The ‘s’ in Laos, like the Statue of Liberty and deep fried potato chunks, is another example of French opulence leading to unnecessary things. Let’s ignore it, shall we?<\/p>\n
I have never seen old-growth forest in Asia. In China and Vietnam, rows of environmentally-friendly reforested trees marched up hillsides in perfect lines. Surely jungle areas creep and crawl with all sorts of growth, but huge trees one sees not.<\/p>\n
In Western Laos trees of unprecedented height and girth spring up dozens of feet above the canopy. At their base they prove too wide for even two tall women to encircle in their arms. The trees ooze up rock faces, forcing nubbies of stump and bark into every nook and cranny, searching for purchase. They provide shade for whole seconds, even when biking past at high speed. Thank God the French were averse to logging this far inland. Hopefully the Lao government takes the “Preservation Area” signs seriously. In other areas clear cuts and slash and burn areas are apparent.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Big trees and cut trees. Courtesy of Pete.<\/p>\n
The people of Laos seem as honest as their trees are tall. I constantly confuse 20000s and 50000s with 2000s and 5000s. I always seem to get the correct change, though.<\/p>\n
In the heat of midday, we bike in our own sweat, while villagers sit in the shade provided by their porches. Thatch huts raised on stilts always have significant porch space. Villagers lounging on the porches casually waft a “Sa-bai-dee” towards us. Sometimes they shake their heads and laugh afterwards. I taste the sweat dripping off my mustache, examine the ample shade provided by the big trees, realize I my idea of destinations is itself excessive opulence. I join the villagers in their laughs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The ‘s’ in Laos, like the Statue of Liberty and deep fried potato chunks, is another example of French opulence leading to unnecessary things. Let’s ignore it, shall we? I have never seen old-growth forest in Asia. In China and Vietnam, rows of environmentally-friendly reforested trees marched up hillsides in perfect lines. Surely jungle areas […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-here-you-will-find-the-posts-that-jim-wrote"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}