Captain Hook

Currently staying at the Captain Hook Homestay near Tat Lo waterfall in central Laos. We read about the homestay in our guidebook but Captain Hook himself didn’t know he made the Lonely Planet cut. With only two rooms in the homestay his world is going to blow up in the next six months.

The homestay is accessible only by car and is marked by a handprinted wooden sign along the road. Stone faced locals collected a 10000 kip development fee before lowering a rope gate to let us through. The daylight is fading rapidly so I’m having a hard time writing. We arrived at the homestay to a group of three older women sitting around passing a large bamboo bong. Hook greeted us in English and French before passing the pipe my direction. He explained that smoking the sugarcane soaked tobacco is a traditional part of life in the village (I was skeptical of this at first but since then we’ve seen people sitting around smoking the towering bongs everywhere. Woman washing clothes? Pipe in hand. Hunter returning from the forest with a wild boar across his shoulders? Ripping the bamboo bong with his free hand)

The tobacco was surprisingly smooth despite its intense delivery system and we made small talk while Hook showed me how to create enough suction to pull on the wide mouthed, moderately air-tight water pipe. We booked a tour later in the afternoon and headed to Tat Lo waterfall nearby for lunch.

We ate curry while playing kitchen with a three year old girl. At the waterfall Louise happened to touch a reactive plant… we grazed our fingers against the pine like needles and the plant retracted them towards the branch.

We got back to the homestay at three to start the tour. I feel inundated with the amount of interesting content that came up during the tour so I’m just gonna puke it all up here in bullet point form. I’ve tried to share this information exactly as I understood it during our time with Hook.

• Pregnant women in the village go into the forest to give birth with a midwife. If they die during childbirth they are buried in a separate part of the forest standing upright. The ceremony takes three days to complete and the body is buried in sections. The head is buried last to give the spirit all the time it needs to escape to heaven (located on the moon).
• It is customary to build your own coffin before you die. If you happen to die during the rice planting season your body goes into the coffin inside your one room house for 1-2 months until your family has enough time to complete the death ceremony.
• If someone happens to die an accidental death, your family must leave the village to live in the forest for five years. As we walked through the main square of the village, Hook pointed out the deserted frame of a house that was abandoned two years ago due to an accidental death. He explained that if the family were to return before their five years was up it would bring very bad luck to the village.
• Hook wants to build another small guesthouse overlooking a meadow but he’s having a hard time negotiating for the land as the people that own it have no use for money
• Men have multiple wives and parents typically arrange their first marriage around 8 years old. One of Hook’s friends is married to three sisters, and his 9 year old niece was recently married to a 50 year old man.
• We ate ants that tasted like citrus and killed them on our skin to act as mosquito repellent
• In an annual ceremony the village ties a puppy to a post and kicks it until it dies to kill off the potential bad luck in the upcoming year. Next, five water buffalos are sacrificed to bring good luck for the year.
• The calendar in the village is 8 months long and the months are named by the food that is harvested in them (Rice, Mango, etc)
• Most of the villagers don’t speak the Lao language and there is no written version of the language they speak in the village. All traditions and knowledge is passed orally and generationally.
• White people are shocking and are explained by saying that they drink so much milk that they turn white. Longer noses are explained by increased bread consumption, blond hair by drinking “red water” (wine), and blue eyes explained by overindulging in “green water” (soda).
• Mr. Cook got his education through his laziness (his words). He was too lazy to work in the fields and his parents decided to put him through secondary school instead. When his parents tried to arrange his first marriage, he negotiated with his brother to take his place, and he weaseled out of his second marriage arrangement by giving the woman away to his cousin. At this point he’d traveled to Bangkok to study English, and his parents began to write him letters begging him to come home, saying that his grandparents were on their death beds. He came back to the village, found his grandparents in good health, and his parents awaiting him with a third arranged marriage. He gave in and started the homestay. Hook has been entirely ostracized by the village due to the fact that he’s had sex with a woman outside of marriage (I didn’t understand this fully while he explained it, but due to his error he’s no longer allowed in anyone else’s home)
• All extended families live under one roof… Hook has 34 people living under his. Some of the other houses had families of 70 living in them. All the houses are built on stilts and are made of wood. Hook explained that the women work much more than the men, and that as a man accumulates wives he gets to sit back, mediate, and manage. Hooks father had three wives.
• We walked along the coffee farm and Captain Hook outlined the history of coffee. We tasted and smelled medicinal plants. As we continued past a rice field, he told us that if anyone touches someone else’s rice plants they kill all the chance for a good harvest. If anyone finds out about the corrupted harvest the perp will be forced to buy the rice owner a water buffalo (or, alternatively, you can go live with them for two months to reverse the bad luck)

• Hook showed us “the romance leaf” and played it to create a grass buzzing sound that people use to court each other in the village. With another plant, he peeled off a portion of the stem and launched the remaining needle-like portion like an arrow into the woods. Afterwords he showed us a scar near his eye where he took one of the plant-arrows to the face as a child.
• Louise helped the women cook dinner inside over a wood burning stove. Each “mini family” within the collective eats separately. We sat with Hook and his wife Sue. Sticky rice, spicy fish paste, and peanut fried morning glory were served on a large communal plant. Taking hunks of sticky rice from the wicker boxes we rolled them into tight balls and mashed them with finger full of fish and veggies. There’s no refrigeration in the house as all food is eaten immediately after its collected. We drank water from the steam nearby as Thai TV played in the background. Excess food was pushed through the floorboards to be gobbled up by the pigs waiting below. The ever present sugar tobacco bongs were passed casually around the room as the extended family sat entranced by the TV. A grandmother hawked loogies and spat them through the floor. I made the mistake of sitting on the wood floor and was quickly shooed to the mat in the center of the room. Hook explained that you only let guests sit on the floor if you don’t respect them. He has a slow, deliberate way of speaking that is really pleasant.
• To name a new child, the father has to wait until he has a dream during a full moon. He then recounts the dream to a shaman. If the shaman determines that the dream is positive they will name the child. If the dream is negative one must wait until the next full moon & dream. Because of this children can go unnamed for years.
• We woke up a 6 am to help prepare the sticky rice for the first two meals of the day. The rice soaks in water for five hours before steaming for an hour in a wicker basket covered in Banana leaves and placed in boiling water.
• Shifting perceptions and mentalities have been driven by the introduction of electricity, and, alongside it, TV. Shows imported from Thailand show dramatically different ways of life and way of living that before had never been seen in the village. This contributes to a growing divide between the TV generation and the elders. Hook is caught in the middles. His two grandmothers moved out of the house when he started hosting foreigners for fear of tourists taking their photos. They believe that when someone captures an image of you it also captures some of your life. This causes you to die early.
• Hook said his being cast out by the community had to do with him having sex out of wedlock with girls from outside the village. I asked, “but how would anyone know?”
  • He explained
    • Two years ago the elder female guru in the village performed her usual ceremony to contact the spirits. The spirits were silent, signaling that someone in the village broken a community law. Thus she set out to uncover the culprit. They used the ole bowl and dry rice test. One by one, members of the community placed a knife vertically into a bowl of dry rice. If the knife fell over, they were innocent. Eventually,, the elders came to Hook to test him. His knife stuck. He denied any wrongdoing, and they repeated the test for specific crimes. EX: Did Hook leave the village and convert to Buddhism? The knife falls. Did Hook have sex before marriage? The knife sticks.
• Due to this misstep Hooks family was required to give a variety of livestock to the powers that be in the village. He is no longer allowed to enter other peoples houses because he is a bad omen. If he wants to leave the village, he can do so only for a limited amount of time and he must be accompanied by someone else to ensure he behaves properly.

It’s a hard spot to be in and not one that I’m jealous of. Gifted with a scholarship via the government and exposed to different ways of thinking through travel, Hook is using the hand he’s been dealt to educate people on his culture and provide for his family. He is an outcast nonetheless.

Maybe this will change as the influx of modern media modernizes the mentality of the village, but for now Hook is forced to play the long game.