The Southeast Asia Travel Specialists Since 1999
Although certain purists may turn their noses up, some of the Flower Hmong gear to be seen on show these days at local markets such as Vietnam’s Bac Ha Sunday Market is quite remarkable. (The colourful Flower Hmong of Bac Ha are a subgroup of the Hmong ethnic group – in Vietnam often spelt H’Mong – who inhabit the area…
Hill-tribes in Southeast Asia. You’ll have me across the term ‘hill-tribe’ in many of our Southeast Asia tour pages, or indeed those of most other operators running tours in the region, or for that matter in most of the relevant guide books you’ll find, and refers to the minority ethnic groups inhabiting the mountainous areas of northern Thailand, Laos, Vietnam,…
The term Tai describes the broad ethnic group (the Tai-Kadai linguistic family) which includes the Thai (Siamese), Lao, Shan, Northern Thai, Thai Lu, Red Tai, White Tai etc who occupy a wide band of Asia from the Assam region of India, through southern China, Burma’s Shan States, Laos, Northern Vietnam and of course Thailand itself. We touched on the migration…
We’re hoping that an upcoming addition to All Points East’s range of Thai destinations will be the far northern mountain province of Mae Hong Son. We’ve been trying to work out how to include this picturesque, yet remote region into our Thai tours but have finally realised it’s impossible given time restraints and that we may as well, therefore, make…
Not only is the UNESCO World Heritage site of Yuanyang’s rice terraces truly spectacular but the town itself would be well worth a visit in its own right even if the surrounding scenery was totally mundane. The bustling little market town – perched on a mountain top – is the main commercial and social site for all the surrounding Hani…
The tiny mountain-top town of Yuanyang lies just south of the steep Red River Valley in the southern reaches of Yunnan Province, not far from the Vietnamese border. Actually been there 3 times without seeing another foreign tourist, yet it is one of the most spectacular, and certainly photogenic landscapes in that part of the world! The rice terraces have…
Although the ambulant Akha street vendors of Khao San, Tha Pae Gate and other tourist hot spots are very successful and the Lisus in Pai night market do well in the high season, across Southeast Asia it’s the enterprising and commercially minded Hmong that dominate the hill-tribe handicraft market. Their bright colours and bold patterns can be and have been,…
Below, a photo fo a Flower Hmong girl taken at Bac Ha’s Sunday Market. Don’t intend to be patronising – these guys have as much right to a cellphone as anyone – but it does look incongruous next to their centuries-old traditional costumes! The ‘Flower Hmong’ or ‘Variegated Hmong’ is one of the numerous sub groups of the Hmong ethnic…