“I will never forget the day of my first encounter with the Akha people, it was forty years ago, in the mountains of the Golden Triangle.

That morning, in the north of Chiang Rai, I mistakenly took a path into the jungle, And I got lost.

The night was beginning to pull me towards it, to take me.

To take me, as one takes a last-minute guest, when nothing is ready to receive him, and the jungle, which until then seemed to me to be an ally, began to transform silently into another world.

A world about which we know nothing, the sounds, the smells, a world where we are no longer in control of anything.

A slight noise, like a breath of wind on the leaves, and we were face to face, he and I.

The Akha hunter was a meter away from me, his eyes locked on mine.

Persian poets say that the eyes are the mirror of the soul, and he and I knew, with a simple glance, that we came from another world, a totally unknown world.

There was something unforgettable in his gaze.

Something I had never seen before, in any look, a coherence, a self-assurance, everything was certainty, doubt did not exist.

He indicated to me, with a swing of his hand, the beginning of a path, which the night was beginning to eat in silence, gently placing his other hand on the butt of his rifle, worn by too many monsoons, then he disappeared into the night.

The spirit gate that marks the entrance to the place still stood out a little from the black sky when I arrived at the village; by instinct or by fear, I went around the path of the spirits, guided by the primitive statues, whose gaze was unambiguous.

And in an instant, as if falling from a cloud into a forgotten ocean, I had arrived at the village lost in the mountains, an Akha village, where I would have to find shelter for the night. 

© Asia Slow Travel