Laos

The French used to say that the Vietnamese plant rice, the Cambodians watch it grow and the Lao listen to it grow. These have to be the most placid people on earth. It's partly their Buddhism, partly their satisfaction with the slow but reliable rhythms of their agricultural lives, and nowadays, I suppose, partly a consequence of the low-blood-sugar economic policies of the communist government.

Even the animals in Laos seem serene. They don't smile and say saw-bah-dee when you engage them, but even the healthy-looking dogs that are all over the place act polite with strangers. Nobody and no thing seems restless here.

The town of Luang Namtha, named after the (placid) river that runs through it, is a provincial capital and market town near the very tippy-top of Laos. It's in a broad blue valley with lots of impossibly green rice paddies and little vegetable plots and farmhouses made of teak and bamboo. While many of the people are ethnic Lao, the surrounding villages are mostly inhabited by hill tribe people: Akah, Lantin, Yeow and Black Thai---which sounds like a pun but isn't.
As I write this, Joe is off on a three-day trek among the Akah, who he seems to think of as his people. (I'm not sure if it was the Wheatons or Bradfords who were originally Akah.)

Jack, Jane and I have visited some tribal villages on day trips, and they are very poor. The tribal people exist on subsistence farming, but that seems to be getting tricky. The government has restricted slash and burn agriculture, which it rightly says is not sustainable as populations grow. But the government has substituted rice-growing in dubious areas and it has cleared hillsides and planted them with rubber trees. When the first rubber is harvested after seven years, Chinese enterpeneurs will buy it and the villagers supposedly will get a cut. But the Lao government is corrupt, so we'll see.

A nice thing about the tribal people is the way the women dress. They grow their own cotten, spin it, dye it, weave it and make elegant black dresses with colorful trim, and also fancy headdresses decorated with painted seeds and stones. At a Lantin village yesterday we saw one grande dame who looked as if she had just stepped out of Bergdorf-Goodman, if Bergdorf's was located in a really dusty place.
Other Laos dress the way the poor all over the world dress now, in that nondescript poly-something-or-other gear that the Chinese churn out for Wal-Mart and everwhere else. Sometimes this garb can be funny; I heard a story about a Peace Corps volunteer in desert West Africa watching an old man slogging across the sand with his camel, and the man was wearing a sweatshirt on which were printed the words SCREAMING BITCH.

Yesterday Jack and Jane and I went up to the Chinese border above the garbage-strewn little town of Mueng Sing and peered across it. We took pictures of one another at the little border post. There was no traffic while we were there, but occasionally trucks pass by, carrying corn, sugar cane and watermelons to China and manufactured goods into Laos.

We're all staying at a place Joe and I visited two years ago, the Boat Landing. The lodge pioneered eco-tourism in Laos and helped set up Green Discovery. It's got eleven comfy bungalows and good Lao food and solar hot water. It also has the best lending library I've ever run into in a hotel or guest house. I'm supposed, according to my Presbyterian conscience, to be reading a book I brought from Bangkok about the Lao royal family. (They died in re-education camps after the Pathet Lao won the war in 1975.) But I am having the best time with Brock Clarke's "An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England." It's a funny novel about a keen-minded, sweetly guileless and borderline-nuts young man who "acidentally" burns down the Emily Dickinson house in Amherst, and then things go downhill for him from there. The novel is also about the pleasures and hazards of reading and writing fiction. Fun first, royals later.

The Boat Landing was set up 12 years ago by an American---a former Thailand Peace Corps volunteer named Bill-something---and a Lao business partner. Two years ago, around the time Joe and I were first here, the partner was summoned to the police station. He and Bill were environmental activists who had crossed somebody important and apparently the partner was going to get a good talking too. Instead, he vanished without a trace. Bill left Laos soon after and now resides in the U.S. There's a story here that somebody should write. But that somebody would be risking his life and maybe the lives of others.

Here is an amusing footnote about bad governments in this region. When Joe and I flew to Laos from Bangkok last week, our little Bangkok Airways turbo-prop also carried a blue-suited delagation from the Myanmar Ministry of Tourism. The Lao government greeted these thugs with considerable pomp on the tarmac at Luang Prabang airport. Many of you know that Joe loves to wear his Moustache Brothers T-shirts---the brothers are the anti-regime comedy troup in Mandalay who have been in and out of jail for years---and he had one on as we de-planed with the Burmese mucky-mucks and the flashbulbs popped. Joe won't, of course, wave this particular banner when we visit Burma next month, but we both thoroughly enjoyed this tiny inadvertent act of forbidden criticism.

Speaking of rotten regimes: I recently re-read the section in the Laos Lonely Planet Guide that tells how during the Indochina war Laos became the most heavily bombed country in human history. The image of fire raining down on these fragile villages from U.S. B-52s can make you furious all over again that Kissinger has never sat in the dock at The Hague. It almost, but not quite, makes you sympathize with Bill Ayers and his cohorts. (What's become of him, anyway? Ayers doesn't seem to have turned up in the Obama cabinet.)

Lao hotels have memorable signs in the rooms listing what you're not allowed to do in them. Two years ago we saw a wonderful set of prohibitions that included "no smoking on the beb" and no "making noisy." This time, our hotel in Luang Prabang, the Xieng Mouane Guesthouse, warned us against, among other things, "drugs and crambling." Also: "Do not allow domestic and international tourists bring prostitute and others into your accomodation to make sex movies on our room, it is restriction." Noted.