More About The Mysterious Oud Wood & It's Ancient Heritage + M

At Chagnaud's factory, on the outskirts of Vientiane, we were shown around his cluttered and eccentric laboratory, which is filled with strange and unique oils and essences, and woods from deep in the Laotian forests. "I can't tell you in 2 sentences what all this implies to me," Chagnaud said.

Perfume is immensely essential to France. However primarily it's for the individuals of Laos, to secure the forests from theft. see this website is this mystical, fantastic thing, magical and rare, but the only way to protect it is to collect it with great care and regard." Getting up at dawn the next day, we drove in Chagnaud's tanklike, dust-encrusted pickup a grueling seven hours to the remote forest town of Kam Keut, not far from the Vietnamese border.

"An amazing thing," he said, "that something so evil might eventually produce something so gorgeous." On the method we went to some of Chagnaud's backwoods oud distilleries by the roadside. Here, in the sweltering heat, employees transported fire wood for the pot fires, sawed substantial aqui laria logs into pieces, and laid the damp chips out on sheets for drying.

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Later that night we roamed around the cool and misty streets of Kam Keut listening to Communist news broadcasts from the corner speakers. Chag naud told me that aquilaria smuggling was a big problem here; lots of towns had matured around valuable trees, not the other method around, as a way to secure them from both Lao and Vietnamese smugglers.

The following early morning we drove a couple of miles out into the countryside, through superb forests filled with delicate, feathery aquilaria trees, and discovered a village that had actually undoubtedly been developed around a couple of unblemished trees. In the center of the hamlet was a weird sight: a massive, fenced-in tree with a sign that identified it as belonging to Agroforex, Chagnaud's business.

"I paid $5,000 for it," Chagnaud said. "I'm not going to suffice down, either. I'm securing it for the villagers. We put a fence around it so the Viet smugglers wouldn't dare touch it. This is how ridiculous it's ended up being, the thirst for oud." "Indeed," Ferrando said later on, as we were walking back to the truck, "of all the items that I offer, oud is the most mysterious to me.