Project Sekong 2012: It’s a slow journey to reach Sekong Province. We make some packing mistakes and have a mess to clean up.
This being the dry season, the road to Sekong was passible. No mud to bog us down but twice we had to be pulled up steep hills when our wheels couldn't move through thick dust.
Report 1
We spent our first day in camp inspecting all the equipment that we carried from Vientiane, looking for damage and cleaning everything that was soiled by road dirt and diesel smoke. It was an all-day job, made necessary by conditions largely beyond our control but magnified by a few silly choices we made when we packed.
The road was miserable. The first forty miles were supposed to be the easiest of the trip. That stretch was, in fact, flat and wide but the road’s surface was all loose rock, as if the builders had deposited a billion cobble stones but had yet to set a single rock in place. We averaged a little over thirteen miles per hour and, even at that snail’s pace, managed to hammer the daylights out of all our cargo.
Der, our driver, foolishly concluded packing the truck by suspending a plastic bag of raw chicken eggs from a ceiling support over the bed. Of course, every egg broke, the bag split and yolk splashed over all our baggage and equipment. That would have been mess enough but all the brick-red road dust we kicked up settled on the wet egg and created slurry that eventually dried to the hardness of aged concrete. Do I remember correctly from my art history class that Michelangelo plastered walls with just such a mixture and then painted murals that have survived for centuries? The egg and clay mixture we created has thus far survived all our effects to scrub it away.
The jack hammering we inflicted on ourselves also damaged my store of emergency foods. I assumed that my precious canned meats and vegetables could survive almost any abuse but somewhere along the way several cans of tuna fish burst at the seam and dripped their contents over our cargo, mostly onto items that had providentially been spared splattering with egg.
Once we’ve cleaned what can be cleaned we’ll start testing each piece of electrical equipment to determine what still works and what needs repair. Surprisingly, it appears that all three of our light bulbs made it in good shape (assuming that, when shaken, silence is golden). If the generator still works, and if our fuel isn’t contaminated, we just might cook under lights this evening.