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First step in Elephant Dung Paper production |
If the Hongsa elephants are savvy enough to comprehend what’s going on with their dung, they must be silently rooting for Mr Paper’s success |
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Oliver’s latest brainstorm is to produce two kinds of greeting cards - one made from sa paper, and the other from elephant dung paper |
Getting there from Luang Prabang is to take a speedboat upriver for about two hours to Tha Xuang, and from there a car or bus climbs through the heavily forested mountains for an hour before descending into the hidden valley of Hongsa District. Hongsa has no real downtown business district, and its suburbs merge into the countryside. The noise of the little traffic that exists fails to ruffle the quiet. Several temples grace its neighbourhoods, a few of them brand new. Many of these feature colorful murals on their exterior walls, scenes from Buddhist mythology.
But it’s not the temple murals that draw the handful of visitors who make it to Hongsa. It’s the elephants. With logging banned in Thailand, this is the nearest place to watch elaphants at their traditional work. Arrangements can to ride them in a setting far more natural than that offered at various elephant riding venues in Thailand. Opposite the town’s only hotel lies a resort set up a few years ago to house groups that had made arrangements in Thailand to go elephant riding in Hongsa.
To start his business in Hongsa, Oliver simply offered the mahouts a new way to make money with their elephants-collect the dung and sell it to him. Workers in Hongsa then wash and boil it for 24 hours in a caustic soda solution and afterwards wash it and wring it twice in a flowing stream. They then send the result downriver to Luang Prabang to get the hydrogen peroxide treatment.
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By itself, the pulp from elephant dung is too coarse to be of use for anything except perhaps packing boxes. Oliver blends it with 50 percent sa pulp. This makes it appropriate for notebook covers, stenciled posters and lanterns. He finally finished his first sheets of the paper this past May, and he at once began experimenting with natural dyes. The wood of the flame tree (maifang ), which blossoms all over northern Laos that month, produces an attractive shade of red. That encouraged him to start trying other dye plants such as indigo, cumin, catechu and onion skins. Oliver's latest brainstorm is to produce two kinds of greeting cards - one made from sa paper, and the other from the elephant dung paper. The one on the relatively smooth sa paper will be intended for notes of good news and happy sentiments. The one made from the rougher elephant dung paper will be for bad news - complaints, diatribes and the like. Elephants are supposed to be fairly intelligent animals. If the Hongsa elephants are savvy enough to comprehend what's going on with their dung, they must be silently rooting for Mr Paper's success. Eventually, Laos will have to halt or at least severely reduce logging in Sayaboury, and the herd will be out of regular employment. But if Oliver's business with their dung grows big enough , they can look forward to days of doing nothing much but frolicking and whatever else they like , so long as they process a whole lot of food at the same time. If there's an elephant version of heaven on earth, that has to be it. |
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