East of Croydon

by Sue Perkins

  We felt stoned on arrival, like we’d walked into a cliché. Everywhere we looked there were the easy signifiers of chill – yin and yang, tie-dye, fresh tattoos with the skin still proud from the puncture. Backpackers lolloped past, decked with coral necklaces, their burnished faces freckled with sand. Everyone held a beer. There were tight huddles of tourists dozing in the heat, the sudden localized burst of transistors and laughter, and the sneak of couples trying to find an uninhabited dune to shag in.

  I knew only one thing about our first day filming here: I was to meet a certain Mr Bounsom, a local fisherman. I won’t lie, I was expecting someone in a similar vein to the other fishermen I’d met along my travels: shy, silent types, their rheumy eyes trained wistfully on the waterline as I bombarded them with questions. I could not have been more mistaken. You see, Mr Bounsom was not just a fisherman, Mr Bounsom, as he would be at pains to point out, was an entrepreneur.

  Mr Bounsom was as charismatic as he was handsome. He was also a little drunk. It was nine o’clock in the morning. I mention that not to be unduly judgemental but because if I’d known he was going to be four sheets to the wind throughout my time with him I wouldn’t have turned down the opportunity to have a little tot of whisky with my breakfast noodles.

  It became immediately clear I’d encountered a fellow klutz. Bounsom was as utterly inept as I was – all zest and no skills – a chaotic, imploding mass around which orbited a collection of dutiful and capable women. He would chide his wife and sisters, barracking them for the benefit of the camera, but his alpha-male posturings failed to obscure the reality that they were the ones doing everything, quietly going about the business of choreographing and producing his day.

  After an awful lot of hugging and shouting, Bounsom gestured in the direction of a wooden boat, long, lean and curved at the ends – like an ironic smile. He seemed awfully keen to get me onboard and demonstrate his fishing skills. Our embarkation was slightly hampered by the fact that neither of us could stand upright on the vessel, me due to a critical lack of core strength, him due to a surfeit of Laos beer.

  Once underway (the womenfolk had to push us from the shoreline), Bounsom took the opportunity to ask for my hand in marriage. We had known each other for approximately seven minutes. I tried to explain some of the many things standing in the way of our union, not least:

  (a) he was married already (I’d just said hello to his wife)

  (b) I’m not genetically engineered for commitment, especially in the form of matrimony

  (c) THE OBVIOUS, and

  (d) he was carrying a loaded harpoon gun, which made him deeply intimidating.

  ‘You, beautiful,’ he said – as the arrow-tip glinted in the sunshine mere inches from my face.

  Bounsom was an extremely excitable sausage, and the slightest thing would send him giddy with delight. Now he was armed the last thing I wanted to do was agitate him further. ‘Gosh. Thank you,’ I said – more in fear than acquiescence.

  As we chugged into the sunlight, I could see the effort scored on Bounsom’s face. He looked worn out. This isn’t paradise at all, is it, mate? This is graft. I noticed the myriad lines around his eyes – the price he paid for those endless shit-eating grins – plastered on for the sake of us tourists. We’re on holiday, though, yeah? We’re taking a break. We’re taking a year off. We’re on a gap year.

  A year off from what? I thought. God only knows there are no gap years here. No downtime. For these people, it never stops. Jesus, we don’t know how lucky we are.

  ‘Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!’

  I started from my reverie.

  ‘Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!’ screamed Bounsom, as our boat smashed into some rocks. I flinched as the harpoon muzzle grazed my left ear.

  ‘Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!’ he screeched again, jumping off the vessel and running up through the sandy hillocks to the cliff above. I followed slowly, feet stumbling on the uneven ground until I finally reached the top. From there, we had a perfect view of the river. It felt more ferocious, misdirected and thwarted by a million rocks as it fired its way downstream. I noticed a few wooden traps nestled into the stone, capturing the tiny shad and croakers as they hurled down the rapids.

  ‘Time to fish!’ said Bounsom, brandishing his spear aloft. I’d not seen one fish pulled live from the Mekong in my entire trip – and the largest I’d seen in the nets was only around six inches long. A harpoon gun felt like overkill; like taking a howitzer to a grouse shoot or a trebuchet to a fox hunt.

  A woman in a lampshade hat sat on one of the rocks at the water’s edge. The river tumbled around her, the spray hitting her hems and lashing at her fingers. In her hand she held a net, just two bamboo poles lashed together in a V-shape, with a scoop of mesh in between. The sort of net you’d get the kids to fish for crab with at Brixham Harbour. Except she wasn’t fishing for fun, she was fishing for her life.

  ‘Whhaaaaaaayyy!’ bellowed Bounsom, at maximum decibels, waving his spare hand in the air. ‘Time to fish!’

  And with that, he reached across and grabbed the woman’s net from her. Inside, two silver tiddlers were flick-flacking as they tried frantically to breathe. And that was Mr Bounsom’s fishing done.

  These were the first fish I had seen taken live from the river, caught by a woman whose face I never saw, a woman who had given up her catch without so much as a word or gesture.

  ‘Fish!’ cried Bounsom, waving the net triumphantly in the air, as if the act of possession alone made it his catch, his achievement. ‘Now we barbecue!’

  The fish were still thrashing about. I wondered if this was when Bounsom would use the harpoon – to silence them for good. Perhaps he’d brought along a grenade or surface-to-surface missile for that job. Who knew? Instead, he simply passed the net back to the woman, who duly rapped the fish on the head and returned them, dead.

  A fire was lit – a Bounsom sort of a fire. No dried moss and flint, no careful eking of a spark, just a casual squirt of petrol and a cigarette lighter. Boom. The fish were suspended in a grill cage over the flame, where they began their rapid transformation into carbon.

  Bounsom cracked open a beer, then another. He started talking. I tried to interject, interview him, get a conversation going, but he wasn’t interested in a formal back and forth. The alcohol had made him both bold and unfocused. He wanted to broadcast. He wanted to preach. His speech was an angry, tangential mess, each sentence empowering a new train of thought. We sat back, as the acrid smoke from the fire enveloped us, and let him rant. He talked about political corruption, his outlandish conspiracy theories on the Thai government, and what life was really like on the islands. On and on in the dizzying heat.

  After a while, I noticed Olly had removed his headphones. Olly listens to everything, so if the phones are off, he is no longer recording. I turned and saw that Matt had lowered his lens. I stopped even trying to prompt or ask questions. To record Mr Bounsom from here on in was to get him into trouble, even if he was too drunk to know it. So we just sat there, listening to his wild ideas, his rantings, his unshaped, raw pain – all of it dutifully translated back to us. This meant, of course, it took double the amount of time.

  Imagine listening to David Icke. TWICE.

  We listened until the sun grew too hot, even for him. I could feel the end of my nose going crispy.

  The fish were now cremated, lumps of black crumble where the flesh had been. I stared at the woman, now silhouetted in the afternoon sun, and mouthed an apology. I don’t have a God, but I prayed that hers would, at the very least, send her a replacement catch she could make a meal out of.

  ‘Wheeeeeeeeey! Paaaarty time!’ shrieked Bounsom, seemingly now bored by his own monologue. He grabbed his harpoon and ran headlong down the bank back to the boat.

  Back at the beach café, a now battered Bounsom was keen to show me his karaoke skills. He cracked open yet another beer and stood there watching as the womenfolk unfurled metres of black cabling, set up the microphone and rigged the speaker system. Th
en he clicked his fingers, and they retreated, silently, back into the walls, whereupon he took centre stage and began belting out some stone-cold Laotian classics.

  This was classic Bounsom, all sound and fury. He would trumpet his brilliance to anyone in range, yet in the whole time I was with him he never caught a fish or cooked a meal or served a guest or lifted a finger – unless it was to raise a Lao beer to his lips. If he was an entrepreneur, then he was the goddamn laziest entrepreneur in all of Laos.

  My dog Pickle died shortly before I flew out for this leg of the journey. While I was away in Cambodia a hard, cancerous lump had formed in her throat, and by the time I came back cachexia had set in. Her muscles were melting into her bones, and the skin hung like an old curtain from the pole of her spine. She died in my arms, on our bed. Ten days later I got on a plane again. Her death was still so raw, so new, that I would routinely howl on the cool marble floor of the hotel toilet once the long filming days were over and I was on my own again.

  That afternoon, as Bounsom began what turned out to be a two-hour session at the mic, a little pup bounced over to me, big-pawed and cocky, the colour of sand with a white bib that began under her jaw and ended mid-belly. Just like Pickle. She came and sought me out, fat tail swinging, needle teeth biting in play. She wound in and around my legs as if to say, I love you, but I knew that wasn’t true. She was merely using me, and the coarseness of my denim trousers, to provide temporary relief from the fleas.

  Then, when the heat of the sun became too much, she crawled into my arms and passed out, her long legs dangling in the breeze. Bounsom had now changed tack, and was using his public platform to regale the audience with his plans for a hotel complex and retail park. (God, his wife was going to be busy.)

  But I am no longer listening to him. I am no longer listening to anything. I am merely cradling this dog, and trying to calculate the practical, logistical and financial implications of taking her home with me on the plane.

  It is another hour before she wakes again, by which point I am up and dancing with her still in my grasp, as Bounsom belts out another South East Asian floor-filler.

  So, a question. What naturally follows three hours of tub-thumping karaoke? That’s right, you got it: an intense spiritual communion. It was now time to roll headlong into something known as a Baci ceremony.

  A Baci is a Buddhist ritual in which a holy man recalls the thirty-two spirits that supposedly inhabit each human body (in this instance, mine). Laotians believe these spirits are responsible for our thirty-two organs, so when they drift away from us, it can have a profound effect on our mental and physical wellbeing. The rite effectively calls the spirits home to where they belong so that one’s life might function fully again.

  In order to attract these wayward souls, a large, handmade pyramid of marigolds was erected. I sat cross-legged underneath it, while the monk, a man well into his eighties, began to chant and intone. Dozens of villagers appeared, taking their place alongside me, bowing their heads and muttering along. Bounsom would occasionally interject – his booming bulldozer of a voice ensuring that any building sense of the spiritual was quickly kicked into touch.

  Candles were lit, and offerings made: a little cash, a little whisky. Spirits love spirits. More villagers arrived, encircling me, protecting me, casting out the bad, and welcoming in the good.

  Fifteen minutes in, and I was nudged gently in the ribs. A villager proffered his arm so I took the cue and did the same. I held out my left arm, and one by one the villagers tied thin cotton bracelets around my wrist in pink, red, orange and white. The strings ensure that the recalled spirits stay with you. I thanked each celebrant as they completed their knot, and they responded by pressing lightly on my pulse point and saying a blessing. After a couple of minutes, my arm was full, almost to the elbow. The right was next, and that too was quickly covered. By the time they had finished I looked like I was wearing a pair of ethnic, hand-woven gauntlets.

  The holy men say that if you want your wishes to come true, you have to wait for at least three days before you remove the strings. When it comes time to remove them, they should be untied, rather than cut, as cutting the strings means the good wishes might be severed. The best option, though, is to leave them and let them fall off naturally. The guys all cut theirs off that night. In fact, I’m not sure Olly even waited until the end of the ceremony before he took his Leatherman out and started hacking at the strings. Stuff and nonsense, he said.

  Yes, of course, you’re right. It is stuff and nonsense. Yet I kept mine on nonetheless – all of them. I couldn’t tell you why. An element of politeness? For sure. Superstition? Maybe. Because no attempt to try to rationalize the universe is too ‘out there’ for me? Why, yes indeed.

  But it was more potent than that. There was something about that day – that concentration of feeling, that purity of intent – that really stayed with me. I liked them, plain and simple. I liked those gentle villagers, who gave up a piece of their day for me, to commune with me, to make me whole again.

  So the strings stayed on. And on. Occasionally one would break off, or unravel, until the last one remained.

  The final braid fell off this January, 2018, seconds after I’d released a seismic fart into the bathtub. Ah, the majesty of the cosmos. After looking through my diaries, I noticed it was exactly four years on from that Baci ceremony. It had taken 1,461 days for my unruly spirits to reunite.

  And as it fell, down the side of the bath onto the mat beneath, Tig was there, out of nowhere, to lick my naked wrist. Tig, the brindled Staffie, who steals food and sneaks about, who is wilful and needy and believes, despite the trauma of her early years, that the world spins just for her. Exactly like Pickle – the reincarnation of naughty Pickle.

  It’s OK, I thought – staring at the newly exposed pale circle of skin – your souls are home.

  We’re all home.

  16. Lies, Dam Lies and Statistics

  One of the fundamental rules of documentary film-making seems to be that a presenter must never be allowed to get comfortable – either physically or mentally. And while that can prove troublesome and disruptive, I guess it means I have to constantly challenge my ideas and feelings about a place.

  We left the peace and tranquillity of Si Phan Don – and, just in case I was getting too used to the finer things in life, like fresh air and vegetables, Steve decided to change it up a little. He wasn’t on this shoot in person, but was still busy operating the levers from back home. As I’ve said before, I like to think of him as a shadowy figure, Charlie from Charlie’s Angels – back to camera, surrounded by gorgeous women – giving us some God-awful assignment by Western Electric speakerphone before hopping on a surfboard and catching some good ol’ Gower waves.

  STEVE: So, how is Sue?

  PRODUCER: Great. She’s having a wonderful time in the Four Thousand Islands, hanging with some stray puppies and singing karaoke.

  STEVE: I see. Then it’s time to send her down a sewer, or a mine – or maybe to a building site. Yes, a really messy, noisy building site. Do it.

  Steve didn’t just send me to any old building site: he sent me to one of the largest, and most controversial, in Asia – the Xayaburi Dam. This was the first dam to cross the main stem of the Lower Mekong, and would end up completely blocking the flow of the river – a river that fifty million people depend on for their livelihoods. In order to learn a little more, I had an appointment to meet the spectacularly monikered Mr Virapong Viravong, the vice minister for energy and mines.

  It may surprise you to know that I don’t get to speak to many ministers on account of the fact that:

  (a) I am deeply suspicious of anyone in government and their motives.

  (b) I have a compulsion to tell them that I am deeply suspicious of them and their motives.

  I am not the person you send in to speak to a minister. I am the sort of person you get to stand outside the minister’s office with a megaphone and luxuriantly punned protest sign until the p
olice turn up and move them on.

  My interfaces with those in positions of power have been brief but eventful: a red-faced outburst at Tory MP John Whittingdale, a rant in a lift to Tory MP Ed Vaizey and a misdial when working as a temp, which saw me get inadvertently connected to the finance minister of the Estonian National Government.

  This is a sensitive subject, and complex, too. Dams are deeply controversial in Laos. The Mekong is a river shared: it flows through six nations, rich and poor, Communist and capitalist, through cities and paddy fields. The action taken at one single point can have a catastrophic effect on the millions who rely on it for their livelihood.fn1

  We headed to the site, the tarmac pathway widening to a vast concrete boulevard. I was treated like a five-star general: the roads were cleared; I had my own security detail, and men in uniform saluted as I drove past. I saluted back at them – it was a reflex, I’ll be honest – I’m not trained. As I reached the head office at Xayaburi, there was a halo of flash-bulbs, as a load of silent men in skinny jeans trained their camcorders and iPhones on me. It soon became clear that we were not only making a documentary about the dam officials, but the dam officials were making a documentary about us.

  Incredible, isn’t it, that you can travel to the poorest regions on earth, and you’ll still find ‘information officers’ and ‘media managers’ there to make sure I stay on message and the party line is toed.

  Mr Virapong was waiting to greet me, stiff-backed and gracious. I bowed in greeting, then shook his hand. If he was surprised at my scruffiness (I was in double-denim and a neck buff – what was I thinking?) then he gave nothing away. Although, as I walked through the door and he caught a glimpse of my ill-advised harem pants, I thought I could detect a faint twitch in the corner of his eye.

  There was precious little time for formalities: this was business. No sooner had I said my hellos than I was propelled headlong into a rather formal and intense presentation on the technical specifications of the hydroelectric plant.