Far North

Approaching Luang Namtha late Friday afternoon, Joe remarked, "We're way out there now." We were. The name refers to the northwesternmost province of Laos and to its main city, or, more precisely, small town. Both are named for the dreamy, foggy-in-the-morning Nam Tha river, a navigable waterway in the monsoon season but too shallow now for commerce. We're just 40 miles from China and maybe twice that distance from the "wild and wooly" Burmese northeastern frontier.

The description of northern Burma came from Bill Tuffin, owner of the Boat Landing. That's the eco-friendly lodge where we're staying and our main reason for making our way up here. Famous among eco-tourism and adventure-travel organizations, the Boat Landing has five two-unit bamboo bungalows overlooking the river and the water buffalo grazing on the other side. Its atmospheric restaurant---wooden tables and benches under thatch---specializes in Lao dishes like duck soup made with bits of a sweet, edible wood, and the local "jeow," chili paste that's eaten with balls of sticky rice.

By "sticky rice" I don't mean rice cooked ineptly by me, but a variety of high-gluten rice grown throughout the higher elevations of Indochina. People eat it with their fingers, which do get a little sticky. You must not lick food off your fingers, though. The Lao believe only animals should lick themselves.

A rangy, soft-spoken American in his mid-forties, Tuffin was a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand in the 1980s and returned to Southeast Asia as soon as he could manage it. He helped found Green Discovery, the eco-tourism group, and with his Lao wife opened the Boat Landing in 1999. Its aim is to promote "small-scale, low-impact tourism." Tuffin's mission statement says his business (probably in his wife's name, as foreigners cannot own property in Laos) helps visitors appreciate local customs and resources, and he encourages local people to "value their natural resources more deeply."

Designed by Tuffin, the guest cottages are lighted with a combination of town and solar power. All the hot water is solar. The pure-water containers in rooms are refillable. This eliminates throw-away plastic water bottles whose ubiquity in recent years has brought better health to Asia but also higher fossil fuel consumption and mountains of trash. The Boat Landing uses all local farm products, such as the sweet tamarind jam we spread on our breakfast baguettes.

Because he's busy running the lodge---one day he spent a lot of time helping a nervous German family whose Visa card had quit on them---we haven't seen as much of Tuffin as we would like. He sat down with us for a while Saturday night, and we had to prioritize our practical and nosy questions. Can we cross into Burma from up here? No, the Burmse military has effectively divided the country into fiefdoms and the Northeast border is closed. How was Tuffin's Peace Corps program? A good one, he said, and added that for him the Peace Corps was "a life-changing experience." I said I knew what he meant.

Getting to Luang Namtha (pronounced Loo-AHNG Nahm-TAH) was not the ordeal we thought it might be. Money made the difference. Instead of paying $10 for the "public" bus---about which we had had some bad reports---we forked over U.S. $150 for a minibus arranged by the Boat Landing. That's big bucks for us, but we're under budget overall and the cost was not much higher than the air fare would have been. (We learned that the "problem" with the Luang Namtha airport is that it doesn't exist. The runways have been torn up for reconstruction.)

The minibus fee was money well spent. The driver was both skilled and cautious on the mountain roads, which often had switchbacks so abrupt it seemed impossible that we could negotiate them without having the vehicle end up on its roof, like a plane turning too tightly. Much of the road on the eight-hour ride was bone-rattlingly bumpy---many potholes in the Lao PDR await their Marxist-Leninist Al D'Amato---and from time to time we had to pull over so the driver's female companion could shrug apologetically and hurl out the door.

And yet. Here is an excerpt from Joe's journal: "The vistas are breathtaking. Around every bend there's another view that would have made Bierstadt drool. The biggest difference is that plunked in front are these bamboo houses, water buffalo and rice paddies. Clusters of bamboo burst forth like bouquets of ostrich feathers. It's all so lush, and it looks so friendly perhaps because we have no real sense of the harsh life required to exist in the midst of this beauty. Our ignorance keeps us from reading the braille of the landscape."

Not bad for somebody whose primary medium is metal.

Joe, in fact, is fast learning about the hard lives of the Lao rural poor. As I write this on Sunday for posting on Monday, he is off on a three-day, two-night guided trek run by Green Discovery (formerly Mistah Kurtz Tours) among the Akha people, one of the region's hill tribes. There are about 600,000 Akha in Burma, Thailand and Laos. They are not Buddhists but worship ancestors and natural spirits. The Akha are known for their farming and hunting skills. Like most mountain Laos, the Akha employ Swidden (slash and burn) rotational agriculture. This practice works all right with low population density but becomes unsustainable as populations grow. That's happening now in Laos.

I was bemused when Joe brought along on our trip a Lonely Planet "Hill Tribes of Southeast Asia Phrase Book" he had picked up at the Globe Bookstore in Cambridge. But when he set off with his backpack this morning at seven he had the tiny volume tucked in his pocket. Among the Akha sentences he will be prepared to speak, should the need arise, are "Have you built a toilet?" and "My arm is broken." The blog will provide a full report on Joe's trek upon his early return. (Described as "strenuous," this trek was one I chose to forgo.)

Another line in Joe's phrase book is this: "I do not wish to smoke opium." The drug is commonly used in these mountains. Some tourists come here for opium, risking terrible punishment by the Lao government. Numerous times in Luang Prabang, a guy on a motorbike glided up to Joe and me and asked, "You want opium?" Most of the aid the U.S. provides this destitute country is DEA money for anti-drug law enforcement and subsidies for farmers willing to switch to crops other than poppies. But opium is where the money is and everybody knows it.

That includes the CIA, which in the Vietnam-war era kept opium production in Laos humming along in order to please the opium-using and -selling Hmong people, who were U.S. allies against the communists. But that was then and this is now. America giveth and America taketh away.

A few notes on Luang Namtha town, which I have been exploring while Joe has been trekking.
Flattened during the second Indochina (Vietnam) war, Luang Namtha is back on the map. It's an administrative and market center and just beginning to gain a toehold in eco-tourism. With its broad streets, mostly red dirt, its long vistas of green hills, and it's low wood and cement buildings, the place is a kind of troppo Blanding, Utah. But instead of a Mormon Church it's got a Department of Propaganda. And in place of a Dairy Queen there's Manychan's Restaurant, which serves a weird and tasty salad of banana flowers, tiny eggplants and long green beans. Another eatery is called Chama, next to the Internet cafe we use (there are at least three), and at lunch today it listed a "cheese sandwich" special for 12,000 kip, about $1.20. I ordered one. The sandwich arrived as a fresh baguette containing lettuce, tomato (just button your lips, all you germophobes), cucumber and onion. But no cheese. Why? I didn't ask, but they probably ran out.

Okay, then, let's talk about "it." By "it", I mean---this is Laos, not Thailand---whether or not to eat uncooked produce. Joe and I don't think the old rules apply anymore--eat only what is cooked or can be peeled---or at least not exactly, and not in all of Thailand and Laos.

These guidelines are still to be strictly observed at street stalls, where sanitary conditions remain iffy. But in restaurants that depend on tourists, precautions are now taken to keep from poisoning the customers. We've eaten salad selectively, and here we are. Joe had one 24-hour bout of the bacterial hebbie-jeebies, and I've had a couple of minor disturbances. But in none of these cases do we think fresh produce was the culprit.

Of course, stay tuned. Joe's hill tribe phrase book says you must always eat any food offered to you by an Akha tribesman. Otherwise you will be considered an intruder or a thief. At the exact moment I am writing this---7 p.m., February 11---Joe may be out in the hills somewhere being either poisoned or arrested. We'll find out.