The joy of a river

Lunar New Year, and Korea is shutting down. So once again, I'm climbing on a plane and going to have a look at someplace new! Hooray!

From Korea to Vientiane is just 7 hours on a plane. Unfortunately, the Laotian capital isn't on a major route from Seoul, so after a frantic drive to the airport after work on Wednesday and a flight to Bangkok, I get to, once again, spend a night on the obliging Starbucks couch. I have a ten-hour layover and it's bringing back memories of the long night on the way to Bali last year...

Sadly they're building a new shop right next to Starbucks, presumably to avoid inconveniencing day travellers, and I can't block out the screeches and whines of their tools. So after a gruelling night spent moving from chair to chair, trying to find a quiet and comfy place to sleep and eventually giving up, I made it to morning and to my 11:45 flight to Vientiane. It took just over an hour, flying north into the peninsular hinterland, over miles and miles of rice paddies and the odd hill. Coming in to land, it was only at the very last minute that the ground beneath us turned from field to concrete runway. Through tedious customs and visa formalities, a driver waited for me in the heat; he had very little English, so, with a minimum of words, he hustled me into his battered Peugeot and set off through the city streets. The buildings lining the wide avenues reminded me of Madagascar: with faded French colonial pretensions, the shabby beauty of the verandah-lined stilted houses appealed to me straight away.

It wasn't until we reached the outskirts, though, that I realised I was going to fall madly and irrevocably in love with this country. We turned onto a dirt road and drove through tiny villages centred around shops operating from wooden shacks. The houses, set on large plots of land, were all built on stilts, and in the spaces beneath, whole families were gathered, eating lunch, or chatting, or simply sharing a smoke. Goats meandered along the edge of the road, paying no heed to the drivers, who were, if we're honest, simply meandering themselves. Some were meandering so successfully they'd come to a complete stop on the road and were now engaged in talking to stall owners, maybe buying a baguette or two for lunch. It was great. I couldn't have come further from the grey high-rises and farm-quilted valleys of South Korea. And we were only a short drive outside the capital city!

My lodge was on the banks of a river, the Nam Ngum, just a collection of rough huts with verandahs and an outhouse or two.



Steps led down the steep bank right to the water's edge, where, having now run out of land, the owners built a restaurant on the water. The deck enclosed a section of the fast-moving river as a makeshift pool.




Tables and chairs were scattered over several moored rafts under thatch, and at the far end, when I arrived, the kitchen was filled with chattering Lao, all of whom stop at the sight of me and come over with warm smiles to wish me welcome to their country. I settled on the edge of the restaurant, my legs dangling in the cool water, a book in one hand, in the other a bottle of Beer Lao, the best lager I've ever tasted. Can life actually get any better than this? The next few days will tell...

Across the river, a village lies, carved out of the forest. A ferry carries people and scooters back and forth, but I make my way there on a section of the restaurant, which detaches to become a thatched raft.



We land next to some women washing clothes in the river and Joy, my guide, leads me up the steep bank to the village. (Joy is a nickname; it means 'skinny' and he lives up to it.) Although Hmong people are increasingly coming down from their traditional mountainous homes to live and work alongside lowland tribes, this village is entirely Lao. The Lao are strictly Buddhist and a bright gold and green temple occupies prime position. Joy takes me inside. He is Hmong so his knowledge is limited, but the images on the wall bear close resemblance to the ones I saw in India, if a little more graphic; one shows a man, surrounded by a feasting family, his guts graphically spilling from his belly.

We walk to the village school, where around 50 children are taught by a single teacher. When we arrive, a pack of kids waves at me from the verandah, but then the teacher walks up and they all disappear back inside to learn about mountains and valleys (Joy translates for me).



I discover that the students are divided into classes, the teacher moving from room to room, handing out work to be done in her absence.



I don't want to interrupt, so I quietly look in through the windows; the children seem fascinated by me though and so I move on for the teacher's sake.

The afternoon, hot and sticky, begs to be observed from the cool vantage point of a tube on the pool, and I find myself very obliging in this respect.

The next day I ventured to the restaurant next door where I bought a Fanta and sat down under a thatch roof at the top of the riverbank, above pumpkin patches and tomato stakes - an organic vegetable garden which has to be abandoned once a year when the river swells, but which otherwise feeds the restaurant, the attached families, and my lodge.

It wasn't quiet. Mohawked boys drank Beer Lao and laughed in the larger hut next to mine, and Thai pop blared from the loudspeakers. The ferry roared its way across the river beneath. But it was calming in its cheerful simplicity. Families of chickens stalked grubs in the overgrown garden. Whenever I glanced up from my book, my eye was invariably caught by one of the legions of butterflies - sometimes a tiny yellow buttercup butterfly, someimtes a giant blue-black Birdwing, 15cm across its span. A silken cream butterfly, its wingtips brushed with orange paint, veered by to inspect my Fanta but went off in search of more natural sugar. And just down the bank, an abandoned hut, marigolds testing its boundaries, played sunny host to an almost chameleon-like lizard, its skin glowing bright red in the noon light, fading to a muddy green at the tip of its tail. He watched me with as much interest as I showed him, turning his head to stare into the camera lens.

I was talking about India a few days ago with some colleagues going there, and found it strange that my enduring memories are of the myriad cafes Sara and I sat in, not talking, often, but simply writing, reading, watching people. It seems that often the best impressions I get from a place are from doing absolutely nothing! Score!

Sometimes in Bali I got frustrated with the thought that everything was just for show, that the only industry was the tourist one, that even the most genuine-looking restaurant was too pricy for locals. It's different here. When lunchtime comes along, the huts fill up with Lao, chattering, bantering with the owners and eating the same food as I've just ordered.

Like I said earlier. Love at first sight.

Observing the North

Having only two weekends left in Korea has focused my attention somewhat. I've realised how many things I haven't yet done and how little time I have left to do them in. In an effort to reduce the list a bit, Harry and I headed down the road to Odusan Observatory this weekend.



It's terrible that I haven't been before, as it really is just a five minute drive from English Village, past our local shops and love motels, across the highway. It's so close that from the top of the observatory, we can see our Hollywood-style sign beyond the village.

Odusan was built to promote the idea of reunification of the two Koreas, an idea popular in the media and with politicians, but often scoffed at by southerners more concerned with whether the economy would suffer if combined with the poor North. The observatory looks over the confluence of two rivers, gazing towards North Korea.

The main attraction is an observation deck with bright orange binoculars through which it's possible to make out the Propaganda Village on the other side of the river. Unfortunately, the binoculars were too low even for my short frame, so poor Harry really struggled...


The Propaganda Village was built by the North Koreans for the purpose of showing South Koreans what they were missing out on. It boasts high-rise apartment buildings and enormous signs beseeching southerners to cross over to paradise. There used to be loudspeakers blaring propaganda as well, matched by loudspeakers on the southern side, until the governments agreed to remove them all for the sake of sanity. Unfortunately, the government forgot (or was unable) to fill the village with people. The buildings are grey concrete, and the glass-less windows stare blankly over fields and unused schools. North Koreans are apparently brought in every day to work the rice paddies, and at dusk, they're driven back to their real homes. The buildings visible to us on this slightly hazy day included mansions with such glorious names as "The Anti-South Media Propaganda Base", "Kim Il-Sung Historical Monument Hall" and "People's Cultural Assembly Hall". Small figures worked in the fields, burning rubbish and preparing for spring planting. I made out what seemed to be a primary school, but the courtyard was empty of children and the swings lonely.

The river is currently full of ice floating out to sea. A couple of weeks ago it was almost completely frozen over, so it's getting better, but it's still hard to imagine the lives of the people we could see. I recently read a book by a teenager who escaped over the border with China, and his tales of famine and desperation were ringing in my head as I turned my binoculars on the farmers. Without heating or even fuel for a fire, many of the people in North Korea have difficulty in even surviving the winter - returning to my toasty room, I vowed not to complain of the cold again...


The exhibition centre is nicely done. There's no judgement - or at least, there isn't in the small amount of English commentary available. The glass cases full of North Korean products seem to show that life, although permanently stuck in the 1950s, is actually quite similar to the rest of Asia. The little area done up as a regular room might be shows a poor but clean space, with a TV and food on the low table. The only sign that this is not a room in just any third world country is the pictures on the wall: placed high up so that nothing else is above them, the Two Kims gaze benevolently over the scene.

The display cases show an amazing array of North Korean products, like adder liquor, with a perfectly preserved adder reaching up towards the cap. The money is well designed, with all the reverse sides showing heroic citizens, stoically looking to the future in a heroic manner, as befits the heroic members of an outcast society.

It's stunning how many products are produced. Although I knew of the ideal of self-sufficiency (or "juche"), I didn't realise just how self-sufficient the country is. The clothing is a bit dated, the toys are largely military, the packaging has none of the appeal of Western equivalents (and is that such a bad thing?) but it's all there.

Even guitar strings are available to the workers of DPRK, and should they require a little relaxation at the end of the day, there's "revolutionary opera" - oh how I wish I could listen to that...


The Kims are everywhere. Wearing a badge with one or the other's face on it is compulsory for all North Koreans above a certain age, and in Life In Paradise, the teenage author tells of how all the children fought to have the latest editions, which were, naturally, more expensive, and therefore worn only by the wealthiest. The personality cult is fascinating and I can't help but wonder where Mugabe failed in this - he'd certainly love to have the absolute power that Kim Jong-Il has. Even during the famine, North Koreans were expected to, and did, go and offer food at the base of one of the Kims' enormous statues that are built on hills in every city. The food is left to go to waste as an offering on their birthdays and other holidays.

Perhaps one of the saddest points for me was the Hometown Searching Centre. Although this is not necessarily the closest South Koreans can get, it's one of the places that families separated by the war come to burn offerings to ancestors on important days, ancestors who are buried across the border and are inaccessible to their descendants, and to look across the water and wonder about their living relatives who were caught on the other side at the ceasefire. This centre allows South Koreans to search for information about their homes they left so long ago.

Odusan's a fascinating place, full of heartache and suffering, but also of hope, in the walls filled with inter-Korean communication and co-operation. All those people, separated by simple ideology - really, what's the point?

In which our heroine goes down the river

On Boxing Day, we were invited onto a boat by Sandra and Ian, Kevin's parents. They have a lovely speedboat which we launched into the river close to their house. The river is very wide, winding north alongside the coast, between banks of tea trees and eucalyptus. Unfortunately, because of the recent fires, the banks were full of rather sad charred trunks, some areas still smoking. Further up the vegetation started getting green again, though, and we stopped briefly by some unspoilt mangroves to haul up a crab pot which had been left there earlier in the week. Kind of like a lobster pot, seeing the two crabs caught in it frantically claw their way away from the entrance and Ian's hand made me once again vow to give up all forms of meat. Anyone who saw their little eyes searching for an escape would never again claim that some animals have no fear or pain. Luckily, one was a female and the other a juvenile, so both were released back into the river. We continued on up the river and into a wide and very choppy lake.

On the far side of the lake, the bottom suddenly became very shallow and we had to manoeuvre our way between sandbanks to reach the entrance to the network of rivers beyond. Safely past the banks Lisa spotted a ray, languidly making his way along, occasionally scuffling at the sand, hunting, perhaps, or trying to hide himself.

Further up the river, the waters became a deep red, apparently from the tea trees along the banks. Swimming in it reminded me of swimming in Silvermine Dam in Cape Town - MUCH warmer though! It was so warm it was necessary to kick down deep to disturb the cooler waters!

It was a lovely spot to have a picnic lunch, so we did.

Coming back to the shallow lake we passed the sandbanks again, this time covered with little groups of pelicans, clacking their beaks at each other and eyeing us in case we tried anything silly. And it would be silly - those birds are much bigger than Finding Nemo makes them look...