“Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he will sit in the boat and drink beer all day.” (Mahatma Gandhi)

As I begin to write this article, at this very moment, actually, I feel obligated to inform my loyal readers that I am not in my usual abnormal state of mind. Well, not the same abnormal state of mind, anyway.  I have been water fasting for 92 hours. That’s right, no food, only water, for just about 4 days now. And since I’ve sort of just started, and this article could take days to write, I may at times sound a little less delusional than usual.

Allow me to digress a little. Some of you may wonder why I’m interested in aquaponics and why on earth I want to do it on the Bolaven Plateau. Well, the truth is, I’ve wanted to play with aquaponics for ages. I just want to do it. So, indulge me a little. The Bolaven Plateau simply bumped into my train of thought at the right time.  Then, having seen some villages there where they still practice slash and burn agriculture, and knowing that much of the more rural population, especially the children, suffer from malnutrition, I realized that I might be able to help by setting up a model. If it doesn’t serve to reduce rural poverty one day, at least I’ll be able to have my fun and say I tried.

One thing that must be understood about the Bolaven Plateau is that it’s far from being the ideal place to raise Nile tilapia. It can get downright cold there at 1,200m. That’s why the whole system needs to be in a greenhouse. However, the greenhouse design has to allow for a lot of ventilation during the day as daytime temperatures can get pretty high. The average mean temperature is 19.5 C, and tilapia thrive in a water temperature of 28 C. Can a fairly constant air and water temperature of 25 to 28 C be maintained year round without the use of sophisticated heating equipment? Only time will tell, but I think so.

What are the advantages of raising an immensely popular yet tropically inclined fish, not to mention a myriad of tropical vegetables, in the cold climate on top of an extinct volcano? Well, there’s a fancy marketing term for it, I’m sure. Something to do with the fact that the same stuff has to be brought up by truck from the city of Pakse which is roughly 1,000m in elevation away.

This is the aquaponic system I envision without its greenhouse enclosure.

This is the system I envision (without the greenhouse enclosure). It is almost exactly 1/4 the size of the University of the Virgin Islands’ commercial scale system but with a number of modifications (not necessarily improvements). Those familiar with the system at the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI) will first note that the fish rearing tank I’ve incorporated is not very circular. In fact, it’s undeniably rectangular. This one will hold about the same amount of water as 1 of the 4 tanks utilized in the UVI system, about 8,000l. I’ll probably build it with bricks, a mortar render, and a coating of waterproof paint/sealant on the inside. It will face south and the exposed surfaces will be painted flat black in order to get some passive heating during the day. As an aside, the coldest season is also the sunniest. Whereas the UVI system stocks each tank with fingerlings and leaves them in the same tank until harvest, I’ve decided to have one tank that can be partitioned into four areas, the size of each partition being adjustable in accordance with the state of growth of the fish. This will give the little fish less room to frolic about than in the UVI system, but will allow the bigger fish a bit more room to stretch their fins.

Four more or less equally spaced drains in the bottom of the tank will take the fish poo and any uneaten food by gravity to a larger pipe which will in turn divide this waste water among 4 clarifiers, one for each hydroponic tank. Those are the bigger of the blue drums that you see in the sketch at 200l each. A number of DIY swirl filter designs are available on the internet. The solids will need to be removed from a bottom drain periodically, probably a few times a day. This is excellent worm food, or it can be applied directly to my coffee trees. From the clarifiers the water goes first into a smaller blue drum filled with bird netting then into a second blue drum for a bit of vigorous aeration. The first acts as a filter for smaller suspended solids and is also a biofilter of sorts, and the second is for degassing. My system’s solids removal, biofiltering, and degassing may not be up to par with the UVI system, but since it will use easily available materials it will be easy to expand it if necessary.

Water spinach, pak bung in Thai and Lao, growing in the UVI system.

From the degassing drums the water flows by gravity into the hydroponic component of the system. Each hydraulic tank is 40cm deep and will be filled with water to a depth of 30cm. They are 1.2m wide and 12m long. The combined grow area is 57.6m2. This is also roughly 1/4 the size of the UVI system. The tanks, or troughs, will be lined with pond liner (plastic). They will be made by shallowly excavating the 1.2m by 12m area, filling polypropylene bags with the earth, and stacking the bags 3 courses high (30cm). This is called earthbag building. The bags will function as both the walls and the aisleways. They will be covered with burlap to protect them from UV light. As aisleways, at about 35cm wide, they are a bit precarious (especially the center aisleway which has wooden poles projecting upwards every 2.8m), but planting and harvesting are actually done from the ends (the plants will grow on floating Styrofoam boards, each 1.2m X 0.6m, so you just pull them off at the far end and load them again at the front end). Besides, a 35mm aisleway is enough room for a petite Lao girl to dance in circles without falling into a patch of lettuce. I, however, am sure to tumble in once or twice.

Praws, glorious prawns! I'm getting hungry.

One thing I will be doing, which is a bit daring but has seen some success by others, is adding giant freshwater prawns (technically, they are shrimp, I read somewhere, but who cares), Macrobrachium rosenbergii, to the hydroponic component. It is claimed that they will only eat the dead roots of plants, not the healthy ones, and will vacuum up the fish poo and other suspended solids which make it past my homemade instruments of clarification and settle on the bottom. These same suspended solids often cause problems as they coat the roots of the plants, making it difficult for them to suck up nutrients. Supposedly the smaller prawns will take refuge in the roots of the plants to avoid cannibalism by their brethren.

As for the system’s capabilities, on an annual basis, let’s take an example in which the 4 hydroponic tanks were planted 1 each with basil, lettuce, okra, and pak bung (water spinach). The results, including Nile tilapia and freshwater prawns, are as follows:

• Basil – 312kg
• Lettuce – 2,100 heads
• okra – 181kg
• Pak bung – 2,000kg
• Nile tilapia – 1,000kg
• Freshwater prawns – 150kg

Most of the greenhouse enclosure that I envision.

I’m trying to design a system that will run on 500W or less (water pump, aeration, lights). I’ll have plenty of power from my 14m high waterfall, but if it’s going to work in some remote village that’s not connected to the grid, running off of a small, inexpensive hydropower setup is a key to success. In the same strain, the use of easily available materials, including the earth beneath your feet, is essential. With that in mind, I came up with the greenhouse enclosure shown here. The file got too big so use your imagination for the front opening.

Without getting into too much detail in this article, I found that some innovative people in the West have set up tunnel greenhouses in their backyards using only PVC pipes. Some reinforce it by putting an equal length of rebar into the pipe and capping both ends. I like it, as both are flexible, cheap, and available everywhere. I plan on using 12mm pipe for wiring (the yellow stuff) with 9mm rebar shoved down it. I’ll have some 30cm lengths of 25mm steel piping with a 40 or 50cm piece of rebar firmly welded to the bottom and bang these into the ground until only the pipe is exposed. One end of the PVC/rebar poles will be planted in these, and they will arch over to the wooden structure running down the center, where they will be firmly attached. With as little waste as possible in mind, I’ve designed it such that the combination of a left-hand segment and right-hand segment is about 10m. This is the standard length of rebar. The segments are at a span of 1.4m, and the posts are at 2.8m. This is due to the fact that the greenhouse plastic comes in 3m wide rolls. Short pieces of slightly larger diameter PVC pipe will be cut vertically such that they will act as fasteners, or clips, holding the plastic sheeting to the framework.

Well, that’s it for now. I’m going to join one or two aquaponics forums that I often lurk on and warn them that there is another amateur out there with delusions of grandeur. Readers! I’m actually going to start building this next month, so any constructive criticism will be much appreciated. By the way, writing this was fun, as only one who has, at this very moment, subsisted on water and air for 116 hours and lost 6.5kg.

On the eve of a trip that will take me back to the United States, a place that I haven’t been to since the very beginning of the Bush administration, before 9/ll, actually, you’re right if you think I may be “contemplative,” to say the least. But before these infrequent if a bit freakish overseas business trips, I’m always a bit, well, silly. This year’s silliness involves running, and running shoes, in particular. Since I was last in the States, a movement has taken place, entirely without my knowledge. It’s called minimalist, or barefoot (nearly) running. I’m in the middle of a book called “Born to Run” by Christopher McDougall. It’s a fascinating bit of non-fiction (non-fiction is always stranger than fiction) and it’s cool how the whole running shoe industry got it wrong. I see this in the pharmaceutical and processed food industries, as well, but that’s another matter. So, I’ve got an insatiable foot fetish at the moment. I wonder how many jugs of beer I’ll be forced to drink if I show up at a Hash House Harriers run in something like these. . .

It was in Vienna, in fact, when I was doing sort of the same tour, in late Autumn of 2010, that I was overcome by another, stranger, silliness. I felt like I’d missed some of those rights of passage that other men/boys have been lucky enough to have. I’ve never been in a fist fight, and, to my mother’s great dismay, I never got a university degree. But, after days, if not weeks (I don’t remember) of research on the internet, and with many hours to kill in Vienna before my boss and one more guy showed up, I proceeded to a quiet part of the city. The entrance to the establishment was discrete, to say the least. With butterflies in my stomach, I entered. A kindly receptionist offered me a menu and duly noted my intention. Inquiries to “specialists” were made and, within moments, I was ushered into a small room with a raised bed, of sorts.  I was instructed by a young, quite pretty, in fact, specialist to remove my trousers and underwear, but I could keep my shirt on. There is something about keeping the shirt on that exacerbates the utter nakedness below. Anyway, the service that she provided was very much business as usual, for her. My naughty bits were sanitized and, gradually, every hair was ripped from my genital area. The specialist’s English wasn’t very good, but she managed a “You’re very brave man.” I appreciated that, as I held back the tears, as I’d read about how some men undergoing what their website now calls a Brazilian Hollywood Cut scream and run out, not forgetting their trousers on the way, I hope.

A "don't miss" spot when on business in Germany.

I don’t remember, completely, anyway, how getting a portion of my pubic hair stuck in my zipper one day escalated to this admittedly bizarre overreaction. I suffered certain consequences, however, as you’d expect. No, not itching or anything like that. That waxed feeling is quite superb, actually, and I can understand how one cannot stop after surviving the first one. Later in the trip we stopped in Baden-Baden, the famous German hot spring resort (yes, this was purely business). This was after a visit to Carlsbad (Karlovy Vary), the famous hot springs in the Czech Republic (yes, this was purely business, too). From a Japanese point of view, Carlsbad was pathetic. Old people with varying degrees of rheumatism walking from spring to spring with a silly looking cup in their hands and DRINKING the hot water. Where were the baths? Anyway, my punishment for doing silly things awaited me in Baden-Baden where we discovered enough free time to visit Friedrichsbad Roman-Irish Bath. Although the Japanese are quite accustomed to public bathing in hot springs, sometimes mixed gender bathing, they always have a small towel to hide their naughty bits. Friedrichsbad Roman-Irish Bath is, on certain days of the week, mixed gender, as it was when we went, and they do not allow anything other than as-you-were-born dress, including a no-towel policy. So, during dinner the evening before this adventure, around dessert time, I felt compelled to warn them of my truly baby-like appearance which they would undoubtedly notice, anyway. I anticipated a lot of chuckling and a bit of admiration for my bravery, but instead I got some serious looks of disbelief. I wasn’t prepared with any statistics about male waxing of the genital area in Japan, nor did I have quite the vocabulary needed. I ordered another beer with a strong schnapps chaser. I had plenty of time to drink them both before my boss replied, “You did what?”

I wonder if she's ever dealt with feet this big. Nice floppy hat.

So, there you have it. I’m sure you will all be glad that I won’t be writing again, probably, until I return, in nearly a month’s time. In the meantime, I have packed and prepared, in my foot-related way, for my journey. A truly wonderful thing about Vientiane is the great number of Vietnamese women offering foot and nail care. My foot, as you can see, is about as big as her knee downward. Unfortunately the lady with the porous rock, who can remove about a 500g of dead skin from the soles of both your feet in about 10 minutes, has returned to Vietnam. I won’t be waxing on this trip, philosophically or otherwise, as 35 euros will go a long way towards a pair of minimalist running shoes.

Crapper design utilizing smaller earthbags. Notice the batch solar water heater.

I have great expectations for this trip, and it will be interesting to see just how thoroughly fate dashes them, as usual. The good news is that I’ve almost run out of money, so I can be faithful to my pledge of using only sustainable building practices and utilizing the simplest of locally available materials. Since a moderate period of poverty is on the horizon, it’s essential to have a crapper and bath to go along with my humble abode, so that I can stay there and frugally subsist, if nothing else. The crapper/bath design has both evolved and devolved over time. The design is no longer bomb-proof, though it could still sustain hits from three sides if the US ever decides to resume their illegal bombing in the area. I managed to get my hands on smaller, 40cm X 70cm, polypropylene bags. These will be sufficient since it will be a small, relatively low-walled building. Without the roof, it will look something like what you can see to the left.

This is an example of a composting toilet.

The most exciting aspect of this design is the composting toilet. No real composting occurs in the toilet, it merely houses a temporary turd receptacle. There is no greater nightmare for a woman than a composting toilet. A turd of any size should be thoroughly washed away to any location as far away as possible, if not oblivion, with copious amounts of potable water and “dealt with.” I will compost this “humanure,” but I haven’t decided what to do with it after it’s becomes, for all practical purposes, entirely safe. Perhaps I’ll pass it through the guts of composting worms, just to be on the overly safe side. Which brings me to an interesting quote from Joseph Jenkins’ The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure.

A young English couple was visiting with me one summer after I had been composting humanure for about six years. One evening, as dinner was being prepared, the couple suddenly understood the horrible reality of their situation: the food they were about to eat was recycled human shit. When this fact abruptly dawned upon them, it seemed to set off an instinctive alarm, possibly inherited directly from Queen Victoria. “We don’t want to eat shit!” they informed me, rather distressed (that’s an exact quote), as if in preparing dinner I had simply set a steaming turd on a plate in front of them with a knife, fork and napkin.

With a composting toilet, you simply do your business as usual, wipe your bum, deposit the toilet paper nearby your turd, and cover the lot with a layer of organic material such as sawdust, or, in my case, rice husks. I have discovered, however, that a woman who is used to dispensing with her turds using gallons of potable water requires gallons of organic material to convincingly cover any sized turd.

Okay, it's supposed to look like this, but better, when done.

I’ve decided to include a bath, as well– not just a shower, as I had earlier planned. I miss taking hot baths at night, as I did when I lived in Japan. I’m going to dabble with a building method known as laminated ferrocement for the waterproof bath basin. I’ll discuss this in detail if I can get even close to getting it to work. Having the bath, I’ll need more hot water than earlier anticipated, so two 55-gallon drums, painted black, insulated with rice husks, with reflective foil surrounding them, and covered with plate glass, will be my batch hot water heater. I’ll add an electric water heating element, if necessary. The bigger, raised tank, is the ordinary water tank that I envision. The system needs gravity to work. No reason not to paint it flat black, too. The carpet-like material acting as a roof is actually going to be thatch, a very cheap and durable material found in great abundance locally. Those nice, square beams will actually be round timber from some area that I intend to clear, if the cousin from Pakse hasn’t already sold my chainsaw.

This is a view from the weir of the crossing point. Flow is slow but the water is high.

The crossing point is about 20 or 25m upstream from the weir, which I’m standing on as I take the photo to the left. A number of boards in the weir are used to adjust the level of the water. When the stream is high and the crossing difficult to negotiate by motorbike, people (mostly relatives of the owner, Billy), remove some of the boards. I don’t want them to. An additional function of the crossing is to raise the stream’s water level behind it. This will make it possible to stock it with more rainbow trout. However, judging from the low flow during the relatively short dry season, I think I’ll be forced to harvest most of them each year before the dry season begins and stock again afterwords.

The first gravel bags go down, the back-breaking work begins.

I wanted Billy to work on the access road and was determined to do the crossing myself. I’d paid Billy and the Cousin from Pakse to complete the job, including filling in between and beside the concrete strips with dirt and applying sod. I paid them for a truckload of dirt to make it easier. However, not only did the dirt cost more than they expected, the Cousin from Pakse had promptly lost this money, and his mobile phone, and then, to top it off, he contracted malaria. This is the kind of thing that happens if I’m not on site. . . So, here I am, being determined to do all the work myself (except for the concrete, which I’m allergic to).

This is the progress I made during the first afternoon working on my own.

I’d taken two boards out of the slot in the weir to lower the water level a bit. This exposed most of the stream bed nicely. The biggest problem was the fact that the gravel was in the wrong place. It should have been within a few paces of me at all times, but it was in fact located up the access slope at the top of the hill, and my crossing wasn’t. Another problem is that gravel is damned heavy. Each polypropylene bag was to be filled with a just-barely-manageable load of 6 heaping shovelfuls. I’d hoped to be able to load 3 bags at a time in the wheelbarrow, but as I haphazardly began down the access slope with them, I confirmed a number of the fundamental principles of classical physics, principal amongst them being inertia. And since inertia comes from the Latin word, iners, meaning idle, or lazy, I could see no reason not to unload a bag right then and there. My determination to do this bit of the project on my own would gradually succumb to iners.

Billy removed the last boards in the weir, lowering the water lever further and highlighting my remarkable progress from the afternoon before.

I was taken by surprise to see Billy walking about expectantly the next morning after pulling out the remaining boards in the weir. Communication is not always smooth between us. The day before when I was at my little retirement shack trying to encourage myself to do something, Billy was around so I asked him if the wheelbarrow was up the hill at his shack. He confirmed that it was. By the time I’d gotten my sneakers on and progressed as slowly as possible to admire the crossing site before getting at it, he’d managed to bring the wheelbarrow, a shovel, and other instruments of destruction all the way down the hill and had parked them neatly at the crossing. So, I was to begin my task by pushing these items back up the hill to where I needed them.

After a laying a few courses of gravel bags, we began filling the void between them.

Now, there are some very good reasons why I accepted Billy’s offer (at least that’s how I interpreted it) to haul bags of gravel down the hill. First and foremost was the fact that it allowed me to concentrate my full attention on the extremely important, delicate, in fact, task of placing the gravel bags. It takes a certain knack and a rather exceptional, if brief, burst of energy to lay a bag down in such a way that the top of the bag is folded under and it is abutted firmly against another bag. Billy, I reasoned, also had a lower center of gravity which would help him manage the load down the hill, and narrower hips that would fit better than mine between the handles of the wheelbarrow.  Oh, and then I remembered the most important reason which rendered me guilt-free– I was paying him.  And so it was that Billy would go up the hill to fetch a load of bags and return. It was my job to unload the bags from the wheelbarrow. After successfully maneuvering all two bags into place, I would sit down in the shade and drink beer, considering future placement points the whole time, of course, and wait for Billy to return with another load.

By the afternoon of the third day we'd finished laying all the courses.

We took the dirt from the bottom of the hillside beside the access slope. This is where, someday, my aquaponics greenhouse and mushroom cave will be, so it would eventually have to be dug out, anyway. Billy formed large piles of dirt quite adeptly with a hoe and I assumed the task of filling the wheelbarrow each time he’d come back from dumping a load. The digging site was far enough away from the crossing that I could sit down and have a few sips of beer while I waited. The beer tasted even better when I’d go and check the progress, pacing around on the freshly dumped dirt, packing it firmly. I did this while Billy attacked the hillside again with his hoe.

By late afternoon we'd finished filling and tamping so Billy started on the formwork.

Progress on the third day went quicker than expected. My legs were sore from the first afternoon of going up and down that hill, and Billy, who’d done it twice as many times, was hurting, too. He’d filled the last of the bags, 7 or so, that I’d brought with me and, while he was feeding his pigs that morning, I drove past them on my way to the market to see if I could get some more. They were still there when I returned, so I tried something, something that I’d considered doing from the beginning, but a little voice in my head had called me a pussy for it– I was supposed to be getting fit, after all. So, I loaded 5 bags into the back of my Chinese SUV and drove down the hill to the stream crossing and unloaded them there. Billy caught on quickly and soon I was ferrying bags full of gravel as fast as he could fill them. Iners, but we were both happy for it. That afternoon we finished filling in with dirt.

A six-wheeler delivers sand and gravel down the access slope. Sigh. . .

I couldn’t stay any longer and, like I said, I’m allergic to mixing and carrying concrete, so Billy was paid for three more days of work to get the job done. To my utter dissatisfaction, Billy assured me that we needed more gravel and sand to complete the project. I looked at the piles at the top of the hill suspiciously. I considered the fact that, eventually, more would actually be needed down there for other projects, so I agreed to getting one 6-wheeler with half a load of sand and half a load of gravel. An odd memory came back to me as I watched that 6-wheeler go down the access slope towards the crossing with gravel. It reminded me of when I was 20 years old and had walked 10 or 12 days along the Tokaido, the ancient route linking Tokyo and Osaka. I’d given up part way through, as I often do, and returned to Tokyo by bullet train, in about 35 minutes.

By this time on Christmas Eve I was completely exhausted from the full day in the kitchen and unlimited beers.

Arriving back in Ubon about 5:00 p.m. on the 23rd, my first step in getting prepared for the Christmas Eve buffet was to mix myself a strong Sangsom & Red Bull. I followed this with another strong one because, well, I could. Then I started soaking 1,500g of navy beans and relaxed a bit until Tony arrived with the piglet. Tony and his lovely wife decided to stay the night in the accommodation behind the pub, and since he was joined buy a modestly robust group of regular expat patrons, I proceeded to procrastinate until well after midnight when I finally applied a spice rub to the inside of the piglet’s belly and stitched it up. So far I’d only cut myself twice.

Not my oven, but it works the same way. When baking, the fire and any coals are removed and the door is closed.

I’d had a fire made that evening, too, and, interrupting my procrastination briefly, I started preparing some stock with the clever idea that I’d just put it in the oven over night. The wood-fired oven is about 20 to 25cm thick with firebricks and concrete and insulated with rice-husk ash. It absorbs an incredible amount of heat; the heat later radiates from all directions, cooking food quite nicely. This type of oven has been in use in the West since at least the formation of the Roman Republic. The trouble is, they take a long time to heat up and a long time to cool down. That’s why I had the fire made the night before I was going to put it to heavy use. I’d also planned to make two more fires, one shortly before the piglet, and one after the piglet. I learned last year that it is much easier to deal with an oven that is too hot, but there’s not much that can be done when an oven is not releasing enough heat.

This little piggie was looking tasty.

The next morning, I pulled the stock out only to find that not much had happened to it. It went on the stove. The heat doesn’t care which direction it goes, deeper into the oven walls, or into the food that’s supposed to be cooking. It needs to be saturated with heat.  So I got a fire going. I actually brought firewood with me from Laos as the stuff we use at the pub is usually not very dry (cutoffs from a local sawmill). I’ll spare you the details, but the piglet came out looking quite superb.

This is what I looked like as I was forgetting about the baked beans in the oven, until the next morning.

I boiled the beans while in the oven with the piglet. At the point in the photo I turned the piglet over and added potatoes to roast. They needed more time to finish off later. I made another fire and got the two turkeys, which had been in brine from morning, inside under aluminum foil about 2-1/2 hours before serving time.  They came out perfectly. As did the stuffing and other stuff. The baked beans weren’t quite ready, though, so I put them back in the oven and forgot about them until the next morning. This is a photo of me forgetting them. All in all it was an excellent meal, I was told. Anyway, I survived.

If successful, I will have the first rainbow trout farm in Laos. If.

One of the main reasons I ventured up onto the Bolaven Plateau was to check if the water temperature and volume were sufficient to farm rainbow trout. The King of Thailand has a Royal Project at Doi Inthanon in Chiang Mai. According to my sources, they can’t produce enough to meet domestic demand. It’s at a similar elevation of over 1,000 meters. If successful, I will have the first rainbow trout farm in Laos. Big “if,” though.

The weir on the middle tier.

The biggest issue is water temperature. It has to be cold enough. I’ve been monitoring it for a number of months now, and it has only once reached a borderline high of 22 degrees C. Mostly, it’s been between 17 and 19 degrees. The optimum temperature is 16 degrees. That’s the environment in which they eat the most and grow the quickest. Another issue is flow. Rainbow trout need a lot of well-oxygenated water. The photo here was taken in early September. I’d say it’s got about a third of the flow now that the dry season has set in, but still a cubic meter or more per second.

Farm-raised rainbow trout are usually raised in raceways, which are basically artificial streams, often made out of concrete. In the flow-through method, water is channeled from up stream through these raceways and returned to the source further down stream, relying on gravity to do the work. I’d been struggling with how I would work this out. Raising the water level up stream helps, but it’s a lot of work to channel it, not to mention having to construct the raceways, which I was going to do using pond liners instead of concrete.

15 or so meters up stream of the weir, this is where I'll raise the water level by 40cm and contain my rainbow trout.

But then came my moment of clarity. Why create an artificial stream when I’ve got a real one going straight through my land? Why use a fraction of the flow when I can use all of it? Duh. If the stream formed the border between my parcel of land and the next, I can imagine the problems, but from one point on the middle tier to one point at the far end of the bottommost tier, the stream is entirely on my property. Shortly after it exits my property, it joins a much bigger stream, a river, actually, so the environmental impact of, say, 10,000 rainbow trout peeing and pooing in the stream is worth noting, but not worrying. I’ve seen nothing larger than a minnow so far so I doubt any barricades that I put up to contain the trout will match the 14-meter waterfall just down stream, in terms of preventing the migration of any natural critters. I have to fly in what are known as eyed eggs from the United States and hatch them myself. They will all be certified females, so their accidental escape does not pose a long-term threat to existing critters, either. By constructing the Irish Bridge I’ll be able to increase the water volume behind it by 50 to 100 cubic meters from its existing 50 to 100 cubic meters (I’ve got some measuring to do when I’m there next).

And what does one do with 10,000 rainbow trout, you may ask? Well, besides sell them, I’ll charge people to come and catch them.

Nothing like a campfire to untangle your thoughts.

Fire is a tool here. A child learns how to build and control a fire by about the age of 7. It is an important but mundane facet of daily life, very much as it would have been for ancestral humans and their immediate predecessor species, going back almost a million years, when fire was an omnipresent tool, of sorts. But I’m (escaping) from a “modern society” where fire is used more as a decoration than a tool. I should have outgrown playing with fire a long time ago, but I can’t keep from gazing into those burning, bright red embers. It was on the second evening I spent on my site, the cold wind blowing from behind, up my spine and down my bum crack (because my one and only sweater is too small), that I was rewarded with bursts of flames after each gust of wind, and a few moments of clarity.

Irish Bridge at Whitely Woods, Yorkshire.

The importance of this bridge is growing in leaps and bounds. In fact, it should no longer be called a bridge. Billy agrees that we could easily raise the water level upstream of it by 40cm or so. So, it’s going to be more of a water feature than a bridge, and closer to a dam in terms of function. I still want it to look something like the stream crossing shown here. Generally, there will always be water flowing over it. The neighbors have confirmed that they don’t mind driving their motorbikes through about 10cm of water.

Step 4. Add river gravel, and voila!

The way I’m going to go about building this crossing is pretty much the same as before. I’ll use woven polypropylene bags containing river gravel on the two sides, although I think one row on each side is sufficient, lay down concrete pipes, enough to take on the entire flow in the dry season, and fill the area in between with dirt and more river gravel. It’s just going to be higher than I originally intended, but there is a reason for this. Okay, so it hardly justifies the “Moments of Clarity” title, because, after all, I’m just going to raise the water level higher than I had planned and keep it running over the crossing throughout the year. But keep reading.

Nope, not sleeping here tonight.

But my not quite completed retirement home was a good bit less completed than I expected. It seemed a bit, well, more “airy” than I desired. Like, all four walls, ceiling and floor, open. In fact, if a pile of logs had, for whatever reason, just fallen from the sky, then that is roughly what you would find. But what a view! Okay, fair enough, it’s not a sheer 14 meter drop, but it would be a bumpy ride down to the bottom.  So, fully expecting to spend the night in my little house, I reluctantly went into town and checked into a guest house.

At first I though he was just trying to get me to help carry them, but how amazing, planks cut on site. . .

Progress, if the word exists here, must be preceded by “painfully” or “excruciatingly” slow. Two full days later, I was determined to sleep in my unfinished retirement home. But I was thoroughly enjoying it all. I mean, the day before, when I was waiting for the crew to show up, this guy and his wife showed up, chatted with me despite my broken Lao, then proceeded through my land into the jungle. Later I heard the sound of a chainsaw, and I watched a huge tree fall from the cousin’s land. What’s that all about, I thought. But, of course, it was my floor. By the end of the second day there was neither a roof nor anything resembling walls, so I slept at a guest house again.

A little bit of mosquito netting will keep the wind out. Anyway, beer Lao in the cooler.

By the third day, there was something resembling a roof and a floor, so I was determined to stay there. This was, after all, an important moment for me. I’d had it played out in my mind for weeks. So I put up my mosquito netting and laid down my freshly purchased bedding. I was resolute about spending my first night there alone. I mean, I was a boyscout at one time in my life, and I had the advantage of having a cooler full of Beer Lao. I had it all planned. A big fire, with seating for a number of my friends, reserved seating, of course, as I knew they could not attend. I was going to put the seats around the fire, take photos, etc., but, of course, my crew wouldn’t leave me alone. They just don’t understand that “I want to be left alone!” for Christ’s sake.

They just wouldn't let me enjoy the moment on my own. Okay. . . What the hell.

And so it was that Billy and the Cousin from Pakse suddenly showed up. I’d been mucking about for a few minutes trying to get the big fire going using kindling and such, and of course the Cousin from Pakse, assuming I haven’t got a clue how to do anything, has a piece of rubber inner tube with him. I mean, give me a liter of diesel fuel to pour over it, and I’ll get it going. Billy and I both complained about the smell. I took the time to show Billy what I intended to do with the stream crossing, and we discussed important matters, such as how beautiful Vietnamese girls are, as Billy had lived there for 6 years. It was then that Billy realized, though I’d told him many times, that the only useful skill I have is speaking Japanese. He threw at me a “Good morning!” and a “Good night!” and a “Young Japanese girls are very pretty, aren’t they?” to which we could not find any disagreement, because you know all these things if you’ve helped the Japanese build bridges build bridges, which I guess he must have done.

Skwerered pork, sliced potatoes, rice with herbs and stuff, and, most importantly, Beer Lao in a bowl.

I eventually drove them off and began making dinner. Of the most important things in life, I’d forgotten one of the least of them, a glass. The lack of importance is due to the fact that almost anything holds liquid. So I used a noodle bowl. In fact, I think I’ll always use the noodle bowl to drink beer. It wasn’t actually so cold that night, so I remember very little after that, as I slept so well, with just the sound of the waterfall beside me.

Almost liveable. Ah, but with the sound of the waterfall, what a pleasant sleep.

By the next night, I almost had walls. I mean, it looks like I have all the walls, but actually the wall on the far end wasn’t up yet. But, what an effect.  There is something about sitting around a fire. Something very primitive, I suppose. Anyway, this is my retirement home. It almost seems fine to me.

A photo from last year's Christmas Eve party. Men are also welcome.

With 6 or so days to go until Christmas Eve, it’s decision making time. The most important ingredient is, of course, all of you. Especially the girls and not-quite girls who dressed up so finely for us last year. Everyone is encouraged to wear red, but I don’t see what’s wrong with green, and wearing clothes at all is not necessarily enforced. Anyway, as usual, we will do our very best to keep you at the Wrong Way Cafe until the wee hours of the morning Christmas day. And, to empower yourself for this important endeavor, you will have to have a good feed. That’s where I come in. In fact, it’s the only meaningful role that I play in the whole thing.

This year, in addition to the roasted turkeys and traditional gravy and such, and not-so-traditional Thai food, I’m going to roast a piglet. I’ve never roasted a piglet, so you will all be my guinea pigs. Most people resort to pit roasting them or spit roasting them, as they don’t fit easily into a household oven, but I’ve got a wood-fired oven, so this year I’m going to put it to maximum use. Allowing a lot of creative latitude, I’m going to follow something Google found for me which is wood-fired oven specific. What is interesting is that this guy, Francesco, cooks 2kg of cannellini beans in the oven at the same time. The article states that the beans are of vital importance, because the water absorbs excess heat, and also (by evaporation) gives the oven the proper amount of humidity. Well, the closest I can get to cannellini beans is navy beans, so that means, allowing a bit of improvisation, Boston Baked Beans. Oh, and he roasts potatoes along with the piglet, on the same roasting tray; they absorb the juices and are coated with the runoff fat. . . Yummy.

Pig on Tony's farm recycling its urine; they have been trained to do this from remarkable distances.

But first I’ve got to get myself a piglet. And not just any piglet. I have the great pleasure of knowing an Aussie gentleman named Tony who manages a small, sustainable, pig farm in Ban Hua Sua, Sisaket. Recently he’s been experimenting with making his own soil. Anyway, nothing goes to waste on Tony’s pig farm. The pig manure is composted and sold as organic fertilizer. Some is consumed by his composting worms which he got from Fergus’ worm farm, same as I did, and he somehow kept them from escaping. His setup is so sustainable, he’s even trained his pigs to recycle their urine by peeing, sometimes from remarkable distances, into their own drinking water containers.

So, don’t miss Christmas Eve at Wrong Way Cafe. The fun begins at 6:30 p.m. when I torture you, as usual, by being about 45 minutes late in bringing out the buffet. But with roast turkeys and a suckling pig, not to mention shiitake and Italian sausage stuffing, roasted potatoes, Boston baked beans. . . at 195 baht per person, it should be an irresistible bargain.