“That very morning, the day after my first night at their place, I knew.
I knew why these ancient cultures gave plants the souls of women. The entire village lived under her tyrannical and delightful charms.
The charms of the most dangerous: Opium.
We were outside of time, we were at her house, because without realizing it, after walking for a long time in the jungle without a path, I had crossed the border, I was in Burma, in Shan country.
Everything could change at any moment.
At that time, there was no other law in those mountains than that of General Khun Sa, than that of Opium and its traffickers.
The Akha village where I arrived was fortunately far from the camps of the Shan troops who controlled the opium trade at that time.
It was a sparsely populated jungle, where the Akha had cut down the forests to cultivate poppies.
It was the women who worked almost exclusively in the fields.
The men spent their days and nights lying down, their heads supported by tiny cushions, lulled by the sensual, almost feline purr of the opium pipe.
Opium is the most powerful of all the winds, it enters you like a little dream, likes to surprise you to better seduce you...and then the trap closes with each smoke, the wind in your head becomes more powerful, and ends up blowing everything away, there is nothing left of your mind.
You belong to him, your life belongs to him."

© Asia Slow Travel