Photos of a Beautiful Isolated Hmong Village // Northern Laos
After our first stop in an isolated Khmu Village where I took these Joyful Portraits of Khmu Villagers, we continued hiking through the jungle to another isolated village, this time a Hmong Village, whose inhabitants are also known as Lao Theung, or “Laotian of the Mountain Slopes.”
According to Countrystudies.us, little is known about this specific group of people, and there are only “somewhat complete” ethnography reports on this population, and their language doesn’t have a written script. As with the Khmu village from my last post, Lao Theung people reside mostly on mountain sides, but in recent years some villages have been popping up in lower elevations.
In general Lao Theung villages are quite small. This village was made up of about 30 families. Most the men participate in hunting and gathering, and in this specific village there was a pond for fishing. Of the three different types of ethnic villages we visited, Lao Theung, are socially, economically, and politically the most marginal group of the three ethnic classes (countrystudies.com).
To learn more about this culture, you can read here.
The adventure hiking group I went with, Tiger Trails, works closely with this community to help sustain it through the costs of the hiking adventure. Prior to hiking groups coming through this village, they had rarely, if ever, encountered westerners.
