We found the villagers to be very friendly in contrast with the German girls' experience in their Pu-Noi village and Yin and his family really looked after us well. As I found earlier in my trip in Borneo, staying overnight in a local village can be very interesting at meal times and this was no exception! We had rat and rice! Actually bamboo shoot and rat stew with wild, green vegetables, sticky rice and lao lao moonshine liquor. Apparently it's rude for visitors to refuse to drink at least one glass of lao lao when it's offered in someone's house and I found drinking that the hardest part of the meal. It's very strong and invariably disgusting reminding me of paint stripper! We slept on bamboo mats all lined up like sardines in a can and next morning started out at about 9am.
Two local villagers accompanied us apparently going the same way to go hunting. I wondered how much of this was to help Tonchang find the right directions as there were quite a few forks in the trail! One of the villagers had a home-made spear gun to hunt with. It was made of wood with thick rubber bands for the trigger and the missile was three metal prongs tied together. We walked through primary rainforest most of this second day and we had to wade one river waist-deep. The leeches couldn't believe their luck! We all got dozens of them around our ankles and in our boots and when I took my shoes and socks off to wade the river, I was already dripping blood from 3 different bites after only 1 hours' walking.
Birds were hard to spot through the thick forest but we saw many butterflies, particularly by the streams in addition to beetles, dragonflies...and leeches! We carried more sticky rice from Khlum Luang for lunch and we walked a little quicker than Tonchang expected again. We ambled the last hour stretching it to 2 hours to enjoy the forest rife with ferns, lichens and mosses before we arrived at Chanteun, the Akha village we were overnighting in at about 2pm on a damp and cloudy afternoon.
The Akha village was a collection of about a dozen bamboo and thatch huts with dirt floors. We stayed with Asai and his family of 3 boys, wife, father, sister and sundry other family members either permanent hut residents or otherwise; it was difficult to tell in the dark of the hut. After sitting inside during a 1-hour downpour, we took a walk around the village. All the female members, small kids included, were wearing their traditional black tunics edged with red and yellow, and the adult women wore headdresses decorated with red and yellow tassles, coins, and metal links. No way would any of them allow any photos to be taken, they all ran and hid when the cameras came out, but I got some pictures of the village and of the young lads after a bit of coaxing.
The Akha village had turned into a bit of a mud bath after the downpour but it was beautifully situated on a ridge with a backdrop of cloud-muffled mountains. Most of the Akha's tools were made of bamboo; all baskets and mats were woven from it; water was collected from a stream in big bamboo tubes like organ pipes and there was a bamboo loom in our house. Only the cooking pots were metal. For dinner we had wild, green vegetables, sticky rice and lao lao again, this time supplemented with bamboo-borer moth grubs deep fried! Asai's father, who said he was "about 60," told us a lot about the Vietnam War. There was a lot of fighting in the mountains around his village and they had to move a few times. Tonchang really had his work cut out translating, as Asai's father seemed to talk for several minutes without drawing breath! Both the villages we stayed at overnight were subsistence farming; consuming everything they grew with nothing to sell at market in Phongsali. Asai's father had told us hardly anyone goes down to Phongsali from the village which made me wonder what they would do with the money Tonchang paid them for our food and accommodation. It also explained why Tonchang and the villager that came with us lost the trail! The villager had a sweetcorn field right where the trail used to cut through the forest. There's no forest on that hillside now or any trail, so they had to go searching for it where the forest started again! The trail was very, very overgrown and we had to bend under the bamboo stems and thorny branches to get through before it opened out a bit an hour or later as we approached another Pu-Noi village. From here, the trail was clear & still in primary rainforest.
The ritual shoe & sock removing to cross the Nam Long River again where the bamboo bridge had collapsed, revealed a veritable metropolis of leeches on my legs! My socks were almost completely blood-red! From the Nam Long, where we had more sticky rice for lunch, onwards was really hard for me! The trail went steeply uphill for 3 hours! The much younger Czech couple found it easier, but they sweated a lot, too! They found time to stop for some bird watching, but I just trudged on trying to get the climb over with as quickly as possible dripping with sweat and blood!
That last day's walk was 10 hours! Tonchang had told us it would be a long 8-hour day and that extra, unexpected 2 hours were really tough. That was the final stretch to Phongsali along an open dirt road in the hot afternoon sun! I managed to get a lift on the only vehicle to be spotted on the road at this time of day which saved me about a half an hour of walking into Phongsali. I'd walked part of that road before the trek and it has some stunning views of the rolling hills beyond Phongsali and there are dozens and dozens of gorgeous butterflies flitting around the many streams coming down from the mountains. I couldn't appreciate any of it this time; I just wanted to get showered, off my aching feet and the pack off my sore back!
Next morning, I was ready to walk some more. I felt very little reaction to the previous day's exertions! Only a dozen bumps on my legs from the leeches that had got a really good suck! It was an excellent trek having everything I'd hoped before I'd arrived in Phongsali; lots of primary rainforest, friendly and interesting villages; I hope I learned something about them. Tonchang did work very hard for us when we had finished our days walking and wanted to ask questions of the villagers even though he was as tired as we were. I'd recommend him to other tourists, but you can't find him in Phongsali, you have to wait until he finds you. He's been guiding for a year now, he told us, so maybe some of the guesthouse owners know how to contact him. He goes to different villages on his 3-day trek to the other guides but he also does a 6-day trek which I think is the same one the Phoufa Hotel guide does. His English is very good and the Pu-Noi & Akha villagers seem to know and trust him.