Regretfully I left Tha Khaek – that friendliest of towns – while a faint pinkness suffused the eastern horizon and Venus faded. My relationship with Venus is special; so often, on different continents, she has shone alone in the dawn sky as another day’s journey has begun.

The newly modernized Route 13, which bypasses Tha Khaek, cost more than money. A few miles north of the town, road engineers demolished part of the Sikhottabong wall, an awesomely magnificent natural phenomenon, several hundred metres long and more than fifty metres high. It looks man-made; immediately one thinks of the Pyramids and Inca walls. That erosion could have created it is very extraordinary – almost incredible. The local legend – it was built by order of the gods, using the forced labour of an ancient people – seems equally likely. Erosion must have spent millions of years on the job but it took the engineers less than an hour to dynamite one corner – and had Route 13’s widening required total demolition it would by now have vanished. I don’t know what, if anything, the experts say; no guidebook refers to Sikhottabong. However, my young Tha Khaek friends told me that the rectangular stones of which it is formed are on average 150 metres long, ten metres wide and fifteen metres high.

For sixty miles Route 13 ran level – or undulated mildly – through a wide, sparsely inhabited landscape quite recently stripped of its forest. By the wayside lay several groups of giant tree roots, bleached and trimmed and grotesquely beautiful, all neatly numbered with white paint, awaiting transport. These sell well in the Rich World as exotic ‘garden features’. The symbolism was painful: forests being uprooted, Lao culture being uprooted.

In the few small dreary bans en route live some of the Hmong (and other minorities) displaced from the Annamites to the east by the Secret War – or, latterly, by dam-building consortia. These unfortunates either farm the infertile land ‘freed’ by loggers, or slash and burn amidst the occasional stretches of secondary growth. Surprisingly, I heard many more birds than in the high forests, perhaps because the ‘relocated’ have been deprived of their muskets. One young man, walking along the verge, tried to stone a cock pheasant, missed, then grinned at me ruefully. Pheasants were numerous and several electric-blue crow-sized birds flashed through the foliage. A local abundance of snakes was suggested by five traffic victims, between one and two feet long.

In the biggest ban I paused to watch a jolly Hmong wedding party ‘invading’ the bride’s home to carry out a pretend ‘abduction’. Soon an elderly man approached me, waving a rice basket in the air and followed by a young woman clutching a bottle in one hand and a liqueur glass in the other. Both were poorly dressed, slightly drunk and rather aggressive. The man pinned a tiny plastic flower to my left sleeve while demanding money; he took the lid off his basket to show it half full of kip. When I had contributed the girl unsmilingly poured me a glass of lau-lao and urged me to toss it back quickly – the pair were in a hurry to get on with their fund-raising.

Until eightish the air remained cool and throughout the forenoon a strong cross-wind prevented heat stress. That was a treacherously misleading wind. At noon, finding myself only twenty miles from my destination – Nem Thone – I made a silly mistake and pedalled on, not realizing that by the end of February the midday sun is dangerous at Mekong level. Before long I was feeling dizzy and queasy and the next two hours were spent under one of the rare surviving roadside trees, contemplating the complexity of its lianas and tangled vines and the various parasitic growths on the branches and trunk. No wonder ecologists (and others) become frenzied when fighting for the preservation of forests. That one tree contained a whole interconnected world, populated by a dozen species of insect – but such worlds cannot long survive, once the host tree has been isolated.

Continuing slowly, I diagnosed incipient heat stroke – a diagnosis confirmed by my not wanting a Beerlao on arrival in Nem Thone. Instead I drank four litres of water – the same colour as the local chicken soup – in the ban’s first eat-drink shop.

Nem Thone is a run-down trading centre rather than a ban. Its straggle of eat-drink shophouses, selling a limited range of identical goods and serving foul food, lines Route 13 for a few hundred yards. The mixed population – Lao Lum, Hmong, Vietnamese – has been hard hit by the road’s ‘upgrading’; previously it took days to motor from Vientiane to Savannakhét, now it takes hours and no one needs to stop in Nem Thone. This perhaps explains the dispirited atmosphere; several premises are big enough to cater for a busload.

Most passing drivers behaved barbarously. New shiny limousines with tinted windows, new Toyota pick-ups, new government department minibuses or four-wheel drives raced through at 70 or 80 m.p.h, arrogantly blowing their horns. This hazard being as yet infrequent heightened the danger for those toddlers, goats, dogs, turkeys and ducks who still regarded the middle of the road as their territory, not appreciating that an EU-style highway leaves them no rights. For me this summed up ‘developing’ Laos: the Haves intoxicated by their new vehicles and a new road on which to exercise them, the Have-nots and their precious livestock being treated as expendable.

In Nem Thone’s two-roomed ‘Gest Hoose’ – opened four months previously – I was, according to the register, the eleventh ‘gest’ and the first falang. Evidently the rather grumpy Vietnamese proprietor hoped to capture backpackers but misunderstood their minimum requirements. (Anyway, who but a cyclist would choose to stop overnight in Nem Thone?) The tin-roofed windowless hut, built of wood scavenged from loggers, was a stifling inferno. My room had a plank bed without sheets, a torn mosquito net, an earth floor strewn with the last occupant’s litter. When I firmly requested washing water a handpump had to be primed with cloudy brown water drawn from a very deep, almost dry well. The loo – shared with two neighbouring families – was some forty yards away, down a grassy slope scattered with chunks of concrete from a nearby building site where a little wooden house was being erected on ‘modern’ stilts.

Nem Thone’s shops offered no portable sustenance for the morrow: no nuts, no bananas, no hard-boiled eggs, no dried buffalo hide, only countless packets of imported junk foods, hanging from shop fronts. On the Mekong plain the consumption of this extremely profitable rubbish is seriously worrying and all generations are addicts; elderly folk who elsewhere in Laos would be carrying rice baskets here carry a selection of garishly coloured packets in transparent plastic bags. The cold drink craze has also taken off – yet another American bad habit – despite icy drinks being so unhealthy in hot climates. (As the Indians taught me many years ago, scalding tea is the most cooling drink when one’s body is overheated.) Even in non-electrified Nem Thone fizzy drinks and Beerlao are cooled in large metal iceboxes standing on beer crates outside every little eat-drink shop. At intervals the ice is renewed; big chunks – delivered every morning by truck – are kept in deep pits.

I studied the local supper menus by lifting the lids off pots, pans and basins and finally chose steamed rice, fish soup and shredded raw cabbage. As all cooking is done before noon the rice was cold and hard and the soup lukewarm. Moreover, the salad had been dressed with that repulsive decayed fish sauce. No one can accuse me of being a gourmet but I gave up half-way through.

While trying to eat, I observed something rare in Laos – a public family row. On the bench beside me a young mother was cleaning out her docile toddler’s ears with loo paper wrapped around matchsticks. Then father-in-law came on the scene, disapproved of this activity and reprimanded her sharply – though not of course loudly. She persisted, obviously feeling that she was doing the right thing; her treatment of the little fellow was gentle and loving and he was making no complaints, standing with his head trustingly laid sideways on her lap. Grandad then called in reinforcements: two older women, also with toddlers, and his wife. Eloquently he condemned his daughter-in-law, but no one else seemed willing to take a definite stance, on one side or the other – a very Lao reaction. However, the young mother, having lost face, was deeply distressed. Picking up her son she moved to sit apart on a low stool, staring fixedly at the sky, her face tilted upwards, barely controlling her tears. This was not a happy family. When the young husband arrived he scowled at his wife and made to take the toddler, who screamed and clung to his mother – thus Father lost face. Seizing the child quite roughly he disappeared up the ladder to the living quarters above the shop – the little chap now silent. Granny then went to squat beside her daughter-in-law and murmured something that brought a sudden smile to the young woman’s face. Grandad, looking sulky, retreated to the back of the shop and poured himself a glass of lau-lao. Meanwhile, to my relief, the toddler could be heard laughing.

Outside the Gest Hoose I wrote my diary. A solitary forest giant towered above the shack-shop opposite, its myriad mighty branches engraved blackly on a soft apricot sunset sky. Along the Mekong one sees many such lone survivors – trees in some way defective, from the loggers’ point of view.

Soon after 8.00 I was asleep – only to be awakened three hours later by a truck driver dealing with a major crisis a few yards from where I lay. It took me some moments to realize what was going on; one isn’t at one’s most alert when roused out of a deep sleep by violent metallic noises. It seemed the entire vehicle had to be taken apart and put together again. I lit three tiny candles and read until 1.50 when at last, after many false starts, the unfortunate trucker was able to drive away.

After a night of heavy dew the fields looked rained on, the air was cool and the sky so hazy that the sun rose as a blurred orange globe – poised, for one memorable moment, above a gracefully drooping stand of giant bamboo.

Between Nem Thone and Pak Xan most of the small wayside bans are long-established Lao Lum settlements, thatched houses on stilts overlooking paddyfields. Some (too few) of the day’s fifty-five miles ran through primary forest. Over one glorious eight-mile stretch I had a steep high ridge on my left and, on my right, the wide jade-green Nam Gnouang, its banks all gleaming golden sandhills, some covered in pale green shrubbery. Then the river turned abruptly to join the Mekong and was spanned by a long, ugly, Soviet-donated bridge. Half-way across I stopped (here the wind was gale force) and gazed upstream towards the dusk-blue foothills of the Annamites. Then, from the other parapet, I looked downstream and marked how the vivid waters of the Nam Gnouang contrasted with the murky brown Mekong, flowing powerfully below the flatness of Thailand.

My guidebook comments, ‘There is almost no reason to stop in Pak Xan, a provincial capital without any attitude.’ I disagree; the capital of Bolikhamsai province does have an attitude, if not of the sort likely to attract tourists. For one thing, it is a military base and I saw an unprecedented number of armed soldiers patrolling the jerry-built main street or lolling about at junctions. This is the town I was not allowed to cycle to from Phonsavanh because of its ‘unsettled hinterland’. In 1979 it was identified as the headquarters of the Thai Isan Liberation Party, led by two Thai ex-MPs and dedicated to the overthrow of the LPRP government. The locals belong to a Thai tribe, the Phuan, and many are Christian – which does not endear them to the Lao government. In 1992 a bus bomb, allegedly aimed at the military, killed several Lao civilians and until recently falangs were advised to avoid Pak Xan and escorted out of the town if they lingered. This may explain people’s reluctance to help me find Mr Osakhanh’s house – he being Mrs Bounyong’s nephew, an English-speaker employed by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. Eventually, by chance, Mr Osakhanh found me; his aunt had warned him that a two-wheeled visitor was imminent and on seeing me wandering and wondering he made the obvious deduction.

The Osakhanhs’ pleasant dwelling – Lao Lum crossed with French colonial – overlooks the Nam Xan’s union with the Mekong, far from the grotty town centre. Here tall palms, mature banana groves and gay flowering shrubs – flowering even in winter – surround each home. In the shade of a deep veranda sat the pregnant Mrs Osakhanh, weaving on an enormous loom. She also spoke English; the couple had met while co-workers on a Lao–Swedish Forestry Co-operation project.

Later, when we were alone, Mrs Osakhanh confided how much she was dreading the birth of her first baby. It was due in April, the hottest season, and then she would have to endure staying in bed for a month, lying twenty-four hours a day over a basin of burning charcoal. Not to do so would be to invite bad luck – including lactation failure – by offending the relevant phi. A few months previously a neighbour had defied this custom after her second baby and the infant, though born healthy, had since gone from one infection to another, with frequent fevers. His mother’s angering of the phi was being blamed and the father, who only believes in forest cures, was further upset by the baby’s being stuffed with Western medicines. ‘I don’t believe in charcoal,’ said Mrs Osakhanh, ‘but still I must respect the phi.’

Charcoal apart, there is much to recommend Lao birthing and post-natal customs. The details vary from tribe to tribe but in general husbands help to deliver the baby, occasionally assisted by

a mother or mother-in-law. Having cut the cord with a boiled bamboo knife the husband ties it with a boiled cotton thread, then washes mother and baby with boiled water. During You Kam – the first month – he must care for both, while relatives look after older children if need be. He does all the household chores and cooking, paying close attention to food taboos. Chillies, papaya and eggs are believed to impede the shrinking of the womb, fish and chicken should be eaten twice a day and herbal tea drunk every hour to stimulate lactation. (A blend of twenty or more forest herbs goes into those special teas.) ‘It makes trouble,’ said Mrs Osakhanh, ‘when foreign bosses don’t understand why men with new babies can’t go out working in offices.’

As a hectic red-gold sunset shimmered and quivered on the Mekong we dined under a palm tree – sticky rice, plump grilled fish only an hour out of the Nam Xan, and a salad of lettuce, spring onions and parsley from the family’s riverside plot. To my hostess’s delight I ate immoderately, having been on rather short commons since leaving Tha Khaek.

By then I had realized that Mr Osakhanh was an unhappy young man – understandably so. He worked as a conservation officer on a monthly salary of US$30 (at the current rate of exchange) and his job satisfaction was nil. We talked until midnight and what I learned gave me a sleepless night. Because the Osakhanhs have since migrated to the West, I am free to quote my host; sadly, he won’t be returning to Laos.

In 1993 some 2,300 square miles of Khammuan and Bolikhamsai provinces were officially designated a National Biodiversity Conservation Area (NBCA). (The Lao government delights in these pompous labels provided by the ‘international community’s’ gaggle of transient consultants and resident advisers.) Most of that area was then accessible only on foot and its new status had been partly inspired by the discovery thereabouts, in 1992, of the hitherto unknown saola about which zoologists are still arguing. Does this antelope-like creature, with long thin horns curving backwards, belong to the goat-related Caprinae or to the Bovinae sub-family? That debate, however, did not bother Mr Osakhanh; his concern was to save the saola from extinction. And he was no less concerned about the dozen or so other globally endangered species living in this region. He had joined the Ministry in 1995 because his job description included ‘reporting illegal intrusions’ but soon it was made plain that he should not notice certain intrusions …

Enter the Lao villain of the piece, the Highland Regions Development Corporation – in Lao, Bolisat Phattana Khet Phoudoi (BPKP). I have mentioned observing an army-managed state corporation logging in Xieng Khuang province and the BPKP is another of those. During the decade after its establishment in 1984 its sale of primary forest Annamite timber to foreign buyers earned US$105 million, 40 per cent of Laos’s total export earnings. In 1995 the sale of Khammuan province’s timber put $12 million into the government’s coffers – yet the provincial forestry department’s budget was exactly $700.

A mixture of rage and grief brought tears to Mr Osakhanh’s eyes as he recounted the fate of Mai Lang-Leng. This extremely rare Lao species of fragrant cypress was recently identified by British botanists as Fokienia hodginsii and now survives only in NBCAs on the remotest Annamite ridges separating Laos and Vietnam. (During the 1980s all those growing on the Vietnamese side were felled.) In 1996 Mr Osakhanh discovered that the vast majority of Laos’s Mai Lang-Leng had been numbered and marked for felling by the BPKP. But he could do nothing to save them; each tree was valued at $100,000. They grew in ancient groves, scattered along high, well-drained ridges, and on the nearest level ridgetop other mighty trees were felled to make space for the BPKP’s enormous Russian helicopters. These winched the Mai Lang-Leng to the nearest road, newly bulldozed through ‘protected’ NBCA forests. Trucks then took them quickly across the border to the Vietnamese port of Vinh from where they were shipped to South Korea and Japan – for use as temple beams, or to make coffins for the rich rich.

Mr Osakhanh saw the setting up of NBCAs as a smokescreen behind which the BPKP could collaborate with multinational dam-building consortia and ‘timber barons’ from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and Japan; such collaborations enable the military to pillage areas beyond reach of their own comparatively limited technology. To obtain all the desired concessions, ‘outside investors’ need only throw a handful of peanuts (by corporate standards) to a few Lao government ministers.

Mr Osakhanh’s grandfather, a friend of Ho Chi Minh, was a Pathet Lao leader who for many years fought and suffered – ‘and he had ideals’. His grandson made the depressing point that the dying off of that generation is leaving Laos increasingly vulnerable to exploitation I thought it tragic that he was planning to emigrate, when his country so desperately needs young people of vision, integrity and intelligence. Yet were he to remain in Laos he could achieve nothing. ‘And I might have an accident,’ he observed. ‘People not welcome in NBCAs often have accidents. That’s how the corporate cookie crumbles.’ In the West he hoped to work for a conservation NGO independent of corporate funding and to publicize the dams controversy. Next morning, as I was leaving, he gave me a ‘Discussion Paper’ by Stuart Chape, published in 1996 by the World Conservation Union and dauntingly entitled Biodiversity Conservation, Protected Areas and the Development Imperative in Lao PDR: Forging the Links. Of that chilling document, more anon.

This was another cool morning and the mist lingered for hours – one of those mobile silvery mists that make landscapes seem magical, as though some elemental fairy wand were being waved. Here were stern mountains, nearby on my right, contrasting with the bland Mekong plain on my left. I had hoped to reach Lao Pako by sunset (Marie and I were to meet there) but after sixty-five miles the afternoon sun defeated me. Instead I spent the night in a friendly little riverside ban a few miles off Route 13 where the primary school teacher eagerly offered hospitality – then gathered his forty-three pupils for an impromptu English lesson.

 

Setting off at 5.45 I got the full benefit of a spectacular sunrise, unusually prolonged – high cloud-banks displaying every shade of pinkness and redness above a clear blue-green horizon.

For me Lao Pako was an unlikely destination, an ‘ecotourism lodge’. But Marie had assured me that it lacked electricity and hot water, could not be reached by motor vehicle and was a tranquil, pop-music-free zone: the management forbids TVs, transistors and tape-recorders. In 1990 the site was leased from the government for fifty years by Burapha Development Consultants Ltd, a German/Austrian/Swedish/Finnish consortium which planned to grow bluegums but soon switched to ecotourism.

Fifteen miles from Vientiane I turned off Route 13 to follow a narrow road in the process of being crudely ‘upgraded’; with every turn of the pedals indelible spots of bitumen splattered my shoes. This road, well signposted by Burapha, zigzagged across country for some ten miles, passing two large bans with a few Western-style bungalows around their edges. Then it ended in a fishermen’s ban on the left bank of the Nam Ngum; from here most visitors hire a canoe to Lao Pako.

I preferred the sandy track that ran parallel to a concrete irrigation channel (Italian aid) with a sophisticated system of locks; beyond the fast-flowing water stretched miles of commercial sugar cane, securely fenced. Not long ago the locals grew their own rice on this land; now they are wage-labourers. Next came a bumpy footpath winding through woodland until Lao Pako’s boundary blocked the way: a high wire fence, a massive wooden gate, a neat notice in Lao and English saying, ‘You may come through this gate but please close it.’ As the construction in question resembled a fortification rather than a gate, all my efforts to open it failed. It seemed I was stymied – one person could not lift Hare over – but in such situations Fate rarely lets me down. A wood-collecting Hmong boy appeared – aged perhaps twelve – and I shouted and beckoned. Slowly he approached, looking sullen, and indicated that I must not continue; his manner suggested an understandable dislike of ecotourists, for whose benefit so much land has been enclosed. Pointing to the notice, I assumed a worried expression and requested assistance. Reluctantly the boy laid down his load and helped me heave Hare over, then quickly disappeared into the bushes. I walked the rest of the way on a hilly footpath; all around was original vegetation of the sort known as ‘dry monsoonal forest’, the trees small to medium sized, interspersed with wild banana and bamboo.

Marie was breakfasting when I arrived. Standing to greet me she announced, ‘I’ve a nice surprise for you!’ Moments later the surprise appeared – Jaques, on his way back from Savannakhét. We spent the day together, strolling through the forest until noon, then swimming in the Nam Ngum, keeping close to the bank – the current is much stronger than it looks.

Despite my allergy to tourist resorts, I enjoyed Lao Pako. Only local materials were used in the construction of its four Lao Lum longhouses, with beds for twenty guests. During my three-day stay few other residents appeared, though several parties came from Vientiane for Sunday lunch; excellent Lao meals are cooked on bottled-gas stoves in the kitchen hut. The restaurant is a thatched platform high above a sweeping curve of the Nam Ngum; from the far bank rise steep forested hills and, looking upstream, one sees in the near distance low chunky blue mountains. A circular open-air bar, its thatch extending over the stools, serves imported luxury drinks as well as Beerlao. Those seriously in pursuit of solitude (or not wanting to spend more than 4,000 kip a night) can sleep far away in the forest in an isolated shelter, modelled on paddyfield watch-huts, with three rattan half-walls and no furniture. I chose the remotest of these; my bathroom was five minutes’ walk away, a deep pool in a clear stream shaded by majestic ‘survivors’.

There is something pleasantly eerie about the Lao Pako area. This came across to me, strongly, even before Marie mentioned that the place is locally regarded as ‘a sort of phi headquarters’, which explains why the lodge’s site – an open level space, naturally treeless – had long remained unoccupied. When cultivating hereabouts, people often found ancient artefacts and in the winter of 1995–6 a Swedish-funded dig excavated forty-five complete jars, 270 kilos of potsherds, spindle whorls, iron arrowheads and knives, fragments of copper vessels, red ceramic plates and green glass, scrapers, stone axes and burnt animal bones. Carbon dating revealed that the site had been occupied, by the same cultural group, from the fourth to the sixth century AD. The dig – close to the guest dwellings – was then filled in. It is hoped to extend this archaeological exploration when more funding becomes available.

On the restaurant platform a frisky north wind tempered the afternoon heat while Marie, Jaques and I considered the Stuart Chape ‘Discussion Paper’. This is a shocking example of the sort of pressures put by the ‘international community’ on the inexperienced governments of small, isolated countries – irresistible pressures, a bulldozer driven at an anthill. First, you ‘place’ the victim country on a scale of poverty related to Rich World values and conditions. We read:

In the UNDP Human Development Report 1996, Lao PDR ranks 138 out of a total of 174 countries, with a Human Development Index (HDI) of 0.40, which compares with the average of 0.563 for all developing countries and 0.909 for industrial countries … Eighty per cent of the population of 4.6 million people is rural, with poor primary health care services, and limited access to safe water and sanitation. In the 1996 report, UNDP has introduced a ‘new, multidimensional measure of human deprivation called the Capability Poverty Measure (CPM)’. The CPM considers the lack of three basic capabilities: to be well nourished and healthy (represented by the proportion of children under five who are underweight); healthy reproduction (indicated by the proportion of births unattended by trained health personnel); and the capability to be educated and knowledgeable (represented by female illiteracy) … Lao PDR has a CPM value of 54.6, ranking the country 80 out of 120 countries assessed on this basis. This ranking is established by the fact that 52% of births are unattended by trained health personnel, 54% of children under five are underweight and the female illiteracy rate is 57.9%. These figures reveal that almost half the population lives in poverty and lacks the minimum capabilities to achieve their human development potential.

Suddenly Jaques laughed aloud. ‘Who do they think they’re kidding?’ He looked at me and asked, ‘After travelling through some of our mountains, d’you believe the UNDP has the foggiest notion how many births are unattended or how many women illiterate?’

We read on:

Marie’s face was flushed with anger, making her look oddly like one of those ‘deprived’ rosy-cheeked women one sees in mountain bans. ‘It’s all so obvious!’ she said. ‘Droves of overpaid men in offices dream up these ludicrous HDIs and CPMs, compute reams of pseudo-findings, present them to the government and offer financial aid and expert advice. Who in authority is likely to argue with them? Simply “ranking” a country so far down the scale undermines a people’s self-respect and self-confidence. And the carrot of financial aid is always tasty.’

Jaques added, ‘Most Westerners – literate, with access to information – haven’t a clue how the development industry operates. So it’s no surprise the Lao don’t argue when told they need “considerable external support” for the foreseeable future.’

Doggedly we read on:

As well as its growing strategic economic position in the region, Lao PDR also has major strategic importance as a result of its abundant natural resources – in particular its water and forest resources which have been, and will continue to be, the keystones of its economic development and which are increasingly attractive to its resource-depleted neighbours. Within the mainland Southeast Asia region the only other countries with comparable natural resource bases are Cambodia and Myanmar. Lao PDR has the advantages of location, and a stable political and commercial environment. However, Lao PDR is currently one of the least developed countries in the world. The country is faced with a great paradox. Despite its abundant natural resources, human development indicators remain among the lowest in the world, and its limited skilled human resource capacities constrain a ‘home grown’ approach to providing rapid solutions to urgent national development issues. The most obvious alternative, over the short to medium term at least, is to rely on foreign investment and exploitation of natural resource assets … The Government has taken the enlightened step of legally establishing a comprehensive and representative system of protected areas. It has also signed the Convention on Biological Diversity … Herein lies another paradox. After taking such a major initiative in declaring more than 12% of the land area for conservation … the Government is now coming under intense criticism from international lobby groups for its plans to link hydropower development to designated conservation areas … If the international community – donors, NGOs, bilateral partners, international banks and so on – is serious about providing effective assistance to the country then there needs to be a collective readjusting of perspectives in terms of ‘what is best for Lao PDR’. While there may be issues of concern relating to current approaches to development, there are issues of equal concern in relation to the application of external conservation models and their relevance to the situation in Lao PDR … The investment contribution being made by the international community in biodiversity conservation needs to be provided on the clear understanding that the conceptual bases and methodologies of such conservation will be suited to the particular constraints and opportunities of the Lao situation. That is, the constraints imposed by severe underdevelopment and the need to address these as a matter of urgency; and the opportunities provided by high biodiversity values, unique landscapes and the need to work with local people in the development of effective management regimes. This may require acceptance by investors of linkages and trade-offs between development and conservation which may no longer be acceptable in their home countries (such as the use of protected areas as catchments for hydropower dams), but are nonetheless relevant – if not imperative – in the Lao context.

Marie slapped the book shut and feigned throwing it into the Nam Ngum. ‘What a cunning thug!’ she muttered through clenched teeth.

Jaques winced. ‘Don’t condemn him – it could be he’s sincere.’ Then he repeated what he had said to me in the bus. ‘Those guys, mostly they’re not bad – only ignorant.’

When I had fetched three hard-earned Beerlaos we debated that point.

Marie said to Jaques, ‘What d’you mean by “ignorant”? Most of us associate ignorance with stupidity and you socialize with those types, you know they’re not stupid. At best they choose not to be informed about the consequences of their decisions. And the arms manufacturers, tobacco companies and purveyors of infant formulas can’t possibly be unaware that they are the direct cause of death, injury and disease.’

I had to agree with Marie though I would have preferred to agree with Jaques. Many corporate predators have had distinguished academic careers, are admired for their aesthetic sensibility, behave honourably and graciously in relation to their own sort – yet are insensitive, unscrupulous and destructive in their treatment, by remote control, of other peoples. Behind this contradiction Marie discerned racism – wrongly, in my view. A century ago the sort of men now exploiting distant victims were engaged in exploiting their compatriots. During England’s Industrial Revolution the ordinary person’s standard of living was ruthlessly lowered as rural workers were forced to migrate to the new urban slums, a process now being replicated in the Poor World, often in the guise of ‘development aid’.

Then Jaques said, ‘I mean ignorance in the Buddhist sense. Nothing to do with stupidity or academic brilliance or scientific know-how. Ignorance of our own nature and our connectedness to the rest of the world. The illusion that we can achieve happiness by asserting ourselves, as separate individuals – always controlling events and environments. Which leads to self-deception about true motives, the way Stuart Chape and his colleagues have to deceive themselves.’

‘I think we need more beer,’ said Marie.

The ‘development and biodiversity conservation’ conglomerate for whose benefit Stuart Chape wrote his ‘Discussion Paper’ includes the Swedish and Dutch governments, the World Bank, the EU, the UN Development Programme, the UN Environment Programme, the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Lao government. By now this conglomerate is extremely sensitive about the catastrophic social consequences of dam-building – the ‘involuntary’ (i.e. forced) resettlement of isolated communities. In Thailand, during the past forty years, the World Bank has funded so many dams that more than 150,000 villagers have been displaced to make way for the vast reservoirs that submerged their homes, fields and forests. World Bank officials claim that financial compensation (always meagre, sometimes not received), and resettlement sites and ‘development’ opportunities, leave the displaced ‘better off than before’. The displaced do not agree.

In Laos, at the beginning of 1998, twenty-eight mega-dams were being constructed or planned. The Huay Ho dam, a joint venture between a Thai company, a South Korean corporation and the Lao state electricity company, had displaced 400 people. The Xekaman I dam, planned by an Australian/Malaysian/Thai consortium, threatened 2,220 people. The Nam Theun II dam – the most controversial of all, backed by Electricité de France, three Thai companies, Australia’s Transfield and the Lao government – would displace more than 5,000 people. In June 1997 a UNDP report, Basic Needs for Resettled Communities in the Lao PDR, commented: ‘Relocations caused by hydropower projects on the one hand appear to be of an involuntary nature: it is a case of absolute necessity and the villagers have no choice but to accept it. On the other hand the developers, generally foreigners, are the ones to assess and the ones in charge, and therefore in a way an international responsibility is involved.’

In September 1997 an Asian Development Bank report, Sekong Sesan and Nam Theun River Basins Hydropower Study, noted: ‘The resettled Nya Heun people at Ban Chat San Unit 8 are suffering from severe malnutrition. Only 7kg of milled rice per adult was distributed in July and no rations were provided during August and September. We were told villagers had resorted to travelling to the market at Paksong to borrow money from money lenders at high rates of interest in order to purchase rice. Others travelled great distances to find creeks that had fish in them. This situation is a human rights emergency that needs immediate attention at a high level in Vientiane.’ (Marie informed me that the situation received no attention at any official level.) The report continued: ‘The cultural identity of an ethnic group may be linked to residence within a particular agroecosystem. Thus, for example, ethnic groups in southern Laos may suffer an irreversible loss to their textile tradition if they lose access to the forest and village resources that provide the dyes and the raw silk.’

Marie replaced these reports (and several others) in her briefcase and said, ‘Mountain people who’ve always lived outside the cash economy just can’t be humanely resettled down in an alien place where their knowledge and skills are irrelevant. There were only 1,200 families in the Nya Heun tribe, living in thirty groups. Now they’re dying out, not only from malnutrition and malaria but from broken hearts. I know, I’ve visited them in that dreadful Unit 8 and looked into their eyes and seen no will to live. But who cares? The dam-builders don’t, the government doesn’t. The UN a few years ago passed two pious wordy Resolutions condemning forced evictions world wide – but as usual it takes no action. Can you imagine a UN High Commissioner for Human Rights standing up to the vested interests represented by Stuart Chape?’

We talked then about de-skilling, an insidious and fast-spreading form of impoverishment. I recalled observing the process in my own home town – which, but for its cathedral and illustrious past, might more accurately be described as a village. Fifty years ago Lismore supported tailors, shoemakers, seamstresses, basket-weavers, blacksmiths, bakers, butter-makers, poultry-keepers – all fully employed. When modernization rendered such local talent superfluous the children and grandchildren of those skilled workers found alternative employment in distant places. But for the majority of the de-skilled in a country like Laos that option is not there – and never will be. De-skilled peasants, without access to the level of education that enables people to adapt to the modern world, are doomed – reduced to scrabbling around on the fringes of the consumer society, trying to earn cash to buy mass-produced substitutes for what they used to make, with pride, out of the natural materials around them. In Laos this consequence of ‘development’ seems especially saddening, given the artistry applied to everyday objects and structures: garments, furniture, rice baskets, winnowing trays, fences, balconies, woven house walls, thatched roofs.

Jaques remarked, ‘Most people, listening to you two, would say you were being arrogant. There’s more hard work in weaving a wall than in building with concrete blocks. And using tin sheeting is easier than collecting and binding grass sections. And it’s quicker to buy a plastic chair than to carve one.’

That reminded me of a reviewer of The Ukimwi Road who countered my criticisms of the aid industry by arguing that ‘it is arrogant to deny Africans the right to try to attain some of the West’s advantages’. A kindly argument – but unconvincing for lack of proof that Western interventions have benefited the majority throughout the Poor World. ‘Arrogant’ and ‘simplistic’ are favourite big sticks with which to beat those who dare to challenge ‘progress’. But I have been too long on the road to fear such sticks. Thirty-five years ago I was accused of being ‘simplistic’ when I campaigned against the new agribusiness then replacing farming in Ireland. I was scoffed at as an ill-informed romantic, looking backwards through rose-tinted spectacles, refusing to recognize global needs. Agribusiness, requiring the replacement of men by machines, the cruelty of factory farming and the use of deadly chemicals, was allegedly essential to feed a rapidly increasing world population. Since then, we have seen many millions of tons of surplus food being destroyed to keep prices high and millions of dollars/marks/pounds being paid out to farmers who refrain from cultivating their land. Yet now exactly the same argument is in use to justify the genetic modification of food plants.

 

On my last evening in Lao Pako I had one too many beers with new friends, an exceptionally congenial Swedish couple. When Mr Bylen stood me a seventh I thought it impolite to refuse though the sixth had felt like enough. Eventually, in merry mood, I tottered off into the forest carrying a mini-lamp which soon expired. By an unfortunate (or incompetent) coincidence my pencil torch did likewise a moment later and somewhere I took a wrong turning – as I tend to do, even in daylight when sober. It was a moonless night and no starlight could penetrate the foliage: the darkness was total. Uncertainly I stumbled over tangled tree roots and into inexplicable shallow holes, then attempted to retrace my steps. I was not drunk enough to be reckless; when I seemed to be getting into denser forest, on a rougher path, I decided to stop and sleep on a root-free space. Luckily there was no dew (an ominous sign, as I realized next day when the temperature soared into the nineties) and I slept soundly, using my journal bag as pillow.

I woke before dawn – without a hangover, which says much for Beerlao – and uncurled myself and stretched (feeling rather like a cat) and lay listening to the first bird and insect noises and the faraway crowing of cocks.

Awaiting the sunrise, I wondered about ecotourism. It sounds less malign than mass tourism but around Lao Pako how do the locals feel when foreigners lease their land, ban hunting and wood cutting and erect a high wire fence? Already this area has been degraded – so why impose such restrictions on people who will perforce ignore them but are made to feel like quasi-criminals by their existence? Daily I saw young men roaming around with home-made guns, seeking protein and looking alarmed when they realized I had noticed them. And during my forest walks I observed that several trees, including a mahogany, had recently been felled with axes. Much is made of the Lao Pako lodge providing jobs for twelve villagers – but if the rest have to hunt and collect firewood furtively …? Also, the expat manager did not respect his staff. On the previous morning I had witnessed him loudly and at some length insulting the young man behind the bar – in front of three other staff members and four falangs. He reminded me of a ‘Rhodie’ reprimanding an errant black – a ‘munt’. In Laos, where such behaviour causes deep humiliation, and the ordinary people are so consistently courteous, expats of this type should be deported.

Unless those running a project are genuinely committed to conservation, methinks ecotourism is a mere gimmick to attract those jaded by conventional tourism. Marie had told me of plans, which she was challenging, to establish an ‘ecopark’ nearby, a few miles upstream. This would mean forcibly ‘relocating’ two small bans, building a multi-storey hotel and entertainment complex, then persuading people that here they could have a thrilling encounter with Nature on the bank of the Nam Ngum surrounded by ‘virgin forest’. The cynicism of such developers is peculiarly sickening; they take advantage of those who vaguely want to be ‘ecologically sound’ but can know nothing of the complexities involved.

In Vientiane, when I paid a farewell visit to Mrs Bounyong, she told me about a bird sanctuary established some eight years previously by villagers who linked a drastic drop in the local fish population to a lack of those birds whose droppings nourish fish. (The birds had of course been eaten.) A specially created lake and a headman’s ‘preservation order’ had the desired effect; hundreds of herons and bitterns settled nearby and the fish increased and multiplied and filled the lake. It is drained every March, when the fish are sun-dried and divided between the ban’s ninety families. In 1996, a foreign eco-NGO got wind of this enterprise and were astonished that illiterate villagers had proved capable, sans outside advice, of diagnosing what was wrong and retrieving the situation. Then they were affronted by the villagers’ polite but firm refusal to allow them to set up ornithologists’ observation platforms – another ecotourism project, to raise funds for that NGO. As Marie had observed in another context, Lao peasants could teach their government ministers a thing or two about rejecting foreign meddling. Sadly, a forest fire had recently broken out near this ban (Chinese loggers were blamed) and as some 300 men struggled to fight the flames a tiger appeared – less than forty miles from Vientiane. Mrs Bounyong feared that the misfortunate animal, deprived by the blaze of his natural prey, might soon kill a buffalo or a person and therefore be himself killed. Or the Chinese loggers might shoot him for his body parts.

 

It took me three hours to cover the thirty miles from Lao Pako to Vientiane; I arrived at 9.30, as the heat was becoming intolerable. (That week’s high temperatures were described by Sheila as ‘freakish, not expected until the end of March’.) On Route 13 I overtook all other cyclists, including a young man on a racing bicycle; the Lao are notable for strength and stamina rather than speed. However, as cyclists they achieve remarkable feats of balance. I passed one woman holding a parasol in her left hand and having her minute baby – not in a sling – tucked under her left arm while heavy wicker pannier bags of vegetables hung from a bamboo pole tied to the carrier.

In Lao Pako I had overheard a UN family planning consultant defining the Lao addiction to babies as a ‘major problem’. Certainly the fifth or sixth (or tenth) infant gives as much joy to both parents as the first – and to its older siblings, who swamp the junior member with affectionate attention. Soon after my return home there was a media debate about the right of parents to administer corporal punishment to their children. Any Lao would have been scandalized, seeing the use of physical violence to discipline children as utterly depraved and barbaric.

Vientiane’s streets were in an even more parlous state than before. A thick blanket of dust enveloped everything and everyone; all age groups were afflicted by rasping coughs. Deep, wide trenches had been dug throughout the city centre, colossal drainage pipes lay all over the place in segments – many broken – and high ridges of excavated earth blocked the traffic. I tried to picture the scene when the rains started in May but my imagination boggled. The Vietnamese companies involved were proving criminally inefficient in their failure to co-ordinate their activities. Also, the relative sizes of kick-backs for the road-construction team and the water and sewage teams were a source of delaying dissension. My expat informant, who was overseeing a foreign-funded irrigation project, grumbled that the Lao are not really interested in ‘development’ and often say, ‘It was OK before …’ He went on: ‘At first they can seem full of enthusiasm for a new idea but they lose interest when the need for hard work and organization hits them. They’ve just not got the mindset for being developed. We’re only wasting money on them.’

The day of my departure was overcast and not too hot, as though the weather phi had registered my low spirits and decided to be kind. I so much wanted not to leave Laos that I left four hours earlier than necessary. The first empty tuk-tuk to come past Sheila’s house was rather battered but driven by a young man with an enchanting smile – Mr Soubanh – who leaped out to help me with my luggage. By this stage I was not travelling light, having acquired an inordinate number of books, pamphlets, reports and diverse documents.

Within moments the tuk-tuk had suffered the first of three breakdowns. Each mishap required Mr Soubanh to grovel beneath the engine for ten or fifteen minutes, doing esoteric things with his bare hands. He then reappeared, grinning reassuringly, covered in red dust and black oil, and on we chugged at less than my cycling speed. It never occurred to Mr Soubanh that I might need to get to Nong Khai at a certain hour and this seemed a fitting way to leave Laos: slowly and inefficiently, in the company of an endearing young man who coped serenely with his machine’s idiosyncrasies and had no sense of time.

Often in the past I had regretted the end of an enjoyable journey but never before had I felt so sad when leaving a country – and this despite an imminent reunion with two granddaughters. It took me a little time – so strong was this emotion – to recognize its real source. On the way to the border it had felt purely personal: I was sad to be leaving the most lovable and in many ways the most civilized people I have ever travelled among. Later, on the overnight train to Bangkok, I realized that at the deepest level I was grieving because were I to return in a few years I would not find the same Laos – not even in the mountains.