Village to-Village Trekking in Thailand and Laos

Trip report and musings

While in SE Asia recently we did two short guided treks to get a taste of the mountainous backcountry and some brief exposure to life in hill-tribe villages.  While these were standard adventure tourist treks organized by local guide companies, they take you to real working villages, not the increasing numbers of touristy villages passed off as authentic catering to mass tourism.  While most tourists would not enjoy these very simple, low-amenity, “home stay” accommodations, such treks are great for folks who want to get a sense of authentic, off the beaten-path, village life.  We loved it!

• 

• 

Such treks provide an escape from the crowded cities and mass tourism hub-bub that appears to engulf much of Thailand.  In less developed Laos, we experienced the feel of even more remote villages.  In both countries we loved the experience of walking through forests and mountains, meeting some people along the way, and learning a bit about overnight accommodations and ecotourism, and about local natural history, agriculture, food-ways, spiritual life, and rural sociology.  While participating in such invasive eco-tourism is mildly discomfiting, it provides a visceral shift in perspective.  Reminded us of our village-to-village trek in Morroco’s Atlas mountains. Following is a brief description of these two SE Asian trips, both of which we highly recommend for tourists with a taste for what seems to be called “adventure travel” in the world of ecotourism. 

Thailand: Doi Inthanon National Park

The three-day, two-night trek was operated by Green Tours out of Chiang Mai.  It was pretty easy walking for fit hikers, covering about 11-15 km daily on hilly terrain with occasional steep spots.  Our guide, Taksin, was friendly, spoke English well and was easy to talk with, and was knowledgeable in assuring our safety and comfort.  The trek is mostly within the Doi Inthanon National Park (482 sq. km), one of the most popular of Thailand’s 127 national parks.  We carried day packs with a change of clothes, water and a small portion of the food.  

We were picked up at our hotel at 8AM and went to a bustling market with our guide to shop for provisions for the trip.  The 2-3 hour drive to Doi Inthanon gave us a glimpse of Chiang Mai suburbs, gradually giving way to less developed terrain before reaching the busy National Park.  Selfie-taking tourists from around the world flocked to the spectacular waterfalls and visited the monumental King and Queen twin cheddi (stupa, a type of temple) built below the summit of Doi Inthanon, the highest mountain in Thailand (8415 feet). 

• 

• 

• 

Doi Inthanon is a fascinating instance of the world-wide challenge of conserving natural areas while allowing the people who occupy these lands to continue their traditional ways and make a living.  The park encompasses a number of villages and several markets, along with many campgrounds, glamping sites, lodges and cottages.  [In addition I saw (but couldn’t get good pictures of) some interesting clusters of huts, some A-framed and some round like a pumpkin! But encountered no hut-to-hut trekking].  The challenge of mixing conservation, tourism and indigenous communities is complicated in Thailand by the shifting presence of multiple tribal groups and government policies concerning commerce in the parks and, more broadly, efforts at village re-location to accomplish a range of rural development aims.  

An endlessly winding (and for me, nausea-inducing) 2.5 hour drive from the busy center of the National Park got us to the village of Shan, where we had lunch and began our first day of walking.

The trails are unmarked and were established by villagers (and their water buffalo) walking to and from fields and markets.  The clay soil was hard baked and the trails clear, but in rainy season (March to June) trails are very slippery.  Following a river for much of the first day we passed through rice paddies (dry at this time of year) with water buffalo grazing on the rice stubble, fruit orchards, and vegetable gardens. 

• 

• 

The first village we stayed in (Hui Khow – Rice River Village) had 39 families (about 200 people), a large school complex used by locals and offering boarding facilities for kids from surrounding villages, electricity, and a road suitable for trucks.  Our Hmong hosts for the night were among the villages who chose not to hook up to electrical service (due to the cost, we were told).  They  lived at the edge of town in a small compound surrounded by their fallow fields, which included a main house, storage building for rice, etc., an outdoor kitchen, an outhouse, a bunk house (where we stayed), and four unfinished small guest huts to expand their ecotourism business. 

• 

• 

We stayed in the bunk house, which had room for about 4 mosquito netting indoor tents, each sleeping two people on a simple pad on the floor with adequate blankets.  Its bring your own toilet paper and really simple accommodations.  We observed and helped with the cooking, enjoyed a few beers and chatted with our guide and haltingly with our host.  The food was mostly Thai (e.g. fish soup, stir fried vegetables with fried rice, though we had scrambled eggs one morning), and nicely flavored with more than ample portions.  They toned down the spice level for us as tourists, but there were always chilis and sauces available at table to punch it up if desired.

• 

• 

• 

The walk to the second village (Hui Hoy – Snail River Village) was through more mature forest in the park, in which we encountered many more species of trees and insects, including large termite mounds.  We had an extra guide who was very familiar with the local trails network and who carried his slingshot and machete along in hopes of finding ingredients for his family’s soup pot that night.  This village was larger and included two Christian churches as well as several Buddhist temples.  Along with the school, these structures seem to be the center of formal community life, along with daily life in the vicinity of the tiny local “convenience stores” at the village center.  The second nights accommodation with a Karen (ethnic group) family overlooked their beautiful sloping rice paddies with mountain views all the way to Myanmar.  The open sided “bunk house” with requisite mosquito netting was lovely place to hang out after the walk, and the ample dining tables provided places to sit and read/write/talk, as well as enjoy our home-cooked dinner (disappointingly, the mother of the house wouldn’t let us help with the cooking!) with our host family and guides.  

• 

• 

Laos: two day trek north of Luang Prabang to Kmhmu village

Operating out of the charming, slow-paced city of Luang Prabang, Tiger Trails offers this brief trek (the also do longer treks), which was a highlight of our trip.  We met our guides in the city at 8AM and drove an hour north, then transferred to a boat to motor about 35 minutes north on the Nam Kahn River.  Along the way we observed massive infrastructure development underway as part of a major Chinese railroad development (a Belt and Road project).  We started the trek at the village of Hoy Ngen, named for the cold stream tributary to the Nam Kahn with its lush beds of water cress.  This village seemed comparatively prosperous, and had the feel of a fairly recent government rural development initiative, with an impressive school complex and substantial houses.

Outside Hoy Ngen we passed a number of farms and steadily up into the mountains where we got an up-close view of shifting agriculture (aka slash and burn) fields rotated every two years and lie fallow for 4-10 years to regenerate the forest.  Clearing these steep mountainside fields looked like a lot of hard work.  We were amazed to learn that these steep hillsides are planted with upland rice (no paddies).  The sticky rice they produce is prized by locals but, while it can be a cash crop, it is not in great demand in the larger national and international markets for rice.  It wasn’t entirely clear whether they used soil amendments (beyond ash from burning) in this largely subsistence crop system, but it seems unlikely.  Some steep uphill climbing brought us to Tik Pha (Foot-of-the-Mountain), a Hmong settlement where we had a picnic lunch.

The mostly downhill trek to our overnight destination, Hoi Fay (Irrigation-Stream Village), was through a mountainous, thickly vegetated environment with towering, steep-faced mountains towering over us.  We encountered locals foraging and farm fields along the way.  A Kmhmu (largest ethnic group in Laos) village, Hoi Fay has about 400 people and no electricity, other than small solar panels for lights (although a few houses have generators and TV’s and charge villagers to come and watch the tube).  The villagers are mostly old folks and youngsters; the teens and young adults mostly work, live and study in the cities.  There is a school for ages 6-12, but no health center.  There is no temple or church as the people seem to be solely animist in spiritual orientation.  There is a community building where the elected village leaders meet. 

Our hosts were, like most village folks, shy and spoke little or no English.  They had built a long, narrow bunk house with about 6 separate rooms, each with a mosquito net tent and a thin mat and ample blankets.  The indoor kitchen had no ventilation for the two fires and could be quite smoky.  The hosts did the cooking and to our disappointment the guides said it was the custom for them to eat separately with the hosts rather than with us or altogether.  But after dinner we talked into the evening about all manner of topics.  

Musings:

Altogether it was fascinating and sobering to briefly stay in and travel between these remote villages.  Village life is hard and young people are leaving the villages to work and live in cities.  Even in these somewhat remote areas the environmental impact of human activity is pretty profound.  We barely scratched the surface in learning anything about the region and its people.  While our understanding of the following topics is naïve, woefully incomplete, and superficial, these are some of the things that left lasting impressions and/or made me want to return and learn more:

• Foraging: Our guide Taksin was a very knowledgeable ethnobotanist and pointed out many plants used for kidney and stomach ailments, headache, healing wounds, etc. In our short time in the bush we saw villagers in the bush foraging and hunting:
  • for ant larvae to dry as protein source,
  • temporarily damming small streams to enable foraging for tadpoles, small fish, crawfish, etc.,
  • a broom-like plant to prepare for export to China,
  • using selected roosters tied by the foot as lures to attract wild chickens for hunting,
  • using up bamboo traps to catch rats and prevent their raiding of stored rice and other foodstuffs, and to supplement the soup pot,
  • fish traps in the rivers.

• 

• 

• 

• Diet: Nearly every family has a pig and some chickens pork is used in many dishes. Sticky rice is grown in upland areas and is favored in rural areas we visited. Widespread use of bamboo shoots in cooking apparently causes stomach upset and kidney problems.
• House-raising: While on an early morning walk in the village it was interesting to see a man setting up a series of tall posts, which an hour later were the site of a house-raising by a group of about 20 villagers.
• Forestry: Thailand has apparently largely exhausted much of its timber reserves and buys teak, for example from neighboring countries.
• Rural development: Village government includes three elected leaders serving four year terms; meetings seem to take place in a designated meeting room. There seem to be government programs in both nations that encourage or require hill tribe villagers to move to villages with schools and health centers, and perhaps to land more suitable for crop production and less fragile. Some of these projects pay for new houses. We were told some villagers move willingly, others resist or refuse to move. In one Lao village we saw at least four vault toilets under construction to help reduce water pollution. Protection of village water supplies seems to be a lever for teaching principles of environmental protection and forest management, and the presence of “ordination trees” is part of an ongoing effort to inculcate an ethos of not cutting trees in protected areas as a means of ensuring clean water supply to villages.
• Shrines and animism: We encountered nature and ancestor shrines and practices (e.g. plant symbols on doorways) along the way, as well as shrines that seemed to mix these currents of totems to the spirits of plants, animals, places buildings and ancestors.  Animism is a key feature of the culture of the Hmong, Karen and Khmu hill tribe villages we visited.  Our guides were steeped in Animism, including Taksin, who spent 13 years as a Buddhist monk.  Encountering first-hand the deep mixing of Animism and Buddhism was a powerful revelation of something previously only theoretical to me.  It was clear that the belief that plants, animals, rivers, mountains, etc. have souls (or spirits) influenced the world-view of our guides and hosts.  Our contact was so fleeting that I was unable to understand how these beliefs translated into day-to-day human interactions with the environment.  Nevertheless, it seems clear that while animism predisposes people to revere nature, it does not necessarily translate into sound and well-informed environmental practices in agriculture, foraging, and rural life.  This gap between ancient animistic resonances between humans and nature and their effect on day-to-day practices of humans interests me.  On these treks I became intrigued with the potential for updating and incorporating aspects of animism in our 21^st century civilizational challenge to bring humans and nature into reciprocal balance. 
• Local schools: As we walked through a village in Laos we stopped to watch the kids rehearsing a traditional dance routine that apparently is performed at sporting events, replete with patriotic music and flag-waving. [couldn’t figure out how to insert video here]

• Impact of ecotourism: It was not possible to determine the impact of trekkers on these more remote villages, but it appeared minimal. However, our guides had a somewhat disconcerting tendency to joke about the numbers of tourists in the region and how they tried to avoid those places. One was showing us around a temple site and said he would never bring his family to this site during the tourist season. They seemed to be indicating that we were OK and their model of tourism was OK, but that tourism in general was problematic. That was even more true of our guides in the cities. It struck me as a slightly odd posture for out Buddhist guides in terms of the Buddhist principle of “right livelihood”.
• Trekking business model: The trekking companies seem to rotate their home-stay business among 3-4 village families. Some of these families have been doing this ecotourism hosting for about 20 years, and several seem to have invested in constructing separate bunk rooms in the past 10 years. Formerly trekkers stayed in family homes. It appears the tour operators pay the host family about 15% of the payment received from trekkers for the trip. A portion of this is transferred by the host family to the village coffers per an agreement with the village. The tour operators overhead costs include vehicles for transport, guides, maintaining an outpost for boat transfers when needed, and space rental in the city.