Monkeys and Scrabble Ladies

 

January 5 2023, Someplace further up the river

After a fine lunch of what I don’t recall we were set upon your own devices for a couple hours. This meant, novels to read, sun rays to catch, letters and numbers in a grid to write out and from time to time get a refill of your wine glass.

Afternoon entertainment was how to cook a Papaya and a fish salad. The papaya I’ll never do, just not my style, the fish salad I might.

We were supposed to spend the night outside of an internet village, but ran out of river time. Sundown 545 and no river traffic after that. At least no Pandaw river time. So at 530 we nosed into a nearby sandbank and tied one line to a tree and the other to a big rock. It was not what I had planned, but getting off again and feeling sand between my toes was pretty nice.

Two of my tribe started playing at badminton one of them I am sure was pretty athletic, but the birdie would come to her and she would hit at it like you do a tennis ball, flat back. In badminton you have to hit it up and back The birdie would come to her, and she’s hit it – splat! - into the sand. Try and try again, flat, not up. Then a high flier came to her, she went back to a great overhead smash tripped and both she and the birdie landed on their rounded parts in the sand. Of course this didn’t happen in a vacuum and anyone with a camera, phone or sketchpad all got it captured for future generations. At least she missed the cow patty, I think.

Again dinner came and conversations needed to be made. I had already heard most of the stories from my tribe, so I seated myself with the opposing tribe. That and there were no seats available with my tribe. I say tribe jokingly but after a few days like people find like people. The opposing side was the ‘Ladies who Scrabble’ and their respective Casper Milquetoast husbands. Boring and tittery. Except for one man who had enough ego for the lot of them and he monopolized the entire meal time with tales of daring do, like shopping in Saudi Arabia, which is much less entertaining than it should be if you use his tale as the baseline. Needless to say, I’ll eat solo before I waste any more precious seconds of my life with the “Ladies who Scrabble”

I know there was an evening something to do, but I’ve already forgotten what it was.

Today the boat pulled away exactly at 7am and within an hour we reached the place we had intended last eve. Because of the annual flooding the villages are all built a mountain goat climb from the water’s edge and this village was typical. The exception to this village climb is that instead of alluvial sand the banks was vertical volcanic rock. Sharp as a razor and straight up. Small cracks are there from time to time and at each crevice there was a crew member to grab a wrist and Sherpa the passengers up the cliff face. It might be an exaggeration a hint, but it was steep, and sharp.

The village to me was the same as the last and the one before. The major difference in that today the Travelin’ School M’arm was in place today and all of the usual gaggle of children with learning their letters or numbers or … something that is really unlikely to be of use to them later in life, since it is either cultivation, fishing or child rearing that the vast vat majority of them will ever need to know.

The adults seemed welcoming to us, with Vieng stopping to chat and ask them about life. One Pandaw aged man only had one arm. He had it shortened when he struck an unexploded ordinance 30 years ago. He refereed to it as ‘the American bomb’. And I guess you really can’t blame him. The bomb statisticians say the for nine years, every eight minutes a load of bombs was dumped on Laos, and they weren’t even in the Vietnam war! Only about 2/3 of the bombs got instantaneously smaller as planned, which left 1/3rd of them to hang around for the unfortunate farmer, child or livestock before changing and ending lives years later.

Through the village we tromped,, peeking into their homes and looking under the rugs for dirt. Across the creek was the Buddhist temple and the only thing to hold a tourist’s attention were the two monkeys that the monk had captured and leashed to a tree in Saffron cloth. The simian slaves were cute and entertaining. Someone gave a child a couple Lao Kip to get a banana bunch. The monkey’s thought it was Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years all rolled into one. One of the two Florida sisters offered a banana to and got a snarl. So, the smart thing to do in that case is to step closer and reach within easy monkey grasp to your elbow. For a woman in her 60’s she has surprisingly good reflexes in jumping back from an aggressive ape. She is not ‘The Monkey Whisperer’.

Back to lunch and then speaking of necessary life skills we had a class on how to fold a napkin to look like a Kimono or a Rose, and then for extra credit how to make an Elephant out of a bath towel and two washcloths. All skills that we will use daily the remainder of our lives.

Afternoon doldrums have set in so I’ll stop for now.