Northern Laos:
We were lucky that our trip to Laos got extended due to the problem with Cambodian visa and we had more time to spend in Northern Laos and Luang Namtha specifically. Located in the golden triangle, this area is the home for some unique ethnic groups living across Laos, Myanmar and Thailand. Lao hill tribes remained more authentic due to lack of tourism industry in northern Laos comparing to their neighboring country, Thailand. In this post, we’ll visit some of the most amazing people and communities. If you’re interested to read about our trip in Laos from the beginning, start from here.
How to get there:
It’s a long bumpy ride from Luang Prabang to Luang Namtha but I still believe that it worth it. I was googling the road conditions in Laos to give more accurate information on the current road and transportation conditions since we travelled few years back and just noticed that roads quality improved over last couple of years and probably travel between major cities in Laos are not as bumpy and painful as 10 years ago but still there’s a good 8 hours bus ride from Luang Prabang to Luang Namtha.
Another way to get to Luang Namtha is from the northern land border with Thailand. It’s 2-3 hours bus ride to the closest land border to Thailand and while this road is windy and bumpy but it would be a great introduction to Laos if getting to Laos via land border from Thailand is an option.
We travelled from Luang Namtha in a local minibus to the land border to Chiang Khong in Thailand on the way out. Laos-Thailand border in north is basically the Mekong river. After stamping the passports on the eastern bank of the Mekong river buy Lao authorities, a short boat ride across Mekong river, took us to Thai side in Chiang khong which is a district in northeastern part of Chiang Rai province. We’ll get to that in the next post
Luang Namtha:
The main town in Luang Namtha region called Luang Namtha 🙂 It can be used as a main hub to visit the remote area in the region and perhaps the only place to find accommodation. After 9 hours of bumpy ride, we got off the bus, dusty and hungry with soar backs and tried to find some basic accommodation first. We picked one of two available options for 5 usd per night with an interesting set up. Clean basic rooms were build around a massive court yard with almost nothing in the middle. After dropping our backpacks in our rooms, the next mission was finding something to eat. Since we got of the bus, being the only foreigners in town, we were followed with some friendly, interesting old Akha ladies that were trying to sell us some fresh herbs! They came with us to the backpacker and followed us in town pretty much everywhere we were going for almost the whole week. we soon realized that what we were thinking is the fresh herbs were actually local drugs from the area. Walking around town accompanied with this lovely ladies who never stopped trying to sell us herbs, we soon found the only local café in the town which was only serving one type of freshly made local noodles. That became our staple diet for the next few days.
Luang Namtha is located in the area, known as golden triangle. The Golden Triangle is the area where the borders of Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar meet at the confluence of the Ruak and Mekong rivers. The name “Golden Triangle”—coined by the CIA—is commonly used more broadly to refer to an area of approximately 950,000 square kilometres (367,000 sq mi) that overlaps the mountains of the three adjacent countries.
Along with Afghanistan in the Golden Crescent, it has been one of the largest opium-producing areas of the world since the 1950s. Most of the world’s heroin came from the Golden Triangle until the early 21st century when Afghanistan became the world’s largest producer. If you are interested in the history of the area please read more in here.
Since drug trafficking is still an ongoing problem, getting checked multiple times in police stops on the roads especially when using public transport is completely normal. We wanted to visit as many areas as we can possibly do within a tight time frame that we had, so we hired a car with local driver with some basic English to help us out. It was four of us travelling and later we had another traveler called Fernando who joined our daily trips so the cost of the car rental became really cheap and at the same time we visited too many places that was not practically possible with public transportation.
Lao Hill tribes Arts and Crafts:
Well I have to confess that apart from travelling, my main passion is textile, design and anything handmade. In today’s world, it is getting harder and harder to get genuine handmade products. I personally love to know where our everyday items are coming from and prefer to have less but pay the fair money for genuine product and keep it for a long time. When we were kid when we couldn’t afford to buy or we couldn’t find what we had in mind, we were always trying to create it and it happens to be the trend for both of us as grown ups too. Being in places that you can still find people making things with local raw materials and basic tools and the final product is amazing is really heartwarming. Laos was great in this regard. Literally every small community that we visited, I learned something new from them. Lao women are a great artisans when it comes to spinning yarn, dying wool using natural dyes, weaving and embroidery. It’s such a joy to watch them create such an outstanding pieces and wear them on the daily basis and for everyday living. They reminded me of the amazing artisans with their masterpieces that we visited in Kutch desert in Gujarat, India.
Ethnic Communities:
Apart being great artisans, we found Lao people extremely calm, gentle, kind and generous despite the widespread poverty in the country especially the rural area.
Landlocked Laos is one of the world’s few remaining communist states and one of East Asia’s poorest. But despite economic reforms, the country remains poor and heavily dependent on foreign aid. Most Laotians live in rural areas, with around 80% working in agriculture mostly growing rice and unfortunately most of them don’t own the land, they work on. Majority of the rice fields and banana plantations are owned by Chinese. Eighty-eight percent of children experience some form of deprivation, and women face widespread marginalization and discrimination. Despite all these facts, Lao people were living in harmony and looking after each other more than we’ve ever experienced before. In most of rural areas, there were some form of school and almost every single kid that we’ve seen were going to school. It’s our independent observations in the area that we visited.
Water Acess:
The more we travel in remote areas, the more we realize how much we take our access to clean water for granted. Although Laos is one of the dominant renewable water resource in Asia, still 40 percent of rural Lao population are lacked access to safe drinking water. In certain location, villagers have to walk up to 2 kilometer to get access to water. Apart from the health issues, lots of kids are taken out of schools to be available to walk back and forth and bring much needed water to their homes. In Laos, we’ve seen very young kids bringing big heavy buckets of water back home. Being close to Mekong river, most of the hill tribe communities had access to the water in the middle of the village and in the afternoons, it was the main hub for socializing in the village.
Hill tribes Ceremonies:
One of the most interesting part of hanging around in villages without being on a tight schedule or fixed itinerary is running into interesting ceremonies like weddings, funerals and lots of other ceremonies that probably we never know it ever existed.
One lazy hot afternoons in Laos, we were walking in a village where all the residents were from Lanten tribe. Lanten women are normally wearing knee height black robes with silky vivid pink decorations around the neck line and normally cover their legs with some sort of white leggings. Unlike the rest of the hill tribes that have a turban or some form of outstanding hair piece, Lanten women, only use a small silver hair pin.
While walking, we saw a giant pot of purple rice cooking on an open fire in the middle of the road. Back then I didn’t even know that the purple rice was even a thing so we were watching it simmering on fire curiously. A nice Lanten lady which we later realized was cooking the rice, came out of her hut followed with her young kids and invited us inside. Following her inside, we passed through the first section of the house where another pot was bubbling away on fire, we entered a dark back room where a ceremony was taking place and she asked us to sit and watch.
On the other corner of the room the village shaman was reading prayers from few old books that were all over the floor. while focusing on the prayer, he was hitting a tiny drum that he was holding and giving a kind of rhythm to the prayer.
Being stocked with the ongoing ceremony in a dark room which we could barely see anything, the shaman stood up and started to rotate a dead chicken which probably scarified earlier as part of the ceremony in the air and in one quick action just throw it right on the other side of the room where we sat and announced the end of the ceremony. We later understood that each household have similar ceremonies and bring the village shaman to cleanse their house from the bad spirits and protect their rice crop for the season. The chicken ended up in the boiling pot that we saw in the other room and served with the purple rice in a big leaf.
The last chapter of Laos:
Luang Namtha was the last leg of our trip in Laos. From there , we took a van to Chiang Khong border and crossed the Mekong border to enter Thailand. Apart from visiting places that we would never forget in Laos, driving in between these small towns and villages were unique experience as well. We’ve seen so many interesting people and things on the roads which we will never forget. Our southeastern Asia trip didn’t started as we planned at the beginning but we are grateful that it didn’t work out as we planned and we ended up spending more time in Laos. In the next post, we’ll continue our trip in the Northern Thailand. Till then, take care and enjoy some of our moments on the road below.
Michael Chernishov
May 23, 2021 at 8:35amWow! What an amazing experience! I love it that you spent time away from the tourist attractions to spend time with the real people and to find out how they live. And your photos are gorgeous as usual!
akhodaparast
May 24, 2021 at 10:39amThanks Michael. Glad you like it 🙂