Thu 25/12/08 22:09
This entry is being posted after Christmas, written as I was on the river.
Pakbeng was the small river town that we spent the night last night. I don’t know for sure but I think that this town’s sole existence is for a halfway point along the river. From what our guide told me was that nobody navigates the Mekong during the night because of the dangers of hidden rocks and other various objects. It makes Pakbeng the place to stop for the night. It’s a small town that seems to have embraced its role as a small tourist spot. There are as many hotels and restaurants as there are houses or stores on its one street. Don’t miss understand me, there is no way that this town is tourist”y” it is real in every sense of the word. The people are busy working at making a living and except for the shopkeepers they barely seem to notice the tourists. Our hotel was excellent, there was a large open area/deck that overlooks the Mekong where we spent the night drinking and talking… not exactly true, we spent most of the night at a restaurant across the street from our hotel, but when it got close to 10:30 we went back to the hotel to chat, listen to Christmas music and hang. The reason we left then was that the city doesn’t have electricity from a grid, they have to run generators, so at 10:30 at night the town shuts off the lights. It’s something that seems so foreign to most people in developed countries, but the people here seem to take it in stride. To be honest it didn’t bother any of us at all… in fact it was kind of quaint.
The temperature here is kind of chilly, probably in the 50s or so right now. It really cools down when the sun is down, or like now, when it’s blocked by clouds. The clouds are really more like fog than anything, and the way it is hugging the hills that line the river is something kind of surreal. It’s 9:30 in the morning and everyone on the boat is bundled up in all the extra clothes that they brought. Coming from a place where a jacket isn’t needed, it really wasn’t something that I thought to bring with me. I did bring a hooded sweatshirt so I’m not completely cold…
Yesterday we stopped at one of the villages that are scattered around the bank of the river. I have to say that it was one of the best things and one of the worst things I’ve seen in a while. As we pulled up to a sandy area on the bank I could see small kids all lined up watching us. Now if you’ve ever seen any of the old Vietnam war movies you probably are familiar with the type of buildings they live in, I think they’re called hootches. I don’t know though maybe that’s slang. They’re made out of bamboo and sit on stilts. The village consisted of about 30 or 40 of these “hootches” which were scattered around so no front door was facing another. The people were poor… dirt poor. Chickens, dogs, and other animals walked among us as we made our way through the village. The young children rarely had a set of clothing, some had underwear, some only a shirt. The best way to describe the situation was if you’ve ever seen the infomercial that has the tagline, “for about the cup of a coffee, you can help feed a child for a month” you would know what this village was like. It really was almost sad that we were spectators in their lives though, I don’t know about everyone in the group, but a few of us were talking later about how it felt like we were exploiting them. We didn’t do anything purposefully bad, but just the fact that we were walking around, some of us taking pictures, seemed like we were wrong to be there. Almost like their misery was something for our benefit. I guess just like a zoo raises awareness of the animals of the world, showing us the real misery of some people in the world raised our understanding of how lucky we actually are. I don’t know if “misery” is the right word, it seems like I’m suggesting that they were sad, and I don’t really mean to say that, they were poor, but maybe their life is harder, and in some ways, better than the average westerner that makes the rounds through their village.
This village is not the only example of lack of wealth that we’ve seen since we crossed over to Laos. It’s sad in some regards, but in the last two days that we’ve been here there hasn’t been any examples of people that have enough to live comfortably… and I’m not talking about cable television or café lattes in the morning, I’m talking about living.
