Imagine a riverside hamlet in a remote secluded valley, where beyond iridescent green rice fields and sparklingly clear water bountifully provide and daily life is attuned to simple, bucolic rhythms.
We’re lucky enough to be in Muang La during the dry season and the lodge where we are staying overlooks this pastoral scene. Each morning, young saffron robed monks bathe in the Nam Pak river’s thermal waters, while villagers carrying tall baskets harvest the river weed or ‘kaipen’, which is pressed flat in sheets soaked with an aromatic dressing, then topped with sesame seeds, thin slices of galangal, tomato and garlic, and left to dry in the sun for a day. We enjoy these nori-like snacks flash fried with ‘jeow bong’, a sweet and spicy paste of roast chili on the side, as huge black winged butterflies flutter around our flower filled terrace.
It’s all hands on deck in the fields too, as across the Nam Pak the annual sticky rice harvest is in full swing and those villagers not employed in the river are there from dawn to dusk. It’s picturesque but back-breaking work in 35 degree temperatures, as men and women work side by side from dawn to dusk cutting, carrying and stacking the grain in an all-out race to bring in this critical harvest while the dry weather holds, as in smaller rural communities like Muang La’s, the crop needs to yield enough to sustain the community for the entire year.
Vast sums of Chinese money are being poured into this region as part of its ‘belt and road’ initiative, but for now at least this unspoiled eden in the mountains of far northern Laos, where a narrow sliver of territory is sandwiched between the borders of China’s Yunnan province, Vietnam and Myanmar is a nightmare of twisting, nausea inducing dirt roads to reach and the journey took us the best part of eight hours from Luang Prabang, which is a mere 200 kilometres south of here. Long may it remain this inaccessible.
Sustainable, stealth luxury is perhaps the best description of the lodge where we are staying as while being fully integrated into the community (the river’s thermal pools and the village’s salt drying beds are on its property and all the hotel staff are local), there’s nothing remotely rustic about its infinity pool or outdoor dining terrace on a midstream private island, accessed by a rope bridge.
Although its all too easy to succumb to total indolence we do venture out, threading our way across the grass ridges that surround the rice paddies to watch the sticky rice ‘Khao Niew’ harvest, sheltering from the heat on straw mats in a traditional bamboo ‘sala’, before taking a bamboo pole raft back across the river.
Borrowing bikes from the lodge to ride into the nearby village early the next morning we visit Wat Pha Sing Kham, the village’s temple and an important pilgrimage site. Unlike the rest of Laos where ‘Lao Loum’ (or ‘lowland’ Lao) are the majority, here people are mostly from the mountain tribe of the Khmu, which today make up around a third of the country’s less than three million population. The Khmu maintain their animist beliefs, though many here embraced Buddhism centuries ago, allegedly after the miracle of a sacred Buddha which was being transported downstream, broke away and chose this branch of the Nam Pak (literally ‘where the water separates’). The Khmu, brought the sacred image up to the top of the hill, built a shrine and converted to Buddhism en masse.
Having already witnessed a sunrise alms giving procession in Luang Prabang we decide instead to visit the ramshackle village market, where they sell offerings like sticky rice to the few tourists and backpackers up this way, who do participate in that ritual. The place is a rich, rambling stew of sights and smells familiar and not so familiar, including tiny roasted chestnuts, buffalo skin crackling, mud crabs, deep fried crickets and other bugs and even smoked rats and squirrels strung from roof beams. For once, even Sabrina is mostly glad that we’ve opted for half board.
In a commitment to sustainability and freshness that’s seldom (if ever) seen, everything the Lodge serves (and there is a different 5 course set menu every evening) is either grown in its own garden (vegetables, fruits, wild and aromatic herbs), raised on the premises (chickens and ducks), or sourced from the river, salt beds or surrounding fields. ‘Khao Niew’ (sticky rice) being so central to Lao culture is ever present and served in the small bamboo baskets in which it is steamed. There are three dishes we’ll especially remember, a spicy pumpkin soup, infused with ginger and coconut milk, a ceviche of river fish with garden herbs and a fish soup made with freshly caught tilapia straight from the river.
Kang Som Pa (Laotian fish soup): Serves 4-6
500 gm (1lb 2 ozs) skinless, boneless tilapia fillets, (or if unavailable, wild salmon fillets)
1 stem lemongrass, white part only, bruised
1/2 tsp salt (plus extra to taste)
2 tbsps fish sauce (plus extra to taste)
2 tomatoes (quartered)
4 spring onions (scallions), thinly sliced
1 tbsp freshly chopped coriander (cilantro) leaves
Wipe the fish with a damp paper towel and cut into portions. Put 1 litre 34 fl ozs/2 cups) water into a large saucepan with the lemongrass and bring to the boil, reduce the heat and simmer for 10 minutes. Add the fish and fish sauce and bring back to the boil, reduce the heat to a simmer and poach for 10mins. Add the tomato and simmer for 5 minutes. Remove from the heat, discard the lemongrass and stir in the spring onion and coriander. Add more fish sauce and salt to taste. Serve hot.
It’s our final morning here and we enjoy breakfast by the water with a mixture of sadness to be leaving this magical place, regret that its customs and rhythms will probably all too soon be overwhelmed by the modern world and dread at the thought of the stomach-churning twists and turns of the mountain dirt roads that have protected it for so long.
Some places are simply meant never to be re-visited.
“Some places are simply meant never to be re-visited.” So poignant that now this place and experience you describe and photographed so beautifully no longer exists—or at least not as it was then.
Laos is a beautiful and under-valued country. Marco captures its essence in this charming short essay. I was lucky enough to spend a week or so there for my brother-in-law's wedding a decade or so ago and I was struck by the generosity and the humility of its people. I wrote at length about my trip in the Spectator and, for once, didn't receive a whole load of on-line abuse from those ghastly anonymous keyboard warriors. I suspect that says much about this magnificent country, where there's so much much to enjoy and so little to get angry about.