Monochrome Chronicles #12: The Sound of One Cricket Chirping
“Last nightI was lulled into sleep by the sound of one cricket chirping. I was awakened in the early AM by the rooster crowing just outside my room, and the cascade of cackling down through the village from other roosters and hens.” (from my travel diary, 2017) Where was I and what was I doing there? I was staying in a guesthouse constructed with rough wood, gaps between the planks in the walls. My room was just wide enough for a single-width futon on a wooden bed and a narrow space between it and the opposite wall. This couldn’t be me. Had I been dreaming? No, I was visiting a small hilltribe village in the Nam Ou Valley of northern Laos. My curiosity, my camera and my inner photographer’s voice had lured me there.
This image sets the tone for this series of photographs. The time was early morning on the Nam Ou River. At that time of day, the river is quiet and often the mountains are shrouded in fog. It is easy to imagine that the outside world does not exist.
I want to believe that the setting guided my camera to this photograph rather than the other way around. Landscape photography is far from my usual milieu. Everything just fell into place for this image.
For this episode of The Monochrome Chronicles, I need to give a more detailed introduction than usual. The setting for most of the episodes so far in this series has been city life, mainly in NYC and Tokyo. The setting for this episode is almost the antithesis of city life. This is difficult to explain in words – hence my photographs will, I hope, express it more vividly.
But first let me explain how, serendipitously, I came to the Nam Ou Valley in northern Laos. While researching for river cruises on the Mekong River, I stumbled upon a website for Banana Boat Tours, which specialized in travel up the Nam Ou River, a tributary of the Mekong, to visit hilltribe villages. Not really knowing what to expect, I signed up for a hiking and boating trip.
Try to imagine this. From my home in Tokyo, I had flown first to Bangkok, then to Luang Prabang, Laos, and then travelled by van for 4 hours to the small village of Nong Khiaw (population 3500), the gateway to the Nam Ou Valley. The next day I found myself in a longboat headed upstream on the Nam Ou River, just me, my local guide and the boatman. I thought to myself, “How can this be? I’ve gone from ultramodern Tokyo, travelled more than 5,500 km and suddenly here I am floating along a river, bounded by untouched mountains, headed for who knows what in the hilltribe village of Sop Jam. What am I doing here?”
I needn’t have worried, I guess. After all I was following my camera and listening to my little inner voice, my constant companions.
Part of me wants to say that my experiences there – walking for an hour or two through expanses of wild grassland and jungle, sleeping in a thatched hut with no electricity, eating the simple food of the villages, strolling around after dark in a village with no streetlights – all of these should have been alien experiences for me…but they were not. Somehow I knew I was on the right track.
I will organize this episode into sections, each one focusing on a specific subtheme of the series. This first section will show aspects of the villages per se, that is, the physical appearance such as houses, buildings and so on. A later section will deal with people at work, and then the final section will be a portrait gallery of villagers.
This village, Sop Jam, had one main road – a finished dirt lane – and one other. The population was about 55 families and maybe 300 people, a mix of Lao and Khmer ethnic groups. The homes had no running water. Electricity for the entire village was generated by a single turbine in a stream behind the village, so some houses had electricity, but usually only one bare bulb in the house. A lone woman was sweeping the street in front of this house. This village, Ban Houahoy, consisted of a dozen or so homes along a single packed-dirt lane. The photograph, I think, gives some sense of how removed these Nam Ou villages are from the 21st century. By the way, this statement is just my observation, and is not meant to be a judgement.Mostly the houses are built of wood with woven bamboo walls and thatched roofs. The houses are quite simple in design and construction. The interior may be a single room or sometimes divided into a kitchen area and a living area, where the family eats, relaxes and sleeps.
In this village, the houses were arranged in a cluster within a forest.Several elements of local culture appear in this image. The house was built on stilts to raise the house off the ground (whereas in other villages the houses would be built at ground level). The stilts rest securely on large stones to discourage infestation by insects. Another element is the display outside the house of hand-woven fabrics, which had been crafted by the women of the village as a cottage industry.The reward for a long life of manual labor might be to sit by a window and watch life pass by. This man had a bird’s eye view of his village. There would be little activity during the day. In late afternoon the children would return from school and play in the dirt street. Later, men and women would return from work in the fields and soon it would be supper time. In the evening, the village would be dark (maybe one street light) and any nightlife would take place inside people’s homes.This woman was cooking supper over an open fire beside her house. Night falls early in the villages because they have few if any street lights. Dusk is a busy time, then, with neighbors conversing, workers returning from the fields, people cooking supper, children playing outdoors.The village community center. That day two prominent families were meeting together to arrange the marriage between a young couple. The negotiations may have gone on for hours. The image shows none of that, but hints at the social organization in the village. Each family (sometimes a three-generation family) lives in its own house, but the village would band together to build a community center such as this. Religion in these villages varies with the ethnic group of the people living there. This was the Buddhist temple of the Tai Lao people in Sop Jam. The design is austere and simple, and incorporates many of the architectural features of the houses in the village. To my eye, though, I sense that this temple also was a community effort whereas the houses were more individual efforts. It also imparts a feeling of strength and stability. Maybe it will outlast the houses and other buildings. After all, it is a temple, a spiritual place.Sitting on a veranda in the village of Sop Jam in the late afternoon, this is what I saw. Minimalism. Almost a Frank Lloyd Wright design. Symbolically, this image conveys the feeling of simplicity within the hilltribe villages. Or maybe it reveals my bias.
As a side story: The toilet at this guesthouse was an outhouse behind the main building. Waking up in the middle of the night with the need to pee, I realized that I was on my own to reach the outhouse in the dark. Luckily, I had a flashlight in my backpack.
Before continuing, I need to describe further the context for this whole series of photographs from the Nam Ou Valley. To do so here only highlights my dilemma: should I describe first the overall setting, or should I plunge right in with my images, which show the details? For this series of photographs, a description of the setting is essential.
The Nam Ou River, a tributary of the Mekong, is one of the main waterways in northern Laos. The entire Nam Ou Basin covers a wide area of 26,000 square km, is bordered by China and Vietnam, and encompasses innumerable small hilltribe villages.
I visited eleven villages upstream from the village of Nong Khiaw, the end of the highway. To reach them, I traveled by longboat for another 1-2 hours. The final jaunt was on foot – anywhere from 15 minutes to 2 hours after the boat docked – walking through grassland and jungle. The people living in this district mainly were of Lao, Hmong, and Khmer ethnic groups. The population of these villages ranged from as few as 10 households and upwards to maybe 50. Indeed, I was now far off the beaten path.
This next section deals with people at work. Generally, livelihoods in the Nam Ou center on three fields: farming; fishing and hunting; and weaving. Basically, in all these endeavors, the work is done by hand.
A haunting and, to me, a deeply moving image of field workers returning to their village at dusk, carrying the day’s harvest of chick peas on their backs. I first saw the crew in the distance, walking slowly along a dusty dirt road. I stood transfixed as they trudged toward me. This image surely captures the sense of the end of a hard day’s manual labor.
This fisherman was carrying a woven seine for catching fish in the river, and a small woven basket tied around his waist for holding his catch. This was his livelihood, his daily routine. I read into his face the patience of a man who spends long days alone, an hour’s walk from his village to the river, quietly gathering the day’s harvest of fish to take back to his village. I can scarcely imagine the quiet he feels day after day, alone.
Here an older man was sitting in front of his house carving something from a piece of wood by hand. He sat alone, carving intently. His face with its lines and wrinkles, his sunken cheeks and his gnarled hands attest to his age. What memories must have been hidden behind that face.
Weaving cloth is a means of livelihood for women in the villages. There are many steps in the process, all done by hand. The first step is planting, growing and harvesting cotton in the fields. The next steps are to remove the seeds cotton and then spin it into yarn.
To create bright colors – red, orange, yellow, purple, black and so on – dyes are formulated in the village using plant products gathered from the forest. The dying per se takes several days continuously and occurs in a hut with woven bamboo walls covered with mud to create the necessary conditions for drying the skeins of cotton.
The final step is weaving the cloth. Weaving is an all-day, day-after-day, task. This 78-year old woman told me she weaves at her loom on most days. She laughed as she described how she had a day of rest that day because she was waiting for her next batch of yarn to dry – pointing to the clothesline in her yard where several skeins were drying in the sun.
Another form of weaving is to make baskets from strips of bamboo. The design of the baskets is elaborate, sometimes using two different colors of bamboo in the design. While weaving cloth is the pervue of women, weaving baskets is the pervue of men.
Another main source of income is farming. Rice is the principle crop but other grains are raised as well. The livestock commonly are cattle, pigs and chickens.
The juxtaposition of the natural grandeur of the forest-covered limestone mountains and the human-scale farming distinguishes this image. The perspective was almost too wide for my viewfinder. In this valley lay rice fields that seemed to form a crazy-quilt design. Each field is owned by a single family and has been handed down from generation to generation over hundreds of years. Though the composition may be fairly pedestrian, this image clearly illustrates the dramatic scenery of the Nam Ou Valley.Farmers in the Nam Ou Valley usually live in the villages and their rice fields may be an hour or two away on foot. During the planting and harvesting seasons, they can live for a week or two in small huts such as this near the rice fields. One farmer described to me how he and his wife went to the fields. They had to carry their tools, as well as food and water. And they had three small children. The husband carried a large water tank on his back with one child sitting on top of the tank. The wife had a bundle of food on her back, carried the youngest child strapped like a papoose on her front, and led the oldest child by the hand as they walked. He laughed as he described how the five of them had walked to the rice fields.Another image of the group of workers returning from their day’s work in the fields – to emphasize that much of the work is done by manual labor. They made an ethereal sight walking quietly through the dusk .
Carrying her tools on her back, this woman and her son were returning home after a day in the fields. The worry on the mother’s face is reflected in her son’s face. On one level, life in the Nam Ou Valley villages seems bucollic. On other levels, life is hard, I think.
At the end of the day, workers would have returned from their toils, and children would have returned from school. For me, a confirmed urbanite, the main quality was the quiet that hung over the village. On a moonlit night I could walk from one end of the village to the far end in about 5 minutes. Not a single person would be in sight, although occasionally I heard voices from inside the homes. Perhaps the front door of a house or two would stand open, providing some illumination on the street. What an uncommon sensation for me to walk alone in the darkness, so far away from the rest of the world (at least the world as I know it).
The moment I saw this woman I knew I had to capture her portrait. The light was favorable for portraiture. Her relaxed posture and the expression on her face was just as I had found her. The barest hint of a smile conveys a sense of contentment, but I detect a sense of wariness in her eyes.
One afternoon, I opted to ride from one village to the next rather than walk. As we traversed along the one-lane dirt road we passed this woman and her friend walking home after spending the afternoon working in the fields. The guide offered them a ride with us in the wagon. The guide, a garrulous man, kept up a running conversation with them. Suddenly all three burst into raucous laughter. For the rest of the ride, he would occasionally repeat one single word and all three would again break into laughter. Later he explained. He spoke a different dialect of Lao language than they did and, when he asked this woman her age, she replied, “65 years old” but the words had a different and embarrassing meaning in his dialect.
Portraits of older people is one of the subthemes in my photography and I found many subjects in the Nam Ou valley. I encountered this woman sitting outside her house, warming herself by an open log fire. We chatted for a while, my guide serving as translator, and she said she was 105 years old, the oldest resident in her village. After that encounter, I usually inquired who was the oldest resident in each village that I visited.
Late one afternoon, near sunset, this woman came walking down a path from the forest. She and I sat on a bench by the side of the path, talking together through the guide as a translator. She told me she didn’t know her age. Though the wrinkles on her face betrayed her age, the look in her eyes was youthful and spritely, I think. She attributed her longevity to good diet, fresh air, hard work and abstinence from alcohol.
Another day, a different village. Ban Had Sao was much smaller than the other villages, just a few houses nestled among the trees. Not much was happening there. Then, rounding a corner, I found these three women sitting on a porch, quietly chatting. Immediately, I knew I wanted to photograph them but decided to take each one individually rather than all three as a group. I don’t know why. The youngest of the three, at age 75 years, was ethnically Tai Lao and the other two were Mon Khmer.
So many of my photographs from the Nam Ou collide to form a kaleidoscopic view. Taken out of context, this image would be unsettling. Taken in context, it is just one point on a continuum, a moment in the life of the villages, an everyday occurrence.What you see is unimportant, but rather what you imagine is the key. This image raises many questions but few answers. It is an enigma. I will say no more than that.An additional piece of context setting. Hiking through the wild grassland was a good way to appreciate the scenery of this part of the Nam Ou Valley, though it took some getting used to the foot paths at first. Most residents live in the villages, but some farm families settle apart from others in the grassland. One such farmer complained that the night before, rustlers had broken into his farm and stolen one of the pigs from his small herd of five or six, a major loss of income for him and his family.
If you asked me why I’m a photographer, this image would be my answer. The penetrating look in this man’s eyes is mesmerizing. The rest of the image nearly fades into the background. A perfect moment of communication between photographer and subject. To say anything more would be superfluous.
Each village is self-governing but also is part of a larger district that oversees the villages. This man was the tribal leader of his village, Ban Ayun, a position that is held on a rotation basis among the elders of the tribe. One evening he invited me and the guide to his home for supper. During the meal, he regaled us with stories about his life as a farmer and how he and his wife had raised eleven children (who were adults by that time). Two of their children and their spouses, along with their young children, still resided in the parental home, making a three-generation family. Though the house had only two rooms, and with six adults and several children living there, still the home didn’t seem crowded.
This guy was just sitting, looking out the window when I approached him. He nodded agreement to my camera and then stayed just the same, which is what I wanted. A minute or two later and he was just a memory and a latent image on my film. We did connect for that one instant, though. Now I have a permanent image on the negative and in prints.
Just about dusk, I met this elderly man taking a walk along a dusty dirt road near Hmong Village, walking for the exercise. He spoke haltingly with the guide, but acceded to my request to photograph him. Part of my series of portraits of older people.
To end this episode of The Monochrome Chronicles, allow me to return to two final scenic images. This first one may be more symbolic than scenic. Pampas grass with its delicate lacey plumage has intrigued me as a photographer for many years. This view is, I suppose, a counterpoint to the dramatic scenery in the Nam Ou Valley. Maybe, too, it reminds me that I’ve seen pampas grass in so many places around the world, which makes the world seem a bit smaller. And finally, a different view of early morning on the river, this time from a longboat in the middle of the river. Forest-covered limestone mountains climb steeply on both sides of the river.
This scene was far beyond the end of the paved highway – a 2-hour journey up river by longboat. Serene is the mote juste for this place.
My photographic series from the villages in the Nam Ou marked a major turning point for me in photography. Prior to this period, I’d had fleeting glimpses of hilltribes in Thailand and Cambodia, and nomads in Mongolia. My experience in the Nam Ou changed my point of view. As early as my first night’s stay in Sop Jam, I knew that I wanted to explore this small unique part of the world in greater depth. Every day I wanted to go farther and farther off the beaten path.
My experience of photographing in the Nam Ou region had another, even more profound influence, which I wouldn’t recognize until several years later. In retrospect, I can see that these experiences laid the groundwork for another and undoubtedly deeper undertaking, namely my photographic series in Nepal – which will be the subject for the next three episodes of The Monochrome Chronicles.
