Behind The Scenes: What’s it Like to Design a Walking Trail in Laos

Hi! It’s Sophie here from the Camino Women team.

Did you know that at Camino Women, we’re in the process of designing and launching a walking trail in Laos?

I wanted to share more with you, so I grabbed Lisa O’Donnell, our team lead for this project, to share her experience.

Okay, so we must start with the important question. Where did the Soum Son name even come from, if this is a new trail?

Lisa: Exactly, this is a new village-to-village trail that we designed with the help of the local community in Laos.

We talked to the local team to give us some suggestions for the name. There were a few options we were considering – such as an obvious ‘Village Walk’.

All of us discussed this and we also asked our Camino women to share their thoughts. Honestly, I cast my vote for the ‘Soum Son’ one, so I was happy it was the winner.

Soum Son directly translates to ‘Community Walk’. This is a community-focused project, so it completely made sense to me.

Why Laos?

Lisa: I thought that Laos was a great opportunity to do this type of thing.

For me, Laos is the most interesting country out of all the destinations that are reasonably close to Australia. It is less developed than other places in Southeast Asia and there is a lot of opportunity to create something special.

What’s it like there?

Lisa: I’ve been going back and forth to different Southeast Asian countries for almost 15 years now.

Laos is one of the countries that has still kept that magic that you expect from visiting these regions. Certainly, Luang Prabang hasn’t changed very much at all. It’s a UNESCO town, so there’s little change that they’re allowed to do.

What I love about the Lao people is that they’re very kind and very gentle. You don’t need to do hard bargaining when you’re shopping or anything like that. They’re more on the shy side. They’re very patient people, as well!

They’re also not hardcore tourism-driven. I think that’s because so many people in that country still live quite a simple life.

From day one, when I met the people from the villages that are going to be involved in this, they were just so welcoming, wanting to feed me and dance with me.

What I especially love in this area is that you have all three of the major peoples of Laos.

The villagers are just really excited about the trail. They see it as an opportunity that doesn’t come along often.

It’s so exciting to see that we can provide that.

You mentioned something about the three peoples of Laos. Could you tell me more about that?

Lisa: The three peoples of Laos are the Highland, Midland and the Lowland people, also known as the Lao people.

My understanding is that the Highland people were the first people in the Northern Laos area. They used to exist in the lowlands, but as the other groups came, they were pushed further up the mountain.

When the Lowlands – 60% of today’s population – came, the Highland people ended up in the highlands.

That is the hardest land to farm. It’s the least forgiving environment. They don’t even have running water. They actually have to transport water up the mountain whenever they need it, which is, obviously, a significant event.

In our case, they’ll need a lot more water because we’re bringing ladies who will still want to wash their faces and use somewhat of a normal working toilet. We’ll be paying those villages extra for this, as part of our overall contribution to their work.

So the question I was naturally asking is – how do they grow food without a water supply?

The answer is field rice, which doesn’t need water like the rice you see in the photos of rice paddies. They can only grow their rice once a year, so they focus a bit more on hardy vegetables that grow with less water.

Also, they have very spotty phone service. So they really don’t have much connectivity at all. In fact, the local team has been trying to solve this for a while, but none of the solutions they come up with have worked.

It’s gotten to the point that they’ve given up and now they get someone to walk up the mountain to deliver a message. It is a 4-hour walk just to get up there! Can you imagine that?

Religion-wise, they’re mostly Animists.

The Midland people are a mix of Animists and Buddhists. They also only grow rice once a year. However, they have more access to water, so they use the water version of growing rice.

The Lowland people, also known as the Lao people, have access to two seasons of growing rice.

So, the locals explained that this means they’re more wealthy. This is what wealth actually means in Laos: they grow one season of rice for eating, and they have another season of rice for selling.

Because they’re Lowlands, they’re closer to water and being closer to rivers means they’re closer to transport. This makes it easier for them to sell anything they might make.

Religion-wise, they are predominantly Buddhist.

Overall, this idea of three different peoples really captured my curiosity.

It really was such an experience to design this trail. Our guide who helped us put it all together, Mr Salee, worked very hard to help design this trail.

He’s a Highlander, but he lives in Luang Prabang. That’s where he gets his work. He has so much information to share about the plants and the area in general.

Were there any particular differences between any of the three village groups that really surprised you?

Lisa: Oh, yes. I have a perfect example. When a man and woman get married, if they are both Lowlanders, they go as a couple to live with the wife’s family. Technically, they say the wife is the boss – the wife gets her say on things!

It’s the other way around with Highlanders. So, a man and a woman marry, they go to live in the man’s village. There’s more of a male role in deciding what happens family-wise.

Whereas the Midland people, it doesn’t matter either way.

There was a bit of banter and teasing between the staff about that while I was there, and I said, “What’s this about?” and they explained: ‘Because he’s a Lowlander, his wife is the boss. He never gets to make his own decisions.’

So, what has it been like working with Mr Salee and the rest of the local crew?

Lisa: Every time I speak with Mr Salee, I ask him lots of questions to learn from him and to get a bigger picture of the history and the religions. Every time I’m with him, I learn something new.

The last time I was there, a group of us, including Mr Salee, went out on motorbikes to see the conditions of the trail. We followed little dirt roads through forests and jungles.

Mr Salee explained how the forest in many areas used to be farmland – where they farmed rice. Then, they let it go and let nature overtake it again.

On the other hand, the jungle has been left pristine for a long time and they’re just taking the occasional tree out and nothing more.

You mentioned that Mr Salee was one of the people who helped create the trail, right?

He is one of our adventure guides from Laos.

Overall, the guiding community in Laos holds him in extremely high regard. I was incredibly impressed with how he was always there by my side, and always seemed to know exactly what to do.

For example, I remember when a mosquito-sized bug blew into my eye. I’m going, ‘Hey guys, I got a bug in my eye that’s not leaving. Can someone help, please?’

There’s a couple of people looking, going: ‘Maybe if we get some water?’

Mr Salee just comes through, and he goes, ‘Let me look after Lisa!’ He moved everyone out of the way and opened up my eye. I felt this big blow of air. The bug came out and it was gone – just like that.

Now, that’s a guide I’d love to have by my side on every trip I take!

Because he is a Highlander, he understands the jungle so much. So, he will say, ‘See this mushroom that’s growing wild here? You can eat this mushroom. Look over there! You can get water from here.”

He even knew that there was a particular fern-type plant that – if you bend it, you can blow bubbles with it!

We’re very lucky to have him. The ladies are going to hear and learn so much. He’s got this incredible wealth of knowledge – he can continue to teach the other guides who will be running the tracks as well.

Why did you choose to make a trail in Northern Laos? What makes that part of the country special?

Lisa: Because I’d been to Cambodia and Laos, both on my honeymoon, I knew right away that the development of Laos needed more care and more love.

In general, if you want to do a hiking trip, you should do it in the northern part of Laos. There, you’ll meet different ethnic communities.

From a community development perspective, they need the most assistance because they’re more remote.
We decided we could make more of a difference by focusing on those areas.

When you say ‘make a difference’, how exactly do you hope designing a new trail is going to influence the locals?

I think what’s really important is that we have to be careful not to completely change their world.

Let me give you an example.

Imagine, when COVID hit, that this whole area was solely sustained by tourism. They would have been in a terrible situation, when no tourists could come for a long time.

We want to make sure that we can supplement their income, but imagine if we gave them so much work that they stopped preparing for their daily living needs?

It’s really important that we grow this with a sustainable ideal – help them improve their lives by having a secondary income.

It’s important, on the other hand, not to bring our pre-conceived ideas of what we think the locals need. So, we’ve reached out to the villages and asked them just that! “What do you need?”

Two of the villages were really keen to get exercise books for the schools. So, we’ve made a donation for that.

We’re still waiting to be sure about what the mountain village wants. The local team feels like some long-term food supplies that can sit for months could be a good idea, in the case of food insecurity.

So, that’s a starting point of assistance. As we grow in understanding with the villages – and they begin to hopefully embrace us as well – it’s really important that we listen to them. We’re not going to come at them with the mentality of ‘now you sit down, and we will help you.’ I would hope the world has moved on from that.

So, what else have you been doing to get the villages ready?

Lisa: Well, we already have training set up.

Over Christmas time, all three villages were going through food handling and hygiene training so that they’ve got all those skills ready to greet our guests.

Of course, that is overseen by our guide as well, because it will be a little while until they get this down. We’re just not going to train them and then leave them be. It’s going to be overseen and managed by someone who understands what needs to be done.

The trekking season is actually quite short because of the weather.

We’re looking at trips from October probably to the end of February – maybe a smidge into March. By late March, it’s starting to get pretty hot, and they start burning the fields for rice production. We need to avoid anything outside of that little window.

We’ve agreed on initially two departures a month for the first full season. The villages feel comfortable with that idea. Later, we can sit down together again and go, ‘Okay, how did you feel about that? Do you think you can do an extra couple of departures?’

They all harvest their rice and vegetables at different times of the season. That’s why they need to think about whether it’s too much of a work drain on their workforce.

It needs to evolve the right way for them.

What else needs to be done?

So, one thing that you’d never think would be a problem, but is a huge problem in the world of community tourism, is marketing.

NGOs come into communities all the time, set up a project and then it goes to waste because no one visits it. The projects need marketing!

Marketing is this dirty term in some circles, but without it, you won’t actually get any of the benefits of building the project.

That’s one of the things that made me happiest about joining Leatherback Travel. (Ed: Leatherback Travel is the parent company of Camino Women.) Our CEO, Mat Newton, doesn’t have much exposure to community tourism in Southeast Asia, but as soon as I explained the problem to him, he got it straight away.

That’s been one of the most rewarding things about this project – I’m getting the resources and discretion to run things how they should be run, without some corporate team in Sydney meddling with things.

Leatherback is really good at setting expectations and telling people’s stories. We share stories about the people that our guests are going to visit. That’s the purpose of this conversation, right? Our guests know what to expect and they understand why we put so much energy and love into what we’re doing.

In this case, obviously, we’re talking about Camino Women. We’ve always known that Camino Women was going to be a very important vehicle for taking guests to remote areas. When we were considering our first project like this, it was never in any doubt that I was going to be doing it with the Camino Women team.

What kind of challenges would an Aussie or a Kiwi have during this adventure?

Lisa: They need to come with what I would call a ‘camping attitude’. Everything on the overall trip – aside from the trail is – really lovely, comfortable, three-star accommodation.

Some of it’s quite remote, but you’ve still got your electricity and your good food. However, focusing on the trail part of the itinerary, you have to come with a camping mindset. Even though you’re staying in people’s village homes, your toilets will be outside.

You need to respect the water, as I said earlier, particularly up in the mountains. You may only get to have a little bird bath or a bucket over your head as a wash at the end of the day.

You’ll be billeted out to families. So go grab that with both hands! Get in there and see if you can help with preparing dinner and spend that time connecting with your host families.

You’re going to spend time and swap stories with your group the next day.

So use that small window of time – before you go to sleep in the village and when you wake up in the morning and breakfast is being prepared. That’s your chance to dive in and really experience what life is like for that host family.

Thank you, Lisa! I can’t wait to meet the Lao people in person!

Sophie, what I really love about this is that you are going to go with the first group.

I’ve done my part in meeting the community, asking questions, and turning all that into something tangible.

I could train to do that walk, but I couldn’t do the mountain part at this point in time.

So, now it’s your turn. You are going to be there for the opening and see the trail first-hand. I think it’s wonderful teamwork!