Muang Long to Muang Long

Leaving Muang Long

With only a little trepidation, we climbed out of the next morning's mist, weighted with extra water, two kilograms of sticky rice, dried pork, bananas, and a bar of chocolate. Again the weather cooperated, with a cool day and bright sun to dry any slick patches on the clay road. Climbing and descending constantly, we had to push our bikes across two rivers, but the knee high fords created more of a temptation to swim rather than any danger. It did remind us how far off the beaten track we were going.

Two helpful ladies pushed our bikes across the river before leaving on motorcycle

As the day wore on, we passed exclusively Akha villages. Many of the women wore their characteristic headdresses while working in the fields or carrying wood back to their villages. One older women, her lips painted red with betel nut juice, chopped her way out of her field with a large handheld knife to give us a melon. She taught us how to say thank you, bringing our arsenal of Ahka vocabulary up to three words (we learned 'hello' and 'bird' in the Muang Long market). People here seemed slightly less fascinated by us, but also more likely to engage us in some fashion, and were remarkably pleased when we used our minimal Akha.

Note the homemade rifle

Late in the afternoon, we finally arrived at the "police station" that the tourist office had mentioned as a place to stay. After proudly displaying our permit, we came to the realization that the police men were actually in various states of inebriation. Perhaps the highly incongruous karaoke should have given it away sooner. I could easily envision our night degenerating into a sleepless battle against their off pitch singing and efforts to get us drunk on Lao beer, so we decided to continue to the next village.

Rural road hazard

Seemed curious.

We rolled into the village of Ban Sam Sop around sunset, and were greeted with the characteristic stares. However, when we stopped the bike, seemingly every man (I think women do all the actual work) and child in the village gathered around us in a full circle. Our efforts at Lao were met with incomprehension, I believe because the majority of the village speaks only Ahka. Fortunately, at least one person in the village understood Lao, and after finding him we were quickly welcomed into his house. In the meantime, we at least entertained the town by letting some of the taller people ride Brooke's bike with the seat lowered.

The village where we spent the night

We didn't know when the fishbowl effect would end, but our host shooed the rest of the town children away when we climbed the six foot ladder into his wooden house. This village's houses are built off the ground on stilts, with space underneath for various livestock. Our host's had one largish room - maybe 30x20 feet - with woven bamboo floor and walls, and a slightly raised platform for sleeping along one side of the room. Surprisingly, a small fire smoked in a patch of dirt in one corner of the home, next to which sat a betel nut chewing matriarchal figure who was either the in-law or our host's mother.

Our host cooked up a tasty but calorically sparse dinner of steamed rice (made earlier in the day) and vegetable soup consisting of boiled greens, garlic and peppers from the village. We shared dinner with only the host, while the grandmother, children, and his wife watched and smiled from the other side of the room. We tried to share our sticky rice, but only got traction with the dried pork and with giving small tangerines to the kids. Mostly, the women responded to our attempts to share with what I think is 'you eat!'. Following dinner, the two women in the house made tea using village leaves, invited us to sit by the fire, and animatedly tried to teach us Akha (lobó probably means 'you drink!'). Before eight, the man of the house had laid down, and the women signaled it might be time for us to sleep although they continued to offer tea. At the late hour of 815, after repeated polite gestures about sleeping, we moved to our blanket on the rice mat bed in the sleeping corner of the room. I believe everyone that usually sleeps in the house slept there, but it's also possible we displaced someone to another house. We asked for the bathroom, and were told only 'the wild', so we took a short walk into the woods behind the town.

The house matriarch

When we returned, a bunch of teenagers were crowded under the house examining our bikes by flashlight. We walked up the ladder to go inside, and the whole group filed up after us. They didn't seem to want to talk or interact, but they weren't unfriendly, just neutral. They didn't leave, so we settled in to bed and took out our tooth brushes. This custom is apparently not shared by the Akha. The crowd of silent observers reorganized into two concentric semicircles around us, like a boys choir. With no further interaction, they watched from this optimized viewing formation as we brushed our teeth. Brooke counted fourteen in our audience. Halfway through the tooth brushing, one of them turned on his flashlight to see us better. With nothing else to say, we lay down and closed our eyes, at which point the group climbed back out of the house. As we pretended to fall asleep and tried not to laugh, the women in our host family put the pot back on the fire and cooked dinner for themselves - it is certainly possible they were waiting for us to lay down before starting and we just missed the hints.

Brooke addendum:
There is a lot about Akha hospitality that we do not understand - most notably how it can include serving us dinner first, like we were princes, and allowing the bedtime spectators, like we were zoo pandas. But our host family was unerringly friendly and welcoming, so our cultural misunderstanding never felt too awkward.

People sleep above, goats sleep below. This fellow hosted us.

I wish I could say we slept soundly, but occasional pig fights below us, talking from neighboring houses and the barking of the house puppy (stored in a rice bag for the night) combined to make for a restless night. Having gotten into bed a little after eight, we probably dozed a normal number of hours before rising at six to pee in the woods. We never did find out where or on what schedule people used the bathroom.

Riding along a ridgeline for sunrise

We said goodbye to the family and bowed out of breakfast in favor of an early start. Inauspiciously our host drove us to a minor road leading off the larger road we had ridden down the day prior. We slid several kilometers down this muddy road, passing numerous turns that seemed as likely as ours to be the correct path, before climbing a similarly horrendous road out of the valley. Occasionally we would come across men wielding home made long rifles, all of whom seemed to agree that we were on the path to Muang Sing. Several times we almost turned around, but the prospect of going back down yesterday's road, combined with the tourist officer's assurance drove us onwards. In one moment where we had almost lost hope, we came across the first village on the thirty mile road back to the valley below. We had traveled thirteen kilometers in three hours to reach it.

Ridgetop descent from police station to ban samsop

Brooke and I have both been reading The Tea Girl from Hummingbird Lane on this trip. It's about an Akha family whose child is given up for adoption and ends up in LA. I had assumed that the book's depictions of Akha village life were hyper traditional - like arriving in Germany to be served bratwurst and hefeweissen by a leiderhosen clad fraulein. However, this village seemed to bring all these presumed stereotypes into reality, which I had not seen in any other Akha villages.

Guard of the spirit gate

First, we rode through a gate decorated with various talismans to frighten spirits away from the village. Next to the first gate sat a two foot tall wooden statue of a man with a foot long penis - apparently typical of Akha customs. We found the village almost empty, with no roads exiting, so we tried to find someone who could point us towards Muang Sing. Of the first three people I saw, all simply turned back into their house without saying a word. Finally, someone pointed us back the way we came, and as I turned dejectedly up the hill we had just ridden down, I saw a giant swing on a small hill overlooking the village. This three poled swing stood about fifteen feet tall, and is used in a ceremony at the start of the rainy season to bring good crops. Unfortunately I felt compelled to leave by the somewhat chilly reception, so didn't get a great look at the swing. As we left the village and reached the turn for Muang Sing, I came across a wooden structure I had missed on the way in. Made of bamboo, it was covered in the Akha equivalent of crosses to scare spirits, and topped with a snarling set of teeth within a mummified set of jaws. On first glance, it looked like the elongated snout of a monkey, but on closer look it was an inverted dog head, left to dry on a stick with it's fangs bared. It's hide had been left on top of the monument with it's paws cut off and tied to each corner. Somehow, I managed to take a few pictures, but very quickly pedalled up the hill towards Muang Sing. 

The smaller wooden objects are spirit ward-offs

Clearly we should have turned around at that point, but instead we pushed and occasionally rode our bikes for five more kilometers until we stood looking down a muddy single track descent. Not knowing for certain if this path continued or if it was even the right path, with a pace that would put us at our destination at midnight, we finally turned around. With only enough food to comfortably last for one day, we pressed on all day and two hours past sunset, carefully avoiding the now dew slickened spots on the clay road, and feeling grateful for the unusually bright full moon. The moonlit view into the misty Muang Long valley was quite beautiful, but on hour thirteen of riding, we may not have fully appreciated it. The friendly owner of our guesthouse literally had been shutting the gate when we arrived, and we were equally fortunate to find a restaurant that cooked up a delicious tom yam soup at nine pm. We slept the sleep of the deeply tired, with plans to head to Muang Sing in the morning.

Jeep track turning to single track. We turned around