The journey from Perth into Laos was an exotic and refreshing change after the monochrome of life in Meeka. I picked up a guidebook along the way and acquainted myself with one of the poorest and most isolated countries in South-East Asia.
Laos is a landlocked country bordered by China, Myanmar (still locally referred to as Burma), Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. The country is about the size of Britain, mountainous with thick jungles and a population of around 6 million. Relatively undeveloped, the main industries of Laos are the subsistence growing of rice, logging and cultivation of the opium poppy. The north-western corner of Laos forms a part of the Golden Triangle of Asian opium production.
The mighty Mekong River flows through Laos from China in the north to Cambodia in the south and, for some of this journey, defines the border between Laos and Thailand. Laos is short on basic infrastructure and the Mekong River is a crucial transport route.
When I arrived, Laos was governed as a one-party state, which had been operating since the communist Pathet Lao seized power in 1975. I noted that there was a low-level civil war from this time still dragging on.
It was December 1993, and Laos was a partly closed country. Flying directly there was not easy, so I ended up having to go in overland from Thailand (after getting my Laotian visa in Bangkok).
Following a comfortable night in the Thai town of Nong Khai, I crossed into Laos over the Mekong River via the strangely named Friendship Bridge. The Laotian border guards were armed with AK47s and did not look friendly, but the business visa and a smile got me through.
I was met on the other side by Dao, Newmont’s Mr Fixit. Dao was one of those smooth, multilingual middlemen who act as company representatives in far-flung places. We got into the company vehicle, which was an ex–Russian army jeep, a UAZ (pronounced ‘waz’) and drove through the chaos of cars, bullock carts, tuk-tuks (motorbike taxis), logging trucks and chickens to Vientiane, the capital of Laos.
As we drove, Dao described one of his holiday exploits to me. ‘I spent an entire week in a hotel room with a girl and all we did was have sex, sleep a bit and get room service. That was the holiday.’
‘Didn’t you go out even once?’ I asked.
‘Why? We were only in Vientiane.’
There was still a lot of French influence in Laos.
At the company office I met Simon Yardley, the country manager for Newmont. He had the world-weary look of the lifetime expat. Simon gave me a warm welcome and a background briefing.
Mining in South-East Asia had recently been ignited by a number of dazzling new gold discoveries. Newmont had found a giant copper-gold mine at Batu Hijau in Sumbawa, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea and the Philippines were also delivering some rich gold deposits. Mining companies were throwing money at putting geologists on the ground all over the region. The aim was to find new, large gold mines in areas that were under-explored. It was a type of corporate-sponsored gold rush and I found myself in the middle of things.
Nowhere was more under-explored than Laos. As a result of politics and geography, no western geologists had been here since the French colonialists had left in the 1950s. As far as exploration geology goes, this was virgin territory and as thrilling a place to prospect as you could find. A geologist could walk up a remote river here and stumble over an outcropping world-class gold mine. There were not many places in the world you could still say that about.
This apparently was my job, and it sounded pretty damned good to me.
‘Jim, do your expenses, grab your maps and then it’s straight off to the airport. You’re flying out to the field by helicopter this afternoon,’ Simon said.
‘No problem, whatever is required,’ I told him, although I wouldn’t have minded a night in town, which looked most exotic, at least compared to Meekatharra.
Simon briefed me on the kind of work I was to do, mainly collecting stream sediment samples and geological mapping and prospecting along the way. There was a lot of the unknown about what I was letting myself in for here, but I could see a great opportunity opening up with this job and I was determined to do well. My navigation and geology skills were good, and after my previous stints in the army and South America I felt confident enough in my abilities.
‘A Canadian geologist will be out there with you for a few days. Mitch will give you a full handover and show you the ropes,’ Simon assured me.
Dao and I headed out in a car packed full of food and supplies. He gave a running commentary on almost every woman we passed. He was not just commenting on their appearance, but their personalities; then it dawned on me – he actually knew them all.
When we arrived at the heliport I could see several large Russian-built military helicopters – HIP gunships and HOOK transports – a reminder of the ongoing insurgency. Sitting to one side was our helicopter, thankfully a reliable Canadian-built Jet Ranger, which looked tiny in comparison to the Russian choppers.
For some reason, every civilian helicopter flight in Laos had to be accompanied by a military officer; now that was paranoid. Given there are only five seats on a Jet Ranger, one of which is for the pilot, this extra body was a pain.
We loaded up and Dao rather ominously wished me good luck. The chopper took off and followed the Mekong River to the north-west. After a while we left the river, and the terrain became mountainous and covered with thick jungle. I could not see any roads or signs of civilisation. The military observer was keeping a beady eye out with his binoculars, following the route on his map and making copious notes in his field-book. He seemed enthusiastic in his observations and I was wondering if I was missing something.
After about an hour we came in to land at an isolated valley, which was set among basalt mountains and jagged karstic cliffs of limestone. We landed in the only flat and open space, next to a village made totally out of bamboo, surrounded by fields carpeted red with opium poppies.
A mass of brown faces gazed into the windows of the chopper. Most of these people were wearing traditional hill-tribe costume and looked friendly enough, though a contingent of smoking, gun-toting, young Pathet Lao soldiers also stood threateningly to one side.
I jumped out of the chopper and with some relief saw a large white guy striding towards me: this must be Mitch. I could hardly hear anything as the chopper rotors were still turning.
Mitch put his hand out, I shook it and he handed me a sheet of paper.
He shouted in my ear, ‘Good luck, mate, you’ll fucking need it,’ and jumped onto the chopper, spoke to the pilot and the machine picked up rotor speed and took off.
Oh crap. But at least I got some handover notes. I looked down at the piece of paper. It said: ‘Good luck, mate, you’ll fucking need it. Cheers, Mitch.’
I turned around to see 300 brown faces, some with guns, rushing towards me.
Everyone formed a large circle. The girls giggled and poked, the children laughed and tugged at me, and the guys with guns just looked like guys with guns.
A group of three men pushed their way into the circle. They looked Laotian but were dressed as westerners, all wearing the pocketed waistcoats used by geologists the world over.
‘Newmont,’ they said.
‘Newmont,’ I replied.
I turned to the first one. ‘Speak English?’ I asked.
‘Vietnamese.’
I turned to the second.
‘Russian,’ he said.
In desperation I turned to the third.
‘Français,’ he said.
I had been an absolute duffer in French at school, although my skills had improved when I had spent six weeks as a student doing geological mapping in the Maritime Alps. My French was better than my Laotian, Vietnamese or Russian, so it would have to do.
That night we slept in a bamboo hut on stilts. I was kept awake all night by the smell and snorting of pigs underneath. Next morning, there was rice for breakfast, then I had to answer the call of nature. There were no toilets anywhere. Like the rest of the village, I went in the nearby bush, which was not a pretty sight.
Planning for the day ahead commenced. The French-speaking geologist, Khamhung, showed me on the maps which areas had already been sampled and we then planned our next expedition, which would last a week.
We mustered our motley crew in the centre of the village. We had about ten soldiers armed with Kalashnikovs and RPG-7s. I had no idea what they were doing there but Khamhung assured me they were necessary. The soldiers were led by a menacing-looking, thickset sergeant with rotten teeth, whom neither the villagers nor the soldiers seemed to like much.
About fifteen local men acted as porters. We loaded them up with bags of rice, dried fish, meat and sampling equipment on improvised bamboo backpacks. These locals were led by their pho ban, which literally translates as ‘father of the village’. This village’s head guy was about fifty and looked very able. Some of his village porters were also armed.
Khamhung and the other two Laotian geologists were attempting to direct this group, and there was much gesticulating and raised voices. My greatest concern was one of the weapons accidentally going off, and I ensured they were all ‘made safe’ (that is, that no round was loaded into the breach).
I was armed with a map, compass, field notebook, geologist’s hammer and hand lens, and a rucksack with a set of spare clothes and sleeping gear. The maps were 1:100,000 scale; they had been made by the French in colonial times, drawn from aerial photos. There were large blank areas marked ‘Non Carte’. This was indeed uncharted territory.
Finally we set off around eleven, the army out ahead, then myself and Khamhung, with the villagers and the other two geologists behind.
We started walking through hilly rice fields. These were not the wet paddies I had seen in Thailand; this was tung hai (hill rice), grown without the intense water cultivation of the lowlands. Most of the land though was given over to poppy cultivation. We were deep inside the Golden Triangle, where the bulk of the world’s opium is grown.
We were making good progress along established tracks for about half an hour, when I heard a commotion up ahead. The army guys jumped to the side of the track, and coming at us full pelt was a bamboo stretcher carried by several villagers with a screaming guy on top. One of his legs was half off and covered in blood.
I turned to Khamhung and gave him a questioning look.
‘Mines terrestres,’ he said with an explosive hand motion. Landmines. He grinned nervously and continued walking. The pho ban despatched one of his men to accompany the stretcher and presumably assist in getting some medical help. Where that would come from I had no idea.
So that’s why this job was paying so well. We all continued walking and I tried to control the clawing fear in my stomach, keeping a close eye on where I was stepping.
We moved up into the steeper terrain, the patchy rice and poppy fields giving way to large trees of primary rainforest. As they walked, the locals collected edible plants and stowed them under their shirts to eat later. I was thankful to be off the established tracks and felt considerably safer from landmines in the forest.
This was 1994, and just before we got our first GPS. I navigated by compass and dead reckoning, using the contours and rivers (where there was map coverage) as markers. It soon became apparent that the Laotian geologists were poor navigators. The Laotian army guys had no idea where they were, and the deeper we went into the forest, the less certain the locals became as to our location. It was all on me.
We stopped at a major river and took a sample. These standard Newmont samples were always taken the same way; they consisted of BLEG (fine river sediment), pancon (concentrate from gold-panning the river) and float (any prospective rock that looked like it might have gold in it). These samples would be sent to a laboratory for analysis. The results might give valuable clues as to any nearby mineral deposit, shedding its bounty into the rivers we were sampling. The multibillion-dollar gold-copper mine at Ok Tedi in Papua New Guinea had been found a few years earlier using this same technique.
The entire tenement area (the concession that our company had been granted) was being tested in this manner. It was roughly 2,500 square kilometres, and coverage was projected to be one sample every 2.5 square kilometres. So 1,000 samples needed collecting and the organisation, implementation and quality control of this program was my job.
After we took our sample, we had lunch. This consisted of tinned pilchards, cold rice and some newly discovered maggots the locals were very excited about.
Continuing upstream, we took samples as required. The terrain was rugged and the jungle now much denser. The only way we could walk was along the riverbed, ankle-to-thigh-deep in water. The army at the front would chop out the overhanging vines to allow access. About an hour before nightfall, we stopped to take the last sample of the day and make camp.
The men constructed a series of shelters using bamboo. To start, they made a rectangular frame large enough for six sleeping men, the poles tied together using jungle vines. Then inside this frame they placed a knee-high platform. This platform was floored with split bamboo, opened up and flattened to create the surface on which you slept.
The top of the frame was angled and banana leaves were stacked there to keep out the rain. We erected our mosquito nets within this shelter and laid out our bedding; I had a sleeping bag and the locals mainly had rough blankets.
Another group prepared the meal. The rice was cooked using thick bamboo poles as steamers. Water was poured in to fill most of the bottom section, and above this a porous origami-type brace supported banana leaves filled with rice. These water-and rice-filled bamboo poles were then tied to a frame built over a fire to steam the rice.
The pho ban was clearly an excellent organiser and, while all this was going on, other locals were furiously digging under the roots of some nearby bamboo. With a jubilant cry, they pulled out a family of rats. These were a delicacy in Laos, and their capture was a cause for some celebration.
One of the soldiers had shot a monkey earlier in the day, and that was roasting on a spit. Grotesquely, the monkey’s face grinned up at me as its lips burnt off, and I shivered in the damp chill of the valley. The monkey was soon joined by the skinned rats, spreadeagled on bamboo crucifixes to be smoked.
For a salad, all of the plants that had been foraged earlier in the day and temporarily stored in various armpits were pooled onto a large leaf. Some evil-looking black paste was added.
When the rice was cooked, the bamboo poles were split and the leaf-covered rice was cut up into individual portions. The cook proudly served me my food on a banana leaf. Everyone looked at me expectantly, awaiting my verdict on the feast.
I looked down upon a monkey’s arm, a rat’s leg, a sprinkling of armpit salad, some leftover maggots and rice.
I valiantly ate a piece of the crunchy rat, looked up and smiled.
‘Délicieux, merci,’ I said, and Khamhung translated.
Everyone got the positive message and went about their own eating, leaving me time to contemplate my meal. It wasn’t that hard; I was ravenously hungry and ate the lot. The rice really was delicious and was cooked perfectly. The monkey I was least keen on; they looked better in the trees than on a plate. The maggots were tart and disgusting, but the rat actually tasted good. I tried not to think about the armpit salad as I wolfed it down.
I bathed in the cold river, then changed into my dry night clothes and fell into my sleeping bag, exhausted.
Yet I couldn’t sleep. My legs were itchy and damp, and I was not able to settle. Every time I moved, I bumped into the men sleeping either side of me, so it was difficult to address the itching.
After some time, the itches had only gotten worse and I switched on my torch (always kept close to hand) for an inspection. I looked down into my sleeping bag under the torchlight and felt a sudden rising horror: my legs were covered in blood.
I shot up and threw off my sleeping bag, gasping. Numerous large, black leeches were attached to me all over my lower half, and blood was freely flowing from the weeping bites. I felt bile in my throat as nausea engulfed me.
The leeches had found my groin most attractive, and my ankles were also covered. I didn’t know how to get rid of them and felt a rising panic.
I forced myself to calm down. I recalled being told that if you pulled them off yourself, they could leave a tooth in you that would later get infected. I stood there shivering with cold and shock, trying to think of how to get rid of these things as they gorged on me.
Khamhung came to the rescue with a bar of soap. I lathered it up and spread the suds all over my legs and groin. The leeches hated the soap, which seemed to upset their skin’s ability to retain fluid. As the suds touched their skin, they exploded. This had the disadvantage of covering me in bloody leech slime, but I was extremely relieved to have an effective weapon, especially as with this method the leeches withdrew their teeth from you before dying.
After winkling the last leech out of my crack, I wiped the blood and goo off myself, crawled back into my sleeping bag and fell into a fitful sleep.
It was damn cold next morning and we shivered around the fire to warm up. I drank a bamboo cup of hot water with cold rice for breakfast, which did little to lift the spirits.
My feet were already aching from being wet much of the previous day. I could see that virtually the entirety of these trips was to be spent in rivers, which could become a real problem.
Trench foot was first documented in the muddy trenches of the First World War. It is caused by poor blood circulation brought about by having sodden feet over extended periods of time. The locals’ feet were hardened from working in the fields and, amazingly, they were mostly in bare feet, and so were probably better off.
As I got ready to pull on my sodden boots, one of the Laotian geologists gave me some Indonesian foot balm: Pagoda Salep. I liberally applied it and found that it not only helped to waterproof my soggy skin, but the liniment also stimulated blood flow. It was a real godsend, and all of the Newmont geologists rightly swore by the stuff.
We hacked on the rest of the day, sampling as we went. I would check the tail in the gold pans with my hand lens, but there was no sign of gold in these rivers.
The following day, the army and the locals were getting edgy. We had found an abandoned jungle camp, which I was told was in a Hmong insurgent training area.
‘We are crossing a ridge occupied by the Hmong, an area where they are still fighting the civil war. They will not be happy we are here and may attack us,’ Khamhung explained slowly in French.
I decided to press on to a major river junction about 2 kilometres ahead and take samples. This would provide geological information regarding the river catchments of the higher, and more dangerous, ground ahead. We could then cross into another parallel river catchment to continue sampling downstream, thus moving away from the Hmong ridge to safer ground.
As we discussed this, two shots rang out ahead of us. More monkey hunting, I thought. Then the soldiers who had been to our front ran straight past us and disappeared downriver, followed by the villagers, who had dumped the samples they were carrying.
Our already nervous group had been surprised by the shots and had panicked and run. This was a serious situation for the cohesion of our team and I needed to act quickly. I did not want a full-scale rout from which our expedition would probably not recover.
I got back to where the breathless rabble had gathered and settled things down a bit. I got the sergeant to put a few of his troops around us as a screen, just in case, and then heard the story told in sign language and through Khamhung.
As the lead soldiers had advanced, they had seen a group of Hmong ahead and two shots had been fired at them by the Hmong. At that point, the soldiers had turned tail and run, resulting in the whole expedition descending into chaos.
It seemed to me the Hmong were probably more scared of us than we were of them. Nevertheless, we were in no position to take them on in what was challenging terrain and the Hmong’s home ground.
To continue moving ahead to sample in the Hmong territory with our current collection of dubious Laotian military personnel seemed pointlessly risky. I also did not want to harass these Hmong villagers. They hadn’t done me any harm; I was here for mapping, not massacring.
We had already achieved virtually all of our sampling objectives for this area, but we did need to retrieve the samples dropped during the last incident. I scolded everyone and chided a small armed group of the stouter souls into volunteering to go back with me and recover the samples.
Ours was a nervy advance, but at least the Laotian soldiers were properly alert now, moving forward cautiously with their rifles in their shoulders and covering each other (and me). I was doubly concerned, being just as worried about getting an accidental bullet in the back from one of our own guys as I was about getting hit from the front by a Hmong sniper.
It was a tense twenty minutes, but once I had accounted for all of the samples, we pulled back a bit and climbed over a col into the next river catchment. We then worked our way downstream, away from the Hmong, sampling as we went.
By the fourth day we were heavily weighed down by samples. The Laotian geologists and I had to be vigilant to ensure these samples were not dumped by the locals. We noted which man had which samples and we warned them they would not be paid if they lost any.
We also had another problem. Virtually the only food remaining was rice, and there was not much of that. We had not had any luck hunting in this part of the jungle, and for meat we were down to the last of the rats.
That night we stopped beside a river and began cooking up the remaining rice. Some of the soldiers went down to a large pool just below our camp. I watched with interest as I saw them aiming their RPG-7 (rocket-propelled grenade) launcher at a rock in the pool.
BANG … WHOOOSH … BANG! The last bang was earsplitting and was the shaped charge of the grenade smashing open the rock.
Stunned fish started floating to the surface, and hungry soldiers jumped in and gathered them up. After one more explosion in another pool we had a good meal of fish soup and rice.
The following afternoon we followed some wild elephant tracks through the bamboo, which led us back to the rice fields. We eventually limped back into the village, wet, bedraggled, tired and hungry.
Before anything else, the villagers queued up for their money. I shook their hands, paid them their 1,500 kip (approximately $2) per day in cash and thanked them. They were all happy with that and keen for further paid work.
Now came the turn of the soldiers. At this point, the sinister sergeant insisted that I pay him all the money for the men and he would pay them. I refused and threatened to report him and he backed off.
But as soon as I’d paid the soldiers, the sergeant took a third of their money straight off them, to ‘pay the officers off’. I suspect he would have taken the lot if I hadn’t been around. Things worked a bit differently in the Laotian Army.
The other Newmont guys and I then bathed in the creek, dodging the leeches on the bank.
Finally, the moment we had all been waiting for arrived: returning to the house we were staying in and the luxury of being clean, warm and dry. I had hung up all of my ‘good’ clothes before we had left, and it was an absolute pleasure to slip on these warm, dry, cotton garments.
My shirt seemed to have a bit of a fold in the shoulder, which was annoying, so to straighten it out I gave it a slap. I felt something like a small egg crack and instantly there were hundreds of tiny black spiders swarming all over my torso and face.
They went everywhere, and were particularly attracted to the wetter places. My eyes, ears, nose and mouth were filling up rapidly with these foul arachnids. Blinded by the acid in the spiders and struggling to breathe, I ripped my shirt and clothes off, sweeping as many of the spiders off me as I could. In horror, I cleared my mouth and eyes and gasped for a spider-free breath.
Eventually I could open my now bloodshot eyes. I blew my nose and collected a tissue full of black spider snot. The Laotian geologists had watched the entire performance and were doubled up with laughter. I staggered back to the leech-ridden creek to wash off the dead spiders and their broken hatchery.
When I returned to the hut, dinner was being served. It smelled delicious. In rural Laos all food is eaten on the floor, so we sat and dived into the sticky rice (eaten with your fingers) and fish, which was tasty. The Laotian geologists got quite lively when some hard-boiled eggs turned up. I felt things must be tough if an egg was that much of a treat.
‘Oeuf, très bon,’ said Khamhung.
‘Merci, j’aime oeufs,’ I said.
I took the egg, peeled off the shell and hungrily bit into the top. Strange, it felt a bit crunchy. Must be a bit of shell; eat on.
No, that really was very crunchy … and gooey.
I looked down at the egg in my hand and saw the remains of a chicken foetus, complete with feathers, wrapped inside a thin annulus of egg white. I had eaten the crunchy head. I presumed the gooey bit had been the brain.
I felt like vomiting as I blew out the egg from my mouth.
The Laotian geologists could not believe their luck. Their new boss really was a funny guy. And he didn’t like the Laotian delicacy of egg with embryo either. All the more for them. I noticed my discarded portion had already disappeared.
The following day in the bamboo hut, I wrote up the trip report. It was handwritten and described the geology and prospectivity of the area, with a recommendation for further work. The text was backed up by sketch maps and cross sections of the geology. I added some pertinent notes regarding the security situation.
We dried and cleaned up the samples and did an HF radio link-up with Simon Yardley in Vientiane, arranging our flight out.
The following morning, a helicopter picked up three of us. We underslung the samples, which allowed the chopper to take a lot more weight (helicopters can lift heavier underslung loads than on-board loads).
The helicopter would return later in the day as part of a side-trip to pick up our fourth man. The Lao military observer had cost us again.
Back at the office that afternoon, Simon introduced me to a young Australian draughtsman named Carlo Seymour, who had just arrived. Carlo had been hired to help with the drafting of the maps for the constant reporting that Newmont required.
Carlo’s predecessor, a diminutive, pot-bellied American called Les, had not been a good corporate fit. His main cartographic endeavour had been to create graphically annotated location maps of the staggering number of South-East Asian bordellos that he had evaluated.
The final straw had come at the Newmont staff house, where some female auditors from head office were staying. They were pleasant and conscientious young women. As they watched TV in the living area one evening, the front door was kicked open and in staggered Les with a hooker on each arm and a bottle of Jim Beam in his hand.
‘So who wants to fucking party?’ he roared at the women.
They declined the offer and he was fired the next day.
‘Carlo will help you draft the maps for your report, Jim. He’s an expert computer draftsman,’ Simon proudly informed me. He had put considerable effort into recruiting Carlo and was keen for him to do well, after the debacle of Les.
I sat down with Carlo in front of his computer to prepare a map of my last trip. He was sweating heavily. It soon became apparent that he had absolutely no idea how any of the software worked.
We stepped outside for a discreet chat and Carlo came clean.
‘Listen, mate, I’m really sorry,’ he said. ‘I bullshitted a bit on my CV. I didn’t really think I would get chucked in at the deep end like this. I have absolutely no idea how the frigging software works … but I’m a fast learner,’ he added in a hopeful tone.
Creative CV writing was one thing, but I wasn’t going to hang myself to save his arse. However, Carlo did seem keen to atone, so I figured out a possible solution.
‘OK, I’ll finish off my maps by hand. Then while I’m out on the next trip, you can convert them in whatever software you can learn in the shortest possible time. I won’t say anything; just get learning.’
‘It’s a deal, mate, thanks. I owe you,’ Carlo replied, relieved.
It was a rather dubious start to a lifelong friendship.
Carlo and I went out that night to check out the local action in Vientiane. We started off at Nam Phu (The Fountain). This was an open-air bar, with tables set around a large fountain. The night was warm and balmy, pleasant after the rigours of my trip. The local beer, Beer Lao, tasted good, and there were some pretty girls floating around, which lifted our spirits.
The surrounding buildings were a mix of attractive wooden French colonial and Russian brutalist concrete. There were a sprinkling of expats sitting around and the place had an atmosphere of intrigue, in a Cold War type of way.
We got talking to the guy at the next table. Jack was a thickset American with a military bearing. He was reading Soldier of Fortune magazine – and he was in it.
Jack checked us out first and then became surprisingly open about his business. He was assisting the insurgency across the border in Burma against an especially nasty military government. Privately raised funds from the USA paid him to ‘advise and liaise’ (provide weapons) with the Karen guerrillas in the jungles of eastern Burma. He was a middleman, spanning a big middle.
Jack showed us the article in Soldier of Fortune, which included a photo of him proudly standing with a bunch of Karen guerrillas. I told Jack about my own adventures on the Hmong ridge and he filled me in on the background to the conflict, of which I was quite ignorant.
During the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 70s, the Americans had befriended the Laotian and Vietnamese hill tribes as allies to fight against the communists. The Hmong, Yao, Khmu, Akha and other hill tribes had been armed and trained by the Americans and they had become firm friends.
The most potent hill-tribe fighters of all had been the Hmong. Their esteemed leader, General Vang Pao, had been a highly effective ally of the Americans during the fight against North Vietnam.
When the Americans left South-East Asia after the fall of Saigon in 1975, these hill tribes were abandoned to the tender mercy of the communists. It was a bloodbath, and hundreds of thousands were massacred or displaced.
The only hill tribe that managed to hold out militarily were the Hmong, partly protected by living on the remote, heavily forested and mountainous Hmong ridge. They were still fighting the communists in Laos some twenty years later when I turned up.
‘Jim, did you see any American-looking men during your trip?’ Jack asked me.
‘No, they were all locals. Why?’
‘There are a whole bunch of missing American prisoners from the Vietnam War, and Laos is the last hope some of the families have of anyone turning up. You’re working in areas no foreigner has been to since the war, so keep your eyes and ears open. There are some big rewards going back in the US if you can find and spring one of these guys,’ said Jack.
Our chat was interrupted by Alex, the eighteen-year-old daughter of the bar owner. She was friendly, gregarious, Swedish and very cute, and she joined us for more drinks as I picked Jack’s brain on the missing POWs.
We had an excellent French meal and finished up late-night drinking in a picturesque bar overlooking the Mekong River; I was going to like Vientiane.
The following day I began planning my next trip. I got Dao to find a Laotian army officer to brief me on the situation regarding the Hmong. A senior officer duly arrived, and brought with him a map that showed the various Hmong villages. The officer proudly informed us that these villages had been strewn with anti-personnel landmines dropped from the air by their military. He finished with a disturbing smile, adding that the villages were routinely strafed by the Laotian airforce.
The army had by now pretty much given up sending fighting patrols into these areas. The Hmong, on their home ground, would pick them off with snipers before melting back into the forest. The situation had reached an old-fashioned stalemate.
More recently, the army had also given up dropping the landmines, as the Hmong would retrieve them and then place them on the tracks into their areas to try to catch out the army on their way in. It was probably one of these that did for the local whom I had seen being taken out on the stretcher. We had thankfully missed these gifts by spending most of our time navigating the creeks.
As a result of all this information, I recommended to the Newmont management that the Hmong ridge be excised from the sampling area. The parts I had seen hadn’t looked prospective anyway and, when the stream samples I had taken came back dead for gold, management concurred.
My next trip was done with the help of an English-speaking Laotian geologist called Somsak. He had previously worked for the Americans in the 1970s as a military policeman. After the communists took over, Somsak was ‘re-educated’. This consisted of three years in the Pathet Laos military, fighting against the remaining royalists in the north of the country.
Somsak had good English, learned from the Americans. He was a small fellow with a keen sense of humour, who found swearing in English highly amusing. This was handy, as over the next two years I swore at him quite a lot.
We set off travelling north from Vientiane in an old Russian army truck, a GAZ-66. We stopped for lunch at Vang Vieng, a scenic and sleepy town that had a vast airfield the Americans had built thirty years before and had been the main base of the secretive Air America CIA operations during the war.
I noticed a local man in his mid-twenties who looked half Anglo-Saxon.
‘Somsak, see that half-white guy over there – are there westerners living here?’
‘No, Jim, he is one of the moon people – babies from girls the Americans left behind. They’re all over Laos, not quite outcasts but not fully accepted either,’ Somsak said.
‘Have you heard of any American POWs being held in a remote part of Laos, or maybe living here by choice?’
‘No, it would be hard to keep that quiet. It’s an American myth I think.’
He was probably right too. I never saw any evidence of missing POWs in the two years I crawled over the place. In a small country, people tended to know one another’s business; it was hard to imagine a piece of information like that remaining a secret. My path to riches and glory would have to be via the more conventional route of gold mining.
We drove on the whole day through forested hills and mountains until we linked up with the Mekong River at the sprawling town of Tha Deua. We spent a comfortable night on a riverboat, which Newmont had hired. At first light the boat set off downstream, a freshly cooked breakfast of scrambled eggs reinforcing the feeling of travelling in style.
That was until I needed the toilet. This small room was situated at the back of the boat and had a drop hole directly into the river. Rectangles of split bamboo were thoughtfully provided: the local alternative to toilet paper. While balancing over the hole, on a moving boat, the bamboo trick proved too much for me, and I never quite mastered the art.
As we proceeded, the mountains on either side of the Mekong loomed ominously larger and the riverbanks became steeper. I nervously reviewed my maps as I took in the scale of the terrain we were taking on.
The boat captain was a third-generation river man and expertly negotiated the rock bars, helped by the high water from recent rains. In the mid-afternoon we reached our destination at a remote village on the bank of the river. Somsak and I went to see the pho ban to discuss our trip. He knew a route and also organised four village porters for the start of the journey.
The following morning we loaded up the expedition onto five smaller craft provided by the village and set off up a tributary on the western side of the Mekong, outboard engines blasting away behind each boat. After three hairy hours of navigating rocks and pushing the boats over fallen trees, we disembarked onto a muddy bank.
We set off, walking on a narrow track that led high into the mountains, sampling as we went. Late that afternoon, we reached a hill-tribe longhouse of the Yao people. The longhouse was a wooden rectangular building about 10 by 30 metres, with a thatched roof.
We were warmly welcomed. I was the first white person they had seen since the Vietnam War, and they were curious. The headman was bilingual in Yao and Pasa Lao, and there were a lot of questions; Somsak acted as translator.
The women made and wore exquisite, fine embroidery, which was how they spent their evenings. I took photos of them, and they were fastidious about preparing themselves for these pictures, which I found touching. Several of the men seemed to spend their entire time smoking opium in an outside hut.
We slept in the longhouse, and the following morning the men from the Mekong village returned and in their place we hired some of the Yao men (we always used locals whenever we could), including the longhouse pho ban, and continued our sampling trip.
We walked over large areas of old rice fields, which now hosted secondary forest. The remains of several abandoned villages were pointed out to me by the Yao men. When we stopped to camp that evening, the pho ban explained through Somsak what had happened.
‘When the Americans left, the Pathet Laos and Vietnamese flew over our villages firing guns and bombing. They followed up with foot soldiers, hunting us down, killing us and burning our houses. We fled into the forest, many of our people died and some escaped to Thailand.
‘A drawn-out war ensued. After several years, the Yao and other hill tribes – all except the Hmong – made peace with the communists and were allowed to live undisturbed. By then only a few villages remained in the area out of a once much larger Yao population,’ the pho ban said.
There was a deep sadness to this man and, indeed, to the whole village. I tried to imagine what kinds of atrocities must have taken place to force an entire people to depart.
I was shocked by his story, but having just walked over a sizeable area of obviously abandoned, previously inhabited terrain, it was totally believable. And why would this man lie to me? I had no agenda here for him to lobby. I spent the rest of the trip in sombre contemplation.
Throughout this expedition and other subsequent ones to the hill-tribe areas, I was told the same story. When Laos fell to the communists in 1975, there had been a systematic slaughter of the hill tribes that had supported the Americans in the war.
The whole scenario brought to mind unsettling reminders of Joseph Conrad’s classic novel Heart of Darkness, with its descriptions of the gross atrocities visited upon native Africans in the remote jungles of the Congo in the 1890s.
As the Vietnam and Laotian civil wars had played out through the 1970s, a multitude of western intellectuals and students had expressed their support for the North Vietnamese war leader Ho Chi Minh. ‘Ho Chi Minh, Ho Chi Minh, Ho Chi Minh is going to win’ was their chant. From the safety of the West, these people had backed the communists responsible for the atrocities and genocide I was having described to me by witnesses.
Many Laotians and South Vietnamese still believe that if the Americans had stayed and fought on with their local allies, they would have prevailed and won. I came to find this view persuasive.
Admittedly, the South Vietnamese government at the time was seriously flawed, but it was not implementing genocide on its own people, as the communists subsequently did. America’s prosecution of the war also alienated a lot of locals. It was complicated.
These observations opened up for me a moral dilemma that I never truly reconciled. I was supporting this detestable communist regime with my work, but I was also assisting its people in direct employment and, I hoped, in economic development in the long term. It was a tough one.
Landmines were not the only hazard. Next on the list were dogs. For some reason dogs, similar to bullies, seek out someone who is different. I was different: I was white, and Laotian dogs didn’t like that.
I countered this menace (rabies was endemic) by always walking with a large stick while going through a village. I never used it: the dogs could see I was armed and meant business, so they left me alone.
Over time and with much study, my Laotian language (Pasa Lao) started to improve. I found children’s alphabet books very useful. Only when you could read the language could you begin to correctly use the pronunciation, which was critical to being understood.
Pasa Lao is a fiendishly difficult language to learn. It is tonal, with no real reference points to western languages. Mastering the tones was excruciating, and word ambiguity led to many a linguistic faux pas on my part that had the Laotians in stitches.
For instance, I got stung by a scorpion in one of our camps. As I rested up I kept asking our field assistant for the medicine pack we carried. All I got was the offer of a cigarette. The Pasa Lao word for medicine (yaa) is the same as for cigarette. No wonder everyone smoked. Bit by bit I got there, and after my first year I could operate in workable Pasa Lao.
My language skills also had another benefit. A Swedish bakery had opened up beside Nam Phu, and Carlo and I would go in there to try and pick up some of the more intrepid female backpackers that by 1995 were beginning to appear.
I would spurt out my order in well-rehearsed and impressive-sounding Pasa Lao (impressive to a non-Laotian speaker, that is). Then I would turn to a western girl at the nearest table and exclaim: ‘Hey, didn’t I see you in Luang Prabang?’
Given that Luang Prabang was the only town that tourists were allowed into at that time, it always elicited one of two responses: ‘No, but I’m going there soon, what can you tell me?’ Or: ‘I just got back from there so quite possibly. Did you like it?’
This opening gambit often led to a night out in pleasant company. My only problem was that I would organise the girl(s), but Carlo was smoother in the follow through and would often end up with the girl(s). Life is never fair.
On one of these evenings, Carlo and I went out with Mitch, the Canadian geologist who specialised in quick handovers. Mitch was in his late thirties and had been knocking around South-East Asia for a while, and his personal life had become somewhat dissipated.
‘Every time I go back to see my girlfriend in Bangkok, she’s sold all the furniture and electrical goods in our flat and I have to go and buy everything back again,’ Mitch complained.
‘Where did you meet her?’ I asked, somewhat baffled.
‘In a bar on Patpong Road,’ he replied, referring to Bangkok’s notorious red-light district.
‘So, Mitch, what kind of girls do you like?’ Carlo asked, trying to move the conversation along.
‘Well, after ten years in Patpong, I find it hard to get excited anymore, but I do really like lactating amputees,’ Mitch said. ‘That’s about the only thing that does it for me these days.’
I felt a gag reflex in my throat, not helped by Mitch then elaborating on the obscure fetish markets in Bangkok.
‘Hey, you guys should come and do Patpong with me sometime,’ he said. ‘I could really show you around.’
‘Thanks, mate, but all of my leave dates are planned in Australia,’ I said hastily.
The expat scene in Vientiane consisted of a small group of foreigners working for multinational companies, members of the diplomatic corps who just seemed to spy on each other, and their bored, semi-alcoholic wives. There were also a few desperadoes pursuing insane business missions.
One of the latter was Chris Crash, an Australian who’d gained this moniker by having frequent high-speed motorcycle accidents. Chris fixed the air conditioners and plumbing at our office and was terrific fun to hang out with. He had left Australia under questionable circumstances.
Chris had a stunning-looking Laotian wife, a petite and friendly woman who spoke good English. However, whenever she found out about one of Chris’s many girlfriends, she would go into a violent rage and beat him with whatever came to hand.
It was hard to tell with Chris whether his injuries were from motorcycle accidents or domestic violence. If you ever travel to Vientiane, watch out for local people of mixed race born in the 1990s. There’s a good chance that Chris is the father.
The more gregarious members of the expat community would get together every week for the Hash House Harriers run. This involved expats and locals running around a part of town and ending up at someone’s house to get plastered. There were well-educated local girls in the Hash, which made it worth putting up with the banal drinking games.
It all made for an eclectic social group in Vientiane, spiced up in 1996 with the arrival of a pair of Thai ladyboys, who cut through the jaded expat male population like a knife through butter.
After about a year working for Newmont, I had panned for gold in almost every creek in the Golden Triangle of Laos, which covered our northerly concession area. We had found a number of modest alluvial gold occurrences and taken numerous samples. Then, when we moved on to the southern tenement area, things got really interesting.
Some weeks into the southern sampling program, we spent a night in a small village beside a rough road south of the town of Ban Done, 100 kilometres north-east of Vientiane. In the morning we prepared for a straightforward one-day sampling foray. The surrounding areas had so far shown some reasonable gold in a few streams, so we were optimistic we might find something.
We set off in single file following the local tracks. A villager led the way. He had a horribly scarred face, which Somsak had discovered was a souvenir from fighting the Hmong some twenty years earlier; there were a lot of disfigured men in Laos. I followed this character, and behind me walked our trusted Newmont field assistant, Oum; another two village porters followed, and Somsak was tail-end Charlie. We didn’t need any soldiers in this area.
After an hour moving south, slogging and sweating through muddy, humid paddy fields, we started to climb into steep and hilly terrain. This area was fully forested with mature trees. It was considerably cooler under the wooded canopy and the villagers now became alert to any foraging opportunities.
We sampled as we went, although the going was slow in this rugged terrain. After some difficulty, we moved onto higher ground and made better progress traversing a long ridge, which took us into the next area we needed to sample. In the early afternoon, we dropped from the ridge into a remote valley with a pleasant creek about 3 metres wide.
‘OK, Somsak, take a stream sample here and I’ll do some mapping. Last sample, then we’ll head back,’ I said.
As I wandered upstream mapping the rocks, I was struck by two quite sexy-looking quartz veins. They weren’t big, just a couple of centimetres wide, but they had the colloform (stripey) banding that epithermal quartz veins carrying high-grade gold can display. I was interested and sampled them, but was not enthused, as they were small and the country rocks were not markedly altered (a lot of rock alteration is good, as it indicates potential for a large gold system).
I walked back to the others and Somsak beckoned me forward hurriedly.
‘Mr Jim, look,’ he whispered urgently and shoved the gold pan under my nose.
‘Shit, Somsak, that’s a one-inch tail. How much dirt did you wash?’
‘Just one pan,’ he said.
I was looking at an inch-long line of gold in the bottom of the pan, so the river gravel was probably running around 3 to 5 grams per cubic metre; it was rich alluvial dirt.
Somsak vainly tried to keep our discovery a secret from the local village porters, but they were already crowded around the other pan that Oum had been washing and were chattering gleefully, with Scarface looking markedly animated. I could also feel my own adrenaline starting to pump.
I stowed the gold in a plastic sample bag and grabbed Somsack’s pan. We rushed up the creek, panning the gravels as we went. The others followed.
Thirty metres upstream: 2-inch tail.
Sixty metres upstream: 3-inch tail.
Ninety metres upstream: 5-inch tail. Holy crap, I had never seen dirt as rich as this; there was probably 15 to 20 grams per cubic metre.
One hundred and twenty metres upstream: nothing.
We slowly panned our way back downstream, trying to find the hard-rock source of the alluvial gold. I reached the spot where I had earlier sampled the colloform quartz veins. Using my geologist’s hammer and a trowel, I dug up some of the gravel from just below where these veins entered the river. Everyone crowded round the pan as I worked it in and out of the water, throwing out the oversized cobbles and washing away the clays.
‘Look at the gold. It’s everywhere!’ I shouted.
Coarse and fine gold speckled the pan, and as I washed down to the remaining fines, it got stronger and stronger. I was shaking with anticipation as I gave the final swirl to create the tail.
‘Mr Jim, ten-inch tail, very amazing,’ said Somsak eagerly.
I looked on in astonishment: the whole bottom of the pan seemed to be covered in gold. This was 1- to 2-ounce dirt (per cubic metre). I had read books about alluvial gold as rich as this and had always dreamed of finding some.
‘You are beautiful,’ I said to the pan. The villagers and my guys started doing a little dance for joy and things became quite festive.
The source of the gold was my quartz veins (and presumably a few unseen others); they were not large, but over thousands of years of erosion had been rich enough in grade to create this virgin alluvial gold deposit. I took another look at some of this colloform quartz, and indeed upon closer inspection, under a hand lens, some fine gold was visible. I should have spotted that earlier.
Automatically I did a quick calculation in my head as to how much gold there could be in front of me. I estimated that around a 100-metre length of river contained good gold-bearing gravel, it was roughly 8 metres wide (3 metres in the active channel plus 5 metres of older, now grassed-over gravels) and probably averaged half-a-metre deep (top of the gravel to bedrock). The grade was guesswork, but given the extraordinary abundance of gold in the pans, an average of 20 to 25 grams per cubic metre was possible.
So there was roughly 300 ounces of gold in just this small patch, worth around $360,000 at today’s prices.
I do admit that at this moment, my first thought was how to mine and keep this gold. I wished I had my old dredge there; I could have cleaned the whole lot up in a couple of days, even digging it up and putting it through a rocker would only have taken us a week or so.
Now I had a real dilemma. I knew from South America that this kind of rich discovery often led to some disastrous disputes. Unfortunately I was working for Newmont, in their full employ, and if I reverted to artisanal gold miner I would be seriously compromising the company and that would be dishonest. Not to mention the trouble that could rain down upon us when the military, which ran a nice line in controlling this kind of operation, got wind of what had happened.
I was sorely tempted, but my moral compass slowly swung the right way. It helped that we had no real mining gear, camping equipment or food and, as if on cue, the rain started tumbling down.
Somsak, Oum and I formed a huddle to discuss what we should do next. I looked over Somsak’s shoulder at the three local men. They were looking at me; their body language had completely changed and now looked threatening. Boy, this party had really died.
Previously the villagers had been friendly and talkative; now they fingered their machetes and looked at us in a menacing way that said that we should depart as soon as possible. A new reality was dawning and I didn’t fancy our geo-picks versus their machetes. If there had been 3,000 ounces in that river, not 300, it might have been a different story. Despite the temptation gnawing at me to stay, I made the painful decision.
‘Somsak, pack up the samples, we’re going back to the village.’
‘But what about the gold, Mr Jim?’ asked Somsak mournfully.
‘It’s not our gold, Somsak. We found it, but it’s Newmont’s and they will definitely not want us starting up a busted-arse mining operation on our own initiative. They’re paying us to find three million ounces, not three hundred. Let’s go.’
Scarface said they were staying and insisted on payment for the day, which I was happy to hand over, just to get rid of the guy.
Our trip back to the village was tricky. We had a lot of weight as we had to carry all of our own samples. We made it just as it got dark. I ordered our gear to be packed up and we left in the truck to stay the night in Ban Done. I didn’t want Scarface returning later in the night to surprise us.
In the scheme of things, this find, although attention-grabbing, was of no significance to a large company like Newmont. Nevertheless, it was amazing that the locals did not know about it, as they hunted animals there. But there was little tradition of alluvial gold mining in this particular region.
This changed as news of our discovery leaked out. We continued our sampling work in the surrounding areas and kept up with reports of what was happening to our discovery, which we had named Huai Ngam (beautiful creek).
The story recounted to us was that the day following the discovery, Scarface and his crew had returned to their homes to get food and equipment. One of them must have let slip about the gold discovery because the whole village rushed the creek, followed by the populace of the surrounding area. In two weeks they had picked the river clean.
Sometime later, we returned to Huai Ngam to do some follow-up mapping and to check there was not a large hard-rock gold system we might have missed.
There was now a well-trodden path to the site and, when we arrived, our creek was beautiful no more. It had been transformed into a moonscape of turned-over gravels, dams and pits. I didn’t feel too bad about this, as the area affected was so tiny relative to the rest of the forest that the vegetation would quickly recover. My little quartz veins and a few other associated stringers had been gouged out, and despite a thorough search in the vicinity, we didn’t find any more mineralisation of note.
That was it: the only gold rush I ever started and, just like James Marshall, the man who sparked the California Gold Rush, I didn’t make a damn thing out of it.
I did learn something from this episode, though. Do not assume someone else will always have found something great before you have your go.
After the regional sampling program was completed, I spent a couple of months on a project called Poung Lac. In geology terms, this was a Carlin-style gold project. This style of gold occurrence is named after the Carlin district of Nevada, USA, one of the world’s most prolific gold-producing regions.
The fortunes of two giant gold-mining companies, Newmont and Barrick, have been built from mines on the Carlin trend. Around 5 million ounces per year (worth $6 billion) is currently produced from the area.
The discovery of Carlin was made in the years 1961 and 1962 by a team (and it almost always is a team) within which Newmont geologist Alan Coope played a most prominent role.
Coope still worked for Newmont when I was there. When he came to Laos to review our data, he shared with us the discovery of the fabulous mines at Carlin. Exploration geologists love a good discovery story, and this one did not disappoint.
Carlin-style gold mineralisation was unlike any other found before. Despite the high grades of up to 2 ounces per tonne, the gold was extremely fine-grained and invisible to the naked eye. Furthermore, the gold was in rocks that did not appear mineralised: massive, grey, sooty, porous, dirty-looking limestones. It was only when Alan Coope took float samples of this innocent-looking material that the initial discovery was made.
Inspired by Coope’s tale, I got stuck into Newmont’s project at Poung Lac, an outstandingly scenic spot surrounded by karstic limestone mountains.
Poung Lac village was a welcoming place and I got to know some of the locals reasonably well. The older residents were still scarred from the forced farm collectivisations imposed on them some fifteen years earlier. This madness had resulted in mass famine across the country and there was a real hatred towards the Pathet Laos by many rural people.
After a month of intensive activity, trenching, mapping and sampling, I was still struggling to work out the geology. I stood in one of the trenches with Simon Yardley, looking directly at a seemingly uninteresting siltstone, which our assays told us was full of gold. Simon pointed to the main sedimentary layer, about a metre thick.
‘Take a good look under your hand lens, Jim. What do you see?’ he said.
I looked. ‘Grey, sooty, porous, massive crap.’
‘The perfect description of Carlin-style gold mineralisation,’ Simon said.
You couldn’t argue with that. I looked a bit closer using my hand lens, and sure enough the rock was altered, slightly silicified and porous. It was an instructive moment. When you are seeking something and you don’t know what it looks like, it is hard to spot – even when it is staring you in the face.
Field experience looking at many different mines, rocks and styles of mineralisation is invaluable. You don’t see with your eyes, you see with your brain, and I wasn’t thinking. To find an orebody (or anything!), it helps to first visualise it in your mind, imagining what it might look like. Try it the next time you have lost something in your house.
Another conundrum of this project was the central valley. This flat area was littered with mineralised boulders – float – sitting on top of the soil. Some of the Newmont geologists had been salivating over the size of a possible underlying orebody that could have given rise to this scenario.
A drilling program showed that this optimism was unfounded. The mineralised float was in fact left behind from the erosion of a narrow, shallowly dipping gold-rich vein on one side of the valley.
Imagine you projected that original vein 300 metres higher (as it once had been), and then eroded the valley floor by that 300 metres (as it was now). You were left with the current situation, an array of resistant gold-rich float littering the entire valley floor where it had fallen during the various periods of erosion.
But this scenario is misleading: there is no gold-rich material beneath the extensive mineralised float; it is barren ground, a trap for amateur players.
This type of reconstruction of past landforms and the processes that formed them is the science of geomorphology, a subject related to geology and a critical one to master for the exploration geologist. A good understanding of geomorphology can save you walking down expensive dead ends for years.
So Poung Lac fell over as a gold project. I was not unhappy with this outcome. It was such an attractive spot, with its steep mountains and two clear rivers running through the connecting pair of deep valleys. Open-pit mining would have trashed the place.
There is a balance to be struck between the benefits of mining development and the protection of the environment, with local people being winners or losers depending on the deal. For the relatively small area that is environmentally damaged by mining, much human benefit can accrue. In contrast, agriculture usually requires vast areas of deforestation for far less benefit.
For example, a sizeable gold mine producing more than 200,000 ounces per annum (worth $240 million), might require 3 square kilometres of forest clearing. There could be two or three such mines in any one developing nation or region. On the other hand, palm-oil plantations in Indonesia alone have accounted for roughly 100,000 square kilometres of cleared rainforest. That is 10,000 times more clearing for Indonesian palm oil than for a decent-sized gold mine.
I believe that well-executed mining does more good than harm and, ironically, it can better protect the environment through providing taxes, education, skilled jobs and effective conservation programs. Inappropriate mining, on the other hand, is more problematic. The large artisanal mining sector can be especially harmful, leaving mercury in rivers and exploiting vulnerable indigenous groups.
In my experience, the most damaging part of building a new mine in an area of rainforest is incidental. It is the building of the road to service the mine that allows general access to previously inaccessible forest and enables (usually illegal) logging and agriculture. For this reason, there are some mines that should never have been built: Grasberg on Irian Jaya in Indonesia and Ok Tedi in Papua New Guinea spring to mind.
Logging and agriculture make poisonous bedfellows. In Laos, I witnessed loggers opening up untouched forest. They were followed up by itinerant farmers who entered this now compromised habitat and burned off all that remained.
These farmers then planted hill rice, which grows for about three seasons before the soil gives out. At this point they moved on to the next area to be burned. They left behind them a deforested wasteland of erosion, silted rivers and bamboo.
This whole destructive process was further expedited by Australian government aid money, which I learned was used in the 1990s to build the Friendship Bridge that connected Laos and Thailand. Each morning, logging trucks queued up as far as the eye could see on the Laotian side of that bridge waiting for it to open. There was nothing left to log on the Thai side, where the forests had already been destroyed.
My final trip up the Mekong was almost a one-way journey. Feeling ill during sampling, I returned to the riverboat that was our mobile base. I went downhill from there and spent the boat journey back to Vientiane with intermittent high fevers. I had dengue fever – also known as break-bone fever, due to the excruciating pain in your joints.
By the time we reached Vientiane three days later I had to be carried off the boat, and had lost so much weight you could shine a torch right through my torso. I really did need to get out of the tropics for a while.
I spent my last four months in Laos mainly in the office writing up all the various reports required for the government and for Newmont. This was good for my social life, if not for my liver.
The project was winding up; Newmont had not found anything of significance. That honour had gone to CRA (now part of Rio Tinto), which had discovered a juicy copper-gold mine on a superior concession area that they had pegged in the south of the country.
My time in Laos ended with a nasty incident. I was seeing the second secretary at the French embassy at the time. She was an elegant Frenchwoman who had a house on the banks of the Mekong River.
We were outside her house on an evening that happened to coincide with the anniversary of the founding of the Laotian communist state. The Hmong rebels would often commemorate this day with a cross-border, shoot-’em-up raid across the river from Thailand and a bombing or two. So things were a little tense.
My girlfriend and I were enjoying a romantic moment beside the Mekong River, when I was tapped on the shoulder. I turned around and there was a short, malevolent-looking, bug-eyed Laotian man who stank of alcohol.
‘What are you doing?’ he shouted at me in Pasa Lao, as he leered at my girlfriend.
‘Fuck off,’ I replied in Pasa Lao, or what I thought was fuck off.
I gave him a quick shove to help him on his way and got back to work.
About ten minutes later a car pulled up and out came five men, all armed with either pistols or folding stock Kalashnikovs. My bug-eyed friend was apparently their leader and he approached, pointing a pistol at me. He had the triumphant look of a man about to claim revenge. I had just met the dreaded Laotian secret police.
The order was given to me by Bug Eye.
‘Get in the car, we go to Samkhe, her too,’ he said in Pasa Lao.
Samkhe was a place that was definitely on my Do Not Visit list. As Dao had explained to me some time earlier, Samkhe Prison was torture central. First up would be a bucket of cold salty water tipped over your naked body, followed by electric shocks to the bollocks, and then they would just take it from there. This was not a place I wanted to end up, far less with a woman in tow. I dreaded to think what they would do to her; indeed, she may have been what Bug Eye had come back for.
I had to remain calm. Together they looked a nasty, brutish bunch, and even the others seemed wary of Bug Eye. This made sense, as he was not only drunk and armed, but was also acting in an unpredictable manner, which further added to his menace.
‘Boh mi bpan ha,’ (There is no problem) I started off in my best conciliatory Pasa Lao, trying to calm things down. While there wasn’t a problem for them, there sure as hell was for us. This was not effective, but they were at least now listening to me.
I tried another line. My language worked quite well regarding mining and military matters, so I fabricated a story based upon these themes.
‘I work directly for the chief of the army on his personal gold-mining concessions in Lang Xiao. I have a meeting with him tomorrow morning and he will be very angry if I’m not there,’ I said imperiously.
That was a reasonable start and, although a total lie, it was partly believable as the army chiefs did indeed run private gold-mining concessions. I appeared to get a bit of traction off the others while Bug Eye, sensing a loss of momentum, became even more agitated.
‘Bullshit, bullshit! We go to Samkhe. NOW, NOW, NOW!’ he screamed, trying to drag me to the car.
He was so small he didn’t have a lot of impact, but the gun in my stomach was making my hair stand on end. Stay calm and think of something to break the impasse.
At this moment my French girlfriend started to cry, which, although unintentional, came in handy, acting as a bit of a circuit breaker.
‘My friend here is a diplomat at the French embassy and she has full diplomatic immunity,’ I said, arms outstretched. ‘You cannot arrest her, or you will cause a diplomatic incident. It would be very, very serious.’
The others thought about it.
‘Maybe we could pay a fine instead?’ I suggested brightly.
‘How much?’ one of them asked.
Oh, how I loved that question.
We started to talk numbers as I apologised profusely for the trouble we had caused by our unthinking ignorance.
The steam was starting to diffuse. The other men clearly preferred the idea of money to Bug Eye getting out the torture gear and potentially causing a ton of trouble for them all.
I negotiated with one of them as Bug Eye glared, still pointing his gun at me. I wasn’t in a great bargaining position, but I wasn’t looking for a great bargain; just avoiding getting my bollocks electrocuted and my girlfriend raped would do.
We came to a settlement and instantly it was all smiles. I shook hands with the others, who seemed happy. As we parted it was Bug Eye who had the last word.
‘I’ll get you and your bitch,’ he said.
We waited till they drove off and scurried back into her house to down some stiff drinks. I was glad I had heeded the advice of my old escape-and-evasion instructor from my army days: ‘Always, always, always: carry money.’
