A lovely Tom Sawyer Style Waterin' Hole, complete with friendly tree...

Another picture for scale....

A WIZARD OF A LIZARD - A rather large iguana-esque creature (the head is the size of a small pumpkin) who is one of the local celebrities in front of a shop where I drank beer, across the street from the immigration office in Vientiane. A man there with a dirty polo shirt and a whole lot of beer inside him struck up a conversation with me; he had come back from America hoping to see this animal, which has been there for many years and through many regimes...a wise old survivor of man's follies...

The man turned out to be more enigmatic than the herpetezoid, however, when he told me that his former job in Laos was working for the CIA, that he was now a rich man living in Walnut Creek, California. (wouldn't it be dangerous to come back here if that were the case?)

I told him I had an auntie living there - but somehow our two exchanges seemed mismatched, like one of those English textbook exercises where you are supposed to recognize that "Thank you, I'm fine" is not the right answer to "Where are you from?"

The man continued to broadcast the CIA story to any and all who passed on the street, and I, feeling the crosshairs coming a little too close for comfort, finished my beer discreetly, and with a nod to the lizard, slunk on down the street to the market to search for more gooey bee larvae.

We had a yellow sand warning yesterday; when I looked out at the city from the top of our office building, maybe 50 meters above it all, all I could see was nothing. Nothing but yellow fog, that is. It looked sort of like the shop floor of a yellow-car-painting company, or like San Francisco looks if you are wearing yellow sunglasses. Of course my nose, eyes, and face knew something was going on - there was an impalpable suffocation in the air, an unbreathability that most people can only understand after sitting in a smoky bar for a few hours - this stuff is killing us, I'm telling you.

Yellow sand, in case you weren't aware of the phenomenon, is gunk blown off of the Gobi and Taklimakan deserts of central and western China, which becomes airborne in the higher reaches of the atmosphere, before precipitating in Korea, Japan, and sometimes California. Hardly sand, most of the particles are colloidal, meaning that they are smaller than cigarette smoke particles and have a certain ability to actually dissolve partially in the air. (known as a colloidal suspension - this is what milk is ).

There is also evidence that it cools the earth, mitigating the recent global warming trend, so it looks like we are stuck with a necessary evil.

A lot of people wore masks yesterday, and I dutifully wore my fancy microfiber model (although I have a really fancy pancy carbon filter from England, but it's too small for my face and doesn't let enough air through) and when I came home I still felt as though a lot of gunk had gone into my nose. So when I blew it out, all I got is what you see above. Nothing. I suppose that's great news, but then again i remembered that it comes in the form of microcolloidal particles - so even things invisible to the naked eye, like the influenza virus, could be in there (the tv news reported finding influenza in the yellow dust, which would explain the rash of stomach complaints around this time)

When I lived in China I heard some kind of story about the 'yellow sand phenomenon' (called red sand in Chinese) that the government had embarked on one of their legendary, epic, Cecil-B.-Demille-type-employment projects, planting hundreds of thousands of trees in the Gobi in an attempt to reduce the yellow sand phenomenon (Beijing suffers terribly; most of the particles that precipitate there are of the honking big variety, causing even greater respiratory distress).

Naturally they had forgotten to do their homework, and planted some sort of fast-growing deciduous species that all flowered and released pollen at the same time - causing such a rash of allergies in the capital that they had to embark on another Cecil-B.-Demille-project to cut them all down again.

Of course this smacks of urban legend, since I don't have the primary source for this, and its the sort of nonsensical story you'd expect to come from the Sleeping Red Giant....

The laotian flag flies from the canoe we took an hour up the Pak Kading - hardly the heart of darkness, but refreshing and wonderful all the same...

handy little garbage can on the railing of a tuk-tuk (modified motorcycle engine with three wheels and tiny seats in the back for passengers)

Laotian herbs abound in the marketplace - I've always equated so-called 'civilization' with the extent to which the herbal folklorico-pharmacopia has been lost to the big pharmaceutical corporations - in Burma, though there are also plenty of extant herbal remedies, there also seems to be a flood of cheap penicillin from India...

the road leading out to the caves - as dusk falls and as thousands of bats pour out of the limestone-cave riddled karst mountains...

A night of Raving - Stark Raving People, that is

Last night was another of those typical nights in Korea.

The Business night-out, the kind you hurry home to dress up for, you abbreviate your swimming session for, the kind you stuff a quick chicken-soup-to-soak-up-the-alcohol-later for...

I was particularly NOT looking forward to this one, because despite my reason for attending being a chance to get a paying writing gig for the first time in a long spell, I just didn't feel it was worth the price of admission: the night out would be with two chain smokers, who seemed to only like talking about different single-malt scotches. (don't get me wrong, I don't mind the occasional sm scotch, but why the hell sit around and talk about them if you aren't drinking them?)

I get to the bar a little late, after a genius taxi driver who seemed to think he would become a millionaire by creeping along slowly and taking the most congested route possible, and walked in, and to my horror was seated between the two chain smokers.

To my relief they had already smoked themselves out, but to make matters a little complicated, one of them, the Korean professor, was already drunk and starting to make a fool of himself...introducing the bar maids as his 'lovely friends' who hadn't yet had their patience worn down by the man.

This was made up for by the delightful discovery of a NORTH KOREAN BEER on the menu - and even more surprising, it tasted great! What the heck? I guess Kim Jong Il's comeuppance of the South finally came through suds....well, I sort of doubt the plebes up north get to drink much of it - like the poor miserable Cubans who have to watch the tourists drink their beer that they can hardly afford, costing like a twentieth of their monthly salary...

Later we ended up at a Sam-Gyup-Sal (thick bacon slab place) restaurant nearby, more soju (sweet potato vodka) and madness, and we ended up at the Canadian professor's house drinking the fabled Ardbec single-malt. Of course, it had gone from a 20 year to a 12 year to a 10 year just in the space of an hour ( I guess people shouldn't be expected to remember how old their alcohol is)...

The stuff had been advertised as 'peaty-tasting' - now that just sounded like nonsense to me - regardless of whether peat had been used in its manufacture, peat is still just glorified mud to me. I swigged the stuff and immediately was hit by a strong smoky....peat flavor....don't ask me how the heck I should know what peat tastes like - I haven't smelled it burning in over 20 years, and I don't think I put any in my mouth then...but it wasn't a bad combination for a whisky.

Unfortunately after several glasses I was left with a distinct liniment-like taste in my mouth. After a few more glasses I think I somehow materialized in my room and it was morning again.

I lost the North Korean Beer bottle, which I was going to scan and present to you here, dear readers...I'll just have to be more careful next time.

LEMON OIL

HOW CAN ANYONE BE SO CRAZY?

This is how it happened (plot twists only believable in a movie)

A friend told me about an auction held by the U.S. Embassy disposing of USIS (a code name for the CIA) goods....so I turned up, never one to turn down a flea market opportunity. (notice how I used two parallel idioms in the same sentence?)

Then I was hooked. It was a sealed bid auction. Meaning that I had no idea whether a few dollars or a few hundred would win. I used a shotgun approach, put down small ten dollar bids on about 70 or 80 items, many identical.

Well, not exactly ten dollars, more like thirteen dollars and two cents. The thirteen was chosen because most westerners, whether they admit it or not, feel the number to be unlucky, and thus would be more likely to pick ten (the number of fingers) or twelve (the number of apostles).

The two cents was to account both for people who put a zero at the end of their bid without thinking, and two also would win over those who think about it, but put a 'one' at the end of their bid to win out over the others with identical bids.

Well, I was shocked and scared when they told me I'd won 24 bids. That's 24 lots of furniture, that is, sets of furniture.

So, 78 hours later, after furious email and sms texting activity on my part, I rounded up 4 of the 30 new teachers on our staff, most of whom were looking to acquire some furniture.

So I managed, somehow, to share the bounty (they paid the 13 bucks in most cases) and the labor (they definately got the short end of the stick on that account) and 7 weary hours later, we had moved THREE truckloads out of the embassy compound and into our offices and houses and whereever we could stuff them.

In fact, we ended up abandoning two desks, two end tables and a dresser to the dirty acid rain of the day. Sopped and furniture-sated, we finished off the day with kalbi and korean sake.

THE NEW SQUALOR

I hope to include this Laotian foot in my 'Feet Around the world series' someday - Just haven't decided whether it will be a flash animation or static pictures....