There are many ethnic minority groups in the north of Laos, and the in word around here is "ecotrekking". This is a very expensive way of creating a monopoly trekking system, with exorbitant prices for the experience of staying in traditional villagers' homes. On perusing the price breakdown, sometimes only 10% is actually going to the villages. 
Instead I cycled around town, and took a motorbike to a few places further afield. The local Hmong and Akha tribes have been stopped from growing their traditional crop of opium poppies and are instead being encouraged to grow other crops. So our western sensibilities mean that entire families have lost their livelihoods. 
The people are wonderfully friendly , with people of all ages smiling, waving and wishing me Sabai-dii. And I've already noticed some interesting food in the market, but more on that later.Click on the links for photos of Luang Nam Tha and Udomxai
It's Xmas Eve and I am looking at a 10 hour bus ride tomorrow into the very northern province of Phongsaly. It's quite close to some of the places I visited in NW Vietnam, so should be quite colourful. Am also hoping the trekking prices are just a little more reasonable.
So Merry Xmas to you all.
For more photos of 
For more photos of 
I spent an entire day getting to a small village in Xishangbanna called Xiding, which is home to a famous Thursday market. The road south from Menglian was under construction as it is prone to huge landslides. Our bus driver inched his way around trucks with only millimetres to spare between the wheels and a sheer drop into the valley below. Definitely the most scary trip I've done so far!
Xiding is up in the hills, almost permanently shrouded in mists, and still cold! Bummer, I'm not yet back in the tropics. It's also a tea producing area and the predominant ethnic group are Aini. Only a few old ladies still wore their traditional clothes, and the market itself was a bit disappointing, though I did enjoy watching them butcher entire pigs. They brought them dead and already scarified, but whole, to market on the back of a motorbike then proceeded to hack them to pieces. There is no part of a pig that can't be used it appears! Vegetarians and those of certain religious persuasions may not appreciate the following photo!
If I'd walked for a few hours I could have reached some more traditional villages (Xiding being a modern uninspiring town) but the only bus back left at lunchtime so it was on to the capital Jinghong on the Mekong River.
Menglian is a small town near the Burmese border, which is quickly modernising with new buildings and apartment blocks going up all over the place. But there is a small relic of the old town, complete with a couple of temples and an old Dai meeting house and residence which is now a museum. Behind the old town is a hill which has huge dragon trees growing in it. It was certainly nice to see some fecund growth after the dry lands of the north of the province.
More photos of 
Prices were ridiculously cheap and I'm afraid I did a bit more souvenir shopping, including an entire Lahu outfit and Wa pipe. I don't think I'll be wearing any of those earrings though!
The hills are surrounded by tea plantations, and a walk out of town finds you amongst traditional stilt houses and friendly locals. I was the only westerner at the market, and from the stares I got I doubt many make it this far. Definitely a great day out.
We booked into a traditional guesthouse, complete with courtyards and a very productive vege garden, then stepped outside to tour the town. We were immediately caught up in a wedding procession and ended up walking through the streets with the families, and being invited in for a feed. Everyone in the valley was like this: during our wanderings we were frequently invited in to family compounds for a cup of tea, or for a meal, the people being so friendly and welcoming. 
Shaxi was an important town on the old tea and horse caravan route, where tea from Yunnan was traded with horses from Tibet. Apparently it is the only surviving oasis on the old trail, and a huge restoration project began in 2000 to maintain the buildings and encourage ecotourism in the town. There is a temple complex and a theatre with stage, both of which required alot of work as they were wrecked during the cultural revolution. The explanation in the exhibit puts it better!!
In the valley they are mostly Bai people, with some Yi villages up in the hills. Everyone comes down to town each week on market day, which is Friday, and this market is huge!! There are separate markets for clothes, for fruit and vegetables, butchered meat, fresh fish, poultry, and right up the end of town there's a special enclosure for all the livestock. The main street is stacked end to end with stalls, some selling some mighty weird stuff like the mouldy tofu which has 2 inch thick hair on it!! 
Angela decided to get herself invited to a Yi village and was last seen heading for the hills on a three hour trek, straw basket on her back. I considered going as well, but decided instead to head on, then changed my mind and stayed another day in order to climb a mountain. Typical, huh?
More photos of 
The real highlight was walking through pine forest, with patches of wild azalea, gorgeous rock formations and blue blue sky. The dog from the guesthouse accompanied me the whole way, yes I thought of how much Hazel would have loved it, and I had made a new friend for life! The walk back down, through stands of eucalypt trees even made me feel a bit homesick, dog and all!
There's a great market just south of Old Town, and the place is beautifully lit up at night. But it's also cheek to jowl tourists and most of the houses are now shopfronts selling all sorts of tacky souvenirs so it feels airbrushed and not quite authentic. It does have excellent clean public toilets though! And the nightlife is hopping!
I cycled north of town for a few hours, visiting a village called Baisha which has become famous for a man called Dr Ho who is a physician of herbal medicine. He's been featured in all sorts of international documentaries, including Michael Palin's "Himalaya" and will happily show you all his business cards from his visitors. But he's also completely down to earth and a genuine healer, I particularly liked his "healthy tea", which he gave me a sample of. 
But Baisha too is scattered with rather pushy shopowners wanting you to buy their souvenirs. It was time to head off to a less touristed town and chill out.
This was the reason I decided to loop out of SE Asia into China, having found a reference to it in a magazine in North Sumatra, and it had been beckoning me ever since. So now here I was at last, off the bus from Shangri-La at 6pm, therefore avoiding paying the 50 Yuan entrance fee as the ticket office had closed. Good start.
We left at 10:30 after a massive breakfast, and began the steady climb to Naxi Guesthouse. From here it's a steep climb up the 28 bends to a superb lookout over the rapids in the upper gorge. If walking uphill isn't your thing, there are men with horses only too happy to transport you for a fee, or you can purchase some happy weed for helping you up those inclines!
Once over the bends the path descends some way and then becomes a traverse along the high path, with glorious views down to the river and the changing colours of the autumn vegetation. We stumbled into Halfway Guesthouse around 6pm, to stay in dormitories looking out on the most spectacular views of the mountains opposite. Even the toilets have views!
An early morning start got us down to the road, and Tina's Guesthouse, by 11am, where we breakfasted while watching the sun rise over the peaks opposite. I can highly recommend their hot chocolate!
Next was the descent to Tiger Leaping Stone, where a tiger is said to have leapt across the river. There's a number of paths, but we just took the one from Zhang's Guesthouse which was fairly painless, though steep in sections. Getting down to the river itself, and watching the power of the water through the rapids, was fantastic.
At the top, I parted ways with Jason and Ellie, who were heading back to Lijiang, while I was walking further down the gorge. I continued on to Sean's Guesthouse in Walnut Grove, where I shared the evening with a cycling tour group on an Oxfam fundraiser. It's strange to be amongst a group of people on a short holiday, whose minds are still irrevocably tied to their home lives and loved ones. It almost feels like being in a parallel universe.
The next morning I was actively discouraged from continuing further up the gorge, mainly because it would cost me lots of money to get back the other way (more on that later), and it wasn't very interesting. Well for a girl without a budget and with a stubborn wish to find out for myself, I headed off regardless. The walk is along a paved road, but this end gets little traffic as most tourists don't stray past the paths down from Tina's. I shared the road with a few trucks and minibuses and the occasional flock of goats. I passed small villages going about their daily lives, and got views of the much narrower lower gorge as the mountains recede and rice terraces stretch out into the distance.
After three hours I took a dirt track across terraced fields and down a dusty road to the river. The water is calmer here and a small ferry came to pick me up but I must pay 20 Yuan for the ferryman to take me across the mighty Yangtze to the other side. Expensive, but a wonderful way to end the trek.
It's a steep heartstarter to the top from the ferry berth, then a gentle stroll into Daju, where I stay at the Daju Inn. I am the only westerner in this tiny village, where the houses are made from mudbrick with stone foundations, and the walls are very thick. I am toasty warm wrapped up in my duvet overnight.
More 
If you take the bus back from Daju to Lijiang, the bus is stopped at the entrance to the National Park and a fee of 160 Yuan is extorted from you, despite having only traversed the park. This fee only applies to foreigners. But if I stop off in the park, and take the local bus back to Lijiang, this doesn't get stopped as there is an assumption that you've already paid. And after watching numerous Chinese tourists ignoring the signs and sampling pieces of lichen and funghi to take home, I wasn't too keen on paying a "Preservation fee".
I took a cablecar up to a spruce lined meadow, a perfect site for some wideangle shots of the mountains. But the real McCoy was another two bus rides and a 170 Yuan cablecar ride up to 4060m, then a 600m climb up steps in oxygen depleted air to the viewpoint at 4680m.
The town is predominantly Tibetan, with some more interesting outfits for me to photograph, and is surrounded by cute Tibetan villages and yaks grazing the fields. A bicycle ride north of town requires a little more effort at this altitude, but affords views of nearby mountains across a marshy wetland complete with waterbirds.
The greatest draw in Shangri-La is the Tibetan Monastery on a hill to the north. I had a lovely conversation with one monk, who showed me around, pointing out the various lamas and making disparaging comments about the Chinese government sponsored successor, whose photo must be displayed. His eyes lit up when I recognised the photo of the current Dalai Lama, and for that I got an apple to eat!
More 
To find an echo of the past it's easy to head to Green Lake Park in Kunming to watch the locals enjoying the sunshine, playing music on traditional instruments and singing old Chinese songs. While the oldies sit around reminiscing and screeching in falsetto, the youngsters mill around, draping themselves against pagodas or beside cherry blossom trees and taking photos on their mobile phones. No not much has changed!
Photos 
But it's hard to stay pissed off long, even with the exorbitant entry price, because the Stone Forest really is spectacular. Even though it was Sunday, the crowds weren't big and it was easy to lose yourself within the maze of karst peaks and feel like the place was all yours. There were traditional Sani dancing and singing performances, and places where you could dress up and have your photo taken (like would I do something that tacky??), and the ubiquitous souvenir shops and roaming ladies selling trinkets. But the star attraction of acres and acres of these limestone rocks made all those small annoyances totally trivial.
Judge for 
The night train to Lao Cai was uneventful, aside from running into two chaps I'd meant to go travelling with for a few days but had missed the meeting time due to a hangover. I swear I'm off the grog for a while! From Lao Cai it was just a short trip on the back of a motorbike then swiftly through immigration and over the bridge to China. Immigration was a breeze but the customs guys found my Lonely Planet Guidebook and promptly confiscated it. Something to do with the fact that Taiwan is coloured differently to China and there are anti-China comments regarding Tibet. Like get over it guys, you're a superpower now, who gives a shit what others think!
So I wasn't feeling too happy for myself by not hiding the guidebook better. But I had a rough itinerary written down so I at least had a plan. A nice chap from Kunming wrote down a few important phrases in Chinese which I am guarding with my life! And then I jumped onto the bus to Yuanyang. What LP says should take 4 hours, actually takes 7 hours, and then we were delayed 3 hours due to an accident between 2 trucks. But everyone on the bus was great, even sharing snacks, and occasionally swapping seats with the more tender stomached passengers. Poor souls, throwing their guts up on the bumpy roads.
Yuanyang is famous for its rice terraces, which are irrigated year round. The Hani people, more on them later, have fashioned them from the mountainsides over centuries. The walls are quite high, some look to be over 6-8 feet. They are unbelievably spectacular, particularly at sunrise and sunset, when they reflect the colours. I wasn't fortunate enough to see a colourful sunset but it was gobsmacking in its beauty regardless.
The Hani are the predominant minority group here, in fact I'd be hard pressed to spy a Han Chinese amongst the crowd. I scored big on my two days here, by being around for a market day and for some sort of event that looked to be a training session for an advertisement. Men were being instructed on the choreography of swinging a hoe, and the women were singing the jingle. I do hope they got paid more than the straw hats being passed out to keep the sun off!
The women wear very colourful clothes and head dresses. Some even wear funny hats. The kids wear hats covered in cheap silver and bells. And the market was full of all sorts of embroidery items as well as jackets and trousers. I could have bought myself an entire outfit, but the weight of them!!
The baby carriers were works of art, and what interested me was that they use cathedral quilting on them. Would be interesting to know the provenance of the technique!
I'm away tonight on a sleeper bus, one with beds, to Kunming. And maybe I can pick up another LP.