From Siem Reap, we took a bus to the Thai border and a train to Bangkok. The next evening we yet again rejoiced in train travel and took the overnight service to Nong Khai, crossed into Laos and stayed one night in the capital - Vientiane. Finally, after a minibus to Vang Vieng and a motorbike ride into the countryside, we arrived at the Saelao project.
The project has multitudinous objectives, and while volunteering there we were involved in a great variety of them. A major goal for the project is to become self-sufficient in organic food for the on-site restaurant, volunteers, and staff. This will require a great deal of work and the supervision of someone throughout the seasons. Dani lent a hand by resurrecting this garden that had been taken over by weeds.
The peaceful location and idyllic surroundings were to be our home for the next two weeks.
All the buildings on site are made from locally sourced, renewable materials. We were enlisted to help make mud bricks for a bungalow to be built for housing future volunteers. Clay earth was dug and mixed with water, then vigorously stomped underfoot to acheive an even consistency. The outer husk from rice was added to thicken the mix and make it more robust.
After the mix was just right, we packed it into a vinyl-lined mould and released the bricks to air-dry for the next week. It was very labour intensive but used no energy apart from our own, and made incredibly tough bricks.
While at Saelao, I apprenticed myself to the immensely practical Ham (rhymes with palm). It seemed to me he was born wielding a hammer and machete, and I learned a great deal about the simplest and most economical way to do many things. Amongst other things, we built furniture for the restaurant together from timbers we cut using a table saw attached to a tractor engine, and re-used bamboo and nails from tables no longer fit for purpose.
Of all our jobs however, perhaps the most beneficial was the teaching of English on school nights to local children. The restaurant became the classroom and a flock of eager teenagers cycled from the nearby village to voluntarily attend, even after a day spent at school.
When asked what they wanted to learn, they surprisingly said 'grammar', so Dani created tables, games and competitions to teach irregular verbs (which we ourselves had to learn about), past participles, and when to use 'in, on, and at'.
By far the biggest undertaking during our fortnight at Saelao was the peanut field. The day after we arrived work began to convert a rice field over to peanut production, and first job on the list was digging post holes by hand in the heavy clay. Many blisters were created before the wise decided to don gloves.
As the next day was a saturday, we asked if the kids that attend English classes could come help for a couple of hours in the morning. All the holes had been dug and poles inserted, so it was time to 'clean' the field, by removing weeds and the remnants of the rice plants. It was not easy work, but the kids were used to working in the fields and chatted and joked as if they were doing something much more fun.
Later in the day a few of us went to cut bamboo in the forest, selecting a few poles per grove to cut down, removing the side branches with machetes, and launching the poles into a lagoon for later collection.
This bamboo was to become the binding element in the fence, erected primarily to keep cows away from the succulent peanut bushes. It proved to be an amazing material - flexible but incredibly strong. Once two rows of bamboo had joined the fence poles together we strung barbed wire in a further two rows, then interwove short bamboo stakes between the barbed wire and horizontal poles, creating a rigid lattice of materials that I felt confident would deter even a very persistent cow.
The next step was to use a hand-operated tractor to plough the area that the kids were unable to clean (95% of the field). It was incredibly hard work, wrestling with a machine that was continually fighting to wander. Four of us took turns in operating the beast, but all were physically wrecked by the time the field was satisfactorily ploughed and tilled.
The next job was by far the most tedious - that of hand-shelling thousands of peanuts for planting. I am sure I must have shelled a few hundred, but admit I would often find other jobs that needed doing, desperate to escape the monotony of a task that could be achieved in minutes by a machine.
Finally the time came for planting, the field pre-flooded to make the soil soft and ensure an initial water supply in the dry conditions of this season. At first a logical and somewhat rigid system was developed by us volunteers to ensure the peanuts were evenly spaced in straight lines.
This system was quite slow though, and we struggled to maintain order once the local kids arrived and set about punching holes and filling them with peanuts in a way we couldn't control. In the end, one side of the field was done the Western way, while the other was completed in less time by fewer people in the Laos style.
For us, volunteering was only one aspect of what we enjoyed during our stay. It was a pleasure to eat comunally, though the lack of chairs did take some getting used to. The food was always delicious and rarely repeated, with a talented local chef providing the meals for us and the restaurant during the day, and a guy with a particular skill for making one of our favourite dishes - wood-fired pizza, in the evenings.
We volunteered 6 days a week, with one free, or 'buddha day' falling on a Thursday or Friday while we were there - depending on the lunar cycle. We worked as much as we needed to though, either helping with various projects or in the restaurant, but also had a good amount of free time, especially in the middle of the day when heat prevented much outdoor activity.
We were also just a kilometer away from the famous 'Blue Lagoon' and a very impressive cave. As volunteers, we did not have to pay each time we wanted to enter, and tried to go swimming in the cool waters whenever possible. We would even wear our clothes while swimming sometimes, in a very lazy version of laundry.
We were also just a kilometer away from the famous 'Blue Lagoon' and a very impressive cave. As volunteers, we did not have to pay each time we wanted to enter, and tried to go swimming in the cool waters whenever possible. We would even wear our clothes while swimming sometimes, in a very lazy version of laundry.
One contribution I thought I could make was to teach spoon carving to people that wanted to learn. In mid-October I ordered the necessary knives online and had them despatched to Saelao, and they thankfully arrived on my third day there - 40 days after Royal Mail had estimated. The locals were very skilled with blades, having played with knives and machetes since they were small children, so my apprentice Boun was able to produce a quality rice-spoon with very little instruction, and in a quarter of the time it took for me to produce my first decent spoon.
Above all, the volunteers and staff made our stay there, and we found it difficult to leave. We will remember it as a highlight of our trip, and a place we may return to some day.
