9th – We pass a sleeping platform made of bamboo in a terraced field that has a carpet of purple flowers. The road is dusty and full of pot holes it is a gray morning and it is spitting rain. A good day for a trek. An old man and women are walking along the road he has a large machete on his belt (a scabre made from a bit of plumbing pipe) and one ripped trouser leg. They look weary and very dusty as they trudge uphill past stands of bamboo and barb wire fences surrounding the randomly shaped dry fields and reservoirs. Electricity wires are strung along the road leading to a marked elephant park on concrete poles and there is a small stream alongside the road.

We splashed out and spent $50 each for two days of trekking and kayaking which could end up being a great deal or not. We shall see! There are 5 westerners all from the UK – four girls and an Irish carpenter with a Loas guide who speaks a little English.  

We round the corner and there is a women pulling a vine out of the undergrowth stripping leaves from it and using it to bundle up branches that are going in the back of a truck probably for firewood in the town. We pass through areas of smoke (something we will do a lot of as they favour the slash and burn method of agriculture) as we bounce along in the back of the tuk tuk along the unpaved road.

The houses are a mixture of breeze blocks with teak walls and bamboo shacks. We stop at a small village and unload next to the turkeys and the children playing boules. A family is making a long boat in their garden – the whole family is involved. There is a large noticeboard with vegetable pricing and a picture of the vegetable – showing what they will get when they take their crops to Luang Prabang to sell.

We take a short walk through some forest where two guys have a chainsaw and are randomly cutting down trees. Apparently the ones they are felling take 15 years to grow to the size that they are now. Our guide says the government will stop deforestation in 2020 – we aren’t sure there will be much left at that point.

 At the banks of the river there is a lady washing clothes and we load into an unstable beautifully crafted canoe. There are few nails and metal staples used in the contruction and some rudimentary joints but when you think of the tools they are using to make the canoes there is a skill involved. With out load it starts taking on water and we need to bail as we get taken across the small river.

 The guide says there are only 2 groups per month that do the trek we are doing most tourists do the 1 day trek. The first village we come to has 300+ people and a school that the 5-10 year old kids attend. It is only 2 rooms each around 10 x 10 feet. The village survives on quarrying and subsistence farming- we step aside as a lorry passes. A full load is worth $50. As we walk further down the valley it opens up and we see 20 guys toiling away in the hot sun with just flip flops on and sledge hammers on springy bamboo handles! A back breaking job for sure we are sweating buckets just walking. As we climb out of the valley into a tropical forest that is slippy and damp underfoot there is a large bang as dynamite is set off.

The guide points out steps that have been nailed to a tree trunk allowing harvesting of the bee hives that are hanging off the branches about 125 feet up. There are dense spider webs in the undergrowth that seem to be a funnel shape with the rain drops we had glistening in them. The soil is a red heavy clay and we pass fields that have been recently burnt. There are not hinged gates here instead you slide the bamboo horizontal bars to one side.

The next village we stop at we have lunch. It is a very poor village of the Humoung people. Five years ago it was properous however opium growing was made illegal so most of the inhabitants moved to Luang Prabang to find work leaving their land behind. The 10 families left are are growing hops for Beer Loa and rice though we can’t see a water source. As we have lunch three guys walk by from another village – hunter gathers with home made rifles. They are not the same tribe as they are carrying cloth bags over their shoulders whereas the Humoung people use bamboo baskets as backpacks. They two tribes also speak a different dialect and build their houses differently on stilts and not on stilts all within 2 hours walk of each other.

On the way out of the village we pass a very green putrid looking pond which is the villages supply of water. Created in the wet season by scattering salt on the ground attracting the cows which then create an indentation in the soil with their hooves creating a pool of water. Before they created the pond they would hike into the surrounding hills and cut down bannana trees scooping water out of the trunks.

It is a long hot climb from the village. A man with a 40 foot long bamboo pole is coming down the track he has lashed some smaller sections of bamboo to it. He stops and stares at us – we must be a sight! All red like lobsters in the heat and panting. As we climb the track becomes more overgrown the soil turns gray and we are in what looks like old opium fields that have been left to go to seed. There are many decrepid shacks in the fields some are even burnt down.

On the outskirts of the village (30 minutes walk) we are going to stay in we pass some women beating brush against the ground. The product is worth 2000/kg or about $1/day and is used to make brooms. The children playing by the stream see us in the distance and chorus ‘Saba di’ (hello) and in English ‘I love you’! There is a lot of slashing of the forest and in a month our guide says they will burn and plant crops. The goats and cows are looking for food in the undergrowth their bells clanging around their necks so if they can’t be found at least they will be heard.

A tree laden with fruit overhanging the path is according to our guide a fig tree we are not sure we understand him. The fruit is popular with wild cats and humans also eat it but they are not ready to be harvested.
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We shower using a bucket in the clean toliet block and I go for a walk around the village. There are people making tables, baskets, stripping bark for paper making, making mattresses and string. Everyone over the age of 15 is put to work in the village. There is a well built school which is a result of a US NGO. Annabelle and I donate $2 towards school books etc.

We are staying in a bamboo shack in the chief of the villages enclosure. He is one of 3 chiefs that serve 4 year terms. The villagers have power if they can afford a generator and oil for it from 6:30-9:30pm. The wealthier ones have standpipes bringing water from the stream otherwise they have to share the village well. Our host doesn’t have oil so after dinner we play cards by candle light while the neighbours TV blares into the night. Our guide cooks a delicous dinner of sticky rice and vegetables with pork. We talk for a while he has just got married and is from the Humoung tribe. His cousins live in the US a result of the CIA secret war – they fled from Loas after the communists took over in 1975 – google Air America.

The village drunk wonders in and out of the enclosure keeping an eye on us. We turn in at 8:45 for an early night to attempt to get some sleep on the mattresses made out of bottle brush.