Poverty Porn

"Can we get WiFi there?" asks E@L, worried that his Words With Friends games might expire. He has already put up a holiday block on both his work email and his Gameknot chess matches. Priorities.

"They don't even have electricity," replies D4 in his mild Slavov Zizec accent. He even clutches at his nostrils quite a lot.  E@L is not sure if he is joking. "I'm joking!" guffaws D4. How can you tell D4 is joking?  Moving mouth. 

~~~~~~~~~

The rooms in the "restored" French colonial guesthouse are large, there is enough space for the two king size beds for the platonic share with Odette. There are electricity outlets, one for E@L's CPAP, several for charging all his devices (modern life is a series of battery depletion crises). There IS WiFi, for 10hrs a day. There is aircon, there are bedside lamps, there are mosquito nets - E@L doesn't need his though, as mentioned previously Asian mosquitoes find him tasteless (not Robinson Crusoe there) - there is hot water.

There is, should be, will be, hot water.  A dribble, a gurgle, a cough then a spurt and then all of a sudden the water is scalding.  Cold on a bit, it's freezing.  Cold down a bit, it's freezing for a few seconds, then scalding.  What is going on here?  To get the temperature right for the shower is like playng a pinball machine, you need Tommy the wizard.  It's a shifting playing ground, it's a struggle. E@L gives up and showers lukewarmly.  

Your turn Odette, good luck.

~~~~~~~~~

Breakfast is nothing much and you know how E@L appreciates his Aussie version of a continental petit dejeuner. Vegemite on toast, muesli wth fruit and yoghurt, a LARGE cup of coffee.  Nah, not likely.

A few skimpy pieces of fruit, the best of the bananas gone to the gibbon under E@L's window, black liquid in a thermos dispenser mislabelled as coffee, stale baguettes sliced and toasted on a small grill. Only one type of jam.  No ao khun, E@L does not want eggs.

~~~~~~~~~

This part of Laos, Si Phan Don, is very dry, not monsoon time. VERY dry: dust: puff powder mist floats up fine fine particles with each step, like underfoot explosions, ha ha. We walk almost the circumference of the island over the two days, from the waterfall on this side (sunset, awesome, 20,000kip for the pathway) to the waterfall, more a cascade, on the other side midday on day two.  We could have hired bicycles (he'd say pushbikes but no-one would have a clue what E@L was talking about) and it's not that they were too expensive at 10,000 kip per day- $1.50 - but D4's lanky knees would bash against the handlebars.

So we walked along the paths slowly, heat and dust, chatting and joking, watching the Laos islanders go about their daily business.  This seemed to be mostly lounging and talking. And looking at us as we ambled along.  They had stopped talking.  A nod and E@L's poorly pronounced sabai dee was met most often with a blank stare.  Even as we headed straight at people walking towards us, there was the blank look or there was averted eyes, as if we weren't really there.  E@L had a hint that even though we weren't interfering but just watching them, they might have resented out presence.  That blank expression was not one of indifference but slight annoyance, as one might dismiss without looking at a chicken that walked on your path. You and the chicken have differnet agends, you live in different, occasionally intersecting worlds.  We are superfluous.

A middle-aged man squatted in the shade of a copse of straggly trees and banged something made of wood with a something made of rusted steel into a chunk of bleached wood for some purpose, next to a circle of smoking ashes and a parked motorcycle. He looked up at us for a second at E@L's greeting, then turned his deeply creased face back to his mysterious task. 

A pregnant woman perched on stool, one leg under her bum the other swinging, in a structure something like a shop. Goddam it, it was a shop.  Small toys, minor doing-things instruments and cheap tools hung by the entrance. Food, biscuits, cigarettes. There was a refrigerator with drinks.  We asked her for two bottles of chilled water. She did not move, perhaps did not understand. Izzy shrugged, opened the door anyway and took them out, held them up and asked how much.  The pregnant woman slowly stood and brought over a LCD solar-powered calculator with a large screen. 10,000 kip, same as a day of bicycling.  Izzy had no kip and the lady would not accept her $5 note.  E@L had amongst the six currencies in his wallet, enough smokey-tintedkip to cover the drinks.

Everywhere bustling around us, up and down the path kids of two/three, five/seven ran amok (not the delicious local fish dish), played all sorts of games incomprehensible to adults and generally had fun independant of the control of whomever were their parents.  The kids would generally respond to our waves, sometimes enthusiastically sometimes less so, and our "sabai dee" greeting would often elicit a muted reply.  But they kept running past us intent on their own lives.

"Well at least the next generation will be more friendly," says E@L

However, there was one girl, perhaps five or six.  She stopped as we walked past, put her clenched fingers to her mouth and pulled them away in familiar gesture, to the side and down.  "Kung pao," she said. "Kung pao."  Chinese red packets. Money. 

~~~~~~~~~

Waterfalls.  Done, tick.  Local inhabitants, however. Not yet completely done, unticked.

~~~~~~~~~ 

The round-the-island-tour boat was set to go at four. We tramped back along the road to our gibbon friendly guesthouse with only 15mins to have a rinse down, a partial de-dusting.  D4 decided to crash; bad knee even without the bicycle handlebars, and a sore hip.  E@L medicated him with some cox-II inhibitor NSAIDs.  Deadly, sure, but fuck they work well. 

Our boat was slightly more river-worthy than the floating village long-tail, it even had cushions on the planks and removable back-boards for support.  Luxury. The roof a bit dodgy, and a splash too much water in the gunwales, bilge, cargo-hold, whatever - under the boards - but it didn't break down. The tour was timed to coincide with sunset over the river. We pulled up-stream towards the beach where we had boarded the day before.  We passed it by though, and came down on the other side of another island, again with the stream.  Negotiated some whirlpools, watched the bubbling scum of waste outleyts and thanked whatever gods may be that we didn't have to swim in it.  Half submerged trees and semi-erect spears of dead branches reared out to impale our boat. 

The captain, took us towards the embankments on the far side of this branch of the river.  Here the wooden shacks did not stand with half their stilts in the river.  That was what we had seen earlier, in the part of the Mekong we were staying.  Instead many of the houses here were built with their foundations in solid ground, still on stilts, many leaning askew, not so solidly implanted. Other houses had their river-side walls halfway down the embankment, where their not-necessarily sea-worthy canoes were dry docked.

Dry boards for walls, curved and peeling off, nailed back, that or thatched rattan, and thatched or corrugated tin roofs.  The embankments were quite steep, and many families had planted vegetables gardens - E@L saw rows of staked tomato vines.  The more river-worthy boats were beached at small landings.

~~~~~~~~

But now, here at the edge of the water, was the point of our visit. Here the timing of the cruise was perfectly coordinated. Now we were to get what was most crucial for our holiday, what we had come for, what we had paid for.

The families were bathing.  They were washing themselves, doing their ablutions in the muddy Mekong. Water niether cold nor hot, always the same. Slightly chilly, no fiddling with taps required.

Splashing all over their bodies the polluted flow.  The froth of scum we had chugged through, from all the waste outlets upstream, their waste outlets going downstream. Bacteria (e-Coli in particular du'h), viruses, parsites. Little children are naked, mother in a sarong, rinsing them over, wiping the dust away with one hand while the other held her child still enough. A women rinsing her hair, twisting it at her shoulder sees us and stops.  Old men with their lower bodies covered by their short sarongs are throwing water up into their groins, then rubbing through the wet cloth.  Young men, old women, children, teenagers, the girls shyly covering up when they hear us approach, the women turning away, the men staring hard.  No-one returns our first timid waves.  No-one sabai dee's back to our timorous calls.

The show kept going, more people up ahead at the bottom of their embankements, more traditionally shy people publicly exposed for fun and profit. On show like circus freaks.  Like a zoo.

E@L turned away.  He didn't look again.  That was enough. He didn't want to see any more, didn't want to invade any more, didn't want to oppress any more, didn't want to exploit anymore.

~~~~~~~~~~

It wasn't so long since these people had to run from the French colonialists who needed free labour.  To hide from the bombings, the napalm, the agent orange of the Americans who needed to send a message to China.  Except for when they couldn't run at all, when they had to stand still or die, when their uncontrollable children, their farming families and loved partners were fenced in by thousands of live, plastic (purposely unfindable), permantly present, plane-scattered land-mines. When they were blown apart, dismemebered, legs lost. When their cattle, often their only resource,  were blown apart.  

So what that these people are bathing in the river? It wasn't so long either, a mere few centuries, that Europeans were living essentially the same way, even worse.  Leave them alone for pity's sake. It cultural pornography. We are rich, they are what we would call poor.  Stop these poverty porn cruises. Make some money here and there with some other tourist scam, but not this way, not boating past your families in their shower, in their bathroom.

E@L shudders.

~~~~~~~~~~

D4 was in the restaurant when we returned. His iPad was on the table, fully charged, and he was chatting with a Dutch fellow tousist.

The tourist had a martini glass in front of him. He smiled and pointed at it.  Consciously ironic, he said: "I asked for a dry martini, look at it. It's almost opaque, almost entirely vermouth.  Sweet as anything I have ever tasted."

D4 countered with: "What's the point of paying $40 a night if the place can't even make a decent dry martini?"

E@L was not in the mood to be amused.  He has no hard-on for this poverty porn.

E@L