Turtle mothers, turtle babies

Once Upon a time I saw a nesting mother...

We’d only just passed by this spot five minutes ago. Ahmaly and I fell silent and looked at each other.

“Isn’t this what we’re looking for?” I asked the sand in front of me.

“Yes, look they’re tracks” Ahmaly replied, her red torch following this new path up the beach. A distinctive row of flipper pushes and under shell drag lead to the bush line. The smell of firecrackers and rain clung to fresh sea air, our dark red torches bouncing cautiously as we proceeded. She was halfway towards her intended patch of darkness away from the trails of light pollution. 

Excitement boiled inside me as Ahmaly reached for the volunteer phone in her pocket. This was it; this is what we were here for. Lightning strikes lit up the sky as mother Elaine began to dig, the swipe and swoosh of her fins in time with the spraying thud of light sand into the air. Forty-five minutes later, with a waiting nest, she was ready to begin the drop of her brood. 

The old poacher, now paid to help Conservationists, was ready to scoop as the eggs dropped. His efforts would ensure a zero breakage success rate from mother to collector to box to new nest to hatching in 60 days. Six volunteers stood nearby, protectively waiting for the soft balls, silently egging her gargantuan efforts on. She looked exhausted already.

  

The next morning

Six hours later Ahmaly, Daniel and I in a thick black hoody, sat on the speedboat driven by Boy out to Munjor Beach.  The sun was rising over blue waves and a chilly early morning wind caught at my cheeks. Daniel from Singapore, lowered his binoculars from the horizon grinning at my somewhat unnecessary layers. We were about to swim over a reef to a fresh egg nest.

No one ever tells you this, and why would they, but dinosaur eggs are very soft, almost like fabric. You did read that correctly, the word, dinosaur. Turtles are  dinosaurs.  Another mother had laid a new batch on this beach while we had been watching ‘Elaine’ do the same back on Juara beach.  We lay together on our bellies among the trees, burrowing gently, downwards to the nest below, careful not to knock or break any eggs. They were the size of Chinese lucky balls.

“Aarrrgh!” I cried out, feeling the stodgy goo between my fingers. “No!” The shift in sand and my hands on the delicate shell had broken an egg.

Five minutes later I struck misfortune again, unaware that my oafish digits were to blame. Sand crumbled down towards the nestled ping pong balls, exacerbating our efforts. On the third crush, this time from a slump of sand, two more came out dripping yellow yoke. I decided to step back and one by one, two by two, out they came in to the waiting mouth of our poly foam box. The total broken came to rest at five out of 104. Ninety eggs were ready to take to their new address: the Juara Turtle Project hatchery.

This may all seem rather mysterious. Turtles? I thought she was in Thailand? Where the fudge is Tioman any way?! I shall enlighten you. I was staying in Ko Lanta, swishing my toes in the sand of the hostel common area, looking for a… ‘something.’ There it was, Jaura Turtle Project, a place to stay, do and maybe even learn?   On the minibus leaving for the ferry port: rammed in as we were, old ladies cast their inquisitive eyes at these curious foreigners. I am as ever enthralled by Thailand and it's nuances, in fact all of South East Asia. This is a part of the world where dashboard-nodding dogs are replaced by dusted purple nodding elephants that smile back. It is a place where children learn how a Gecko sounds instead of a sheep, with an upwards 'uh' tone to the downwards 'oh', so fun for little mouths to repeat. Half a week later, when the nodding elephant was a memory behind several more bus journeys and a stay on Perhentian Kecil, that incidentally reminded me of Kellerman’s in Dirty Dancing, I held on to the interior of a tiny Jeep careering over an incredibly steep hill. Juara was at the bottom.

Turtles hatching

“Put one on top of the others,” instructed Charlie.

A crowd of us had gathered around the 1ft diameter fenced nest in anticipation.  Just a couple of small nondescript heads were poking out, and a few rings of sand clung in patches where their eyes should be. They had finally reached the fresh air at the top. In a bid to wake them up to their need to get out of the shifting sands around them, we followed his advice. Just the top baby turtle began to shift his flippers in a flurry of fins.  Charlie picked him up expertly by the ‘rails’ of his shell, his little fins thinking they were in water and not suspended in air, and placed his tiny body in the centre of the baby heap. With a sudden great push from below, they heaved upwards as one. It was like watching an erupting volcano or bees leaving a hive en masse in search of pollen. 

They crashed up against the fencing, trying to get to the waves ahead of them. They climbed over and over each other, some falling on their backs with their necks stretching out so they could flip themselves back over; and a few of us motherly volunteers succumbing to a kind of cross species broodiness and picking them up ourselves. And this is definitely a real phenomenon. How else do you explain all those videos of kittens on You-Tube?

When we released them two hours later, a small crowd of families had gathered. Now, beating themselves against the inside of a foam box, they sounded like a crowd of birds flapping their wings against the wind. The evening was at that point where it changes suddenly from light to pitch black. Twilight is especially fast on the equator and this was a blessing for our brood of 200. The box was tipped and the most we could do now was hope they all made it to the sea, not back up the beach or in the beak of a hovering bird, the likelihood of either most certainly swayed by the presence of a crowd of humans. At the same time, a storm was appearing with globs of water greeting us a cool hello. 

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Great swipes now came from the bottom of the great hole Elaine had previously dug. She slowly turned her vortex in to a small ridge, and even slower, after about an hour, she managed to shift her exhausted self and nudge her shell away from the covered nest beneath. I left before she made her about-turn to face the waves. Something told me, besides my own tiredness, staying to watch her return could be a step past the line between impassioned volunteer and intrusive voyeur.  I crept away, leaving her safety to the remaining volunteers.

Tid-bits of Volun-tourism

Clean up on Tioman Island 

The phone was ringing an urgent tune.

"Hello, Juara Turtle Project?" I asked.

"Hi, it's Julie, there’s more washing up on the beach. Can you ask Charlie if anyone can come down to help?"

A short explanation came from the other end with a request to gather troops. I was volunteering at Juara Turtle Project on Tioman Island, where fishermen had been dumping their oil in the bay. It seems they wanted to save themselves the official fees in Singapore’s busy ports, 123 nautical miles away.

Charlie, ever the horizontal hippy, the big man in charge, drawled in his methodical California accent:

“Whoever wants to go can take a bike. There’s rakes down there still.” 

Lumps of oil were melting in to the sand, fast.

Three of us hopped on to reclaimed Dutchies, sans breaks, and creakily wound over to the hotel in question, using our flip-flops to skim along the floor when we needed to slow down.

Tioman Island is a remote easterly national conservation park, shaped a little bit like a wine bottle. Steep mountains separate quiet villages and a lack of partying has kept this secret Malaysian location away from most of the backpacker crowd.

Juara bay lies on a calm patch of barely visited sand. Clear waters and reefs dot the coast under a white-hot sun. By night phosphorescent plankton can be seen shimmering in the moonlit water, waiting for nesting turtles to wash ashore.

When an oil spill happens, whether near or far from land, eventually it is brought to solid ground by the ebb and flow of currents. The black grease normally solidifies in to lumps of tar, sometimes sticking itself to rocks, rubbish or animals. When it melts under a hot sun, it slips through fingers, in to the sand, blending with the grains, meaning that what is raked up is sand itself. As the tide pushes itself back on to the beach, the water filters in to the sand with all this oil and then you just have a giant never ending shit storm of impossible clearing and tiny crabs whose home is this now polluted beach.

On arrival to Julie’s hotel, rakes and wheelbarrows aided us in scraping and filtering oil from the sand. It would keep coming back and by the next morning a fresh sheen of dark stickiness would cover our scooping. Our debt to nature was beginning repayment, even if it appeared futile.

Three hours later I was covered in oil, sweat dripped off my brow and my back was sore from bending in to the polluted sand. Raking, hauling was thirsty work and followed by cold ice tea, courtesy of Julie’s gratitude. The hard work left a strange mix of satisfaction and unrest. I was happy to pitch in and play eco-warrior, and I took the opportunity to play eco-warrior with gusto because I wanted to. I was, simply put, not so full of delight at the cause.

It would be wonderful if the chances to clean and conserve need not occur; that would mean everything is and will continue to be in balance in future. As someone who at least tries to live with a sense of reality, hilarious though the claim may seem, these opportunities will continue to come for a long time. The experience of tripping in to a minor catastrophe really encouraged me to take up my recycling bag and join the ranks in the War-On-Pollution. It's like the war on terror but with cleaning materials and no one gets bombed. We have the opportunities to help now, but they won't be here for much longer before its' gone. The question now is whether we choose to take the chance while we have it. 

Cleansing Ko Lanta

 Breathing and cleaning up in Ko Lanta, Thailand  

The grainy sand sticks to my toes and won't let go, leaving a dusty perma-film along the soles of my feet. The hot wind blowing across my back distracts me from the heat of the sun. An unknown black lump has attached its sticky tack to a washed up water bottle. It moved at my touch, slinking and clinging between my fingers, like toxic play-do.

Getting up, I took a few steps nearly treading in another blotch of mystery goo. Ahead of me tiny lumps had bottle caps in-bedded in them, larger ones showing off a sand casing, sprouting plastic straws, and even one completely shaped around a lost flip flop.

I conceded that missing the Klong Dao clean up was justified while my book –filled beach time with long thoughts on how to make dream catchers, turned in to a two-woman black gold treasure hunt. Only the treasure was unwanted, and, we wondered, where had it all come from?

If you ever wondered what an island of hippies might look like, go to Ko Lanta. The smell of incense cones and clunk of wooden wind chimes will explain it all. Stumbling off a Songteaw few days previous, I lumbered around muddy potholes on Thailand’s second largest island, in the dirt track next to Chill Out House hostel. An ivy-laden gable tickled my hair as I trundled inside to discover wooden tables in a tree house, people playing Jenga and a bed to myself for 100 baht per night. After the prices on Koh Phi Phi, where you’ll pay two thirds more a night for a strobe-lit dorm full of teenagers crawling all over each other, like drunken incestuous rats, this was a very good deal.  I was also quickly informed that the best Pad Thai on the island was a two minute walk away and could cost just 40 Baht per serving (about 80p).

Not only did Ko Lanta impress my wallet, it turned out to impress me. After months of living in Bali and months of buses on winding Asian highways- the traveller’s road- I was in need of some peace and quiet. Bangkok had ruined me again, Kanchanaburi educated me in the hardships of war, Krabi showed me how easily a beautiful place can become a tourist wreck and Phi Phi told me how sad it all was. I needed somewhere to exhale.

I spent my time here eating the cheap pad thai, visiting a lighthouse and getting attacked by monkeys that were too familiar with humans and ice cream. Sunshine bleached the tops of womens’ hijabs as they whizzed by on their scooters in the midday scorch.

I visited a Mangrove forest for the first time and saw tiny crabs scuttling along the silt, squaring up to each other as they held up a giant red claw each. Their mismatched arms a sign of virility in this swamp of roots pulling out of mud. I even fed some malnourished and poorly treated elephants. Why did I feed the elephants you ask? Well I’m so glad you did.

So often in South East Asia, elephants are used to attract tourists to certain areas. People need to make money and feed their families. But too often putting food on the table comes at the expense of a creature’s liberty or even their health. Quite often Mahouts will use a Thotti, a long wooden stick with a metal hook, to control the elephants. This ‘control’ generally comes in the form of beating and driving the hook in to an elephant’s ears. For more information on this go to One Green Planet.com. 

On the drive to the Mangroves rainy season storm clouds hovered above menacingly. A Canadian girl and I wondered in to an elephant trekking ground, after finding a monkey park with the monkeys all tethered to posts, unable to run about or escape. This time of year is slow business for the locals, allowing us a better look at the animals. We stopped the bike and went to say hi to the Mahouts in a dusty open field. Two hungry looking baby elephants were bound to a tree, their ears ripped and full of bloody holes and mother tied to a post across the other side of the field. With a look to each other we decided to find a market to get bananas for the animals, we were not going to give money and feed the supply and demand of this treatment.

It’s up to you to decide whether we did the right thing that day. To us it felt like the right thing.

Rainy biking and windy diving in Hoi An

Returning from My Son

As we (I was now back with dear Ciara, my partner in Asian bike journeys) set to hop back on the red carcass of the squeaky bike we had hired, the clouds started to come true on their threat of rain.  This wasn’t to be any rain, but magic rain which transforms humans in to drowned rats.

Now I thought that this being Asia, where tropical rain comes and goes as quick as Callum Best at a single’s party, it would be over pretty soon. So, sensing the imminent downpour, we stopped before it started, for a strong coffee in a derelict looking open café. It housed several old men, coughing away on cigarettes and Mahjong.

I thought stopping here to avoid rain was a stroke of genius. It turns out, it wasn’t genius at all. As we discussed the finer points of Vietnamese traffic laws, or rather their non-existence, the ongoing drizzle didn’t appear to be growing heavy or showing signs of abating. We decided to go for it, unaware of the impending arduous task of trying to see in theatrical curtains of rain.  I have since discovered that the original Roman meaning of genius is a deity or spirit who comes and goes as they please to endow you with creative talent and brainy power. So where mine was that day, I don’t know.

I’m uncertain how well I can explain but really, it was awful!  Think, not one item of clothing or crevice in your body that hasn’t been molested by cold rain. Ciara’s bus was in two hours so we had no choice but to keep going through.

The drops filtered their way in to our mouths, tasting of field with a hint of buffalo poo. Not that I know much of the flavour of farm animal excrement. The storm got up our noses. It stung our squinting eyes and ran in such a fashion round my helmet that my wet hair crept along my moistened cheeks and worked its way between my face and glasses, so that I couldn’t see more than 4 meters in front of me.

When we clunked in to a petrol station somewhere outside of I-have-no-idea-where-I-am-please-help, the ‘20p’/Dong poncho I’d bought, which had ripped down one side, was now purely acting as a windbreak. It had kept me dry for all of ten minutes and poor Ciara who neglected to be such a spend thrift, hovered close, freezing on the back of my bike. I had offered to pull it up over the both of us, like some sort of waterlogged windproof bed sheet.

Finally, rolling in to Hoi An town, I praised,“Oh my Buddha we’re back!”

We were met with a scene from the film ‘The Day after Tomorrow’. Maybe it wasn’t that dramatic but nature certainly looked pissed at humans that day. Watching people push their flooded bikes along narrow rivers of streets, made me hopeful for steaming hot Pho. And a non-air conditioned room where my ears might clear of their post-diving clog.

Diving Hoi An

A couple of days previous, as we had been staying at the exceptionally lazed and beautiful hostel, ‘Under the Coconut Tree’, out at Cua Dai beach, I went on a lil’ dive trip. Water logged itself in my ear canal during my first dive and in the words of Ed from Birmingham, I tried the “old hoppadeemus” to free it. It didn’t work, and 24 hours later, with the water still sloshing mildly in my head, I went to sleep in a very coldly air-conditioned room where it solidified.  Two flights two days later left me walking a little wobbly as I nervously handed over my passport at Bangkok passport control!

As for the Diving…

The prestigious, I use that term loosely, Cham Island Diving centre took me to, well, Cham Island. As beautiful as the sparse reef and clientele were, the guides and safety standards left a lot to be desired. Before I got on the boat that morning, no one had checked my dive creds, only our word. Which is fine, if you say you can dive and you can’t, it’ll become pretty obvious when you arse up a buddy check or breath from the wrong regulator. I can dive, I am also qualified to drift dive as an advanced open water diver, *salutes PADI.

The thing about a strong drift dive is that if you don’t understand the basic idea of staying close to the bottom where the current is weaker, you may well lose your dive group. Which is pretty dangerous, in case that wasn’t obvious. Han, from Bulgaria, ended up thirty meters from the island. As the numbers of ours, and other groups, dwindled, we rose to the surface early. While Han was located my buddy and I were left to cling on to a large barnacle covered buoy and await the dive boat’s arrival.

I will concede that they stuck to their duties in getting us all safely out of the sea, but they could have easily avoided losing clients and their fins by,  

A, ensuring we were all qualified to drift dive.  

B, actually checking that we were all genuinely certified to the right standard with experience in drift dives,

C, taking us to a site with better conditions.

In the end everyone was ok and they did however, put on a good spread at the island. They gave us a good two hours to eat, digest and fall asleep in a hammock. And being a positive person, even though I was less than impressed with their lackadaisical attitude to our safety, the way to win me over is through food. I still won’t be rushing back to risk my life with them again.

Middle- Nam

Bike to My Son

Little more than 55 kilometres from Hoi An lies the ancient Champa-built ruins of My Son. Built from the 4^th to 13^th centuries with its’ roots owed to Indian Hinduism, My Son was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999.

I skipped through a lot of country from Hanoi to be here, by way of two weeks spent helping a thankless invalid. I might have been on my way to Cambodia, as originally planned. But who sticks to an original plan these days? I hopped over going to mountains in Sapa, or running through caves in Ninh Binh, and stopped for a walk through Hue’s old war- ravaged citadel, on the way to historic Hoi An. The Viet 'Cong' (the American label for the guerrilla troops of South Vietnam and Mekong who fought alongside the the North Vietnamese), had given the yanks too much credit in assuming that they wouldn’t desecrate these momentous temples of Vietnamese religion and culture, in their bid to chase down Communism.

After 55km my dead bum was gnawing at the edges of my patience. The road traffic requires you to keep your eyes in your rear, rather than on the scenery. The Han River flows next to much of the road. Sisterly jade rice paddies and twisting train lines on the opposition side quench a thirst in your eyes for sights you never knew you’d missed. It was however, still a relief to roll up to this vast red brick sanctuary and, after falling off my bike, sooth my posterior back to life.

At the entrance a square squat hallway invited me in to pay and gain the background information, contrastingly modern against the Monkey Bridge out front, that lead the 2km to the great temple exhibition.

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A cacophony of grasshoppers played me down the lane to the first ruin. To walk on these stones is to step back in time. To walk in the foot-steps of past emperors and deities. How magical, to think of it all in former glory back in those early years.

Some of them, the temples, have been taken back by nature. Mounds of dirt and patchy grass grip at the bricks that peak out of their earthy tombs. Worn pathways and ancient rocks whisper to old pomp and ceremony. Giant craters in the fourth temple hint at the not so recent war between East and West. The final temple resembles a rollercoaster, all a jumble of hills and craters tale-telling on ghosts of the past.

I wondered exactly how much this place was bombed? Two shell cases sat beside an archaeological find inside a ruin. Juxtaposing spiritual enlightenment with western ideological fear. How much was destroyed in the name of preserving our current version of Genghis Khan's pillage, Capitalism?

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Holy places have a habit of making me wistful. I began to mull over whether I could ever leave Asia. Imagining myself another life where I am ‘settled’ requires decoding of the word itself. ‘To settle’. The verb defined in the Oxford dictionary with more than three meanings. Here are the top three: to reach a conclusion or agreement to a problem; to reach a decision; to come to a dissatisfactory acceptance.

To ‘settle down’ is to accept an unrealistic and bogus idea of existence. Even those who think their life is mapped out will find surprises, whether good or bad. And those whose definition of adulthood is based on ownership of some form (cars, careers, mortgages and kids for instance) are only defining their experience of the world through money and possessions.

I don’t think that the Cham emperors of the past, when building their red mortar worshipping grounds, would have ‘settled’.

Dodging bikes and eating noodles in Hanoi

Night by night, this non-stop nocturnal city all comes to life without needing to sleep. Hanoi buzzes and vibrates with the rolling of thousands of humming motorbikes. They light up the darkness as I look outside the window for a Kent click cigarette. It's a toy as much as a lung blackening death stick. A stick that goes well enough with beer, tramadol and the cripple I have come here for. Light pollution gives is an ironic beauty. 

 

By way of twist of fate I have found myself back in Vietnam. Round two in the ring. I forgot how much I love Hanoi. This crazy, busy, buzzing, bustling encampment is a city of verbs. People get out to sit with each other in public with fresh Bia, to play badminton in parks and sit with babies along the sidelines as a thousand mopeds whizz by. This East is not like our West at all, and they are rightfully, fiercely proud of that fact.

There are voices of travellers flopping along streets that bend in to avenues, thick with activity. Fog follows daytime hazes, which give way to twinkling traffic light and shop signs. I feel exactly the way I did when I was last here- totally in love with the country. With so many twists, surprises and delightful occurrences, it's easy to forget every version of reality that you knew before, to forget that you have anything to do but enjoy lakeside al fresco coffees.

Hanoi has me figured out. The way to my heart is through my stomach. Noodle soups with beef, duck, chicken, maybe even dog. Throw it all in it tastes good enough for me! Bun Cha with round vermicelli noodles, bamboo shoots, spring onion and saw tooth, it’s a cleansing lemon and spicy goodness. What could be better than a nice walk around this city, to help digest these culinary treats?

Hanoi, the Paris of Vietnam. The New York of South East Asia. From towering terraced hotels and their balconies, parks that litter the city span, to the cafe culture and freedom to smoke anywhere you like. As if I needed any more proof, on a mission to pick up takeaway Vietnamese filter coffees - skimping on the condensed milk- Cafe Day Ro's interior shows me its' tribute to Paris with a wall sized poster of the Louvre. 

Patisseries, attic windows, tree-lined boulevards all hint at past colonial influence. But this is still distinctly Vietnam. At one moment you are walking down the street gazing at an ancient temple decked out with dragons, the next you have been pulled in to a seat to help people learn English. And as soon as you leave to return to your waiting disabled gent, you are navigating around mopeds, vans, pedal bikes and street vendors so that crossing the street becomes a sport. Especially for a man on crutches. 

And just when I have fully fallen for the place, birds chirping in the sculpted and stately trees to accompany the scene surrounding this lake, I look to my right to a bank strewn with litter and a man pissing with abandon in to the wind. Oh Asia, you never fail to be both consistent and surprising, only after six months, that’s no longer surprising. 

And then there is Ha Long Bay. A place to forget the outside world and anything else. Bay of the dragon, where karsts lie a mere five meters under the turquoise sea and jut sharply up to what looks like hundreds of feet. The closer formations pitch dark and inviting against their cousins in the mist behind, who appear fainter like silhouettes. Or ghosts. Or mirage. 

You melt away like the sweat in your brow, with the true meaning of drifting.

When tourism meets indigenous culture

Journeys in Laos' hidden North  

Three generations of family live in one room in a Hmong village between Muang Sing and Luang Nam Tha. They share the bed, the cement floor and the kitchen together. Offering us sour lychees and opium they explained how they walk for an hour twice a day to reach their farmland. I never caught their names but thanked, 'Sabai-dee' profusely for their hospitality, determined to leave a good impression of foreigners. We were the first white people they had ever met. 

Just outside these two main towns, as in most areas of Laos, wooden village upon riverside wooden village lie next to the roads. In the midst of our cultural exchange, the father, head of his part of the household, returned from the fields. A rattan sack laden with vegetables hung heavily off his back. He dropped the dead weight and plonked down to light his pipe. A dark brown cloud of smoke emitted from the end, and it was at this moment one of our group asked for a photo with the family. I shifted uncomfortably. 

It’s not that we didn’t want to pose with them, we didn’t want to be another tourist pretending to be more cultured than five minutes before the meeting for the sake of someone’s Instagram folio.

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I see photos of people surrounded by African children; I've been one of those people. I see people sitting in groups of poor children smiling away next to these cute little dirt covered malnourished faces while making the piece signs with their fingers next to a white well-fed grin. I also see people having photos taken of their genuine friends, people they have volunteered with or spent time helping, and built a rapport. And there is the difference, that is not voyeurism but that's what we would have been had we posed in that photo. We would have been those exploitive tourists.

However our un-enthusiasm for posing in ‘white saviour’ photos let us down and I wondered how this might look to our hosts. Would our discomfort be mistaken for disrespect and boredom? This was no more evident than in the next village. 

The Akha people here were used to seeing Westerners. 

The unmissable blue sign at the side of the road said as much, "Case free village". Rag-tag children bounded up to us on over size bikes and mismatching shoes. "Bye bye!" they greeted us, hands held out for requisite offerings of confectionary. And I just felt vulgar, impotent that all I could have offered was sweets and I had none. I took no photos.

At our final stop, the Lanten village, bamboo and rattan homes on stilts greeted us amongst a family of jungle hogs quenching their thirst in a leaf lined log trough. Here the women still wear traditional blue tunics and shorts. Their hair uniformly styled in to buns decorated with silver coins that glint in the sun. All material is made by loom, which they use for themselves rather than selling to other Laotians who won't buy it. 

Did we want to buy any cotton? The question came so eloquently translated, five minutes after our arrival. The purpose of these visits was becoming clear. I declined, when I should have said yes, for if you are going to visit remote villages and their adjoining cultures, you should be prepared to offer or buy something for the privilege of being shown the dwellings.

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"We have a very rich culture here." 

Laotian society is as diverse and intriguing as its’ emerald roller coaster track of mountains. As if the latter half of the twentieth century is yet to come, but all the negative outcome of the Vietnam War has. “We call it the American War”, a charity worker from Nong Kiaow tells me, inadvertently explaining the pockets of Western resentment. An insurgence of sightseers waiting to happen.

I wonder how long it will be before these strong networks of tradition in every day life will become only ties to the past. In these days of capitalism and sky-scrapers, we are seeing the desolation of natural environments, feeding and mating grounds of countless animals and the cultures and homes of indigenous peoples.

How soon will Laos’ culture be whittled to a small, watered down remnants of heritage? Or swamped with mass tourism like Thailand? One only need look at Vietnam to see the quick pace of tourism and ‘gap-yah’ wonderers trampling along the main backpacker circuit. I only hope the face of tourism and drunk-packing changes for the better, towards more responsible, respectful and eco-friendly tourism, before any more lasting damage can be done. 

 

Woman at Lanten Village