"Over there is Luang Prabang," said Doua, our guide. "It’s so noisy!"
We were standing on top of Phou Luang, the highest peak in the area. Straining to hear the sounds of the bustling metropolis of Luang Prabang in the valley below, I thought I could just make out the putt-putt of a long-tail boat on the Mekong.
Not many travelers come to the Hmong village of Phou Luang Tai: a few each month in the high season. You can only get here on foot, and it’s a five-hour walk from Luang Prabang that ends with a steep 700-meter climb, the kind that hurts your calves on the way up and your knees on the way down. On this day it was over 30°C (86°F), which didn’t help. But the last stretch was beautiful, as we rose above the treeline and saw hills rolling to the horizon, covered in virgin forest.
We arrived near sundown at a burnt clearing near the summit. Thirty-five thatched huts were scattered across the slope below us. We sat on a bench next to Doua’s parents’ house and watched the sky turn as red as the clay, then fade to a deep, deep blue. The moon was almost full. To the South, in the valley below, we could see the lights of Luang Prabang, a town of 25,000 people that to the Hmong seems vast and remote.
There’s no electricity in Phou Luang Tai and inside the house it was utterly dark. Hmong houses are simple: wooden walls, thatched roof, dirt floor. Typically eight or nine people live, eat, and sleep together in one room. The toilet is a bush out back and there’s a bucket of cold water and a plastic scoop in one corner if you feel like a shower.
Doua’s brothers and sisters have all left home, and his parents don’t know what to do with the extra space.
A clay pot was propped over an open fire that was also the main source of light. The family lit some candles and had a torch as well. We shared a meal of beef noodles that we’d carried up with us. People here can seldom afford to eat meat (they trade their pigs and chickens for clothes and tools) so the meal was much appreciated.
The Hmong are subsistence farmers. They grow corn to feed their animals and dry rice to feed themselves. These are the only crops that will grow at this altitude, on a thirty-degree slope, in an inch or two of soil. And to grow even these crops they have to slash and burn the forests. Each family must find a patch of land large enough to support them for one year. They strip the trees, plant and harvest their crops, and then have to leave the that patch fallow for at least three years. Next year, they start again. Doua’s parents are both in their sixties, and won’t be able to keep this up much longer.
Once the meal was over, it was time for sleep. Lao radio carries two hours of programming in the Hmong language each day and people in Phou Luang Tai can listen on battery-operated radios, but there are no other distractions. People here still go to bed and wake up with the sun. Doua’s parents gave us their own bed, a wooden platform in one corner with some blankets laid over it.
We woke at dawn, and I slipped out the back door to wander around. Three pigs were blocking the front door, waiting patiently to be fed. A rooster was marching around the village like a town crier. Men and women were already heading out to roam the surrounding countryside, looking for suitable places to slash and burn. Doua’s parents fed the pigs, the chickens, a very small horse, and finally us.
Around 8 am we heard the slow beating of a gong. The Hmong are animists, and the village shaman was beginning his morning ritual. We stood outside the shaman’s hut respectfully and peered in. He was sitting on a table with a cloth wrapped round his head, chanting steadily and jangling bells that were strapped to his wrist. Behind him, a second man was beating a gong. Doua explained that the shaman was riding into the spirit world to beg favors on behalf of the villagers; his self-induced trance would last an hour or two. Then he too would head out in search of forest to burn. No surplus here to pay for a layabout priest.
Nearby, Doua pointed to a hut with leaves hanging over its front door, a sign that the house was taboo. Probably because of an illness, the shaman had decreed that no-one should leave or enter the house for a week. (Quarantine; a good idea in the case of minor illnesses, successful enough to convince everyone - including the shaman - that the shaman knows what he is talking about.)
We walked through the rest of the village and saw people weaving baskets by hand, mending clothes, grooming a cock to lure a few wild hens.
At the far end of the village, we came to the primary school, a shack about the same size as one of the Hmong houses with two blackboards and some very beat-up old benches.
As we walked up, there were fifty schoolkids playing outside. They will spend most of their lives in that shack, all ages in one classroom with one teacher and three or four books between them. Their chances are not good. Doua grew up in the same classroom, also with 50 other kids. Every year a few more dropped out. He was one of only two to finish high school.
Doua told us that many of these children have not left the village yet; they are too young to go with their parents. All they know of Luang Prabang are the ghostly lights in the valley below. They have no TV or internet, few books and magazines, only the two hours of Hmong radio to connect them to the outside world. They were both excited and afraid of us, as you can tell from the expressions on their faces in the photo above. One little girl burst out crying and would not stop.
Some westerners have a very romantic idea of peasant life. The Hmong don’t. For a thousand years, people in South-East Asia have dreamt of being ‘rescued from the mud’: getting work as a bureaucrat, a monk, a concubine, anything but toiling in a rice field. As far as most people in Phou Luang Tai are concerned, development can’t come fast enough.
Ironically, environmental activists feel the same, but for a different reason. Forests act like reservoirs, soaking up water in the rainy season and releasing it slowly during the dry season. Burn them down and you alternate between floods and droughts. In the worst cases, as in America during the Depression, the topsoil dries out completely and blows away. Things are not yet that serious in Laos, but river levels are falling and habitats are being lost. The Lao government and its international sponsors want to change the Hmong way of life, resettle the people to the cities, and restore the forest.
In ten years Phou Luang Tai will probably be gone. And though the pictures are pretty, and it was a privilege to come here, and even though I know that many of the people here will go from rural poverty to urban poverty, few will be truly sorry to see this little village die.
More photos from our visit here.
Phou Luang Tai: N19°59.976′ E102°08.899′ Z1023m