A long way on a step-through

How to hide a large market
















The Entrance to Vientianes Wattay Airport at rush hour
















Generic market shot #1
















Generic market shot #2 'who's for curry ?'
















Generic market shot #3 dried fish















Amongst the laburnums at the RTC



















Insert humorous double entendre




















Just plain nasty



















Generic market shot # 4

















Generic market shot # 5 'who ordered the fish with flies?'

A long way on a step through

Now I’ve found my bearings a little better in Vientiane I am starting to shop smarter, there is a small supermarket, café, bike hire place which is right in the centre of Vientiane which is distinctly French, the coffee and the baguettes are excellent, I used to do most of my shopping there as it is clean, air conditioned, well organised and a most of the products are recognisable, they even have Belgium beer, Jameson’s Whiskey and Tim Tams amongst other goodies, but they do charge fulang prices ( prices are comparable with what you would pay in Europe) which is OK for a short stay but if I’m going to live here it is an outrageous thing to do, the Laos don’t shop there. Vene told me that there is a huge under cover market called “Talad Thong Khan Kham” which is not far from the hotel and is hidden from the main road by soothing that looks like a run down market, so I thought I’d give it a whirl. It’s really worth finding these places they are a kaleidoscope of sights, sounds and smells. I also took on the opportunity to try and get to grips with this completely mad money system they have here.

More on money and numbers;

This not the first time I’ve bleated on about the Laotian kip but I have been in Laos for a total of about 2 months now and it is still giving me grief. Just a quick re cap, there are 5000 kip to the Australian dollar at the moment, this makes conversion a lot easier than when I was last here when it was 8000 kip to the Dollar. 50,000 kip is $10, 1,000,000 kip is $200, diving things by 8 in your head whilst working out all the zeros is a headache. Being such small denominations it is not long before you are buying even small items that you are getting into the hundreds of thousands. Unlike English, Laos and Thai have different names for one thousand, ten thousand, hundred thousand and a million, tends to repeat after that i.e. the word for a billion will be a thousand million. So not only do you have to know the basic integers, but also the multiples of 10 all the way to a million (not a lot costs over $200 in Laos). Otherwise you fall into the most basic of ‘trying to speak another language’ which being able to ask the question, no problem, ‘How much’ is ‘todd dy’, and then not understanding the answer. In the tourist area’s there is usually a large calculator on hand to punch the digits in, not here.

Then there are these damn notes. All the same size and the 1000 kip, 2000 kip & 10,000 kip are all blue. In addition one side of the note has the Laotian numbering system ( it is a decimal system so at least that helps ) but the zero was a later edition so zero’s are universal but the first number is Laos, the 1 looks like 9 and the 2 looks like a 6. Being Laos it is very important to have the picture of revolutionary leader ( still haven’t got his name yet) on everything so you have three notes which are the same size the same colour with the same picture , a lot of zero’s and confusing numbering system. To add to confusion the 5,000 kip, 20,000 kip and 50,000 kip are all brown, same size and same picture.

Back to the market; its times like this I really miss having a house, there such a huge variety of fish, fruit, vegetables and spices that I would really like to jump in at the deep and start creating bizarre dishes. Neil Perry would be wetting himself, ‘all the flavours, and fusions, and local produce - I could charge somebody a hundred bucks for that’. What your mssrs. Perry, Ramsey et al. would not show was the amount of flies that are swarming round the meat and fish stalls, more than a Aussie BBQ. I took some snaps, I’m sorry their a bit blurred but I didn’t want to use my flash as some people get a bit funny about that sort of thing, not in the belief that it captures your soul but more in the belief ‘he’s taking pictures, there must be a buck in it for me’.

On Sunday, Myself Chris & Somjan road up to the RTC, the hospital run by Master Kampu up close to Kilometre 48. Somjan used to work for SED-LAOS but has since left but has remained a good friend and was happy to come along as translator if we covered his expenses. My aim was to fit the new air inlet and to get tier diesel generator running on biogas. Our mode of transport this time would be three step-through motorcycles that we own/hired between us. It is not long trek just over out to Kilometre 48, which is 48 Kilometres from Vientiane city centre (clue is in the name) and then a hanger left onto a very rough dirt track for about 10 Kms. Through the city on Sunday morning then out on Road 13 North at about the same speed we reckoned on about 1 ½ hours each way which is not a big stretch but the seat on a step-through is not really meant for those sorts of distances so by the time you get off you feel like you’ve been interviewed by Molly Meldrum. The last time we were here was the wet season and the rough road was mainly deep puddles although the deep ochre soil seems to have very low percolation and didn’t seem to get any worse. This time it is the dry season and the road is mainly sand, deep in places. Sand and motorbikes are not a good mixture but the step-throughs are only a tad over 50 Kgs so they weren’t difficult to save if you felt it going over. Anything larger that was not built for the task would have been a hand full, (Charlie, Claudio has fallen off again).

On arriving at the RTC we were met by Master Kampu and his wife, MK was in surgery, which is conducted Laos style, whole families come by truck load, boat load or motorbike load and they all sit in front of MK as they are examined one by one and MK preaches the health gospel to all assembled. Although my Laos is still at the basic level the word ‘Boom Boom’ was mentioned a number of times which is the Asian colloquialism for coitious. So this would account for the Laos distinct lack of embarrassment and uninhibited talk. Whilst the surgery continued we went down to the diesel shed which was having a refit (new thatch) and after a bit of dicking around with the hose and the inlet and getting water out of the biogas pipe, I tried to fire the thing up. Unfortunately it did not work at all; the engine just did not like the gas. I tried different combinations of mixtures and throttle positions and then put the gas directly into the air intake, still nothing. Hugely disappointing and a huge headache to figure out what to do next. There should be no problem but I think it is a combination of the poor state of repair of the diesel (probably only about 14:1 compression) and the poor quality of the gas, further investigation needed. We stopped for lunch and MK broke out the herbal local whiskey which he dug into with vigour. It was a terrific spread as it always is, some incredibly hot beef salads and clear soup and a mushroom dish which was just very difficult to describe. Kampu tends to starting talking after a couple of drinks and through Somjan he was making some remarkable claims about the herbal medicines that he was creating. I won’t mention anymore here as we discussed a number of different ways that his claims could or should be verified and having it in the public domain could be counterproductive. We met some of his patients who seemed quite happy to be paraded in front of us these included a women who had the illness of ‘talking too much’ I could not possibly comment. Also a young man who had a terrible cancerous growth on his neck (see picture) which MK was treating with his herbal medicine. It is impossible to find the words to cover the different emotions you have when you see such a sad case as this, the positive is that he is receiving treatment but I could not possibly comment on weather his treatment he is receiving at the hands of MK is worse better or indifferent than the treatment he would receive in the west (or even the large Hospital in Udon Thani, Thailand, which appears to be the first destination for serious illnesses in Vientiane). However I would be very interested in the outcome. As the afternoon wore on, I went and secured the new air inlet on their aging diesel whilst discussions were held on the possibility of building a better road to the hospital, somewhere in the region of $US12K to $US20K and the possibility of bringing power as well. The long ride back, needed a bum break by the time we got back into VT, we stopped at a small café, restaurant on the banks of the Mekong not far from Chris’s house and watched another beautiful sunset. I didn’t take many photos on my trip, the majority of the camera memory was taken up by a 1:30 min video of me attempting to get the diesel running on biogas for reference. I plan to return to the RTC when Sunny arrives which will be early March, hopefully I can find out why it won’t work and if possible fix it, or at least have the answers.