Elyse and I are back from what I think have been the best few days of our trip. We made our way up to Luang Nam Tha to do some trekking in Nam Ha, which was Laos' first national park when it was founded in 1993. We arrived here at 9pm on Saturday, after a long day on the bus from Luang Pra Bang. This gave us a whole hour to organize a trek beginning the next morning, find a place to stay, and find something to eat before we collapsed.

The next morning we met our guide Pone and set off on a tuk-tuk ride to start our hike. The rain which has followed us through Laos decided now was as good a time as any to really pick up the pace, so we began what would be a very muddy two days in the jungle. Our destination was an Akha village that would take us about six hours to reach through rice paddies, dense jungle, and once we neared the Akha village, endless slopes of rice planted where the jungle had been recently cut down and burned. This slash and burn agriculture is a traditional use for the three tribes that call the national park home, and it's hard to fault someone who is practicing subsistence agriculture for destroying something that I might value in its untouched state. Recently, Chinese companies have started to pay villagers to farm rubber trees in the park. The companies pay the Lao government as well, and everyone is happy except the forests and the ecotourism industry. The villagers now have money to add meat and vegetables to their diet and to pay for the small solar arrays that a company is installing in the village. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The beauty of this trip was that we were the only gringos we saw for two days, as we walked with Pone and experienced the conflict and confluence between development and conservation. We also experienced the extraordinary hospitality of the Akha people, who were having a merry time when we arrived. It was a day off, a goat had just been slaughtered for the spirits, and the lao lao (rice whiskey) was flowing. We spent some time in the village but stayed in a hut with our guide a couple hundred meters outside the village. This was a really nice setup, because we ate dinner with a few people and got a chance to wander around, but we didn't feel like we were intruders so much as funnylooking houseguests. The food was really fantastic, and I've posted a picture of lunch below. Note the banana leaves that serve as placemats and tupperware:


Just as we arrived a small child carrying his even smaller baby sister on his back came up to us and offered us the berries he was munching on. He hung out with us for a while, as we traded words in English and Lao and I tended to my somewhat battered feet - the mud and leeches had taken their toll; Elyse's somehow came out fairly spry. Our friend, whose name was Pa Tu, is now a sales and brand representative for K.C., and can be seen in the village sporting the sweet apparel that Elyse is modeling below (picture taken with village in the background):


Our walk back the next day was longer and sunnier, and we did our mitzvah for the day by tending to a rather nasty machete cut on a villager's hand. My duct tape magic is probably still keeping that bandage on his palm.

Beautiful wildlife abounds in the jungle:


The walk home through rice paddy mazes:


Wet and having fun in the jungle:


We're now in Vientiane, where we've secured visas for Cambodia and learned the secrets of Lao cookery. We're off to Southern Laos this evening as we continue our long journey following the Mekong.