Beaches and palm trees....boring. Just assume a lot of that kind of crap happened.For a month life was sweating in degenerating old colonial offices turned into coffee shops or communist cement blocks, playing guitar near moldy-slow estuaries, motorcycling through endless stretches of rice fields, and being sandwiched into buses. Glamorous. Lots of tourist junk, marble mountains rising out of the ocean, caves of pearly light beams, rides on old boats...
I was questioning myself, what kind of crap was I wasting my life doing? A savior came in the form of a little town deep in the mountains near the Chinese border.
The first morning, after the night long bus, the sun finally began to tear apart my mental muck, cutting crystal lines on vast verandas of emerald rice terrace. As my bus stopped, right outside the window were three guys playing guitar - I almost kicked the window open to get out. Israelis, Canadians, a Brit, a Belgian and an Italian (stirred vigorously with one American) are apparently ingredients in a soul-salad.
Leaving my hilltop villa one late morning I found myself drawn into a strange social circle of 14 year old Hmong girls and an Armenian. HMO?NG!!! What the hell is a Hmong? Within a day I had an entourage - and it was awesome.
The girls spend all day selling handicrafts on the streets to tourists. That is as much as most people will probably ever know about them. I feel blessed to have been sucked into the gravity of their unseen lives. Their homes, families and minds are otherworldly. One reason for this is probably that they live in a completely other world.
Surrounded by perfect weather, under the shadow of Indochinas highest mountains, nestled amidst fertile rice fields and abundance of hemp, the Hmong of the region are self sufficient. They spend their days making and dying their own clothes and their own clothing materials, drying their own tobacco, making their own musical instruments, forging their own steel farm tools and knives, distilling their own liquor, building their own homes, milling their own grain, and of course growing their own food. The handicrafts they make in excess are sold for cash in order to buy consumer goods like rubber sandals (called "speedcars" - alas, they don't make a size big enough for me...), market food and cell phones (...).
Yet despite the beauty of this proud and sustainable life, the Hmong live uncomfortable close to misery. Suicide is freely talked about in relation to broken love and also easily accomplished (eating a small dose of an abundant roadside plant). The conditions for the very young are despairing...but perhaps only from my perspective. I aim to not interject my values on their culture but seeing little girls sleep outside in the rain with a handful of unsold key chains makes me question whether morality can really be all that different from place to place...can it? In a place where you can take care of everything in your life on your own, total self reliance, why do little girls have to sleep in the rain? This made all the more disturbing by the fact that some of these little girls who fall asleep outside, or wander around by themselves at an inopportune hour find themselves with a one way ticket to China to start new lives as wives...or worse.--
In the end, I had to leave this Eden. I think this was the closest thing to original paradise I've seen - in all its horror and glory. It is a life before the fear of death and the shame of poverty. They are free because they do not play the 'winner's-loser's' game with the same cutthroat audacity as we do. Even the mildest pot-head in Indiana has Alexandrian ambitions compared to local sentiments in this constellation of mountain villages. Although the world is big (bigger than I'd hoped...I need to start believing in reincarnation to satisfy how much I want to do and see) I have found a home of sorts. Unfortunately, it may not be there when I return with the lambasting pace of tourism development currently underway. Travel, as with everything, relies on time and location.
