Beetle Juice

Day 92: Tat Lo (LAO) – Pakse (LAO). “It's back to the pain / pleasure thing again”, I said to Karen as we walked the last few hundred yards back to our simple lodgings. “It was hard work getting here but today we got the rewards!” I was referring to our mornings trekking that had taken us deep in to the forests of the Bolaven Plateau, passing waterfalls and traditional villages to give us the feel of the 'real' Laos.

We had been lucky enough to hook up with Mr Chane, an excellent English speaking Lao guide who had lived in these forests all of his life and knew the land and the people intimately. Which was a good thing: During the Vietnam War Laos became the most heavily bombed country per head of population in the history of warfare and even today the unexploded ordnance on this strategically important plateau still claim the lives of countless innocent people.

The scenery in this isolated part of the world was unbelievably breathtaking, but as always, it was the people that provided us with the truly unforgeable memories. Representing the Katu ethic minority, the villagers of Ngai have a strong culture religiously embracing the practices of animal sacrifice to pay homage to the forest spirits.

With rudimentary agriculture and the cultivation of small crops of peanuts, chillies and coffee beans the tribes people were just about able to sustain their often quite large families (which, from talking to one villager, can often contain 10 – 12 offspring). Quite clearly life is very tough for these enchanting people and they represented amongst the poorest we had met during our 15,000 mile journey – bringing home to me the disparity of the worlds wealth: Back home in England, I wouldn't regard ourselves as 'rich' by any stretch of the imagination, but here I was in Southern Laos, carrying more 'loose change' in my money belt that most of these people earned in a year of incredibly hard graft.

But despite the obvious conditions of poverty, the inspiring thing that Karen and I took away was how happy these people appeared to be. Smiles and laughter. Friendship and interdependence. As soon as we arrived we were warmly welcome into the community to the extent that our hosts insisted we share a 'bamboo pipe' with them. Even the little girl whose job it was to collect the dung beetles from the huge pile of buffalo pooh that littered the village was smiling and giggling with us. Her mother was going to fry them up with some red ant soup. At which point, we decided not to stay for dinner!