Hmong Chic

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.

Hmong Metal Band

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.

The only structure left undamaged in the bombings

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.

My little 110cc scooter, fully loaded

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" to Paksan

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.

Hmong Beauty

I’ve complained to a few different people back at home and in other parts of the world that I’ve been very, very cold throughout much of this trip.  Everybody seems surprised to find out that it could be cold here, usually fuelled by a belief that every corner of Southeast Asia must be a sweltering sweat hole.  Well, during the hot season that is true, the heat in Laos can be unbearable, but during the winter much of the country is quite cold indeed.  Much of the country is at a higher altitude, which in and of itself will cool things down quite a bit, and large parts of the north/north central area of Laos are really more influenced by the weather patterns in southern China than they are by the southern monsoons.

So what I’m trying to say is that when I woke up on the first morning of the Hmong New Year celebrations I pretty much thought I was going to freeze to death.  There are no heating units in any of the guesthouses in Laos, so it’s just as cold inside as it is outside.  When I woke, shivering, teeth chattering, I could see the steam in my breath.  Thank God for electric water heaters.  The “hot” water was much appreciated, even if the only way to really get the water hot is to turn down the volume of water coming out until it’s barely more than a trickle.  Any more than that and the little water heating units aren’t strong enough to do more than make the water luke-warm.

After a nice hot breakfast I made my way over to the old air strip in town, which apparently doubles as a kind of fair grounds now.  Hmong New Year (known as Bun Kin Kieng here… that’s what I’ll call it from now on) actually lasts officially for a week, and some of the celebrations and rituals last a month.  There are live bands, food stalls, traditional bull fights, carnival style games, and other things to keep one entertained, but the main purpose of the extended celebrations is to have a “love market”.  Single women and men (some single, some not – polygamy is acceptable in Hmong culture) come to the celebrations looking for a husband or wife, and hopefully love, too.  They have a very strange, ritualized way of meeting and courting members of the opposite sex.  Here’s a simple run-down of how it works.

It begins with the women, almost all of them in traditional festival clothing, stand with groups of their friends in a line, and other women stand across from them, and they toss tennis balls back and forth, talking and laughing and having a good time.  They wait for men to come along and play with them.  Women that are more attractive and talkative tend to have 4 or 5 men standing across from them at any time, tossing a tennis ball back and forth with them and flirting.  The girls that aren’t so hot, or are too shy, or too young, tend to just throw the ball back and forth with their friends.  This goes on for days, weeks, sometimes a month at a time.  Hundreds of people lined up together, playing catch with a tennis ball, flirting and bargaining.  Traditionally they’re supposed to sing songs to each other.  Songs declaring their friendship, songs declaring their interest in one another, songs proclaiming their love to each other, songs stating their intention to get married, songs for actually getting married, and even songs for getting divorced.  Depending on how well they sing, or how serious the song is, groups of dozens of people may stand around and gawk at the couple while they sing to each other.

A large group of Hmong people watching a woman sing and toss her tennis ball with somebody.

Another important consideration is which Hmong clan they come from.  Hmong people are forbidden from marrying people within their own clan.  Aside from how well they like each other and their obligation to marry outside of their clan, there’s something else at stake during these odd courtships/haggling sessions:  Cows.  A wife isn’t free in Hmong culture.  She costs cattle.  If she’s not very attractive, not very nice, or just not a great pick for one reason or another, well, then one nice healthy cow will do just fine.  If she’s super hot, or has a fantastic personality or is a mean cook, then it’s going to get more expensive.  Maybe a young, healthy bull instead of a cow.  Maybe two cows.  Maybe three!  You get the idea.  One Hmong guy told Hans that the most beautiful girls don’t even want to speak to the local guys, they’re all waiting for a Hmong guy that lives in America to come along.  First, ‘cause they want to move to the USA, second ‘cause the guy will probably have better access to prime cattle.  The whole ritual is one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever seen. Hans saw strange parallels to games we play in America like egg tossing, and theorized that in the past they may have used eggs instead of tennis balls, signifying fertility.  I didn’t quite get the rules correct, but strictly speaking if a girl doesn’t catch the ball it’s supposed to be some kind of acceptance of the man who is throwing to her.  Again, this egg theory of Hans’ would seem to make more sense if that were true.  Purposely allowing the egg to be broken…  Anyhow, it’s just weird.  More than the crazy costumes the women (and just a few of the men) were wearing, I was struck by the juxtaposing of modern and ancient cultures, of east and west.  Many of the men have punk hairstyles, dyed strange colors and sticking all over the place, wearing sunglasses and combat boots, mostly black clothing with iron-on pictures of skulls and flames.  Facial piercings.  Leather pants.  The girls, in their traditional costumes, talking on cell phones and wearing sunglasses, while sitting on the back of a motorbike.  The young people in Hmong society seem to be embracing so much that comes from modern, Western culture, however this bizarre tennis ball tossing ritual to find a mate is also alive and thriving for them.  Hans and I were both told, in fact, multiple times that they like it this way, and the young singles we met all said that this was how they planned to find their partner.

On the first day there really wasn’t much to see, it was mostly just kids playing the ball tossing spouse finding game.  Apparently practicing for the future.  Since all Hmong people have to have the pig party and the chicken party in their home villages, they all travel to Phonsavan on the first day of Bun Kin Kieng.  The second day, after everybody has arrived, is when the party really starts.  However, I did spend most of the day getting great photographs of young women and girls in colorful outfits, playing catch.  One extremely interesting thing I did see, though, was a huge group of people surrounding 2 men and 2 women.  The younger man and woman were married, and the older 2 were their parents.  They were standing together, singing back and forth to each other for a long, long time, it must have been a couple of hours.  The woman that was singing was crying and crying, her mother leaning on her shoulder and consoling her, rubbing her nose with a tissue.  I asked a guy standing there what was happening and he explained that it was Hmong divorce.

Hmong Divorce

I couldn’t imagine that, having to stand in public with a group of about 50 people standing around staring at me, singing my divorce.  Later that evening they were eating in the same restaurant as I was.  Apparently the woman had to pay for dinner that night, too.

Bullfighting arena

The morning of the second day is when the bullfights begin.  Not like Spanish bullfighting, where a bunch of guys take a long time to wear out and kill an animal, but bull-on-bull fights.  60 or 70 different bulls are matched up against one another and fight until one of them runs away. The “stadium” is actually two natural hills next to each other, with a long, flat expanse cut between them.  There’s a dirt “wall” at either edge of the pitch, however it’s scant protection against a running bull.  Thousands of people line up alone each side of the pitch, and if you pay an extra fee (like I did!) you can actually stand down in the bullfighting area itself and even walk right up alongside the bulls while they fight.  Sounds dangerous?  You bet your ass it is!  People have definitely been seriously hurt before, and my friend Simon told me that sometimes kids get trampled and killed.  Basically the fights go like this in theory:  two bulls are brought out into the ring.  They’re brought near each other so they can size each other up and get pissed off.  The bulls begin digging up dirt with their horns and flinging it in the air to show off, and eventually they’re coaxed close enough to each other that they begin fighting, ramming their heads together and cutting each other up with their horns.  Eventually one bull decides that he’s had enough and turns tail.  Shamed by losing and angry as hell about being forced into it, the bull will then run at the people standing in the arena, and eventually up into the crowds, chasing people until it’s either subdued, or calms down by itself.

Up close and dangerous!

The problem was that the bulls didn’t want to fight.  There were a few good matchups, for sure, but most of the morning was spent watching people try to force these giant animals to fight each other, and the bulls were having none of it.  I was given many different explanations for why this was so, starting with the hot weather (it was cold, dammit) and going into the crowds freaking the bulls out.  Either way, there wasn’t much action.  However, when there was action, I got straight up into it, running alongside these big bulls fighting, getting up as close as I could to get some nice shots.  I also got chased a few times, and had to run my little white ass off so as not to get gored.  My God, what a rush!  Adrenaline is my favorite drug.  Normally people would be considered stupid to get so close to large, angry animals and then get chased as a result of it, but under the context of a celebration, and having my camera, and therefore a purpose to it, all seemed to make it so much more sensible.  And challenging.  I’ve decided that if I were ever in a situation where I could photograph riots or mob scenes, or street violence, or even combat, I’m pretty sure I could keep my head about myself and do a good job of it.  Standing around in front of an angry animal, waiting to get chased for no good reason would scare the crap out of me.  Doing it with a camera in my hand?  No problem.  Where and when?

After the bullfights I headed back towards the airstrip for more photos of the tennis ball spouse hunt, and got some absolutely fantastic work.  It was actually extremely difficult work.  There were so many more people than the first day that people were unable to keep a good semblance of a “line”.  It was more like clumps of people everywhere throwing balls around.  The backgrounds were very difficult to work with, lots of crappy wood and wicker stalls with pieces of white, black and colored plastic draped over them as tarps, not to mention the fact that an old disused airstrip is hardly the most attractive of places to shoot.  Add to this the fact that most of the women, and many of the men, were holding umbrellas to keep the light out of their faces.

The tennis ball spouse hunt

The light was perfect, all day – and people were doing everything they could to keep their faces out of it.  Some people were holding beautiful, hand-made traditional parasols.  Other people were holding cheap, flimsy, crappy Chinese umbrellas.  I wound up using my flash for fill-in most of the day, having to pay extremely close attention to my exposure as the lighting conditions changed from group to group.  Trying to get the right balance of fill flash under the parasols, and then working to make sure their clothing that was in sunlight didn’t overexpose was difficult to say the least.  Good, clean compositions with properly balanced exposures was incredibly tricky, however I was very happy with my work by the end of the day.

Divorced today, married tomorrow...

Two interesting things happened to me that afternoon.  First, I was walking around, and I saw a huge group of people standing around and staring at a couple that were singing to each other.  I walked over, and immediately noticed that the woman singing was the woman I had seen getting divorced the day before.  I asked somebody else what was happening, and he told me that they were agreeing to get married to each other.  So, I saw the same woman getting publicly divorced, and then publicly remarried in two consecutive days.  Weird.

My friend Ong

Secondly, there was an absolutely gorgeous girl I had taken photos of and chatted to the day before named “Ong”.  She asked me to stop and talk to her again if I saw her the next day, and so when I saw her I did just that.  Only when I stopped to chat with her, there were a few men already standing there trying to pick her up.  As I approached and started talking to her, one of the guys started trying to sing her a song.  She promptly turned her back on him and ignored him while chatting away with me.  He kept trying to edge around her, to get between her and I so he could sing his song, and she continued elbowing him, blocking him, turning around, and generally thwarting any efforts he made to sing to her.  The guy eventually gave up and stood behind her glaring at me over her shoulder, with fiery anger in his eyes.  As we talked together, more and more people started gathering around and watching.  I found out that she’s actually from “Kilometer 52” village, located 52 kilometers outside of Vientiane.  She told me that she’s actually an English language student in Vientiane, and told me that she wanted to hang out and be friends when I got back to Vientiane.  By the time we exchanged phone numbers there must have been close to 100 people standing around and staring. Under normal circumstances I would have been happy to stay there and talk to her for quite a while longer, but I just couldn’t handle being publicly scrutinized while flirting.  Sitting at a restaurant in Vietnam with a woman is bad enough, with people at their tables openly staring and listening, but this?  I’ll talk to her another time, when dozens of people aren’t listening to and discussing every word we say to each other.

After the sun went down it was, you guessed it! Beer Lao time!  Well, after a fat dinner of grilled fish and sticky rice.  Hans says he could eat grilled fish every day of his life.  I find it hard to argue that point with him.  We ate our dinner (and drank our beer) at a little food stall run by our friend Simon’s family.

One thing I haven’t mentioned much in this blog is the amount of unexploded bombs littering Laos.  It has the dubious distinction of being the most bombed country on the planet, and also having the largest amount of unexploded ordnance of any country.  In Xieng Khouang province the bombs are literally everywhere.  They use unexploded bombs as stilts for houses, as fence posts, as doorway decorations.  Cluster bomblets hang from walls as decorations all over the place, and the cluster bomb casings seem to have 1001 uses.  The two most common seem to be vegetable planters and barbecues.  Simon’s family (like most others) has there own private cluster bomb casing which they use as a fireplace/grill/barbecue all in one.  They had it set up out in front of their food stall, and after having my dinner cooked in it, I stood next to the bomb casing with a bunch of Hmong guys, drinking beer and whiskey and warming our hands.  Bombshell barbecues, a true Laos experience.  I haven’t seen it all, but I’ve seen quite a bit.

Bombshell barbecue

To wind the evening up, I decided to lose a lot of money.  I almost never gamble, and there’s a damn good reason why.  I suck.  I never win.  It’s not even about skill, it’s simply bad luck.  I have good luck with most other things, and I think the universe has decided that when I gamble, I’m just asking for too much.  There were these little stalls with a wheel of fortune kind of game.  Basically, there’s a little wheel with a plastic pointer sticking through pegs that are inserted along the edge.  On the wheel the words “energy drink”, “yogurt”, “pepsi”, “chocolate milk” and “Beer Lao” are written in separate sections, and in each section there are 3 slots marked 1, 2 and 3.  For 1,000 Kip you get a chit that you place on the table, also containing 5 slots, one for each drink you can win.  So, say you bet 1,000, and then place your chit on Beer Lao (like I did).  If it lands on the number 1 in the Beer Lao slot, you win one beer.  If it lands on the 3, you win 3.  So, I figured that if I bet 5 at a time (about 60 cents, USA) on beer, eventually I should win back what I’d spent.  One Beer Lao costs 8000, so even if I only landed on the number “1”, I’d win 5 beers, worth 40,000.  Surely I would hit the Beer Lao slot at least one in 8 spins!  And if I hit the number “3”, I’d win 15 beers!  That’s 120,000 Kip right there.  Plus, the woman would let you “sell” back what you’d won for cash, so I could just keep however many beers I wanted and sell back what I wouldn’t drink.

The Wheel of (mis)Fortune

So, to make a long story short, I lost 200,000 Kip.  That’s about $25.  Once again, by the time I was finished there was a group of about 30 or 40 people standing around watching, many of them betting with me by the end of it in the belief that I HAD to hit the Beer Lao slot eventually.  Personally, I think the game was rigged.  200,000 Kip means I spun the wheel 40 times, Godammit!  With only 5 different slots, I still find it unlikely that in 40 spins I wouldn’t have hit “Beer” just one frigging time.  So, defeated (broke, no more cash in my wallet), I said to the woman “Okay, you just got 200K out of me, you should at least give me one beer for my trouble”.  “One?”, she said, “I’ll give you two!”.  So off I walked with the two most expensive beers I’ve ever had in my life.  One for me, one for Hans.  Damn, if they weren’t cold and delicious!

Early Morning in Phu Khoun

I’ve spent the vast majority of the last two weeks doing nothing.  Quite literally just sitting around, doing absolutely nothing whatsoever.  Well, either that, or spending long, long hours on a little Korean motorbike I bought, trying to find somewhere that I can do something.  Believe me, it’s not by choice.  Aside from one beautiful, clear morning in Phu Khoun at the beginning of the trip, the weather has been awful.  After that last post I wrote it’s basically been grey, windy, cold and often raining.

I finally arrived in Hua Phan province after 4 days of driving, and there I found some of the most remote and beautiful scenery I’ve ever seen.  Hua Phan definitely ranks in my top 3 list now of beautiful spots in Southeast Asia.  Unfortunately it also happened to contain possibly the worst weather I’ve ever experienced in this part of the world.  I think when I lived in Chiang Mai it was actually colder for about a week, but at least it was dead, dry cold.  Not windy and foggy and wet like it was in Hua Phan. Ouch.  Numbness.  It was literally not possible for us to leave for 3 days, at least not on motorbikes.  One day when it was dry we decided to drive about 55 kilometers to a town called Na Maew which is at the Vietnamese border.  We went about 15 kilometers, very slowly, and we were so cold we just decided “screw this crap” and turned back.

The little Korean motorbike I bought

We finally headed back to Xieng Khouang province, to a town called Mueang Kham on the 22nd of November because I’d been told by at least 4 people that the Hmong people in the area would be celebrating New Year’s there for one week at a cave called Tham Piu.  Well, it was actually a “festival” to commemorate 374 people that were killed in the cave during an American bombing.  So, it was basically Lao people playing bocce ball and volleyball and sitting around in tents getting drunk.  We found out that the Hmong New Year festival actually started on November 27th in Phonsavan, so we decided to head there (about 60 kilometers away) and hang out until then and photograph the Plain of Jars.

Well, it sucked there, too.  Cold, grey, crappy weather, nothing to do – we wound up driving over 200 kilometers back to Vang Vieng for the next 4 days just to get some good weather until the New Year’s festival started.  Well, as we drove into Luang Prabang province the weather cleared up, we saw sunshine for the first time in about 10 days.  The weather continued to be good through Vientiane province towards Vang Vieng district, and as soon as we were checked into our hotel I grabbed my camera and ran down to the river to take some shots.  And the clouds rolled in, the wind began to blow, the rain started to fall, and we were cold and wet…  again.  Hans looked at me at one point and said “PLEASE get the cloud magnet out of your ass, Jake.”

Apparently I did get it out, ‘cause we finally got some great weather.  Vang Vieng is best for landscapes, and while I didn’t get anything amazing this time through, I did drive all over the place and find some awesome spots to come back to and try again.  All the rice has been cut there now, so there’s lots of yellowish brown fields full of dead, cut stalks.  Not so picturesque.  Next year…

We headed back to Phonsavan on the 26th, and pulled in early in the evening, cold and numb.  The weather was awful again on the 27th, but of course we still went over to where the festivities were supposed to take place and there was… nothing there.  A bunch of wooden frames with no stalls set up, nothing but a few people wandering around.  I stopped and asked somebody what was up, and they told me the festival started at 4pm that evening.  And odd time to begin a week-long festival, but whatever.

At about 3:30 we went back and it was still dead.  We wandered around until we found some guys playing bocce ball and we stopped to watch.  This bellowing drunk Hmong guy named Simon came over and invited us to come to his house for dinner and explained that a small ceremony happened at sunset, then everybody went home and had a “chicken party”, and the real festival would begin the following morning.  I have a policy of accepting invitations as often as possible while traveling, so we stuck around.

The "Rope Ceremony"

At sunset everybody in the village gathered around a small tree that had been cut down and then set up with a long rope attached to it and a pile of axes beneath it. Our new drunken friend explained that everybody would walk three times in a circle under the rope, and then turn and do it in the other direction to signify the bad things from the old year leaving and the good things coming in the new year.  Simon, in his drunken state, repeated this mantra over and over again, all night – “the bad things go and the good things come, the bad things go and the good things come”.  The village shaman, with a big red hat, came out with a chicken, cut it’s throat, and while the chicken was still alive and struggling he flung it back and forth, spreading it’s blood all over the ground and the pile of axes.  Then he rubbed the blood all up and down the trunk of the little tree, and then everybody walked in a circle in one direction under the rope, and again three times the opposite direction.  As they finished, several men from the village who had been carrying rifles starting firing them up into the air, and some of the kids blew off some firecrackers.  And then they all walked away.

Bangin on the Doorway with Scissors

We went over to Simon’s house, drank “Lao Lao” (of course) and ate these strange, sticky cakes made of deep-fried rice flour paste which we dipped in molasses, and then his mother took a basket of snacks and fruit and stood in the doorway with them, chanting and banging on the door frame with a pair of scissors.  Again, Simon told us she was sending off the bad juju from the old year and inviting the good juju from the new year.  “The bad things come and the good things go, the bad things come and the good things go…”.  While she was doing this the father was walking around the house pasting up little squares of paper with gold patches and little red stars.  Here and there I saw old, yellowed, curling, moldy ones stuck up, and Simon explained that they leave them on the walls until they fall off.  Above Simon’s head on the wall was a little square altar with several of strange pieces of paper wrapped around the bottom.  As his mother finished singing his father started chanting, then took a rooster out of a little wicker basket he’d been carrying it in, and proceeded to pray in front of the altar while holding it and some incense.  Then he cut it’s throat.  He bled it into a bowl for a few minutes, and then again while it was still struggling he lifted it up and smeared it’s bloody neck on three pieces of paper around the altar.  Then he tore off three little swatches of feathers and stuck them in the blood on the altar.  As he finished his wife proceeded to kill two more chickens, which were promptly put into boiling water so they could be plucked more easily.  After this, everybody in the house had to eat a hard-boiled egg.

Praying with incense and a chicken

From what I understand, the village had ceremonially killed a pig earlier in the day, and then every family had to kill chickens.  Following the chicken slaughter, all the men go from house to house together, drinking beer and eating chicken and rice in each home.  It was Thanksgiving evening, actually, and so I was pleased to be able to tell my mom and dad that I did, in fact, get to sit around with a large group of people and eat poultry.  And I did just that, in fact.  I ended the evening standing outside in the freezing cold calling them up to wish them a happy Thanksgiving and then walking back to my guesthouse.

As I headed back I looked up and saw… STARS.  Could this mean good weather for the next morning?  Well, that’s part 2.  And if you thought part 1 was weird, just wait!  The last few days have been strange, for sure.

Cute Kiewkacham Kids

So after basically a solid week of awful weather it was time to leave Luang Prabang.  There was actually one day that was perfect from dawn ‘til dusk, and I made great use of it by shooting most of the day at Wat Xieng Thong, which is arguably the most beautiful temple in Laos.  On my final night there I met two other photographers, a guy named Branden who I met on top of Phou Si hill at sunset, and another guy, Paul, who’s living and selling photos in Luang Prabang.  We hung out and talked cameras and photos for quite a while, but before too long it was time to head back to my room and get some sleep before the long ride back to Vang Vieng in the morning.

Vang Vieng is 206 kilometers from Luang Prabang, if I remember correctly, but it’s a long 206 kilometers.  For those of you that must think in miles, that’s roughly 130 miles.  However, it is, as I said, a long trip due to the quality of the roads, and the fact that basically the entire journey is through mountains.  Added to that it was raining on and off the entire way, and I was often literally driving through the middle of clouds that were draped alongside the mountains.

As I did on my way in, I stopped in Kiewkacham on my way out, but this time only for lunch and not to stay the night.  I wandered around the village and snapped some photos, and talked to the village chief again, this time asking him for information on Hmong New Year’s celebrations.  He informed me that it falls on November 27th this year, and said that the celebrations are best in Phonsavan in Xieng Khouang Province, near the famed Plain of Jars.  Big check mark in my book for that one…  I’m DEFINITELY going.

The entire way on Route 13 there are Hmong, Khmu and Lao villages hugging the edges of the highway, and almost without fail kids in every village waved and yelled “sabaai dii!” (“hello”) as I drove past.

In the afternoon as I was just about to leave Luang Prabang Province I saw a Hmong girl in traditional festival clothing standing by the side of the road in Lak Ha Village.  I pulled over quickly to ask for a shot, and then I noticed 2 or 3 other girls coming out dressed in the same way.  After they let me take a few posed portraits a Lao woman came up to me and started telling me that this was a “Cultural Village”, and that they were having a celebration that day.  A “Cultural Village” in Laos is basically a village where they produce some kind of traditional food or crafts and they promote it for tourists to come and take photos.  She invited me to come down into the village and check it out, and so I pulled my bike off the highway and walked further down into the village.

Hmong Girls on the Highway

There was a great big party going on with long rows of tables set up with plenty of food and booze for everybody.  In the center of the village they’d set up a stage where old Lao men were dancing with young Hmong girls in traditional costumes.  The men seemed to be having the time of their lives.  The girls looked absolutely miserable.  I was invited to eat and drink, which I did for a while, but things started to get odd for me.  Somebody went and fetched a young Hmong lady and basically ordered her to sit down next to me and serve me.  Every man eating at the table had a girl feeding him and serving him drinks, the girls basically looking bored and dejected.  I was the only foreigner there, as they were “celebrating” the fact that the “Cultural Village” would be opening to tourists soon.

Put bluntly, it’s kind of like a human zoo where tourists will stop off on their tours through Laos so they can snap pictures of the colorful little people.  While I did get a couple of nice shots while I was there, that kind of situation just really isn’t my scene.  I like natural interaction with people that leads to natural looking photos, and I want the context to be honest, unstaged, genuine.  And I just simply felt bad for the girls there.  Some of the younger teens seemed to be having fun, but the others, sitting and serving the men Lao food and dancing to Lao music (in the Hmong cultural village…), just looked depressed.  I had to get out of there.

And so I did.  From that point it’s about 90 more kilometers to Luang Prabang, and during that stint of the trip I got stung by a bee in my hand and had to pull off the road to find shelter from torrential rain twice.  And thank Gawd I did, ‘cause hiding from the rain in another Hmong village I got my favorite portrait since I arrived in Laos.

I spent 3 more days in Vang Vieng, sitting in a little hut by the river, watching the almost relentless rain we were plagued by.  Laos is a slow place with little to do on a sunny day – on a rainy one, well, there’s pretty much nothing to do but sit around and stare at the rain.  Maybe play cards.  Or drink too much Lao whiskey.  Which is what I’m going to write about in my next post!

My House in Vientiane

Well, it’s been about a week or so since I posted, so it’s time for another.  Overdue, actually, but internet access is a pain in the ass here, so… bear with me.

I know the photo I started this entry with is less than exciting, but a few people have asked to see my new house, so… there it is.  I signed my contract 12 days ago, and moved into the apartment unit next door while I waited for them to finish fixing up the house for me.  I was assured that it would be ready in 2 or 3 days, and 12 days later it’s finally ready!  Now, this is Laos, so I wasn’t expecting it to be ready on time.  But my patience was starting to wear thin.  I wouldn’t have even been getting too concerned yet, except for the fact that tomorrow I’m taking off for Vang Vieng and Luang Prabang in the early morning, and won’t be back until the day before Hans, my friend, will be arriving and moving in with me.  I’m not positive, but my gut feeling tells me that Hans wouldn’t be too happy if he arrived and I told him that we would be sharing a bed until the house was ready.  In fact, I’d be a hell of a lot more concerned if he wasn’t upset about that.

Anyhow, I don’t know what in the hell they’ve been doing in here for the last 12 days.  In fact, I’m not convinced they were doing anything at all.  I mean, there were a couple of guys in here every day watching TV and smoking cigarettes, but I didn’t notice any other significant activity.  I’ve been over to check out the house every day – not difficult to get in, seeing how they’ve left the door not only unlocked, but wide open, all night long, with the TV, refrigerator, etc. sitting inside – and I swear to God, nothing was being done at all.  I came over the first day, looked around and thought to myself “okay, there’s a couple hours worth of cleaning and picking up to do, then I’m in!”.

Har dee har har.  I tried coming over and standing in the doorway and staring at the guys “working” inside to try and “motivate” them a bit, but they just smiled, and then offered me a seat and a shot of whiskey.  Finally I made it abundantly clear to my landlady yesterday that I absolutely needed the place tonight.  So, she did the wise (and predictable, if you’ve been in Asia long enough…) thing and told the men to get the hell out of the house and did the work herself.  Once she was finished, it took me 10 whole minutes to move all my stuff over here from the adjoining apartment unit.  12 days… 10 minutes.  Call it cultural differences if you will.

My house is $300 a month, has two bedrooms, and one great, large room that serves as kitchen, dining room and living room all in one.  Want to see an oh-so-exciting picture of it?  Here it is!

The bare inside of my house...

Looks bare and boring?  Wank off, I’ve been inside for an hour.  Want to see the inside of my bedroom?  Well then… come over and get real friendly.  It’s basically illegal to have a Lao girlfriend, so you might find I’m very receptive.

So anyhow, it dawned on me the other day that while there is a body of work I need to produce inside Vientiane, a certain amount of stock photography I need to compile, really it’s not a very exciting town to shoot in, and the work will be slow going.  In fact, the majority of the work I need to do in Laos is in Luang Prabang and the countryside.  Vientiane is a very pleasant town, it’s relaxed and easygoing, the people are sweet and quite funny, great to talk to.  There’s basically no stress here.  And if your job is to sit around and hope for weather decent enough to work with during the few hours a day it’s worthwhile to shoot here, you’ll be bored out of your friggin’ mind.  It’s the only sensible place to be based in Laos, and I’ll need to be here about a week out of each month to sort through and optimize my work.  I need to be here to shoot Thaat Luang festival coming up, which will be great…  but it’s time for me to get the hell out and do some real work.  So, I rented a motorbike with the intention of going out of town and scouting for spots to work in.  So that’s what I did.  I went out of town, and started traveling down dirt side streets (they’re all dirt…  besides streets inside of larger towns and highways, the entire country’s infrastructure is comprised of rutted dirt tracks) looking for good spots.  I found a really lame waterfall, especially for Lao standards, and I found some dusty, inactive villages with a few people sitting beneath their stilt houses, wondering what in the hell I was doing.  I almost dumped my bike in a stream I had to ride across.  I knew that if I kept going on the highway I would eventually meet mountains, so I kept going.  And wound up taking a 160km detour to Vang Vieng district.  I wanted to scout for spots, and so I got my wish!  My rental contract, by the way, had a clause that said I wasn’t allowed to take the bike more than 20km from the center of Vientiane.  Bah!

If you don’t know about Vang Vieng, it’s basically a pit-stop on the highway between Vientiane and Luang Prabang that has become a hippy hellhole.  The bars in the town have opium and pot on their menus, and lots of backpackers go there, sleep all day, and then party like idiots all night.  Inside the actual village itself, there are now rows of bars/restaurants with padded lounge seats all facing large-screen TVs that they show DVDs of the TV show “Friends” on, ad nauseum.  I’m not even kind of exaggerating.  They show “Friends” all damn day, and the worst thing is that the places are completely packed.  Young, adventuresome types fly halfway across the world to come to Vang Vieng and sit on their asses eating crappy Western food, smoking weed and watching American TV.

And let’s hope God keeps them there because Vang Vieng district is one of the most stunningly beautiful places I’ve ever been, and I don’t want to be bothered by those people while I’m out photographing the sites that they’re too baked to enjoy.  I was only there for one afternoon and one morning, but that afternoon I went around and scouted for sites to shoot the next morning.  I woke up the next morning, went out and “bang, bang, bang”, hit each spot methodically and got some of the best landscape photos I’ve ever taken.  Here’s one for you to check out.

Vang Vieng Scenery

Sorry, but the early morning shots with color in the sky and warm, golden light get to go on my marketing site the next time I’m in Vientiane long enough to do some optimizing.  Even with the hazy sky I think this shot came out fantastic, and it looks really great full size.  I love the grayscale effect of the staggered mountains in the background.

Not all the shots I took that morning were of the quality I’m after, but most importantly I was able to look at my material and figure out exactly where I want to go next time, and how I want to crop my shots.  I’m itching to get back out there and knock out more work.  On my way back I made notes of some other great spots along the highway with fantastic views, jotting down the kilometer numbers on the highway markers so I know exactly where to go back to.

So I’m off tomorrow.  I’ll be gone for about 10 days, then back here for 2 days, then back out for a few days.  So, it might be a little bit before I write again, please forgive me.  I’ll try to write while I’m gone, but since I won’t have a decent monitor I won’t be able to work on accompanying photos ‘til I’m back here in Vientiane.  A couple people have commented that my posts are great, but the internet generation doesn’t have more than a 5 minute attention span.  Well, I’m verbose, and my lack of ability to make frequent posts means the ones I make will be lengthier.  Hope you can make it through them.  Next time, no crappy shots of my house, I promise!  In the meantime, if you want to find me, try kilometer 144 on Lao national highway 13 at about 6am, approximately 15km out of Vang Vieng.  I just might be there.  Bring your own tripod, mine is being used.

Wat Sisaket in Vientiane

Well, I’m in Laos now.  I have been for 9 days, in fact.  For those of you that checked in to see what’s been going on, sorry for the delay.  I did, in fact, write a post while I was in Pochentong Airport in Phnom Penh, which I was going to add to when I got here.  However, I had a little bit of trouble retrieving it when I discovered in Vientiane that the motor in my hard drive had somehow died on the flight over.

Seeing as how I shoot digital, not being able to use my computer poses a few problems for me.  Problems, irritations, maddening, head scratching, cursing, foot stomping…  well, you get the idea.  So, I spent the majority of my first week getting my computer problems figured out and solved, finding, renting and moving into a house, getting a nice new LCD that I can optimize images on, and in general just getting situated and figuring out my way around town.  Now, after encountering a few difficulties, and spending quite a bit of time and money, I’m ready to go.

I’ve been to most of the main tourist attractions in town, mostly temples, and I’ve started getting some great stock photos (like the one at the beginning of this post…), but that’s not what I want to write about in this blog.  I’m going to write about the festival that just happened.

Ticket sales for the ferris wheel... the woman is the background is my favorite part of this image.

In Theravada Buddhism there are two related holidays, Wan Khao Phansaa and Wan Awk Phansaa.  Starting on Wan Khao Phansaa all monks are forbidden from spending the night anywhere outside their temple.  This basically translates into a ban on travel.  They are also forbidden from eating after midday.  This lasts for 3 months, and so for 25% of each year monks are basically required to stay home and be hungry in the evenings.  Buddhist practitioners are also encouraged to abstain from alcohol, sex, and other vices during this time.  Between Wan Khao Phansaa and Wan Awk Phansaa monks also do not perform any wedding ceremonies.

A panning shot of kids on the ferris wheel.

On Wan Awk Phansaa these bans are lifted, the monks are allowed to travel and eat in the evenings, weddings are performed again, and people who have been abstaining can now have all the booze and sex they want.  So, yeah, it’s basically a big party.  Down along the Mekong River front there have been lines of temporary food and product stalls, LOTS of beer being sold everywhere, a few old, decrepit amusement rides that you couldn’t pay me to get on, and some very, very simple carnival style games.  For example, my favorite was one where they line up rows and rows of Pepsi and orange soda on the ground, and people stand back a few feet and throw little wash buckets at them.  If you can successfully cover one of the bottles of soda with a wash bucket, you win the bottle of soda.  Mind blowing.  And apparently, very popular.  There were also some big booths teaching people not to eat or play with dead chickens if they find them (bird flu!), and lots of other stuff I didn’t understand because I’m not yet fluent in Lao.

Maybe not as easy as it looks...

Thailand has a holiday on the full moon in November called “Loy Krathong”, where people make little boats out of banana tree stumps, banana leaves and flowers, called a “krathong”. They put candles and incense in them, along with some hair and fingernails and a few coins, and then put them in the river and watch them float away.  The idea is that your sins from the previous year are being carried away down the river.  Well, they roll that into Wan Awk Phansaa here, and so on the second to the last night of the festival people flock to the Mekong River, buy krathongs and then pay a guy about $0.25 to swim with it out into the river for them.  However, I didn’t see anybody putting hair or fingernails in them like they do in Thailand, and there aren’t any coins in Laos, so they don’t put those in there either.  I spent that night wandering around the riverfront, taking pictures of people and activities, and finally people with their krathongs.  It had to be one of the most poorly lit festivals I’ve ever attended, and it was extremely challenging to get good photos.  Out of about about 250 shots I took just of people with their krathongs I got one for this blog, and 3 others that I’ll market.  The rest were crap.  You try getting good, clear pictures of people lit by candlelight at ISO 800.

Lao girls preparing their "krathong".

Finally, on the last day of the festival there are boat races.  Villages from all around the country build these really long, skinny boats that hold dozens of people who all row in unison.  Everybody around town has been talking about these boat races all week, and how exciting and wonderful they are, so last week I went down to the river, scoped out spots, and found the best one I could.  They asked for over $50 to reserve the spot, and chalking it up to a professional investment I put down the cash.  They assured me that I should be there two days, the 14th and the 15th, and this was their justification for the $50 deposit (as compared to $25).  The deposit was to cover two days of food and drinks, 6 liters of beer and 3 dishes of food each day.  Well, there was nothing going on down there on the 14th, just a bunch of people sitting by the river and getting drunk. I tried several times to find some people to pitch in with me to pay for my seats, and I figured it was a great deal.  I told everybody I invited that they could just pay half, and then they could have all the beer.  If I was going to be shooting photos, I damn well couldn’t be getting drunk.  Well, I never found anybody to go in with me, and so yesterday morning I found myself sitting alone, baking in the sun in a very expensive seat, unable to drink any beer.  I could have been a great big pig and tried to consume all the food that came with the reservation, but I decided that an aching, overextended gut also wouldn’t help me any.  I discovered that the wonderful, open view I had was now obscured by tents and umbrellas, and the boats were so far out in the river I would have needed a 400mm lens to get anything decent.  I was determined to get something, though, and I scoped out a nice view through some tree branches to my right were I could get a great shot of the boats coming through.  A nice crop on the photos and they would have worked nicely, at least for my bog.  Would have…  until this fat old tourist woman decided to stand on a chair and hold her video camera up over her head, right into my view, completely ruining any chance I had of getting some good shots.  So, I don’t have any boat photos to show you.  And now I know that next year I can either buy a 400mm lens or I can pay somebody a couple hundred dollars to ride alongside the races in a motor boat.  Live and learn.  For now I have to settle for far-off pictures of boats next to a blurry, fat hand holding an equally blurry video camera.  At least when I demanded half my money back from the restaurant manager she gave it to me.  They did not, however, agree to bag up the 6 liters beer I’d paid for so I could drink it at home later that night.  I bought some on the way home, anyhow…