Chapter 9. Lemongrass Stains - Loei

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Loei is a provincial cow town. In the showrooms on the access road coming into Loei, there are only a few more mopeds and pickup trucks on display as tractors and roto-tillers. Mine is among the few Western faces in town others have seen. When passing in front of a high school schoolyard for boys, they point at me with index fingers extended, “Farang, farang!” Stares around town are commonplace. I feel like the featured caged zoo animal of the month at Busch Gardens.
When I arrived by tuk-tuk at my guesthouse, I asked the proprietress if she had a room. She went to her registration booklet and studied it. “Yes, I think I can give you”, she paused to review it once more, “Number one. With aircon.” Wonderful. I put my pack down, relieved. Pat handed me the sign-in book. They were no other guests. The last entry was for three days ago.
I registered at the tourist office as the first visitor to Loei in the past eight days, and the first foreign guest in over two weeks. Dew, the absent-minded twenty-five year old on call, sprung to his feet and fell all over me to offer the very little information the office had. Most of the scant pamphlets were of little use to me; they were all in Thai. I inquired about a daytrip in the direction of Lom Sak.
“Dew, do you know how I can get to the Château de Loei from here?”
He came back immediately. “You need to drive to-”
“No,” I stopped him. “I need to go by bus.” I had just told him seconds earlier that I came by bus and have no car. The distance is too great to take it on with a moped.
“Oh, I give you bus schedule.” Dew search under the main desk in a series of cubby holes. He looked it over to make sure it was what I needed and handed it to me. “Here you go.”
I took it. “Thanks very-” It was in Thai. Dew didn’t think this through very clearly. “Could you”, I extended to him my pen, “write the names down in English for me?”
He did. I can get on a nine a.m. bus to Lom Sak and it passes back through the drop off point at four thirty in the afternoon. I wondered how I was going to keep myself entertained for the whole day in the middle of farmland.
I thanked him, if for his outgoing, awkward demeanor and that he is among the few with whom I could converse. “Welcome to Thailand!” he shouted as I opened the door to leave. Only he forgot that we discussed my time in Bangkok and Khon Kaen. I have been in Thailand for ten days.

The community’s nightlife does little to dissuade me from identifying the Loei populace is mildly redneckish. When bourgeois families eat out at the outdoor patio restaurants, they arrive in Honda Accords wearing no more than a Hawaiian t-shirt, ripped jeans, and flip flops. Following dinner, they contribute to Thailand’s dangerous and painful fascination of Karaoke. Apparently, plates of papaya salad followed by roast pork in chili sauce washed down with a liter of Heineken isn’t enough for one evening. The head of the family deems it necessary to complete the night out with a tortuous rendition of New York, New York. Even the battalions of ants hauling away bread crumbs from under the picnic tables need to take cover.
The Oasis Pub and I work together well. It is a cozy, brick columned, open-air pavilion with a well laid stone floor. The pub promotes different bands and singers nightly for Loei’s culturally starved. Unfortunately, every night is amateur night in Loei, including the young lady currently singing whom I would pay a generous sum to put the microphone down and walk away. From the other end of the dining hall, I figured her to be in her early twenties, not as thin as most Thai women, though much more completely figured. The low cut black cocktail dress did her well, easily making her the best dressed woman in the entire province at that moment. Few listened to her; no one applauded when she finished a number. Even if she were any good, the crowd at the Oasis considers her as background diversion on an eventless weeknight.
The song mercifully stopped and Chi Mee, my waiter, had finally learned the formula of keeping my glass properly filled and replacing the unpoured drink into a bucket of ice water. His service was borne out of an over willingness to please and the novelty of having a foreigner as a customer. Without the bucket, drinks assume the balmy outdoor temperature at a frightening speed. We cannot speak a word to each other, but flashy body language has bridged the gap. When he went back for a second bottle, opened it and bathed it in ice water, he came over to get a high five I kept held up for him.
Yep, this is a cow town.

I jerked my head up forward when I heard her voice. “Can I sit here with you?” It was the atrocious singer in the black dress. But I did not know that until she later revealed it to me. Prettier up close than when she was on stage, I suppressed the earlier scorn I had for her singing. The braces on both rows of teeth sparked in the lamp light when she smiled at me.
“Sure! Please!” I motioned her to the chair across from me, then asked Chi Mee to get her a drink by a few gestures. She graciously accepted one from my large pre-chilled beer bottle. I had gone two hours without the slightest acknowledgement but from my waiter. I was delighted to have her join me.
Ghee Ka is from Loei and sings almost every night at the Oasis. She, like I, needed some different company; hers from the preset tedium, and mine from not having uttered a noteworthy word to anyone for two hours. We exchanged pleasantries. My not having recognized her threw her off.
“Did you like my songs, Rich?”
Then it hit me. “Of course! You were wonderful!” when you didn’t sing, is what I really wanted to say. I had to lie to her.
I complimented her on her English. She took a few courses three years ago in Khon Kaen. But since then has hardly uttered a phrase or sentence. We sat together for forty minutes. Chi Mee hovered nearby and ran an errand for Ghee after she handed him a few banknotes. Soon thereafter he came back with a Styrofoam take out dish of grilled fish and curly purple squid parts. Two sets of chopsticks were inside next to some dipping sauce.
“This is for you and me. Please…” She gave me two chopsticks and we dug in. Gladly, the chop sticks also served as a pointed skewer so I did not have to make apparent my ineptitude with them. Without a fork and knife, I think I’d perish.
What a sweet girl. I almost felt bad actively despising her singing.
She embodies provincialism, seeing herself in Loei over the long term. She has never left Thailand and doubts she ever will. “I do not want to miss Thai food. So I stay here.” For the briefest of moments, I entertained asking her to join me around Issan. It might work out, who knows. But when she told me how far away the next big town was, some sixty kilometers, I realized that Loei for Ghee was her real-life Truman Show.
“You come see me tomorrow, please?” she asked as I fastened the Connecticut lapel pin to her elastic dress strap.
I considered her situation many others might see as a dead-end job leading nowhere. However, Ghee is a nice-looking innocent girl who has chosen not to dare go elsewhere. She, at the very least, will not become a victim of the savage and downward-spiraling pithole of Bangkok. This Issan girl will keep put.
“I’ll be here. I am a big fan of yours, Ghee.” It had very little to do with her singing.

The bus put together with cardboard and Elmer’s Glue™ deposited me on a lonely stretch of road. The attendant kept a watchful eye on progress to Lom Sak so I would not miss the stop. There read the unsightly sign covering the asphalt overhead: Château de Loei Winery. It lacked the elegance and pretense most wineries live for. Château de Loei is also lacking in a few other categories. A local chap pulled over to take me on his moped the remaining mile to the entrance. The countryside is lush. Lime green rice paddies sprout new shoots in perfect order. Corn flourishes as do papaya trees. Crops climb the triangular-peaked hilltops. Like Ukraine, Thailand should be an agricultural behemoth.
If in search of Southeast Asia’s version of St. Emilion or Sonoma, Château de Loei is a huge letdown. One of only three commercial wineries in Thailand, it is the first and the biggest. Upon first glance, I am grateful not to have opted for the other two. Three women occupy the only office I can find near the front gate. We cannot speak to each other and I meander off without the expectation of being asked to leave private property. The grounds are poorly kept; the bare pavement has not seen a broom in years. The corrugated metal roofs of the unused edifices flap wildly in the wind. Vegetation has engulfed ceramic containers. If Thailand shot movies of ghost towns, this would be the movie set. To think that wine is made here defies everything I learned about five years I spent in the business.
In twenty minutes of snooping around, there still was no sign that a professional in winemaking business even existed. I found the vacant and undecorated tasting room. Empty bottles were laid for viewing next to a plastic encased award that read Sliver Award - Château de Loei. Under it: Tasting Category: Chenin Blanc - Thailand. Of all the wineries in Thailand (three), this one got the Silver (not Gold). Ernest and Giulio Gallo would not approve. A refrigerator designed for soft drinks at a convenience store contained a few green bottles of partially full white wine. Two sinks consumed the central space of the room. But for a framed rectangular promotional poster on one wall, the chamber is completely undecorated.
An office worker found me before I started snooping around the unguarded cellars and said that the winemaker was not available. But I insisted to meet and interview him, having come all the way from the United States. Stretching the truth, I said that the import of Thai wines to the United States was of interest to me. That sent her back to the office and got him to come to the tasting room.
Natthawat Limwatcharakorn (known forever from this point forward as Nate) has been Senior Winemaker at Château de Loei since its inception twelve years ago. Shy but amenable, he explained how the winery brought the Chenin Blanc and Syrah grape to Thailand, the only two to thrive here. He studied only a month in the Loire valley to pick up the trade and receives advice time to time from Australian consultants. This made sense to me; it is the Australians who have best applied their knowledge of oenology in harsh environments. The soil in Thailand is rich, but Nate has to deal with temperatures that never plummet at night; winter is a time of year on the calendar in Thailand, not a season. The Australians have had to battle poor soil and brutal summers, a daunting task to grow a fruit that is very finicky.
It occurred to me: Does the vineyard have multiple harvests like with other crops in Thailand? I posed that to Nate.
“No, we only have one, and this is February. Now, it is low season at Château de Loei.” I looked around. No kidding.
I do not know how many acres are in one rai, but the vineyards stretch out over six hundred fifty rai. “How many bottles do you produce each year? These are all questions he could easily handle and his English was good enough.
“We make 200,000 bottles of Chenin Blanc and 60,000 Syrah.” He had no red available in the tasting room, but did pour me the white. I spun it around in the glass at the height of my forehead to legitimize to him my knowledge of wine. I wanted Nate to think I had some clue. But what do I have to worry about? I arrived flush red and my shirt was again soaked. I hardly could pass as a wine professional at first sight, or somebody who was once one.
Then I took a sip. The Chenin Blanc was easy to drink. Nothing complicated, but the price of $13 or so per bottle I found to make the wine overrated.
“This is very good” I said to him. I could not take a bottle with me for its weight and fragility. He poured me more and we continued. “How much do you export?”
He came back very quickly. “Ten percent. To Germany, Singapore, Hong Kong,” he needed time to name them all and used his fingers as a checklist. “Swiss, Czech, and Netherlands.” I knew he had to mention the Dutch because I personally remember importing Château de Loei into Antwerp.
“Why don’t you grow other varietals? Why only Chenin Blanc and Syrah? No Cabernet? No Merlot?”
“The land is too cruel here. Grapes won’t grow.”
The answer to my next question, I had no list and was simply improvising, stunned me. “How many workers do you have full time here?
“About one hundred fifty.”
Come again? Where did you put them? Did they all go to Seven Eleven to pick up some snacks? I could not have come across eight human beings on the grounds. Maybe they were out tending to the vines. But I did not follow up.
Nate went back to his office and handed me a business card. The natural flow of our time together had come to an end. This was about as polite as he wanted to be for an uninvited guest and I knew when it was a good idea to depart. I studied the card, but it was missing a crucial detail.
“Just one more thing, please. Do you have an email address? What is the winery’s website?”
Nate was unashamed to inform me. “We have no Internet in this amphoe”. An amphoe is a sub-region of a Thai province. Nate pointed his finger at the countryside and spun around three hundred sixty degrees. “No access.” I left him behind to study forecasting sheets and processed how far the winery’s parent company, CPK International, still has to go. On a side gate, The letter “K” had fallen off to the side and swung in the breeze. The “I” was missing completely. A staff member drove me to the main road. It was thirty minutes past noon. The cloud cover did little to conceal the UV rays racing to the earth and gripping my skin. The bus from Lom Sak back to Loei wasn’t scheduled to pass for another four hours. There was no shelter, as the winery’s roadside restaurant is shut down for the season. It looked like a very dull, hot, and grim afternoon.
My improvisational skills still with me, I jumped across the road and put out my left thumb, an odd feeling because for years, I was used to the right. The first vehicle to approach was a powerful grey Isuzu pickup. It pulled over and I opened the passenger door. The driver caught a glimpse of my worn and parched face. “Where you go?”
“Loei”, I practically begged him and would have offered no resistance if he ordered me into the flatbed.
“OK, we go. Come.”
I hopped into the spacious, snappy cold cabin and stretched out. I tried to contain my smile that reflected the luck I had just encountered.
He prefers to be called Jack more than his given Thai name. A dapper banker from Bangkok with bare bones English, he said he would take me anywhere along his route I wanted to go and anywhere in Loei. I snickered. Now I have my own personal driver in a reclining air conditioned cabin. My legs extended one hundred percent forward and my shirt was already drying. The cold air from the wide vent bit into my wet chest.
As a courtesy, it is always appropriate to converse with drivers when you get a ride. They seek a break from the monotony. Jack handed me a cell phone and divided his attention between the road and me to explain about his family and his assignment in Issan. I would have preferred he speak in Thai and I could have pretended to understand. At least that way both his hands and eyes would have been on the wheel. Jack put the radio on to listened to the news.
The return to Loei took half the time as the bus did to the winery. Jack kindly declined my invitation to lunch. He had brown bagged it. I stuck a lapel pin to his finely starched collar and then stepped down. We waved goodbye and the communal pickup truck was passing at the very same moment to take me back to my guesthouse. I do not often talk about the cost of travel. The entire journey and time at the winery and transportation set me back about one dollar and fifty cents. More splendid was how people went out of their way to make it work without a hitch.

Ghee continues to limp because of a moped accident a few days ago. Her fine legs are ravished with scars and scabs. I told her she was lucky. It is common to see young students walk around in an arm cast in Northeast Thailand. At the Oasis for a second night, she left her friends and joined me at another table. Though still polite, she looked so horribly bored. I asked her if she wanted a drink. No, thank you, she said. Something to eat? Not hungry. She asked nothing of my day and told me she slept the entire afternoon, leaving us with a huge vacuous gap to bridge. Many Thai women in the company of foreign men often speak very little. I have observed this in my previous stops. Couples sit across from each other, with either nothing to add or communication is hindered by the language. This doesn’t suit me and I was not necessarily bored of her, but looked for a graceful way to move on to another restaurant. I could not just get up and leave. Nevertheless, there is no use in pursuing someone whose aspirations in life do not stretch past the last roundabout in town. She has contently sentenced herself to the purgatory of Loei, and it pains me to watch her do nothing to change this.
She ordered me a fine dinner of roasted pork morsels and shrimp fired rice. As I started in, she got up to sing. I concentrated deeply on the meal and ignored her pitchless voice.
It was then I decided to break my habit of dedicating three nights to a single town. Three men outside the room of my guesthouse were taking a few days to manually dismantle a house with only a hammer. The banging starts at about 6:30 and goes almost until dusk. Though I never approached them, I was hoping they could take apart the house quietly. Apparently, no, this is not possible.
Loei is dull, but pleasingly so. I want to go smaller and see how more removed Issan can become.

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Photos

Excitement - Downtown !
Control Yourselves...

Welcome to the Chateau de Loei!!!
Sonoma...St. Emilion it is not...

Administrative Buildings
Noboby home today...

Which Way to Go?
To the tasting room, of course...

Fields of Fruit
Chenon Blanc vines...