A haphazard chronicle of my inevitable misadventures during a year in Vietnam and points east.

p.s. I'll be pitifully grateful if you send me email during my exile: TravelerKaty@hotmail.com

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Muang Sing, Laos

Trekking!!

Pretty much the only thing to do around Muang Sing is "hill tribe trekking". The town is very small, features about four restaurants, three of which appear to be owned by the same family, seven guesthouses and a small market. Oh, and Akha women selling bracelets, can't forget those. They are absolutely inescapable, magically appearing at your side within moments of your leaving the room or table. And while I am not opposed to bracelet vending in general, these women were an incredible pawing nuisance, and their bracelets were uniformly hideous. Naturally I bought one, in the vain hope that seeing it on my wrist would inspire the tiny predatory old women to find fresh meat. In fact, I think it may have had the opposite effect -- it marked me as a weak-minded buyer of crap who might be worn down again with sufficient harassment. Anyway, as a result of the extreme lack of activities outside of fleeing old tribeswomen, my travelling companions and I immediately signed up for a two day trek. Unfortunately for my peace of mind, the main feature was to be these selfsame Akhas.

Trekking in Laos and Northern Thailand is a curious affair. Unlike most other countries, where the focus of the trek is clearly on the scenery, here the focus is on the people you meet, minority tribes resident in the mountains stretching from Myanmar to Vietnam. It's not that the scenery is bad -- it's quite nice, really, with jungle and mountains and villages and fields -- but it is secondary to the experience of viewing the tribal people in their natural habitat. I now have somewhat mixed feelings about this whole concept, but I'm getting ahead of myself. First, we did the trek.

It was just four of us, as there aren't too many tourists clamoring for treks in these days of post-SARS Southeast Asia: Doug, 26 year old Californian who has recently completed 4 years of teaching in Japan; Danny, 19 year old overachiever and backpacking addict who is beginning his senior year of college and has spent every summer since age 15 bon solo backpacking tours; Ket Keo, or KitKat as we called him, our 25 year old Lao guide; and myself, the oldest and slowest. I didn't feel bad about holding anyone up, however, since they wouldn't have reached the minimum tour size without me.

We selected our guide on the basis of the air of professionalism and responsibility of the company. The idea of wandering into the hills to view people like animals is strange enough -- we wanted to make sure that nobody was being taken advantage of. It was also certainly in our own interest to have a guide who spoke English, Lao and a bit of the language of the tribes to be visited, since we were sure to have plenty of questions and otherwise we'd all just be staring uncomfortably at eachother.

The trek itself was relatively benign. The first part was flat, through sugarcane and corn fields and fallow rice paddies, waiting for the monsoon. We stopped in two Hmong villages, and watched them weaving and milling rice flour. Another hour walking and we were in our first Akha village, which really gave no sign of the Akha weirdness to come. Here we got more of a sense of the general oddness of cultural trekking, as we stopped at the Chief's house for some tea and chat.

It's strange enough just waling through villages and saying hello to everyone. It's even stranger to sit on the floor of the chief's balcony while women (coldly) and children (curiously) stared. The chief was wearing soccer shorts only, his wife was wearing a sarong skirt and traditional Akha headdress of dark cloth decorated with foreign coins and other silver objects, and was periodically nursing a massive baby. I did not mention a shirt on Mrs. Chief, as she was not wearing one -- the Akha are a clothing-optional tribe. Babies wear nothing, toddlers wear either nothing or shirts only, and women wear skirts and sometimes a shirt or something that looks like a big cummerbund. It's like one of those National Geographic pictorials, except you never get a sense from those photos of how dirty everyone really is, how ragged their clothing, and how desperately poor they look. The chief and his wife, for example, who looked fairly well fed and who could be expected to be a bit better off than most, had seen four of their ten children die in infancy.

After loitering the requisite fifteen minutes (the Akhas believe it is bad luck if someone walks through the village without stopping) we headed up the hill and into the jungle, our destination an Akha village atop a mountain about three hours away.

At first, upon entering the village of Pawaikao, things seemed pretty normal. Kids said hello, dogs barked, adults stared, and the chickents and pigs ignored us. The chief's house had a separate room suitable for segregating the foreigners from the family. Like all Akha houses, it was on stilts, made of wood with walls of wood, bamboo or jungle leaves. The roof was corrgated metal, a symbol of wealth in the village, and the floor was made of thin strips of bamboo stretched across wooden slats in the nature of a mattress on a bed. Though I have heard that bamboo is extremely strong, walking across this floor did not inspire confidence -- it bent with every step, giving the sense that you might fall through the floor and flatten the chickens below at any moment.

The houses was basically one big room plus the tourist addition and a covered deck. On one end of hte main room they built a hearth of about five inches of dirt, upon wihc a wood fire cooks meals and boils water from the well ten minutes away. Underneath the house, pigs and chickens roam at will, occasionally venturing up the stairs (chickens only) to be summarily shooed off. Dogs, which hated me, also ran around with abandon when they weren't circling and baring their teeth at me, unaware that they would soon be Chinese food.

We were lulled into complacency during our first hour, as we sat in our room chatting with a few young Aka men. That is, if you can call a combination of mime, rope tricks, juggling and drawing "chatting". Things began to go wrong when one of the Akha men drew a car in his notebook, then by a series of gestures and method acting, clearly suggested that we would be the car, while the Akha would be shooting at us with their highly accurate home-made rifles. This was the first sign that all was not peace and tranquility in our little village.

After we left the protective confines of the chief's house (who, by the way, was wearing soccer shorts) in order to go exploring, things got considerably weirder. Doug went off with the young men to inspect their gun. When he refulsed to pay them to shoot it (it was a very dangerous and haphazard-looking home-made muzzle-loader) the 15 young men and boys circling him joked that they would beat him up if he didn't cough up, then indicated that better yet, when we were all leaving the following morning they would shoot us from a distance.

I, meanwhile, wandered uphill, where children were absent-mindedly manhandling a yelping puppy and semi-clothed Akha women stared malevolently while making their teeth, gums and lips permanently blacker by chewing betelnut leaves. All three of us had similar experience during our wanderings -- men and children "joking" about violence inflicted upon us, many disturbing throat-slitting gestures, and even a four year old naked boy got in to the action by lunging toward us with the chicken claw tied on a string around his neck.

As for the adults, when they weren't creeping us out they were asking or demanding money or other items. Though we did not distribute any money or gifts, as we were specifically instructed to avoid the creation of a begging-dependent society in these villages, I did end up handing over my few remaining Advil to a guy with a toothache, and shortly before our departure from the Village of the Damned I could be seen doling out dollops of sunscreen to maybe 20 residents, men, women and children alike. All seemed fascinated by the way they could rub it into their skin and smell it on eachother. At SPF 45, they're all quite safe from sunburn for a few hours at least, and since they never wash, it could last days.

I did gain some valuable insight into my own capabilities during our stay. The toilet facilities, such as they were, basically consisted of a greenery-free section of a hillside facing the village. In view of the village, in point of fact, which doesn't afford a whole lot of privacy. The three of us dubbed it The Sandbox. Using the sandbox wasn't so bad, if you were able to find a spot concealed from the majority of the houses. However, after we determined that the Akha were scary and possibly insane in some cases, it meant first that we never again split up, and second that there was no way we were going out there in the dark. Just before dark we took a communal trip out there, but that night was when I acquired this valuable information -- in a situation in which you are stuck in a remote village with "joking" gun and machete-wielding villagers, it is possible to "hold it" for an exceptionally long time. This newfound ability on my part proved highly useful during my marathon tailbone-unfriendly ride on a dirt road to the Thai border in the back of a modified Toyota pick-up two days later.

The visit wasn't all weird and creepy, of course. Dough and I were both a big hit with the kids, with Doug being generally a clown and giving the boys rides on a deerskin, and me playing monkey-see-monkey-do with the girls. I also managed to utterly scandalize some open-mouthed women by involving about 30 kids in a sophisticated game involving me making monster noises and chasing them around. Akha women do not play with the children. In fact, I saw very little affection displayed between anyone of any age at Pawaikao.

We watched as children with a metal pick dug into the ground to catch termites (did you know they have wings? Yikes) that were subsequently attached to wooden snares and used to capture birds for food. We also saw what appeared to be the Akha version of a bachelor auction. A young man wearing a red baseball hat with fake flowers sticking straight up out of the brim (the lonely bachelor, according to KitKat) sat on a porch with the Woman in Charge, while young women stood around, questions were asked, and items exchanged. I can't really be more specific, as I was summarily shooed away by the Woman In Charge when I got within 50 fee of the event.

After dinner at the chief's house (not with the Chief -- the family ate separately) we were treated to an Akha massage, a technique which involved an inordinate amount of, shall we say delicately, posterior palpitation. Once this odd massage started I was happy for two reasons -- first, that I was fuly clothed. Given the flexible attitude toward clothing among the Akha, this was hardly a given. Second, that it was young women giving us the treatment. One of the original creepy young men we talked with in the chief's house had been quite fascinated by me, feeling my leg and suggesting in pantomime that I'd be much cooler if I removed my blouse. During my wander through the village, he had cornered me and indicate that he would be performing the massage, a possibility that would have resulted in strenuous objections on my part. At any rate, the ladies were the masseuses, and my hind end was seemingly the topic of much discussion and comparison among them, with all three of them copping a feel. I'm not certain if it was the shape and perhaps over-padded nature of it that had them so intrigued, or the possibility of cash being located in the back pockets. They pretty much patted us all all down like cops looking for weapons, then held out their hands simultaneously in a request for money. KitKat took care of that, fortunately, so we didn't have to place a dollar value on the weirdest massage of our collective experience.

The next morning we made it out alive, though not before watching a woman practically break her child's arm for misbehaving (he wanted to go to the fields with her). Although we developed a new policy -- No Akha -- we were unable to implement it immediately because we had two more Akha villages to visit on the trek. Fortunately these were decidedly more tame. At the first one, the chief (who was wearing soccer shorts) was friendly, played with his children, and his wife was laughing and friendly too. A smiling female Akha -- who'd have thought it existed? At the second village, the chief (in soccer shorts, naturally. I began to envision the ceremonial Donning of the Soccer Shorts as the chief is named) told us all about hte wedding preparations underway in the village that day. However, despite these more positive encounters, I plan to hold firm to my No Akha rule henceforth. At least as soon as I can get rid of those bracelet ladies.

The whole idea of hill-tribe trekking is strange, and it's very difficult to judge whether the benefit from or are harmed by the periodic presence of foreign gawkers. On one hand, some are desperately, desperately poor and can use the additional money for education or medicine, particularly now that the Lao government has cracked down on opium production. At the same time, the presence of foreigners surely disrupts their traditoinal way of life and encourages them to beg for money and gifts rather than doing hard traditional work in the fields. The Akha are perhaps particularly unsuited to this kind of outside interference, as they certainly seemed to us to be hostile to outsiders, unlike my experiences wandering through villages in northern Vietnam.

All in all, the experience was less fun than it was bizarre, creepy and thought-provoking. I guess I'l see what trekking is like in Thailand where it's practically a major industry in the north, but my expectations aren't too high. I think I may stick to scenery-oriented trekking in the future.

Remember, NO AKHA!



Copyright 2003 Katy Warren
posted by Katy at 12:01 AM