[monumentum]

 Laos - Vang Vieng (12-May-2012)

Perfectly aware that the photos here require greater dynamism in composition. Everything seems too uniform & predictable. Nature nature, roads roads.

 The warmth of these villagers are simply unexpectedly delightful. Here they invited us to dance their traditional dance, & played music from the only handphone that all of them had. They shared the only grilled fish they had with us, & a heavy shot of Lao Lao which sent me into whirls of intoxication. We were complete strangers to each other. I cannot describe the openness & hospitality extended, wanting nothing at all in return, just the savoring of "the moment". It is simply unimaginable in the context of my own society. It's true to say that the grass is always greener on the other side. How corny indeed! Yet, how is it that the "first-world" societies today are actually "first-world" in mentality? That's questionable. What's the "first-world" mentality anyway? A mere pursuit of progress & the talent to consume? I'm really not sure anymore. What's truly valuable to humanity, I wouldn't say is always valuable in monetary terms.

 Kaeng Yui waterfall isn't exactly a tourist spot, but I'm glad we went there. For if I hadn't, I wouldn't have learnt of the existence of these wonderful beings, I wouldn't have captured these sights.

 I'm reading Thoreau's 'Walden', very insightful, very contemplative. Still on the 'Economy' section, yet I really wanted to nod to everything sentence he so cleverly lay out for the reader to digest. 

"The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor. They have no friend Iolas to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra's head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up."

I nod violently to this. & there's more...

 "I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when men is only condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man's life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many poor immortal soul have I met well high crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot! The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh."

"But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It's a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before."

And so Vang Vieng offers all these food & drinks which we might or might not need to sustain us. Mango lassi, banana-coffee shake, & the 3rd I have no recollection of what it might've been.