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It was good to be working with my hands and the rest of my body again and it was good to be working with trees again too. It had been far too long since i'd done either of them. In the summer, working on the boat, i'd done a bit of physical work, but that was all i'd done for over a year - that's not counting the physical exertion involved in travelling of course. And going such a long period without working is very unusual for me.
In return for doing this work we were given lunch each day we worked and this was some of the best food i'd had for a long time. It was simple, but probably mainly organic, and there was brown rice too, which was great as it's virtually impossible to get in India.
That day i worked from a bit after ten until about four in the afternoon, with half an hour or an hour for lunch. It wasn't all that long, but i was quite tired by the time i got back to the Palms Beach. This was partly due to the unaccustomed exertion and partly due to the additional hard work of cycling to and from Aurogreen, which was a good half an hour's ride over difficult roads. I'd hardly done any cycling at all for years before that. But it was good to feel like i'd done something more strenuous than sitting on my arse for a change. And it was also good to feel like i'd done something constructive and useful too.
The next day i worked the same hours, but i was beginning to get back into the swing of working by then and it wasn't very difficult.
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As soon as i got back to the guest house after the second day working, i had to go straight out again. I had time for a quick shower and then i was due for a Tamil lesson with a teacher who lived in the village near the guest house. His name was Pougahl and i'd met him the previous Sunday in the little, hut-like cafe next door to the Palms Beach. I'd asked him if there was anyone around there who could give me Tamil lessons and he'd said he would. We agreed to start on Tuesday evening.
He arrived back from work at exactly the same time i went round to his house and after his mother had given me a cup of coffee we started the lesson. It lasted about forty minutes and he taught me a few of the very basics like hello, how are you?, where do you live - in fact all the questions that Indians know in English and ask me all the time. Now i could do it back to them in Tamil! It wasn't very much really, but it was enough to give me an exciting feeling of beginning to come to grips with the language.
Although i can speak Spanish fairly well, French not so well, Dutch a little bit and Malay hardly at all, as well as being able to understand a fair ammount of Italian and Portuguese, i'd never had a one-to-one language lesson before. With the exception of French, which i learnt at school, i've always mainly taught myself. I've been to Spanish and Dutch classes, but standard language classes are almost totally useless, in my experience, as environments to learn a foreign language in. But after that first one-to-one Tamil lesson, i realised that was the only way to learn a language quickly. I could see that given a couple of months - which i wouldn't be - i could develop a good working knowledge of even a language as unfamiliar as Tamil with two or three lessons like that a week.
This was an interesting discovery - and one that will probably change the way i learn languages forever now. The advantage of speaking English is that everywhere in the world there are people who want to learn that language and even if i can't afford to pay a teacher, i'd always be able to exchange lessons.
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On the Wednesday i was due to meet up with Bobby again at three in the afternoon, so i told Georg i might be in in the morning, although i possibly wouldn't be, and that i wouldn't be working all day. There were other things i wanted to do and, rather than taking my computer to the farm in the morning, or going back to the guest house and picking it up in the afternoon, it seemed like a sensible plan to do other things that day. But in the morning i phoned Bobby and he'd forgotten about it and was doing something else. He said to come at nine o'clock on Thursday instead. This was a bit of a drag as it was late morning by the time i knew this and i would have gone and done some pruning if i'd known, because i'd been really enjoying it and i was keen to do a bit more. Anyway, i eventually went along to Aurogreen after lunch and worked for the afternoon.
The following day i got up early and got to CSR by about nine, but Bobby hadn't arrived yet. That was alright, i didn't expect him to be there at nine, i reckoned about half past was more likely. And i was about right. Anyway, we spent a couple of hours chatting about geeky computer stuff and i showed him a few things and gave him some files off my computer and then i left him to get on with his other work.
On the way back to the guest house, i stopped at the bank to change a travellers cheque, but the clerk just said "no". I stood there for a while trying to get some kind of explanation of this and they eventually told me they didn't have any money. This was because of the bandh that had been on in Pondicherry for a couple of days.
"Bandh" is an indian term that refers to something which doesn't really exist in european politics. It's a kind of combination of a strike, a blockade and a general disruption of normal business. This time the people holding the bandh were the local fishers and they'd managed to completely bring Pondy to a halt the day before. They were protesting about something to do with the discharge of waste into the ocean, which will seriously damage their livelihood. I'm afraid i don't know any details about it, which is pretty slack of me, seeing as it was going on so close to where i was!
Anyway, it would probably only have lasted one day if it hadn't been for the usual heavy-handed tactics of the police. As they do everywhere in the world, they'd turned the protest into a riot by violently attacking the protesters. This produced a situation that took several days to calm down in the end.
Anyway, not being able to change money was a bit of a blow, as i'd just begun to think about moving on again. But unless i could get enough money to pay my bill at the guest house i couldn't go anywhere. However there wasn't anything i could do about it, so i just had to wait till the next day and see what the situation was then.
I was thinking about going back to Madras to start trying to sort out the next stage of my journey. I didn't want to have to go all the way to Trivandrum to fly out, so i wanted to investigate possibilities of leaving from Madras instead. I was also feeling like i should try and go earlier than i'd planned, as it would be good to have more time to try and sort out a visa for Laos and all that stuff, which could possibly take a while. I didn't want to end up with hardly any time left to actually spend in Laos by the time i finally got there.
I had been planning on going to Aurogreen to do more pruning, but in the end i couldn't be bothered - partly because i was feeling a bit unsettled by the prospect of leaving the next day. And in the end i just sat around the guest house all afternoon and got a beer at five o'clock when the fucking temple started screeching.
Five o'clock was also the time when i should have been going to Pougahl's house for another Tamil lesson, like i'd arranged with him on Tuesday. However, i wasn't feeling like that either. I felt a bit bad about not showing, but then Indians don't seem to be as neurotic about doing what they've said they will as Europeans are, so i wasn't quite as bothered as i probably should have been.
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When i got back to the guest house i decided to ride up to Auroville and say goodbye to Charlie and Georg. After that i took the bike back to the hire shop. It was really weird walking the couple of hundred yards from there to the Palms Beach. It felt like walking on land does when you've been at sea for a very long time! But i gradually got my land legs back. I realised i'd hardly walked at all since i'd had the bicycle, which was nearly two weeks.
I was really glad to be getting out of the Palms Beach guest house, the place had begun to irritate me in a weird way. Nothing i could easily put a finger on, but a combination of the terrible food, sleeping in a room that was like a prison cell, being kept awake at night by people drinking and talking till late outside the window and being woken at five in the morning by the temple screeching probably contributed a lot to it. There were other minor things that annoyed me a bit about the place and, anyway, i'd been there nearly two weeks, which is a long time for me in one place!
After a ridiculously long journey on a series of buses, i finally arrived at Broadlands guest house at quarter to ten that night. Luckily they had one dorm bed - and i think it was the only one - apart from that, they were completely full up.
I went across the road and got a bottle of Haywards 5000 - a strong beer - and sat on the roof to drink it and look at the full moon.
It felt really great to be back in Madras - well, to be back at Broadlands, anyway. And it seemed impossible that it had been four weeks since i'd left there with Jenny to go to Senji for a couple of days. I couldn't believe two weeks had passed since i left Hampi either. The time spent at Auroville seemed to have gone in a flash. It was incredible - like i'd just snapped out of a trance or something. Although it hadn't really been a trance. I don't quite know what it was, but i think that just having been doing things that interested me - although it was hard to put a finger on just what those things were - and spending time in a place that interested me, had been such a change that it was like a whole different reality. Now i'd walked back into the old reality again and, although it was good too, it didn't have much connection with the other place.
I suppose this is the time to explain a bit about Auroville. Well, it's a bit overdue, but better late than not at all...
It was founded in 1968 as a city for the future, based on the philosophies of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. He was an indian guru of some sort and she was a french woman, with north african parents, who lived around Pondicherry from the 1920s or 30s and was the main inspiration behind the founding of Auroville. I don't know anything else about either of them and the only thing i know of their beliefs is that they were anti-religion, which is a very definite point in their favour as far as i'm concerned.
Anyway, today Auroville consists of over eighty small communities spread out over an area of about twenty five square kilometres, of which about ten are owned by Auroville. Within the Auroville area there are also a few Tamil villages and their lands. The place itself is kind of strange. It's very spread out and apparently disjointed. Although this wasn't unusual to me, as most of Australia's like that, but it must be very confusing to most Europeans arriving there for the first time and trying to work out what's going on and where everything and everyone is. In some ways, it reminded me of Canberra, which is the capital city of Australia. There doesn't appear to be anything there at all to most people who are used to normal, high-density type cities, because everything's spread out and scattered over a large area and there's a large ammount of open country in the centre of the city itself. Darwin's pretty much the same.
Of course, Auroville isn't anything like as big as either of those cities, as far as population goes, anyway. There are something like thirteen hundred residents of Auroville, a fair proportion of these aren't Indians. At the time i was there, there were also a few hundred guests, visiting the place for a while during a sort of tourist season that happens every year in January.
I've heard a lot of opinions about Auroville from all sorts of people, in all sorts of places, and mostly from people who don't really have any grasp of what's actually going on there. Or maybe people who've seen a different aspect of it to what i saw. Most people seem eager to slag it off. And most honest Aurovillians would be aware of a lot of bad aspects of the place too, but that's the same everywhere. I'm pleased to say i didn't experience any of the downside of Auroville at all while i was there. However, from experience with similar sorts of communities in Australia, i knew perfectly well it was there if i wanted to look.
Auroville inspired me. What i saw there and the people i met there left me with an entirely positive impression. I'm not silly enough to think that it's an unconditionally wonderful place, but at least people there are doing a large ammount of work to make it, and the area around it, a better place. Anywhere where they've planted so many trees in such a short time and in what was a deforested desert beforehand, can't be all bad. Even though most of those trees seem to be australian natives, which are quite out of place in that environment. Well, not so much out of place in the environment, which is very like parts of Australia, as in that continent. However, much better the wrong trees than none at all. And anyway, people there are doing a lot of work towards restoring the native forest species which were obliterated systematically by the british colonial powers over a very short period of time.
I was probably lucky to meet Charlie, who pays the non-resident local workers there well above the normal agricultural workers pittance, rather than one of the farmers who pays the same rates. Although that's not to say that they're not doing good work as well. There certainly seems to be a strong and healthy culture of alternative, environmentally sound agriculture there. The computer network side there was interesting too - within a short time they would have what would probably be one of the most advanced public-access internet connections in the whole of India, which for a fairly isolated, international community like Auroville should be a major benefit to a lot of people. It will be good to maintain links with them through that medium when i'm back in Australia, and to build links with other communities and individuals there who are working on similar things to what Auroville is doing.
All in all, i think i found the things i needed to find. And it was probably good to get out while i still hadn't come across the things i wouldn't have liked. I'll probably go back there some day and i'm sure then i'll come up against some of it, but that's life, it's the same everywhere.
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On the Monday i went to the Air Lanka office to see if i could change my flight out of India from Trivandrum to Madras, as i really didn't want to go all the way to Trivandrum just to fly to Colombo. It wasn't any problem to do this, i just had to pay a bit more, but it didn't ammount to that much, although it was a lot more than the train to Trivandrum would have cost. But it was well worth it to avoid that extra travelling.
The ease of changing the route was opposite to what the travel agent in London had told me - predictably, i suppose. She'd said it wouldn't be possible to change the routing at all, which i thought at the time was nonsense. Actually, it was amazing how easy it had been to deal with Air Lanka after all the hassle i'd had to go through in London getting the flights in the first place. But i think most of that was due to the fact that for some reason the travel agents couldn't deal direct with the airline, but had to go through another agency.
However, they couldn't tell me anything about the KL to Melbourne sector of my trip, as this was with Malaysian Airways - even though it had been booked through Air Lanka and was supposedly a joint operation of some sort. So i decided to walk to the MAS office and make sure my flight with them had come through alright, as it had been full when i left London and i'd only been wait-listed for it.
It turned out to be a long walk down a very busy, dusty main road - another part of Anna Salai, in fact, which also passes not far from Broadlands. There was only one person behind the desk and there were a lot of people waiting, so i had to hang around quite a while. But my flight was confirmed and i got the ticket changed. It saved having to do it in KL, although it would probably have been a lot easier there - if the office was anything like the one in Penang.
As well as changing my departure from Trivandrum to Madras, i managed to get a slightly earlier date and a flight that connected much better with the one from Colombo to KL too. That was great, i'd originally been scheduled to leave Trivandrum on the eighteenth and to fly out of Colombo a day later. Now i was leaving on the fifteenth and i had less than an hour to wait in Colombo. This also meant i'd arrive in KL on a Monday rather than a Friday, so in fact i'd be able to start trying to sort out tickets and a visa for Laos almost a week earlier. If i was really lucky, i'd find myself going there on the new moon, which i thought was on the twentieth. If not, it would hopefully be very soon after.
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Now i had a week to hang around in Madras while i waited to get out of India. It was a pleasant thought, to be leaving. It wasn't really a problem with India that had made the last six weeks a bit less than wonderful - it was me. But at that point in my life, and at that point in my journey, India wasn't really where i wanted to be - especially not wandering around aimlessly, unconnectedly, staying in hotel rooms and not being able to cook my own food. I think this was one of the worst things really. I like to cook food for myself and i rarely eat so well if i can't. It's not easy to get a proper healthy vegan diet unless you prepare most of the food yourself - or eat with other vegans, of course.
But a week in Broadlands wasn't such a bad prospect. There was nothing to do in Madras, at least nothing i could be bothered searching out at this time. So all i could do was hope a few good books passed through the book swap/library there and a few interesting people passed through the courtyard. There was a good restaurant round the corner - the Maharaja Hotel - so it wouldn't be too bad.
Over the next few days, i didn't do much at all, except read, write, play with my computer a bit. And shit a lot. I got sick with a fairly mild dysentery which i think i picked up in Pondicherry. I tried not eating at all on Tuesday and half of Wednesday, but that didn't do any good, it just made me really week and i felt like i was sick, which i hadn't before. On Thursday i went to a homeopath who was just round the corner and got some homeopathic pills from him - i forgot to ask what they were. I didn't really want homeopathic medicine, mainly because they make the pills with lactose, i wanted to see an ayurvedic doctor. The man in the guest house who told me where the homeopath was had told me he did homeopathy and ayurvedic medicine, but he was wrong. Once i was there, though, i thought i might as well give it a try. One thing was certain and that was that i wasn't going to see any quack western doctor, or "allopathic" doctor as they call it in India, and let them give me some poxy animal-tested chemical drugs which would make the symptoms go away but would fuck my body up in ways that would be harder to heal than the original illness.
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Larry and Jenny turned up at the guest house on Friday afternoon. They'd been in Mahabalipuram, which is down the coast towards Pondicherry, since they got back from the Andaman Islands at the end of December. I wasn't really surprised to see them as i'd somehow expected them to show up at some point. It was good to meet up with them again and we sat around on the roof and swapped bits of stories about what we'd been doing over the last five or six weeks.
Naturally we ended up on the piss heavily and i drank a couple of quarter bottles of rough indian vodka over the evening. It was nice, as i hadn't had much to drink for a few days and i hadn't been pissed for ages. I thought it would probably sort out the dysentery anyway.
And it did! Well, at least, it seemed like it had... I think it was partly due to that, anyway. But probably mainly due to the homeopathic medicine i'd been taking. Whatever it was, the next morning i did a shit that wasn't completely liquid for the first time that week. It wasn't exactly solid, either, but still, it was a step in the right direction.
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The next night was a much wilder drinking session than the day before. In fact it ended up as quite a party. I joined Larry and Jenny and a couple of other people on the roof at a bit after dusk and gradually over the next few hours, more and more people joined us until there was really quite a big crowd. There was a large ammount of beer drunk and i think the last of us went to bed somewhere around four in the morning. I was still sticking to spirits that night and apparently i threw up seven times. I don't remember that much about it, but the main problem was starting drinking on an empty stomach, which was pretty silly. Anyway, the next day i was feeling like shit and i couldn't do very much.
And i still felt pretty rough when i woke up on Monday morning, which wasn't helped by the fact that i had to get up at half past six. My flight was at half past ten and i wanted to get to the airport fairly early. I caught an autorickshaw to Egmore railway station and got a train from there. The whole journey took less than an hour.
There was quite a bit of fucking around at the airport, with security checks, x-raying baggage a couple of times, looking through hand baggage and things, and the whole process took longer than it does in most places - which wasn't entirely surprising, i suppose. But anyway, it was a good job i got there early. At Colombo it was more of the same, although not nearly as much as at Madras, which was strange in a way, seeing as they've actually got a civil war going on and India hasn't.
Because the flight from Colombo to Kuala Lumpur went via Singapore, it took quite a bit longer to get there than it would have done if it was direct. We eventually arrived at about half past nine and, walking through the arrivals area, i couldn't work out why the place seemed so familiar as i didn't think i'd been there before. But then i remembered i'd changed planes there on the way from Penang to Mexico. So this was where the journey around the world had really started, as arriving here completed the circle. I'd been thinking about completing that circle here, while i was on the plane, but it suddenly became real and it was quite an exciting feeling. I was also the closest i'd been to home for eight and a half months - exactly nine moons.
The Travellers Moon Lodge, where we'd stayed in March, was full when i got there, so i had to get a room in the hotel next door, which was a lot more expensive than i'd been used to - even in Madras - and it was a windowless box. But i wasn't too bothered about that, it was only for one night anyway and it was good just to have arrived and to have a bed. It was nice being back in KL. I had a much more positive feeling arriving there than i'd had when i'd landed in Trivandrum two moons before. It was probably partly due to the fact that i had a specific goal there and, although it might not be that easy, it was fairly simple. I had to get from there to Viang Chan, the capital of the People's Democratic Republic of Laos, which is usually spelt the french way "Vientiane". And that was all.
On the plane i'd spent a fair bit of the time thinking about being in India and about the rest of the journey, which was rapidly drawing to a close. I carried on pondering these things that first night in KL too. India seemed to have been a ridiculous and futile waste of time and opportunity really. I don't know why i was in that weird frame of mind while i was there, but it seemed to have really prevented me from doing very much that was worth doing. The two weeks travelling with Jenny and the two weeks at Auroville had been good - although still pretty scattered and unfocussed - but the rest of the time, about a month, i seemed to have done nothing at all. In fact, three weeks of that month had been spent at Broadlands, hardly even leaving the hotel, and almost never leaving the immediate area! I guess i just needed to rest a bit, but India's not a very good place to try and rest in, it must be one of the least peaceful or restful places on the planet!
Anyway, i seemed to have snapped out of that lost and confused state of mind on the way from Madras to KL and i was feeling totally positive and happy to be there. Maybe it was just the effect India has on me for some reason. It was weird, i couldn't explain it at all.
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Fruit! It was so good to be somewhere where there was lots of different types of appetizing tropical fruit for sale on little stalls on the streets all over the place. And fresh soya milk and tofu. It really was a vegan heaven after India, where all you get for sale most of the time is bananas - and i was bananas enough, without eating the fucking things!
I phoned the Lao embassy and they told me i had to get Veronica to fax me an invitation to visit her in Laos if i wanted a visa. At first glance that looked like it could be tricky as i had no way of getting in direct contact with her. I thought the first step would have to be phoning her parents in England to see if they had a phone or fax number for her. If they didn't, i'd then have to try Voluntary Services Overseas in London, who she was working for. But whatever, there was nothing i could do at that point as it was still the middle of the night in Europe. I'd have to wait till about four in the afternoon, when it would be eight in the morning in England. That was the first day down the drain then, because there was no chance of doing any bureacratic stuff after that time. But that was OK, i wasn't in a real rush, although i didn't want to spend any longer in KL than i had to. It wasn't a bad place for a tropical city, but still, it was a city, and it was airless and polluted and - compared to India, anyway - it was expensive.
It was a kind of weird jump coming from Madras to KL. Malaysia was so totally different from India - and Kuala Lumpur wouldn't look very out of place in Europe really. It's still got a distinctly asian feel to it, but i got the impression that was rapidly disappearing. However, when you look at places like London, which is bristling with mosques, and Sydney, where there's a massive Vietnamese community, you realise that big cities are just developing a universal culture of their own. It's not really related to any country or continent.
But one of the weirdest things was to have come all that way, and to such a different place, and to still hear Tamil being spoken all around me. A large proportion of the population of Malaysia are Tamils. And it was interesting too, the difference for me between this visit to Malaysia and the last time. A lot of things had changed for me. Before, i hadn't had any contact with the Tamil language or culture at all. Now, i was fairly familiar with it, knew a few words and could even read some of the signs written the Tamil script.
As well as that, i'd arrived there with a very different outlook on all sorts of things - Asia, the world, travelling, myself and probably a lot of other things i couldn't easily put a finger on. I'd been right the way round the world, in a limited sort of way, and i'd seen what was maybe a vaguely representative cross section of it. I'd been on three of the five contintents: Australia, North America and Asia - including the european and indian sub-continents and the Malay peninsular - and although i hadn't really seen all that much of it, i'd sort of been to the four corners of the world. I certainly felt i was closer to understanding it all as a planet, as parts of a whole thing, rather than as isolated and separate bits which just happen to be on the surface of the same spinning lump of matter. But i wasn't exactly sure that i'd liked much of what i'd seen. It would probably take quite a while for it all to sink in and although i'd certainly got more of a feel of the overall scale and relatedness of the place, maybe to say i was closer to really understanding it, is a bit of an exaggeration. Or at least, if i understood it, i couldn't really express what it was i understood.
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A bit after four o'clock that afternoon i phoned Veronica's parents' place and spoke to her father. He didn't have a phone or fax number for her, but he gave me her postal address, which was a start. Once i'd had that, i decided to send her a telegram and tell her to fax me. I didn't know if it would get to her, but it was a start at least. Then i phoned my mother and asked her to phone VSO and see if they had a phone or fax number for her. It seemed more sensible to get her to do it, as i had visions of getting throught to a large organization and it taking forever to get any information out of them - and phoning London at that time of day was quite expensive.
So that was it for that day. At least i'd made a start, even if i didn't know any more than i had before.
I went to the Telekom office in the morning and there was a fax from my mother waiting for me, with the phone/fax number of VSO in Viang Chan. At first i thought i'd send a fax, but then i thought it was better to phone as that way i'd at least have a bit of an idea of what was going on straight away. Strangely enough, Veronica was in the office - just for five minutes and for the first time in weeks. I told her what i needed and she said she'd send me a fax straight away.
Things were going right with a vengeance now. It began to look like this might all turn out to be massively easier than i could possibly have expected. However, it was dangerous to get too optimistic. I thought i'd better just wait and see what happened. After all, there was still the embassy to deal with, and that sort of thing could have hidden difficulties at every step.
At about two o'clock, when they opened again after lunch, i took a taxi to the Lao embassy, as it seemed really complicated trying to get there by bus. Before i went i put on long trousers and a long sleeved shirt, to cover up my tattoos, and a baseball cap, to hide my haircut. I had no idea how much they'd judge me by my appearance, but i wanted to be on the safe side just in case a more casual approach made things difficult or impossible.
The embassy was basically just a house and there wasn't anyone else waiting to be seen or any of that normal visa-getting stuff. I just had to fill in a simple form and give them three photos and Veronica's fax. The man i dealt with told me to phone the next afternoon and he'd let me know if my application had been approved or not. If it had, i'd be able to pick it up on Friday. It was beginning to look like i might be going on the new moon after all.
If they approved it, that was. I was a bit worried after i left there that the occupation i'd put down on the form might bother them a bit. I'd said i was a technical writer for some reason - maybe because i thought this might head off any weirdness there might be about me trying to bring a computer into the country, i dunno. Anyway, i put it down as my occupation now and then, when i'm feeling in the mood! But i wondered if they might latch onto the "writer" bit and suspect me of being a journalist and refuse me a visa because of that. I hoped they knew what a technical writer was, but i began to think it had been pretty stupid putting it on the form in the first place. Oh well, all i could do was wait and see. I'd know in twenty four hours.
In the meantime, i had to find some way of amusing myself - at least slightly. I'd really seen and done everything i wanted to see or do last time i'd been in KL - and that wasn't really very much anyway. I needed a book, but it's not the best place to get English language books. They're there, but there isn't a massive selection available - not anywhere i'd managed to find, anyway.
And the Travellers Moon Lodge wasn't like Broadlands - where you didn't need anything to do because you could spend all day having interesting conversations with the other guests. There was a sort of roof garden area where you could sit around, but it wasn't particularly comfortable and the other inmates weren't quite as friendly as they had been at Broadlands. It had been better when me and Nicki were there before - when the dorms were bigger and they weren't all double bunks like they were now. You could sit in the dorm and there'd be someone to chat with.
I was beginning to get a bit bored. However, it was just a vacant sort of boredom, not a depressing sort like it would have been in India. I just had to go to bed early and get up late and stare into space as much as i could to while away the hours.
The following morning i finally managed to send a post card to Begoña, Conor and Txamen in Bilbao - which i'd been constantly intending to do in India, but had never been able to remember. I'd promised to send them one from Italy, but of course i never made it there, and i'd been trying to remember to send one ever since.
When i'd done that, that was it. That had been the excitement for the morning. All i could do now was sit around and wait till two o'clock when the embassy opened for the afternoon and then i could phone them and find out how my visa application had gone.
I phoned up just after two and he told me it was all approved and i could go and pick it up in a couple of hours. That was amazing. It was all happening quicker and quicker.
I went straight round to the travel agents and booked my flight, which ended up being on Saturday anyway - mainly because the travel agents couldn't get it together to get the tickets any quicker, i think. And then i went to the Telekom office and sent Veronica a fax telling her when i'd be arriving. That left just enough time to have a large and tasty "banana leaf" veg meal at a Tamil restaurant nearby. The meals there were two and a half times as expensive as they were at the Maharaja in Madras - according to the exchange rate, anyway - but i think they were a bit better too. After that, i grabbed a taxi - which was difficult in the growing insanity of the beginning of KL's peak hour - and went to the Lao embassy to pick up my visa.
The taxi driver was an interesting man - a Malay, i think - he'd been all over the world, including Australia, Europe and other parts of Asia. He was really into travelling and he said whenever he gets a few thousand ringgits together he gets a plane ticket and goes somewhere, always staying and eating in the cheapest possible places. He told me he had nine children, but he never took his wife travelling with him because it was too expensive. I asked him if she got pissed off when he went overseas without her and he smiled and said yes.
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By Friday evening i was crawling up the walls with boredom. The only thing i'd had to do that day was pick up my ticket and that didn't take long. I kind of felt like i should make an effort of some sort to entertain myself, but i really couldn't think of anything to do. I could have gone out to search for a book, but even if i found one i wanted to read, it would have meant more bulk and weight in my already overloaded bags. It was ridiculous, i seemed to have accumulated any incredibly vast ammount of extra junk in India - almost all of it seemed to be books of one sort or another. I had three teach yourself Tamil books, one of them in French, one large book on a computer subject, which was really useful to me and had been much cheaper than it would have been in Australia, exercise books full of writing because i didn't feel safe just having this book stored on a computer - which could easily get ripped off any time. I also had a blanket which i'd bought in Hampi and a couple of dhotis which were handy as sheets. It was really getting a bit ridiculous. If i hadn't had the computer too, it would have been quite a small ammount, but with this thing taking up a fair bit of space and adding a few kilos to the weight, the whole lot was beginning to get a bit too much to carry. One more book might be the straw that broke my back!
There was a barbecue on the roof that evening and i went up and had a look briefly. But it was a bit crowded and there wasn't really anywhere i could hang around and feel comfortable. Anyway, the smell of burning flesh doesn't inspire me to join in very much. I thought i'd pop out and drink a Special Brew in a chinese bar round the corner and then see how i felt. Unfortunately it was closing when i got there, but i got a bottle to take away anyway. The barman opened it and put a straw in the top, which amused me a bit. In the end, i didn't go back up to the roof as i got talking to a couple of people in the dormitory and we ended up sitting in there chatting till quite late. They came from Chelmsford.
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It was an easy trip, although for some stupid reason i'd forgotten to book vegetarian meals. It happens occasionally, i don't know why. But sometimes it just doesn't occur to me. It's crazy really as i've flown so many times and booked vegetarian meals so often, it should be automatic by now. Maybe it's just unconscious wishful thinking - like it would be nice to live in a world where the people who want to torture and kill animals and contribute more to the destruction of the environment had to ask for special meals, rather than the other way around. Oh well, one day maybe - but not in my life time...
A while after we left KL i looked out of the window and we were flying more or less parallel to the west coast of the peninsula and a little way inland. Directly off the right hand side of the plane, in full view from my window, there was a largish island. I looked at it for a few seconds and thought it looked kind of familiar. I'd been reading a newspaper and not paying any attention to where we were or anything, so i was a bit disorientated for a short time, but i thought maybe it was Penang. I looked at it for a little while and then i recognised the Komtar tower, which is a large, circular tower block right in the middle of Georgetown. We were close enough and the air was clear enough to see a lot of detail of the whole island. I looked at Georgetown, trying to make out the places i knew and at the incredibly long road bridge that joins the island to the mainland. Then i looked across the other side of the island at where i knew Sungei Pinang was, and the organic farm. I could recognise the view of the coast i'd looked at from the top field at the farm. After that my eye traced the route i'd taken when i'd left there, up to the coast at Teluk Bahang and along the coast from there to Georgetown, the route i'd also taken a bit later, with Nicki, when we went to check out the beach at Teluk Bahang after i got back from Thailand. The memories were all so vivid and it seemed quite incredible that it had been so long ago - and a whole world away.
A while later, we flew over the other coast of the Malay Peninsula, but by this time, we were over Thailand. After a while, we flew close enough to Koh Samui and Koh Pha Ngan to check them out too, but not quite as close as we'd been to Penang. The memories of those places all came back too, as i looked at the wide beach at Cha Weng and pictured the horror of that resort, then at Mae Nam beach and remembered the boat ride i'd taken from there to Haad Rin almost as soon as i'd discovered how hideous Cha Weng was. I tried to spot that place near Had Yuan where i'd gone with Kelly and Yoki and i thought for a while about Kelly and how that was the last place i'd seen her - the last place i'd ever see her.
And then it was gone and we were getting closer and closer to Bangkok, where i had to change planes.
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The runway at Viang Chan airport felt like a dirt track under the wheels as the plane landed on it and taxied up to the terminal, which looked like a smallish bus station. As we walked from the plane across the tarmac to the airport buildings, there was a large crowd of people gathered on a first floor balcony watching us, but i didn't see Veronica among them. She was there to meet me, however, when i came out of the arrivals area. It was really nice to be met by someone when i was arriving in a strange country - it's hardly ever happened to me before. We caught a tuk-tuk - the local name for the equivalent of an auto-rickshaw - and went into town.
Viang Chan is a capital town - it would be stretching the imagination too far to call it a city. It seemed a pleasant, relaxed sort of place, although i didn't get much of a feel of it that first afternoon as all we did there really was drink beer. We got through a few litres of the local draught beer, called "bia sot", which is brewed by the Lao Brewery in Viang Chan and is one of the best beers i've come across anywhere in Asia. They also do a bottled version, which is available all over the country - although you can only get it on draught in Viang Chan.
Later on we caught a tuk-tuk out to Dong Dok, about fifteen kilometres from town, where Veronica was living. She had a flat in the campus of the forestry college there, on the first floor, above a mechanics workshop, surrounded by trees. It was a nice spot to live and handy for her work.
Over the following week i didn't really do very much, partly because there wasn't really very much to do and partly because it was nice to be in a home again, with a kitchen where i could cook.
I went into Viang Chan two or three times, but there wasn't really anything to do there either. And it was strange, but although i got to know my way around quite well, i never really came to grips with Viang Chan. I wasn't sure why, but i just didn't really get a feel for the place. It's unusual for me, in fact i don't really remember it ever happening before, although i might just have forgotten, but i normally get the feel of a place almost as soon as i touch my feet on the ground - and certainly by the time i've spent a few hours there. This was different though, i never made any sense of it.
It was a pleasant enough town, relaxed and clean, particularly after Madras and KL, but there wasn't anything particularly interesting about it. It was built on one bank of the Mekong river, which is the biggest river in south east Asia and probably one of the longest in the world. On the opposite bank, which is four or five hundred metres away, is Thailand. The Mekong marks the border between the two countries for a few hundred kilometres in this area. But apart from the river, there didn't seem to be anything else worth mentioning.
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It was a very short flight, in a small, twin propeller driven plane, and the only unusual thing about it was that we had to show our passports and get stamps on pieces of paper when we left Viang Chan and again when we arrived at Luang Phabang. Luang Phabang airport was really just one single runway inside a fence. Outside the fence there was a single smallish building where we had to go to get our passports stamped.
Luang Phabang was a pleasant, quiet and fairly slow little town on the southern bank of the Mekong, which at this point runs almost east-west and no longer marks the border with Thailand. Both sides of the Mekong are in Lao here. At a rough guess, i'd say the river is getting on for five hundred metres wide at that point, although it's probably closer to three hunred really. I find it difficult estimating distances over water. On land it's no problem, but there's something deceptive about the surface of a river or the ocean which confuses my eye. I think it's because it's constantly moving - there's no fixed points to mentally pace out distances between.
Anyway, Luang Phabang was quite a major port, providing connections with a lot of places that don't have any road access. All along the riverside there were lots of different types of boats, tied up or moving, which were the focus of a variety of activities. All of them were long and narrow, which could be just because that's the traditional shape - like a canoe - or maybe because it's easier to build them that way. They were all shallow draft boats too, which is necessary in a river, especially when you load and unload at the banks, rather than on a jetty or a pier, which must be complete impossibilities on a river like the Mekong. Apart from the fact that they'd get washed away in the massive ammounts of water that race downstream in the wet season, the differences in the levels of the water between wet and dry seasons is so great it just wouldn't work. As it was, i was intrigued about how they manage to save their boats from being smashed to pieces by the currents and the tree trunks it must carry along in the wet season and for a short while after.
The boats tied up on the shore at Luang Phabang ranged from small dinghies or sampans - i don't know the lao word for them - which were a bit like punts really, to large freighters, a hundred or so feet long. The little ones were probably about twenty foot long and maybe a bit less than three feet wide and they were either propelled by canoe style paddles or they had an inboard engine - in which case, they were unlikely to carry a paddle!
Bigger than them, there were a variety of passenger and cargo boats, all with at least part of their length covered over in some way. Their proportions were the same as the smaller ones, although they might have been two or three times as long.
The biggest ones i saw were roughly the size of a Thames barge in length and beam, although with a much shallower draft when fully laden. There were a variety of designs and some had chisel-like heads, straight across and sloping backwards into the water, while others had a more common rounded, pointed bow. I suppose the chisel head lets you drive head first onto a sandy shore and load or unload more easily in some situations. These freighters all had a two storey house built on the back. And when i say "house", i mean "house" - they were made of timber and weather board, like a land house, with corrugated iron roofs and maybe a verandah all round at first floor level. I guessed the wheel house bit was at the front of this on the top deck - probably part of the living room! - and the engine room was probably directly underneath. The rest was presumably the crew's home. A couple of them even had a television aerial on a pole sticking up above the roof. It must be quite a pleasant life cruising up and down the Mekong on a boat like that. No really bad weather, enough crew to have a reasonable social life, not very far between ports and a good view all the way.
The weirdest thing i felt, sitting a couple of afternoons in a bar on the river bank, fifty feet above the level of the water and probably about the same distance back from the edge of it, was there were no tides. I looked down at the water's edge one day, after sitting there for an hour of so, unconsciously expecting the tide to have gone out a bit. Of course it hadn't changed at all. It was really weird that it surprised me, i didn't realise how deeply ingrained the rhythms of of the tides are in my subconscious.
When you came down the main road that ran through the centre of town, it stopped at the road that ran across it, along the edge of the Mekong, and straight ahead of you was a wide flight of concrete stairs which went down fifty foot of so to the sandy beach which lay along the waters edge in the dry season. Down here was the main passenger and small cargo boat port. There were always people getting on and off boats, loading and unloading boats and boats arriving or departing. Along to the left, which was downstream, there was a boatyard on the sand, where they were in the process of building two or three largish vessels. A couple of them were steel freighters at different stages of construction and one was a smaller timber one of the same sort of design. The timber one was about the biggest of that type i'd seen - the freighters were a bit different - and the hull was more or less complete. I was kind of surprised to see it didn't have a keel, or a single spine running the whole length of the hull in the middle of the bottom. Instead, it had what i suppose was a kind of double keel, a spine on either side of the bottom, up a bit from the lowest level, quite different from timber cargo boats of my experience.
Along here, up a bit from the water, there were large gardens, or small farm plots, with vegetables growing in the new silt soil that the previous wet season's floods had brought down from upstream.
The view across the river was good - not exactly spectacular, but beautiful in a quiet, unassuming sort of way. There were lots of little boats moored alongside the water's edge, with a strip of sand running along behind them. Up the gradually sloping bank, after the sand, there was a patchwork pattern of small vegetable plots - again, growing in the freshly delivered soil. At the back of these little fields there were occasional clumps of bamboo, probably fifty or more feet high, looking like shiny plumage - a bundle of giant green ostrich feathers standing upright in the soil. Behind the bamboo there was a flattish strip, fifty metres or so wide, covered with trees which were mainly coconut palms. Then suddenly, out of the trees, there rose a string of low, wooded hills, maybe two hundred yards high. And in the gaps between these you could see a whole series of hills, all green and forested, stretching right back to the horizon.
It looked a peaceful and natural world beyond the river - a world that humans lived with and fitted into, but not one that they'd destroyed and altered beyond all recognition, beyond all semblance of nature. I'm not saying it hadn't been changed by humans, the forests on those hills weren't virgin, but they were still forests - not plantations. The motorized traffic on the river wasn't very environmentally friendly perhaps, but it was a thousand times better than a road.
I wondered, as i sat there and contemplated that tranquil landscape, how long it would be allowed to remain the way it was. There were plans to build a road linking Kunming in southern China with Bangkok, the capital of Thailand. This road would go through this corner of Laos - not near there really, probably through or very close to Hong Sa, in fact. But when there's a major road there they're sure to want a road to Luang Phabang joining it too, so i dare say that would eventually mean a bridge over the Mekong somewhere around there, followed by the cancerous growths of destruction that pop up around any new roads that get built everywhere.
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The speedboats were weird little things, very low and with crazily sharp-pointed bows. They were powered by the Thai style outboard motor - a car engine mounted on a swiveling braket on the back, with a very long propeller shaft sticking into the water at an angle. In fact, i'd guess that those boats were Thai made, as they were a totally different style from the local ones in every aspect. In front of the motor, there were four rows of seats with a space at the very front for the luggage. To call them seats is a bit of wishful thinking really, as they're really just compartments about the shape and size the inside of a matchbox, with a vinyl covered cushion along the back, which two people have to somehow squeeze into for the two hour journey. If you were short like Lao people, it would be easier, but it was quite a difficult job for me, and i'm not even very tall for a British person.
The trip up the river was beautiful, but i think i would have appreciated it a bit more if i'd done it in more comfort and at about a fifth of the speed. I don't know how fast those boats go, but i'd guess it to be somewhere in the region of thirty knots, possibly more. Whatever, i've never been keen on travelling at high speeds on water and it didn't help me appreciate the journey. The alternative would have been eight hours or something, on the slow boat, but i think if i ever did a trip like this again, that's the way i'd go.
When we arrived at the port near Hong Sa, whose name i never quite caught, we had to wait a while for the ute from Anne's work to come and pick us up. There was someone she was working with in the boat too and he'd arranged to be collected from the port.
After a climb up a long, winding dirt road from the river, we went down again for a while into the plain where Hong Sa was. This plain was a fairly large expanse of flat land, completely surrounded by hills. The most noticeable thing, coming down into it, was an almost total lack of trees. Before the town itself came into view, you could se a largish expanse of farmland - divided up into padis - with raised farm houses dotted here and there, but not a single tree. Further on, you come into the town, which has got a few trees, but still nothing like as many as i think i'd like if i had to live in that climate and environment.
Hong Sa is really four villages which were close to each other and had been joined into a single town. The area in the middle, between the villages, had been filled up with new buildings. This is the area where Anne was living.
Like everywhere else in the tropics, the practical and comfortable traditional timber, bamboo and thatch, raised houses are being replaced by ridiculous uncomfortable and impractical european-style architecture. Concrete floors, with no air space between them and the ground, with brick or concrete walls, are stupidity in the tropics. They're cold in the cool season, hot in the hot season and horribly damp in the wet season. They might need less maintenance in the short term, but they cost a phenomenal ammount more to build and when they do start crumbling - which is never very long in the tropics - they're difficult and expensive to repair. The opposite is true for traditional architecture. The combination of wooden floors, raised well off the ground, with bamboo matting walls and thatched roof means it's cool in the hot season, warmer than concrete in the cool season and as dry as is possible in the wet season.
But people don't seem to care about these things - or at least they don't know about them until it's too late. What's important to them is that a european style house is sophisticated, modern, a symbol of wealth - and they see old-style housing as being backward, old-fashioned and therefore inferior - those sort of ideas are the curse of the whole world, of course, not just the tropics and certainly not just Laos. But whatever the feelings of the Lao people on this stuff, they certainly seem to be building these inappropriate and expensive houses whenever they can afford it.
Anyway, Anne was living in one of those houses. It was an ok sort of a house in its own way, but it looked a bit out of place in that part of the world. There was another house behind it, in her back yard, built of timber and bamboo, with just one room and a large verandah. Anne was using the verandah as her kitchen.
The back yard was quite large and covered in grass. It had a well in the middle of it, not far from the kitchen, which was the only source of water. This well was a large hole in the ground with a corrugated iron roof over it and a dodgy and badly repaired timber platform over one side so you could stand out over the hole to pull water up. Getting the water was a difficult task as there was no kind of pulley or anything to make it easier. The water level was eight or ten metres below ground level and the length of the knotted rope attached to the bucket meant you had to lie down on the boards with your arm reaching down into the hole while you let the bucket fill up. Then you had to stand as close to the edge of the ricketty platform as you dared and drag the bucket upwards, trying not to lose too much water by letting it hit the side of the hole. If i lived there, i would have definitely got a longer rope and hung a pulley from one of the roof joists to make life a lot easier. Of course, there was probably no chance of finding a pulley in Hong Sa.
Across the road from Anne's house there was a food market. The main market time was early morning, finishing by about half past seven. There was a smaller evening market from around four in the afternoon till sixish. But the range of food available there was much smaller than at Dong Dok market and the majority of things available there were meat. There were all sorts of weird, bloody bits of animals laid out on the small tables or on sheets of plastic spread on the ground. There were also occasionally whole animals of one sort or another, including some particularly disgusting looking dried, almost mummified little beasts, blackened and extremely unappetizing in my opinion. I think i would have found it difficult living in Hong Sa for a long period.
We didn't do very much while we were at Hong Sa. I didn't even get it together to walk around the village a bit, except for going to the police station to get a stamp on the bit of paper in my passport - which, strangely, they didn't charge for. I spent most of my time either sitting around the house reading through Anne's collection of Guardian Weekly newspapers or getting water from the well, lighting the fire, cooking.
It was nice to be cooking on a wood fire again - although it's a bit more hassle than gas or electric, and when i have to to do it all the time for long periods i get quite sick of it. It was nice too to be cooking on the floor, in what was basically and outside kitchen. When you looked out from the kitchen in some directions you could see the tree-covered hills which surrounded the village and from various parts of the area round the house, you could see the whole three hundred and sixty degree panorama of forested hillsides, in bits and pieces.
Anne was working for the Lao-Swedish forestry project, doing something to do with administration that i never really quite grasped. The official aim of the project was to develop sustainable forest management systems, but the Lao government had got them mainly working on developing systems of agriculture for the nomadic hill-tribe people of the area as part of the government's campaign to make them stop their traditional nomadic lifestyle and their slash and burn, mobile agriculture and settle in one place.
This is something that's being done a lot in the areas around the world where this sort of culture exists. And it's increasingly being justified by claims that the traditional slash and burn agriculture system is bad for the environment. It's not. Or at the very least it's highly debateable whether it's worse than anything it could be replaced with. The so-called "slash and burn" system has been proved to be sustainable over thousands of years - which is more than you can say for what they want to replace it with - and the only reason it's under pressure from the governments now is because they want to deprive the tribes that live that way of their land and the freedom from government control that their nomadic lifestyle gives them.
I'm simplifying the issues quite a lot here, but that's my view of the fundamental principles involved in the forced resettlement of nomadic forest tribes. Sadly a project which apparently should have been doing something else has been hi-jacked for these ends. However, i don't know much about this particular project and this is just my personal interpretation of the issue - and not necessarily Anne's opinion.
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