As luck has it, we arrived safely in JingHong, Xishuangbanna on a Lucky Air flight from KunMing

I think this may be wild Black Snub-nosed Langur (Pygathrix bieti) in the Yunnan Wild Elephant Reserve in Xishuangbanna. Her black mate was in the tree above and she was chasing Brian who was on my head while I was taking his photo; while keeping Daisy at bay on the other side of the bridge over the river.

On our long hunt for wild elephants we found a lot of things including their footprints and dung all over the place, but no elephants. Possibly we had better hunt at night?

JingJi is the chinese name for this bird which translates to some kind of muliti collored crystal chicken. The bird is very wild and dies quickly in capativity. Daisy knows because her uncle catches them in the mountains of her home town and sells them -- in spite of everyone's objections. I lost my bird book and can not find his english name. Looks like a pheasant?

We traveled all day to XiDing in western XiShuangBanNa to get away from the more touristic areas. There were poinsettia tree growing wildly all across XiShuangBanNa and Laos too. Appropriately, XiDing translates to “decisively west” in Mandarin. and despite what the tourist guide books say about XiShuangBanNa translating to “a land of magic and dreams” in the Dai Minority language, it actually means “12 rice fields”.

Traditionally, the Blang people considered teeth blackened by chewing betel nuts a beauty characteristic. The houses of the Blang are made out of bamboo or hard woods and consist of two floors. The first floor is designed as a warehouse for food and a stable for livestock animals, such as chickens, whereas the second is designed to house the family. Smoke from the kitchen fire in the house goes up through cracks in the tile roof, and it is a beautiful site to see smoking roofs on a cold day.

BuLang represent a small minority with a total population of about 90,000 mainly in southern YunNan and Laos. We stayed in a house in one of their villages and did a lot of hiking in the surrounding mountains.

Here, animals outnumber people and the sounds day and night are evidence, people work on tea and sugar cane farms, and make thier houses of hard woods, and everything else from bamboo.

A Hani Zu woman and child in the XiDing town market - The Hani ethnic group shares the same origin with the Yi and Lahu ethnic groups. They all evolved from the ancient Qiang people. The Qiang people used to be a nomadic tribe living in the Qinghai-Tibet plateau. Later one branch of them moved south and early by the 3rd century, their forefathers had inhabited the swampland along the Dadu River and Yalong River. In the 7th century, they immigrated into the area near Mt. Ailao and Mt. Wuliang. In the Tang and Song dynasties, the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms successively reined in this area. The Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) established a prefecture to rule the Hani and other ethnic groups in Yunnan. The Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) exercised its rule through local chieftains, who were granted official posts. During the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) court officials replaced the chieftains. The Hani Zu language is not scripted and is written as notches carved on sticks.

Hani Zu minority in a village where we stopped to hike for a while because we got tired of driving.

Brian did a great job on this trip and really grew up a lot. With just 4 teeth, Brian will eat just about any food now, and on this trip he learned to speak with birds.

The Dai minority is very much related to most of the population of Thailand which explains why water fighting is a major holiday event across a lot of China. Almost every Dai house is built on stilts has a weaving machine set-up under it. I took this photo for Katharine who is interested in weaving and knitting.

We were told the Jinuo tribe worships just the head of the cow and can eat the rest, which seems a lot more practical than making the whole cow sacred. Also, for a man to marry, he needs to kill a buffalo with his bare hands and just a bamboo stick, and the heads laying around are a symbol of the number of guys that successfully married. We were looking for the reciprocal people heads in the cow pasture for the guys who did not marry, but did not find it.

The Jinuo tribe was discovered in Yunnan’s southern rain forests in the 1950’s with a population then of about 8000 persons. The Juno are animists (animists believe that all things on earth have souls, or spirits, whereas non-animists distiguish between the animate, which can have a spirit, and the inanimate, which can't) and, like Taoists, worship their ancestors. The Jinuo are especially sun worshippers. The sun-drum is a sacred musical instrument in Jinuo culture. Each Jinuo village has two sun-drums, the Father Drum and the Mother Drum, which are the embodiment of the divine spirits and which therefore may not be handled except during sacred ceremonies. Unfortunately, Brian and I read the above only after we returned to Hong Kong and well after we banged the Sun-Drum and did the sun-drum dance.

Jinuo, like the Dai are also weavers and, like the Hani, their written language is not scripted, but rather notched on sticks.

Brian learned to stand up after on his own on Jinuo Mountain after banging the sun-drum hard and loud.

In the Xishuangbanna origional rain forest protection area, the Jinuo kids have turned the nature walk into something really exciting, and play their part as a recently discovered primitative tribe well, also in the chinese spirit of earning a living.

Jinuo women are beautified by large holes in their ears. Like the BuLang tribe, women with pitch black teeth, blackened beyond total darkness by the pitch of trees, are considered beautiful.

The roots of the largest fichus tree in the rainforest.

Daisy and Brian at the temple in JingHong city

The hotel in JingHong did not have a bath tub.

After we crossed the boarder into Laos, there were no more shows for tourism and things got more layed back.

Previous photo - close up.

The Mang minority in northern Laos are actually the same as the Miao minority in China who are especially prevelant in GuiZhou which is Daisy's home provience. Their dress is very similar.

In Laos, people celebrate the solar new year and the kids dress traditionally and play catch with bean bags in their villages to find their destiny in the form of a boy friend. Boys stop by and play catch for the same thing. We saw this mile after mile along the road and played a little catch ourselves.

Every so often a one year old on a thousand mile drive goes berserk and we need to stop and go for a walk and change his diapers. This was one of those stops and I just snapped a shot of the back side of a house where they had hung their dinner tables and cooking pots.

We spent new years in Muang Xai, Laos. Brian experiened a lot of new environments.

Kids riding their bikes in ther underwear with a sling shot arond the head in the middle of nowhere.

Gambeling is a tradition on New Years day.

Time can stand still in Laos -- We had lunch at a roadside resturant and noticed a Happy New year 2010 poster on the wall, yet this was already New Year's day, 2012.

A temple in Louangphabang

The royal palace in Louangphabang. The king here used to drive a Continental with a red license plate and simple an engraved elephant on it, and undoubtedly got no parking tickets. We also noticed an old motorboat with a 35hp Johnson outboard that looked a lot like Wickeyup in the palace garage. In the main house there was no photography allowed, yet it is memorable so it should be ok :-)

The temple at the top of the mountain in Louangphabang.

If we were not born into the countries and families that we were born into, probability is high that we would be doing this every day at work instead of e-Mail and typing on Microsoft.

Local kids playing and swiming in the Luang Xi travertine waterfalls south of Louangprabang.

We arrived here late in the day and the sunlight was a lot of fun.

The Mekong river at Loungphabang. Brian and I completely filled it with rocks back in JingHong, Xishuangbanna, but it seems some water seeped back into it before it got here.

Many hundereds of monks come out for food from the locals at about 6am each morning.

A road side diaper change stop. I we did a bit of playing in the dirt for a while, and topped it off with some hiking before we could get back into our grueling auto and continue on the winding bumpy long drive.

Daisy and Brian with our driver from China, Guo ShiFu. Guo ShiFu drove us all the way from JingHong to Vientiane.

Daisy cooking food for Brian in a roadside resturant.

The mountains about an hour before Vang Vieng

Brian learned to stand up on this mountain top, in Laos.

The sickness I had in Vang Vieng was worse than any food poisoning I had ever experienced. I went to the doctor who charged $5 USD and told me I had toxic food poisoning, and a fever from dehydration and prescribed mineral water, which the hospital pharmacy then provided for another dollar.

The blue lagoon is very blue, and full of fish.

A boat ride on the Song River in Vang Vieng

Brian after about a thousand miles driving.

From our hotel on the Song river in Vang Vieng

And this is our traveling family, out of focus, including Guo Shi Fu, just before we got to Vientaine and then took a flight through Bangkok to Hong Kong.