Goodbye chair!

Today my little sister, Ella, graduates from college. I am so happy for her! Thinking about her all dressed up in a cap and gown makes me nostalgic for… the Macalester College English Department. After posting about the Quaker gathering several months ago I recently heard from Harvey Gillman – an inspiring Quaker writer. He made me think about the value of a sound bite versus a well thought out version of the truth. In any case, I haven’t posted in awhile and there is a lot to say. So sit back, get yourself a snack, if you are anywhere near Norwich, Vermont ask my dad to make you some of his famous fried tofu. This entry is long. Also note: I read only one book at a time while traveling.

“How would proud traditionalist societies founded on a sense of family and community respond to [Rambo’s] grunting individualism and back to basics primitivism? How would developing nations deal with refugees from affluence, voluntary dropouts from the Promised Land?” (“Video Night in Kathmandu” 1988 Pico Iyer 8 ).

There are two ways to get from Louang Phrabang to Houayxay in Laos. Actually one way, two speeds. The way is via boat up the Mekong and the speeds are:

1) s l o w or

2) veryfast (even Lao people wear helmets).

Everyone has different advice; “we took the fastboat – we were crouched in the fetal position with earplugs and a helmet holding onto a jackhammer for our lives for six hours” versus “after the first day I’d met everybody on the slowboat and finished reading all my books – the second day I picked my toes for ten hours.”

I decided on the fast boat – two and a half hours into the trip we hit a rock, the boat exploded, my luggage sank to the bottom of the Mekong and I drowned (which explains why I haven’t posted for a bit). I can only write that because I spoke with my parents this morning so they know I lie. OK, I boarded the two-day boat. After rushing from country to country for the past few months I looked forward to two days of absolute forced leisure.

The first day the boat was numbered 007. It was an excellent boat and transported 14 tourists, 23 locals, a few chickens, and quite a few pharmaceutical products upriver to Pakbeng where we spent the night. On the way there I noticed the famous Plain of Jars on our right, I also saw a nice tree.

The second day was looonnnnggg. Our driver hugged the shoreline and scraped the bottom several times. Nine hours into the trip the captain’s wife went up front with a hammer and started hammering something at his feet – then she hammered a few other floorboards, walked back to the engine room and continued to hammer. Just after the second to last stop we scraped bottom again, pulled over on a beach – apparently the engine was broken. Everyone gathered their things and followed a man who said we’d have free transportation into Houayxay and his friend’s guesthouse.

Everything about the last few hours stank of scam to me but what could I do, sit on the boat? We walked through a village and the people watched us without the usual greeting “Sabadii!” No one on the road stopped to help or offer a ride – unusual for Laos. Our truck pulled up and it cost a dollar each – we boarded the scam-truck:

After a 15 minute journey our driver pulled an old trick – he stopped and ordered us out of the truck and into his friend’s tuk-tuk. We were to pay him 10,000 kip and his friend 5,000 kip for the rest of the trip to town. The boat-scam was so obvious I was surprised they tried another one. Us Falangs conferred and decided we were mad and insulted – if I’m going to be scammed I want to be completely oblivious to it! We paid the truck driver 5,000 kip for half the ride and walked the remaining 6k.

Falangs rebel and have a beer after long hike with 3 ton baggage! We felt pretty happy and even better when Rennie, the nice Canadian, admit he stole the truck key and threw it into the woods leaving the truck running. Nice one Rennie! I was still mad that night and the next day but the day after I started to think – why did these two groups of people, tourists and locals, have such a frusterating interaction and why did they seem to interact this way fairly often?

As tourists we are so bombarded with importunities from a variety of locals – girls who live off their bodies and touts who live off their wits, merchants who use friendship to lure us into their stores and “students” who attach themselves to us in order to improve their English – that we begin to regard ourselves as beleaguered innocents and those we meet as shameless predators.

To do so… is to ignore the great asymmetry that governs every meeting between tourist and local: that we are there by choice and they largely by circumstance; that we are traveling in the spirit of pleasure, adventure and romance, while they are mired in the more urgent business of trying to survive… (Iyer 15).

The Princeton online dictionary defines a tourist as “someone who travels for pleasure” (wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn 8 June 2006). But what’s pleasure? Tourism occupies a continuum that stretches from tourists that get pleasure from conquering many places to those that derive pleasure from integrating fully into one new place. Imagine a group of Westerners in short skirts and tank tops sitting at a bar in Vang Vieng talking loudly and snapping pictures of the locals before heading to an internet cafe at one end of this tourist spectrum and one Falang person marrying into a Laos family and renouncing anything Western on the other end – I’ve been tempted by either end. I think most of us hope to fit somewhere in between.

Scam-adventure aside, it was time for more fun! Houayxay Laos makes up the most northern boarder crossing with Thailand but my Laos visa was still good for another four days. I first heard about The Gibbon Experience from a girl in Siem Reip, Cambodia who explained it as a conservation project involving zip lines, treehouses, singing Gibbon apes, and rainforest. I had a reservation and stopped off at the Gibbon office in Houayxay that day. I was feeling torn about whether or not I wanted another TOURIST ADVENTURE but was reassured when I read this in their brochure:

We will not participate in ‘Ethnotourism.’ We consider that promoting tourism in Laos in a way that emphasizes ethnic oddities is cheap and disrespectful as it generates in the uneducated visitor a legitimate desire to ‘see those strange tribes.’ Consequently, the tourist’s camera is naturally focused on ethnic cloths or jewellery; children soon start to dress up and ask for money for a picture. We believe this folklorization process freezes traditional hill tribe culture within a fixed, narrow perspective, reducing them to a somehow dead and shiny artifact from the past. People from the mountainous forest have a deep knowledge of their environment, plants and wildlife. We therefore prefer to highlight what they are actually doing to protect and manage their natural and cultural heritage, now and in the future… Forest conservation and canopy visits generate as much income every year as a logging company could do only once. (The Gibbon Experience 2006).

The road from Houayxay into the Borkeo National Forest is being financed by someone who will benefit from trade between Thailand and China – it’s under construction but the driver said it becomes an easier to drive every day. We hiked the last hour and a half into the forest and flew into treehouse #1 for instructions and a snack. This is from the first day – over the next three days we learned to zip horizontally.

Our guides were straightforward with us – they were happy to have us and hoped we had a good time but mainly were glad for our money to help conserve the forest, animals, and their own communities. Over three days we saw a poisonous snake, a giant jungle grub, singing Gibbons, another monkey group, and we hiked our tushies off. We are covered in sweat and barely have enough energy to open our mouths to smile here – Nuan and the rest of our guides were amazing!

In the end we didn’t feel that we were being pampered but that we were helping to pamper the forest. If you are interested in this well-run conservation project contact them and sign up!

www.ecotourismlaos.com/activities/gibbon_trk.htm

http://www.gibbonx.org/en/contact.htm

So what next?

I extended my plane ticket and am settling down in Thailand for a month to learn Thai and volunteer at an orphanage in Bangkok. By settling down in Thailand I mean in Chiangmai, Pai, and back to Bangkok. I am tired of being a tourist because there’s only so long I can live with the illusion that tourism creates. I think traveling is important to get a feel for places you would or would not want to spend more time in. This afternoon I get my third Thai language lesson. I am in Chang Mai for about a week. Lots of Veggie food makes it feel even more like home! This “voluntary dropout from the promised land” is digging in her heels and settling into herself here.

“Home has nothing to do with hearth, and everything to do with a state of mind; that one man’s home may be his compatriotes exhile; that home is, finally, not the physical place, but the role and the self we choose to occupy” (Iyer 9). I agree with Iyer but would add that we are shaped by the geography that surrounds us. A few months ago far away in Burlington Vermont my roommates were away for Christmas break. I lay in our apartment cold, bored, and alone and asked myself what I would do if I were traveling at that moment – decided I’d probably be out meeting people and immediately walked down to the Radio Bean and met everyone. Traveling, like home, is a state of mind.

Tags: Gibbon Experience, Laos, slow boat

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 7th, 2006 at 8:56 pm and is filed under Laos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.