I love nature

Last weekend, we drove eight hours south to the Konglor Caves in Borikhamxay province. Partly to counter those accusations I mentioned in the last post.
Anyway, driving through villages and dried-out rice paddies, surrounded by these towering limestone cliffs…there was a lot of not looking away, that’s all I’m saying.
It’s the kind of thing that makes you hear music in your ears (especially if you’ve seen a lot of movies), and makes you imagine living in their shadow, and seeing them every day.
It took us a long time to get to the caves. The road was bad, and sometimes non-existent. We used my friend Tim’s GPS device to get to the river, it was that bad. “You are heading south. You are heading south,” it kept saying.
We ended up paying a villager to take us there.
‘There’ was a surprisingly lovely but somewhat pricey hotel, where we left the car and took a boat 40 minutes up the river to a new resort closer to the caves- simple bungalows, cold water showers, and the most pristine river I’ve seen in ages.
The caves- when I say caves, I mean a river winding four kilometres through a mountain and out the other side, by the way- were pretty spectacular. Massive, pitch-black (and lit up sporadically by the navigators’ headlights), cathedral-like, 100 metres wide and 100 metres high in some parts, filled with sparkling stalagmites and stalagtites…what’s the difference by the way? Which is which?
You have to see these caves now, because in a year or two, the resort will be the new Vang Vieng. I mean it: they’re building a new road to get there this very second, and soon, the water will be murky, the rooms will smell funky and there will be beer bars all along the riverbank. Maybe even in the caves themselves, where the glittering formations will be tarnished with black fingerprints. They say that limestone stains for 1,000 years when you touch it. Imagine.
So we were lucky to see it when we did.

The boats we took chugged down through riverside villages, where kids, or sometimes whole families, lined up on the shore to wave hello and goodbye. They were happy, excited to see us, with our light hair, pale skin and fount of potential funds.
I thought about what it would be like if we were Asian people, winding our way between riverside towns in rural Australia. People there wouldn’t line up to wave and smile. They would be more likely to stare, hostile, or turn away and mutter. They would treat us with suspicion.
I know that without a doubt, and it made me sad.

This post is dedicated to my black Haviaina flip-flop that I left behind in the caves- it slipped off my right foot and floated away into the darkness.

It’s also dedicated to my friends Malikhone and Kek, who, like many Lao girls, made me look once again like a towering amazon in a field of random wildflowers that we came across on the way.

Big story in the past week:
The finalists were announced for the title of Miss Apone Lao, the country’s very own beauty pageant, put on by the Lao Women’s Union.
I was given complimentary tickets to the finals, but I wouldn’t have gone even if I hadn’t been away loving nature. After being photographed with the 18 finalists in our office last week- the Vientiane Times was a major sponsor of the event- I had seen all I wished to see of what is expected of the prototypical Lao woman. As stipulated by the Lao Women’s Union, that is.
Honestly, 18 girls with perfect hairdos, in heals and sinhs, bowing low and barely saying a thing just doesn’t do much for the sisterhood, does it?
I had a bet with an English colleague on who would win. We both liked a girl with honey skin and slightly Indian features- all the boys thought she was ugly because “skin too dark”. Of course, it was the most docile girl with the whitest skin and the roundest face who won.

Two more interesting stories in the paper here this week:
A women’s group is pushing to have marital rape criminalised. The rationale is that having sex with your wife when she doesn’t want to is a form of domestic violence, a fact that should be reflected in the country’s sexual assault laws.
It’s not rocket science.
Or is it? I thought, as I tried, as patiently as I could, to explain to the editor- the editor- that yes, in fact rape is still rape even when the parties are married…
The boys in the office all thought it was tremendous fun, as did the editor, until I pointed out the part in the story about how Laos is a signatory to a certain, you know, international convention that defines rape as such, and that the country is sort of 'lagging' a bit. Strangely, that seemed to shut them up…

The other story, or rather the lead up to the first draft being written, gave me enough of a glimmer of hope for the future of this country’s media, and the people involved, for me to keep doing what I’m doing. For a few hours, at least.
One of the journalists got wind of a group of workers, from an unofficial street-corner labour market, who were so poor that they had actually started selling their blood.
My journo went undercover down at the street corner, and posed as someone wanting to know where he could get some blood. He also spoke to a woman who had paid US$75 for some blood for her cousin, when she discovered the blood bank was empty.
I read his first draft and got really excited. I told him he should take it further- speak to the Red Cross and turn it into a campaign to get more people to donate blood, so that people wouldn’t have to buy blood from strange men on street corners. We had a heated, creative-differences type of argument, of the likes not previously seen by me in a Lao newsroom, and he finally agreed to speak to more people.
Before he could do this, the editor checked the copy and was outraged at the very thought that Vientiane Times could suggest that people were so poor they would sell their body parts, and made him change every mention of ‘selling’ to ‘donating’, and replace any mention of money with some kind of euphemism for ‘a small gift for services rendered’.
What we got was a lame story about random men on random street corners who were so kind-hearted they were giving away their blood.
Welcome to service journalism, Lao-style.

She really is an art nerd!
Anyway, you might have noticed the photo of my painting. I’m liking it more every day- what does everyone think?
I like the apple, especially.
This post is also dedicated again to Pat, whose entire computer was stolen last week by some kind of animal in the night- his computer and many thousands of songs, photos, articles, workplans and words of academic brilliance.
How is he coping??