Gone (a traveler's tale)

I knew the Israeli girl was gone, and I don’t mean gone for a walk or gone somewhere else but gone, gone. Her father who looked like the kind of guy who had seen a couple of things, realized, I think, that there was little likelihood. I’m a father, I have a little girl, I can’t imagine. Girl is probably the wrong thing to call someone who was, or used to be, an officer in the Israeli army. It was Asia, that’s what they call unmarried women.

Tiger Leaping Gorge Yunnan, China from Wiki

It had started the way many things do with the idea to go for a walk for a couple of days. I was living down in Dali and had been hearing “backpackers” talking of a “trek” through a place called Tiger Leaping Gorge. Trek is code amongst the banana pancake crowd for a leisurely walk. This was back in the mid 90s before mass tourism had much touched that obscure part of Yunnan pushed up against Tibet by who knows what sort of tectonic plate.

I’d already done a snowy mid winter walk along the ridge of Cangshan Range and spent too many days wandering on the cold glacier of Yulongxue Shan where I had no business being midwinter and alone. I was ready for a flat walk with banana pancakes.

On the mini bus out of Lijiang I met the three of them, a young guy, and a couple that were older, maybe in their mid 30s, they were headed back to the gorge to look for the companion of the young guy. I’ll call him YG for young guy as I’ve long forgotten any names if I ever knew them.

YG and the Israeli girl, his companion, had had an argument of some sort as people traveling together sometimes tend to do. They’d separated to walk along at their own pace without having to look at or discuss with each other whatever it was they were arguing about. When the YG got to Walnut Grove, the midway point, he waited and waited, Israeligirl never showed up. Thinking she’d perhaps turned around and gone back, the next day he retraced his steps to  Qiaotou. (Shaw-toe?) She hadn’t gone there either so he alerted the PSB and things took on a life of their own from there.

They all went back up the gorge, the YG and the police, and they looked. They looked from the last place he’d seen her and they looked further down the trail from there. They talked to everyone living in the vicinity and they kept looking on into the night. Then they went to Walnut grove and screamed at the guest house owner who hadn’t registered her in his books so to save the 30% “local tax”. Then the next day they went back to  Qiaotou where there was a phone and called Lijiang which is the biggest town around.

Technically she’d gone missing in the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of which Zohngdian is the capital. Zohngdian has been renamed, it’s now  Shangrila and in my estimation not the better for it. The entire area is now a World Heritage Site. Roads, hotels, tour groups, airports, ATMs.

So the three Israelis and I slept at Qiaotou, then we too hiked most of the way to Walnut Grove and looked. We looked up and mostly down the hill from where the YG had last seen Israeligirl and to tell you the truth there seemed no place a person could disappear to. The hillside was open, treeless.  We walked on to the Guest House which was tended by the owner’s ten year old daughter and a teenage helper, no one else was there.

The guest house had a few very basic rooms without water, no electricity, we were after all at least 20km from the road.. In the morning when I got up the guest house daughter was scraping the wax from the table where the middle aged fellow had been playing with it and made a mess spreading the wax around with match sticks and what not. In the kitchen we huddled around the woodstove. There was little to eat, the owner was off buying supplies, but the guesthouse daughter offered yack butter tea. I had some moon cakes which I shared around. We smoked a bowl of pot, I was the only one to take up her offer of the tea. Refreshingly strong tea and filling at the same time.

Daughter of the Guest House owner at Walnut Grove. She managed the place very well in the absence of her parents, I think she was 10. Notice the churn against the wall for making yak butter tea. Slow slide film with natural light.

The next day we walked out to the far end of the gorge and took a ferry across the Yangtze to the lovely little town of Daju which was at the end of a road and it was possible to take a bus. The walk seemed long to Daju, maybe 30km.

Daju had a short landing strip for small aircraft and some old style timber frame houses being built. They actually had banana trees, something I hadn’t seen in China. Daju at the downriver end of the gorge is one of the lowest places around. It’s past the gorge, they get a full complement of sunlight. The next day after an eight hour bone rattling ride on a poor excuse for a road we were back in Lijiang. Eight hours to go fifty kilometers.

It was in Lijiang that I met the dad. He’d flown across the world as fast as he could but by now we were at day seven or eight or something. His daughter had been gone an awfully long time. He asked what I thought of the deal and I had no theories or impressions that would add to an understanding. Very few people live in the gorge, anything that happens everyone knows.

It wasn’t until a month later that I found out the end of story, and even then it was only by chance that I heard.

I should say before someone corrects me that the river up by the gorge isn’t called the Yankze, in Yunnan it’s called something else entirely. I should also mention that though the trek is basically a flat path that has been in use for centuries if not millennia, there are many side paths. People leave little trails, herding goats, collecting mushrooms, picking herbs. And, as in most places none of the side paths are marked, nor are any paths marked. Everyone knows where they are going.

Locals crossing a foot bridge Tiger Leaping Gorge

One evening I fast walked and jogged the 23km of path from Walnut Grove back to Qiaotou in a little over 3 hours with a broken headlamp and moon behind clouds. It might not be a super highway but it’s close to it. Towards the Qiaotou end of things the path cut through the center of a small prison, it was without walls. I guess the place is for model prisoners and in any case the walls of the gorge are as good a barrier as any. They cut large pieces of marble. At the time I was there that was the furthest extent of the road, now I think the road goes all the way to Walnut Grove maybe further. The night I walked they were still working by the light of bright bulbs long after dark. No one said anything as I walked on through. Silent prisoners, feeding a saw, cutting rock.

The gorge itself is deep. It’s deeper than the grand canyon, the walls though not as sheer are larger than El Cap in Yosemite. At the time I was there no one knew the size of the gorge, or if they did they didn’t advertise it. Sitting at Walnut Grove one has a very intimate view of the wall on the opposite side. I knew at the time that surely this gorge was as big as any wall I’d ever seen. I was puzzled as to why the gorge wasn’t famous, now it is.

The sun shines on Walnut Grove very late and leaves early, maybe five hours of direct sun, that’s how steep the walls are. The hillside was intensely terraced. At the edge of the town I once found the ruins of an abandoned house with a house sized boulder in the middle of it. The house had been built in a place too susceptible to rockfall.

It was at Qiaotou in the backpacker cafe that I found the end of the story. Like many places on the banana pancake circuit the cafe had a log book for people to jot down their impressions or messages.

Backpackers Cafe Qioatou - It could sometimes be days between customers.

Israelidad had hired some kind of professional searcher and they had found his daughter. Probably they’d also hired locals,  and they’d done a grid search marking where they’d been. The stream crossings had been tricky and she’d wandered far downhill at one place looking for a better crossing. There are different crossings for pack horses and other places better in the wet season, and so on, many little trails headed nowhere. The young woman had fallen down between large rocks at one such crossing and been very badly injured. She had lived a few days unable to move but well enough to jot down some thoughts. She had pen and paper from her backpack.

I read about all this in the logbook at the cafe.

A sad and terrible thing for sure.

If anyone ever reads this who was there at the time my apologies for any inaccuracies or misrepresentations. Sean if you read this it looks like your guest house has been very successful, I’ll be back someday. Lastly to Israeligirl whom I never met, I hope you rest easy.


Below are some more photos from the two walks I did into the gorge in 95 and also the walks on the Canshang Range and Yuahlung Shan from just before the Tiger Leaping Walk. I post them here so as not to detract from the story.

Above-From the second day out on my hike of the Cangshan Ridge. Barely visible is the distant peak of Yuahlung Shan, the gorge is just left of it. This hike was my first test of my sleeping system which was comprised of an old summer weight synthetic bag, the fleece pants and jacket I was wearing and a hat, on top of a Thermarest and inside a bivi sack covered with a space blanket. Worked fine.

Self snap shot on the East side of Yuahlong Shan. A long ways from anyone I knew in a place of no trails or maps, in other words heaven on earth. I bought salted beef, packaged noodle soup, moon-pies and green tea at the market, great backpacking food. It was this cold midwinter wander that convinced me I needed to go for a flat walk such as tiger leaping gorge where I could sleep in guesthouses.

Qiaotou-The road to Zhongdian and Lasa Tibet which was closed to outsiders at the time, it has since opened. Not much traffic.

Yualong Shan from the West. It's this mountain that forms the steep east side of the gorge, probably the deepest river gorge in the world.


Except for the first, all photos are mine, taken at the time of the story and a month later when I did the walk again. I was using a manual Pentax with a decent 28mm lense and a not so good 80-210 zoom. Velvia 50 or 100 and always natural light. I've come to appreciate digital photography a heck of a lot.


I've purposefully skipped all sorts of second guessing. Nothing about walking alone or abilities to follow a trail or our lack of searching in the right place. Things happen.

Walking out to the road

The road means different things to different people. For me it meant a return to the power grid, cell phone coverage, showers, beds, restaurants. For Lorphaew’s son who was along for the walk and had never seen a road, it meant a lot more.

We get up early, I fill my water bottles from the cold water in the kettle and we leave. Tui, Lorphaew carrying my pack, Lorphaew’s son, and myself bringing up the rear. I don’t think we even had a hot breakfast, cold rice and water. Tui remarked this was a record early start for him, maybe seven o’clock.

The day before I’d cut a three inch hole in my boot to match the inch and a half hole in my foot, covered them both tightly with athletic tape, hoped that the pressure would be relieved, and crossed my fingers for luck.

The first part of the walk followed the path from Jakune Mai to Jakune Gow, I’d been on the trail four times before, that didn’t make it any easier. We stopped to wash at a stream crossing, from there the trail goes up and up and up, maybe 1800 feet or more. The first time I was already tired after two long days and I was lying down at the rests, took the starch out of me. This time at least I stayed standing to catch my breath. 

Jakune Gao 2006

Lorphaew brought up the rear carrying my pack and his presence made the effort easier. I speak no Akha and he speaks no Lao, and so we can’t talk, but when you are the slowest it’s nice to have someone behind for company who doesn’t push.

Much sooner than I’d of thought we are at Old Jakune, in the two years since I’d been there it had melted further into the forest. I had to wonder how long it would be before only the discerning eye would know that here for decades uncounted, maybe centuries,  was a village where people were born, lived to bear children themselves, and passed on. How quickly the trees grow. The time comes for everyone and we all fade from memory.

Just above the old townsite is the trail junction to Nambo, more faint than the trail to town. Probably not many make the long hike to the Lahu village. Young men going “visiting” more likely than not. Our route took us still higher, almost to the top of the highest mountain in the vicinity, Phou Mon Lem, a name that has something to do with the long grass that grows around the top.

When we cross the ridge we stop and I take a photo. A poor and uninteresting photo at that. Some tree covered hills, some fog, barely imagined further hills. I breath deep wondering if this is my last view of this area. Close by are the hills on both sides of the Nam Fa, the river valley without roads or cell phone coverage, trees never cut, river never damned. Beyond is the Nam Mekong the riverine historic waterway of south east asia still in fog and wide, and on the other side of that, Shan State, the part of Burma ruled by an independent army.

I like these hills.

After the top we began to see survey markers. A Korean mining company is intent on developing a copper mine and making a road. It will certainly change things. Tui says he understands us Falangs don’t like to see roads. I don’t mind roads, but I do like the untracked forests and miss them when they are gone. It would be great if Lorphaew and all from his village didn’t have to walk so far to go to the market, or the doctor. More worrisome is the potential for pollution from the mining, I doubt there would be any environmental restrictions at all. A lot of villages downstream.

The walk downhill is at a much more moderate gradient. Once in awhile more survey flags from the intended road. The path cuts side hill amongst very old large trees, the walking is easy, cool in the deep shadows. The trees and the path might well have both been there when America was fighting it’s war for independence. A land without roads doesn’t mean a place without history or people

Drinking from the spring, Lorphaew, his son, Tui.

All too soon we are wading the river for the seven crossings that mark the approach to the Lanten village that is where the trail meets the road. A  young guy has driven his motorcycle into the ford to wash the dust off, it is colorful new and fast looking even sitting still. Lorphaew’s son stares at the bike with intensity, he has heard of them. Later Tui’s friend arrives in a decrepit minivan without seats to give us a ride to town. Lorphaew’s son watches carefully from where we sit on the floor in the back as we bump along, when the road suddenly becomes paved and the minivan twists through the S turns his jaw drops in wonder. On the road again.

Wildside Trip on the Nam Fa (from quite a while ago)

Tiger Tracking on the Nam Pha from Frank Wolf on Vimeo.

This video is of a white water rafting trip down the Nam Fa in the late nineties or the early part of the last decade.

It looks like the video was made by someone who makes adventure videos with no connection to the actual trip. The trip was organised by Wildside adventures run by Michael O'Shea also known as the guy that kayaked the entire length of the Mekong with lots of good stories from half drowning in Tibet of Yunnan province, I read his account of the trip online a long time ago.

This is kind of a run on post, I'm hoping that someone who was in the area at the time will post a long and if they want anonymous or not comment about the whole thing and I'll erase this half conjecture collection of run on sentences with some factual information. Hint hint you know who you are.

Looks like most of the time was spent above the junction of the Nam Hee where the river is most turbulent and it probably took them the most time to get down. Assuming the Kahmu village was up close to Vieng Phuka somewhere. Don't know about the Akha village, a just moved Jakune Mai? The camera traps that used film were a give away. Don't know when digital came out but it's an indicator.

Return to Jakune Mai

Some days start out bad and get better, rather that than the other way around.

I get up early. Nature calls. Everyone else has to get up to take a leak too but I prefer to get out while it’s still mostly dark. Others are doing the same, young pregnant moms hitching up their skirts, and old guys like me ducking behind a pig sty or old fence. The village is surprisingly without smells for a place without toilets. Dogs and pigs and cats all have their place and serve multiple functions in what I guess you’d call a traditional village. Maybe I’d just gotten a little too used to things.

When viewed over the perspective of time, most of our existence as Europeans has been as a crop growing metal working people living not so differently than the Akha do. Only in the last hundred years of so have we developed telegraphs and computer chips. Pigs and chickens under the house are kept in at night, dogs are free to roam but mostly outside of the house, they guard for danger, chase rats, and assist in the hunt. Cats live in the framework of the house assuring a lack of large insects, snakes, lizards, mice or rats. I was comfortable to be in the house of a friend in a village I’ve been to before with sounds and smells and a rhythm familiar and predictable.

I used my bit of private time to clean and apply new tape to a blister that had been bothering me for a few days. I’d been ignoring it. Out on the porch of Lao Pao’s house there was some light and I intended to wash and air my feet. First I peal off my old layers of bandages in the light of my headlamp and some of the syrup from my blister spills on the split bamboo floor. White blood cells I guess it is, I don’t know, I’m not a doctor.
Things were worse than I’d thought. What had been a bothersome distraction for days, was, on closer inspection a big hole in the skin on the inside of my left foot. The mother of all blisters. I used some of my water to wash.

Tui my guide wasn’t overjoyed to see my foot no doubt he was wondering how this big old falang was going to get over the hill and back to the road. When shown to Lawboa my foot garnered no more than a moment’s look-see. People live and die in Jakune without recourse to doctors or hospitals, on a scale of one to ten a nasty blister barely twitches the seriousness meter. As my wife tells my kids when they get a scratch, it’s a long way from my heart.

What was obvious was that walking was going to be a problem. My desire to revist Mongla further down the Nam Fa was out of the question. Sompanyao on that long high ridge above Xienkok would wait for another day. We were still a long way from the Mekong or a road. There’s a way over the side of Phou Mon Lem from the old townsite of Jakune Gao, then a long downhill to a town of Lanten people with a road, it’s the shortest way out.

I gathered my washing stuff and headed up to the village spring. Before I left Loubi’s house I asked Tui if I could  buy a young shoat for dinner. This was a rest day and we hadn’t had much meat. Good way to lay some cash on the owner of the piglet and for all in the house to have a mini feast.

The water was piped down to the upper end of the village via a system of hollowed bamboo trunks. Still when it arced out over the tiny bridge it was freezing cold. I’ve no idea how people take showers in it every evening. I wore a wrap around type sarong everyone wears for modesty, still a young girl who came to fetch water ran away in fright. Shortly thereafter the new village headman came walking up to the spring to say hi, I should have already been to visit him, but what with arriving late and staying in the former headman’s house I’d been ignoring the niceties.

I’d barely started back to the house when Tui met me part way very excited about a deer that had been shot, he wanted me to make sure I had my camera. After a quick glance at the butchering job in progress I ducked inside fetched my camera and took this photo.

Law Pi’s two eldest sons had gone hunting with the two guys from the next house. The heart is beside the pan and the liver and lungs are in the pot. Notice that they are discarding the contents of the upper intestine, they’ll save the casing to make sausage.

One front leg goes to the new headman, and another leg goes to the house of the oldest man in the village, that’s the way it is. That still leaves a heck of a lot of meat without refrigeration. No parts are wasted.


I’ve read reports by nutritionists saying the upland people get half their sustenance from the forest, not only in the form of various fauna but also the wild plants, especially the ones that predictably grow up on old rice fields gone to weeds.

Every single male hunts.

The government has outlawed the hunting of endangered species as well as market hunting. That leaves quite a few species, and almost all of the ones that have been traditionally hunted for food. Muntjak which is a small primitive deer with a forked set of horns, and wild pig are the two big game species. Smaller animals include squirrel, all the birds, snakes, bamboo rat, porcupine, civet, and so on.

Above are the jawbones and other parts of some animals stored with plants and leaves tied about them. Normally there would be the horns of muntjak and the larger ones of the sambar which is a larger deer. Sambar horns fetch $100 at the market, no doubt muntjak quite a bit less. The term trophy hunter used as a pejorative in modern western society. But I’ve yet to see a people who don’t value and save the horns of a deer. Notice the round wheels of suet from deer or pig.

I’ve no doubt that the leaves tied to the jawbones of prey are somehow related to a ritual either for luck in future hunts or to the life given up to eat. I’ve heard the Akha believe spirits to be in all things, no doubt they exist in deer too.

Photo of the cutting up.

Inside the house many willing hands were cutting and chopping the dear to be made into a huge dinner.

I’ve never eaten at such an elaborate Akha feast. At least four different kinds of meat dishes, two different jeaos (spicy sauces) and a huge soup. The rice is from the mountains, with a little imagination you can taste the smokey flavor of slash and burn.

photo of laid out dinner

I was surprised the guang (muntjak) tasted exactly like the deer back home. Below a photo of a muntjak caught in a Wildlife Conservation Society camera trap down south. This one is a red muntjak, there are many varieties.

photo WSC

The muntjak is the oldest deer species. Like many tropical deer it’s horns are mostly for defending the territory of a foraging specialist.

As often happens when I have the smell of lots of fresh meat and blood in my nose for too long I wasn’t so interested in eating meat. I tried one of the minced meats, then settled into the soup on top of my rice. Laobi’s wife seeing that I wasn’t eating much meat reached down into the soup pot with her chop sticks and deposited a largish hunk of meat in my bowl. It was extremely tender and mild with a small bone in it’s center. Deer embryo leg. Soup was probably fluid from the embryonic sack.

I’m mostly ok eating different things, if they taste ok, I’ll eat them. Tui my friend mentioned afterwards that he’d always avoided that dish before.

I dozed through the afternoon in a “belly full of meat” kind of daze. I was tired from days of hikes that lasted into the night. I was trying to rest up for the next day when I’d try to walk out to the road. I’d been on much of tomorrow’s route before. In making a beeline to the town the trail cuts up over the highest piece of real estate around, for the first couple miles it goes up and then up a lot more.

I carefully made a two inch diameter cut in the side of my boot where my foot had been rubbing. Better to give up some protection from dirt and water in exchange for an end to the rubbing on my foot.

In the late afternoon I went out to take some photos in the late afternoon light. First  Lawbao’s wife then quite a few of his family and the guys next door asked me to take their photos. I’d taken some pics of my host and the headman of a close village on a previous visit, and brought them back and given them to people as gifts. Maybe word had gotten around.

Many of the poses were stiff and rigid, as if they were redying themselves for something painful, others were clowning. None of the women wore make up. They live too far from the road to have seen many magazines or how women use make up in “civilization”. It has been almost 3 years, I’m waiting for the day I can return and give them their photos.

Lawpao on R, his wife and youngest children.

This post is part of a series of posts about a long walk I did mostly in Muang Long district of Luang Namtha Province Laos in the winter of 08/09. Below are the links to the other posts.

Long Time Traveler Muang Long

One Day Treks in the Vicinity of Muang Long

Lahu NIght Out

The Trail To Nambo

Hmong House

Further Into the Forest

Ban Nam Hee

Lost in Laos

Nam Fa Means Sky River

Nam Fa means Sky River

I have no doubt as to where I am when I wake up to the sound of the saht hitting the koak-tam-kao. The foot powered pestle falling into the large mortar carved from a log is such a low solid sound it reverberates through the hard packed earth and up the posts the house is built on and into beams supporting the floor and the sleeping platform I lie on.

Usually I wake up when the eldest wife starts the fire. Today the sun is fully up and the wife of the eldest son is dehusking the rice under the house. There’s a slight creek as one end of the long pole attached to the saht is pushed down with the foot, then a hesitation as the saht at the other end tops it’s arc then that moment that hangs in time as saht falls through the air and hits the coak.

The chickens are eager to get any fallen grains, the husks will be collected to be mixed with the boiled hearts of banana trees to feed the pigs, and the family has rice for one more day of the year, one of many years, in many generations, of the people called Akha.

Koak tam kao, and in her hand the cotton she is twisting into thread, notice the rice bag that is actually an old fertilizer bag bought from town, it still has the markings 18-20-0 representing how much NPK.

I rub the sleep from my eyes, grab my camera and duck underneath the house to take a photo. I know at the time it’s just a cornball tourist photo. Gotta have a picture of the foot powered saht. I’m accompanied by a couple kids and a dog, the woman is spinning cotton fibers into thread at the same time as she pushes the saht with her foot.

I saw a video shot in Vientiane by some sort of cultural preservation arm of the government, they were taking kids to see a foot powered sat tam kao. Kids in the capital can now grow up never having seen rice de husked except by machine. Gone the way of the water buffalo I guess.


This post is part of a series of posts about a long walk I did mostly in Muang Long district of Luang Namtha Province Laos in the winter of 08/09. Below are the links to the other posts.
Long Time Traveler Muang Long
One Day Treks in the Vicinity of Muang Long
Lahu NIght Out
The Trail To Nambo
Hmong House
Further Into the Forest
Ban Nam Hee
Lost in Laos

On the left the Naiban of ban Huay Poong, on the right the local guide from Ban Nam Hee

Inside breakfast is busy with lots of people. We had rice and a jeao made of toasted peanuts, hot peppers, pig oil, and enough salt to cause stroke. The headman pulled an SKS out of the roof above where I’d been sleeping, opened the magazine dropping six cartridges onto the blankets, worked the action to extract the one left in the chamber, and handed it over to one of the guys that had come to breakfast.

Young hunter with SKS

Tui translated. The young men had chased a large boar the day before. The wounded pig was too tough and they hadn’t been able to kill the it. One of the dogs was hurt so badly it might well die. I could picture scene in my head, young guys running around in the bushes, dogs whirling about, pig snorting and screaming, dogs barking and biting, thick brush and trees, muffled explosion of black powder muskets with lots of smoke that lingers in the slow air of the deep forest.

The hunter was borrowing the center fire rifle to finish the job today. Cartridges are expensive, probably around a dollar a piece, the headman is fine loaning out the rifle but not the ammo. The rifle is called the same thing in Laos as in the US except using mangled french consonants that come out something like Sik Kuh Say. It’s a soviet block semi auto, uses the same rounds as the AK, might well be half a century old.

A new local guide is hired. Tui, and the guides discuss the route, our old guide will return to his village and a new one will take us to Jakune Mai. I was beginning to lose track of how long we’d been out, it had only been three days and nights. This house and other houses and other cook fires in other villages in other trips seem to meld into the fires of the juggies up on the Greys river and on into the Androscoggin of my young teens.

The headman told of his difficulty kicking his addiction to opium, and his re acceptance by the people of the village. I listen with ambivalence. Opium is as much a part of their culture as the saht to dehusk the rice, it’s up to them to refrain from liking it too much.  There’s more talk, of the division of the village, of the route to Jakune, of the other villages of the area.

Soon enough we were walking again. Walking was becoming the thing we do. First the local guide I called uncle, then me, and then Tui. The blister on the ball of my left foot had been hurting for a couple hours each morning, either the feeling would go away or I would stop noticing.

The walking goes easy, down hill but not steep.

Not a the biggest by any means but that root flare is greater than two meters. This just happened to be where we took a break. Purple back pack on left of photo

By late morning were in the very large trees of the Nam Fa Valley. (nam means water or in this case river, fa is sky, so “sky river”. I’m used to very large trees and uncut forests, but the soil at the bottom of the valley is so rich the trees grow very high and the trunks are very large, some of the largest trees I’ve ever seen anywhere. The roots flare out widely to support such weight. What light filters through seems green.

I read a while ago on one of those online forums for scientific NGO workers that a Malaysian lumber company would like to build a hydro dam on the Nam Fa. The fact that the company up to this time only deals in wood is enough to make you wonder. The valley is a long long way from anyone that needs large amounts of electricity.

We took a break at a trail junction. To our left was the path to Mongla an unknown number of kilometers downstream on the south bank of the river. At least here was a route to somewhere I’d been before. I remember Mongla as it was when I left it over two years before, the morning mists so thick and heavy everything was dripping, the soft spoken Naiban and his very pretty young second wife not yet with a child.

I put on my flip flops to protect me from stones bruising my feet and used a couple of poles to steady myself. The Nam Fa was as I remember, knee to mid thigh deep, very fast, and fifty meters wide. In this land of deep forest the river is open to the sky and reflects blue. There is the musty wet smell of a big river.

Nam Fa means Sky River

From the water marks on the bank it looks as if the common high water in the wet season is four feet deeper. With six feet of water coursing through, the river would be impossible to cross for many months of the year. In a place where all travel is by foot an impassable river would create a long barrier.

For a while we just look at the river. The Nam Fa is only navigable in portions, it provides no access as a transportation route. The place where it enters the Mekong is difficult to see, it joins in the middle of a set of rapids, the sandbar pushed up by the confluence is high. I have looked for the entrance a couple of times, it hides itself well. The Fa joins the Mekong just below Xiengkok, someone had to point to it for me to see.

Across the river we walk to a village high above the flood plain. I’m not real happy. We still aren’t close to Jakune, the village is another one neither Tui nor I have ever heard of. It’s called Ban Jungah Mai, the Naiban is only 22yrs old, and he also is named Tui. I don’t know which is more unusual that a small village had such a young headman or that an Akha guy had a Lao name.

I headed under the shade of the house and watched a woman weaving while Tui made arrangements for us to continue on towards Jakune. It’s always a problem with a guide, they want to return to their village, the further they walked the more they want to ditch you and head back.

Weaving Ban Jungah Mai

We headed back downhill towards the river but at right angles to the direction we’d come up. After an hour in the mid afternoon hot sun we reach a tributary just before if joins the main river and miraculously two boats.

It’s difficult to describe how startling it was to see boats. The valley we were in is remote in large part due to the impassable rapids up and downstream. The peoples are Akha, Hmong, Lahu, yet here were some Lu with boats.

The Lu are a type of “Tai” peoples, sharing a similar language to the Thai, Lao, Thai Nua, Dai, etc., and also sharing a similar Teravada Bhudism, similar writing systems, etc. These young guys were River Lu. The kind of Lu who live along rivers and are specialists with boats and fishing. Never before had any Lu lived along the middle portions of the Nam Fa.

Boat on the middle portion of the Nam Fa

Our new guide and a few of his friends and their wives and children had hiked in carrying their tools and built the boats on site where they used them in the few miles with navigable rapids. They also built a water wheel to power their sat tam kao to relieve the women of one daily chore.

Very quickly the boats are down the four kilometers to the landing for the trail to Jakune Mai. Tui and our new guide know each other. Tui used to teach high school and the guide was one of his students.

As we walk up the hill and Tui and the guide talk, I notice that the long muzzle loader our guide is casually carrying over his shoulder is pointed straight backwards and into my face. Interrupting I start to ask Tui if there isn’t some sort of safer walking arrangement and with a couple quick words they put me in the front of our little band. Tui explains the locals have never had any training.  I’d guess all that would be needed would be for the hammer to catch on a twig. Call my a nervous Nellie if you will.

Local Lu Guide

We head uphill. The grade is fairly steep and continuous. Afternoon turns to dusk and the guide leaves us to jog back to the river while there is light. The trail is well used and obvious. Dusk lingers in twilight then it’s dark. I turn on my headlamp and Tui switches on his flashlight which flickers for a while before dying. I figure now is as good a time as any to start talking about snakes.

I don’t like walking at nights, I much prefer sitting, or sleeping. We got to Jakune Mai before it was very late, I doubt it was much past seven or eight. Walked right on through the village without people noticing much, there are no lights, we’re just a couple more people wandering around in the dark. Dogs didn’t even bark. Maybe we smelled like everyone else.

Despite the dark, finding our way to Law Pao’s house was obvious, the village lies on a grade and the house is situated at a certain angle. For the first time in a few days I was in a place I’d been before.

Village Swing in the Morning Fog

Lost in Laos (and first white guy)

We had lost the trail a long time ago and I for one had no idea where we were going and neither did my guide. If the local guide had a clue he wasn’t sharing, so that’s two out of three at least.

We weren’t lost lost, none of us had lost our sense of direction or anything. The road from Thailand was still over there, the Mekong somewhere in front and China way in back. I’ve been getting lost since I was eight or nine in woods not so different than these. Things have been worse in this life, at least we were standing on solid ground, it was warm enough, we had water.

Crossing the Nam Fa

It was certainly no where near as bad as I’d had it a couple years before not thirty kilometers from where we now wandered. At that time we’d ended up just heading in the direction of a road. This time we were a lot further from a road, but we were not too far from the village we’d slept in.

My guide Tui who is actually the director of Tourism in the prefecture wasn’t too pleased. He figured I’d be perturbed. I wasn’t, other than the inconvenience I was ok. Long walks into untraveled areas with inexperienced guides often end up with some wrong turns along the way. Maybe I should start at the beginning.

For anyone wishing to read about the walks leading up to this day, below are links to what are the preceding stories about this walk.
Long Time Traveler Muang Long
One Day Trecks In The Vacinity of Muang Long
Lahu Night Out
The Trail To Nambo
Hmong House
Further Into The Forest
Ban Nam Hee

We’d gotten a slow start leaving Ban Nam Hee. Tui went and adjusted the antenna for the kids watching TV, no one in the village knew how to adjust the satellite TV. The school master awoke blinking in the sunlight, last night’s drinking session had taken it’s toll. I guess the teacher was a little out of control, they needed a new one. School is kind of important to a village with 100% illiteracy. Not one single person could read or write other than the schoolmaster the government had sent.

By the time we moseyed down and crossed the river it was mid day. The river was the Nam Fa, we crossed it just below the junction of the Nam Hee. There was a raft on the other side. Our local guide shed his clothes, swam over, and poled across to get us. We didn’t even take our shoes off so to save time. Photo above

Once across the river we followed the main trail for only a short way before diverging on a less traveled path. The fainter trail headed steeply uphill until we left the immediate river valley. As it gained elevation the trail became more difficult to see.

Sometimes trails get grown over due to a lack of use. That wasn’t the case here, this trail was progressively more faint. Tui remarked how when locals walk off trail in the woods they often break small seedlings pointing the broken top in the direction of travel. Then he did just that, and so did I feeling slightly silly. Eventually we were just walking in the woods. Once in a while Tui or the local guide would hack at a creeper with their long knives.

When the understory became thicker and the hill steeper slowing us down to a very slow pace, I asked Tui if we just maybe ought to call it a day. Go back to the village we knew and start anew the next day. Neither the local guide nor Tui wanted anything to do with that, big loss of face on returning to the village.

I don’t know how we ended up taking the route we had, I’d been more or less passively tagging along, I guess it was as much my fault as anyone else. I was the oldest, and though these were the woods and hills of our local guide I should have quizzed him more about where we were headed before starting out. To tell the truth I didn’t have three words in common with the young fellow. Tui was communicating using Lu I assumed, but I think our local guide’s command of the Lu language was extremely limited. The chance of him speaking any Lao or even being able to use the words in common between Lu and Lao was about zero. Heck even young American guys his age usually speak using grunts and snorts.

After discussion our local guide changed direction almost 180 degrees. Instead of heading straight back the way we’d come he was cutting sidehill towards the east.

We slid  down a hill too steep for the soil to cling, into a creek bottom, and began following that back towards the river. Large trees that had fallen formed natural bridges back and forth across the creek. Sometimes we were under them, sometimes over, and sometimes walking along the tops of the logs, it was off of one of them that I fell for the first time.

It was a slick log that had lost it’s bark, slippery from all the moisture of the stream bed, and slimy with rot.  Easy enough if one is careful to balance and not trust to the friction of your soles. The distance was very short, maybe three or at most four feet. I landed flat footed if straight legged on a rock. One second I’m on the log the next second I’m standing on a rock.

Ten minutes later I tripped on a vine and sprawled downhill face first into the rocky stream bed, again unhurt.

I decided to take a break and slow down. Getting lost is ok, getting hurt isn’t.

We continued to splash down the stream bed for a while before cutting uphill on the opposite side. Tui didn’t enjoy walking in wet tennis shoes. My boots worked pretty much the same wet or dry, and the guide had a pair of little rubber shoes. I’d also been having problems with a blister on my left foot but it seemed to stop hurting after a couple hours walking.

When we came to the worn trail again our pace picked up considerably. To this day I’ve no idea why we didn’t take it in the first place. Maybe there were fields we weren't supposed to see.
Sorry about the lack of photos on this day, I was mostly trying to keep up.
The trail cut up the same hill we’d been headed up before only at a more moderate incline. I was able to push myself as fast as possible without worry of tripping up. The afternoon was waning. As we worked our way around the south side of what must have been a large flat mountain and descended down that side Tui started a conversation first with the local guide then with me.

First he confirmed with me that I thought Ban Jakune was on the other side of the Nam Fa. (Jakune town on other side of Fa River) I thought it strange to state the obvious. Without even conscious thought there was a little map in my head as there must have been in Tui’s. We’d already crossed over the Nam Fa above where it curved to the south and up ahead somewhere we’d have to recross and climb the long hill to Jakune. I’d been to Jakune twice and Tui had been there probably three or four times. We were both in a part of the countryside we’d never been in before but we both knew the general lay of the land.

What was perplexing to Tui was that according to our local guide we’d be soon starting up another hill and towards the top of that would be Jakune, without re crossing the Nam Fa. Myself I had no problem with this seeming bit of illogic. No matter to me if Jakune had been moved lock stock and barrel miles over the river and plonked down on the wrong side, if they had a place for me to sleep I was fine. Tui continued to push and prod at the idea like a sore tooth that he just couldn’t leave alone. He knew something wasn’t right but for the moment we were just walking along a trail in the forest, and the only thing to do is keep walking.

Triple canopy forest is always half in twilight, to take a photo I’m always having to slow the shutter way down or bump up the ASA on my small sensor camera. When evening comes it comes quickly and it comes completely. Full night is darker than the inside of a cow’s belly, not even the tiniest bit of starlight can enter. Thankfully as dark began to come on in earnest we entered the outskirts of the village. With the vague outlines of houses visible our local guide made a beeline to the house of the headman. Tui whispered one more time, “this isn’t Jakune”.

After the how dee doos we were invited to stay the night. Setting his pack inside Tui and the local guide took off to try to buy a chicken or other food and I sat inside with the headman and some other old fellows. To break the silence I volunteered that we’d come from Ban Nam Hee that morning. Someone asked how many hours the walk had taken us, probably wondering why we were arriving so late from a half day’s walk. At least a couple of these guys could speak Lao.

I asked if this was Jakune, and they said yes. I’d been absolutely clear and asked about Jakune Mai or “New Jakune” as I know Jakune old town had been abandoned. So I told them I’d come to their town two years ago, to which the headman responded that that would have been impossible, my current visit was the first time a “falang” had ever come to their village. Falang means Caucasian.

I was both very amused and confused at the same time. Confused because the town is named Jakune yet it’s not Jakune of the world I inhabit. Amused because of “the first white guy” thing.

Amongst tourists looking to leave the beaten path, going where no other traveler has gone is the holly grail. In the larger scheme of things it’s unimportant whether some other foreigner has been to a village or not. One is as able to immerse oneself in the rhythms and flavor of local culture in a soi off Sukumvit in Bangkok just as well. The experience has more to do with the tourist than the setting. It’s all too common that an expat living in a country for years never learns to eat the food or speak the language.

When Tui returned with the local guide it was also with a request to pay off the local guide. The young guy was interested in sharing a chicken and some white liquor with new found friends in the village.

I told Tui, “they say this is Jakune but it’s not”. Tui reminded me that he had been saying the same for half the day. Over dinner and talking we pieced together the puzzle.

For unknown reasons Jakune Gao (old Jakune) which is now an abandoned village halfway down the side of Phou Mon Lem had split in two. Most of the families had established the Jakune Mai (new Jakune) we knew of, which was still a long day’s walk away. A large number of families had moved to the village we were now at. People call it new Jakune as it is inhabited by people from old Jakune but more correctly it is known as Ban Huay Poong in Lu language. I think huay means creek or stream or something. Someone is bound to read this and correct me.

Another day passed, somewhere in the watershed of the Nam Fa.

Breakfast with Naiban Ban Huay Poong, local guide on right, note the traditional jackets worn by the local guide (embroidery on sleeve) and the Naiban.