Good trek

Both Thais and Laos are famously sentimental about their home villages. The one thing Laos almost always ask us when we've gotten to know them a little is, would you like to visit my village? On his three-day trek, Joe came to understand why the Laos consider their villages peaceful and spiritually pure refuges from Lao urban life, which itself seems to us pretty laid back.

It's not being naively romantic to state that, despite many hardships, Lao rural villages---where nearly all the country's six million people live---are good places for making a fulfilling life. People like the airy, hardwood and bamboo houses they inhabit. One can be put up in three days. There's more than enough to eat. Rice crops are abundant, as are fruit and vegetable gardens, and most people keep chickens, hogs, and maybe some cattle and water buffalo for meat. The government has done a decent job bringing water to people, saving labor, and helping with irrigation schemes that can double annual crop yields. The nominal "communism" in rural Laos---unlike the somewhat more meddlesome urban variety---seems benign, and these practical, easy-going people are allowed to just get on with it. As in Vietnam, it's not the state that's withering away, but the Marxism.

While modern health care and education are still rudimentary and badly lacking, people do surprisingly well with fat-free healthful diets and by thoroughly exploiting their intimate knowledge---Joe found it just uncanny---of the natural environment.

No one else signed up for Joe's trek, so he had his Lao guide, Kenkeo, age 28 (no relation to Hotel Ken of Pakbeng), and his Akha guide, Nolu, age 20, all to himself. It was a revelation. The two men's connection to their natural surroundings was so total, so organic, that Joe came away with enough basic knowledge about living off the land that he might be able to do it himself, in lush Laos if not in the less generous landscape of Becket, Massachusetts.

Bamboo is not just for building and making tools such as bird and fish traps, it's for eating. The tenderest shoots are below knee height, the next tenderest are knee to waist, the least tender waist to chest. Steamed bamboo shoots are tastiest dipped in some chili paste mashed fresh with a wooden mortar and pestle. A palatable soup can be done in