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.

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.

Sunburned and happy...

So, to begin things, I guess I should introduce myself to those of you who don’t know who I am, what I do, or why you should be remotely interested in reading what I have to say. So, here goes:

Hi everybody! I’m Jake. I’m an American guy who’s been living in and traveling extensively through Southeast Asia for the past 8 years. My love affair with the region started as a result of a love of the cuisine, a keen interest and ability in foreign languages, and just a general curiosity of places and cultures far removed from my homeland. My second trip to this part of the world started in early 2001, and was meant to be a 6 month extended vacation, sabbatical, party, escape from reality, whatever you want to call it. I’m still here, and have no immediate plans to leave this cozy little corner of the Earth.

Originally my love affair began with Thailand, but after working in Chiang Mai teaching English for half a year, I was forced to accept that my paltry salary wasn’t going to afford me a decent living. I’d heard that jobs were more plentiful and salaries significantly higher in Saigon, Vietnam, and so I headed there in a final attempt to continue my life in Southeast Asia.

Both things were true about Saigon’s teaching market, as well as the fact that Vietnam’s visa regulations were, surprisingly to me, much more simplified and liberal. Feeling much more welcome and comfortable in Vietnam, I settled here, and that’s where I’ve been since January, 2002.

I love teaching English, it’s fun and rewarding, and I’ve got a good standard of living, however I’m a bit too ambitious to be happy with the same position and responsibilities ad infinitum. Over the past several years I’ve worked diligently on other personal and professional interests that are now shaping the direction my life is taking.

First, my obsession with foreign language has led me into some great relationships and experiences, which have ultimately become professional pursuits. I had my first book, Vietnamese For Beginners, published through Paiboon Publishing. I’ve got a second title finished and it’s currently “in queue” for publication, and I’ve done several random jobs involving translation and interpretation. Starting mid-October I’ve got another translation job beginning, and I’m hoping my work involving language services will continue to expand.

Secondly, and more important for the content and direction of this blog, is my photography. I’ve been interested in photography for many years, however in the past my lack of experience and education in photography, and the costs involved with buying a “real” camera (SLR as compared to point and click), coupled with the expense of film and processing made photography an economically forbidding hobby to take up. I would happily snap roll after roll of film on my trips, hoping for a few good shots, fully understanding that if I had more technical knowledge and more flexibility I would be able to take much better shots.

In 2005, while preparing for a one-month trip to Peru and Bolivia, I decided that it was high time for me invest in a digital camera and do away with the old craptastic camera I’d been using for years. I discovered that manufacturers were finally producing consumer level digital SLRs, and went ahead and purchased my first “real” camera, as I thought of it then.

I had no idea whatsoever that my new Nikon D50 and two crappy Sigma lenses would change my life.

I went on that trip to South America in 2005, and snapped thousands of shots while I was gone. And, hey! 3 or 4 of them were actually pretty good! I hadn’t had time to properly familiarize myself with my camera, or even the fundamentals of photographic theory before I left, and spent lots of time scratching my head, trying to figure out what the hell ISO settings were, and how or why I would decide to use one or the other. The camera got set on auto, and that’s where it stayed. After returning to Vietnam, I dutifully put my camera away in the corner of my closet, where it stayed for over a month.

A shot from my 2005 trip to South America, taken in Bolivia.

In late December of that year a not-so-random encounter with a pro photographer I barely knew resulted in the two of us going out together for beers and photos on New Year’s Eve. After watching me take some shots and seeing some of my photos he basically said “Wow, you don’t understand a damn thing about your camera! But you know how to see a good photo…” He taught me what my ISO settings (and a few other marginally important things like that) were and said we should shoot together a few more times.

We shot together more and more, and through the experience I gained and a kick in the pants or three every once in a while from my buddy, I quickly started to develop a deep interest and ability in photography. In a mere matter of months it grew from a desire to take nice photo album shots of my vacations into a serious interest, into a hobby, and then into something much more. Photography became a lifestyle for me. My camera and what I did with it became something I was planning my life around, not something I brought along with me. Where I was going, what I was doing, what I was planning, who I was with, all of these things started to be more and more dominated by photography. I found myself spending much more time outdoors, observing my surroundings, discovering new places. I began to get a much more developed idea of what the people and places in Vietnam were about, and my understanding of the culture grew. Soon, my photos ceased to be snapshots of “stuff I saw”, and started to grow into definitions of things I understood, my way of capturing my vision of the world around me and allowing me to show it to other people. It became a way for me to not only to discover new things, but to understand them, then see them differently, and then express that sentiment. It started to become my life.

Lagi, Vietnam, 2007

I started to believe more and more that it was possible for me to turn this into a career. The more I worked at it, the more my friends and my family seemed to be supportive of what I was doing, and finally, in a complete absence of any marketing or self-promotion at all, I began getting offers for paid work, both in the form of contracts and in the purchase of individual images for both editorial and commercial purposes.

It started to become clear to me that first, I was going to have to formulate a plan, an idea, and to target a market before I could be successful. I also wasn’t going to be able to pull this off while working 6 mornings and 6 evenings a week teaching English. Through my own personal interests, counseling from at least a few trusted friends, some needed support, both moral and financial, from my family, and a hell of a lot of planning and hard work, I’ve managed to set myself up with the equipment I need and a bit of a nest egg so I can give it a shot.

So, about a week ago I quit my job and started off on my latest adventure. I’m still in Vietnam, and after taking a short trip up to Hanoi to start things off, I’m back in Saigon and preparing to leave for Laos in 6 days, where I hope to spend the majority of the next 6 months taking pictures and building a library of stock travel photos to market. I started a website, the Laos Photo Library, to market and promote the work I’m going to do while I’m there, but still didn’t have another means (besides Flickr) to show off my other work in an organized fashion. My friends have been telling me to write about my experiences for quite some time, and after a conversation and an offer to help with site development from my good friend Josh Sullivan, I decided to start this blog as a means to let people know what I’m about, where I am, and what I’m doing, as well as show off some of my personal work that I don’t intend to actively market. Thanks, Josh. I owe you a lot more than a couple of beers, apparently.

So there you have it. Blahg, blahg, blahg. After putting up this intro I’m going to start on my second entry, detailing my oh-so-exciting experiences with crappy weather and digestive infections up in Hanoi over the previous several days. My last week here in Saigon I’ll be running around, tying up loose ends, taking photos before I go, and generating some more shtuff to write about. I’ll be making regular entries while I’m in Laos about what’s going on there, and in December I’ll be making a trip to India for a few weeks, which should result in some great stories and fantastic image galleries. After all that… who knows? I’ll just have to wait and see how successful I am at this, and if you’re reading my blog, then so will you! Wish me luck if you want to, and here’s to hoping that this winds up being the introduction to a success story. And if it isn’t, then damned if I’m not going to have fun along the way.