Max left for a two day boat ride to the border, finally making his way to Thailand for his air conditioned buses and hot showers. I signed up for a two-day trek (ugh, walk) into the Nam Ha NBCA, a protected monsoon forest where wild animals such as elephant, rhinoceros and monkeys roam free, but not during the trekking hours. That's when the wild animals sleep.
I was looking forward to two days of walking, but as always with group tours, a little apprehensive about who my companions for the next two days would be. I had also seen enough of village life to last me for the next decade and was hoping that we'd be passing through those quickly. I was in it for the monsoon forest, the closest I 'd be able to get into a jungle given that I'd not be returning to Cambodia on this trip and had arrived in Laos in the dry season.
I was accompanied by two nice guides, the lead who spoke decent slow English -- or at least had a good repertoire of phrases and stock conversation having to do with the trek in his reserve -- and an assistant who spoke French with a flat accent. Probably close to how I speak French. There were four others on the trip -- a Danish couple and a British couple. The Danish couple, two nineteen-year olds who were taking a long vacation before beginning university, were tall, angular and blonde and spoke very good English, but not when the conversed with each other. The two brits were academics. The man was a bit more dashing and rugged than his shy, bespectacled counterpart. She was a small blonde woman who was pretty first thing in the morning before the awareness of herself had settled onto her countenance and made her seem uncomfortable. She made no attempts to style her hair, just split it down the middle and tied it into two unmatched pieces with rubber bands, and she wore bright fabrics that clashed and hung off her thin frame.
I knew instantly that I wouldn't hit it off with any of them, but I was in it for the walk and hoped that the beauty of the forest and the exertion of the climb would keep conversation to a minimum. And climb we did. We made a decent ascent on the first day, but ended the climb too early which ended the trek early and gave us hours in the village where we would camp for the night.
At dinner, the conversation was flat and annoying. The British woman, a researcher of infectious diseases, commented on how miserable everyone in London must be to be living in a city. I should have let it go, but I was bored and told her that I happened to really like living in a city. I said this as conversational as possible, but she shrunk and receded further and I felt slightly bad for pointing out her blunder. Soon after, the Danish couple remarked how all the Americans that they've ever met are tend to be really loud and dominate conversations. After two months of smugness from European travelers and Canadians vehemently denying that they are anything like Americans, it took a lot of energy to smile and fill my mouth with more sticky rice. I tried to explain that it's hard to say what a typical American is like given that our country is enormous and varies from one end to the other, but in a friendly way. Then I ate more sticky rice.
The next day landed us in several more villages. Each village was getting more tiresome than the last and made me want to wave, walk quickly and exit. My fellow travelers, however, were still amused, lingering to snap another picture of a naked child with a handful of dirt or a woman with black teeth smoking a pipe. It's not that the villagers were paying us too much attention, trying to sell us things or putting on a show. It was that I'd seen how they lived and I got it.
First you'd enter and a pack of dirt covered children would scamper over, the girls standing
in the background, some with babies strapped on their backs with a big scarf, all offering shy, endearing smiles. The boys were bolder and would push each other from behind and running off. The men were usually dressed in western clothes, fake adidas sweatpants or T-shirts that said things like "sweetheart" or "i love you" with pictures of hearts and arrows. The women wore traditional tribal dress -- dark indigo clothes and wrappings for their calves -- styled their hair in the traditional tribal way and wore thick silver earings and silver coins in their hair. They were all working in some way or another, the women sewing handicrafts or carrying loads of wood from the forest into the village in large sacks on their back, the weight loaded with a strap across their forehead.
The men carved water jugs out of bamboo trunks or fashioned animal pens from long stalks of thin bamboo. And the grandmothers sat around where the puppies and piglets warmed themselves in the morning, smoking pipes of tobacco. The houses were thatched bamboo huts, the roofs made of dried ramuttan leaves and marked with black where the charcoal fires penetrated from the insides. Clothes hung to dry everywhere. Pigs, dogs, puppies, chickens, roosters roamed and scrounged for food. The kids shooed and smacked the animals for fun, then ran off to the river to find something better to do.
The male Brit liked to amuse himself by playing with the children. They would creep up behind him while he would pretend not to see them. And then he would turn suddently and chase them back, when they would giggle and scatter like pigeons.
On the second day, we climbed deeper into the monsoon forest. The floor of the forest was layered with moist leaves and where there were no leaves, it revealed patches of rich, rust colored soil that in places turned to a soft, dirty sand. The moisture on the giant fern and banana leaves was lit by the morning sun. Everything smelled wet and fertile, as if the soil was right up against your nose. In the canopy above, the birds bantered and echoed each others song, squirrels jumped and chattered and all around was the steady buzz of cicadas.
We climbed until we were exhausted and then we climbed some more. I was glad to get on the truck that would take me back to my hotel, a hot shower and a hammock.
