After seeing the remote tribal villages from the touristy 'slow boat' on the well-beaten 2-day trip down the Mekong River from Chiang Khong in Northern Thailand to Luang Prabang in Laos, I felt an inner urge to get to a remote village as soon as I could after my arrival in Laos. Luang Prabang is a small, pretty town, but very touristy and rather dull, there being little to do except enjoy some nice temples and wander around watching other tourists. Of course, the food markets are always interesting and still, after 5 months in the region eating only local foods, I find plenty of vegetables that are unknown to me, although I have tried just about all the fruits I can find.
I spent 2 days in Luang Prabang disoriented and organizing logistics, and then took an early morning bus from the public bus station to a town called Nong Kiaw which is the last town with a road on the way to the fabled Muang Ngoi, a pretty village on the large Nam Ou river only accessible by boat: A pretty village that now, I discovered when already on the bus, has become well and truly trodden by the tourist trail, the Lonely Planet guide even saying that in so many words. If Lonely Planet puts it in that language.....well, I started to wish I'd chosen a different destination.
At the bus station my Spanish friend Luisa and I were the only foreigners. As I've written previously, foreigners simply don't take public buses, they take the triply expensive air-conditioned tourist minibuses and suchlike, thereby missing out on one of the most enriching (and physically uncomfortable) parts of travelling in foreign countries. Public bus journeys provide wonderful insight into a country and its people, and the lack of foreigner-to-foreigner babble on the bus and one's inability to verbally communicate very much in the local language means that you can properly take in the visual feast of the passing scenery and the colourful turnover of local people cycling through the bus...what are they carrying? How do strangers interact in Laos culture in the forced immediate close physical proximity of a full bus? What are their attitudes towards one another and to the world around them? How do children behave? What kinds of people get on and off where? Can you start to make patterns of prediction based on how people dress as to what kind of place they will alight?
By the time our bus departed two quiet, well-informed Dutch travellers had joined us making a total of four foreigners and the rest assorted rural Lao people.
But before we even left the bus station I had a moment which cracked open my mind and set me on fire.
There was one young woman at the bus station evidently waiting for her bus who was tall, elegant, and looked completely out of place: she was clad entirely in traditional tribal dress. She wore a long narrow black skirt and a kind of black jacket or blowse adorned with many silver discs, and some sort of headdress that I can't recall. She stood out from everyone else in the grace of her garments and gestures. I don't know what tribe she was from (Akha perhaps?) but she looked a little bewildered and uncomfortable in this city context. Yet she had a distant look in her eyes that stopped my mind and fascinated me: she moved with a power, a command, a wild and independent freedom that was palpable and captivating, and that I have only seen in women from remote villages, women who know how to bring life from the earth around them with their own hands, women (and men) who are thereby free from the 'umbilical cord' of urban civilization that so constricts most of us Westerners. Although she seemed uncomfortable in the bus station, this tribal woman had a kind of power that made my heart pound. She knew what most of us do not; she knew how to make life: how to support a family deep in the jungle using her wits and skills; how to craft clothes, grow food, husband animals, build houses, facilitate births, raise children intuitively, make baskets, live in community, and all the myriad other skills that peasant villagers' take for granted, but that are life-arts that Westerners have usually lost---and that so many of us in the alternative movements are trying--without role-models--to re-learn from scratch. Somehow, with her feet grounded on the earth she deftly tilled and her head held high in fierce pride, it seemed as if this tribal woman looked through and over everything around her at the bus station.
And what is even more remarkable is that she was a *young* woman, in 2008, in a major Laos town, still wearing full tribal dress! Traditional dress is usually one of the first things a culture loses as Westernization starts to spread its greedy fingers into a community. And usually it is the young people who lose it first. Somehow, she had chosen to keep hers. Who was this woman? Where was she returning to? What was she doing in Luang Prabang?
Luisa later spotted an apparent husband and child with her; neither of them were in tribal dress but already jeans and T-shirts. Yes, as Helena Norberg-Hodge writes with such insight in her fantastic book, 'Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh' , it is the young men who are the most vulnerable to cultural change--who feel backward and in their adolescent search for identity and acceptance, try to be 'cool' following new, media and tourist-influenced role-models, typically wearing jeans, black T-shirts or leather jackets, and sunglasses; smoking, drinking and riding motorbikes...hanging out on street corners self-consciously dragging on cigarettes...you know the package. It is sad. You don't see that in the traditional villages, where young men have a role, a place in the community, and a sense of meaning and identity that fills the space otherwise occupied by teenage angst and acting out. I have seen it, so I am convinced. Boys who aren't embarrassed to help their mothers, or to show affection to their younger sisters; who have no concept that it isn't 'cool' or good for their image to help with caring for the neighbours' toddlers.
If the mere bus station offered me this, what would I find if I reached a traditional village?
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