Strange massages and embarrassing accidents: trekking in Luang Namtha in Northern Laos
Slashing our way through the jungle, a few embarrassing accidents and a weird massage by a gang of teenagers - there’s a whole lot to experience when trekking in Nam Ha National Protected Area in Northern Laos.
Interested in booking a trek in Luang Namtha? Read our ultimate guide to organising a trek in the area.
I am lying on a grubby mattress in the dark with hands roughly pummeling what feels like every inch of me. The feeling could easily be mistaken for some kind of torture, but I assure you that it isn’t supposed to be.
Every now and then a phone camera flash lights up the room as someone takes a selfie and I am able to see the faces of my not one, but three masseuses. They are all about 15 years old, faces whitened with powder and lips stained with a slash of red lipstick. Something about all this feels a bit surreal and very wrong.
It felt nowhere near as relaxing as this.
I briefly wonder whether we actually did end up taking mushrooms in a bar in Vang Vieng and if this experience might be me still tripping out, drooling in a corner somewhere, off my face on ‘shrooms.
But in the next second, knuckles under my shoulder blades bring me painfully back to reality and I let out a grunt.
It felt much more like this.
"You like?" asks one of the girls, her face suddenly materialising close to mine in the darkness.
She doesn't wait for the answer and her face once again disappears into the blackness of the hut. I turn my head, willing it to be over already and try my best to get comfortable.
Welcome to the Akha village.
Trekking in Luang Namtha
At the beginning of our trip to Laos, Vincent and I had decided that we wanted to do at least one trek to visit some of the hill tribes in the northern region.
Luang Namtha province is an extremely popular place to go trekking and there are a number of companies offering one to five day treks within the Nam Ha National Protected Area.
You can choose between a range of different experiences depending on your interests (e.g. nature, wildlife or hill tribes) and whether you want to combine trekking with another activity such as kayaking.
For more information on organising a trek and choosing a trekking agency, see our write up on everything you need to know about trekking in Luang Namtha.
The very beautiful Nam Ha National Park in Luang Namtha.
Whilst we are huge lovers of all things nature, views and wildlife, on this occasion we wanted to see and experience something different.
Don't get me wrong, Laos is home to a whole load of wildlife including tigers and clouded leopards. It is just that the chance of you seeing any of these larger mammals whilst trekking in Luang Namtha (or anywhere else in Laos) is extremely remote.
Perhaps we’ve been spoiled by our wildlife experiences in Zambia and Botswana or in the national parks in Sri Lanka, but anyway, this time we weren't after wildlife. This time we wanted to do something we hadn't done before: visit hill tribes.
A little introduction to the Akha hill tribe
Vincent and I were particularly interested in seeing whether we could organise a trek to an Akha village.
Famous for their distinctive headdresses and traditional clothing, the Akha are a hill tribe that originally made their way into South East Asia from China during the early 20th century and can now be found in the mountainous regions of Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, North East India and Yunnan Province in China.
Wars in Burma and Laos resulted in many Akha becoming displaced and so a lot have migrated to neighbouring countries, with almost 80,000 now living in Thailand’s northern provinces of Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai.
An Akha village in the Phongsaly province in Northern Laos.
Akha traditional clothing is extremely ornate and eye-catching and essentially what they are well known for amongst tourists.
Akha women are master embroiderers and weavers: they grow cotton and weave it on foot-treadle looms; hand dye their clothing with indigo and then embroider the cloth with colourful designs.
The most unique item of clothing is undoubtedly the Akha women’s spectacular headdresses which define not only their age but also their marital status. Different styles of headdress are worn at different stages of an Akha woman’s life.
Each headdress is unique and can be decorated with items such as silver coins, feathers, woollen brightly coloured pompoms, beads, seeds and much more.
An Akha woman and child in Phongsaly.
But what really peaked our interest about the Akha was their belief system: the Akha religion, known as zahv, is most often described as being a mixture of animism and ancestor worship.
The Akha strongly believe in the presence of both good and bad spirits: usually, the good spirits live in the houses and in the village and represent their ancestors who look after family members, while the bad spirits live in the forests and rivers and cause illness and death.
An Akha spirit gate in Luang Namtha.
Most Akha villages have an elaborately carved spirit gate covered in wooden charms, which marks the division between the realm of man and domesticated animals and the outside realm, belonging to the spirits and wildlife.
The gate functions to ward off nefarious spirits and to entice good ones. It’s really important that visitors do not touch the spirit gate, because it is believed that this will allow bad spirits to enter the village and will cause people to become sick and die.
An Akha spirit swing.
Akha villages also each have a tall four-poster ritual ‘swing’ (that visitors also shouldn’t touch), which is built and used once a year in a special four-day festival known as the Akha New Year, where they ask their ancestors for help to ensure the fertility of the next rice harvest.
Our jungle experience
Reading about the Akha’s beliefs and spiritual practices was enough to convince us that we needed to book at least one of our treks in Luang Namtha’s Nam Ha National Park.
Vincent loves reading about different world religions/spiritual beliefs/spirits/witchcraft/folklore (you name it, he has read it) and a complex and intricate belief system like the Akha’s was definitely a draw for him. (I sometimes like to joke that 60% of his brain is consumed with thinking about things likes witches or religion and the other 30% is focused on wrestling, which he argues doesn’t leave much time for anything else including his bodily functions). But I digress.
What happens when your brain is almost entirely composed of witches and wrestling.
Luang Namtha has a number of trekking companies to choose from and after visiting pretty much all of the tour agencies in the town, we opted for a 2-day-1-night Ban Phouvan Akha trail trek with Into the Wild.
Interested in more jungle trekking experiences? Check out our complete guide to visiting Gunung Mulu National Park in Sarawak, Malaysia!
Day One
The morning market
Our guide for the trek was Bounmi, a funny, friendly guy who we later discovered was only 17. We had a fairly early start at 08:30am and our first stop was to Luang Namtha's morning market so that Bounmi could pick up food supplies as he would be making all of our meals on the trip.
Walking around the huge morning market is an event in itself.
Women sat behind huge mounds of what looked like the world's hottest chilli paste; there were cakes and sweets I recognised as being the same as Malaysian kuih; banana leaf wrapped delicacies; piles of shredded bamboo topped with spring onions and chillies; rice noodles; huge slabs of pork and beef; pigs heads and offal and of course, plenty of sticky rice everywhere plus the usual fruit and vegetables (although a little more exotic than what you would get at your local Tesco).
And of course, what would a market in Asia be if there weren't some of those more unusual food items (well, by Western standards anyway) also on display?
Bounmi showed us a basket crawling with crickets, grasshoppers and some other winged insects and explained that they were very tasty stir-fried. Next to it were several bowls covered in netting and containing a whole load of toads, who every now and then would hop in unison as though testing the limits of their man-made prison.
The toads are usually made into a soup which is flavoured with lots of different herbs and spices and can be served with sticky rice. There were also eels and some other beetle-like insects that I couldn’t identify.
Whilst these more unfamiliar foods did nothing to whet my appetite, everything is eaten and nothing is really wasted here. Which is more than I can say for what happens back home.
Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to the jungle we go...
Once our food shopping was done, we were back in the car and on the way to Nam Ha National Protected Area.
We stopped briefly at Ban Chaleurnsouk about 20 minutes into our drive, so that our driver could signal to our second local guide, who was from one of the nearby villages, to jump on his motorbike and follow us to the starting point of the trek.
Five minutes later, we pulled up at the side of the road and it was time for us to jump out. Our guides got out and strapped their machetes around their waists (we noted with amusement that one of the machete ‘belts’ was actually a computer cable) and a cheeky photo later, it was time to set off.
Our ever smiling guides.
There was no gentle introduction: pretty much right away we were jungle trekking.
Trekking in the rainy season is difficult for many reasons and several of these became apparent almost immediately: 1) the rain makes the already verdant jungle grow over the path 2) the now wet path is super muddy and slippery and 3) violent rainstorms fell giant trees.
Bounmi leading the way.
Ever the professionals, our guides took all of this in their stride and put their machetes to excellent use: we watched with amazement as Bounmi literally cleared us a path through the jungle.
And even after this, it wasn’t apparent that what we were walking on was actually a path. To my untrained eye, nothing looked like a path. It was just all...very jungly.
Apparently this is a path. Who knew?
Bounmi was very good at taking regular breaks, especially during the uphill climbs, which in the heat and humidity seemed to tire everyone out.
After about an hour, we stopped at a clearing and both our guides were very excited to find mushrooms - they spent the next 15 minutes picking everything they could reasonably fit into their plastic bags and a baseball cap.
Baseball caps aren’t just for wearing you know.
Our local guide would be selling the mushrooms he collected back in his village, while Bounmi informed us that he would be cooking some of his collection for our dinner that evening.
To me, this sounded yummy but for Vincent aka ‘the mushroom-hater’ the prospect of a ‘shroomy dinner didn’t exactly set his stomach rumbling. “Guess I’ll be eating lots of sticky rice,” he muttered.
We stopped at about midday to have lunch which was carefully laid out on two banana leaves, freshly cut by our local village guide.
Stir-fried bamboo, some spicy greens, steamed sweet sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves, actual bananas and a fruit that looked like an apple (but tasted like a pear) plus another huge mound of sticky rice ensured that there was no way that we would go hungry.
Once lunch was over it was time for our local guide to depart (his main job was to carry our lunch to ease some of the physical burden on Bounmi) and so then the three of us were on our own.
The climbing crab hunter
Our trek took us past a small but picturesque waterfall, where we came upon some local people collecting crabs.
One of the crab collectors also turned out to be an insane-in-the-membrane climber. Despite having already amassed a sizeable amount of crab goodies in his net (which Vincent regarded with a worried stare, clearly wondering if they were going to be added to our dinner thereby requiring him to eat more rice), simply hunting around in the rock pools for crabs was clearly not enough for this guy. Nope.
Bounmi taking some time out to sharpen his machete.
A few minutes after our arrival, our crab hunting friend proceeded to climb up the entire waterfall with the agility of a mountain goat, stepping from slippery piss-wet through rock to piss-wet through rock in just his flip flops, like it totally weren’t no thang.
Every now and then he would have to contort his body into odd positions as he stuck his hand into small crevices in the rockface, fingers outstretched and grasping, searching for crabs that might have hidden themselves away.
At the top of the waterfall and knowing that we were all watching him, he turned around and posed up a storm. What a f@%king genius.
Evil plants and accidents
One of the things I really enjoyed about this trek was the fact that Bounmi was so knowledgable about the plants and animals in the jungle.
He was constantly pointing plants out and cutting things off to show us: from the scrapings of tree bark that locals use to cure stomach aches and diarrhoea to natural ‘tiger balm’ to ease muscle aches and pains.
Bounmi explained that this type of knowledge is usually passed down orally though village elders and that his parents and grandparents had taught him to identify different plants when he was growing up in his Khmu village.
By this point I needed this jungle tiger balm.
I was also pretty surprised to find that Vincent and I were both very open to trying random things that Bounmi would just scrape, dig out, or uproot in the jungle: from the inside of a rattan plant (which I’d only ever thought was used to make canes!) and which tasted slightly sour and potatoey, to wild rhubarb, which I was pleased to identify correctly.
Perhaps there is still a role for me as a jungle-trek guide somewhere in my future...
Given the frequency with which I experience food poisoning, a jungle stomach problem remedy is probably a useful one to know about.
Bounmi also took the time to point out what I ended up nicknaming as the ‘evil plant’ or ‘hardcore stinging nettle’.
It is basically like a stinging nettle with a burn 1000 times worse. The top of the leaf is fine to touch but the underside is covered in small hairs that can irritate and burn your skin.
He cheerfully explained how one of the participants on a jungle survival trek unwittingly used the leaves to wipe his bum after doing a poo. Apparently, Bounmi heard screaming and rushed over to see what had happened to find the poor man stumbling about in agony.
Probably how that man felt after basically rubbing his genitals with a jungle stinging nettle.
The thing with this plant was that it seemed to be everywhere, especially when we were walking along the river. Bounmi was constantly hacking away at it to remove it from our path.
This got me wondering about whether either of us would get through this jungle trek unscathed because although both of us love hiking and have completed a number of strenuous treks over the years, we also have a fantastic ability to trip up over our own feet at inopportune moments.
I needn’t have wondered, as in the afternoon it started to rain and we began to slip and slide along the path even more than before.
The hardcore stinging nettle’s usual hangout.
It wasn’t a case of if one of us would fall over, it was when.
And I managed to fall, spectacularly.
Yep, I knew it would happen.
We were just rounding a corner (if I can even say that a path in the jungle has a corner) and the rain was coming down hard.
I stepped on to what I thought was pretty solid ground. Turns out it wasn’t - it was actually a big muddy mess and I slid and then toppled backwards into a mass of plants, grasping at leaves, stems and branches to try and arrest my fall.
Vincent later said that it looked like I was being swallowed by the jungle and he was actually genuinely worried that I’d fallen down a deep hole and hit my head.
An artist’s impression of how I basically fell over.
Bounmi and Vincent each took one of my arms and pulled me up onto my feet (I was lying on my back like an upside-down tortoise at this point).
“I am alright, I am fine,” I reassured them, more embarrassed than anything. “It probably looked a lot worse than it was.”
However, my left arm was starting to burn and itch like crazy. It turned out that I’d actually fallen into one of those evil plants and now I was reaping the consequences.
My skin had reddened and was starting to develop huge welts. My whole forearm began to throb. Bounmi asked if it was itching or hurting and I told him that the pain was far worse.
We continued walking and along the way he broke off the stem of a plant that had a sort of slimy white inside and told me to rub it on my burn (I assumed it was like a jungle version of a dock leaf). It reduced the burning a tiny bit but it was still really uncomfortable.
Oh the embarrassment.
Bounmi told me that the pain could last a week. A week! And it also got worse when you wet the area, which you can imagine was super fun as it was still raining.
Every time I removed my rucksack, my bag would graze my arm and the burning would get worse. I couldn’t lean on that arm or even touch it. They really don’t mess about, these jungle plants!
Hilariously, Vincent had also already come into contact with the hardcore stinging nettle when he had fallen earlier in the day, but neither of us had known why his skin had become irritated. Now at least we had matching burning arms. It must be love.
My arm, a week after my encounter with the stinging plant.
There were, of course, nicer plant-related encounters. My favourite was definitely wild cardamom, which we saw growing close to the village.
When Bounmi uprooted the plant you could smell the sweet scent all around. He also showed us where the local Akha had actually planted cardamom, mainly for the purpose of selling it to the Chinese.
Wild cardamom.
He then proceeded to pull several of the plants up (Vincent and I briefly wondered whether the Akha would mind him doing this), telling us that this would be added to our coffee at breakfast the next morning.
Muddy, dirty, soaked through and now with a burning arm, the prospect of a spiced coffee at breakfast the next day sounded heavenly to me.
Our home for the night
The final part of our walk on the first day took us steeply uphill, through fields of mountain rice and our sweating was rewarded with beautiful views of the surrounding mountains and hills.
We could also see the village where we would be spending the night. Perched on top of one of the hills was a cluster of wooden houses, mostly built on stilts.
Our accommodation was situated on the edge of the main village on the crest of a hill. It was basic: we were staying in a purpose built hut for visitors, which consisted of thin mattresses and duvets that would be spread out on top of woven rugs on the floor. I mean, no one expects the Ritz right?
I’d just trekked through the jungle for six hours, was covered in mud and had fallen into a sort of skin-burning bush (and yes, I am begging you to feel sorry for me). At that point I would take whatever accommodation would have me. We dumped our bags and took a walk around the village with Bounmi.
Just over from our accommodation we could see the village’s spirit swing. In the steadily fading afternoon light, the towering structure looked more than a little eerie and mysterious. It was cool to actually see this in real life.
As we walked down the hill towards the village, we were already being followed by a stream of curious children who would shout things and then run away; run away if you pretended to take a photo of them; and then gesture for you to take photos of them, after which they would happily spend 15 minutes ‘working it’ for the camera.
A lot of them were extremely photogenic - I felt like this was a village full of potential models!
These kids might live in a village but they still know how to be gangsta.
Most Akha villages don’t have electricity or running water. If there is electricity it is supplied through solar panels and it isn’t usually available all day.
This village had running water, but it consisted of a hand pump in the middle of a paddock-type structure. Everyone in the village who needs water collects it from there and it is also the public bathing area.
We had the option of taking a shower there ourselves (men can strip down to their tighty-whities and women have to wear a sarong) but we felt that there was such curiosity about us from both the men and women that showering might become too much of a spectacle. Instead, we opted to stay filthy dirty for the night.
Bounmi pointed out a little hut where mushrooms were being cleaned and dried: these ones looked different to the ones we’d picked on our trek.
They were large and fleshy, with bright red caps and looked very like the toadstools you see in cartoons but without the white spots. Apparently these were extremely valuable and were sold by the Akha to the Chinese for medicinal purposes. One kilogram sells for around 800,000kip (around £75)!
Jesus. I clearly need to get myself into this mushroom business.
A note about photographs
As we walked through the village, I asked Bounmi if I could take photos of some of the women who were wearing the traditional Akha headdress. He reassured me that I could, but I felt extremely uncomfortable not asking the subject of each of my photographs for their permission: this is not after all a human zoo.
Just as I didn’t want to become a spectacle by showering in the public bathing area, these women should also have a choice about whether they are photographed or not.
I also prefer to build a relationship with someone before photographing them (I think it is only polite before sticking a camera in their face) but Bounmi spoke very little Akha (and many Akha don’t speak Lao) so it was quite difficult to do this.
Many of the women I asked to photograph refused, which was fine. I had also read before the trek that when someone takes a photograph (especially of babies) some Akha believe that the camera steals their soul.
Not only is this a terrifying belief that would understandably make anyone really uncomfortable in front of the camera, but I also didn’t want to become known as the village soul stealer!
Whether this was the reason that many of the women in the village didn’t want to be photographed, I don’t know. I felt that perhaps it was also the fact that despite treks bringing in vital income for these villages, some people were sick of being gawped at by tourists.
At one point Bounmi, in a mixture of Lao and Akha, asked a lady why she didn’t want to be photographed and she responded that she didn’t want to end up on YouTube. Which is quite understandable.
As Bounmi went back to our accommodation to prepare our dinner, Vincent and I were left to stroll around the village.
Children were being scrubbed down at bath time; a whole group of boisterous puppies played and rolled around in the dirt and a fierce-looking topless woman was walking around carrying a machete. It was a great opportunity just to observe regular village life in action.
An Akha woman who told us she was happy to be photographed.
Vincent bought a big Beer Lao from one of the tiny local shops (it was both cheap and cold) but without a bottle opener, he had to crack it open against a bench, spilling some of the beer on the ground and eliciting hoots of laughter from the locals.
And there we sat for a while, watching the sunset over the hills.
A bit of child labour and a delicious dinner
Back at our accommodation, Buonmi had enlisted an army of teenagers to help him prepare dinner.I could just about see him in the near darkness stir-frying something in a pan.
Whilst some of them helped to wash up dishes, others were doing typical teenage activities (basically scrolling through their phones and watching videos of very light-skinned Thai popstars dancing provocatively whilst wearing skin-tight PVC outfits).
As dinner wasn’t ready yet, we took the opportunity to hang out with the ‘youf’, many of whom asked us for the English words for penis, vagina and breasts (kids really are the same everywhere).
We then played a short game of whether a YouTube video featured a Thai star (most often it did) or an Akha star (there was one video featuring a lady singing an Akha song).
They also bizarrely kept asking Vincent and I to kiss as we were a couple, which we didn’t do because...it was just plain weird.
A boy of about 13 years old and one of Buonmi’s main helpers was also really pleased to show Vincent that they both had the same Samsung phone.
He then proceeded to entertain him by playing every single video and cartoon he had saved.
In turn, Vincent showed him a few of the videos he had of the Wang Yeh boat burning festival that we attended in Taiwan in 2018, which elicited some shocked sounds (especially at the sight of a man flagellating himself to the point of drawing blood).
Perhaps we should have thought about what we were showing the kids, but hey, it is all part of a cultural exchange, right?
Yummeh!
Dinner was served - mushrooms cooked two ways and (luckily for Vincent) another stir-fried vegetable dish.
Bounmi was an excellent cook - the food was extremely tasty and after a fairly challenging six-hour walk we were famished and so we gobbled down as much as we could, while he kept encouraging us to eat more. The helpers got to eat too: I think this was part of the incentive to assist with dinner.
Too shroomy for Vincent but very tasty.
Weird massages and lots of selfies
As dinner was winding down, we noticed that we were being joined by more and more made-up teenage girls, aged between 15 and 17, who had started to jostle around our table.
As soon as I had finished my last bite, a girl grabbed my right arm, gave it a sort of rough cuddle and said, “I like you.” Pinching and pressing my arm further, she looked at me questioningly in the candlelight and whispered, “Massage?”
I was really confused. I had seen the ‘Akha-style massage’ on our itinerary: we were due to have it after dinner as it is something that is traditionally given to guests who spend a night in the village.
But who were the masseuses? This bunch of teenagers? I’d actually been expecting a gnarly old woman to be doing it (not sure what that says about me, but that’s the truth).
However, there was barely any time to think of the question, let alone vocalise it.
Erm…this wasn’t what I expected.
“Ready for your massage?” asked Bounmi.
“Errrrrrr….”
Too late - this was the cue for all the girls to pull us off our seats and shove us, stumbling, into the hut.
Inside, we saw by the light of a single candle that all the mattresses had been laid out in a row and that many of the girls had now sat down around them. They beckoned us to come over and lie down.
I guess it was time to have a massage - there didn’t seem to be much negotiation about it! Vincent looked over at me, a little bemused at the mattress setup.
The mattress set up did nothing to reassure me.
“Are all these kids staying over?”
I told him that I didn’t think so - that would be even stranger, plus I hadn’t seen ‘highly inappropriate sleepover with random teenagers’ on the itinerary.
The massage itself was not completely terrible - it was similar to a traditional Laotian or Thai massage - all elbows, knuckles and quite a lot of stretching, with what felt like a little bit of pinching thrown in.
The really strange thing was being massaged by three sets of hands at once. And by teenagers.
I tried not to think about the last part because it made me feel a tad uncomfortable and gave the whole experience a creepy paedophile element which somehow had me in the starring role.
Miss “I like you”.
Plus, I was worried about my burning arm. I could barely lay down on it and the idea of it been roughly kneaded and stretched (which was what was happening at that point to my other arm by ‘I like you’ girl) just made me wince.
As she finished up by giving my right arm a good slap, she moved around to start work on the other side and I took the opportunity to pull my left arm back, shaking my head and making a grimace - what I think of as the universal sign for ‘pain’.
Luckily for me, my sign was perfectly interpreted in the dying candlelight and she was happy to massage my left hand instead.
Meanwhile the few boys in the room were lying back on the mattresses and taking selfies - it was only in the illumination of the flash that I could see the entire room.
There were about fifteen boys and girls in there, with six of the girls massaging myself and Vincent.
The girls squealed at the selfies because they looked terrible in them (massaging someone isn’t easy work and so they weren’t ready to pose) and I closed my eyes and wondered whether this kind of stuff had also happened to Bruce Parry (yeah I know, deluded to think that we are that intrepid) and just didn’t make it into his TV series.
I hadn’t known what to expect from hill tribe trekking in Luang Namtha, but it certainly wasn’t this.
My back was being slapped - the massage was over! I decided to put the flash on my camera and take a few pictures of the massage team, mainly so I could wake up the next day and make sure that it wasn’t all a disturbing dream.
Like the younger kids, the teenagers were more than happy to pose and eventually demanded that I take more and more photos of them - I ended up deleting quite a few.
They also then cheekily asked for money for the massage - I gestured outside to Bounmi and did my best to explain that it was part of the fee we had already paid, although I don’t know if that was understood.
Meanwhile, the boys had wandered out of the room to take part in the next evening’s activity: arm wrestling.
Bounmi seemed to be adept at beating everybody, much to the delight of the group who kept egging each other on to challenge him.
By this point, Vincent and I were absolutely shattered and after watching the arm wrestling for about ten minutes, decided that it was time to head off to bed.
We didn’t want people getting too comfortable.
Our room had thankfully been vacated and we tried to make ourselves as comfortable as possible on the thin mattresses. As I settled down and pulled the duvet over myself, Vincent asked into the darkness:
“Did they massage your bum cheeks as well?”
“Nope, that one was only for you.”
Good night.
Day Two
No lie-ins
I was hoping for a lie-in given that I’d felt like my bones were grinding against the floor all night and so I hadn’t had a restful sleep, but there was no such luck.
Torrential rain had been hammering on the corrugated iron roof of the hut since 03:00am and at 05:00am a bastard cockerel had decided to be everyone’s most annoying alarm call.
By 06:00am I could hear that the gaggle of teenagers were back and making a sh*t-ton of noise.
I don’t like being woken up early.
Through my slitted eyes I could hear the dull crash of metal pans being moved around and water being poured. “They must be preparing breakfast,” I thought dully. Vincent grunted and turned over. Surely there was a little more time to sleep?
Bounmi got up around an hour later to start cooking and after that there was no sleeping to be had - we eventually relented and got out of bed at 07:30am.
Just then, the door to the hut swung open and as we peered, blinking into the bright light, we could see a teenage girl carrying a baby staring wordlessly at us. After a few (very long) minutes, she closed the door and we were able to get changed into our walking gear.
Fairly sure the rain didn’t look this picturesque.
It was still pouring when we went outside, bleary eyed and wearing the still-damp clothes from the previous day’s walk.
A few of the younger children from the village were standing around the table outside the hut and looked at us curiously while we brushed our teeth and washed our mouths out with bottled water.
Vincent braved the rain to go to the toilet, but the idea of doing my business in a squat toilet that would undoubtedly now be wet and covered in mud was too much for queasy old me.
Plus, I didn’t feel like I needed to go. I figured that if the need arose, I could just do it in the jungle on the way back if necessary.
I hate rain.
I actually ended up not going to the toilet for 29 hours (as I had only gone in the jungle after lunch the previous day), which I totally DO NOT recommend. I really should have felt the urge to go but since I didn’t, I must have been pretty dehydrated.
From the vantage point of the table, I looked out at the sheets of rain and the muddy path and shuddered. I hate rain at the best of times and right now it just looked disgusting outside.
Breakfast
Luckily there was one thing standing between us and the rain for now and that was: breakfast. And what a breakfast it was.
Buonmi had gone serious Jungle Masterchef on us. Laid down on the banana leaf tablemats was a steaming bowl of tomato soup/curry and another containing some stir-fried sweet, garlicky vegetables.
The tomato soup was seriously so good that we asked him for the recipe, which he proudly told us contained eight whole tomatoes (plus a number of other ingredients).
Yes.
Oh yes.
And he was as good as his word - he had made us some amazing cardamom flavoured coffee which I made sure to sip reallllly slowly, afraid that it would end way too soon.
I was super sad when I asked him if there was any more left and he said there was only enough for one cup each!
Fully fed and watered, Vincent and I mucked about with the kids for a bit longer while waiting for the rain to abate.
The kids also wanted self portraits drawn on their hands. Random, but hey, Vincent wasn’t complaining.
One of the older girls took my hand and Vincent’s and tapping the skin on mine she shook her head and made a sad-looking face. She then tapped Vincent’s hand and smiled and gave a thumbs up.
We eventually realised that she was referring to our different skin colours and the universal ‘fair is good and dark is bad’ theme that seems to be prevalent in the whole of Asia.
Pretty sad to see that even in a remote Akha village you can’t escape this. Those Thai pop music videos have a lot to answer for…
Sliding about
The rain had reduced to what is known in Manchester as ‘spitting’ (though to be fair, dyed-in-the-wool Mancs would probably call torrential rain ‘spitting’ as well) and Bounmi told us it was time to pack up and go.
We had to walk down the hill and through the village, along a path that had now basically just turned into a huge mudslide.
I watched a woman walk down it in her flipflops, carrying an enormous sack of wood that was basically strapped to her head. She had little trouble negotiating what looked to be an extremely treacherous path.
I do not have the skillz to negotiate this path in the rain.
Bounmi said the best way to tackle the path was to actually run down it, but I was way too scared of falling and breaking my ankle, or worse my neck, so he helped me to walk down. I was stumbling and tripping everywhere but eventually I made it.
Poor Vincent, offered no help, ended up tripping over and sliding down the whole muddy hill on his bum. We weren’t even in the jungle yet and he was already completely covered in mud.
Pretty much what happened to Vincent. No exaggeration, I promise.
As we were leaving the village, Bounmi pointed out some small wooden structures on stilts, that I had assumed were for grain storage or were chicken coops. It turned out that parents actually build these small huts for their sons.
When a boy becomes a teenager, he moves out of his parents’ house and into one of these huts. The boy is then allowed to bring girls back to his hut to get frisky with them get to know them.
Basically this is the Akha equivalent of a bachelor pad.
There is no obligation for these couples to get married - the huts simply provide a testing ground for relationships. Only when a couple gets married can they move out of the small hut and into a proper house.
I have to say that I was really surprised - these structures looked anything but roomy. But I guess not much space is needed when you are doing the horizontal tango.
Bounmi also showed us the ornately carved spirit gate, situated at the edge of the village.
A new gate is constructed during the Akha New Year and we could see previous incarnations of the gate in the same area. At that point, I wished that there was someone around who could explain to me what all the different carvings on the gate meant, as I hadn’t ever seen anything like that before.
Our trekking on the morning of the second day was mostly downhill and although this sounds easy, the morning rains had made this walk a lot more difficult.
Two of our teenage helpers came with us as our local guides and carried our lunch, which I was happy to discover was more of the stuff we had had for breakfast (mmmm...more of that yummy tomato soup!) plus a different dish of sauteed carrots and potatoes.
Oh god yes.
Get in mah belly!
The remainder of the trek was mostly flat and as the weather in the afternoon dried up, it was a lot more of a relaxing walk and we were actually able to enjoy the beauty of the jungle. Some of the trees were absolutely huge and looked like they had been carved!
We emerged out of the jungle at around 4:00pm and onto the main road to find a tuk-tuk waiting for us.
On the way back to the Into the Wild office, Bounmi stopped off at both Khmu and Lanten villages that were located along the side of the road, just to give us a brief idea of the lifestyle and village set up of other ethnic minorities who live in the Nam Ha National Park area.
A traditional Khmu house.
Lanten villages are particularly famous for their hand-dyed indigo clothing and the women’s distinctive hairstyles.
A Lanten woman spinning cotton.
And then it was time to go back to our hotel for a much-needed shower and scrub. We were tired, covered from head-to-toe in mud and I briefly wondered whether my fingernails would ever be clean again.
Was it worth it? Abso-f@%king-lutely.
Our experience in Luang Namtha had given us a fantastic taste of what a hill tribe trek was like and we had loved it, even the weird, random and uncomfortable moments - all of this made it extremely memorable.
Now we wanted to go somewhere even more remote, where visitors were few and far between.
It was time to head to Phongsaly.
Have you trekked in Laos? What’s the craziest trek you’ve ever been on? Let us know in the comments below!
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