I’d learned from my last visit to Bangkok that I really do enjoy taking tours. It’s ironic: as a tour guide, I’m reluctant to enlist someone else to show me around a place, but I also know the value of having a local’s perspective.

Most tourists to Luang Prabang visit the area’s waterfalls and caves. It is also the jumping off point for the two day slow boat trip on the Mekong river. Having done the river trip on my last visit, I opted to try one of the more unique tours I saw offered, working on a rice farm.

We were picked up at our individual accommodations, and I immediately befriended the two younger travelers who were on my tour that day. That is one of my favorite things about joining a tour: meeting other travelers. In fact we did go on to meet up with one other in the next town for more exploration before heading our separate ways.

Is there an appropriate time for cultural appropriation?

Upon our arrival at Living Land Farms, we were given the conical hats you’ve seen in any photos of Asia’s farm land. Donning the hat seemed a requirement, almost like wearing a helmet when cycling, but there was a strong tinge of resistance given the fuss over cultural appropriation in the United States.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with a Vietnamese shop girl I met in Seattle. I was telling her that I bought one of the conical shaped hats in Mexico as it seemed perfectly designed to keep the sun off my head and neck, but I wasn’t quite bold enough to try wearing it in public. She replied, “I’m Asian, and even I wouldn’t feel comfortable wearing that hat”.

Overcoming my reluctance, since I’d be the only one not wearing the hat, I fitted it to my head, and moved on to enjoy my experience. We were seated on the second floor of a two story wooden building constructed primarily out of bamboo. They served us tea which was steeped in a small basket woven from the same leaves that made up the roof of the building.

The 14 steps of rice harvesting

As we sipped out beverages, our guide explained that we would participate in all thirteen steps of rice production that day. He reassured us that we would not end on an unlucky number as the 14th step would be eating the rice.

He took us into a room with all sorts of archaic tools and challenged us to guess what each was for before demonstrating its use. It was then that we learned he had a great sense of humor. He showed us the rat trap that farmers not only used to get rid of the pests, but explained how the rats provided a source of food for the farmer while he was waiting for the rice to grow.

After seeing the tools used in rice harvesting, we were taken outside and shown how to separate the good seeds from the bad. First he put an egg in a bowl of water, and we watched it sink to the bottom. He took it out, added some salt, and stirred the water a bit. A second time he put the egg in, and it floated on the top. He added a handful of seeds into the water, and showed us how the heavy ones sank to the bottom. He was then easily able to remove the buoyant, less viable ones from the water.

Getting dirty

We were each given a handful of seeds and headed out to the rice paddy for planting. The first order of business, he said, was to remove our shoes. No matter what footwear you wore, it was almost certain to be swallowed by the viscous gray mud when you tried to lift your foot. I didn’t mind at all since the mud was extremely fine and massaged your feet as it oozed around them. The most challenging part would be to try to get out of the paddy.

Following his lead, we made a little mound of mud and sprinkled our seeds on top. We then covered it over with a thin layer of mud like frosting a cake with your hands. We would spend a good deal of our morning dipping our hands in the water in repeated attempts to remove the mud.

Next to our newly planted seeds were stalks of rice growing, likely planted by previous tourists. Our guide pulled small starter bunches, and handed one to each of us. He said that, like carrots, the stalks needed to be thinned out once they started growing and that we would plant ours in a fresh paddy, but first we had to prepare the paddy for planting.

If nothing else prompted me to sign up for this tour, it was the vision of me plunging through mud behind a buffalo, and finally the time came. Our guide led us individually into the paddy, and had us grasp the handle of the plow. He assured us that we didn’t need to push, and that all our effort would be concentrated on not falling into the mud. It was shocking the speed with which the buffalo made its way through the paddy once it began moving, and we spent our turns racing to keep up with it without leaving our legs behind in the sticky gray soup.

The buffalo really did all the work. It was simply our job to keep the plow upright, and we all managed to do it without plunging into the mud. In just 10 minutes, we had finished plowing and all stepped in to plant our starter stalks. We planted the 3 inch wide starters about six inches apart, and it looked like a bald man’s hair implants when we stepped back to reflect on our work.

Our guide explained that the starters would grow for about a month in the paddy before being transplanted again to another paddy for their final 3 months of growing to maturity. Since we only had the morning, we walked to a paddy with mature stalks ready to be harvested.

Harvest time

We were handed a sharpened sickle and instructed to grab a handful of the stalk and cut it about 3 inches from the ground by pulling the sickle away from us. Given its sharpness, I was glad that the cutting was made away from us. The curved blade was ideally designed for this purpose.

We took our stalks and headed back to the main building, where we laid them on racks to dry in the sun. Again fast forwarding the process, he handed us already dried stalks and showed us how to remove the bran from the stalk. The process involved lifting the stalk above our heads and then striking it against an angled piece of wood at our feet. As the stalk hit the wood, the bran dislodged across the floor.

To separate the unusable bran, we winnowed the pile using a fan that had been thatched together from the rice stalks. Both the threshing and the winnowing were skills that none of us could mimic with the proficiency of our tour guide. His experience was displayed in the confidence of his efforts and the fruits of his labor. Gathering the bran into brackets was at least one task in which we were his equal. Our pride would not last long.

The next step in the process is to separate the rice from the husk. The milling process is done using a contraption that looks like an oversized hammer with a very long handle. The bran is placed in a stone bowl, and the hammer is brought down upon it by stepping on the other end. Certainly easier to use your legs than your arms, but as we learned, it was not something one does correctly the first time.

While we struggled to get our rhythm with the hammer, our guide operated it rhythmically alternating between feet, his movement looking more like a dance than work. My effort to repeat this was in vain, and I was lucky if I could even maintain consistent hammering.

Once the husk and grain were broken, they needed to be separated using a process that is about as challenging as flipping an omelet in a pan without using a spatula. We used a wide shallow basket to toss the rice into the air, at the same time trying to get the heavy grains to land on a different part of the basket so it could be easily separated from the husk. We were told that a woman who could do this well would secure a good husband. Perhaps this was one of the reasons none of us mastered the skill.

No part of the plant is wasted in traditional harvesting, and we took the husks to a grinder where they could be made into flour using a grinding stone. All we needed to do in order to operate the machine was to push and pull on a long rod, but we found the weight of the stone to be a challenge. Though our guide moved the grinding stone like a turntable, we struggled to break the inertia of the stones with any consistency. Fortunately, no one was relying on us to produce the flour that would be used to make rice milk.

The final two steps in processing were soaking and cooking the rice, but even that presented a challenge none of us was willing to take on. Our guide presented us a woven basket filled with rice that was being slowly steamed with rice that had been previously soaked for two hours.

He hoisted the basket with about three quarts of rice in it and asked if any of us had flipped rice. While one of our group had, she said she was uncomfortable flipping that volume of rice, especially when it was the very same that we were hoping to enjoy for lunch.

Chow time

A few hours after we began our accelerated class on rice processing, we got to enjoy the fruits of our labor. Well, not all of us. The rice harvesting experience had cost $40, and for $10 more, lunch was included. Given that a good meal in Laos typically costs $2, I’d opted to feed myself lunch later, and once the tour was finished, they were eager to help me do that.

Only one other participant had opted out of the lunch, for the same reason as me, and they seated us away from those who’d paid for lunch. We were brought a plate or rice crackers and dip while the others enjoyed platters of food. To add to the discrimination, the third person in our group, who’d paid for her lunch, was seated by herself, apart from us with a tablecloth while we were left to off a naked wood table.

After everyone was served, our host came and told us to let him know when we were ready to leave. We asked if we were to be taken home separately from the rest of the group, and he indicated yes. We were enjoying our crackers and laughing about the demonstrative bias until he returned 5 minutes late and asked if we were ready to leave yet. We flashed an understanding look at each other and got up to leave.

On the way back to our hostels, we mused on what surreptitious presentation the others were experiencing that we were not allowed to know about. It didn’t really matter. We knew that the lunch was really overpriced, but the experience of harvesting rice was money well spent!

Here’s a video of the whole process: