Chapter 7

The following characters appear in this chapter:

Thao

Guide, 5’-5 or 6’’ tall, about 130 pounds, 23 or 24 years old, black hair, brown eyes

Venerable Phet

Abbot of Wat Xieng Chai, 5’-7’’ tall, about 140 pounds, 42 years old, a shaved head and brown eyes.

Captain Vanh

Militia Captain, 5’-5’’ tall, 135 pounds, 30 years old, short black hair and brown eyes

Mike still has the Narrative

What Khamla hadn’t seen, because he hadn’t reentered the house, was the case with both of my .45 caliber, M1911 Colt automatic pistols and the dozen loaded magazines for them. Chanthra grinned on seeing it there on the floor.

“What is that?” Yuang asked seeing the case there.

“Those are my pistols,” I told her.

“Pistols?” she said in an unsure voice before understanding showed on her face. “Oh, guns!” she murmured.

“Do the police know that you have those?” she asked following that.

“No, they don’t. That is why the Amulets moved them along with the two rifles that I have and the rest of my ammunition. We will need all of that to deal with the warlords, the drug dealers, and more,” I told her.

“Yes, you are a soldier, and soldiers don’t always tell the police what they are doing or why,” she said after a bit of thought, accepting what I had told her.

This, however, wasn’t getting anything done, and it was getting later by the minute. Yuang took the new stove into the food preparation area and moved the very old and burned-out stove there out of the way. She soon had charcoal in it and started it burning.

Chanthra had removed the rice pot from the box with the dishes and cookware and had added the dry rice to it. I had gone out to the truck and returned with the 20 liter can of water. She added water to the rice and prepared it for cooking as soon as the fire in the stove was ready. It was now obvious that 20 liters of water wasn’t going to be enough for very long. We would need to find a source of clean, drinkable water to refill the can soon. In the meantime, there were other chores to be taken care of.

Getting out the sleeping bags and the mats, I placed two of each in the small room. The last set went in the main room near the back wall. In the meantime, Chanthra had gotten out the two oil (kerosene) lamps and filled them.

Yuang had found a well-used mortar and pestle along with a scarred block of wood that would serve as a cutting board in the food preparation area and set them out so Chanthra could start preparing the vegetables and the meat that they would be frying in the wok when the rice finished cooking.

Since I didn’t have a lot to do presently, I went outside to see what was around the house that we could use. There was water in the rice paddies behind the house, and while the Thais and the Laotians used this source of water for bathing, not even they used it for drinking. Instead, each house usually had one or more khlong jars (large ceramic containers) under the edge of the room to collect rain water, which was usually clean enough to drink. The one here was only partially full, and the surface was covered with mosquito larvae. The water was dark and didn’t appear like it would be good for drinking. We would need to find another source of water.

The food was eventually finished, and the ladies filled our bowls with rice and a large platter held the fried meat and vegetables that Chanthra had prepared. The Thais and their neighbors do not have knives at their meals. All of the meat and vegetables are cut up before being fried. The normal utensils for a meal are several sizes of spoons and an occasional fork. They had also bought a bottle of num bplah (fish sauce) and peppers at the market, as they are used in much of Asian cooking.

The meal was delicious, and we ate it by the light of the oil lamps as it gets dark early here. Sunset is usually around 1900 hrs. (7:00 PM). We had eaten leisurely and talked about the day’s events, but on finishing and cleaning up, it was time to retire.

“I think the two of you should sleep in the room. I will sleep out here in case there are visitors. I’ll keep my pistols with me,” I told the two women. Neither of them appeared to be happy with this decision.

“The Amulets will protect us,” Chanthra insisted. They had both seen how I had distributed the sleeping gear but had drawn a different conclusion.

“Yes, they will,” I agreed. “But it is still better to be prepared in case of trouble,” I reminded them. We all prepared for bed, and Chanthra and Yuang took one of the oil lamps into the room with them. I kept the other one out in the main room with me.

We had finished our breakfast of fried eggs and rice when Khamla arived in his tuk tuk with another man. Chanthra and I had packed up most of our things while Yuang made breakfast. Most of our things were ready to go when Khamla came up the steps to the house. The other man followed him.

“This is Thao. He will guide you to Muang Sing. He knows who you are to see there,” Khamla informed us. Thao was fairly typical of the Lao and Hmong people here in Northern Laos. He is about 5’-5’’ or 6’’ tall, a bit thin at around 130 pounds with black hair and brown eyes. He appeared to be 23 or 24 years old. We all exchanged greetings with him. He in the meantime had been looking around the house at our things there in the main room.

“Is this everything that you have with you?” he asked in a questioning voice in very good Thai.

“We have other things with us, but they aren’t here presently,” I told him to a puzzled look from him. This was right before all of the things that had appeared yesterday afternoon and most of the things that had been purchased at the market here disappeared. Both Khamla and Thao didn’t appear to be well on seeing this. The one new thing that remained was the case with my pistols in it.

“The Amulets help those whom they send out to do things in many ways,” Chanthra told them.

“Yes, pee, we didn’t know that you are a Holy Woman,” Thao replied, while Khamla had said nothing but still appeared frightened.

“I am but a simple teacher of the Amulets,” Chanthra told them.

“Yes, pee, if you say so,” both men replied. They weren’t the only ones who had been startled, as Yuang had also been surprised when everything disappeared including the stove and the remaining food. All that remained were our backpacks, the water can, and my pistols in their case.

Before we set out for Muang Sing, there were a few things that we needed to do. Thao had taken a seat in the bed of the truck because there was no more room in the cab with the three of us in it. We followed Khamla back to town and returned to the market for some fruit and other snacks to have for the trip to Muang Sing as well as to fill the cooler with cola and ice. Following that, I pulled into the one filling station that we had seen here and filled the truck’s tank, since we didn’t know when or where we would find more fuel.

“How do we proceed from here?” I asked Thao once the tank was full.

“Continue on the road through town. It becomes road # 17 shortly after you pass the last market. It is 58 km. (36 miles) to Muang Sing town,” he told us.

It was only some 6 km (4 miles) before we left the valley of the Nam Tha River and the town of Luang Nam Tha and were in the tree covered mountains. Road #17 followed the river through those mountains on its twisting and turning course. It wasn’t long after leaving the town that the condition of the road deteriorated. There were places where there had been cave-ins and others where there had been landslides or large boulders partly blocked the road. This was in addition to the many potholes and other problems with the road’s surface.

It was something less than about halfway to our destination before the road left the river and continued through the mountains. This did not mean that it improved any, only that we were no longer near the river. There had only been a few small bridges along the way, and I mentioned this to Thao as we drove along.

“The bridges are in better shape than the road,” I told him.

“That’s because the warlords make sure that they are. It’s so they can move their drugs. They make the local people do the repairing. They raid their villages and kidnap them to do the work,” he told me.

We had seen a number of hamlets on the way through the mountains. They were almost always built on cleared ground and consisted of small houses and other buildings on wooden piles with thatched roofs. Their naked children, chickens, and pigs could be seen moving around in the settlements on the sides of the forest-covered mountains. Their main crops grown on the their slanting fields were dry rice and poppies. They shifted to different fields every year or so to allow the fields and the earth to rest.

We eventually came out of the mountains and on to the valley of the Nam Sing River some 10 km. (6.4 miles) from Nuang Sing town. It had taken us two and a half hours of rumbling, skidding, and slow driving to reach the town. Most of the snacks and the cola were gone.

“We are almost there,” Thao had informed us, as we came out of the mountains. He didn’t appear to think that it had been a bad trip. Road #17 was joined by another road just before we reached the town.

As we approached the town, Thao knocked on the back window of the cab again. He wanted to give us directions to our destination.

“Turn left at the road just past the Wat,” he told us when I had pulled over to the side of the road and stopped. Chanthra sat up on hearing this. I thought that she may have drifted off to sleep.

“There is a Wat here?” she asked.

“Yes, pee. There are four Wats in Muang Sing town,” he told her.

“Really!” she asked. “Luang Nam Tha had few Wats, at least in the town,” she added.

“Many here are very religious. There are many Wats in Muang Sing District,” he assured her.

“How far do we need to go on this new road?” I asked when they had finished.

“I will knock on the window when you need to turn. Turn right then,” Thao told me. I pulled back on the road and turned left when we had passed the Wat.

“We will need to return to visit that Wat,” Chanthra told me. We had only gotten a quick look at the Wat, but it appeared to be very colorful. We had passed several sois or streets on this new road before Thao tapped on the window again, and I tuned right. It appeared that we had moved most of the way through this small town before we turned.

Unlike Huay Xai and Luang Nam Tha, Muang Sing was not built with the main road of the area, road # 17, going through it. It was built to one side of the road and in a bend of the Nam Sing River. From what we had seen of it so far, it appeared to have a regular street pattern. It is after all the administrative and economic center of the Muang Sing District.

We had gone only something like 120 meters (390 feet) or so on this new street when Thao tapped on the window again.

“Pull in beside the house here,” he told us pointing. The house he was pointing to appeared to be a rather nice Thai style house. It was not, however, surrounded by a wall or even a fence, but there was sufficient room around it to park the truck on the side of the house with ease, and I pulled in. The other houses were a good six meters (20 feet) or so from it. It was a single story house with a tin roof.