Food From Northern Laos: The Boat Landing Cookbook

The photo above I "borrowed" from a review on a shutterbug web site called Bangkok Images. More than likely it's a photo by Kees Sprengers and it's in the book.


Two people associated with the Boat Landing, a husband and wife team of cook and writer Dorothy Culloty and photographer Kees Sprengers have written what sounds like an extremely comprehensive book on Lao cooking. They also have a web site with a similar address that is well worth putting on your favorites list and stopping back for a look see every once in a while. The web address is http://www.foodfromnorthernlaos.com/


Kees alerted me to the upcoming release of his book but I've been negligent in giving it the promotion it deserves. What can I say, it's hunting season, election season, and I'm a procrastinator. Also I didn't have a copy and I'm real shy to broach the subject of shelling out some cash for a book about something my wife does all the time.


What I did today was put it on the request list at my library, I'd urge you to do the same. They almost always honor requests to buy books and doing so accomplishes two good things. It puts santang in the hands of Dorothy and Kees in the form of book sales, and it introduces Lao food to a wider audience. I know where I live all the affluent yups with time on their hands like nothing better than to buy a whole bunch of new cooking paraphernalia and a book with tons of gorgeous ethnic photos to go along. If only it included a music tape of Bhudist chants in Pali from a Tai Lue temple complete with giant cymbal clashes and drums. Well maybe some morlum for mood music. I digress.


How to write a review about a book I haven't seen? I didn't quite have the gall to email Kees and suggest he send me a copy. Thankfully it's all been done for me by Vienne that Lao chef in Spain with the great web site. He's read the book and gives it a much more thorough review than anything I've seen yet. http://laocook.com/2010/10/01/food-from-northern-laos-the-boat-landing-cookbook/ after reading Vien's review and shouting out the good parts to my wife as she was packing the kids off to bed I now have official permission to buy.


Often when my wife cooks foods that she is apt to repeat she takes note of amounts of ingredients and writes them down correcting herself when she adds more or less, eventually she knows exactly how much of what to make say the noodles for Kao Piak or a Gaeng Keowan. She shares the ingredients lists freely with her friends but not the amounts as Lao people are used to a much less measured system. Some secrets are harder than others to give up. Thankfully Dorothy holds nothing back. This book will be a new source of ideas, all written down with measurements even!


There is of course one question that will have to wait until I have the book.


There is that one ingredient that all Lao people use in almost everything they cook. It is the ingredient that no westerner will ever admit to using, the ingredient foodies don't even like to talk about, the ingredient that can change a dish from simply "very delicious" to "saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaap!!". How do they handle the ingredient so controversial, so, well, downright sinful, that we dare not speak it's name? The ingredient that I've seen in use in every different ethnic village, the ingredient I've seen in use, in ubiquitous use, in villages so remote that some residents have never seen a road or car.


Will they deny it's use? "Oh that's not "real" traditional Lao food". Ignore it completely? List it as an option?


I'll have to wait for the book.

Khaen Khene Lao เดี่ยวแคน หมอแคนฝรัง Jonny Olsen

The links are down, you tube taken down by Jonny himself. I'm back to re write and repost different vids.

I hadn't searched for Johny Olsen on you tube for a while. He has more recent solo and improvisational recordings that I love. I've been a big fan ever since seeing his hastily shot videos made in Thailand in some one's back yard against the backdrop  of a falling down chain link fence.

He also does these kind of funny electrified hip hop things that are also very Lao but with a modern interpretation. Besides being a recognised khaen player Johny sings Lum, often accompanied by the traditional skinny teenage dancing girls in funny costumes. The production of some of the things he did a few years ago are very very Lao, like what you'd see during a hot day on the video player of a long distance bus.

Lum like many kinds of music I hadn't heard before took some getting used to, but after being subjected to a steady diet, sometimes non stop, it grows on you.

Below is the one with the dancing girls

LP's walk in Phongsali

Yao breakfast at Ou Tai
I'm reposting this to change the name on the link to protect anonymityIn response to a photo of some young Lao Sueng women, whose ethnicity I was unable to pin down, I got a comment and then an email from a French fellow who has walked the length and width of Phongsali province, mostly off road.

We both had photos of the same town high on a ridge above the Ou taken from the same spot. LP's photo was taken four years earlier before metal roofs. The trek he describes was done in the fall of 07.

Original in French here, http://voyageforum.com/v.f?post=1495745 you need to cut and paste to go to the post, I think there are is stuff in the link that isn't html.

I should add, LB does all his walking without a guide, but, and this is a big but. He can speak many minority languages and has spent a good portion of his life studying these people. He has an intuitive sense of when things aren't going right as well of all the complications of being a foreigner in these different villages. He is probably more knowledgeable than many of the local Lao guides I have walked with. He travels by himself, but I'd suggest you not do the same, I'd go so far as to recommend that you don't.





Ban Nam Phou San Gao January 7, 2007

Same town in 03 from a scan of one of Lionels photos.

French to English translation Show romanization



September and October 2007

In 2006, in the far north of Laos, the first trip of 34 days, alone, on foot and without a guide in the mountains of the fascinating province of Phongsaly (summarized> ICI), allow me to do some bearings.

Hmong House

The Hmong guy Lao Bii, was Tui’s friend, they knew each other from when Tui’d been to Nambo before.

I'm going  to apologise in advance for anything I get wrong. I don't know much about the Hmong. I've met and talked to plenty in Thailand, China, and America, but I really don't know much about the way they live in the more traditional setting of rural Laos.

At first we waited for Lao Bii in the yard, he was out hunting birds like all guys do at the end of the day. With seemingly every guy in the village out looking for birds every afternoon you have to wonder how there are any birds left. But there are, and there always have been.


When Tui's friend returned we went inside. After setting our packs down, slipping off our boots and donning flip flops, we went to off find people I’d taken photos of two years before. I always try to hand out a copy of a photo to anyone I take a picture of.


We also stopped in and said hi to the soldiers stationed in the village, and Tui showed them some sort of documentation authenticating my permission to be gallivanting about.. Since my last visit the government sent fourteen soldiers including two political officers and a teacher to live in the village.

Eating insects in the Lao PDR

The video begins with a guy named Sangtong waving his net back and forth over a wheat field catching grasshoppers (dakadaeng) in a rice field. Santong comes from Ban Tat Luang which is just out past the famous stupa of that name. His wife dips them in boiling water to kill and clean them then fries them in the wok and sells them.

The next shot is of women digging in the earth for maeng jute jill or as I less delicately call them “maeng kii kwai” (buffalo dung beetles). The voice over and the scientists go on to explain that 40% of children in Laos are malnourished, or I think that’s what sahmhua means.

The last series of scenes are an interview with a woman who is growing wingless crickets (maeng jii law) and regular crickets (maeng jii nai) I think the wingless version is just the imature stage of the cricket. The woman in the clip started out with 3 barrels but is now up to 56, quite a little growing operation. Now she’s trying to grow grasshoppers commercially.

There is one shot of a woman cooking up bamboo shoot soup with crickets, a very common use of the insect that can be found in restaurant stands all over the country. Lastly some folks that have had a few beers eating deep fried crickets with beer which is kind of yummy. Guy says they taste like meat, which of course they are.

The Trail to Nambo

Tui makes a last phone call while still within range of phone tower.

The trail to Nambo is a relative superhighway. It is by far the most gradual and fastest trail for hundreds of square miles. Using the cut of the the Nam Long through the mountains the trail steadily gains elevation while never resorting to switchbacks or steep sections. I've walked the trail twice, once back in 06 and more recently in the winter of 09. The trail provides easy access to the upper drainage of the Nam Fa. The trail is also used by all the Lao Sung as a quick access to the market at Muang Long. Bear in mind that tiny market is the biggest one in north western Laos beyond Muang Sing, and Burma across the river is even less traveled, it's a long way upriver to China or down to Thailand.


In 06 I saw the tracks of a single motorcycle made at the beginning of the dry season. I think it was a rider from that GT Riders club out of Chang Mai Thailand. They would of had to have pushed and drug the bike up and down many of the numerous stream crossings. None of the villages have motorcycles or other transport. I assume it was an off road bike, one of the last to have made the transect to Viengphouka. A few years ago there were temporary bridges strong enough to drive on with one of those one cylinder Chinese tractor things. The bridges were made by felling two large logs across the streams and covering the logs with branches and then mud and dirt. The logs have rotted away and are gone. Now there are small single slippery logs strong enough to support a person. I'd think it would more time and effort now to drag and carry a motorcycle up and down the many stream crossings than to just walk.

Stream Crossing

Camera Camera

CAMERA, CAMERA - Trailer from malcolm murray on Vimeo.

From the press release,

CAMERA, CAMERA is a stunning new documentary that shows Laos through the fascination and confusion of a traveler's lens. The directorial debut of award-winning cinematographer Malcolm Murray, the film was written and features interviews by journalist and author Michael Meyer, and was produced by New York Times staff photographer Josh Haner. Throughout CAMERA, CAMERA, Murray and Meyer recreate the experience of traveling in Laos, a fragile yet deceptively brutal world. From ancient temples to mountain villages, in jungles and on rivers, we see what travelers see and discover what they don’t as the plot moves deftly from the comical to the taboo, reveling in the experience of Laos and lingering on things left unsaid. CAMERA, CAMERA is a documentary for anyone who has traveled to or taken a photograph in a foreign country. The film quietly calls upon viewers to ponder the multifaceted and often ambiguous impacts of travel and photography on citizens of two worlds.

My Short Career as a Professional Writer

                                           Abandoned Mansion on Mekong 2001


A couple of months ago I was contacted by an online media specializing in news and info on East Asia. They wanted me to write somthing, AND THEY WERE WILLING TO PAY ME!!!!!!!

Ok, it wasn't much. $50 for around five or six hundred words. The idea is what grabbed me, Pico Iyer, Paul Theroux, and VS Naipaul, Somchai, writers.