In Thailand, Laos, and much of mainland South-East Asia, feet are considered “low” and dirty. So you need to remove your shoes to enter a house (and put them on again when you leave, rather than dirtying the next house you visit with your grubby feet). And never, ever point your feet at anyone… (Here’s more on the finer points of feet etiquette in Thailand.)

2: Have The Wrong Tattoo in the Wrong Place

Like Hindu/Buddhist symbols? Be careful where you tattoo them if you’re planning on visiting places where people practise Hinduism. That funky little Om tat on your ankle can cause immense offence to observant Hindus: it’s as offensive as tattooing it on your butt, and a hell of a lot more visible. Cover it up, or feel the wrath of villagers.

3: Pat A Child (Or Anyone Else) On The Head

Remember the bit in Gran Torino where Clint Eastwood’s character pats the little Hmong child on the head and the entire room goes silent but for a volley of abuse from grandma? Touching someone on the head is taboo in many South-East Asian cultures, most obviously in Thailand and Laos. Don’t do it. To children or to adults.

4: Beckon with an Upturned Hand

In Bali, and many other parts of Indonesia, the classic European sign for beckoning – with the upturned palm — is offensive. Beckon with palm downwards, not upwards.

5: Take Offence at Spitting, Swastikas or Staring

In Hindu cultures within Asia, the ancient symbol of the Swastika remains a sign of blessing, untouched by the use the Nazis made of it. Anywhere where folk chew betel, and plenty of places where they don’t, spitting is, well, just part of life. As is staring. In most small towns and villages in Asia, you can expect a curious audience. (Not to mention the odd bit of mobile phone photography.

6: Refuse to Answer a Personal Question

“Where is your husband?” “How old are you?” “Why don’t you have a husband?” All of these are perfectly acceptable gambits within the first couple of minutes of a conversation all over Asia. Refusing to answer them, or ducking the question, presents as rude and unfriendly.

What cultural challenges have you faced in your travels? And what’s the worst thing you’ve done to cause offence? Drop me a comment and let me know.

The post The Sunday Six: Ways To Offend The Locals in Asia appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

Tropical lichens spin their symbiotic web on a mature tree.

And when your guides are animists, who whole-heartedly believe in the spirits of the forest, the experience is deeper. When hiking in Europe you might lay a stone upon a cairn, as a good luck sign and mark of your travels. In the Nam Ha protected region of northern Laos you lay an offering of leaves at a sacred place.

In this instance, a termite mound, home to the tiny creatures whose minuscule minings can crumble the tallest tree to soil. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, leaves to soil.

As we laid our leaves, Sing and Zhang, our guides, half-chanted, half-sang a Hmong prayer to the spirit of the forest, requesting safe passage through his territory, wishing us luck on our journey, and praying for the continuance of the circle of life.

A velvet-soft flower with edible seeds.

There’s a beauty in both life and death in an ecosystem this rich. Scarlet flowers with seeds just waiting to drop. Mushrooms in shades from indigo to gold sprouting from the death of older plants. Tiny baby birds, with a smattering of feathers, their grassy nest concealed behind green leaves.

Gently parting the leaves with a knife.

Flower heads dying away as they disgorge their seeds.

Waiting for the cycle to begin again...

And wild bananas just beginning to sprout their seedy fruits.

Wild banana flower with blossoms turning to fruit.

One of the many pleasures of travelling with the nine year old is the childlike wonder he takes in watching ants go about their business. The sort of leisurely watching that, as adults, working too fast and too hard, we almost actively unlearn.

Ants, moss, lichens... so many lifeforms on one tiny patch of bark...

There is nature, too, on the grander scale. The Buddha tree is a type of parasite, which grows up around the host, until it finally engulfs it completely, soaring skyward as if the host had never been.

A majestic Buddha tree.

We learnt a lot in our two days’ journey. Zhang and Sing taught sir traditional Hmong hunting calls. How to simulate the mating call of a muntjac roe deer using a leaf. The different female birdsongs which hunters use to attract the male. And, by far the most exciting part, how to use a traditional fishing harpoon…

Now, bamboo is one of nature’s wonder plants. It has a tensile strength equivalent to steel and can grow tens of feet in a month. Folk here eat it — and rattan shoots, too — make spoons, chopsticks, baskets and incense sticks with it, build bridges, houses, rooves…

But who knew that wild banana plants could regrow those huge leaves inside a week, and turn from seedling to tree in five months?
We ate lunch — packed in leaves — off banana leaf tables. Slept under a banana leaf shelter. And transformed shreds into drinking cups from a little stream.

Using a banana leaf cup. So far no ill-effects from the water...

There was an odd transformative moment on the journey, too. A big part of parenting is letting your children manage their own risk (within limits) and grow, hopefully, to be both bigger and a better person than you are.

Now. I knew Z was going to be fitter than me at some point. He’s male. I’m female.

He’s my son, for god’s sake! Just by being a ma I have one foot in the grave.

But I hadn’t expected that point to come so soon.

So we walked 50k over hilly terrain — with a couple of slippery ravines thrown in — over the last two days. When we reached the dazzling sheer granite waterfall which heralded our riverside camp for the night, I was tired. I could, to be honest, have slept.

The nine-year-old? He was straight in the water with the harpoon, looking for crabs.

Today? Well, we agreed to do very little (bar a trip to the museum round the corner and a bit of unschooling on botany). But I’m feeling the burn. He’s fine.

It’s an odd feeling. A combination of intense parental pride with an awareness of ageing and mortality, a shock that my little boy is growing up so fast…

It’s in the preposition, I guess. He’s growing up. I’m growing, well…, old.

I’m 36. In much of Laos I’d be a grandmother by now.

Another challenge for mum's vertigo.

There is, also, nothing quite like vertigo to bring home one’s frailty. Five minutes into our journey, we came across a bamboo suspension bridge, unpleasantly high above a disconcertingly low river, its slats so dilapidated that for long stretches one has to balance on the cables.

I have, quite literally, had nightmares about this sort of thing. In particular, about Z falling through one (my vertigo is associative: like my father’s, it’s worse when my child is at height than when I am).

But I am really keen that he does not inherit my irrational neurosis.

Anywise. He went first. He crossed sensibly, slowly and safely, with neither fear nor assistance.

He crossed this bamboo pole bridge, too.

Simple, effective and, frankly, fairly terrifying.

And the most terrifying bridge of the trek, suspended thirty-odd feet above the Nam Tha river with a handrail that disappeared midway. (When it comes to Lao bridges, the conventional maxim for vertigo sufferers — “whatever you do, don’t look down” — is a recipe for something rather worse than vertigo.)

My pathetic, terror-stricken inching was sufficiently obvious for Zhang, our local guide, to come and, quite literally, hold my hand for the last few steps.

I had asked sir to hold Sing’s hand.

Less, when looked at rationally, for his benefit, than for mine. The bridge looked terrifying. But to actually fall into the water (which was deep enough to be non-lethal) one would have had to trip and fall at a flawless right angle.

Neither Sing nor Z appeared to feel hand-holding was necessary. He made a steady, cautious, safe crossing, while I quivered like an oversized jelly on the other side.

But there was beauty everywhere. Young maize against a blue and cottonwool sky, outside the Lantaen village where a sudden rainstorm made chickens and piglets run squeaking for cover and little naked children race out to dance in the rain.

Agriculture can be beautiful too.

And a little darkness, too. Because when you live in the world of the forest, and the spirits, the spirits bring harm, as well as good. Almost every child we met in this poor, rural region wore the string bracelet the shamans put on children when they fall sick. Many more than one.

The threshold from the Nam Ha forest to a Lantaen village.

Not the powerful spirit who controls the forest and your passage through it. But darker forces. The spirits of the unburied, unmourned dead. Who will, if you do not guard against them, emerge from their unquiet rest, pass into the village, and feed.

Thanks to Debbie Dubrow for hosting Photo Friday.

To do it yourself? Visit Into the Wild in the night market, Luang Namtha, Laos. For two days trekking and one night camped by the river, two amazing guides, one Lao meal, water and three Hmong meals, all to ourselves, we paid 1,000,000 kip ($120 US). You will need to carry sufficient water for the first day (two days if your kids won’t drink river water boiled with wild cardamom roots). Wear serious shoes, bring a well-fitted snorkel mask if littlies want to spearfish by night, sandals for river crossings, a raincoat in the rainy season, insect repellent, sun-cream and plenty of high-energy snacks.

The post Spirits of the Forest appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

Her name means “Be Loved”. Be Loved’s younger sister is called “Be Happy” and the baby’s name means “General”. Appropriately since, like many youngest children, she isn’t shy about asserting her needs.

Sing chose his daughters’ names before he was married — late for Laos, at twenty-eight. His wife and he were working in business administration in Vientiane, the capital, when mutual friends set them up on a blind date. On their second date, five years ago, they married.

Their eldest is four and a bit. You do the maths.

We spent the last two days with Sing, trekking the Nam Ha protected area near Luang Nam Tha in northern Laos, and he invited junior to his home village to meet his daughters.

“When I was working in marketing administration, I worked six days a week. Out of seven, I had only one day off, the Sunday,” he says. “I never saw my family. Then the company moved to a different province. And for one or two whole months I would not see my daughters.”

So he chucked in the career for which he had studied for seven years. Studied English. And became a guide. He works three days a week, on average, and gets to watch his little daughters grow.

The village he lives in is a largish one. About five hundred families. Several hundred kids. A good swathe of whom, when we visit, are chasing each other in and out of the houses, helping junior in his quest to capture a chicken in a bamboo wicker hen-house, gawping, slightly timidly, at the giant Westerners who have lumbered into their midst, or, in the case of this little one, mugging for my camera.

Mademoiselle was totally fascinated by the camera.

Giant and, in my case, rather smelly Westerners. We’ve covered 40-odd kilometres of fairly constant up and down in sauna-esque conditions over the last two days and the baby lasts about a nanosecond in the crook of my arm before mewling politely, if insistently, for her mother.

Sing and his wife are an interesting couple. Both, clearly, very happy with their three young daughters, planning two more, and overjoyed to have found each other so — by Lao standards — late in life. Also both meditative, serious-minded people.

She speaks about as many words of English as I speak words of Lao, so I talk mainly to Sing. Both of them come from the Hmong tribal minority, whose language is similar to Chinese. There are Hmong scattered throughout northern Laos, northern Vietnam, and the Chinese border region. Around Luang Namtha they are one of the larger tribal minorities.

One of the few (by Western standards) possessions Sing keeps in the big and beautiful house he built is a qeej, a musical instrument he translates as a “cannon”. It’s a large mouth organ with six curving bamboo pipes, which the Hmong play at weddings, funerals and New Year. You can inhale, exhale or sing into the mouthpiece, and stop the pipes individually or multiply to produce a tone.

“Did it belong to your father?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “I bought it six years ago. Very few Hmong people play it now. But we need people to play, to keep the music alive.”

There are three different melodies that are played at funerals, Sing says. One for babies, one for people in their middle years, and one for the old. Rather than bring bad luck on the house by asking him to play a funeral song, I ask him to play me a New Year song.

Playing the qeej. An uncanny sound...

It’s an unearthly, very ghostly sound, like a more breathy and hollow accordion, with a tonality that’s other-worldly. It bears absolutely no relation to the pentatonic or octave scales I’m familiar with. Schonberg, I think, would have loved it. Z plays it, happily as Larry.

Communism has been unkind to most of South-East Asia, but here in rural Laos, where it meets agrarian animism and ancient traditions, it seems to work very, very well.

When Sing and his wife married, they left Vientiane province to come here. They identified a plot of land in the village. Sing went to the chief of the village to ask his permission to build there. He bought the bricks, bought some timber, bought corrugated iron and gathered bamboo. And built himself a house.

“You don’t need to buy?” I ask.

“No, no,” he says. “In the city, you need to pay money. In the country, you just ask if you can build a house. You ask if you can farm some land or plant some trees.”

They keep chickens and pigeons. They have no pigs, no farmland. “Farming is a hard life,” says Sing.

The village guide who trekked with us farms. He is up at 2 or 3am to tap his rubber trees, then up to the dizzyingly steep patch of land he and his wife cleared when they married, while his daughters gather forest plants as fodder for the pigs.

Zhang, our village guide, working on his land.

He grows, however, everything that his family needs. From tomatoes, pumpkins, aubergines, melon and papaya through to lemongrass, ginger, culantro, holy basil and chilli, from rice to traditional herbal cures. They sell spare chillis and the occasional chicken at the market, but essentially it is subsistence.

Lemongrass and a herb which is used for strength.

It does seem, from the villages we visit, that more than land is held in common. Everybody looks after the children, who play happily together and run in and out of each other’s houses as if they were in common. Doors are always open. (Laos has one of the lowest crime rates in the world.) Festivals are shared. The village pigeons all share a dove cote.

When Sing talks about the economic benefits of rubber trees, he says, “For my village, the income is 100,000 dollars in one year,” rather than identifying an individual who makes an impressive living from it, as folk would in Thailand or the West.

In the West, happiness, or even contentment, is a struggle. We medicate for the lack of it. Unhappy adolescents take out their rage in crime. We believe we are entitled to a million and one possessions, laptops, HDTVs, hundred-dollar moisturisers… Our children go through lives deluged in streams of plastic crap. To see people living so contentedly with so little is a beautiful thing.

The handbag, by the way, is furry. And a source of intense pride.

The post The Good Life? appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

This little girl is six, and had been carrying her eighteen-month old little brother in a sling on her back for most of the day.

The forlorn look?

Well, it could be the weight. He’s a chunky little fellow: he probably weighs more than half what she does. Or it could be the way he’s tugging at the huge silver earrings the women and girls all wear.

It could be the impact of the Chinese melodrama on the telly she was watching through the window, nose virtually glued to the glass.

Or it could be that she’d had a hard day at work, hustling tourists to buy embroidery and bangles with the baby on her back.

Child labour in Asia comes in many forms, and in the cool, scenic highlands around Sapa, where we are now, it’s often very photogenic.

In this shot, she looks a bit more like a little girl again. She’ll be married in a decade or so, and the cycle will start again.

Thanks to Debbie Dubrow of Delicious Baby for hosting Photo Fridays, a collection of travel pics from around the web.

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Or, for that matter, the absolute, unalloyed luxury of starting every single day with a complete free rein.

Where shall we go today? What shall we do? What shall we see?

All, as it happens, for less than the rent or mortgage on a one-bedroom London flat.

I was self-employed, single and working from home when Z was born. On a Sunday. By Tuesday, I was back at the laptop, newborn at boob, hitting a deadline I’d hoped to get out of the way before he arrived.

Now, I’m aware that working from home is many mothers’ dream. But, like self-employment, it tends to spill. You cannot leave your work at the office, because your office is your home. When jobs for different clients collide, you work all the hours god sends, and then some.

Preparing for a holiday was a frantic scramble: endless late nights at the laptop, followed by a last-minute squash of possessions into backpack (usually sitting on it, by the end), check of passports, cards and tickets. Enough, in fact, to make you need a holiday in itself…

So… here we are. Our year out to travel the world has extended to a multi-year trip. My assumption that we would return to the London grind has been replaced with a desire for a 300-euro a month rental somewhere the boy can become bilingual in Spanish and I can work much, much less.

And what have we done with today’s time?

Well, we caught the night train from Hanoi to Lao Cai, a highland town spitting distance from the Chinese border, and picked up a bus to Sapa.

It’s a slightly surreal place, Sapa. Tiny Hmong women in dark leggings and endless scarves and minuscule Wen Xai ladies in scarlet turbans wander amid French colonial buildings, fantasy Pyreneean mansions appear amid dramatic contours clad in oriental pines, while water buffalos laze on the endless rice terraces.

We had coffee.

Breakfasted. Bought a penknife, with a compass. Chatted to a Vietnamese family at our guesthouse and two Hmong ladies in town.

And then we went for a walk, in the blissful, cloudy cool, four miles or so, to Cat Cat village down the valley, below the cloudy hills.

We looked at the wonderful landscape, the maize, young rice and paddy terraces, and the bamboo irrigation system. Played pooh sticks in an irrigation channel. Z built an archipelago out of mud, tried to catch a butterfly, and picked me a bunch of wildflowers.

And, yes, as they say on the postcards, we are having a lovely time. Thanks to Josie at Sleep is for the Weak for the writing prompt, time.

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