Village hopping in northern Laos
It's just been a few hours after getting off of an 8 hour boat ride down the Mekong, concluding a 6-day tour through northern Laos visiting local villages of different ethnic groups. This has really been the experience you read about in magazine travel articles or guidebooks, but never seem to get yourself.
The sort of experience where you can walk around in a village, and people will invite you to sit down with them and have some afternoon snacks with them. At this Tai Dam village outside of Luang Namtha, I tried the coolest little purple sweet potatoes. Just peel and pop in your mouth.
The sort of experience where people wear traditional dress... even when they're not expecting tourists. This was at an Akha village that we reached by trekking from Muang Sing.
And the sort of experience (with the help of a guide), where you can visit people in their own home, and they go about their daily living in front of you. Like this Lanten man smoking his water pipe, and wearing the traditional indigo-dyed shirt.
I contrast this with traveling in Xishuangbanna, China, where it just so happens that about 10 different minority groups all live happily in the same village. Where there's a marriage ceremony taking place every hour, people celebrate new years every day, and clothes are bright and shiny.
Of course, I did come across some scenes where I had to take off my detached touristic gaze, appreciating the "traditional" and "authentic," whatever they mean, and had to confront children in a line picking lice out of each other's hair, or women frying meal from the World Food Program for school snacks. And on the one hand I can't help but feel thankful for being brought up in a developed nation, and think no matter how picturesque the houses on stilts look, living in a nice house in the US is so much better. So much for cultural relativism.
But on the other hand, I see posters in villages from international aid groups that say, "together we can fight poverty," and also wonder, is war really the best analogy to describe people's lives?
