. It is not wide and it is a border. From the Lao side, at least, no life emerges from it. No steps, no paths, just great forbidding jungle; no vegetable gardens flatter her banks.

The agriculture in ths place is also very thick and intensive. Many of the surrounding hills have been burnt bare by the peasants with man ton planted row by row like Flanders Field. All throughout the fields of them men and women were hard at work clearing. Their features were covered against the dust and soot by knitted face masks and they wore heavy clothing despite the heat. Machetes, axes and hoes went up and down battering the soil and remaining tree trunks as though the earth were something to be punished. When I cycle by, the workers stop and shout, cheering. In fields where this work had already been completed, I could see a solitary worker – also heavily dressed – and carrying a yellow tank on this back, spraying. All over this pastoral setting seeped the unpleasant chemical smell of diffused poison.

At one point I had to clear over an expanse of road under construction made muddy by watering. The mud of it got into every pore of Charlene and ripped the lubrication off her chain and gears. I stopped at a halted lut tai (http://mair-hyman.blogspot.com/2013/10/your-cheatin-heart.html) that had a bottle of motor oil in the carriage and waited for the owner to descend from the hill to ask him if I coul take some oil for my gears. "Is this motor oil (nam man)?" I asked.

"No", he answered and used a word I did not know. So I took up the bottle to look inside and there I saw the milky liquid and could smell all the horrifying ramifications.

Inside was the sticky white water, the poison male gift unforgivingly given to a forgiving Earth. Deep in the horrifying bowels of a factory somewhere, a human masticating machine with tubes and pipes and clock-ins, in a place designed to pervert the dreams and lives of its workers, deep in such a place this deadly sperm was being enacted. Man had found another way to rape the land; it was no longer enough, no longer economically satisfying, to abuse nature on a small scale. Now an entire system had to be implemented so that some people could have their daily orgasm, their exploiting discharge as money clattered into the bank.

I never thought cycling would turn me into a feminist.

To make a long story short, the air stank with it.

The rest of the way to Kenthao was rough, especially when I passed kilometre 50 on the speedometer. I had calculated with Google Earth that this was a distance I would do that day but of course I cannot take every gully and tire distraction into account. The bottom line is that km. 50 is some sort of psychological barrier for me.

There were no places to eat along the way, either, so I had to make do with industrial noodle soup in a shop. All this meant that I was weak and stretched. Every inch forward was like climbing the Everest. I was losing control of my body.

In mid-afternoon the blanket haze had given way to a dull warm sunshine, but as I climbed the last painful crest to Kenthao thunder clouds began to gather and threaten over Thailand. The river below rushed red and furious in its shortened banks and tiny rain drops began to hit the fine yellow sand of the road, creating miniscle moon craters on its surface. The rain at that point was not heavy enough to turn the track to mud and just light enough to flatter the air with freshness.

When I entered the town and the road became asphalt the rain began in earnest and drenched me.

It was all delight, a joyeous undertaking, a limpid exhilaration: I was wiped of the day's dust by that one act of grace.

Bless the Lao Police

People who know about muscles and stuff will tell you not to work out streneously two days in a row. The first workout pushes some sort of acid out of your unused muscles while tearing them. If you don't give your body a chance to rest then all kinds of damage can occur. So after yestday's gruelling 65 km I got up and did another 25. This was against my body's better judgment and it protested.

The sun, even shortened by the clouds, was extravegant in its pain and I was perspiring so profusely I thought that every vital fluid was leaving my body. After a horrid lunch of fried garbage balls I went to siesta in a Vat in Ban Nahin (see photos).

I thought I was nice and refreshed after a doze and a coffee, but I was just wrong! A few minutes back in the saddle were enough to prove that I simply wasn't going anywhere.

But this silly country! There is no shade anywhere! On the cut-off from the N4 to the dirt road leading to Paklai I fell into a heap of unconciousness on the outdoor wooden bed of a service station and there I lay and could move no more.

I was simply shattered. The view was an ugly road and some petrol pumps. I would have wished for a more romantic view of rolling hills, but that is what I got stuck with. After a tiny rain I got back on Charlene and half way up yet another gruelling climb I was stopped by the police.

The police in this country are in a league of their own. After a bit of friendly banter they asked to see my passport and even took a photo of it with a smartphone. Luckily I speak Lao well enough now to present well, as a teacher in Vientiane. They gave me a bottle of ice-cold water and offered to take me to the next village.

They finally dropped me 10 km up the road and introduced me to the nai ban. They wouldn’t let me take their photos, but now we’re friends on Facebook!

I washed up and walked to the temple. A rain and violent wind started up and all the earth smelt of goodness from the sky; I was tired, so tired.

A Blinking of the Eye

Ban Pakkem

That night ended a lightning storm right over Ban Pakkem accompanied by rain of deluvian proportions.

Someone in the nai ban's house was snoring monumentally at about 23:00, and rather than go squeeze his nose or make noises like Louis Funèse in "La Grande Vadrouille", I put in my industrial strength Canadian Shoppers Drug Mart ear plugs and went back to sleep.

Sleep. A sleep as sweet as death, this slumber was a never-ending descent into a timeless restfullness; a heavenly repose, a lithe and supple dream time perfumed by only sweet memories. I had opened the window of my room on the stuffy top floor and the cool star-filled breeze was collecting itself in patterns of joy all above and throughout the mosquito net provided for me by my hosts.

I could feel my thigh muscles relaxing, almost breathing like lungs.

At about 5:00 a thick and deaf rumbling began to pound its way through the ear plugs, as though a thousand drummers on a distant hilltop were trying to breach the distance and establish contact with the village. I opened my eyes in the dazed nether-light of my forgotten dream and it occurred to me to take out my ear plugs.

When I did, the truth of the situation hit me. A rain, a big one.

Just to place this in its correct and entire context: this was to be my last cycling trip on the back roads before the monsoon hits and turns the entire country into a river of mud. I have another big trip planned for May on an asphalt road out of Oudomxay, but this was meant to be my last gasp into the heartland of Laos while I could still pedal before the ຂີ້ຝຸ່ນ (dust) turned into ຂີ້ຕົມ (mud).

And now it was raining. And not just raining! The tin roof of the house was like a sound box, exaggerating every single sound, every one of the millions of droplets until the depths of despair. Lightening, followed in rapid succession by thunder, first cut the air and then propulsed it. The building actually moved. The storm was right above our heads.

I got up to look out the window, visions of my head struck by lightening never far from my imagination, and there saw the entire village and valley beyond beset by the staccato blinking of the Universal Eye.

Out there, to the right, there seemed to be a mountain. The base of it was lit from the interior, as though it were built of a florescent transmitting rock. It was only later that I realized that I was looking at the crown of the Buddha tree growing in the back of the Vat garden I had visited that very night.

Indeed, that night after dinner and after darkness had descended over all the land I walked down the path to the Vat and wondered through the grounds shining my flashlight on the temple frescoes:

A woman took an arrow shot into her flank by a monkey-monster;

People crossing a river carry a musical instrument;

A pair of masks in horrifying and morbid black and white;

Buddha is being born – gods are smiling, and Krishna is too. A heavenly woman showers the baby with flower petals: the Universe, at peace, is finally facing redemption.

But now in the total darkness punctuated only by lightning throngs the Vat was black invisible and the tree looked like a mountain lit from within.

As much as I loved the sound and smell of the rain and the deep throat-filled rumbling of the thunder, I stood there cursing my luck. I turned my flashlight outside to get a view of the village and the rooftops but the beam was halted within a meter or two by a wall of heavy drops.

Even if the rain stops immediately, I thought, it will take hours for the sun to dry the mud. But the rain did not stop immediately at all. It carried on with a vengeance well until 8:00. It carried on while the children walked to school in their uniforms: white shirts for all, black trousers for the boys and a dark sin with silver trim for the girls. It carried on while the village dogs sat with their ears held back. It carried on while the roosters crowed to the invisible fleeting sun.

The sun cleared the slogging earth just enough to let it compact under the early morning load of trucks and public transport. It was neither ຂີ້ຕົມ nor ຂີ້ຝຸ່ນ, and the air smelt as though it had been pulverized with a fine mist composed of mountain honey and citrus flowers. All along the path the immediate vegetation was pristine and collected as if the evening’s storm had forced it to control its contrasts, paradoxes and get a hold on itself.

Rain laden leaves, thick with slated thirst, flittered in the wind. I could almost hear their untroubled voices this morning calling victory and vigour against the cruel fate that had littered the sides of the road with other, less fortunate debris.

The distant hills still stood hidden and alone, as if lost in thought, meditating on the futility of expectation.

I myself was reminded of a beautiful contradiction in which I found myself just the night before when I went for my constitutional around the temple grounds: I had come across a fresco of the Buddha locked in a state of meditation, protected by the seven-headed cobra which symbolizes to my mind the serendipity brought by nature when all is going well. He sat there, the Great Man, with his eyes partly closed and all the Universe serendipiting to help him out of the jam of existence and longing. On his countenance he wore the kind of satisfied smile that quite frankly infuriates everybody.

I found myself in the following paradox: I saw for the first time that the real peace proposed by Buddha was liberation from desire and its evil twin brother, envy. At the same time I found myself desiring to be in that state and envying anyone who was in that state. The envy, the jealousy I felt in my heart was so great that I think that if Buddha would have rolled up to me then and there I probably would have smacked him out of sheer annoyance!

How dare he be free of envy while I am stuck in the mire of desiring to be free of desire?