Back into the fray

The new house



















View from the balcony

















Heisenberg the cat


















Wapi's leaving party















Working in Laos 'any questions ?'
This is a bag of coffee made by Laos biggest
coffee exporter.


Back into the fray
Long time between blogs, my blog entries will be at less regular intervals than have been in the past. This is mainly due to the amount of work I am doing. Once again I am ill prepared for a plan going exactly to plan. I was looking forward to my return to Laos to commit full time to the myriad of interesting projects I was due to get involved in. I reckoned it would be the best thing for me to do get stuck into some serious work and get the trials and tribulations of the last few years behind me. Well since my arrival it has surpassed my expectations. LIRE is going through a tremendous dynamic change and the bioenergy team is now snowed under with a myriad of diverse ventures, so much so we are really struggling finding enough people to do the work both fulang and Laotian. So I tend to be working long hours and bits of the weekend as well. I need to be selective in the amount of information I divulge in this blog as some of the projects are at ‘delicate’ stages in negotiations and I don’t want to commit a ‘wikileaks’ and others are still ‘blue sky’ and at the ‘gestation’ phase. Of the projects I am at liberty to divulge is the biodiesel manufacture which is now ramping up to the more practical end and a solar coffee drying project down in Paxon, myself Tom and Vonvouilay a Laotian engineer will be going on a one week field trip in early February.
The news this week is I have found a house. It is a real nice two story Laos style house but has a fully functioning European kitchen. The living quarters are upstairs which is normal as it is cooler during the hot months, both bedrooms are air conditioned. There is also a balcony which has a beautiful view of paddy fields (or mosquito farm as it has been christened). I have only taken a couple of pix on the day I did the pre check and signed the contract. I am sure there will be more in the blog in the future. The standard practice here if you are a fulong is to have a six month contract, which you pay in full, and then renew and pay on a month to month basis. This wasn’t the problem cash flow wise however getting my hands on the cash proved to be more problematical than it should be having issues with my Master debit card at all the Laos banks. It works fine in the ATM’s but the tellers will not accept it. I called my bank and every thing was fine their end. So the only thing I could do was to get it all out from an ATM, take it to a bank and convert to US dollars and then pay the landlord, a process which took three days in all. Over $2000 with 8000 kip to the dollar and the highest value note being 50,000 kip. Nearly 400 notes in all I actually emptied one ATM.
Anyway moved in on Tuesday, thanks to Edward picking my stuff up from the hotel and then shipping me out to the house complete with the box I sent from Australia. The Landlord was waiting for me (or rather the balance of the rent) also my house keeper or Mare Ban (literally Mother House) and my cat. I said I didn’t need a Mare Ban but I don’t think I had a choice , her husband is my gardener which I do need to cut the grass. The cat seemed to come with the house and was already sitting on couch with that ‘what’s for dinner?’ expression on its face.
Never had a cat before and it has foolishly accepted to eat the cheapest dried cat food on the market ‘ Mee-ow’ believe it or not. The up side is it will handle all the mice and rats (I live very close to Paddy fields remember). The next thing to do was to find a name for cat. After dallying with ‘Schrödinger’ (a bit obviously really). And ‘Mrs Slocombe’ (Tribute to John Vegas’s cat in ‘Ideal’). I have settled with ‘Heisenberg’ not after German physicist, father of Quantum Mechanics, as you may think, but after the alias of Walter White in the TV show ‘Breaking Bad’ which I am working my way through again. Admittedly he got his a.k.a. from the German physicist and father of Quantum mechanics, but it seemed only fitting that I stick with the German theoretical physicist and cat naming convention.
I had a ride out with Tom and Somjan to the RTC to see master Kampu and his wife, this was an informal field trip and it would be good to catch up again. Last year you may or may not remember I blogged about the developments that had occurred since my last trip including a new road and power. We wanted to get some data on the cost of the power installation and also some idea of how much fuel the diesel generator used to consume when it was used for power. It was a fairly slow day at the hospital so we sat and chatted with MK and his son in what I presumed was his new ‘entertainment’ area complete with brown sofa (ref: “he died with a falafel in is hand”). MK and his son got stuck into the rice whiskey which MK insisted made you stronger and is good for Erectile Dysfunction. He was also proud to show us his latest incarnation of the cure for AIDS which was presented in an old sports drink bottle. The down side to this medicine, if you don’t have AIDS it will kill you. With MK sometimes it is hard to determine the wheat from the chaff but the whiskey that is consumed the ration of wheat to chaff grows every wider. About an hour in a people carrier turned up containing an entire family (3 or 4 generations) seeking medical advice. MK asked if he could be excused and ‘duty called’ he lit a cigarette and ushered the entire clan into consulting room. What an inspirational figure he cut as a medical professional, an old man in shorts, half cut on nasty whiskey, smoking a cigarette; ‘House’ eat your heart out.

catch you on the flip side