A bit of Ranting Down South in Laos

February 12th;

An exciting couple of days jaunt into the 'neck' of Laos with an intrepid Dutch girl. This is the second time I have had a female platonic travel companion (fptc), and both of them were Dutch, and both of them were named Marion. The first Marion went down the exotic Usumacinta river with me in Guatemala/Mexico (the river forms the bortder) so many years ago, and it is not a little bit weird that this Marion also had planned a river trip; the feeling of repeating myself was too eerie; Marion 2 even looked like Marion 1.

The river's name this time was the Nam Kading, and the launch point, appropriately enough, was a village called Pak Kading. Most of the reason I wanted to go with Marion is that she said the river was pristine, had been cited by the lonely planet as a potential spot for adventure travel, and because I was rather festering in Vientiane.

Not exactly festering...but I had acheived a queer balance of travel without moving; after my arrival in the capital, I didn't feel like going anywhere else. Very similar to my thing with Yangon, I seem to have this predilection to want to 'decompress' for the longest time after arrival in a country, and to slowly interpret that country in terms of its capital city.

So when I had the chance to join her on this trip, it was largely a chance to get some travel momentum. After being in Vientane only four days, I already owned a hammock and ropes (plus the valuable real estate in the hotel to hang it in, since my room fronted a balcony), a kilogram glass whiskey bottle of honey, assorted snacks and a small DVD collection (they apparently are coming from China directly, and are 30% cheaper than Bangkok)...in short, I had set up shop and started to accumulate the detritus of budget travel....

Of course it is true I'm still convalescing from the hard road of Burma and the subsequent devastation of the winter camp, where I was laid low with fever...but it just seemed logical that I should make an attempt to get off my keester and see two or three cities of this country.
It was a great trip. I left Marion yesterday in Tha Kaek, a rather annoying town at the junction of the Mekong and a chain of limestone karst formations (read 'hills') jutting out of the plain. I say annoying because we stayed in this lovely guesthouse (four dollars for a single) with a garden and loads of beautiful teak furniture, which turned out to be still miles from the Mekhong, and the center of town.

Tha Kaek was suffering from Urban Sprawl, despite not really having enough population to call it a Big City. The street in front of the guesthouse was lined with businesses, but behind those buildings were just jungle, farmland, crisscrossed with canals and chicken coops.

The consequence of this is that what appeared to be actual urban space was not; rather it was frontage designed for motorcycle traffic that would later become car traffic. None of the shops were what you would call typical urban shops like restaurants or clothing or department stores; they were mostly selling furniture or metal welded roofs or snacks.

There was no sidewalk, and no reason to build one either, since there was no pedestrian traffic. How much this reminded me of similar places in American cities, places that make a pedestrian feel like an alien creature, an unwelcome blemish on the face of a car-crazed culture!

I also noticed that there seemed to be a trend in making buildings. The traditional Lao, indeed, indochinese way of making a house is building a house on high stilts, so that instead of having a first floor to a two story house, one just has freely circulating air. This design assures natural cooling for the house, as well as flood protection.

The trend in Tha Khaek was towards one of energy dependence; instead of building a light, airy construction, they were now building concrete block monstrosities, that, since they now lacked a natural cooling mechanism, were dependent on several side mounted air conditioning units. In order to make the air conditioning more effective, then, it is necessary to seal the house up, participating in a sort of airless vicious cycle.

The design of western homes and the use of vapor barriers in insulation has often been cited as a major design weakness and potential health risk of western construction. What will it mean here, in this tropical area, where mold, mildew will have a perfect, anaerobic environment in which to flourish?

How much worse, then, than this dependence on air conditioning, which appears to be slowly and steadily making its appearance in this country that never knew it (Lao have used caves and hilltops for the occasional breath of cool air).

Air conditioning is not only shocking to the body, since it causes exposure to temperature extremes, and stifles the body's natural ability to cool off, but it is also extremely anti-egalitarian, since the air conditioning unit produces hot air outside the house, where it is assumed into the environment, thus making a hot day hotter for those unpriveleged persons not inside of the house (pedestrians passing by, for example)

I know, I know, it sounds a bit hard-ass of me to deny everyone the right to have air conditioning. But this wilful and wanton tendency towards energy dependence is to me just as disturbing as the warmongering that it entails later (the governments will all end up fighting over sources of energy or water in the future).

It seems appropriate to end this tirade on a slightly hypocritical note. I'm typing this story on a laptop, Bus-bound and hurtling back north towards Vientiane with only the light of a crescent moon for company. The batteries heat up quite a bit during use, and I'm finally cooked to the point where I can write no more.

Gentle Reader, I leave you to imagine the crescent moon and the barely perceptible friendliness of its light.