Trip Report, Xieng Lom & Hong Sa, 8-12 February 2009

BACK TO THE BEGINNINGS

For background, Hong Sa, LS-62, was my first "home" in Laos, September 1966-January 1967, when I transferred up to Nam Bac, LS-203, north of Luang Prabang.  When Nam Bac got really hot the summer of 1967, I was transferred over to Xieng Lom, aka Xieng Hon, LS-69A, through the end of the year.

My wife, Sunee, and I drove up to Nan, the provincial capital of this northern Thai province. We spent about 9 hours on the road and stayed the night at the same hotel where I used to stay in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Two large Hmong and Yao/Iu Mien refugee camps were nearby.  A Thai friend, Mr Piak, drove down from his home in Chiang Mai to meet us and provide chauffer services with his 4-WD, 4-door modified Isuzu pickup for the trip to Laos.  I've known him since 1966 when he was working at the airfield at Ban Houei Sai, L-25; he’s a great guy.

Next morning we took off to Huey Khon, the Thai side of the border.  The Thai and Lao had just agreed to make this an international crossing point in December so we were actually some of the first numbers to pass through this border crossing. One note, no Visa On Arrival at Lao Immigration, you must have a visa issued by a Lao Embassy/Consulate.

We arrived at Muang Nguen, which I had never visited before, although I had made rice

drops there 40 plus years back.  It’s a pretty large town these days, and it is the crossroads for the area, so it will be growing larger.  The road to the west goes to Xieng Lom, and to the east, it takes you to Hong Sa, with connections to Luang Prabang and Sayaboury.  To the north and the Mekong River, there is a connection to Pak Beng and the paved road on up to the Chinese border.

We drove about two hours to the west to Xieng Lom on a good, gravel road that looks like it's been newly rebuilt. We arrived at Xieng Lom and I wondered just where I was! Back in 1967, there were only two roads/streets in the main village area and one 50 cc motorcycle. It was mine, and was the only motor vehicle.  Now?  The town is in a grid pattern, with half a dozen streets each way, quite a few schools, ranging from kindergarten to upper secondary (high school), other government buildings, a large market area, and lots of vehicles, all new since my last visit. Including, of all things, an reverse osmosis bottled water plant, don't have to haul up from the creek anymore.

We went looking for the school I had assisted in rebuilding back in 1967. It's located on the southern edge of the main valley, and was built on the site of the old WW II Japanese airstrip.  We found it, still there, looking a bit worn, but still functioning.  Note the iron bar reinforcement installed back then when we were rehabbing the school.

We interrupted a meeting of the head of the school and a few of the teachers. We introduced ourselves, explained the TLCB assistance program, and asked if they had any needs.  The deputy principal immediately pointed up behind his head at the holes in the tin roofing and said all seven rooms of the school were in the same condition. Upon inspection, we saw he was right.  He requested 200 roofing sheets for replacement, but given the cost of almost $900, I said we would take it under consideration for funding at a later date.  We asked if there was anything else needing repair, and during a walk around the school, he pointed out the three-door outhouse and a small bamboo and grass-roofed structure that housed three of the teaching staff.

He requested 30 sheets of roofing tin for an addition to the outhouse, which serves 217 students and 13 teachers.  The villagers would provide the cement, water seal toilet, wood posts, etc. to do the addition. For the bamboo teachers’ house he requested 70 sheets of roofing tin, with the villagers providing the balance of the materials.

Both of these requests came within the $500 budget I had from the TLCB Assistance Committee, so I handed over baht 15,000 to the school principal. We then emphasized that any further assistance would be dependent on their performance with these two small projects.  (As an aside, I got an email on 16 March from a friend in Vientiane who phoned the school. Some materials were already on site and others were ordered for delivery, so it looks like progress.  This makes me feel better, as I am always a bit nervous when dealing with a new group and project.)

With school business finished, we did some wandering around the town. You can't call

it a "village" any more because of its growth.  We looked for the house I used to stay in, but were told that it is now in the local Army compound, so we skipped that one. We also looked for the old SKY compound which also had a STOL airstrip, LS-274, but it too has changed and is now the local police compound, so gave that one a miss, too.

We checked out the guest house situation. There are four in town, and we easily found two, and stayed in a pretty good one.  We visited one village just to the north, Ban

Xang, and were looking for one old guy I had helped out back then, a below-the-knee amputee.  I had helped him get a new artificial leg.  He had lost it fishing with a 60 mm mortar round tied to a bamboo pole. He had dropped it after arming it, and not in the water as he had intended.  I had also given him a note sealed in plastic, a "to whom it may concern" notes asking pilots, at that time Air America and CASI, to help the guy out with transport down to Vientiane for a new leg. The guy was a rice farmer and his problem was that the foot hinge rusted out after a while in the paddy water, and the foot fell off, and his leg just sunk into the mud, making it difficult to walk behind the water buffalo. I found his house and some of his cousins, but the man had died a few years back. I had wondered for some years how he made out with that note, and whether he had showed it to the pilot of an MI-8 helicopter, for example.

We had dinner at a restaurant at the large morning market, and had OK eats.  We went back there for breakfast the next morning, but it was difficult to find because of heavy ground fog, real heavy, and we drove around a bunch of the streets trying to find the place.

We left Xieng Lom and headed east back towards Muang Nguen. Just before Muang Nguen there is a new road, still under construction, heading north.  We decide to take a look, and 45 minutes later ended up on the Mekong River some 17 km upstream from Pak Beng, the southern terminus of the "Chinese Road," as it was known long ago. There is a new road across the Mekong that goes to Pak Beng and we had an offer to take our pickup across on two of the smallish long-tail boats lashed together.  Nope, didn't think the insurance would cover that!  In any case, this routing might well be for heavy truck traffic in the not too distant future, trucks going back and forth from Yunan to Bangkok. There are lots of changes in the wind.

We left for Hong Sa, which is located one hour to the east, also on a newly upgraded gravel road. We chose to stop at the Sisophon Guest House for a couple of reasons. The first was that a sister of Lao refugee friends of mine in Minneapolis owns it. We got a discount rate, but paid for food and beer. Second, it is sited right between the school we worked on back in 1966 and our old IVS house.  The guest house was handy, too, right opposite the market area and the "bus terminal, " a sort of loose definition for commercial transport to Sayaboury and other local towns.

Hong Sa, like Xieng Lom, would be difficult to recognize from 40 plus years back. It is nicely laid out in grids, with several large government buildings, new schools, and private homes of concrete blocks and new wood construction. They were doing street upgrading with heavy equipment as we watched.  The only vehicles in the valley in 1966 were our IVS Jeep and the Lao Army M-35 deuce and a half, which didn't work.  The wood bridge across the small river where we used to bathe is now a Bailey.

We visited the old primary school next to the guest house, and introduced ourselves to the principal.  I asked where the old wooden building we had worked on back then was because there were three buildings on the site now.  He said that it was long gone, torn down to make way for new construction.  I asked about the dug well from the old days. The villagers had put in some hard labor to dig it back then. It was also gone, filled in because with the new city supplied water, it was not needed any more.

The school principal asked why I knew about the old building and well. I replied that I had been IVS here in 1966, and had made 16 fun jumps back then. The principal sort of lit up and without coaching said "Tan Mac!." Hey, that's me, nice to be remembered. He had been a first grader at the time.  I handed over copies of a bunch of black and white photos I had from those days, taken of the school and some of his friends, most likely. I asked him to hand them out if any of the kids, now adults, were still around.

On initial blush I didn't see anything outstanding at the primary school that needed TLCB assistance so didn't really raise the subject. Also, I didn't have enough time to really survey the other schools in the valley, so I saved that for a subsequent trip.

The next morning, I was talking with a guy who turned out to be a former USAID heavy equipment operator for out Public Works Division.  I asked him about an airplane crash site I had once visited just to the south of the long, Caribou capable airstrip.  I hadn't taken any photos of it previously but I remembered it as something like a single engine "Twin Beech," twin tail. I have wondered about that plane for years. Whose was it?  Speculation was that it was an early commercial plane from the 1950s, perhaps.  “All gone,” he said, “turned in to scrap and sold.”  He mentioned another crash that must have

happened after I had departed, a single engine, high wing plane. It sounded something

like one in the Cessna series.  I had never heard of this one at all.

Then we hit the lively morning market for a look see.  Sunee bought up a bunch of hand woven cloth, and a new "Nokia" cell phone from a young merchant whose first language was Chinese, not Lao.  He was a new arrival, I reckon, which is not an unusual occurrence in Laos these days, immigrants from the north.  We had seen the same up at Phonsavan on the PDJ, at Long Tieng, and at Xaysomboun/Moung Cha/LS-113.

Time was up for Hong Sa this trip, so we got back on the road to Muang Nguen, then across to Thailand, and back to Nan for the night.  Day five was the nine-hour drive back home. We ran up about 870 miles on my van and 200 miles on our Thai friend’s pickup on the Lao side.

As an aside, readers are invited to sign up with the Thailand-Laos-Cambodia Brotherhood group, www.tlc-brotherhood.org While it is mostly comprised of veterans, this is not requirement to join and be a full-fledged, voting member.  Note the "Assistance" page at: http://tlc-brotherhood.org/thare.html  

The Brotherhood group has helped provide about $222,000 to small school support projects and other school-related items in the Udorn and Nakhon Phanom areas of NE Thailand, and starting in 2007, several such small projects have begun in Laos.

Photos for this trip here: 2009-02 @ http://picasaweb.google.com/mactbkk/200902XiengLomHongSa#

Photos for all trips here: All Trips @ http://picasaweb.google.com/mactbkk/?pli=1

Now to get planning on the next TLCB trip to Laos and another school project.

Mac