To Napa Kuang Resort

We arrived in Vientiane at the Hongkham Hotel. There we were to meet up with most of our fellow trainers: Phoumy, Reba & Cam, Billy & Julie, whom we had not met before, and Bill and Suzie, whom we had met a month earlier in Boston. We had known them as voices on the phone, and it will good to put faces with names. They all had arrived the day before, after crossing the Friendship Bridge, and had spent the night at the Hongkham. We will be returning to this hotel in two weeks, after we finish the training at the Lao-Vientiane Hospital and come back to the city, where Disty will teach at the University.

Our fellow trainers had gone out for a walk and had not yet returned, so Chip and I wait in the lobby, while Disty went off to change money. I realize I should take this opportunity to do something productive, so I ask at the desk in my best Lao (not good): Excuse me, but where is the bathroom? If the lobby bathroom is any indication, this new hotel will be quite comfortable. One curious feature, for fellow bathroom aficionados, the wall between the men's and women's room was a half wall and stopped about seven feet up.

The hotel is located a few doors down from the hotel where we stayed three years ago when Andy, Chip, Disty, and I were here last. It is curiously not hard seeing these places we shared with Andy. They bring up very warm feelings of being all together. In my previous post, I forgot to mention the toll booth we had passed on the way to Vientiane which seemed curiously funny and random on the dirt highway last time we were here and curiously like home to me this time. The places here in the city where we were all together are familiar; when we get to the countryside, it will be new and different, with no memories of being with Andy, which in some ways may be harder.

After a few more minutes, our group arrives back, and we meet them all, load the two vans and one pickup truck with the six Rubbermaid tubs we brought filled with books and t-shirts and medical supplies and the fourteen tubs brought by the West Coast contingent, minus one that was missing at the airport and two that were still in route, filled with more books and supplies, everything we needed for three weeks of training.

Bill and Suzie joined us in our van with Keo and Sone, as we headed toward the Napa Kuang Resort, whatever that meant. The road was familiar. It was the same road we had driven south from Luang Prabang to Vientiane three years ago, but now we were heading north, into the province of Vientiane and to Bon Thalot.
Along the way, we stopped at a roadside market, where we bought fried banana chips, which we ate on the ride.

We spent the ride getting to now one another, better. Swapping stories about our most amazing experience traveling. I chose to tell the story about being in Thailand in Tamafiwan in the Lao-speaking part in the north. We had come to visit Andy's friends, Ouie and Anat. We were staying at Ouie's house. One late afternoon, we went to visit, Luong Bob, Andy's 70ish, ex-pat friend and former employer at the organic farm there. He was too ill to come outside and so he spoke with us from the second floor of his house, wooden shutters open, he sat at the window, as if he were in a stage production of Romeo and Juliet. We all sat on the ground under his window as the sun was setting and then said goodbye. Andy had already arranged for his friends to show us a sustainable house they had built on the grounds of a Wat nearby. As we left Luong Bob's, each of us hopped on the back of a motorcycle. Mine was driven by a man named Tao I had never met before. We drove on a rutted dirt road and into the woods along a rooted path. We came to a wooden bridge as the evening light was darting through the forest. The light was a golden brown as we crossed the bridge and suddenly came into a clearing of perfection: immaculate buildings at the edge of a circular road that bordered a flowering pond. Coming towards us all in white walked a solitary Buddhist nun, bathed in the muddy light. She radiated purity.

About an hour later, we came to a fork in the road. Sone pointed to the right and said the hospital was that way and that we would be going left towards the Napa Kuang Resort. We made the left and drove a few kms into the marketplace of Bon Thalot—past the bus station, where you can get a bus back to Vientiane every hour each day—into the impossibly crowded streets of motorcycles, pedestrians, trucks, dogs, cows, chickens, cats. There they are building a newer, more spacious market to alleviate traffic congestion. I think that it may be good for them, but I am still not sure that, for the people of Laos, all "progress" is good. They are a poor country, by many standards, but it is a rich, beautiful, and happy country to the eye and ear. A few moments later, we drive through the gates to the Napa Kuang Resort and into a large parking area surrounded on three sides by outbuildings.