| Lessons in Reality |
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A veteran travel writer takes some lessons in reality in Laos’s remote Na valley 
After about five hours, the spirit woman’s incessant moaning finally got to me. In the darkness of the Laotian valley of Na, what at first felt like some dubiously spectral episode from the pages of The Travels of Marco Polo was beginning to seep into my brain and my bones. The same angry spirits that just that evening had made a local woman’s mouth slobber and her eyes roll were now, it seemed, rioting through my own soul. Zipping myself out of my sleeping bag, I moved to the edge of the village headman’s porch and gulped a few deep breaths of the jungle air before vomiting onto the dirt below. Of all the things I’d hoped to experience in central Laos, the animistic spirit world was not one of them. I’d spent several days trekking 50 miles by foot and boat into the roadless expanse of the Hin Boun River basin as part of an expedition team that was systematically charting the area for the first time. Our mission was not to explore the area for the purposes of biology or anthropology but to map the region for a Thai-based ecotourism venture. Whatever wonders we discovered would one day be featured as highlights on guided treks into the Southeast Asian wilderness. Because the implicit aim of any eco-tour is to experience a place untouched by the unifying juggernaut of global culture, the primitive village of Ban Na Koke held ample possibility as a backcountry destination. Cut off from the rest of Laos by a ring of steep limestone mountains, the valley where it sits can be entered only through a damp tunnel that twists for half a mile at the base of the craggy ridgeline. Inside that isolated valley, we came across pristine hardwood forests, abundant wildlife, and the vine-entangled ruins of a mysterious old city the villagers referred to as Aran. We also discovered a local community unlike any we’d previously found in Laos. Whereas people in other parts of the Hin Boun basin wore Buddhist amulets, the villagers in Ban Na Koke draped their necks with small pouches of herbs and spoke reverently of phii, the powerful apparitions that haunt their valley. When my expedition team arrived, the village headman offered to host us in his house—on the condition we give him 500 Thai baht (about $12) so he could buy a pig and sacrifice it to the spirits of the valley in our honor. Four nights later, when the headman still hadn’t bought the sacrificial pig, the phii swooped in and seized a woman in the village. At least that’s one interpretation. In truth, I wasn’t sure what to make of things when the woman started to moan amid the fading evening light, rocking her body back and forth in front of a flickering oil lamp. A sharp-eyed, white-haired old man—the village shaman—was summoned to diagnose the problem, and he gradually determined that the phii were upset because they had never been properly introduced to us Western interlopers. Moreover, the spirits hadn’t even known of our presence until one of the village boys shot stones at some jungle birds during a valley hike that afternoon. The birds had apparently spilled our secret, and now the spirits wanted to know who we were and why we were there. In retrospect, the whole situation might not have been the work of spirits. Indeed, the phii-possessed woman had acted strangely from the moment we’d arrived in the village, and some of the villagers had mentioned she was “weak.” In local terms, this meant it was easy for the spirits to possess her, but a medical analysis might have revealed a predisposition for mental and emotional instability. As for the sacrifice, it’s true that the headman never got around to purchasing a pig, but the fallout might have been more political than spiritual. After all, 500 baht was a lot of money in that part of Laos, and many villagers were no doubt chagrined that the headman hadn’t thrown us a welcoming ceremony (which, in a sleepy little village like that, might well have been the most memorable event of the year). At the time, however, I wasn’t so rational. After washing the vomit out of my mouth, I sat awake on the headman’s porch and listened to the woman’s rhythmic moans. In the darkness of the valley, exhausted by days of hiking and lack of sleep, I could understand why the people there believe in spirits. Somehow, I could feel the phii lurking in the dense jungle around me, affronted, enraged, and disconcertingly real. And maybe that feeling was the truest souvenir of my experience in that far-flung part of Laos. If traveling far away from the mapped and wired world offers us anything important, perhaps it’s the simple opportunity to not just explore unfamiliar landscapes but to also briefly leave behind our most basic assumptions about reality. As we hiked from village to village, we rarely used cash; we paid for most of our food and assistance with pocketknives, ballpoint pens, digital wristwatches, and what medical supplies we had. Even after we finally emerged in the village of Konglo, where people owned motorcycles and accepted paper money, I was again reminded of my isolation when an elderly man approached us and hitched up his shorts to reveal thighs thickly laced with ornate tattoos of elephants, birds, and dragons. At first, I couldn’t remember how I knew about this dying Laotian tattooing custom, which is believed to ward off evil and increase luck. It wasn’t until days later that I recalled having read about it in Marco Polo’s Travels. |
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