Double Whammy - Part 2! (finally updated/finished)

So before I get onto part 2, I forgot to mention that we got our washing around 8am this morning (rather than 10pm last night). It turned out we collectively gave them 50kg of washing and it was all done in one night, one washing machine and one dryer! Impressive.

So after lunch we ditched the bikes, got changed in a pit toilet and headed off on the trek to the Mong Village at the top of the mountain. We were at about 300m and got up to 1500m. It was 32degrees and about 90% humidity. Needless to say it was a slow difficult climb, but we all made it including Haans who is 71 and has had a double by-pass!

The children were very cute and very shy at first. There are rules amongst the Mong tribes that you can't marry within but by golly you don't have to stop pro-creating! There were kids everywhere. I sat with one of the teenage girls while she crafted/weaved sections of roof for a new building. The building we stayed in had two sleeping rooms with a plank bed. It was rough! Our guides made us Larb from scratch, mincing the meat themselves by chopping it repeatedly.

The Larb we had was beef based with thai corriander, mint, lemon grass, onion, spring onions and stalks and the secret ingrediant in this one...Banana Tree Flowers. On their own, they taste terrible and from the villages apparently they taste worse. However, the wild ones when cooked up in this dish are amazing. Our local guides were also our cooks and incredible at weilding a knife to cut things free hand (no board although they did have one for the meat and smaller herbs). As Lauren, Sam and I sat with them, they told us the origin of Larb and its name. The King was calling on a village and the family he was visiting was in a panic as to what to make. They killed some chicken (Larb can be done with Pork, Chicken or Beef and sometimes Tofu but that is more western) and cut up herbs, minced the meat and combined it with salt and peper and other flavours they could scrounge up and served it all to the King. The King was amazed with the flavour and asked what the dish was called. There was no answer and so he named it Larb which means Lucky Food.

It was a long night, but well worth the trek. We curled up on the wood slats and nodded off as best we could. There was a slight mix up with our bedding that being each side thought the other was bringing it. The girls scored from the locals 3 pillows, 2 blankets and some thin mattresses (kinda like doona thickness). The boys got 2 blankets and some matresses (less and thinner than the girls!).