Laos - Part 2

Beautiful Poverty

As far as discoveries go, regardless of how there’s nothing left to discover, we all like to feel like Columbus (or Marco Polo here) and pontificate as if no one, ever, has set foot before wherever we happen to be today. Me too. So bear with me.

In that spirit, I was enchanted on the road from Pakse to the Si Phan Don, with the setting sun, and the red earth, and the dwellings on stilts, the ladies in sihns (colorful traditional skirts), the kids riding adult motorcycles, the trees, the hammocks, the cocks (as in the husbands of hens) that crossed the road and the pigs that stayed in their troths. So pretty.

Later in Don Kohne I took fabulous sunset pictures from my floating house in the Mekong. The palm trees against a glorious setting sun. The river. The blue sky. Notice the next picture, rice fields and water after a rain…

Sunset view from my room.

Next picture, rice fields and water...

Heck, I’d have to give up my life and figure out which NGO of the probably thousands operating in South East Asia I want to join. What would be my cause? There are many worthwhile ones to choose from. Children, women, land mines, education, environment…? In this remote (to us) beauty, best instincts come to the surface and even the more rat-race committed of stiffs may consider tossing the suit, donning a sarong and joining the mission.

Except for the heat.

Yes, travel guides and personal memoirs do mention the heat. But do they really? It’s hot. It’s humid. Your clothes, however minimal, stick to you like a second skin you want to shed and can’t. The air sticks to you. The smells cling and linger. Hats do little. 280 SPF is useless. You start considering night-time-only NGO’s. But when the sun sets, after you’ve captured the beautiful sunset for friends and family who probably think you’d do as well in Hawaii, that’s when the next ‘except’ begins.

Except for the insects.

Notice I say insects. Not just mosquitoes, which can make you sick and make you scratch like a monkey, but all kinds of gnats of which the most prominent is a tiny moth-like creature attracted by the billion to the lights (particularly the one over your food) and, in the absence of light, to the lightest object around: you.

Noon starts looking better.

Except for the dirt.

Heat and insects, whether sufficiently described to ward off finicky travelers like myself, are part of the literature. Perhaps we fool ourselves (I fooled myself) that it was the pioneers of the East India Trading Company that really fell prey to the elements and us, tourists of the twenty-first century, would not. Feel free to go “duh” at my shock. The dirt, though, I haven’t seen described anywhere. Are guidebook writers not looking down? Do they expect it because the country is poor?

A blast from the past...

For the record, people here as as clean as you or I. They bathe, brush their teeth, sweep and keep home, restaurant and hotel clean. Other than that, there is rubbish anywhere you look. Plastic bottles, wrappers, papers and cans litter the areas around houses, the sides of all roads, boat landings, beaches and water in rice fields. Piles of it accumulate under the wobbly houses (leaning into each other like drunks at dawn) of Nakasong's port.

My point.

The Mekong flows past you with bubbles of a beige pus bobbing up and down, as oozing pimples about to explode. And you want me to set my ass in an inner tube and hope my sphincter holds?

No one has a clean record on cleanliness. At the time Europeans were ‘discovering’ the East, their chambermaids at home emptied the contents of the chamber pot out the window and onto the street. Much later, Don Draper and family, in an early episode of Mad Men, left the picnic ground by tossing into the grass the remains of their day. We have created feel good Earth Days to pick up trash from beaches and parks. And how many a college boy (or girl) would think the ground at Don Det and Don Khone an improvement on their dorm room?

I hear that tours of urban ghetto areas, dangerous, devoid of beauty and probably dirtier, are becoming a tourist trend. I see, however, a difference between the degrading slums around the megalopoli of the world, and those remote places in our planet endowed with this exuberant, beautiful poverty that inspires our senses, transports us in time and makes us want to be better than we are.

Another beautiful afternoon.

In pursuit of this beauty, some endure days sitting in cramped buses with the neighbor’s chicken napping in their lap and a pig squealing in their ear, rip new Nikes in rocky streams, and loose two pounds a day from the sauna effect of sleeping under a corrugated tin roof in 100 degree weather. If you did that for an afternoon in South Central, you probably deserve getting shot.

From the palm trees, to the river, to the dwellings and the fields, and the natives smiling sa bai di (hello!), to the ratty fishing nets that they throw so photogenically over the water, the Si Phan Don has beauty in spades. And the rubbish in the ground and on the surface of its life source breaks this little tidy old lady’s heart.

Transportation

We do care. But we talk about the environment only as a big thing, the kind that we go to governments with. That makes us rally about industry that pollutes. We are aware (or are we?) of how much trash as tourists we add to the mix (just think cruise ships). But is anyone looking at the ground beneath their feet? Why not, then, add to the list of NGOs a new battalion, a duster crop if you will, of mighty maid volunteers ready with broom, hose and recyclable trash bags, lending a hand and getting the world ready for tea?

Seriously.