Jake Catlett Photography

Hmong New Year (Part 3)

The next day of Hmong New Year was supposed to be much of the same. Another bullfight, more tennis ball tossing.  More Hmong girls in traditional costumes wearing sunglasses and talking on cellphones.  I’d already gotten quite a bit of nice material of both subjects, plus I was a bit hungover from the the bombshell barbecue, so I woke up a bit late.  After a headachey breakfast and a couple of much-needed stiff coffees at our favorite local eatery “Craters” (two huge unexploded bombs in front for decoration) we headed over to the bullfight.

Blah.  More bulls that wouldn’t fight.  That venture didn’t last long ‘cause there was no point, and I honestly didn’t need any more photos of girls in weird costumes throwing tennis balls.  We finally found an open internet shop and I spent most of the late morning and early afternoon on the ‘net, chatting to friends, reading emails, and uploading the text and photos for a much-needed update to this here blahg.

3 o’clock we finally went to the Plain of Jars, which is a damn interesting place to check out, but as I’d been told by several people already, it’s just the wrong time of year to be there for photos.  The light was awesome, but the hills in the background are all dead and brown.  Nobody wants to buy photos of brown hills.  I encourage you all to learn more about the Plain of Jars, it’s an amazing place, but I’m not going to go into the deep explanation here.  The short story is that there are thousands of huge stone jars (some over 6 feet tall) strewn across the plains of Laos, and there’s much contention about what they were used for.  They’re 2500-3000 years old, and there are over 60 sites where they are located.  Only 3 are open to the public, the dozens of others are closed because they’re littered with American bombs.  Sometimes I’m not so proud of my country.

Anyhow, Hans and I went back to the guesthouse to relax.  For the last several days we’ve been hearing odd music drifting through our window.  Odd because it’s occasionally punctuated by heavy metal screaming.  Every time we walked outside though, we couldn’t figure out where it was coming from.  Hans was especially determined to figure out where it was coming from, so we set off on a mission to find it.

Find it we did.  What we found was the screaming Hmong metal band.  Hans explained to me that they’re a genre of music called “Screamo”, which basically they sing melodic verses followed by bouts of shrieking.  5 Hmong guys on stage with big hair, bad make-up, and a terrible sound.   But damn if it wasn’t entertaining.  The music itself would have been mildly entertaining for a while, but the real show was the crowd.

I want you to imagine, if you can, old Asian tribeswomen, scarves wrapped around their heads, sitting on plastic chairs and watching a bad heavy metal band.  And not acting offended, confused, or anything out of the ordinary.  Like it was a Gordon Lightfoot concert or something.  Add to the mix lots of little kids, and then insert a few Hmong girls in traditional costumes standing behind stage banging their heads to the music.  Little traditional Hmong groupies.

I’ve been in Asia for a long time, and I’ve seen a lot of weird, weird shit, but this…  this was one of the strangest scenes I’ve ever witnessed in my 34.5 years on this screwed up little planet.  The freaky, screaming Hmong metal band in the middle of Laos is something I will never, ever forget.  I luckily had a great photo of (most of) the band that I got during my wanderings the previous days, but I didn’t even bother shooting the show.  There was no way to capture it.  I could have caught the band the right way, but the stage was so crappy, the crowd so sparse…  a photo would have looked boring, it just wouldn’t have captured the atmosphere.  Plus it was after 6pm, I would have had to use flash, and using flash would have highlighted the bits in the foreground while the background would have been lost.  No, I’m sorry, but the image of that show is something that will have to remain in my mind.

The next morning it was time to go.  Not only had I gotten the material I wanted already, but my visa expires in 3 days.  I gots to go, ya’ll.

We had a few options to get back to Vientiane.  We could go back the way we came, which would basically mean going over the same route a fourth time in 2 weeks, we could go through a town called Paksan in Bolikhamsay province, or we could go across Saysomboun, a “special zone” that has until recently been closed to foreigners due to the fact that the Hmong rebel resistance has been centered there for decades.  Saysomboun also contains the highest mountain in Laos, and I really want to see it.

So!  Saysomboun it is.  So we thought.  We headed off in that direction, the road eventually became a dirt and rock track, and after about 30 kilometers we arrived at a checkpoint, staffed by a very young guy, about 20 years old, waving his hands at me to stop.

“You can’t go here” he says
“Why not?” I reply, “we want to go across Saysomboun to Vientiane”
“Oh, no, it’s too difficult, you can’t go.”
“But, I’ve heard of people going through here on motorbikes, and we want to see Phou Bia, the highest mountain in Laos”
“Sorry, foreigners aren’t allowed to go”

Now, 20 year old guys in any country are not the decision makers, so I started asking to speak to his superior so we could ask permission.  No, no, no he said, over and over, until finally he sent somebody off to go ask for us.  No, we could not go ask ourselves, his friend would go ask.  Now, I don’t know if this guy actually went to ask somebody or just drove out of sight and then waited a couple minutes to come back, but whatever, the result was that he came back and said “Baw.  Baw hai pai”, which means “No, they aren’t allowed to go.”

Denied.  I wasn’t happy.  I didn’t really feel like being re-routed an extra 200 kilometers or so through Paksan.  It had to be through Paksan, ‘cause I also don’t like driving the same stretch of road 4 times in 2 weeks when I have an alternate option.  I don’t like, I don’t like, blah blah blah.  The long and the short of it is that we couldn’t go.

We headed south to Muang Khoun, a town that was the capitol of Xieng Khouang province until America literally bombed it out of existence.   The only structure that seems to be left fully intact is an ancient stupa on a hill over the town.  Phonsavan is only the capitol of the province now because they had to build a new one.  We got to the turn-off to Paksan, at another checkpoint, and at this one nobody denied us entry, nobody told us not to go.

Well, maybe they should have.

I have been riding these little 110cc motorbikes through Southeast Asia for over 8 years, and I have never, never, ever had a more difficult trip.  The “road” can barely be called a dirt road.  Dust and rocks is more like it.

Hans crashed twice.  The first time he was behind me and I looked in my rearview mirror and saw him on the ground.  I turned back, saw that he was fine, but his left footpeg was bent back and jammed under his gear shift lever, and it took some kicking, pushing and wrestling between the two of us to get it back in a position that made driving and shifting gears possible.  The second time he was in front of me, and the road was so dusty that his wheels basically just slipped out from underneath him and he did a face dive at the road.  I don’t know if you’ve ever watched a good friend bail off a motorbike like that, but it’s not a fun thing to watch.  He nailed his knee really bad, and we simply won’t know how bad it is until he’s slept on it for a night.  His foot peg got all fucked up again, and while we got it wrenched back into a position good enough to make driving possible, it sure isn’t “good”.

We stopped in the next village for a drink, and Hans went to check if he could open the lock on his bike seat to lift it and get at the gas tank.  The key broke off in the lock.  The same key that goes in the ignition.  3 is a charm, to be sure.

Another long story short, the family’s house we were parked in front of had a daughter who is hands down one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever encountered.  Just standing there doing nothing she was dead sexy.  But when she walked over to Hans’ bike, unscrewed the plastic guard panel in the front of the bike and fiddled inside for all of about 30 seconds, screwed the guard back on, and then explained that she’d disconnected the ignition so he could now start the bike with the kick starter, and then showed me how to turn the damn thing off by flooding the engine with the choke, well… I was pretty much weak in the knees.  If it wouldn’t take 5 days of riding to get back to her, I’d probably ask her to marry me.  That is if Hans didn’t slit my throat and throw me off the side of the mountain so he could do it first.  While standing there fantasizing about my new life with this young woman, her dad came out and undid the bolts mounting the seat to the frame of the bike so we could lift it up backwards and manage to get gas in the bike.

The road from then on got much worse.  Just look at the photo.  It’s not an impressive shot, but it’s an honest view of what the road actually looked like.  We took these damn bikes across terrain that I would have never thought possible. The road had been dynamited in spots, and huge tractors were reworking the road.  There were landslide areas where the road was literally wiped off the side of the mountain.  And we had to drive through it.  Not dirt, not dust, not rubble – head sized boulders on the edges of mountains.  Add to that the 7 rivers we had to drive across, and the fact that by sunset we were not even halfway to Paksan.  But, since I have a guardian angel, or, more likely, I suffer from dumb, stupid luck, as the sun was setting we came into the one village between here and there that has guesthouses.

So now we’re in a village in Thathoum district, Xieng Khouang province.  What you say?  You have no idea where that is?  Well, basically, neither do I.  I had never heard of Thathoum district before today.  We’re still 100 kilometers from Paksan.  And 100 kilometers on this road is a LONG way.