The Coffee Diaries
In Search of Mindfulness and the Best Coffee in Lao
Eerie ghost towns, wild foreigners and the sunken city of Pakse
On a Sunday afternoon, in a dusty town in Tbong Khmum province, I managed to find the confidence of going to the coffee shop in front of the market for the first time. The place was always crowded with shirtless and police uniformed men and all have dead-eyed stared me down every time I approached the place in the past.
You see, I was desperate. The closest place next to where I lived, a coffee stall the size of a British phone booth by the main road, was my default choice for too damn long. The daily habit of drinking a morning brew was cut short to a leisure activity on the weekend and only on weekends because I find the Cambodian coffee, served in a small Tequila glass, to be so strong that one shot will stay with you throughout the entire week, turning your innards into stew.
The lack of acidity and the overflow of bitterness was an unfamiliar taste I welcomed without hesitation like with most things, social and cultural, during the first couple of months of living in Cambodia. “Such a unique flavor!” I said with the first sip. “Not only does it wake you up but it kicks you in the teeth,” I said after the second, trying to convince myself. No amount of convincing could ignore the dryness in my tongue and the instant heartburn I would get once I finished it.
A fellow English teacher told me where I could find good coffee. “There? The place with all the cops and shirtless tattooed men?”
“Yes. Don’t worry. They’re Buddhist tattoos,” he tells me.
I approach the place and they stare me down, as anticipated. Even on a road under construction, a silence falls upon us. This is how a showdown begins, I’ve seen it in those Clint Eastwood movies. But this isn’t the West. I put my hands in a prayer formation, raise them to the front of my face and greet them all formally in their language and in return I get smiles and laughter.
I try to say “sorry for the hesitation and the awkwardness, I’m not myself without good coffee”, but my Khmer skills aren’t good enough to make excuses, something that is essential in the survival toolkit for Americans but isn’t so in Cambodia.
I sit down and the shopkeeper brings me a tall glass of coffee with ice at the top and condensed milk at the bottom, a common sight in South East Asia. My God if it wasn’t the best coffee I ever had. The acidity of the delicate Arabica beans, almost caramelized, smoothly settles in the palate and what lingers is an almost chocolatey taste, like cocoa even. I tell the shopkeeper this and he smiles humbly as if he’s heard it a thousand times before. That’s why this place is packed.
“Where are the beans from?” I ask.
“Prateh Lao,” he says.
I dial a friend of mine living north and ask him: “hey babe, do you want to go to Laos?”
After an 8 hour ride north in a 12 seat van carrying 26 people and 3 chickens, I get to Stung Treng, a province that borders Lao’s southern territory. It’s here where I’ll rendezvous with other friends. The next morning we hitch a ride that takes us to the border and beyond, the 4,000 islands to be specific. At the border checkpoint, the guards ask us for 2 extra dollars aside from 35 that was the visa cost. I look for any other instructions I might’ve missed.
“For what?” I ask them.
“For the stamp,” the guards say.
“Is the stamp made of gold?” I ask. Then it hits me.
Having lived in Mexico, I’ve had my fair share of extortions. The police there are almost comedians, with their devilish smiles and sweet-talking, it comes off casually to them since they’ve practiced so many times and though we anticipate it already, we’re always taken aback once they drop the punchline. I hadn’t experienced it yet in Asia.
“Oh! Now I know what’s going on,” I hand him the two dollars. “It better be a beautiful stamp.”
It was. The best I’ve ever seen. Welcome to Lao.
We were at the checkpoint for another hour waiting for the rest of our company. Our van driver tells us in Khmer that the other passengers, tourists, weren’t so contempt with the extra two bucks either and made a scene which also led to the guards frisking them simply because they can and what turns out of it? A large sum of cash.
Being able to throw down several dozens of dollars on branded glasses or booze willingly with no remorse but makes a fit when asked for an additional two dollars at an entry checkpoint are traits from a type of people I don’t understand. A superiority complex kicks in as if it were a calling, and they don’t hold back. Tourists.
You can enter a country with a limited amount of money on you and if you have more than that well you smuggle it in which is just a fancy way of saying you hide in places that people wouldn’t find on the first try. As in, not in your God damn pant’s pocket. As volunteers, we weren’t as concerned because no way in hell would we have that kind of money.
“How much are we talking here?” I ask the driver. He said a sum that had too many zeros for me to follow. “How much in dollars?”
“12 thousand,” he says.
“12 Gs in your pockets?! What if the dude fell in the river?” I say.
“If that happened to me, That would be a bad day,” the driver says.
Indeed. What became of him, who knows. We got back on the road arrived at a port that would take us to one of the 4,000 islands to stay the night.
The original plan was to kayak on the Mekong River and count the islands one by one to make sure they were 4,000, not one more and not one less, but the weather had other plans. We woke to thunder and the rattling of rain against rooftop metal sheets. The narrow streets of the island of Don Det were so flooded that children with improvised fishing rods tried their luck. The Mekong’s current was so strong that the island’s coastal roads were no more and now one with the river. Without asking, we knew there would be no way off this island any time soon.
“My good sir!” I approached the owner of an Indian Restaurant that was next door to our hostel. “I have two questions for you: 1) when can we leave this island and go to Pakse and 2) where can we find good coffee?”
“Even if I could find you a boat that goes to the mainland, the Mekong flooded all roads north. It seems you’re stuck on this island. Coffee? You can find here,” he says with a grin. You can’t win them all.
Two days later, we’re notified that boats can ride across the river and the road to Pakse, Lao’s most southern city, is no longer as flooded. The scene looked similar to a mass exodus. Fishermen with their motorized canoes were brought in to help ferry the angry horde of tourists awaiting departure. We were relieved that our travel plans weren’t entirely down the shitter but still swirling around the bowl with water.
Once we arrived at Pakse we witnessed the toll. Cars served as jet-skis, kicking up water as they plowed through the flooded streets. Motorcyclists had surrendered and stood by their rides on sidewalks waiting for help of any kind. Many didn’t wait. A roundabout on a hill gave us an eagle’s nest view of the city. The local college stadium looked as if it had been abandoned some time ago and nature had reclaimed it, army trucks filled with plastic poncho wearing soldiers were at every street conjunction and passengers beside me gasped at the site of an entire neighborhood submerged. The top parts of the few standing metal huts poked out of the water, some with people standing on them. Countless houses lost.
We kept driving, simply because there wasn’t a place dry enough to be dropped off at. Amid everything we saw through the windows of our protected van, shielded from the presumable pandemonium of the outside world, hopelessness was not to be seen. Dogs stood above the water on top of cars and rooftops, small families on even smaller canoes and makeshift rafts mildly paddled their way through the inner neighborhood streets and groups of men sat on inflated donuts (the ones you would see at the beach or waterparks) with a cold bucket in between them and laughter all around. One of them caught me staring and raised his beer my way.
We reached the main avenue where cars roamed without restraints. The driver let us out and sped off before we could ask him where to stay. We went from guesthouse to guesthouse asking for rooms, which they all had, but all gave the same answer: no electricity and no running water. It seemed to be the same answer for coffee shops and restaurants, too. Pakse was without electricity and, quite ironically, water. We couldn’t stay here. A tuk-tuk driver noticed our desperation.
Every other destination in the southern part of Lao was flooded too, according to him. We hoped of going to Thakek, to visit the Konglor caves and ride the motorcycle loop, but we kissed that plan goodbye for good. The only area that surely wouldn’t be flooded was the mountains in the Bolaven Plateau, where the coffee is at.
“It seems like we’re heading to Paksong a couple of days early,” I tell my friends and to the driver I ask: “how much to get over there?”
He says an exaggerated amount.
I say “you have to be fucking kidding me,” in my mind and not to him. He gives us a greedy grin. We take a step away and huddle together like a football team. Here’s the cold truth of it: we can’t stay in Pakse, he knows that. He also knows that, given the state of emergency Pakse is going through, no buses are leaving for other areas at the moment. Maybe if we waited two to three days the roads will get better, but, where could we hold out the storm? We have no second option.
“Let me go negotiate with the man,” I say to my friends. “I’ve lived in Mexico and Thailand before, I’ve done this before. Don’t worry, I got this.”
I return no more than a minute later to inform them that I did not have it. Tuk-tuk driver won. In less than an hour we were on another ride inbound for the mountainous region of the Bolaven Plateau, temporarily putting the sunken city of Pakse in the rearview mirror.
In the end we were thankful that there was a way to leave the city. Wheels rolled on asphalt for hours. Fog began to cloud visibility and our eardrums popped due to altitude. The Bolaven Plateau made an astonishing entrance as the mountain ridges flanked both sides of the main highway. Paksong, the coffee hub of the region, sat right in the middle of it and that’s where we were heading.
There were no other moving cars on the road. We passed by houses and shops that all gave the vague impression of being abandoned to the mist. The place would be a ghost town but it appears that even ghosts were absent.
“So… where do we stop?” the driver asked, not looking as nervous as we were. The group was hesitant to respond. Then, I eventually said: “To wherever we can get some coffee.”
We stopped at the first opened restaurant by the road. Van doors open and the cold smacks us in the face. We had forgotten what shivers were, what numbness felt like. None of us had proper clothing for cold temperatures. When living in Cambodia, why would you ever need it? It didn’t matter; we had made it to the coffee.
“Bring me a cup of your country’s finest!” I say to no one in particular as I enter the restaurant and to the waitress: “Lao coffee, please.”
We huddle around a fold-out metal table and one by one they bring the coffees. I was the last to receive one. The glass was small, more suitable for a mojito than coffee, with a metallic pour-over filter on top and nearly two fingers of condensed milk at the bottom. The waitress initiated the procedure. Warm water was already inside what I could only assume was a Vietnamese drip filter to moist (I hate that word, moist) the medium-coarse coffee beans. A few seconds later, she poured the rest of the warm water into the filter and the dripping began. I was a bit concerned with the excessive amount of milk in the glass. Such sweetness in coffee is only ever acceptable when making frappes to children or hipsters. But the rich aroma of Arabica convinced me to give it a chance.
“OH, BALLS THIS IS GOOD!”
“Shhhh!” a friend of mine hisses. “Your Western-ness is showing.”
I didn’t hear her. I couldn’t hear anything. The few seconds it took to take my first sip and splash it around the palate, I swear it was longer than a cigarette puff, longer than a kiss. A caramelized nutty flavor, almost chocolatey, stayed after I passed it down. Better than any kiss I’ve ever had, I reckoned.
“Alright, I’m satisfied. Let’s go back home,” I tell my friends. They let out a giggle. I wasn’t joking. What else could we do in this town? Besides us there’s no one else here but the mountains and the distant echoes of waterfalls.
We drank.
Off the top of my mind I can think of three great things about Lao: the people, the coffee, and the beer. I’m not sure of what hocus-pocus is put into the fermentation process, but its final product carries a honey-fruitful taste, one that doesn’t clash with its must or bitterness. And the fact that it comes in a big ass bottle and at a more than reasonable price, makes both the tourists and locals gather around joyfully. Lao lager sat well with us, like a bottle of warm milk before bedtime, and we called it a night earlier than expected.
Amidst the tossing and turning on my hard spring bed, a vague sound of yelling could be heard in the back of my mind but I wasn’t sober enough to get out of bed. The next morning, a friend asked if I had heard the shouting. I told her yes and that I tend to scream when I sleep so I thought it was me. She looked puzzled, lost interest in what she had asked, and expected an explanation from me. I told her it was too damn early to get into that.
My friends went out for breakfast and I stayed to get business done in the bathroom. I could never go if someone else was in the room. Two minutes into sitting on the toilet I hear pounding. BOOM BOOM, the sound of boots against door followed by a faint cracking of wood.
“YOU GET OUT HERE RIGHT NOW!!!! I’M GONNA FUCK YOU UP!!!!” a voice comes from the other side of my room’s front door and another barrage of pounding hits it. “COME OUT HERE, BITCHES!!!! YOU WANNA FUCK WITH ME??!!”
I’ve envisioned myself getting attacked while on the toilet before. It has always been a personal nightmare of mine. You can be prepared for anything, but not for this. It’s the most insecure spot a person can be and I’ve considered keeping a pair of numb chucks hidden in the toilet’s tank. I knew this day would eventually come.
“Alright, let’s do this.” I pull up my pants, put the lid down though I’m not yet finished (a habit) and go outside.
“Can I help you?” I say to the man as I creek the door open just enough for my pointy nose to get through. He’s shirtless but with pants and lumberjack boots on; about my height and not really in shape but still in better shape than me; he looks confused when he sees me, more than I must look.
“OH SHIT, MAN! Are you American?” He asks. He looks agitated, jumping around, like boxers before a fight. At this point I don’t know if his quarrel is with Americans or not.
“No, señor,” I say. I look for marks on his arms that could indicate drug use. None. His eyes aren’t red either. Maybe just good old fashion crazy.
“Woah, Spanish. What the hell…” He says, more confused.
“Si, señor.” Who could ever have beef with possibly the only Mexican in rural Lao? “¿Se encuentra bien?” I play along.
“Oh, man. I’m so sorry, man. I thought you were Lao,” he says.
“Tu,” I point to him, “Tu eres A-me-ri-ca-no?” His English isn’t a second language. I can tell he’s from California.
“Yeah, yeah. Vietnamese American. I’m here for work, but ever since I got here, THOSE motherf — “ he points out the balcony to a group of kids and elderly people watching us — “have been harassing me!” I take a look at them. Three kids maybe teens, an elderly man with a coffee cup, and two women in cleaning uniforms. Is he referring to the hotel staff? “Those little — yeah, I’m talking to you! Come over here and fight me you pieces of — “ he directs his anger at them. While he unlashes cuss after cuss, I slowly tiptoe back into my room, close the door which now has a dent courtesy of a big boot and sit back down on the toilet. This made me miss the craziness of California.
Paksong was still engulfed in mist and the occasional light sprinkle. There were no tuk-tuks or motorcycle rentals to be found, so we walked. We came here for coffee, and nothing will stand in our way. Except for a crazy American on the loose. Ten minutes into our walk and we can hear his not so distant rant.
“What the hell you looking at?!” a yell pierces through but we cannot see him. The surrounding fog is as thick as butter and the thought that he can appear in any given place without us anticipating it puts us on edge. Another yell seems louder: “Bitch ass foos!” Behind us, we see a silhouette get darker and darker as he approaches.
“Run!” I tell my friends. We fast pace to the nearest coffee shop. We weren’t surprised to find it closed like the rest of Paksong. As we waited by the garage door acting as a front entrance, we could hear the exclamatory words of the crazed man approaching. Suddenly, the garage opens and a greyish-white bearded European greets us.
“Coffee?” he says in slick French. Our savior brings us a round of double-shot espressos. The crema sits on the surface like milky waves on a shallow shore. It’s strong but it doesn’t kick you in the jaw. It fills the belly and warms the heart. We learn that the beans are grown in a collective plantation behind the houses of the main road. Think of it as one big communal backyard, each taking care of their beans.
We take a road toward the plantations. The fog still blinds us, we move without direction. People think beans come out similar to how they are in their bags as if they were plucked from the branches like apples. They can be red or green and easily mistaken for berries.
A beauty caught my eye. Close to the plantations, a 1926 Suzuki motorcycle sat in front of a bohemian style coffee shop. The owner of the shop was turning it on for maintenance. The engine sounded like a lawnmower, but still working. “Coffee?” the owner asked before a brief conversation that involved the moto’s backstory. Why the hell not, we said. He manually grounded the beans from the plantation behind his shop. Once coarse, he put them in a drip filter as he talked about how the coffee business is a community lead effort. The shop’s decor was in a style that suited my tastes. For a small moment, I envisioned myself owning a place like this; for an even smaller one, I was happy.
It was time to head back to the sunken city of Pakse. The nights were cold and damp in the Bolaven Plateau; but the mornings were with milk coffee, huddled around a fire, on a cliff with views of a waterfall descending into another realm. Paksong was put in the rearview mirror when we hitched a ride on the back of a once military truck that serves as the town’s main form of transportation west. A black and white photo of El Che Guevara was stamped on the driver’s rear window; his legacy had reached the other side of the world.
A little more than two hours of green fields and mountain ridges and we were back in Pakse on roads that were once underwater. The floods had dispersed south and many streets saw sunlight, many more hadn’t yet. The city had awakened and was alive again.
“It has never been this bad before,” the owner of an Indian restaurant and hostel where we decided to stay told us. “Of the nine years I’ve been here I have never seen the city underwater.” We previously came to this place once we first arrived in Pakse, but because of the flooding we couldn’t stay. Now, we sit in the restaurant with coffee in our hands. The other guests here at the hostel are all middle-aged men from places you wouldn’t expect to run into in southern Lao: Andorra, Morocco, Britain, Croatia, and India. Some traveling, others simply shrugged and said they didn’t know when asked why they were in Lao.
“So it’s not a seasonal thing, huh?” I asked.
“Water filling up the streets during rainy season is normal. But an over flooded Mekong rushing down river and taking everything with it isn’t,” he says. I’m not sure of what he’s implying. Ever since I’ve entered the country I’ve been cut off from the outside world. I’m not aware of the gravity of this monsoon’s toll. My confusion is evident.
“Chi-na,” the Englishman seated at the table next to us mouths in a whisper. Both the men mockingly looked over their shoulders, as if a Communist spy was lurking about. “And all their dams being built upriver all the way to the Yunnan.”
I inch closer and mouth back at them: “Do tell.”
“Hey my friend,” his eyes are trying to focus on mine like a digital camera, his breath smells of a two-dollar bottle of Lao whiskey. “In all honesty, I love you, but fuck you.”
Tension fills the room with hushed words exchanged between associates. At this moment, more friends had arrived and heard what was said out of context.
“What’s going on?” a buddy of mine asks.
“Just making new friends,” I tell him.
After hours at the Indian restaurant, we’d decided to linger and drink more of Lao’s lagers. My friends and I, huddled tightly to ourselves, were talking about the trip, how mostly nothing went according to plan yet it was very fun, when an older guest here approaches us.
“Are you Americans?” he asks. Most Americans know that when abroad that question can either go great or not so great. Usually, it’s the latter. “Everyone in the world knows of America: the movies, the music, and the clothes. But do Americans know about my country, Morocco?” He went on for many minutes more. He was right about a lot of things and we acknowledge them. “In my country, there’s a saying: if you speak four languages you’re a successful businessman, if you speak three you’re a Doctor, if two then you’re a professor, and if you speak one you’re American.”
Truer words had never been said, and that is the case for most Americans, but what the man didn’t know was that the people sitting at the table were Chinese-American, Peruvian-American, and Mexican-American, all fluent in at least another language more, who live in Cambodia and also spoke Khmer.
As if noticing potential hostility, one of the other travelers brought a guitar to lighten the mood. “Who knows how to play?” the Morocco man asks to no one in particular.
“Marco can,” says a friend of mine.
Fuck, I whisper.
“Can you?” asked the Moroccan man.
“Well, it’s been so long — “ the guitar is shoved into my chest. Without asking for it, I already have an audience waiting. I strum a few chords to remind myself that I’m not completely useless with a guitar. I can’t remember any songs and the people are waiting. I decide to play Riptide, the only song I would say I knew by heart until that night.
I forget the strumming pattern and scarcely remember the lyrics, but I push through. Rhythm picks up, I see heads bobbing, they’re expecting something fucking amazing. No need to keep the beat with my foot, my heart is practically beating in my left ear. I open my mouth and I hear a crack in my voice. Oh Christ this is gonna suck, I say to myself. Somehow we make it to the chorus intact, and the eight most repetitive lines of any traditional song are erased from my memory. I’ve forgotten how it goes, so I hum. I hum until someone has enough pity to end this.
The guitar is yanked from my hands. I expect no applause, but I hear it and it’s coming from one person. The drunken Moroccan man.
“You did something that came from the heart. I respect that. We all do. But hey, man,” he lays his hand on my shoulder and says: “I love you, but fuck you.”
The day came for the long haul back home. We left early morning the next day and a total of 13 hours on the road awaited me. Pakse was alive and bustling as if the underwater experience was only but a vivid dream. Reminiscing on last night’s episode, I was glad of how it ended. As soon as I had told the guitar-wielding man “fuck you” as well, we started telling everyone in the hostel that. By midnight we were all hugging each other and singing songs from House of the Rising Sun to Bésame Mucho and Bella Ciao. When bedtime came, the farewell norm was to tell everyone “good night, I love you, but fuck all of you.”
What seemed like a five minute shut eye later and we’re back at the border. Same procedure: extra two dollars for the stamp. I contemplate the idea of sprinting to Cambodia. Would they chase after me for two dollars? The more important question: should my lazy ass run for only two dollars? Border guards won again.
Border crossings on foot is a surreal experience. What is between the two checkpoints of countries? Borderlands? What if someone died in the area or gave birth? What if I killed someone and —
“Passport,” says the man at the checkpoint. I greet him in Khmer. He is surprised that we know the language. The faces of Cambodian people always glow up when they hear their tongue spoken by foreigners. It motivates us to keep practicing it.
“Miss us?” I ask the guards. They all giggle.
“Of course!” they tell us.
In Stung Treng I part ways with friends who live there and I hop on another ride that goes south. I’d need to hitch on another three vans that will take me to Kratie, then Kampong Cham, and finally east to Tbong Khmum bordering Vietnam.
Kratie, a province that runs south along the Mekong, is just as flooded as Pakse. The Mekong looks more of a sea than a river, but many Cambodian houses are made in a way that anticipates these events. They’re built on wooden stilts, houses planked on top high above the ground. The rice fields look as deep as lakes and I envision any sort of sea creature living in it, tentacles reaching out from the abyss, wrangling and constricting refugee oxen and cows stranded along the national road.
Cars move through the like boats. I see people outside of their homes looking at the river that was once their main road. I assume the electricity is out hence the children playing in the waters, all unable to control their laughter. I see dogs on cars and tables and trees, trying their best to get as far away from a bath, siblings on makeshift rafts rowing through their parent’s rice paddies playing as adventurers, and circles of men on tires and plastic chairs with a cold bucket in between. One of them catches me staring and raises his beer to me. I whisper something in English and the old lady in front of me turns back as if astonished that the foreigner knows a foreign language. I repeat what I had said to her in Khmer: it’s good to be home.
