3 days of trekking to the Hmong and Khmu hill tribes of Laos: Hills, trails and Jungle Boy fails

We’d been on the hunt for an ethical way to visit the remote tribes that live up in the hills of Laos, but we’d heard a lot of the companies that offer experiences are exploiting the people of these tribes, taking their passports, limiting their mobility and freedom, or making them perform or continue to wear old traditional dress- something we absolutely didn’t want to be a part of. We wanted to learn more about the way they lived and about their culture, without it being rubbish for them. So, after scouring the internet looking at TripAdvisor and travel blogs, we stumbled upon White Elephant Adventures. Despite the name (they’re named after the Hindu elephant Erawan) they’re the only company in Luang Prabang not to offer elephant riding- they already had a big tick in our book. Reviews said they were ethical and authentic, and we’d not found anything that came close to that, so we went for it...

Day 1

Our first day began with a minibus drive to the river, where we waved goodbye to as many home comforts as a backpacker has for the next 3 days. A local man was waiting for us with a tiny thin boat that only allowed 2 of us in at once, so it took 2 trips to get us 3 and our jungle-extraordinaire guide Kong across to the village where we’d begin our trek.

Day 1 involved 5 hours of trekking through corn crops, rice paddies and a lot of jungle. We slogged uphill, scrambled over rocks and ducked under branches- watching a 6’6 giant attempt this was excellent entertainment.

We stopped for lunch in a little jungle clearing by a stream where Kong skilfully lobbed sticks into a tree to get us tasty fresh pomelos and where Ryan less skilfully lobbed sticks into the wrong trees to get us absolutely nothing. His dreams of becoming a Jungle-Boy still pretty distant.

By late afternoon we’d arrived at our first Hmong village to spend the night. We met the chief and were welcomed by the family who were going to house us for the night. Kong took us round the village where we got to see how this tribe lives, from the knife making kiln to the village school. Everything was made by hand with the few resources they had. That evening we ‘showered’ in the outdoor village fountain and had cabbage soup for dinner before going to sleep on the floor of our hosting family’s hut.

Day 2

After approximately 40 minutes sleep, (ok I’m exaggerating, but not by much- those sodding roosters need a lesson in what constitutes as ‘morning’) we got up to Kong cooking us breakfast on an open fire and tried to suck all the caffeine we could out of the tea bags he’d given us. Fed, we ambled over to the village school to see what an English lesson in a remote tribal village looked like.

And I thought being a teacher in England was tough. Crikey. The children in the class are a mixture of Hmong and Khmu, meaning that these are their first languages. However, at school the teacher speaks Lao. So now they’re in a lesson using their second language trying to learn a third. Virtually impossible. They were expected to copy unintelligible chalked Lao words and the English words next to them off of the blackboard whilst sat at eroding wooden planks that served as table. None of them had a clue a) how to pronounce these words or b) what on earth they meant. And yet there they were, turning up everyday and trying their best to get on with it. Absolute troopers. And hats off to that teacher, he has zero resources and 40 noisy children to contend with. The Khmu children who attend this school live in the Hmong village during the week, completely self sufficient, making their own food and doing their own washing at 11 years old (and younger). Can you imagine our children in England doing that?

Still baffled by our school visit we donned the backpacks, said ‘Oua Jao’ to our hosts and continued on our way, this time to a Khmu village. Living in the hills makes for some amazing views, it really is beautiful out there. Less beautiful was the sight of the inclines we were having to tackle on Day 2.

Safe to say we were a sweaty, thigh shaking mess by the time we reached the village and our home for the night 4 hours later. The only person at home when we arrived was the grandma of the family, tiny and almost bent double, she must have been at least 80, but was busy working away peeling the corn and sieving the rice. Kong taught us how to use a handmade spinning top, though we were absolutely shocking at it, and then took us to see the Hmong village down the road where the local boys were much, much better at it, putting us to shame. He also found us a pumpkin for dinner and so we (thankfully) swapped cabbage soup for pumpkin soup that night.

Being so remote, and with no electricity to cause light pollution, the stars were incredible.

Day 3

After another shocking sleep we dragged ourselves up and out. We brushed our teeth next to the dead rats the husband had hunted that night, made sure there were no scorpions in our boots, and donned the sweat encrusted backpacks. Day 3 saw us trekking for 5 hours through bamboo forests and competing with big inclines and declines. Our knees and ankles were shot. Finally though, we made it to the tiny boat that would carry us across the river to our minibus and back to civilisation as we knew it.

We were grubby (understatement), tired and sore, but what an amazing 3 days we’d had. Kong was a fountain of knowledge. Being Hmong himself, we were able to quiz him about language, marriage, food, schooling, religion, and anything else we could think of. He found us star fruit, guava and pomelos as we trekked each day, and was an all-round good egg. We learnt so much from both him and the villages that opened their homes to us, and it really was humbling to see whole tribes with so little just get on with it, and more than that, to do so happily.