The Silence Of The Everlasting Hills

I was trying to get to the Nam Kham. Rivers have always attracted me.

But the road conditions were gruelling. It matters not what the angle of the incline is, when the path is fine dust – not even laterite – there is no way to climb it, and pushing Charlene is no fun.

And so I stopped at this village for the night. Beautiful place and kind nay ban, but with the unfortunate addition of electricity that turned this place into a graveyard for the kind of beauty you know exists in deepest darkest Indochina.

I stopped, chatted with the folks, found the nay ban, bucket bathed in the communal bath area, found some hot water to make a coffee and sat down to write. The sun was still high enough to give me warmth. The nay ban was going over his communal documents. Peace was in the valley.

But not for long. Soon, neighbour after neighbour turned on his sound system and those same eight Thai pop songs were blasting out of every hut in the village. Makes you reconsider the miracle of electrification and the wisdom of supplying juice to people who have not paid for it and so can therefore afford sound systems. Far be it from me to patronise, but stepping from the bronze age to the 21^st Century in one afternoon seems a bit hazardous a journey.

For the old people in the village all that noise had absolutely no effect. They kept on their chores, drawing water, fetching fire wood, hanging up laundry while I, earplugs firmly in place, went on a fruitless search for someplace over the rainbow where you could still hear the forest.

 

 

 

 

 

Get Thee to the River

 

Getting to the Nam Kham was only half the fun. Or, as Jane Aston once said, 'One of the wonderful things about life is never knowing in the morning how the evening will be'.

I left Nam Man with great reluctance, dressed to face a day of cycling in the cold – layers upon layers, with one side-saddle ready to receive my warm clothing as the day wore on and the sun rose loyally in the East.

The East. The East! What wonders can compare with this fabulous continent; this delicate, cruel, sparse, rich Asia as full as she is with her fair share of fanatics, of calm wisdom, of rain and of parching droughts? She starts in Istanbul, this Asia of mine, and has led me here, today, to these steppes north of Phonsavan and south of the Nam Kham. In Laos, in pacific Laos.

As I left that strange plateau the rolling hills began, green and tree covered. In my inner ear – that truthful vibration of who we really are – rang the old refrain:

מה, מה לילה מליל
דממה ביזרעאל
נומה עמק, ארץ תפארת
אנו לך משמרת.

To get up to the Nam Kham you have to follow a stream called the Hou. The road runs above the villages that line the stream, but you can visit the villages just by going down a steep hill if you are ready to climb its sibling at the far end of the village. Electricity in the villages is provided by generators that look like outboard motors with their propellers stuck in the water. The stream turns the propellers and the village has lights (and, inevitably, music...).

I took a few of those roads and visited a few of those village. A kettle sits on pieces of burning wood, water simmers to a boil; I dig into my saddle bags for coffee and milk and invite the village for a drink.

I know the large river is before me and I had planned to take a boat from this road to Donkham, a few kilometres downstream. I also knew that on the other side of the river the real riding would begin: the savage hills and the northern vistas. I was not to be disappointed.

 

River Boat

River Boat

Slicing the territory of my trip in half was the Nam Kham River. According to the map, to Google Earth and all the information I was able to gather, there was no road on the other side of the river.

My plan was, therefore, to take a boat downstream to Donkham and cut inland, up and westward toward Luang Prabang.

There was, of course, a road on the other side of the river and I hesitated before deciding not to take it, and take the boat instead. It was expensive, but worth it.

I felt that I needed some river time, some long moments of sitting and watching life go by, of watching villages and garden plots and people bathing. It didn't last long enough.

The village port of Donkham was a largish kind of place compared to the rest of the dots on the map. Pleasant, but I didn't want to stay there.

And so on I pushed into Khmu country.

 

 

 

Jews and Khmus

 

The nicest evening I spent on the trip with the sweetest people was certainly in the village of Ban Soupoune, a mixed H'Mong/Khmu community.

Notes from my diary:

... the joy of being in a village without electricity: the night descends like a thick purple velvet soup, stars timidly come out, twinkling until dawn.

... on the streets are strewn camp fires and neighbours huddle, every twenty meters, taking comfort from the cold, the biting mountain cold that hits as soon as the sun is shut off; well before the dusk and long before the crepuscule when she shines her last.

... villagers walk earnestly to water stations, pumps or pipes or rivers to wash before the air becomes punishing, brittle and cutting like death's own sickle.

In the morning the entire village is assembled in solemn expectation, bunches of them crouched before the home of the nay ban. Speeches are made, opinions are given and a feast of rat is prepared.

The beasts are impaled on sticks and turned over the fire, another stick is used to scrape off the newly singed fur, exposing the white flesh beneath. I have been told that bamboo rat is a delicacy, but I left soon after breakfast, which was – thankfully – an omelet.

Just before I left, elephants came walking through town, their mahouts riding high. There was a time when Laos was called the Land Of A Thousand Elephants, but now it would be more correct to call it the Land Of A Thousand Toyota Pickup Trucks, so the vision of these large lumbering animals with their intelligent kind faces is surprising; almost surrealistic.