The Reality of Village Life

[The_Traveler]

If you see pictures of tribal villages and they are neat and well swept and the people are freshly washed and neat, it's a fake.

Village life is difficult and hard, there is little or no running water and there is no push for neatness or smoothness or any of the things that we in the West believe are so vital. These people are poor, they work really hard at backbreaking chores and there isn't much energy or interest left for fixing things up.

Another thing that is totally fake are these so-called 'treks'. A group of Westerners gets walked up and down hills and end up in villages that are relatively close to passable roads.

We drove into this village just as a 'trek' group left to walk back several hours to the very place we started a 20 minute drive away.

This is a White Tai village (I think) near Muang Sing in northern Laos.