Phanchai, Laos: The spontaneous cheering in this village, deep in the remote mountains of central Laos, can only mean one thing. They have found survivors.
For more than a week, seven fossickers from three small villages in Xaisomboun province have been trapped in a cave, surviving on what relatives presume were the two days’ worth of snacks and water the men had taken in with them.
We had just pulled up at the staging ground at Phanchai Village late on Wednesday – after an eight-hour crawl over diabolical mountain roads from the capital, Vientiane – when loud whoops rang out.
It came from where the families and villagers had been gathering each day to cook for the rescuers and wait for news. Finally, some news had come – and it was good.
After no hints of life since the cave flooded late on May 20, word filtered down from the mountain shortly before dusk that five of the men had been found alive. Hungry, but OK.
Those gathered there replayed to us a video, just released by jubilant divers – who were using an improvised internet connection from inside the cave – showing the five men smiling through the low light and huddled together on a rock. At least one still had a working head lamp.
But two of their loved ones and neighbours remain missing. And the survivors still have to get out through the dark, narrow, flooded labyrinth.
After the initial joy, the feeling at the village was one of tempered optimism.
Complicating everything is the kilometres-long climb up the track – hewn from the jungle over the past few days – used to get food, medicine and equipment from the staging ground to the cave.
The rain had started on the morning of May 20, the villagers said. It was not particularly heavy, but was steady and it set in.
The eight men – one escaped before the others were trapped in – had met in Phanchai Village that afternoon as they prepared to go in.
“Everyone told them not to go because of the rain,” the people, including family members, repeated to us. “But they didn’t listen.”
The lure was gold. One woman said a buyer regularly visited the village, paying $US50 ($70) for gold flake roughly the size of the very tip of a finger. The trade was enough for some fossickers to build new, modest houses.
“It is not to get rich, but to provide better for their families,” the woman said.
The operation to save the men has drawn comparisons with the 2018 cave rescue of 12 children from the Wild Boars Thai soccer team. Some of the same master divers are involved again this time, including Mikko Paasi and Thailand’s Norrased “Ben” Palasing.
One man in frequent contact with the rescue team told this masthead it could be an even more complex operation to extract the trapped people than it was in the Thailand scenario. Video posted from the rescue mission shows claustrophobic spaces filled with muddy, coffee-coloured water.
Most of the experienced divers appear to have come from Thailand, which has caused some controversy in Laos, a one-party Communist state.
Somchay Vilayvong, a deputy village chief in the province, apologised after posting that the Thai rescuers “showed up on their own, wanting recognition”, according to state-controlled news site The Laotian Times.
At the staging ground, there were also whispers that the Laos government wanted to be the one making any big announcements. If true, this was blown by the video sent from inside the cave.
Mun Duang Somdi, the mother of one of the men who has been found, was across the road from the rest of the dozens-strong group of families and supporters when the news came through.
“I came back here and the people were cheering. I was very happy,” she told us.
But she still looked pained. The ordeal was not over.
Doing any small thing a mother could, she clutched a plastic bag with juice boxes and snacks, hoping someone could deliver it to her son.
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Zach Hope is South-East Asia correspondent. He is a former reporter at the Brisbane Times.Connect via email.
