Napakuang Resort

Napakuang is well-known in the Vientiane Province, Napakuang means Deer Field, in the past this field was full out of deer, they had been living here for a long time. It belonged to rice field after people had settled village after moving from the north of Laos during the second war. It still keeps only smell of deer in the present time. So it makes visitors being closer forest and mountain easily.

We have well prepared our experienced team to welcome you whether you are from abroad or not. Let’s your weekend relax is a great holiday.!
—From the Napakuang website (http://www.napakuang.com)

The place we stayed for two weeks, while the team did its training at the hospital is called Napakuang or Napa Kuang Resort. In Lao, there are no spaces between written words, and though the two separate words Napa Kuang mean "Deer Field," as we enter the gates of the resort, I see the sign "Napakuang." To the right, just past the gate, there is a statue of three deer. The deer no longer roam the rice fields around the property. Napakuang is located at the edge of Ban Thinkeo, at the west end of the dirt road that winds through Ban Thalot.

When we first drove in, it was hard to get a sense of the place. On the left, or south side, of  the large parking area in the center of the property is a two-story building with what looked like hotel rooms. On the southwest side of the parking lot, there is a small hut with three cement walls and a thatched roof. Ten meters to the south of this is another larger similar building. On the north, there are beautiful plantings, a fish pond, a building, and an open porch.

We all checked in and received our rooms. Disty and I had what they had called a "Deluxe" room. And as we walked into what would be our home for the next two weeks, it was certainly comfortable, with a big double bed on the left, a combination wooden valet and dresser on the right. The room featured air conditioning, a tv, and a more-or-less western-style bathroom. Since we brought very little, it didn't take very long to unpack and explore.

I wanted to see the badminton courts and the fishing house that is advertised on their website, which I thought would be my entertainment in what I thought would be leisure time. I headed out with my computer in hand, in case I could find some internet. There were signs everywhere that there was free Wifi at the restaurant, so I headed in the direction I thought would be the restaurant, across the parking area, towards the north and the porch. There was a pervasive smell in the air of burning wood and plumeria.

The fishing house was not recognizable and was being used as a bath house by the locals who seemed to live on the east side of the house along a dirt road. Below the porch where I stood, between me and the fishing house, down 10 rickety stairs, was the badminton court. The badminton court looked abandoned, unpainted, no net, but it did have a judge's chair and a pair of light stands, one at each side of the net, each holding a 4 x 4 piece of plywood angled toward the court and dotted with a combination of incandescent bulbs, fluorescent lights of various sizes, and strings of wires. It looked forlorn and abandoned. I was disappointed, because I hoped I would be able to play and replace my usual diet of tennis with some similar activity. To the left of the badminton court, an empty rectangular dirt pit, the length of the badminton court and perhaps 3 meters wide, lay.

The porch I was standing on was level to the parking lot and rooms. To the west of the "athletic center," there was a small lake with a bridge to an island with a cluster of new cottages. The restaurant part of the resort overlooked the lake, but it was roped off and people were busy putting varnish on the floor. It smelled awful.

There were a few tables in a terraced sitting area below the restaurant to the east and overlooking the lake and courts. I sat at one of the six picnic tables made from tree trunks, opened my computer, and was magically connected to the world and my New York Times home page, all the news that's fit to print.

We met that afternoon as a team in one of the two conference rooms at the resort, a beautiful room in a building just to the east of the path to the badminton courts, set up with three long rows of tables, with seating for about 100 people in a hotel elegance that was befitting heads of state. Here the 12 of us met and talked about the week ahead and prepared for the next day's events, cotraining training and our opening party.

By evening, the floors of the restaurant were dry, the smell was gone, and we ate up on the porch of the restaurant at a table in the northwest corner overlooking the lake. Everyone in our group was still in a combination of time zones, and we retired early to our rooms. Many of us filtered out to this spot during various times of the night and morning, over the next few days, sleepless from time change and feeling the need to prepare or catch up with the incessant work of the training. This area became our unofficial headquarters.

The first morning, I woke early in the dark, around 3, found my way to the porch and listened to the plaintive cries of the kittens and the chickens and the cows on the hills around. After sunrise, at about 6:30, we were served a breakfast of eggs, bacon, ham, french bread and butter and jam, and lettuce and tomato. And the young women who were our servers prepared cafe Lao at a small table set up by the railing overlooking the lake. The morning air was foggy and cool, maybe 55 degrees F, as it would be every morning throughout our stay. Later in the day, it would warm to 80 or so, but the morning air was cool enough so that I wore a sweater.

The first day proved to be the rule of our training: be prepared to change. This was partly due to what I would term "facts on the ground." It created a need to be constantly ready to do something new or redo something already done. This day, Sunday, we were preparing for cotrainer training, which did not happen, and the opening banquet, which did.

Before we needed to get ready for the banquet, we explored a bit outside the gates, down the dirt road about 5 minutes walk, past the puppies and chickens and turkeys and lovely neighbors, into the market, where we found almost everything we would need, for sale. I bought shampoo and shaving cream in a tube, and we wandered through the marketplace looking for exotica and reminders of home.

Guests arrived at about 6 and filtered into the conference room where everyone from each team, Lao and HLI was introduced. A few speeches were made, and we moved to the dinner part of the evening, back out at the restaurant, perhaps 60 of us at long tables. A Lao band hired by HLI started playing and we all began dancing, notably the servers joined us and everyone in the place was in a large circle dancing the lamvong, men on the inside women on the outside. We were taught a few moves by the Lao women, doctors and servers, but every once in a while each of the non-Lao among us would throw in a little twist or watusi, which would set everyone into fits of laughter. One song had us holding our ear or raising our arm or lifting our leg as instructed by the singer as we moved counterclockwise, three steps forward and two steps back. This definitely broke the ice for our group, and we all danced until the wee hours of the evening. By 9:30, we were all in bed and ready to meet up again at some untold hour of the morning to fight off sleeplessness and prepare for the first day of our training.

***

During a long a busy week for us, the badminton courts were painted and the lights repaired. It turned out that the dirt rectangle next to the badminton courts was a bacci court. On the weekend, Chip and I found badminton racquets and birdies ("pik gai") in the market. Badminton was the connection to the community and Napakuang became like home to me. The servers became friends, the neighbors became our badminton partners, and I learned to count, exhort, and play in Lao. I also learned to appreciate Lao hospitality and kindness towards us and each other. Each evening the courts would be full of people of all ages, some playing some just hitting, some just standing around, all on one court.

As the two weeks went by, the resort was home to many government agencies and NGOs—the Red Cross, Concern, The Ministry of Transportation, Ministry of Foreign Affairs—an ever-changing who's who of Lao development a few hours from the city. The place would alternately be hopping and desolate, but the feeling of the place remained constant. It was a first class place to stay, with a first-class athletic facility, although the fishing house was never used for anything but a community bath house, as far as I could tell.