Women Of Cho (1st draft)
My time in Vientiane, Lao is over. The purpose of going to Lao was to see a friend and his family and also to see if I could finish a first draft of the Women Of Cho. Seeing old friends is always a joy and even more importantly they allowed me to stay and write. I owe gratitude for the time and space.
I’m calling it a first draft but we will see if the editor ‘abides’. There’s still a lot of work to be done. Before I left I took my friends and their son to a restaurant in Vientiane called the Bistro 22 known for its food and French chef. We had to leave a little before schedule due to the child having a chocolate attack. You can imagine the smile on the face on a 10 month old child watching chocolate pour out of a brownie cake and ice cream melting just as fast.
I boarded a plane for Bangkok, Thailand and headed back to familiar ground, Koh Samui and Koh Tao. Since I’ve been here I’ve been diving every day and enjoy seeing many friendly faces that I’ve met in the past. I’ve been here for only a few days but I feel this is also a place I can write as well as enjoy myself with a walk down the beach at sunset or sunrise and still manage to get things done.
I already miss walking down the banks of the Mekong watching the fishermen or boats transporting goods and people up and down the river and of course the sunsets are breath taking.
Another manuscript is taking a loose form in my head. I can see it mystically swimming through a curtain of fog with shapes and shadows coming and going moving like an eel across the rocky ocean floor hunting with a grouper close by. I’m back at Asia Divers Resort allowing the dust to settle around ‘The Women Of Cho’ before a major edit begins.
Another bit of business to attend to while I’m here is Nepal. I leave for Nepal in the near future for two months and luckily for me I have made friends in the past with some trekking guides and hospital volunteers and their previous experience has proven invaluable. They have a tendency to grab a piece of paper and start jotting down places they loved and tell the story as they go. One guide I met at the Strand in Rangoon. This is how my travel guide comes to fruition, people I respect giving information about where they would go if they were going to do it all over again.
It was St. Patrick’s Day here yesterday and I went to a beach party where I knew a friend would be DJ for some serious funk and I could hear it from down the beach. There were lots of green bathing suits, sparkled body painting, food and music. It was a lovely day and the sunset over the Gulf of Siam was filled with smiles and good cheer.
www.davidcdagley.com
