Hmong Homestay- Muang Sing

Sasha:

The main draw of being in the far North of Laos is the nature and village treks offered by the local travel agencies.  Laos still has a considerable number of landmines out in its jungles, so hiking on your own isn't especially recommended. We were game to try out the experience.

Clouds over a Hmong Village near Muang Sing

Our companion on this part of our journey, Adam, wanted to do a village tour and homestay.  We agreed to try it out with him.  We went to Tigerman Trekking on the main street and signed up for a one day-one night bicycle trek.  We would bike about 25km, see a variety of different hilltribes, get a traditional lunch, dinner, and breakfast, and stay overnight in a Hmong village for $37USD/person.

When we showed up, our first task was to pick out a bicycle.  There were ostensibly 3 bikes with gears, and 6 fixed gear bikes with padded seats and baskets.  Ra wanted a mountain bike, and two of them didn't have chains, so he took the other.  Adam and I selected identical fixed gear bikes, except Adam is 6'3" and I am 5'6".   Of the three of us, I was the lucky one!  Ra's bike had gears, but they didn't work and his chain fell of frequently.  The seat was so hard, and the bike designed for someone shorter, so he spent his time riding without sitting on the seat.  Adam's bike was so small for him that he could barel extend his legs past 90degrees while seated, so he had no power and his chain fell of more often than Ra's did.

Ra and Seeno posing in front of traditional swing

Biking on dirt roads near Muang Sing

Our guide was named Seeno, a Hmong man who was a cousin of the guy who ran Tigerman.  He was dressed in a black and black/red/gray camo hoodie, and black baggy shorts? pants? with hardware that were equal parts skater and goth. I took comfort that we were being guided by someone who resembled a hip asian dj.  He was also extremely good at putting bike chains back on the gears.  I was thrilled to tell him that I grew up with a bunch of Hmong kids in Missoula, MT.  They were the largest minority in the city I few up in.  The Hmong people helped the Americans in the Silent war that took place in Laos at the same time as Vietnam.  After the war, the US govt. helped some of the Hmong people relocate to the states to avoid persecution.  For some reason, most of them went to the Northern US, places like Minneapolis, Missoula, Seattle. . . Because of this, as far back as I can remember, there was a country called Laos where the Hmong people came from.  I was geeking out, telling Seeno this story, and he seemed to understand (although did not want to talk about the silent war) and when I told him that some of the kids I went to high school had the last name Moua, it turned out that his last name was also Moua, and that among the Hmong here, if you have the same last name, it is as if you are brothers.  I had tried telling this story to a couple of other people here, and he was the first person that seemed to understand or care. Having the connection of knowing his US "brothers" was very satisfying to me for some reason.

By the time that we got to the first village, Ra was struggling.  He was faint, sweating, and couldn't get his body temperature down.  We managed to find a place to sit down- basically on one of the village women's porch- while Ra tried to calm his system down. Eventually, one of the local women came by with some little green berries- they were hard and extremely bitter- kind of like the texture of an apple with the taste of a sour lemon.  Oddly enough, either the flavor or the sugar was enough to get Ra going again.  He seriously debated between riding back and continuing on, and he decided to power through.  I think he did the next couple hours from sheer determination and will power.

The arm of Adam with Hmong kids. 

When we would ride into a village, there might be a couple of women selling handcrafts- embroidery, or baby sized hats with huge red pom-poms on the top.  The local kids would wave frantically saying Saibadee! or Hello!  depending on whether or not they knew the English word and be dressed in what looked like Goodwill hand-me-downs..  The rest of the adults would mostly ignore us. Some people will be wearing traditional costume, but most area wearing the same thing the Lao people in town are wearing.

Next to one village, a man and two boys were building tools on a forge.  The boys would take turns stoking the fire, while the man pounded metal.  Ironically enough this was the only place we found shade, so we stopped in front of it to cool down to moderate success.

Adam under the Spirit Gate

We did get to see evidence of some traditional culture- a spirit gate in front of one village that we were advised not to touch.  If we did, they would have to rebuild it entirely.  That same village had a swing built on a tripod for a once a year festival that involved matchmaking boys and girls to sit on the swing together.

Inside the Lao Lao brewing facility

We were about 90 minutes late for lunch, or at least 90 minutes later than most tours.  This was in part because we started late, because Ra needed some down time after the heat exhaustion, because our bikes were more often pushed up the hills than ridden, and because the last village we stopped at involved pulling out snacks, which we then shared with a bunch of local kids and followed up with by spinning poi for them. By the time we had lunch, Adam was also ready to drop from heat exhaustion, though Ra was staring to feel better. We had lunch in a house? barn? where the local village made lao-lao, the home-brewed whiskey.  Lunch was sticky rice, huge omelet, and stir fried green beans and onion.  With hunger being the best seasoning, it was delicious.  After lunch, we each had a taste of the lao lao- which was really good for liquor that hasn't been aged, and was served out of a plastic jug.  So good, in fact, that we paid 10,000 kip (about $1.25) for a bottle of it, which they poured strait out of the 5 gallon jug into one of our used water bottles.

Our post lunch ride was much easier, if you don't count the number of times the chain came off of Adam's bike.  We stopped in a weaving village, which I was excited about. It involved a two minute demonstration of how they use a loom, followed by 8 women carrying cloth and scarves decending upon me, each intent on selling their wares to me at inflated prices.  Believe me- having 8 stacks of fabric shoved at you at the same time was unpleasant.  I bought one scarf for $2.50, then yelled at the guys to leave quickly while I still could.

While riding we had fun coming up with translations for Seeno's name. We came up with the following:
Both yes! (si!) and no! (no!) in Spanish. C-note or a hundred dalla bill, ya'll. In Lao, he told us the translation was colored bump.  Huh.The translation for my name, as pronounced by Lao people, Sasa, is "slowly".  This is a very appropriate word for many things in Laos.

At about 4 or 5pm we arrived at the village Seeno lived, where we would be staying. We wandered around it with him. There were many houses with bamboo walls, thatched roofs, and no windows.  Why no windows?  Because it is traditional.  The Hmong people here only moved to Muang Sing around 16 years ago, from the outskirts of a city to the country so they could be farmers.  Seeno grew up in the city, then studied English in Vientienne for two years (all he could afford) before coming to stay with his cousin here in Muang Sing.  He lived in a one room house with his cousin's family- Tigerman, his mother, and his wife, their three children, and two other cousins. This is the house where we would be sleeping- Ra and I in one bed, and Adam sharing with Seeno and a cousin. Adam was not thrilled with the arrangements.

Adam, Seeno and Ra in front of Hmong houses

Hmong village kids.  Super cute, and kinda shy.

The village had communal out houses with squat toilets, and a basin full of water, and washing areas that consisted of a cement block with a water hose and drain.  This was the showering area.  I used it to wash the mud off of my legs and to wash my face, but Adam did the full shower.  He stripped down to his boxers, and hosed himself off.  Luckily the local women wandered away to give him relative privacy.

Dinner came just after dark.  We all sat down at the table together to eat, except for the Mother who was a Shamman and the small children, who ate by themselves on the floor. There was more green bean stirfry, a soup with pork, an omelet, and salad leaves.  We each got a plate of sticky rice, and scooped up food with either spoons or with the rice.  The fantastic thing for me, is that it was easy for them to make the meal gluten free!  Soy sauce wasn't required, and vegetarian was easy too.

After dinner, we were told that the family goes to sleep between 9-9:30.  Being that there is only one light in the building, and really only one room that meant that we were also going to go to sleep at that time.  Each bed was separated by mosquito netting, and perhaps a foot or two.  This sort of served to create rooms, being that the light was over the cooking area, and there were no windows to let light in.  Still in shock about the sleeping arrangements, Ra had mentioned that he sleeps in just his underwear, and Seeno told him that perhaps he should wear more just this once. . .

I guess when I heard "village homestay" I assumed that there would be a bungalow for the falangs to sleep in, and didn't realize that we would be shacking up with the whole family.  We are spoiled in how much privacy we have in compared to these people.  They clearly didn't blink at having Adam share a bed with two dude, but he was almost ready to leave over that.  Our bed was not particularly "made", and we were quite certain that they had not changed the sheets for us, or that they would think about doing so.  I had earplugs, bur Ra was kept awake by the sounds of sleeping in the same room as so many other people, and at the memory of the HUGE spider he saw in the house before we went to bed.  At some point in the night we shifted, and felt the bed frame sink on one corner.  Clearly, this bed was designed for Hmong people, not two American falangs. We avoided that corner of the bed, stayed very still, and made it through the night.  We have observed that people in Laos get up EXTREMELY early.  As in 5:30am..  With everybody else moving, and starting the fire on the cooking stove in the house, we didn't sleep much later then they did.

Sign on the school campus. WTF?

Bleary eyed, we had a little breakfast (omelet, boiled green beans, lettuce with dressing, sticky rice, some dish with meat in it) we set off on the bikes again for our short morning ride.  Our first stop was the school.  There were hundreds of  10-16yo's lined up in front of a school house as the headmaster was reading announcements.  Not a single student actually appeared to be listening.  They were much more intent on gossiping with friends, or staring at the weird falangs on the schoolgrounds.  The young, orange clad monks were in the back of the line, talking and joking with one another.  I was surprised to see them studying with all the other kids. We looked into a few class rooms.  There were posters of the quadratic equation, and algebra that I could barely remember learning on one classroom, and another was filled with english and grammer that was mostly correct.  As we left, the announcements had stopped and half of the kids left the school grounds.  "The Afternoon class," Seeno told us.  So, they have to show up in school in uniform at 8am on Monday morning just to listen to that guy talk for 20 minutes?  Yup.

Rice noodle sheets drying on bamboo.

From there, we biked to the rice noodle village, where one woman was well on her way to making a couple hundred kilos of rice noodles.  Pour-smooth-lift the lid-pull the pan out of the steamer-put the new pan in the steamer- move the pan-move the other pan-fold up a noodle sheet-scrape noodle sheet off of pan onto bamboo to dry- repeat.  She had a system that she would perform over and over, in no rush, giving each pan of noodle sheet to steam just the right amount, then cool the right amount, then dry on the bamboo.  It was pretty fascinating.  We cringed to learn that the oil she used to keep the noodle from sticking to the pan was pig fat.  But, with all the pigs around, I imagine that is easier to get and cheaper than vegetable oil.  Sigh.

By the time we got back, we were exhausted and sweaty.  We checked back into our hotel where Ra and I napped for the next few hours.  Meanwhile, Adam and James packed up, and got on a bus back to Luang Namtha.  By late evening, both Ra and Adam had come down with food poisoning- the "bad kind".  It was a really bad night for Ra, and the 2nd one in a row without really sleeping.

Although he was sick, Ra and I agreed that it would be more comfortable to be sick in Luang Namtha than the tiny town of Muang Sing.  The room we had had bugs crawling through the window, and the hotel staff liked to yell across the guesthouse at one another at 6:30am. I did my best to pack most of both of our bags, then hiked down to the bus station to buy tickets.  As I walked across town, I was determined that he wouldn't have to do the walk with his backpack while he was sick. I got to the bus station where one minivan was about to do the drive and had very few passengers.  I managed to get a local who spoke some English to convince the driver to drive to our guesthouse to pick up Ra and the bags.  The driver has me sit in the van to wait.  He then sells a few more tickets and suddenly the van is quite full.  I see what is happening, and using the same translator manage to secure two seats in the front, next to an open window with only 1 other Lao person, instead of being smashed in the back with 2 other people.  The woman who moved for Ra and I was shooting me evil looks.  When we got to the guesthouse, Ra was packed and pretty much ready to go.  He threw on a shirt, and hauled ourselves downstairs.

The drive is only 2.5 hours, but I don't know how Ra, with his fever in full force, would have made it had he not been sitting next to a window, with a solid view of  the front windshield.  Meanwhile, the evil-stare woman was puking into plastic bags in the backseat.  I felt kinda responsible, but I'm too much of a protective mamabear to sacrifice my sweetie's well being for someone I don't know.

Overall, the homestay and trek was a challenging experience for us. However, it ended up being one of the more memorable and authentic interactions we've had.  I appreciate the fact that it was the travel agent who sold us a homestay with his own family.  I certainly can't accuse him of exploiting anybody, which was some of our objections with some other hilltribe tours.  It was such an honest look at a sort of poverty and entirely different social norms than what we conceive of in the US.  One thing I appreciate is that there was not a moment of shame or apology- just the frankness of how they lived, and our opportunity to conform to it while we were there.  I think about the difference between this family, and Hmong people I was friends with from home- who seem to have so much more in common with me, the same geography and education that I had- and now find it much harder to connect the two.