Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 21, 2025
The hills above Phete are bare or thinly forested and every available inch of level ground is under cultivation with corn and a few rice paddys near the creek; the latter were a great surprise, for we had not expected to find rice so far north. The village itself was exceedingly picturesque but never have we met people of such utter and hopeless stupidity as its inhabitants.
They were exceedingly shy at first, watching us with side glances and through cracks in the wall. Wu learned that we were the first white persons they had ever seen. I imagine that much of their unhealthiness was due to too close intermarriage, for these families had little intercourse with the people in Phete who were only "a few steps" away.
One of them was Phete and it seemed that we would reach the village in half an hour at least, but the road wound so tortuously around the hillside, down to the stream and up again that it was an hour and a half before we found a camping place on a narrow terrace a short distance from the nearest houses.
In Yün-nan, however, animals do most of the pack carrying, and coolies protest at even an ordinary load. We left Phete in the early morning and camped about five hundred feet above the hunter's cabin in a beautiful little meadow.
The Chinese guide finally persuaded the people of the genuineness of our money and we purchased a few eggs and a little very delicious wild honey besides the sheep. These people as well as those of Phete spoke the Li-chiang dialect but with such variation that even our mafus could understand them only with the greatest difficulty.
A steep trail led up the valley and after three hours of steady riding we reached the hunter's village of three large houses on a flat strip of cleared ground in the midst of a dense forest. The people looked much like those of Phete but were rather anemic specimens, and five out of eight had enormous goiters.
At most we could not develop more than three hundred feet in an afternoon and we never breathed freely until it finally was dried and safely stored away in the tin cans. We left Habala, on November 23, for a village called Phete where the natives had assured us we would find good hunters with dogs.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking