Indochina Traversal - part 1 - Yunnan and Luang Namtha

This was actually a family trip - all five of us went including my wife (not just Dad and kids).

It took some planning and I had worries about how everyone would hold up, my youngest being 8 (a boy his older brother being 11 and sister 14), and none being used to backpacking - because that's what it was: our first family backpacking holiday.

I was not completely sure the time available was enough to complete the trip, and since I of course needed to book and pay for the flights ahead of time, that was real concern.  Further I hadn't heard directly from anyone who had crossed the land border to Myanmar (other than the internet) so there was some risk we'd be stuck there.  I should add that while the backpacking aspect was for the great fun of it, it was also to keep costs low since we have little disposable income so getting stuck - there or anywhere - would have been more than irritating if it had meant taking a flight down to Bangkok and another to Yangon purchased at the last minute.

Well, none of these negative scenarios came to pass, and while the trip was far from any prior expectation in terms of actual events, it was, in the end utterly wonderful for everyone.

The plan

My idea had been to impart experiential learning for all of us but perhaps particularly the children within a loose cultural framework: the Buddhist cultures of upland areas of Indochina.  These areas historically have been effectively a contiguous region of nations that have remained distinct from their geopolitically ruling countries due to the mountainous and forested landscape.  We needed to traverse some reasonable subset of this region taking cheap local transport without needing any special or difficult to obtain visa arrangements.
I did a little internet research on the hill cultures, but there's not much detail easily available outside academia seemingly.  Well, anyway the idea was to find out for ourselves.  I came to the conclusion that we should see a little of such each of Yunnan, northern Laos, northern Thailand and a part of Myanmar.  The map above shows the loose original plan.  Broadly we ended up following this, though the realities of doing so were not as expected - that's the "experiential" bit!

Yunnan, Surprise Surprise, Can Be Cold

We flew from Hong Kong to Kunming (a return flight), then took a one-way to Xishuangbanna (also called Jinghong or "Banna").  Since it was our first backpacking and we'd be arriving in the evening I'd looked on-line and booked what seemed a reasonable hotel for the first night.

Local architecture

My thought was to use this as a base and do a simple trek in the nearby hills.  I had an image of Jinghong as a village, basically of some mix of Chinese and Hill Tribe nature.

Multilingual

I had two surprises: Jinghong is a much more a city than a village and is very much Chinese.  Ethnic hill tribes people live within the constraints of a normal Chinese city and must conform to those norms.  It's not their city.  That's not to say there's any sense of repression (none visible) - but certainly we hadn't arrived at in the cultural space I'd been looking for.

Eat your vegetables

The other surprise was the cold.  All research (and prior experience) suggested it would be mild - dry and warm, but not hot and certainly not cold.  We had barely enough clothes and hotels in the region were not at all built to insulate from this low a temperature (5 - 15C typically).  This was an irritation, but we were aware of hot-humid conditions enough to agree we had the better alternative.

Delicious street food

Market food

So, while not a fascination of Buddhist ethnic diversity, Jinghong is nevertheless an interesting place as every Chinese city is - but with a regional flavour.

A wide variety of street food is eaten, due, surely, to the diversity of culture in the region.

Snacks

We visited a botanical garden for instance - but the interesting aspects were the walk there and the behaviour of other, mostly Chinese tourists there and towards us.  We're reasonably used to and expect this: often we're more interesting to other tourists than the tourist site itself.

I'm the interesting one...

Jinghong rests on the banks of the Mekong River - I took my older son down there, observing, even in the city, that locals use that fertile land to grow various crops.  We walked down amongst them.  We would experience the Mekong again later in the trip.

City farming by the Mekong

Christmas in Lao

"Laos", the normally given name of this country is not correct.  It's better to refer to it as "The Laos" since the 's' is in fact a plural, the country being formed through the uniting of three kingdoms.  Some, to avoid the missed plural, call the country just Lao.

We arrived there after taking the bus from Jinghong, overnighting in Mengla.  There's a sharp reduction in wealth on crossing the border - there's a shanty just there - and the road is worse.  Of course this is the far reach of a large, poor and underpopulated country.  It becomes apparent quite soon that much of the funds that reach this area come from the north.  It's also clear that the locals are dubious of the implied quid pro quo.

This time of year is high-season in Lao and in particular the trekking areas in the north around Luang Namtha, therefore I had pre-booked at a recommended guest-house there, Zuela, for the 3 following days.

Bamboo Oven

Our arrival in Luang Namtha was really the first real backpacking: we arrived at the bus company's premises which was rather distant from where we wanted to get to.  Of course it was a little different this time for how it had been for me when I first started backpacking, since I immediately pulled out my GPS phone with MapsWithMe installed which already had Zuela tagged.  Still, arrival in a strange, poor town where none of us spoke the language was exciting and a bit unnerving for my wife and the children.  So we traipsed through this new world for 1/2 hour to the guesthouse - it was a great feeling for me - sharing freedom of backpacking with my family.

Opening the Oven

The feast.

But we had (rather non-backpacking-like) time pressure - so we organized a 1-day trek in the rainforest combined with visits to villages of ethnic minorities for the next day.  It's possible to do treks of up to a week, sleeping each night under a lean-to.  That will be for when the our children are older.  We did, however, eat food found by our guides in the forest, combined with what we had bought that morning in the market, and cooked in a bamboo "oven".

The villages are poor, quiet and slow.

Hand-woven scarves are promoted as a way to bring in needed cash

They use a particular dye made from local plants.

We stayed for three days, including Christmas, which was uneventful - no-one made much of it, not the locals who are Buddhist or Animist nor travelers who've come this far to get away from such things.

This guy is "The Chinese" who's lived there 40 years.  He sells noodles or exchanges it,
weight for weight for rice since villages very often have no money at all.
He then uses the rice to make more noodles.

A "machine" to de-husk or crush various agricultural products

In the Luang Namtha market

This is a trap for snakes or rats, made entirely from forest materials.
The animal goes in one end and triggers the other causing the log to fall.

Down the River

We had to head to Thailand but could reasonably spend a day or two getting there.  The plan was to go to a town near the border by bus, stay there and look around, then head across.  But then I saw advertisement for trips down the river (the Namtha).  I'd thought this was only possible earlier in the year due to the low level of the river, but on asking, they said is was possible (on an adequately small boat).  Could we organize to go all the way to the Thai border?  Yes we could!  - but we'd have to book the whole boat, which was pricey.  A fellow traveler then mentioned he'd seen a note up on a notice board asking if others were interested in joining their trip - so I inquired.   In the end I convinced them - two couples - to join the trip I was organizing.  There followed two full days entirely disconnected from the outside world - we saw no outsiders and met no-one who could speak English.