A superb Green Discovery trek

Our last evening in Luang Phabang ended with us getting a full refund for the laundry to compensate for the lost shirt. We felt a bit guilty as they had done a good job with the clothes they did return, but it still probably wasn't enough to cover the replacement shirt.

In the morning my flu-like symptoms had abated a bit, but I now had a rash spreading up my arm. Hurriedly I referred to the health section in the guide book where I discovered that a flu-like illness and a rash are symptomatic of dengue fever. Not being some sort of hypochondriac, I probably wouldn't have worried about this, but we had met several people already who had contracted dengue, and when we were in Cambodia the health services claimed to be dealing with an epidemic, although this may just have been a ploy to get more tourists to donate blood, since Khmers apparently refuse for religious reasons. As we were waiting for the bus, we saw some of the Mekong weed for sale, so bought it for the journey. It also started pouring down so Joanne bought a rain poncho. It wasn't looking very promising for the trek we had booked for the following day: me with Dengue Fever while the monsoon empties the skies on us.

This was another crazy bus journey and the weed was a real disappointment: we worked out that it was supposed to be grilled. The bus was in better condition than the one we'd taken to Luang Phabang, which we had doubted would make it up the last few hills, but this time there were large sections of road missing, apparently having fallen down the hill. But, as always in Asia, health and safety comes first, so just before the missing section of road there was a pile of rubble to prevent you from driving over the precipice, then rocks along the length of the missing section until a second pile of rubble indicated the end of the gulf. When we arrived in Luang Namtha, where our trek left from, we were transferred to a large tuktuk called a sawngthaew (which mean “two rows” after the two benches in the back, where the passengers sit), and driving towards town some people commented on the black smoke from a fire (or could it be clouds?) coming our direction. Next I think something karmic may have happened: the sawngthaew in front carrying everyone's bags knocked down a calf which had wandered into the road. Seconds later the heavens opened, and it didn't stay water for long: soon golf-ball sized hail stones were bouncing off the road and our vehicle. The driver stopped pretty quickly, as did all the other traffic around, and we sat in the back, wondering if the end had come. After a while it retuned to very heavy rain and the driver proceeded cautiously. He dropped us outside a hotel, but the rain was too heavy to work out where we were or where the hotels we wanted were, in fact my flipflops were nearly washed away when I got down from the back, so most of us just queued up to book into the hotel we were left at. The LP stated explicitly that they did not recommend any of the Chinese-owned hotels in town, as they are overpriced and poor quality, and here we were booking in to one, so I almost expected the rate to be hiked up to obscene levels considering our present predicament. In fact the hotel was very nice, and the price did not seem at all inflated. So there, Lonely Planet! Getting to our room I discovered my rash has spread over my chest and down my other arm, and I was still feeling quite ill, so I was now as convinced of my dengue as I was convinced by the apocalyptic downpour that monsoon had definitely arrived early. Given both of these, we seriously considered trying to pull of of the trek, until we discovered that it was now fully booked, which meant that the cost was now very reasonable per person. So we just crossed our fingers instead.

We got up quite early for the trek and I felt quite a bit better, and the skies looked fairly clear, so we decided not to try and get out of it, although their booking rules stated that a cold was not considered a good enough excuse.

Of course they might have seen it differently for dengue, or worried about me infecting the villagers with something if I showed them my rash, but I seemed to be passed the worst. Joanne had been worried that she would slow the rest of the group down, but it soon became clear that Joanne was about in the middle of the group in terms of speed, but there wasn't that much of a spread and the group kept up a good speed. The terrain was quite nice a varied with plenty of ascents, and the forest we were walking through was lovely thick forest, along a narrow footpath.

Lunch

The difference between this trek and Cambodia was obviously huge form the beginning: these guys knew what they were doing; they knew that nice forest and nice scenery were important; the “main” guide with the better English, Ponsa, was incredibly knowledgeable about the forest, the animals and plants in it, and about the tribes who live in it. We got no rain on the first day, although there were lots and lots of leeches. I didn't find them too bad, but most of the girls were squealing and panicking every time a leech was near them. I brushed a few off while they were still just crawling up me, looking for a good place to feed, but once I was too late and the beast had attached. Apparently insect repellent kills them and, yes, lighters can be used to remove them, but the simplest and most used removal technique on the trek was to pick a leaf, grab the leech and tug it off, the leaf acting as a barrier that prevents it from switching to your hand. Quite early on we also saw a poisonous (apparently) snake although it was very small and not at all scary-looking.

Poisonous snake

The trek was in the Nam Ha Nation Protected Area. Laos has loads of NPAs covering fourteen percent of the country and Provincial Protected Areas covering a further four percent, making it one of the most protected countries on the planet.

However they are not protected in the same way as national parks we might be used to: they were created in places that take in lots of forest sparsely occupied by various tribal villages, so the government could hardly tell these people to stop using the resources from the forest as they always had done. Instead they chose to treat the people as part of the conservation area, so that the tribal people are still allowed to hunt, fish, collect plants, cut down trees for timber or fuel, and carry on as they had done traditionally.

Cleared for rice

The important distinction between this and illegal activity is that none of these activities can be carried out with a financial motive, so no commercial exploitation of the forests is allowed. Of course there is a problem with illegal logging, and some tribal people exploit the forest for more than subsistence, but the principal seems to me a good one. We did see some tree-chopping and one or two ugly areas of torched forest, which is apparently perfectly legal for the villagers to plant rice where the trees were. It did make me wonder about the future though, because even if the illegal activity can be contained, the forest is not an infinite resource. So if some tribes are very successful and the villages start spreading, there is still going to be a problem with lack of resources. I put this to Ponsa, who agreed and said he thought the hope is probably that enough people leave the villages for the cities to keep the villages from growing too large.

More excellent food

When it was time for our lunch stop, two villagers appeared from the jungle and helped Ponsa and the not-so-good-English-speaking guide (whose name I've forgotten) to prepare the food.

Guides are not immune to leech attack

The food was absolutely fantastic, some prepared in advance, some prepared speedily on quickly built fires, served using products entirely gathered from the surrounding forest, so that our table cloth / plate was banana leaf, our chopsticks were bamboo, the prepared food was wrapped in banana leaves, and our restaurant was a bamboo shelter that had been built by the villagers. I asked Ponsa who maintained the paths and he said they were all maintained by the Akha people, whose village we were going to. Some of the bridges and paths seemed maintained more than someone living in the forest would need and when I asked about that he said that Green Discovery gives the villagers money, although he didn't say the money was explicitly for path maintenance, so maybe it's just an understanding.

Leech

I gather most of the money goes to maintaining their school and that sort of thing, although when we arrived in the village I was struck by what an enormous amount of livestock they have, so I think they must be quite wealthy for forest-dwelling villagers, although Ponsa refused to describe them even as relatively wealthy. Our accommodation in the village was actually separate from the rest of the dwellings: there was one longhouse to sleep maybe twenty visitors. Always with their eye on ethics, Green Discovery had started out with “proper” homestays like we had in Cambodia, but this had apparently caused too many problems within the villages; either the money is distributed evenly, in which case someone is being inconvenienced with visitors for nothing extra, or else the money goes to just the houses accommodating the foreigners, which leads to envy.

Joanne taking a Lao shower

This was apparently the way they had found kept the most people happy, so it was now policy. After we got settled in and were shown the “shower” (the stream behind the house), we set out en masse to visit the villagers. The first thing I noticed was a group of smaller huts on stilts, round the outside of the village. Apparently this is where the teenagers live, so that they can get enough privacy with their girlfriend or boyfriend at night. What an excellent set-up! At first I felt a bit uneasy imposing on the villagers like that, but it soon became clear that they were delighted to have their photos taken, which was after all one of our primary purposes in walking around. As usual in Asia, the children were incredibly cute and a bit precocious and the men were very friendly. Here the women were not unfriendly, but they did seem to be really quite shy, most of them certainly not wanting to have their photos taken, although very keen to have their children photographed. On the way back to our hut, I was accosted by a group of men just back from hunting, who wanted me to sit and drink lao-lao with them. How could I say no? They seemed quite pleased that I liked the drink and even accepted another one, but tried hard to prevent me from leaving. Apparently, a little later, the young German guy in our group refused to drink with them and they told him “Scottish drank”. Nothing new there then!

Drinking lao-lao with the vilagers

Back in our longhouse, I noticed a sign that perhaps explained why the villagers were so keen to be photographed: I thought maybe it was just that they liked to see the images on the LCD screen, but here was a sign asking visitors to laminate and post photographs to the village, care of Green Discovery.

Of course the villagers have no cameras of their own, so how marvelous it must be for them to receive laminated photos of their children. We plan to do this soon, from Bangkok probably, but anyone reading this blog should feel free to have pictures of the Akha people laminated and posted to them. Again, our dinner was a joint effort between our two guides and two villagers, and was really delicious. After dinner some girls from the village were gathering outside, giggling and singing.

Our masseuses (mine 2nd from right)

I thought they had just come to gawk at the foreigners, which seemed fair enough after we had traipsed through their village with cameras. Soon they filed in and Ponsa, already prone, instructed us to lie face down, arms by our sides: a Lao massage! Joanne worried about the cost and asked Ponsa. It's included, he said. The massage was quite similar to the Thai massage I'd had several years earlier: lots of trying to pop the joints and wrenching bits of body around. I think the girls were still learning actually, as they were all only about fourteen or fifteen, and it certainly wasn't a match for the Thai massage I received from a powerful old Thai woman.

Cute!

Akha gift used as phone holder

At night it rained heavily, but it had cleared up again by the morning and my flu symptoms had almost completely gone too, so, feeling much better, I was much less worried about the rash since it presumably wasn't dengue or meningitis, or any of the other worst-case options I was contemplating. Before we set off we were all presented with a “gift from the Akha people”, a charming little woven pouch which I've been using as a mobile phone holder since. Because of the rain, we were all anticipating even more leeches, but in fact most of us didn't see any all day. Again the trekking was fantastic, with just enough uphill to make me feel like I'd had a reasonable amount of exercise, along interesting tracks through beautiful forest. Again the food was fantastic. We told Ponsa he and the others should leave Green Discover and open up a restaurant called “jungle food”, keeping all the same food and method of serving.

After the trek was over I felt great, about as good as I had done since heading off on this trip. I don't think it was just the exercise, although that was undoubtedly a part of it, I think that it was just such a lovely experience that it left me with a gooey after glow. When I realised that this trek had cost us less, in the end, than the awful trek we did in Cambodia, we left quite a generous tip. They did a fantastic job, and I would not hesitate to recommend Green Discovery Laos to anybody. All the trekkers agreed to meet up for dinner after our showers, and everyone turned up apart from the two youngest, dutch girls: two German ladies who go on adventure holidays together every few years, leaving their husbands at home; a German girl working for an NGO in Phnom Penh and her younger brother, a somewhat nerdy computer programmer. We all agreed it had been an excellent trek and a good evenly matched group.

Take photo!

A superb Green Discovery trek

Louang Namtha, Laos