A portion of an E-mail written by Patrick Martino…

The Price is Right (Laos)

No one has to haggle over the price of a cheeseburger in America. The price is always clearly understood because it is printed on a menu. While traveling through South East Asia, however, I have found menus and printed prices often don't exist. While visiting Laos, I learned the hard way you should always ask how much something costs before you order.

Northern Laos is a country filled with tall marching green-jungle mountains cut by long narrow valleys. There are few roads or even towns. In the town of Muang Sing, less than ten miles from the Chinese border, the majority of the populous lives high in the hills and mountains, where the higher elevation provides the ideal cool environment for growing corn, dry rice, and the cash crop of the region: opium. The population is an eclectic mix of unique tribes Akha, Hmong, and Thai Dam, some of whom still wear their traditional costumes. It is to see these tribal people and the surrounding scenery that most tourists are attracted to Northern Laos.

The mountains around Muang Sing are laced with unmarked hard packed walking trails, which are the only links between the villages. Under a bright shining sun, one afternoon, I ventured for a brief walk from my guest house onto the mountain paths to explore.

I climbed a modest mountain and then descended into a remote valley of tall marsh grasses and dry rice paddies.

At the end of the trail, an Akha family was seated in a hut enjoying a meal. A teenage girl, with a pink blouse and her black hair wrapped in a black turban decorated with shiny silver coins and cowrie shells, enthusiastically shouted in Lao from a window, "Hello."

The girl had a round face and a stern almost hostile countenance. She was perhaps thirteen or fourteen years of age. She motioned to her mouth, shouted in English "Money! Money!", pointed to her mouth again, and then to me. It seemed she wanted to know if I would join the family for a meal.

Being invited to partake in a meal with a local family is a unique and often rewarding experience. I jumped at the chance but should have been warned by her overly enthusiastic calls for money.

The bamboo hut was raised on stilts half a story. It was tiny, half the size of a one car garage. It floors and walls were made of bamboo and its roof was thatched with palm leaves. A barbed wire fence ran below the hut. The huts posts straddled the fence. I had to dip low and duck to pass between two of the barbed wire strands to reach the bamboo ladder, which led into the tiny hut.

Inside I found the girl, who had so eagerly called to me, her bright eyed yet silent younger sister, a mother nursing her baby daughter, and an aged grandmother with wide white and missing teeth. The other women wore the same ornate traditional Akha headgear as the girl who called me, a black squarish turban covered with silver coins and white shiny shells. A young man with raven black hair and wearing a western white shirt, who I assume was the father of the baby girl, also was waiting for me as I climbed the short ladder.

They motioned for me to sit and to enjoy the food before them. The meal was basic. We feasted on white steamed rice eaten with our hands and slices of a white looking carrot. The carrot tasted like a radish. Using bamboo chopsticks I followed the example of my guest's. I dipped my slices of white carrot into a green slurry of spicy vegetables, held in a wooden bowl.

I did not eat much. Radishes and rice are not my favorites but I was pleased to have the experience. I was pleased to gain a perspective on just how simply most people in the world eat.

I could not communicate with the family as they chatted with each other. I just smiled to show my satisfaction.

The family seemed to enjoy my visit. They were mystified by the size of my feet and the pictures in the books I carried in my knapsack.

It was only when I began to leave and wanted to pay that their was a commotion of sorts. I had forgotten to ask before I began to eat just how much my meal would cost.

"How much I asked," as I motioned that I would like to give something for their hospitality and the meal. The girl who had invited me to dine clapped her hands twice and then struck the back of her hands together once. I smiled and mimicked the clapping. She grew upset. I clearly wasn't understanding.

She repeated the same clapping for a second time and then a third. I did just as she did and smiled thinking it was some type of game of paddy cake. It took me awhile to realize the clapping was a method of counting.

The young man in the white shirt realized I did not understand. He reached for my pen and paper inside of my knapsack. He wrote the number twenty. I was shocked. "Twenty thousand kip?" I asked. "For a little bit of rice and some radishes? No way!"

Twenty thousand kip is roughly two dollars in Laos. It is a lot of money. You could buy a room in a guest house for twenty thousand kip. There was no way I was going to pay twenty thousand kip.

I had made a large mistake, when offering to pay, by opening my money belt. The young man saw I was a millionaire and must have inflated the price.

The Lao kip is extremely weak when compared to the US dollar. When I exchanged a one hundred dollar bill at the border with Thailand, just three days before, I received 1,610,000 kip and a stack of notes roughly six inches thick.

My attempts to negotiate the price down from twenty thousand kip aggravated the girl who had invited me to dinner. "Money, Money!" she shouted as she pointed to her brother and then to his antique musket propped up against the fence outside the hut. Her avarice and unbridled cupidity were shocking. She seemed to have an ambivalent hate for me because I was not generously doling out the funds to her family.

The gun had the bore of a .22 and looked more appropriate for a museum than for hunting. It had the longest black barrel I have ever seen. From its shoulder stock to the end of its bore it must have been five feet in length.

"Money , Money!" the tiny tyrant kept repeating, pointing at my money belt and then the gun. The rest of the family was silent.

I took out six thousand kip. I thought six thousand was more than enough. It was a fair price for a meal with vegetables and rice in any town.

The young man, however, wasn't pleased with my tender offer. He smiled and wrote again on my paper. Fifteen thousand was the new price. I shook my head. He wrote ten thousand. I shook my head again and gave him eight thousand kip.

To have given the family ten thousand would have been an extra twenty cents, no big deal to most people. I am however traveling until my money runs out. I have long ago stopped calculating my expenditures in dollars and cents. I looked at the two thousand kip difference not as two dimes but as a loaf of bread or a bottle of water I would be without. Eight thousand was more than generous.

Even though the young man and the rest of the family seemed satisfied with eight thousand kip the little Napoleon was not. She still howled for more cash. She grasped the barrel of the gun and shook it back and forth from where it was resting on the fence, not pointing it at me but seeming to want to. She guarded the stairs of the bamboo hut.

I laughed, not out of fear or because of the absurdity of the young girls actions but in an effort to diffuse the situation. The rest of the family seemed to smile and laugh with me, perhaps in acknowledgment of the girls greed. Even as I left, the girl rattled the fence as I ducted beneath it, hoping to ensnare me, and still crying "Money! Money!"

What could have been an all around positive experience ended up disappointedly because I had forgotten before hand to ask for the price of my meal.

I suppose I don't blame the girl for wanting more money.

What would you charge Bill Gates if he walked into your backward barbecue carrying a brief case full of cash and asked for a cheese burger?

Index of Patrick’s Stories