"The drive there is very pleasant", a friend told me the first time I came to Laos. "Less than two hours from Vientiane. At weekends, it’s crowded with expats and Thai tourists. You’ll see, they have great restaurants and the best fish in the country." He was right. Ten minutes after leaving the city, the first villages start appearing along the winding road. Slowly life falls into to the lazy pace of the water buffaloes on the paddy fields. Peasants at work. Women gathering firewood. Kids playing. Just the peaceful Lao way of life in the country side. As you drive on, the villages are fewer in between. The plain becomes rolling hills, the landscape stunning.

A few hundred meters after passing the dam on your left, you’ll reach the top of the hills. From there you can see the reservoir, spreading out beneath you, full of little islands and boats pulling logs in between them. Wonderful. However, as you walk down the main road to the village you’re hit by a sudden feeling of being in a ‘‘Mad Max’’ movie cranes and boat skeletons from a bygone era and the stiff sound of hammers beating metal in the background. The street is paved with decrepit shacks, piled up tree trunks and torn out roots. Further down towards the water the scenery is more animated, people sell giant fish, tools and different kinds of orchids, they even play billiards. "The area was flooded in 1972," my friend had told me. "There were over twenty villages in the area at that time. Most of the peasants living there had no idea what was going on. Just imagine: you’re in the middle of a war, and then you hear about a reservoir, you simply don’t believe it! But one fine day the water was there. All the villages were flooded. People had just about enough time to leave."

That’s how Thalat was created. To start with there were only a few houses for the dam workers. It didn’t become a village until the peasants living along the Nam Ngum river had to be relocated because of the increasingly high water level. "Those guys had no choice," says Max, a Danish man working there for the Mekong Committee. "When you build a dam, you should analyse the consequences for the locals. In this case they didn’t. These people who were farmers, became fishermen and the small village a busy little fish centre. Just like that. But the incredible thing is that it worked out really well for them. The reservoir was very generous in fish. It still is." During winter, the production is about 500 kg a day, which is nothing compared to the rainy season. The heavy rains feed the river with new oxygen, and that’s the best time to fish. Then the daily production shoots up to 7 tons. Half of it stays in the area, the rest goes to Vientiane.

"But it’s a good place for the fish too," laughs Max. "I won’t say that these people are bad fishermen, but they’re not the best. Old men are saying that with time some species are disappearing and that there aren’t anymore big catfish. That’s not true. I could show you some real big fishes. But there’s a lack of fishing skill among these old farmers. So they just catch the small fish, pakeo as they call them, those who move at the water surface." Another problem for the fishermen are the trees. When the area was flooded, nobody had thought about cutting the forest. "Nobody knows how many nets are lying in the dead branches, but there must be thousands."

In the sixties, wood was cheap and abundant; today it’s scarce and expensive. And the wood of Nam Ngum, by staying so long under water, has got a good reputation: stronger than anywhere else in the world, according to those who cut it. Three kilometres from the village, on the peninsula, endless lines of yellow Chinese trucks stand loaded with wood, ready to drive up to Yunnan. "I was one of the first who stopped working as a fisherman and became a lumberjack. "The wood business started in 82", remembers Noy, one of the Nam Ngum captains. "It was run by a Thai company during the first 7 years, but now I think it’s a Lao or Malaysian company that’s in charge", he is not quite sure. Every day, except when the moon is full, he’s out with his boat together with his son Thip, a friend called Soumpha and two other boys from the village. They’ve been working together for three years. "A good team" says the captain, laughing. "I drive the boat, my son and Soumpha do the diving and the two others are helping us."

The time they spend on the reservoir depends on the location of the trees. "Mostly we re only out for a day or two, but sometimes it takes a week or ten days. We never come back to Thalat without a full shipload of logs to sell to the company."

From what I understand, Noy and his crew work independently and sell their wood to the main company. "We just bring them the trunks. In a month, I make between $110 and $130, depending on the total number of logs and their size."

The next morning we followed Noy and the boys our on the reservoir. It was an amazing experience and very different from what I had expected. After having found a good location, a place where they could cut 10 to 12 trees without having to move the boar, Noy slowed down the engine. Thip dove into the water with something looking like a thick straw stuck into his mouth. As I turned I realised that the straw was actually a pipe, connected to a tank of compressed air. "Wow", I thought as the yellow pipeline kept on rolling, "that’s pretty basic!" Just a pipe, goggles, a torch and a diving costume. "First, he will choose a tree," explained his father, "then he’ll tie a metal wire around the middle of the trunk, with which we will pull the tree out of the water once it has been cut. This wood, teak or rosewood, doesn’t float. It’s too heavy!".

When Thip emerged, he passed the pipe to Soumpha who dove, a huge yellow chain saw in his hands. Then we waited. The sun was rising. The water looked incredibly smooth. There were two other boats working far to our left. "Usually it just takes twenty to thirty seconds", said Noy. Nothing happened. Just still water. Then, the surface was ruffled by big air bubbles followed by some tiny pieces of wood came. Twenty two seconds had passed since the boy had dived and this was a signal for the captain. "He’s on his way up." Just then we could feel a slight touch at the bottom of the boat. "Not much of a sign," I thought. But it was enough to make the rest of the crew understand that the tree was cut and it was their time to work.

While Soumpha quickly swam back to the boat, the whole team was suddenly very busy. It’s a funny thing to say, but the excitement was similar to when you catch a big fish. One of the boys pulled our the chain saw, Thip was tugging at the wire, trying to figure how big it was while the father was at the crane. Soumpha was already preparing for the next dive. It took them half an hour to pull our the log, cut off all the branches and fixing it at the back of the boat tied to huge empty barrels to help it float.

At the end of the day, when we drove back to the harbour, there were 16 trunks floating behind us. The captain was happy. "This is a good day," he exclaimed. The whole team seemed to agree with him because they started telling their friends that the falangs had brought them luck. They were all laughing. I asked them if they knew that their job was dangerous. Rather reluctantly they said they did, and that accidents sometimes happen, but less than before they explained because now their equipment was very good. "The last accident was two years ago," said Noy.