Ari's Planet

In the morning in Huay Xay I wait for the minibus to Luang Nam Tha where I plan to do some trekking. There are not enough tickets sold for my minibus, so the driver shifts us to another one behind it that is already fairly full. Apparently, the tour shop that said there was only one bus in the morning wasn't quite on the money. He shoves bags in the "trunk" all the way to the roof. It doesn't look like the door will close. Somehow it does close, with a sigh of compressed baggage. It's a bit packed. We ride up to Luang Nam Tha over a winding twisting road, up and down, back and forth. We learn that this is a typical mountain road in this area. I manage to doze at times. We arrive around noon after 2.5 hours. There are a few other tourists in the minibus who plan to go directly on to Muang Sing. I need to change money and want to check out Luang Nam Tha. Changing money is simple and I get the best exchange rate to date, 8890 kip/USD with no commission at Lao Development Bank. Exploring the town is pretty fast and I realize there's not much point staying, so I hike back to the bus station.

We wait until around for the next transport. As I recall, this was a minibus as well, which again goes over some lovely roads. It was also about the most uncomfortable ride, there being scant room for my knees. I was crammed in the back seat and the only good thing is the ride was just 1.5 hours. Oh, writing this 3 weeks after the fact is not so great. Along for the ride were an Irish couple, a Puerto Rican, and two Australian girls, along with a few locals, for a grand total of around 15 people all crammed in. So we get to Muang Sing in the afternoon. As we approach town we pass rice fields and the typical bamboo thatched huts on stilts. I look out one side of the van and say "turkey", John sees something else (damn, I forgot) and Zeeta sees a naked woman bathing. We run into a British/German couple sitting in the guesthouse. I'm quickly trying to find people to join me on a 2-day trek to keep costs down. I take a room with the friendly owner then walk over to find a trekking company.

There are three companies in Muang Sing, right on the main road. Two seem reasonably established while a third doesn't even have a name sign yet. I stop in the nameless shop first and Phong gives a friendly and interesting description of a trek to me and the Australians. Sounds good. For due dilligence we check out the two other shops. One is staffed by a woman with a baby, though she's more concerned with her baby than with giving us information. The second one doesn't seem as friendly. I like the first, but we decide to meet back in an hour after eating and seeing if the others want to join us. I come back and chat with Phong. He invites me to come help his brother learn English after we conclude our business. The others seem interested in a trek with one of the other companies with lots of organized activities, but I really want something simple. Eventually they all come over to Phong's shop, bringing the cost to about 460,000 kip each for 9 people, about $17, for 2 nights and 2.5 days, everything included. This is is down from around 560,000 with only 3 people. I wander around and check out the kids playing in a yard. They become fascinated by my tripod, one of them convinced it is some sort of sighting telescope.

I ride with Phong to his village, about 3 km from town. Turns out Phong has 60 brothers and sisters who arrive in two shifts. Phong is teaching English and wants me to help the students learn better pronunciation. The schoolroom is in a thatched hut with basic wooden benches and a "whiteboard"--a piece of plywood painted with white paint on which Phong writes with white chalk. We go over the day's lessons. The students are of all ages. They are good students: they have learned to mispronounce words just as Phong mispronounces them. Getting them to say "jacket" correctly is a challenge. After the class a few students want to chat some more, then I have dinner with Phong and his family. We eat from communal pots, rice, a local bitter green vegetable, some kind of typical meat dish. They're Mung and moved here about 10 years ago from the Plain of Jars area. His father came up first to find a good plot of land offered (or allowed) by the government and the family followed. We eat the rice they grew, they do not make excess for sale. Phong gives me a ride back to town.

It pours rain that night. Around 9 pm it is coming down in torrents. The roof clatters. Eventually it stops raining and a miserable little dog takes to yapping. And yapping. And yapping. Somehow I sleep, or the rain drowns the dog, or the dog sleeps in the rain, I don't care. In the morning it rains more, and I'm thinking this is not going to be the best weather for trekking, but by 9 am it has cleared up. We assemble at the trekking company, leave our big bags, and hop on the songtaew for the 1/2 hour ride to the Akha village for the start of our trek. They provide us bottled water for the first day. The water comes in these flimsy plastic bottles with caps that don't really close. I have my own water in Playtpus water pouches, one with a drinking tube. For the remaining days they will provide us with boiled water. This information does not bode well for the organizational skills of this company, as we shall soon see. I will use my water purifier and water containers, no worries, thank you.

What to bring on a trek: Your feet and a sunny disposition. A complete list is at the end.

We walk up to the village and stop by the local school. The kids are out playing during recess. It looks like half the village is there. Several women stand around with babies. They range in age from 15 to around 39. So that's where all the kids playing in the yard came from! The other tourists snap some pictures. I realize that traveling with 7 other tourists with cameras is going to make photography difficult. I grab some shots of kids playing the local version of volleyball, in which the head and feet are used rather than hands. We start our walk through the jungle.

The jungle is wonderful. It is the dry season and hot. My hat becomes soaked in sweat. We walk past local vegetation, bamboo stands. We come to sugarcane fields and our guide hacks down a few stalks. Sugar cane is delightful. We hear people clearing the forest. They practice slash and burn agriculture. In February/March they cut down the vegetation, let it dry, then burn it. Later they will plant crops. We stop for lunch. A family is cutting young trees down, two girls, mother and father (actually, I'm assuming a familial relationship). The man has a home-made axe which fascinates me. It seems effective. We eat sticky rice, eggplant paste, fried vegetables. We continue on, up and down. It is slippery at places, both from the rain and the steep muddy grades. We take many frequent stops. Our guide complains of blisters. Apparently, he is not used to walking much. The rest stops are far too long and too frequent. We pass a man with a colorful chicken on a string and an ancient rifle--it appears to be a flint-lock, but I can't believe it's that ancient and I must not know enough about guns.

The hike is fairly tough and hot, with up and down sections. Along the way we stop to rest. We sit in simple thatched huts. Our guide says they are used for rice storage. Rising up from the disturbed structure are tiny white moths or insects, rising up like burnt embers from which the fire has gone out, or like the white rice of which they are dissimilar except in the bones of one and the wings of the other. A man with a backpack shows up. Turns out he is from Poland and is hiking around on his own. He asks locals for directions. He's doing better than our guide. We come to the village at which we will stay the first night. At the approach to the village is a spirit gate. This must not be touched, as touching it will somehow damage something and it will need to be reconstructed. The gate is a wooden affair with various decorations, the meaning of which I am ignorant. The path runs through and around the gate. It is not clear to me if the gate or the world will need to be reconstructed, or if there is a difference between the village in which one lives and the forest. This is only because I am confused, it is not the gate that wonders. Just at the village is another structure, some sort of four-cornered thing with long poles arcing up and to the middle from which hangs a kind of hook; is it for hanging bad tourists or for kids to play? Neither the Pole nor I have a clue.

The villagers come to see the visitors. We come to see the villagers. One set of us has gone a bit farther to be at the same place and do the same thing. Pigs and children, chickens. One 2 year old wanders around with a white chick but won't hold still long enough for me to get a picture. The Pole has a map and the locals are fascinated by a picture of the falang (foreigner) on a motorbike surrounded by Lao police (in a friendly manner). I am fascinated by the Polish guy's approach to travel: he is into his 2nd year of a 5 year round-the-world backpack. He wanders around on his own, stays where he can. We stay in a hut a bit apart from the village in which the foreigners stay. Our guide and two assistants cook dinner. Kids run around hunting birds with slingshots. The girls take a cold shower. We sip lau lau (rice whiskey) brought by one of us and sit in the dark. We eat dinner, then the women of the village show up to give us a 20 minute traditional massage. My calves are most grateful. The Pole joins in, and a few minutes later the village head shows up. He seems rather agitated, and the Pole thinks this is something to do with paying for the massage and maybe with the Pole not having a proper guide with him. It looks like there's some money issue going on with the guide and the "chief", and we get the feeling something improper is going on. It pours again at night. The rain comes and goes, the sky clears and there are stars, then it rains again. Before dawn the chickens call, the dogs, the pigs, the children. Finally, I clamber up.

Water was boiled for us at night, but everyone is only alloted 2 liters for the hike (until we reach the next village). The day before I drank something like 6 liters. The water bottles don't all close properly. I am glad that I brought my water purifier and can carry at least 3 liters in properly-sealing containers. I can always purify additional water on the trail. I carry another liter for a total of 4. This water bottle issue is a stupid mistake on the part of the guide. They should provide proper water containers or tell people to bring their own, such as screw-cap bottled water containers available in Muang Sing.

We get going and trek along. We pass similar landscapes. The slash and burn method has left a few places recently denuded. Smoke rises from the distant valley. It is man burning the earth to eat. Brilliant orange fungi grow on a charred log, slivers of the sun. We walk through tall grasses, down a steep slope, cross a stream. We walk along a river. There is a sign with what look like warnings, drawings of things like a grenade and a bamboo fishing net, and various numbers that look like fines. I think it means that there are grenades in the water, or maybe fishing carries a fine, or something like that. We cross a section of the river. One of us goes off a bit to take a dip, when he comes back the guide gets upset with him. Apparently there are unexploded bombs that may be left over from fishing (UXO from the US war is just not enough, I guess). Why didn't the guide tell him not to go in the first place when he asked if it was ok? Yes, another indication that we're not in the best of hands. We come to a place for a swim in the river, a short way before our next stop for the night.

The approach to the village takes us past sugar cane which is being harvested. Trucks are loaded beyond full with sugarcane. A man is sitting on the road smoking from a thick bamboo pipe. We come to the village shop. The other tourists pounce on the lao beer stocks. I hang around a bit. A man is shaping a piece of wood into a homemade axe like that one I saw the day before. He chats with his buddies. Many of the men are carrying young children in pouches. We were told we would get to stay with a family (home stay) on our second day. This didn't register with the guide who wants to put us up in a shack used by a Chinese sugarcane plantation company. I ask about staying with a family but he says this would cause hardship for them so I relent, but this is another negative mark on the tour company. Our guide says that we're the first tourists in 4 years, but none of us buy this: kids younger than 4 seem to understand tourist things. His remark about the sugarcane company is very interesting, so now the villagers are growing a cash-crop for China, which lies just a few kilometers away and is in easy walking distance.

I sit in the schoolroom. Several boys are playing. They play just like I or my peers might have played when I was their age, an elementary school student in Israel. They run around chasing eachother all over the chairs. One older boy is giving a younger kid a hard time, the younger kid is being a bit of a sour-face about things and the older boy is being a bit of a bully. He gets him with the eraser on the face and the younger kid gets all pissed off, it could have happened anywhere. They spit a lot. The other tourists have attracted a crowd of kids. Some of them come over to me and start grabbing my legs. I figure hey, I'll pick him up, kids usually like that. Oh, did they ever, the next 15 minutes were spent at "try to topple the big falang". The worst of the little terrors gets nicknamed Osama. What a bunch of brats. I go to take a picture of some flowers, the kids pick them and hold them up for me.

We have dinner. Much of the village comes over to take a gander at us. One of the women mends a massive gash in one of our group's pants. We play some cards. I look at the clear sky. By the early-morning hours it will be fogged over. We get to sleep on ratty pads with even rattier blankets. I'm glad I have my silk sleep sack. Learning from prior nights, I don all my dry clothing. I wake several times from the hard floor and cold. Around 4 am I wake with the cold, stumble in the fog. One of the guides has started a fire and is trying to keep warm. Eventually I throw on my rain jacket, finally achieving some warmth. The lack of sufficient warm blankets is yet another mark against the tour company.

The next day is our last. We have two options: the long and the short. The short is taken since some of the trekkers weren't into another long day. Again, not surprisingly, we get a bit lost, as our guide does not really know the way. We cross a field of downed trees and a few streams. We come to the last village but the guide suggests we just go on back to Muang Sing. We were also supposed to stop by a few other villages on the ride back but this did not materialize either. Oh well. That evening the guide makes us dinner at his home, a very nice gesture. All in all, I really enjoyed the trek. It is interesting beautiful country. My best times are when I am out walking, day in and day out. My body feels good, I relax. Even the relatively minor problems of using a new tour company and a somewhat less than stellar guide did not dampen my enjoyment.

For a trek in the north of Laos, I recommend taking plenty of warm clothes and your own water containers and water purifier. I would have been even happier had I brought my fleece jacket, though a sleeping bag would be even better. I probably carried the most of anyone on the trek and they kept getting surprised as I pulled out more stuff. I ended up using most everything I brought, though, so I do not regret the extra weight.

Clothes:
Hat, t-shirt, short-sleeve shirt, long-sleeve shirt, trousers, shorts (double as swim trunks), 3 pair underwear, 3 pairs of socks, 2 liner socks, thermal pants and shirt, lightweight rain jacket (in water-resistant stuff sack)
Hiking boots (good for traction in the mud and protection), sandals (for evening, crossing streams)

Equipment:
Water bottles 3 L capacity (with drinking tube is very good)
Water purifier and spare batteries (miox)
Sleep sack or sleeping bag
Medical kit and medications (see listing elsewhere on site)
Compass, whistle (actually used this to get the guide!), space blanket, waterproof matches
Knife, headlamp, small flashlight
Small backpack with good hip belt for all this stuff

Toiletries:
Toilet paper, toothbrush, toothpaste, floss, soap, hand sanitizer (doubles for quick wound and nick cleansing)

Camera:
As much as you want to drag around plus a lightweight dry bag for stream crossings

Misc:
Money belt with passport, etc.
Wallet

My camera, lenses, bag, and accessories weigh about 3 kg. Water weighs another 3 kg. Clothes, those carried, probably weighed 2 to 2.5 kg. My small backpack probably weighs 1.5 kg and my medical kit about 0.8 kg. The other items maybe add another 1 to 1.5 kg, so I estimate the weight at around 11 kg. This is more than most people, and if you leave out the camera and count only the dry weight it's about 5 kg, but like I said you might need this stuff. If you're trekking in a warmer area then you can leave some of the warm clothes out.