Mekong Villages

[Tim]


Today is our first full day on the river.  We just stopped a midway point called Pak Beng, where tourists generally overnight as they go downriver from Thailand to Luang Prabang.  Our pilot got his river passbook stamped, Janet, Amanda, and my mom went ashore to get lunch foods and see what the town was like, and the three kids skipped shale-rocks out onto the river.



Last night at dusk we pulled over onto a sandy beach and went up into a village to see what language and people group they were.  Amanda found out that we were still a full day's journey from her people group, and she engaged one old lady in conversation as night fell around us.  It's beautiful listening to the tonal language used here, and the evening was a comfortable cool.  And we saw a firefly.

When we set out again for the boat, night had truly fallen around us.  The village homes along the road were generally lit by a single lightbulb, and many of the people were tending cooking fires outside in the space between houses, or sitting and smoking and watching us pass.  Amanda says that if they had been her people group we would have had many invitations to join the family dinners/campfires.  As it was, we had no expectation of any invitation and had food to eat back at the boat.

Back at the boat, though, our pilot was busy exercising hospitality of a wonderful kind.  He and his brother had kindled a bonfire on the rocks above our boat, and we were delighted to sit on the banks of the Mekong, in who-knows-where-Laos, enjoying the dancing firelight and without a care.

There's more to tell about that campfire ... something about barking jungle deer ... but I want to tell about another village before I sign off.  The evening village where we docked seemed sad (and in fact the conversation that Amanda had with the old lady was about how the government was tearing down their houses to improve the road) and unfriendly, but there was another village yesterday that was really neat.  It was our first stop and our first encounter with rural Lao villagers.






The steps up to the village end at the high water mark.  Since we're in a low rainfall season now, there is a bit of a hike to get up to the stairs that lead into the village.  There is no road to this village--only the river--so the stairway here is essentially the front door.

At the top of the stairs, this is the first set of houses we find:



And this old lady was delighted that I could at least greet her in her language.  She chuckled and repeated the words several times.  She is splitting bamboo canes.




I was confused as to why some of the buildings were poorly constructed (what I would have expected from a subsistence-level village with limited access to the outside world) while others were well-designed and well-executed post-and-beam structures.  It turns out this village had been selected to be a "model village" by the Lao government and that had made it available for some NGOs to help out in years past.  We saw the school that a foundation had constructed in 2008, for example.  So that's what you're seeing in these next photos:

The picture above is the school and its grounds.  The six small houses on the left are dorm rooms for kids from villages too far away, so they stay here.

Our stop on land lasted an hour, and since we hadn't been on the boat for very long before then, there was hardly any sensation of the land moving.  Later, after two days on the boat, and when we arrived in Thailand after three days on the boat, then it was different.  Every time we were standing still on land, the land seemed to pitch and roll.

In our third day on the Mekong, we were finally among the people who are Amanda's people.  We recorded the locations of the villages we saw on both sides of the river, and she is planning to go back downriver from her home to become more acquainted with the area.

On the Mekong

[Tim]

I am in the coolest place, doing the coolest thing, right now.  We are traversing north-central Laos toward its western border with Thailand, and I'm on a chartered riverboat.  And every moment is delicious.

Our friend, Amanda, lives in Thailand and spends much of her time in the villages of Laos as a traveling nurse.  At age 28, she fluently speaks several languages and has training in linguistics to be able to continue learning.  I'm so impressed with her!  When I got the job teaching in Danang, a year ago now, I looked at the map and realized that we could go overland from our place to hers, but through a country I had no experience with and no language for.  So I contacted Amanda and asked her how much arm-twisting it would take to get her to meet us in Vietnam and be our traveling companion back to her home.  Not much!

My first thought was to take bus-transport.  Those sleeper-buses that crisscross this part of southeast Asia can get you there, unless you crash because the driver hasn't slept for 20 hours and is using amphetamines to help him stay alert, but the adjectives applied to the adventure on Trip Adviser and from veteran travelers often include "harrowing" and phrases like "the worst sleeper bus experience I've ever had."

Laos, as you may know, is mountainous.  Landlocked and mountainous and poor.  The Mekong River (the same one that flows out through Saigon way-way-way downstream) cuts through the western part of the country.  Maybe I should say the Mekong cuts OFF the western portion of the country, because there is but one bridge, and it's miles and miles away from Luang Prabang (Lao's second city and our point of entry when we flew in from Hanoi).

And now we are 70 miles or so west of LPB on the Mekong.  Everything to my left (across the river in the piture below) is part of the country of Laos cannot be accessed from Laos except by boat.  Crazy to me.

Dissuaded from going by bus, but still wanting to somehow cross over to Amanda's home turf through Laos, I looked at the map and realized that the river passage might be just the ticket.  My mom is traveling with us, so our 5 plus my mom and Amanda is 7 ... and with 7 people it is comparable in price to buy tickets on a riverboat or to charter our own boat.  Plus, that way we have the luxury of a boat all to ourselves and we get to choose where we stop.  That's important to Amanda, because not all the villages we're passing are of the people group she works with.

Amanda's people-group lives in Lao and the language is similar to Lao, but they are ethnically not Lao.  I say that as if Amanda is of her people, but she's not.  She grew up in China but her family is from Pennsylvania and now she lives in Thailand and spends most of her time in Lao among her people-group.  She's all mixed up, if you ask me.  Write to me I'll give her your contact information and she'll add you to her group for email updates.  As is the situation with many people living and working in this part of the world, when communicating with her you'll have to choose your words carefully to avoid pricking the ears of government monitors looking for political or religious activity.

Hello and Goodbye from north-central Laos!

[Tim]

We flew up to Hanoi on Tet Holiday, which turned out to not be such a bad idea.  After 36 hours or so, though, we'd had enough and got on another plane for a ride of similar length.  Only this time, we flew west into landlocked Laos.

There are stories to tell.  Janet wanted to book rooms ahead.  Tim was just sure that there would be plenty of rooms available.  Tim prevailed.  There were no rooms.  Tim's desire for spontaneous lodging options doesn't get to prevail anymore, for the rest of the trip.  We did get a good room for the second and third days in Laos, but that first night was a doozy.

Luang Prabang is beautiful and bulging at the seams with tourists.  Of which, we are 7.  My dad flew ahead to Chiangmai today, so now it's a traveling party of 5 Chases, my mom (who is also a Chase, so I guess that makes us 6 Chases), and Amanda.  Amanda came to visit us and is now going home to Thailand with us, in our next leg of the journey.  Overland in Lao.

I'm giddy with the excitement of it.  Tomorrow at 8am we will go down to meet our boat.  It would have cost the 7 of us around $450 to buy seats on a boat that holds 40.  But instead, we have CHARTERED  a boat for around the same price.  So exciting!!

Tomorrow morning I am boarding a boat on the Mekong River and traversing north-central Laos over to Thailand on a 3-day trip.  Yes, I just wrote that again because it is so exciting.  This hasn't been on my bucket list for my whole life, but I've been really, really looking forward to it ever since I realized it could be a possibility.

See you when I get to Thailand!

~Tim

The boat on the left is the type that we've chartered:

Happy New Year Again!

[Janet --from several days ago]

Happy New Year!

Vietnam is in the midst of celebrating its most important holiday: Tet.  (Finally, a word that's easy to pronounce!)  It's the lunar new year, and although there's a bit of partying when January 1st rolls around, no one here really thinks of that as the new year.  Tet is the real New Year celebration. Today is the second day of Tet, a day for visiting friends and neighbors.  We are in the airport in Hanoi right now, taking advantage of our long break from school to do some traveling. It was a lot of fun, though, seeing all the preparations that led up to Tet.

The city decorated far more than we expected for Christmas, but those decorations all looked a bit out of place. Pine trees with snow on them? Ice caves? What? But for Tet the city gets decorated all over with flowers and orange trees.  Parts of town that are normally wide open lots became flower markets.  Just like Christmas tree lots for us, people set up temporary stalls selling kumquat trees and various potted plants. They sleep there at night to keep their stock safe, and there's a festive, "campy" feeling in the air.  People with gardens take special care to get their flowers to bloom at the right time.  There's one kind of flowering tree that they make sure to defoliate exactly 45 days before Tet so that it will blossom on Tet. Those trees have a yellow flower, but up here in Hanoi the special tree is one that blooms pink.  People will buy either a large flowering tree or an orange/kumquat tree to put in the entrance to their homes.  They might add some red bows or red lucky money envelopes to them, but mostly the flowers or the fruit serve as the decorations.  It was such fun to see that tradition and compare it to our Christmas tree tradition.  

On Tet Eve Daniel and I were the only ones in our household to stay up to see the midnight fireworks.  We joined another couple in walking our neighborhood out to the place where we thought the fireworks would be displayed.  As it turned out, we and quite a few other people had wrong information: at midnight fireworks started exploding a good distance south of us, and many people jumped up and got on their motorbikes and zoomed off to be closer to the action.  We decided that it would actually be more interesting to see what was happening outside people's homes, so we wandered back through the neighborhood.  At nearly every house, one or two people were outside burning the papers they send to their ancestors in the afterlife.  Some of the papers were fake money, but we weren't able to tell what the rest were.  Everyone wished us a happy new year in English and Vietnamese, and we wondered if it was auspicious to greet a foreigner early in the New Year.  Doing what brings luck for the coming year is on everyone's mind, and I've heard that everyone is super nice to each other on the first day of Tet, putting old family quarrels to rest--at least for one day.

It's been lovely to motorbike or walk on the small streets of the city in the days leading up to Tet because many of them are lit up by canopies of colored lights and lanterns.  We may put Christmas lights on our houses and shrubs and such, but because the streets are so narrow, the Vietnamese can string lights all the way across the street.  It feels magical to walk under them, and I'm sorry they aren't like that always! 

Another Tet tradition is to put on your best clothes and take photos at the flower displays set up for that purpose.  In Da Nang we were having our coldest weather yet, with gusty winds, so not many people were venturing out to the parks on those days.  In Hanoi, though, the weather was just beautiful, sunny and about 70 degrees, and the lake area was full of families in traditional clothes posing in the gardens.  It reminded me of an Easter Sunday--everyone dressed up and posing in flower beds and in front of budding trees.  

We're leaving Tet behind now and heading into Laos and Thailand.  More stories to come!

Student Connect

[Tim]

Most of my Saturday last weekend centered around a "Student Connect" event that we helped to create for the expat youth of Da Nang.  The foreigners here gather for church on Sunday mornings (it creates trouble when Vietnamese Christians are worshiping God alongside their expat brothers, so we have Danang International Fellowship only open to holders of foreign passports), and a year ago the church created a monthly youth event called Student Connect.

It's comprised of some kids who attend D.I.F. and some kids who don't, and being a Christian isn't a pre-requisite to joining us for a day of swimming or a scavenger hunt in the old city of Hoi An.  Next month we'll do something Easter-themed, and last Saturday we went up into the hills to a pool area advertising mud baths.

There are two adults in their 20s who are the primary youth leaders, but Tim and Janet (into their 40s now) are the older, administrative parents who are there to make sure the restaurant provides timely food, coordinate with the van drivers, and juggle receipts and such.  It's kind of fun, actually, to get to be around all the energy of the youth but not need to be the ones channeling it into positive outlets.

We got to the pool and used Google Translate to ask "Where is the mud?"

The mud turned out to be less of an attraction than the heated pool.  They pump heated mud into hot-tubs, let you sit in it for a bit, then drain and clean the tubs.  Not all that exciting, and definitely not as fun as the mosh-pit of mud we were sort of hoping for.  :)

At the dinner I stood and shared something God has been teaching me about being offended.  I read in the Bible that Jesus said we should do things like "turn the other cheek" and "go the extra mile" and I've been reading those things all my life as if they are ways to be more godly or a better person.  Lately, though, I think that they are Jesus' methods for how to not be offended.

If a Roman soldier exercises his rights, he could give any Jew his equipment/baggage and require one mile.  Jesus said that we should go the one required mile and then go a second mile for the Roman oppressor.  Why?  To convert him?  I think at one time I believed that might be part of it.  After all, Jesus also said that we should let our light shine before others so that they will see our good works and give glory to God.  So I thought the turning of the other cheek, the giving of the coat, the going the extra mile were for that purpose--for the benefit of the other person.

But now I think Jesus was telling us the secret of having an untroubled heart.  If an evil person is taking my shirt, I should give him my coat also.  If I'm unfairly required to carry a load one mile, I should finish my obligation and then do more, of my own free will.  It's for my good that I do this, so that my heart can release the resentment that naturally builds up with requirement/obligations.

Pastors should be careful what they preach. 

Ever since I stood and gave that 8-10 minute talk at the Student Connect event last Saturday, I've had NUMEROUS times when I felt cheated or badly-used.  Many more times than would ever normally happen to me!  Each time, I look for a way to go the extra mile for my own heart's sake.  It's a mundane example, but one taxi driver went the long way around and ran the meter up to 43,000 ... so I paid 50,000 for a ride that should have been 30,000 (in a country where tipping is rare).  Little things like that, over and over again--I feel like my offense-forgiver is getting a workout.

Indignant.

There is SO much to that word, and it seems like I've been "righteously indignant" several times this week.  To be indignant I have to have rights that have been violated.  Words related to "being indignant": arrogance, rights, huffy, impatient, forgiveness, etc.  And now I realize I may be writing too much to a blog that may not care about offenses and forgiveness.  I'd like to discuss it one-on-one with you, if you have time:  <thechaseplace@gmail.com>.  

Stay tuned.  In the next week we'll head to Lao and then into Thailand because my students are all having their lunar new year holidays.  :)