How to Live Forever (Thailand/Laos #4)

Shhhhh
During the ten years beginning in the mid 1960's—while the world was watching the Vietnam war unfold—an unpublicized and illegal 'secret war', denied by the USA until 1994, was being fought in Laos. Despite both America and Vietnam maintaining official acknowledgement of Laos' neutrality in the war, the Vietnamese were running troops and supplies through Laos. And America, in reply, was dropping cluster-bombs across the Laos countryside. A lot of cluster-bombs.

To be exact, over half a million bombing runs—that's on average, one run every 9 minutes, for 10 years. That's more than the US dropped on Japan and Germany combined in World War II. That's enough to give Laos the unfortunate title as, per capita, the most heavily bombed country in history. The long-term trouble with the cluster bombs is that a quarter of them don't detonate on impact. So even now forty years later, a quarter of all villages in Laos contain unexploded ordinance (aka 'UXO'), lying like land-mines in farmers fields, in household yards, and under school playgrounds. Most of these UXO are 'bomblets' the size of tennis balls, loaded with ball-bearings that'll shred anyone nearby—not just the person who sets it off.

In Laos' capital Vientiane, I learned all this while visiting the fascinating education centre at the Cooperative Orthotic and Prosthetic Enterprise (COPE). Since the secret war ended forty years ago, over ten thousand Lao have been killed or maimed by UXO. The people at COPE help provide disabled people with physical rehab, and locally designed, custom built prosthetics. Visitors can help support the enterprise buying handmade souvenirs, clever cartoon postcards made by a local artist, or even a locally made prosthetic limb for a victim of UXO. The people at COPE have managed to present this ongoing tragedy infused with a message of hope. Lao in the remote villages are getting education programs using plays and songs, and foreign demining organisations are helping to train local people to destroy over a hundred thousand items of UXO annually. And justly, the US provides aid to remove Laos UXO.

As if war wasn't senseless enough, consider this: America's modern day funding for the removal of UXO in Laos is almost exactly what they spent on the bombing missions to put them there in the first place.

Cattle Guards and Sabotage

Perhaps the most interesting rewards of travel are the stacks of interesting folks I encounter along the way. On this trip I became acquainted with people from every proper continent (still haven't met an Antarctican), aged from seven months to seventy years. Their occupations ranged from missionary to marijuana farmer, army to art therapist, brain surgeon to bum. I encountered the whole gamut of perspectives on the world, and on the curious egocentric bipedal primates who dominate it. Here are some of their stories:

I met an Italian, Andreas, whose wife left him suddenly, just a month before our meeting. They had been together for 17 years, including a year of separation before patching things up. She left him for another man. I couldn't imagine his heartache: he decided almost immediately to depart on a 1500 km solo bicycle trip across Thailand. He told me he was, "healing, one kilometre at a time".

In a riverside town in northern Laos without roads or Internet, only accessible by a precarious ninety-minute river boat ride, I met three crazy Germans who planned to construct their own bamboo raft and navigate it eight hours downstream to Luang Prabang. When I checked their building progress, things were progressing as entertainingly as I suspected. My friend Umut's hands were raw and bleeding from open blisters. "I'm ruined," he told me, still picking out leeches from between his toes. After a day of chopping and hauling bamboo out of the forest they tried to float the roped-up bundle downriver to their building site. It quickly got taken by the current, and they along with it attempting to save it. If it wasn't for a friendly Lao boatman passing them after sunset, they would have either lost the wood or drowned trying to save it. At this point I inquired about how many boats they had built before (let alone navigated through rapids, without paddles). Their leader responded casually, "None. I've never built a boat before. But come on, this is easy stuff: I'm an engineer."

I was suddenly reminded of a quote I once heard: "If a man is a fool, you don't train him out of being a fool by sending him to university. You merely turn him into a trained fool, ten times more dangerous."

On a long train ride I met an engaging young British writer/director/videographer named Craig. We chatted for hours about the world, and when I checked out his website later, I discovered that he won the Doritos 'King of Ads' competition for his self written/directed/filmed commercial. I also found a funny news interview of Craig explaining how he took his prize cheque, bicycled it down to the bank, and received some funny looks from the depositing teller as he glanced at Craig's scruffy beard and torn shirt, and the £100'000 cheque he was trying to deposit.

We rented our catamaran from a grizzled old Dutch sailer named Kris. He captivated us with tales from flying aircraft aid missions in the Congo and Nigeria in the 1960s, and sabotaging Shell operations when he discovered first-hand the atrocities they were committing in villager. He had even personally killed some Shell employees that he knew to have orchestrated mass murders of villagers. I asked if he was a wanted man, to which he replied "No, but I'm not welcome in South Africa anymore."

There was a middle aged American named Dave I met on a night-ferry, who fought to keep his high-maintenance wife from corrupting his kids' potential free-spirited attitudes towards travel. She always wanted five-star accommodation for their trips, so he had to provide balance—he took his two young daughters to live a summer in a remote Ethiopian village. He described the village chief as clothed only in a thin vine tied around his waist. The chief explained he wore the vine "because the missionaries don't want us to be naked." Dave described the appearance of nearly all the women of the village (who protected their cattle herd from south Sudanese bandits): a shaved head, rippling muscles, wearing only a loincloth, an AK-47, and two crossing straps of bullets between their bare breasts. Years later, Dave's kids turned out pretty well.

A Giant, Mobile, Windpowered Hammock

One of my main reasons for traveling is to live a perceptibly longer life. I've always felt that a week in a foreign land feels like a month at home, and neuroscience can back me up with the mechanism of how this occurs: When the brain is recording more information and more detailed memories, moments seem to last longer. Remember when you were five and a year felt like an eternity? As you age the world becomes more familiar, which means less information recorded, and the perception of time passing more quickly. This trip felt huge, because of the diversity of landscapes, people, and activities I experienced. I learnt new skills in yoga, cooking, meditation, elephant mahouting, sailing, and scuba diving. At this rate I feel like I'll live forever—or at least it'll feel like forever (and our perception is our reality).

The end of my six-week trip could not have been better. Of my final ten days in Thailand, all of them involved time on a boat, including sleeping six of the nights. I finished up with five days of scuba diving in one of the best diving sites in the world, Ko Tao. But before that, with four friends, we chartered a 33' catamaran in Phuket for four days and sailed the Andaman coast in Phang Nga Bay; a place of striking beauty, where near-vertical blades of karst and needles of rock stab at the sky from deep below the surface. We stayed one night in the protected cove featured in The Beach, and passed by the island famous from The Man With the Golden Gun. Each night I slept out on deck, on the netting between the hulls, rocking gently in my giant hammock*. We snorkeled off the boat, and swam through short underwater caves, enveloped by schools of fish. There was nightly bioluminescence in the sea—one of my favourite phenomenon—allowing us to bathe in a glowing aura of microorganisms. And somehow, each night, without any rain or proper clouds and the brightly starlit sky above us, we witnessed lightning.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dear me, this email was a rather lengthy one! I got carried away, knowing that it may be a while until the next one: On my first day back at work I asked my boss when I could have my next holiday. Considering that I squeezed out 11 weeks of leave in my first year with the company (only four of them paid), his response was just a hearty laugh and a head shake.

For more inspiration on ways to live forever, check out the last of the trip photos by clicking any of the thumbnails.

Thanks for making it this far, and for all the lovely replies. Until the next time the universe conspires to bring us together,
-Mike

*For a clip of our sailboat, our dingy, and some enormous schools of fish, check out my Youtube channel.

Free Whiskey Buckets (Thailand/Laos #3)

In The Tubing

Twelve years ago, Vang Vieng was a quiet riverside town surrounded by stunning karst peaks on the dusty, rough, winding road between two of Laos' major destinations. A quirky old Lao man named "Mr T" had an organic mulberry farm a few kilometers outside of town, where travelers would stay to volunteer milking goats, picking mulberries, and teaching english in local villages. One day Mr T patched up some old inner tubes from farmers, and gave them to his volunteers after the morning labours to float a few hours down river to the town. Fast forward to today and this simple concept has inadvertently created the monster that is now Vang Vieng: "An atmosphere of lethargy by day and debauchery by night. Hedonistic backpackers sprawl out in the pillow-filled restaurants, termed 'TV Bars', watching re-runs of Friends and Family Guy episodes until the sun goes down, and then party heavily until the early hours." It's the only place in Laos where drugs are not just available, but on the menu: Choose from "happy shakes", or "happy pizza" with a variety of happinesses to suit. And a few kilometers up river, beside Mr T's once-tranquil organic mulberry farm, "the pulsating music, drinking games and drug-fuelled partying of the increasingly lively riverside 'tubing' bars starts at lunch-time and goes until sundown." 

The shirts and singlets available in town, reading "In the Tubing, Vang Vieng" -- which I can only assume is meant to read "Inner Tubing" -- are up there with Bali's "Bintang Beer" shirts as trophies for those tourists drinking their way around the world. One could also consider Vang Vieng as a contender for the Darwin Awards capital of the world:  Most tubing bars have hacked together obscene slides, ziplines and rope swings, some of them with intersecting trajectories. (the Big Slide is more commonly known as the "Slide of Death"). The high season for partying coincides with the low season for water level. And by late afternoon many patrons can barely stand, let alone swim. Last year twenty tourists died here. So far this year, two. 

Back on the farm, Mr T can't even benefit from the tubing rental income of the craze he began, because a cartel controls it all. He can't stop the thumping music overlapping from all the illegal riverside bars either, because the bar owners are either bribing the local policemen, or are the local policemen. Tired of fighting, Mr T started a drink stand too, with delicious mulberry cocktails. All the profits go to fund nearby village schools. A large sign ironically encourages you to "Drink for the Children". They say if you can't beat them, join them. Cheers. 



Like Red Wine
With nothing much to do during the scenic two-day slowboat ride to Laos' UNESCO heritage town of Luang Prabang, people's options were limited: read, sleep, chat to fellow travellers, or drink. When I visited the "men's toilet" (aka the back of the boat, where some heavier drinkers were congregating) I met an exceptionally friendly ginger-haired Irish lad named Sebby. He was wearing a custom printed t-shirt, featuring an actual sized, grinning self portrait. Bright orange letters beneath his face proclaimed, "Support Your Local Ginger". Fortunately for me and everyone on the boat (most of whom he was already acquainted with) he was a brilliantly happy drunk. On the second morning of the trip when everyone was boarding the boat, Sebby lurched past us dragging a garbage can, filled with beer and ice. "I ran out of beer yesterday," he explained when he saw me laughing. When Sebby reappeared around at 9am with a beer in each hand, my doctor friend Jan explained to us, "I'd hate to see his liver. I've seen people suffering alcohol withdrawal. It's as bad as heroin, except that heroin withdrawal can't kill you." 

Several weeks, and hundreds of kilometers later, I was photographing the drunken riverside chaos of Vang Vieng, and saw a grinning ginger, his body covered in writing. He had sunglasses drawn on his face. Even though Laos' tourist trail is varied, with little offshoots and side trips, I can't say I was surprised to find Sebby here. He shook my hand enthusiastically, and told me a serious story that nonetheless made him laugh (he was still drunk of course). "Last week I got alcohol poisoning, I think I could have died. My pee looked like red wine!". I was wondering to myself if it changed his outlook on life, when he offered me a free bucket of whiskey and coke. He had a job at the bar. "They pay us with free accommodation, food, and unlimited drinks. I think I found my dream job!" He had been there a week already. He explained quite frankly how he knows he won't last long at his pace. "I'll die a young man," he said smiling with his arm around me, "But I'll die a happy man!" 

VIP (Very Ill Passengers)
I had traveled in crammed minivans, stairwells of rickety buses, and on rooftop luggage racks of pickup trucks. So I thought I'd try a VIP aircon bus, which included a free lunch. As it turned out, that the only thing as advertised was the 'bus' part. When I was laid out with food poisoning in my hotel room for the next 24 hours, unable to even keep water down, I chuckled as I thought of that old adage, "There's no such thing as a free lunch". I was also chuckling because the icing on the cake, as it were, was that it was my birthday -- yet the only cake I could consider in that sorry state was metaphorical. 

I swore off so-called "VIP" buses that day, and for my next journey, hopped on the locally preferred transport option: a beat up old pickup truck with a broken handbrake. Every time the driver got out, he had to quickly throw a rock behind the wheel before we rolled away. Joining me on the wooden benches in the tray were half a dozen Lao, a sprightly rooster in a cardboard television box, bags of vegetables the locals were taking out and comparing like westerners would smartphones, a couple children suffering badly from motion sickness, and a live pig in a bag -- with a hole just large enough for its snout to protrude-- that gave me such a fright the first time it squealed, that it made me squeal, and everyone howled with laughter at me. During the five hour trip, we passed the VIP bus to arrive before it. Now that's what I call VIP.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you'd like to see the very best of the photos I've been 'making' (as the Germans say), check out my Flickr set for the trip by clicking any of the thumbnails above. 

Peace,

- Mike

Elephant Gods and Gibbon Songs (Thailand/Laos #2)

Elephant-sized

The Thais worship elephants (called 'chaang' in Thai; also the name of a delicious beer) as gods, and it's not hard to see why: They're amazing animals, intelligent and calm, many tamed as workers by their lifelong keeper, the mahout. But since Thailand's ban on logging, many elephants and mahouts are out of work, and some have turned to illegal Burmese logging, or begging in cities for money. Others have turned to tourism, running mahout training classes in the forests around Chiang Mai, teaching foreigners about elephant handling. I spent a few hours riding on the shoulders of my own elephant; my feet tucked behind her enormous leathery ears, my hands on the coarse bristles of hair on her head. There's something about riding an elephant that just makes you laugh, almost continuously. While washing her in the river at the end, the water behind her began to violently bubble. I soon realised I was witnessing one of the greatest farts in the animal kingdom. It was followed by three floating poops, the size of basketballs. Truly godlike creatures indeed.

Maximum Capacity
After an extended stay in Chiang Mai I was on the road, standing in a crammed local bus that stopped frequently to deliver parcels to roadside villages, and for anyone with an outstretched arm. After an hour of bending my neck awkwardly to avoid a haircut from the ceiling fan, I found a comfortable seat in the stairwell, knees and feet hanging out the open door. It was much more legroom than a seat afforded, so I happily took in the sights and smells of passing village life. Our destination was a town we knew nothing about, except a rumour that a once daily boat runs (or ran) from it downriver, towards our eventual goal of Laos. 

We exited the bus near the river and saw a full boat untying ropes for departure. We sprinted to it, and the Thai captain seemed to indicate it was the boat we wanted. I asked the English girl on board where the boat was headed, to double-check.  "You need to buy tickets up on the hill over there," she replied quite unhelpfully. Clearly, she hadn't been in this country very long. The driver urged us onboard, into the unshaded nose of the boat in front of the other 12 passengers. From the back of the boat came the unhelpful English girl again, twice yelling, "maximum 12 passengers!".  We laughed heartily as the boat took off: At the situation, having barely caught the once daily boat out of town; and at the girl, who thought that tickets need to be purchased from booths and that vehicles have maximum capacities. Not in Thailand, honey.

Furrier Guides
We decided to splash out and do the three day Gibbon Experience, which is up there with a safari for one of the more expensive things I've ever done in a developing country. The Gibbon Experience is an (almost too) successful project to protect the rainforest by turning poachers into forest protectors, and giving nearly 100 local villagers a sustainable income from tourists so they can preserve their ecosystem. (It is debatable whether you consider tourism as sustainable income, but Laos is a stable country).

So how do they attract tourists? By tapping into all westerners deep-seated desire to live in treehouses, and fly through the jungle. (ever seen Return of the Jedi? Our little Lao guides only needed to be furrier, and we'd have our ewoks too). We began our trip into the jungle after a short instructional video helpfully explained how to step into our zipline harnesses like we're "stepping into a diaper", and to make sure we tie up any "crazy hair".

All the seven treehouses of the project were unique in location, view, design, size; but they were all entered and exited by zipline. We were fortunate to get the biggest, closest, newest* and best treehouse: a four-tiered treemansion in the canopy 40m high. It could comfortable sleep a dozen people, but ours was a rad and diverse group of nine people from six countries. This made the three days of hiking and epic ziplining -- some over 40m high and 500m long -- even more enjoyable. The "Treehouse nine", as we named ourselves, got along so well we actually stayed together for a total of a eight days!

Though many jungle tourist attractions have ziplines and even treehouses, few have gibbons to look and listen for (their songs were described as quite beautiful). These apes eluded us for the first two days, and though none of us knew what a gibbon sounded like, when were woken at sunrise on our final day by a call like nothing we'd ever heard before, we all knew immediately we were listening to gibbons. We sat in total silence for nearly an hour, focused on the haunting, eerie songs. They echoed through the morning mists rising through the jungle, the songs lifting and falling as one gibbon was joined by others for their crescendo chorus, before the decrescendo back to a single gibbon. The only thing I can compare it to are loon calls echoing over dead-calm Ontario lakes at sunset.

Mindgames

The second evening in our tree-mansion we heard noises on the roof and before long discovered we had two more occupants, of the rodent kind. The daring critters must have tightrope-walked the 50m zipline cable to reach the treehouse. After dinner, with light fading and none of the usual distractions from alcohol, electricity or technology, it wasn't long before our attention turned to how we could catch and evict the free-loading rodents from our exclusive treehouse. We tried chopstick bridges over water buckets, dangling rice baskets, and slingshot snares on precarious railings. The rats always managed to get the sticky rice bait, either through creativity, speed, or waiting until we were laughing too hard to notice them approach. Eventually the rats were full of sweet sticky rice and went to bed.  It then dawned on us, hilariously, that in over an hour we -- an engineer, a computer scientist, and a brain surgeon -- couldn't outsmart a rat.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

What is better than 25 photos? How about 25 photos per second! With sound.  

Experience some of the jungle ziplining madness and take a short tour of our treemansion on my Youtube channel. And as always, there are new photos and micro-stories at my Flickr site 

Pop gan mai,
-Mike

*we wondered how the closest treehouse can also be the newest. Our guide told us a harrowing tale about the original Treehouse #1 catching fire in the middle of the night, full of six sleeping tourists. One of them had left a candle burning (against the rules), which torched a mosquito net and quickly spread. The occupants were just able to save their harnesses from the flames, and zip, three at a time, into the darkness as the treehouse burnt down behind them. Bloody tourists!