Ramblin' Down the Ho Chi Minh Trail : Part 2

Continued from last month.

It's a really heady experience for an American to be facing the border gate into Vietnam. We technically set our foot inside, according to the 0-0 mile marker, with the gate another few hundred kilometers down the backside of the mountain.

Kevin at the Vietnamese Border

After a photo stop, we retreated back to the Nongchan intersection, where we planned to top up with diesel fuel before heading on South. We learned that the man who sells diesel fuel was in Vietnam for the day, but another man suggested we have lunch at his restaurant to bide our time. Reed wanted to move on, but this is the only place we were likely to find lunch for sale. Upon investigation, Nick discovered that the restaurant is also a whorehouse. We were treated to many lively smiles and covert solicitations by the ladies who hurried to get the tables and themselves ready for lunch. I followed the proprietor-pimp outside to oversee the preparation of a squawking skinny, black chicken for soup. Only the very tips of the beak and toenails went to the dogs. The two hemispheres of the head, cleaved lengthways, found their way into Reed's and Jason's bowls, respectively.

After a few rounds of chicken soup, sticky rice, Beer Lao, and songs from Nick's guitar, it became clear that none of us were up to afternoon delight with the Vietnamese women working the truck stop. That ushered the return of the missing man who owns the fuel, and soon we were back on the road with a full tank and bellies. Within a few hundred meters, we left behind the last pavement we would see for at least five days.

Truck Stop Girl

Leaving the pavement for the dusty, red road introduced us to a part of this region that few outsiders see. Now we were following one of the arteries of the Ho Chi Mihn Trail, where you stay on the road and never take a path you don't know. As if to remind passersby of the danger, bomb craters make the already rugged countryside even more jagged and foreboding.

The few villages along the way are populated by Bru, Pu Thai, Chali, and a number of minor regional tribes. Their simple lifestyle require routes between the villages only for simple, slow vehicles carrying small loads short distances. The second most popular form of transportation after motorbikes is a wooden cart pulled by a two-wheeled conveyance with a basic one-cylinder gasoline engine, long handlebars, and dirt-traction tires. It resembles a slightly larger version of the Gravely lawn tractor. Top speed is about 30 km/h with 15-20 people, plus various produce, building supplies, livestock, and chickens.

We had two maps to help us navigate through this largely uncharted area. One was Nick's 1986 topographical map surveyed by Russia but inscribed in French. Reed brought a more recent map that concentrated more on villages and towns. Neither of them showed a connecting route between us and our next destination, Xepon.

Reed and Nick apparently had different ideas about how to read the topo, with Reed pretty sure that a western passage around a series of ridges would make the most sense. Nick wanted to explore a more eastern route along a river. I wasn't involved in this part of the planning, but every time it came up it seems that one or the other would prevail. We wouldn't have to decide until the next day after sleeping overnight in a Bru village called Nahom.

A Rather Fresh Bomb Crater in a Rice Paddy

We arrived at the turnoff from the main dirt road about ten kilometers from the truck stop, and our route turned from road to path. We followed it through a forest that opened out to dried, bomb-cratered rice paddies indicating a village nearby. The most apparent path took us over the raised furrows that separate the square paddies, making for some rough riding. We stopped in the village to make sure of our way. The villagers just stopped and stared at the imposing Beast carrying the four farang. Nobody smiled until Nick greeted them cheerily in Lao and then only reluctantly. This is far from the reception I got when entering villages in Northern Laos on bicycle, and we all recognized the challenge we'd have to overcome if we wanted to gain the confidence of the villagers we planned to visit for the first time. We continued along the path beyond to Nahom.

Soon, the path narrowed into a group of thatched huts on stilts peeking out of the shaded corner of a large field on the edge of the forest. Reed honked at a couple of chickens and pigs and pulled the Beast into the center of the 30 or so huts, leaving it to idle.

Reed took advantage of the situation to show his best monster impersonation. A few of the kids got it, but the majority scrambled for the nearest familiar adult. The crowd parted like a school of fish as he ran toward the middle of one group, arms high in the air and growling. What an entrance.

Fortunately, we weren't all strangers to this village. Nick had laid the groundwork for a good relationship with them, staying with the headman's family himself a few times before bringing his first group to tour the Trail. Some of those early tourists contributed to Nick's campaign last year to install a concrete floor in the schoolhouse. It wasn't long before the villagers who recognized Nick got everyone calmed down. The headman, Gome, and his wife, Jenta, were out walking, they told us, soon to return. Reed finally shut off the engine.

Almost before the greetings were finished, one of the villagers came to Nick with a problem. His eight-year-old son had gashed his foot earlier that day with a hoe. The little boy looked worried, and in America, his parents would have had him in an emergency room for stitches. But as one recent bicycle traveler to Laos said in his own travelog, there are no decent hospitals in Laos. Unfortunately, this family doesn't have the option to get to Thailand for treatment, as the bicyclist suggested in the article.

Reed's Frightened Patient

Reed packed a medical kit, but he worried that once the villagers saw it they'd all want treatment. It's a valid concern here and not as callous as it sounds. These villages lack even simple medicines like aspirin or antibiotics, although one can get them in a pharmacy without a prescription. They think all farang are medically trained — also not such an odd notion considering their relative ignorance of Western allopathic medicine.

So Reed asked Nick and Jason to determine if anyone else needed immediate attention. When it turned out they didn't, I finally had a chance to see the good heart and soul that I knew must lurk somewhere deep inside this big imposing farang from Brooklyn.

His first impression here notwithstanding, Reed has been around enough villages to know how some things are done. He carefully put the boy and his parents at ease by showing them the contents of the medical kit and making silly faces to the boy and all his friends. The entire village stood by as he went to work by the village well. As one of the villagers operated the pump lever to deliver a steady stream of clean water, Reed gently scrubbed the wound, showing the little boy how to bite his shirt collar if it began to hurt.

Meanwhile, Gome and Jenta wandered in with big smiles for Khun Nick. He introduced everyone all around, when suddenly, the sky, which had been developing big black clouds all afternoon, burst forth with the second big rain of the season. Everyone scrambled from the operation at the well for protection inside and under the stilted huts. Many of them, including Reed and those assisting with the boy's treatment, ended up under Gome and Jenta's famiy's hut.

Reed Administers Treatment

With the wound clean, Reed withdrew some iodine and gently encouraged the boy to place his shirt collar between his teeth again. He dabbed some of the deep brown iodine onto a swab, turned to face the sun and chanted some jibberish, just as he'd seen medicine men do when administering to villagers on prior trips. The boy never winced or showed any sign that the iodine hurt, although the wound was well open and we all knew it did. Reed followed the same ritual with an antibiotic cream then dressed the wound. He had Jason interpret his instruction to bring the boy again in the morning for a dressing change and a second look.

After showering under rainwater sluiced from the roof of one of the huts, I climbed the bamboo ladder into the dark hut, being careful to first remove my flip flops, and dug around my backpack for some clean, dry clothes. As my eyes began to adjust, I could see that the six-by-12 meter hut contained but a single room divided by a few curtains. There was no furniture. Two separate doors opened onto a partly covered deck running across the front in the long direction. Under the edge of the roof where the water dripped the most, someone had placed a number of containers to catch and save the rainwater.

I sensed movement from the farthest corner telling me that some of Gome and Jenta's family was inside. The hut smelled mostly like clean straw with a pleasant patina from smoke and meals and human interaction to suggest a home. A single layer of woven bamboo reeds, crisscrossed in a regular pattern and trimmed into rectangular panels, separated the room and the family's belongings inside from the elements. The panels allowed soft light and fresh air to enter but kept rain, insects, and dust outside. Well-swept bamboo and textile mats covering the hardwood-planked floor felt good on my feet. I found a discreet corner behind a curtain and finished dressing.

Before long, Jentah announced that she had dinner ready for us in the hut. We retreated with the family and a couple of friends, and Jentah instructed us to sit around the four places set on the mat with a basket of sticky rice and a pot of chicken soup in the center. As honored guests, we alone would eat while our host family and the other guests sat outside the circle.

Jenta and 2 of her 12 Children

All of us know the protocol for eating sticky rice. After washing your hands in a bowl of fresh water, you reach into the basket with your right hand — never your left — and claw out a clump big enough to roll into the size of a small candy bar. You can dip the rice into the spices or the soup or whatever you like. You eat only until you are full and leave the rest. If you eat everything in the basket, that means you want more.

The skinny chicken was freshly killed just before the meal, same as at the truck stop. Nick calls them "marathon chicken." You don't get much. It would be unthinkable to leave any meat on the bones, so here, chicken is always finger food. It's slow going, but dinner is a social event anyway.

Dinner

Jentah and her daughters picked up the meal when we finished, and a few more men joined us in the hut. They were headmen from nearby villages who had heard of our arrival. I busted out the first bottle of vodka, bought at the small duty-free hut on the Vietnam border earlier that day, and asked Jentah for a glass. I had learned at a funeral during my last trip to Laos how to handle this aspect of socializing and began handing out shots. Each time, the glass came back to me, and I'd pass it to the next man in the circle.

Nick, Reed, and Jason began to discuss the purpose of our trip. They had read a 1999 book by John Prados called The Blood Road. Although Nick and Reed have visited the Trail before, this book refocused their interest. Reed and Jason first determined after a few questions that Gome and Jentah's village were indeed Bru people. They asked the headmen their ages to determine how old they would have been during the Vietnam War. In each case, the answer surprised us.

I have met some unhealthy Lao tribespeople who look much older than they are, but the healthy ones hardly show their age. We spoke with one 57-year-old man in a village earlier that day who laughed about it, saying, "You farang don't live long like we Lao do. We go 90, 100, 120." Ironically, he was the oldest man in his village.

Nick and Several Local Headmen

Census results don't paint a perfect picture, and the child mortality rate probably skews the last one that put the life expectancy for Lao men in the mid-late 50s. But I believe that these people, who live in a place where the ability to avoid sickness determines the ability to survive, probably follow more closely the rule of survival of the fittest than people in more technological cultures. Perhaps, given the chance, these hearty tribespeople would outlive their less genetically selected counterparts elsewhere. Each of the head men, who looked between 30 and 40 were well into their 50s.

The conversation progressed very quickly, and Nick later said that something magic happened that night. Gome and Jentah had always been warm with him, but they'd avoided questions regarding things like bombs and the wartime experience. Not tonight. As the vodka glass went around the circle, we learned that some of the men had helped the North Vietnamese to carry things along the trail in exchange for rice and how the Bru villagers on this part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail had no choice but to become involved.

To be continued...