Culture Shock, Finally: Luang Nam Tha and Muang Sing

After one night in the border town of Huay Xai, I and my new friend Monique (she's on the left):

Modeling traditional hill tribe accessories.

decided to head northeast to Luang Nam Tha.  It's home to about 150,000 people, making it the largest settlement in Northwest Laos. It's on the national map of the country.

And there is nothing there.

This place would barely make it onto a map in Thailand at all. It's got two banks, a post office, a few restaurants and a store or two and that's the whole place.

We went there to go trekking in the mountains, only to find that because it was low season we would have had to pay for a guide just for a few people, making it absurdly expensive. So we rented a motorbike instead and headed north through gorgeous countryside:

Deep jungle:

A slow, tempting river (it was hot):

And orderly agriculture filling any open space:

to Muang Sing, a stone's throw from the Chinese border. This town is even smaller than Luang Nam Tha, but it sprawls out in a wide, flat valley.

We passed teenage girls coming home from school in their traditional Lao wrap skirts, all carrying umbrellas to prevent their skin from darkening in the sun.

All along the road were little bamboo settlements:

A lot of Laotians live this way. According to the 2005 Census done by the Lao Department of Statistics (the internet is a wonderful thing), about 73% of Laotians live in rural areas, down from 83% in 1995. Keep in mind that the criteria for measuring whether a village is in a rural or urban area are fairly relaxed on their definition of "urban": to be considered urban a place has to have a population of 600 people or more than 100 households, a road for motor vehicle access, a majority of households in the village have electricity and running water, and there needs to be a market in town. Not exactly Manhattan.

In Thailand, I went on treks through the mountains to see people living this way. It turns out that all I needed to do was take a drive through Laos.

When I moved to Thailand I spent my first month with 35 Americans in one of the most Westernized, touristy areas of what turned out to be an incredibly Westernized, touristy country. When I moved to Northeastern Thailand to teach I was still with Americans and could speak enough Thai by that point to introduce myself and order food.

So I never really dealt with culture shock until I got up into Nothern Laos. In Muang Sing, tribeswomen selling bracelets in a restaurant ate the leftovers off my plate and asked for the rest of my bottled water. Both nights I stayed in Luang Nam Tha the electricity went off and stayed off for hours with no promise of ever coming back on. I suddenly realized that I was a tourist traipsing through the 44th poorest nation in the world.

It didn't feel great.