Gold Rush

by Jim Richards

  We were making good progress along established tracks for about half an hour, when I heard a commotion up ahead. The army guys jumped to the side of the track, and coming at us full pelt was a bamboo stretcher carried by several villagers with a screaming guy on top. One of his legs was half off and covered in blood.

  I turned to Khamhung and gave him a questioning look.

  ‘Mines terrestres,’ he said with an explosive hand motion. Landmines. He grinned nervously and continued walking. The pho ban despatched one of his men to accompany the stretcher and presumably assist in getting some medical help. Where that would come from I had no idea.

  So that’s why this job was paying so well. We all continued walking and I tried to control the clawing fear in my stomach, keeping a close eye on where I was stepping.

  We moved up into the steeper terrain, the patchy rice and poppy fields giving way to large trees of primary rainforest. As they walked, the locals collected edible plants and stowed them under their shirts to eat later. I was thankful to be off the established tracks and felt considerably safer from landmines in the forest.

  This was 1994, and just before we got our first GPS. I navigated by compass and dead reckoning, using the contours and rivers (where there was map coverage) as markers. It soon became apparent that the Laotian geologists were poor navigators. The Laotian army guys had no idea where they were, and the deeper we went into the forest, the less certain the locals became as to our location. It was all on me.

  We stopped at a major river and took a sample. These standard Newmont samples were always taken the same way; they consisted of BLEG (fine river sediment), pancon (concentrate from gold-panning the river) and float (any prospective rock that looked like it might have gold in it). These samples would be sent to a laboratory for analysis. The results might give valuable clues as to any nearby mineral deposit, shedding its bounty into the rivers we were sampling. The multibillion-dollar gold-copper mine at Ok Tedi in Papua New Guinea had been found a few years earlier using this same technique.

  The entire tenement area (the concession that our company had been granted) was being tested in this manner. It was roughly 2,500 square kilometres, and coverage was projected to be one sample every 2.5 square kilometres. So 1,000 samples needed collecting and the organisation, implementation and quality control of this program was my job.

  After we took our sample, we had lunch. This consisted of tinned pilchards, cold rice and some newly discovered maggots the locals were very excited about.

  Continuing upstream, we took samples as required. The terrain was rugged and the jungle now much denser. The only way we could walk was along the riverbed, ankle-to-thigh-deep in water. The army at the front would chop out the overhanging vines to allow access. About an hour before nightfall, we stopped to take the last sample of the day and make camp.

  The men constructed a series of shelters using bamboo. To start, they made a rectangular frame large enough for six sleeping men, the poles tied together using jungle vines. Then inside this frame they placed a knee-high platform. This platform was floored with split bamboo, opened up and flattened to create the surface on which you slept.

  The top of the frame was angled and banana leaves were stacked there to keep out the rain. We erected our mosquito nets within this shelter and laid out our bedding; I had a sleeping bag and the locals mainly had rough blankets.

  Another group prepared the meal. The rice was cooked using thick bamboo poles as steamers. Water was poured in to fill most of the bottom section, and above this a porous origami-type brace supported banana leaves filled with rice. These water-and rice-filled bamboo poles were then tied to a frame built over a fire to steam the rice.

  The pho ban was clearly an excellent organiser and, while all this was going on, other locals were furiously digging under the roots of some nearby bamboo. With a jubilant cry, they pulled out a family of rats. These were a delicacy in Laos, and their capture was a cause for some celebration.

  One of the soldiers had shot a monkey earlier in the day, and that was roasting on a spit. Grotesquely, the monkey’s face grinned up at me as its lips burnt off, and I shivered in the damp chill of the valley. The monkey was soon joined by the skinned rats, spreadeagled on bamboo crucifixes to be smoked.

  For a salad, all of the plants that had been foraged earlier in the day and temporarily stored in various armpits were pooled onto a large leaf. Some evil-looking black paste was added.

  When the rice was cooked, the bamboo poles were split and the leaf-covered rice was cut up into individual portions. The cook proudly served me my food on a banana leaf. Everyone looked at me expectantly, awaiting my verdict on the feast.

  I looked down upon a monkey’s arm, a rat’s leg, a sprinkling of armpit salad, some leftover maggots and rice.

  I valiantly ate a piece of the crunchy rat, looked up and smiled.

  ‘Délicieux, merci,’ I said, and Khamhung translated.

  Everyone got the positive message and went about their own eating, leaving me time to contemplate my meal. It wasn’t that hard; I was ravenously hungry and ate the lot. The rice really was delicious and was cooked perfectly. The monkey I was least keen on; they looked better in the trees than on a plate. The maggots were tart and disgusting, but the rat actually tasted good. I tried not to think about the armpit salad as I wolfed it down.

  I bathed in the cold river, then changed into my dry night clothes and fell into my sleeping bag, exhausted.

  Yet I couldn’t sleep. My legs were itchy and damp, and I was not able to settle. Every time I moved, I bumped into the men sleeping either side of me, so it was difficult to address the itching.

  After some time, the itches had only gotten worse and I switched on my torch (always kept close to hand) for an inspection. I looked down into my sleeping bag under the torchlight and felt a sudden rising horror: my legs were covered in blood.

  I shot up and threw off my sleeping bag, gasping. Numerous large, black leeches were attached to me all over my lower half, and blood was freely flowing from the weeping bites. I felt bile in my throat as nausea engulfed me.

  The leeches had found my groin most attractive, and my ankles were also covered. I didn’t know how to get rid of them and felt a rising panic.

  I forced myself to calm down. I recalled being told that if you pulled them off yourself, they could leave a tooth in you that would later get infected. I stood there shivering with cold and shock, trying to think of how to get rid of these things as they gorged on me.

  Khamhung came to the rescue with a bar of soap. I lathered it up and spread the suds all over my legs and groin. The leeches hated the soap, which seemed to upset their skin’s ability to retain fluid. As the suds touched their skin, they exploded. This had the disadvantage of covering me in bloody leech slime, but I was extremely relieved to have an effective weapon, especially as with this method the leeches withdrew their teeth from you before dying.

  After winkling the last leech out of my crack, I wiped the blood and goo off myself, crawled back into my sleeping bag and fell into a fitful sleep.

  It was damn cold next morning and we shivered around the fire to warm up. I drank a bamboo cup of hot water with cold rice for breakfast, which did little to lift the spirits.

  My feet were already aching from being wet much of the previous day. I could see that virtually the entirety of these trips was to be spent in rivers, which could become a real problem.

  Trench foot was first documented in the muddy trenches of the First World War. It is caused by poor blood circulation brought about by having sodden feet over extended periods of time. The locals’ feet were hardened from working in the fields and, amazingly, they were mostly in bare feet, and so were probably better off.

  As I got ready to pull on my sodden boots, one of the Laotian geologists gave me some Indonesian foot balm: Pagoda Salep. I liberally applied it and found that it not only helped to waterproof my soggy skin, but the liniment also stimulated blood flow. It was a rea
l godsend, and all of the Newmont geologists rightly swore by the stuff.

  We hacked on the rest of the day, sampling as we went. I would check the tail in the gold pans with my hand lens, but there was no sign of gold in these rivers.

  The following day, the army and the locals were getting edgy. We had found an abandoned jungle camp, which I was told was in a Hmong insurgent training area.

  ‘We are crossing a ridge occupied by the Hmong, an area where they are still fighting the civil war. They will not be happy we are here and may attack us,’ Khamhung explained slowly in French.

  I decided to press on to a major river junction about 2 kilometres ahead and take samples. This would provide geological information regarding the river catchments of the higher, and more dangerous, ground ahead. We could then cross into another parallel river catchment to continue sampling downstream, thus moving away from the Hmong ridge to safer ground.

  As we discussed this, two shots rang out ahead of us. More monkey hunting, I thought. Then the soldiers who had been to our front ran straight past us and disappeared downriver, followed by the villagers, who had dumped the samples they were carrying.

  Our already nervous group had been surprised by the shots and had panicked and run. This was a serious situation for the cohesion of our team and I needed to act quickly. I did not want a full-scale rout from which our expedition would probably not recover.

  I got back to where the breathless rabble had gathered and settled things down a bit. I got the sergeant to put a few of his troops around us as a screen, just in case, and then heard the story told in sign language and through Khamhung.

  As the lead soldiers had advanced, they had seen a group of Hmong ahead and two shots had been fired at them by the Hmong. At that point, the soldiers had turned tail and run, resulting in the whole expedition descending into chaos.

  It seemed to me the Hmong were probably more scared of us than we were of them. Nevertheless, we were in no position to take them on in what was challenging terrain and the Hmong’s home ground.

  To continue moving ahead to sample in the Hmong territory with our current collection of dubious Laotian military personnel seemed pointlessly risky. I also did not want to harass these Hmong villagers. They hadn’t done me any harm; I was here for mapping, not massacring.

  We had already achieved virtually all of our sampling objectives for this area, but we did need to retrieve the samples dropped during the last incident. I scolded everyone and chided a small armed group of the stouter souls into volunteering to go back with me and recover the samples.

  Ours was a nervy advance, but at least the Laotian soldiers were properly alert now, moving forward cautiously with their rifles in their shoulders and covering each other (and me). I was doubly concerned, being just as worried about getting an accidental bullet in the back from one of our own guys as I was about getting hit from the front by a Hmong sniper.

  It was a tense twenty minutes, but once I had accounted for all of the samples, we pulled back a bit and climbed over a col into the next river catchment. We then worked our way downstream, away from the Hmong, sampling as we went.

  By the fourth day we were heavily weighed down by samples. The Laotian geologists and I had to be vigilant to ensure these samples were not dumped by the locals. We noted which man had which samples and we warned them they would not be paid if they lost any.

  We also had another problem. Virtually the only food remaining was rice, and there was not much of that. We had not had any luck hunting in this part of the jungle, and for meat we were down to the last of the rats.

  That night we stopped beside a river and began cooking up the remaining rice. Some of the soldiers went down to a large pool just below our camp. I watched with interest as I saw them aiming their RPG-7 (rocket-propelled grenade) launcher at a rock in the pool.

  BANG … WHOOOSH … BANG! The last bang was earsplitting and was the shaped charge of the grenade smashing open the rock.

  Stunned fish started floating to the surface, and hungry soldiers jumped in and gathered them up. After one more explosion in another pool we had a good meal of fish soup and rice.

  The following afternoon we followed some wild elephant tracks through the bamboo, which led us back to the rice fields. We eventually limped back into the village, wet, bedraggled, tired and hungry.

  Before anything else, the villagers queued up for their money. I shook their hands, paid them their 1,500 kip (approximately $2) per day in cash and thanked them. They were all happy with that and keen for further paid work.

  Now came the turn of the soldiers. At this point, the sinister sergeant insisted that I pay him all the money for the men and he would pay them. I refused and threatened to report him and he backed off.

  But as soon as I’d paid the soldiers, the sergeant took a third of their money straight off them, to ‘pay the officers off’. I suspect he would have taken the lot if I hadn’t been around. Things worked a bit differently in the Laotian Army.

  The other Newmont guys and I then bathed in the creek, dodging the leeches on the bank.

  Finally, the moment we had all been waiting for arrived: returning to the house we were staying in and the luxury of being clean, warm and dry. I had hung up all of my ‘good’ clothes before we had left, and it was an absolute pleasure to slip on these warm, dry, cotton garments.

  My shirt seemed to have a bit of a fold in the shoulder, which was annoying, so to straighten it out I gave it a slap. I felt something like a small egg crack and instantly there were hundreds of tiny black spiders swarming all over my torso and face.

  They went everywhere, and were particularly attracted to the wetter places. My eyes, ears, nose and mouth were filling up rapidly with these foul arachnids. Blinded by the acid in the spiders and struggling to breathe, I ripped my shirt and clothes off, sweeping as many of the spiders off me as I could. In horror, I cleared my mouth and eyes and gasped for a spider-free breath.

  Eventually I could open my now bloodshot eyes. I blew my nose and collected a tissue full of black spider snot. The Laotian geologists had watched the entire performance and were doubled up with laughter. I staggered back to the leech-ridden creek to wash off the dead spiders and their broken hatchery.

  When I returned to the hut, dinner was being served. It smelled delicious. In rural Laos all food is eaten on the floor, so we sat and dived into the sticky rice (eaten with your fingers) and fish, which was tasty. The Laotian geologists got quite lively when some hard-boiled eggs turned up. I felt things must be tough if an egg was that much of a treat.

  ‘Oeuf, très bon,’ said Khamhung.

  ‘Merci, j’aime oeufs,’ I said.

  I took the egg, peeled off the shell and hungrily bit into the top. Strange, it felt a bit crunchy. Must be a bit of shell; eat on.

  No, that really was very crunchy … and gooey.

  I looked down at the egg in my hand and saw the remains of a chicken foetus, complete with feathers, wrapped inside a thin annulus of egg white. I had eaten the crunchy head. I presumed the gooey bit had been the brain.

  I felt like vomiting as I blew out the egg from my mouth.

  The Laotian geologists could not believe their luck. Their new boss really was a funny guy. And he didn’t like the Laotian delicacy of egg with embryo either. All the more for them. I noticed my discarded portion had already disappeared.

  The following day in the bamboo hut, I wrote up the trip report. It was handwritten and described the geology and prospectivity of the area, with a recommendation for further work. The text was backed up by sketch maps and cross sections of the geology. I added some pertinent notes regarding the security situation.

  We dried and cleaned up the samples and did an HF radio link-up with Simon Yardley in Vientiane, arranging our flight out.

  The following morning, a helicopter picked up three of us. We underslung the samples, which allowed the chopper to take a lot more weight (helicopters can lift heavier underslung loads than on-board loa
ds).

  The helicopter would return later in the day as part of a side-trip to pick up our fourth man. The Lao military observer had cost us again.

  Back at the office that afternoon, Simon introduced me to a young Australian draughtsman named Carlo Seymour, who had just arrived. Carlo had been hired to help with the drafting of the maps for the constant reporting that Newmont required.

  Carlo’s predecessor, a diminutive, pot-bellied American called Les, had not been a good corporate fit. His main cartographic endeavour had been to create graphically annotated location maps of the staggering number of South-East Asian bordellos that he had evaluated.

  The final straw had come at the Newmont staff house, where some female auditors from head office were staying. They were pleasant and conscientious young women. As they watched TV in the living area one evening, the front door was kicked open and in staggered Les with a hooker on each arm and a bottle of Jim Beam in his hand.

  ‘So who wants to fucking party?’ he roared at the women.

  They declined the offer and he was fired the next day.

  ‘Carlo will help you draft the maps for your report, Jim. He’s an expert computer draftsman,’ Simon proudly informed me. He had put considerable effort into recruiting Carlo and was keen for him to do well, after the debacle of Les.

  I sat down with Carlo in front of his computer to prepare a map of my last trip. He was sweating heavily. It soon became apparent that he had absolutely no idea how any of the software worked.

  We stepped outside for a discreet chat and Carlo came clean.

  ‘Listen, mate, I’m really sorry,’ he said. ‘I bullshitted a bit on my CV. I didn’t really think I would get chucked in at the deep end like this. I have absolutely no idea how the frigging software works … but I’m a fast learner,’ he added in a hopeful tone.

  Creative CV writing was one thing, but I wasn’t going to hang myself to save his arse. However, Carlo did seem keen to atone, so I figured out a possible solution.