But they're going to kill the snake

My Lonely Planet guidebook’s description of the speed boat ride to Huay Xai (Laos) used terms like “ludicrously dangerous” and “mortality rate”.  In the end, it was the fear I saw in my guest house owner’s eyes when I asked her to book me one of these death-commutes that changed my mind.  I’d ignored a similar look in Guatemala when deciding on a chicken bus trip out of San Pedro and lived regret it.  This is how I came to be where I am right now; on a slow boat to Huay Xai, a two day trip from Luang Prabang (Laos) that includes an overnight stay at Pak Beng (Laos).  It’s not so bad.  Watching the tall cliffs along the Mekong River meander by while drinking a big Beerlao and listening to some Brand New on my iPod isn’t a bad way to spend a day (or two). 

Things happen quickly here.  Last night I was sitting on the front steps of my guesthouse in Luang Prabang, uncertain about where I would go tomorrow when a Swiss guy (Lukas) sat next to me and we started discussing our travels.  He’d just finished a semester abroad at a university in Bangkok and was traveling Thailand and Laos with three friends.  Two of his friends were also Swiss, the other (Hanna) was German.  Before long, he and I and his friends and a few other guests from the guesthouse had taken over the front porch.  Not long after that, Lukas suggested we get some Beerlao and that started a mildly epic night that ended with a restaurant employee politely requesting their table back that we’d pulled out onto a sidewalk and were using for a German drinking game called “south north” (or something like that).  This gang had spent four months studying in Bangkok followed by four weeks of traveling.  They had some advice on where to visit in Thailand and where to avoid.  They told me Burma shouldn’t be missed and filled me in on what to expect there.  They suggested I tag along with them on a tubing trip in the center of Laos.  However, I need to start working my way back toward Bangkok if I hope to have time to visit Burma.  They were good people and I’m glad I met them. 

In my last blog post I discussed my tour of Dalat and the evening at the bar “Saigon Nite”.  An episode that I didn’t note was the conversation I had at a large table of drunken locals as I waited for my Dutch friends outside of our hotel.  How I came to be at this table was an invitation from one of our Dalat tour guides.  He and some friends play pool and drink each night at a small place attached to the hotel I was staying at.  I, being one man, was ready to go out well before the two girls I was accompanying, so I decided to spend my extra time having a drink with my tour guide and his friends.  I found them sitting at a big picnic table outside a really small bar that was filled almost entirely by a large pool table.  It was cold out and everybody was wrapped tightly in their jackets and in front of each were multiple bottles of beer.  Some were still full, most were empty. 

There were five men at the table, but only one spoke and he spoke a lot.  He was a loud, gregarious, chubby man (by Vietnamese standards).  His name was Thrang (or something like that).  He had a plate of dried shark meat that he dipped in a hot sauce and shared with me and the rest of the table.  He asked me where I was going and where I had been and was, like many I’d met here, very interested in what I thought of Vietnam.  He laughed loudly at his own dirty jokes (about naked women, tomatoes, and cucumbers).  His laugh was a mix of doctor evil, Dracula, and jaba the hut.  It was maniacal.  It started explosively and ended abruptly.  When his laugh died, he would look me intently in the eye and then continue with whatever the hell it was he was trying to tell me.  Then he said something that got my attention.  I can’t remember exactly what his phrasing was, but it was something along the lines of; “After our war with America, I have one problem with America.”  He looked around the table, but I’m pretty certain nobody had any clue what he was saying to me (whether due to drunkenness or lack of an understanding of English, but most likely it was varying portions of both).  He went on to tell me that his father had served under an American commander and that this was something he was very proud of.  He said that when a hill needed to be taken, three Vietnamese leaders were chosen to lead the assault and that his father was always one of the ones to lead.  He said that his problem with America is that we “went away”.  I think he is among the minority here, but I don’t know.

But, that’s not the reason I’m telling you about Thrang.  It was something he said later that I reflected on many times in Hanoi and Sapa.  He said that I will find the people of the south nicer and that I should maybe consider telling people in the north I’m Russian (maniacal laugher).  He said that the north is poorer.  He said that their lives are harder and they are not as friendly.  I figured a little less friendly would be OK.  People couldn’t get much friendlier than what I encountered so far.

Hanoi, Vietnam;

Thrang was so right.  I’m not going to write much about Hanoi.  It’s a loud, dirty city filled with people who aren’t particularly fond of me or anybody else from what I can tell.  It wasn’t all bad.  I’ll share some of the highlights and oddities and I’m sure a few other things that you wouldn’t consider either odd or interesting. 

On Christmas Eve I met an Australian girl named Elyse at a nice café called Koto across the street from the Temple of Literature.  I’d just left the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum where I’d seen Ho Chi Minh’s embalmed body protected by four Vietnamese honor guard soldiers with bayonets fixed and reflected on the fact that he was adamant in his wish that he be cremated.  After I left the mausoleum, I was approached by a Vietnamese man who asked if I was American.  He was thrilled to find out I was and announced the fact to the crowd around us (pointing at me like a circus animal and excitedly announcing “American!”) and then asked to get a picture with me.  Then a line formed.  For the next minute or so I was posing with various Vietnamese in the shadow of the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum.  It occurred to me that it might be a natural human emotion to feel a bit humiliated by what was occurring, but I didn’t.  I had nothing to do and all day to do it.  If I could make a few people’s day a bit better, why not?

So, anyway, Elyse wanted to eat snakes.  In a country that had “dog markets”, a snake restaurant wasn’t a huge surprise.  She suggested that we take a tour of the areas outside of Hanoi the next day.  The highlight would be a snake market where we would eat at a snake restaurant.  Elyse was cool and I figured a snake meal would be a memorable Christmas brunch, so I agreed. 

It turned out I agreed to much more than I thought I did.  The evening before the snake market, Elyse and I went to a bar called Mao’s Red Lounge (the name screams Christmas Eve fun).  There, we met an Englishman (john?) and a Canadian (jett) that both taught English in Burma.  I got a familiar not-so-thrilled-with-americans-in-general vibe from the Englishman, but they were cool nonetheless.  Elyse mentioned the snake plans and our new friends filled us in on what we might encounter.  Jett talked about seeing a snake slaughtered, snake blood, and a still beating snake heart.  I thought that they were just having fun with us.

Snake Market (on a dirt alley somewhere outside of Hanoi);

Jett wasn’t just having fun with us.  On Christmas Morning I met Elyse at her hotel.  Our tour guides showed up a few minutes later on their motos.  We visited a silk market and a flower auction (highly entertaining – hearing a Vietnamese auctioneer is a life experience).  Elyse and I looked at each other for a moment when it was time to go to the snake market.  We had concerns, but we shared a silent determination. 

We got on the back of our respective motos and started our long trip to the snake market.  We drove for about 25 minutes through congested streets, down a highway, over a long bridge, past random street vendors and cows grazing in city alleys and roadsides, and, finally, through many dirt alleys until we got to our destination.  There were no other falang (tourists) around.  In fact, we’d seen very few falang since we left the hotel. 

The restaurant grounds had one small building on it that housed the cooking area.  Otherwise, it was a small pond with multiple dining areas built on stilts above the water.  Bridges connected each dining area.  It was a traditional sit-on-the-floor place.  We were shown the snake cages that housed a variety of water snakes and cobras.  One of the hosts took out a cobra.  Elyse and I stood well back.  (I actually held a cobra once many years ago at a festival in Pennsylvania.  It had been devenomized by a man who later died of a cobra bite.  Even small baby cobras can kill you…but I digress).   Then he took out a water snake and handed it to me.  Our hosts (two of them) then showed us to our table, one still carrying the water snake.  Elyse and I agreed on the “small” meal, which we both thought saved us from witnessing the snake slaughter.  We were wrong. 

Once Elyse and I realized that they were going to kill the snake in front of us, we both panicked a bit.  Nobody at the restaurant spoke any English at all, so Elyse called her hotel so that they could translate for us.  She explained that we ordered the” small meal” but that “they’re going to kill the snake” and then handed the phone to one of our hosts.  After a brief conversation he handed the phone back and hotel employee told her everything was fine and that we were only getting the small meal, but that it was expected that we witness the snake slaughter.   

So here it was; the place where my own squeamishness and empathy towards the snake met a local cultural expectation and I need to decide which side of the fence I was going to land.  I eat meat.  I will continue to eat meat throughout my service in Namibia as it is a big part of their diet.  All the meat I’ve ever eaten was killed well out of my site except for the occasional fish caught on my yearly UPS fishing trip.  This will not be true in Namibia where I will have to get used to witnessing, and likely participating in, the slaughter of animals for food.  In any case, this is how I justified what I was about to participate in, rightly or wrongly. 

Our hosts brought us to our table and set out a small mat upon which they placed two medium sized glasses with lemon grass stalks sticking out of each.  One poured rice wine (whiskey really – 100 proof) in both glasses while the other held the snake.  Then each grabbed an end of the snake and pulled it taut.  The man holding the head of the snake folded the head back forcefully and then folded it once again.  He then took out a small knife and inserted it just below the fold.  He opened up about a 3 inch slice in the snake belly and then pulled out what turned out to be the heart.  I don’t know if the word for “artery” is the same in Lao as it is in English, but the man holding the head said this word and then the other man sliced a small part of the guts and blood came pouring out into the rice wine  in a deep red cloud.  He then sliced the heart out and put it in a shot glass and handed it to me.  It was still beating.  I was still looking at the beating heart when one of my hosts poured rice wine into the shot glass and then motioned for me to drink it.  I swallowed everything in one shot and then looked at my hosts and then at Elyse and felt like my day had just ended.

I wish I could say the meal was good, but it really wasn’t.  Snake meat is very dry and though the restaurant tried its best to dress it up, it just wasn’t very good.  On our way out of the restaurant, a man (I think the restaurant owner) was sitting at the front gate with a bong (very common here – used to smoke a hairy type of tobacco).  He packed the pipe and then handed me the bong.  I took it and drew a puff while he held his lighter to the tobacco.  I blew out a puff of smoke and he seemed please and said something to me in French.  It was a strange day. 

So, that was Christmas brunch.  I hope yours was equally memorable.  Moving on.

Sapa, Vietnam;

I did a two day/three night trek north of Hanoi.  The hike was based out of a town called Sapa which is a remote farming town on the mountainous border with China.  Farming terraces for growing rice were carved into the mountains side as far as the eye could see.  It was interesting to see how the locals lived, but their existence was so tainted by tourism that it was hard not to feel like I was looking at my own negative impact on the world as opposed to how other’s live.  Sapa was a tourist zoo and I was as much a part of the reality of the place as the locals, which sort of defeated the purpose of visiting a remote farming village. 

I met some good people on my Sapa trip.  I met a man who was evacuated after the fall of Saigon.  It seemed he had a very good life in the States.  He was a retired software developer that coded programs used to analyze space shuttle stress data.  He was traveling with his wife and daughter (soon to be law student) and they all lived in San Francisco.  The four of us shared a sleeper cabin on the ten hour ride to Sapa.  The father and I spoke for a long while about his life in Vietnam as a child.  He’d grown up in Dalat and was happy to hear I’d visited there.  He said that he’d once gotten caught swimming in the Dalat lake which was strictly prohibited because of frequent drownings and that the police took all of his cloths and made him chase their car naked through the city while they threw out one piece of clothing at a time.  He said he and his friends would camp every weekend and he said his childhood there was a very happy one.  

I don’t know what the average age is in Southeast Asia, but I’d put it at about seven.  There are kids everywhere.  My tour group visited a primary school.  The kids all had the hand writing of a calligrapher and seemed to be working on pretty advanced math for second graders.  The school had a small house on its grounds that many of the teachers lived at.  Images of Ho Chi Minh were everywhere.  

The men in Sapa, my tour guide explained, work extremely hard most of the year.  He said that there are some months where there is very little for them to do (like now) and that during these times they spent their days completely drunk on locally made rice whiskey.  He said they start drinking in the morning, nap in the middle of the day, and then drink more in the evening.  Walking around Sapa you saw almost no men at all.  They were all inside somewhere, sleeping or drinking.  We saw a fight between two men.  It was pushing mostly and seemed to be over the placement of a small rock on one of their properties.  The men here wear only western cloths and the women only traditional dress.  They were quite poor and their houses were very simple and totally un-insulated (it gets very cold here). 

Luang Prabang, Laos;

I flew from Hanoi to Luang Prabang the day after Christmas.  Flights in Southeast Asia are cheap ($100-$200 range). Laos is very laid back.  It’s much quieter than the other places I’ve visited.  You hardly hear any horns whereas in other countries horns seem to be the primary form of communication.  The street vendors stand quietly as you walk by.  The voices in the markets are a bit hushed.  Tuk tuk drivers rarely call to you.  Buddhist monks are common in Southeast Asia, but, here, boys and men in saffron robes are everywhere.  Laos seems to have a lot of the good qualities of Southeast Asia and less of the dark underbelly you find in other countries. 

I took a Lao cooking class.  After days of hiking and sightseeing and markets, it was a really nice change of pace.  The others in the class were all fun.  They were all teachers except for one Lebanese man (Richard) who did video editing for Aljazeera.  He said his job was interesting but very stressful.   I learned quite a bit in the class.  Lao cooking is 95% prep work and 5% cooking. 

I went hiking at some waterfalls outside of town.  They were so pretty that they almost looked fake.  Emerald blue water flowing down a series of perfect waterfalls.  That night, I ate dinner at the night-market with a Malaysian traveler (Ben) I’d met hiking.  The food area at the market was a long alley with food stands on both sides and a small corridor through which people walked and looked at what was being offered.  A plate of food was 10,000 kip (about $1.25).  A bottle big of Beerlao was the same.  Each food stand had a clear incandescent light above it so that everything was either brightly lit or in complete darkness.  The thinnest crescent of moon burned orange above the tuk tuk drivers hunting for fares at the dark edge of the alley.  The electricity briefly cut out touching off a loud cheer from the crowd.  The whole scene had a rich-beautiful -creepy feeling to it.  I was also extremely tired.  Traveling like this can be exhausting. 

Pak Beng, Laos;

This is the only town on the Mekong River between Luang Pragang and the Thai border.  It’s here for only one reason and that is to serve as an overnight spot for people traveling the river.  I ate dinner and breakfast at the same restaurant.  The owner was nice and her little daughter would sit with me while I ate.  She spoke to me constantly.  I had absolutely no clue what she was saying but she seemed very pleased with the conversation. 

I hope you enjoyed this post.  I’ve got a few more hours left on this boat and then I’ll be in Huay Xai.  I hope everybody is enjoying their holiday season.  Thanks for reading.