Muang Sing is a crossroads in the far north of Laos, hard up against Yunnan, China and the Burmese frontier. Until just a few years ago, Muang Sing hosted one of the largest opium markets in Asia, with tribesmen from the hills selling sacks of raw opium to middle-men representing one of the heroin refineries on the Mekong. 

Nowadays the opium trade is nearly extinct in this corner of the Golden Triangle.  Heroin production has shifted to Afghanistan, which offers the ideal blend of war-lord politics and rural poverty, plus easy access to European markets.

The large poppy fields may have given way to rubber plantations, but some elderly addicts continue to cultivate a few plants for personal use. 

Old women sometimes hissed “Opium?  Opium?” at me in villages outside of town, and one wizened street hustler showed me a small stash of black paste underneath the bracelets she was selling. 

 There’s a golden temple on a hilltop outside of Muang Sing where the Adam’s apple of Buddha in entombed.  On the full moon of the 12^th lunar month the sacred hilltop is the scene of a festival that draws villagers who represent over a dozen distinct ethnic groups from the surrounding hills. 

Although the Muang Sing festival is ostensibly a religious event, the atmosphere reminded me of the West Virginia state fair, which I attended a few years ago during a road-trip from D.C. to Louisiana.

Both carnivals attracted a slew of festive yokels, along with sharp-eyed carnies in town to prey on the rubes.  In West Virginia, vendors hawked cotton candy and kettle corn; in Muang Sing the local delicacies were grilled chicken feet and sweet sticky rice baked in a bamboo tube.

Some of the carnival games were the same.  Pop a balloon with a dart to win a prize.  Place bets on homemade roulette wheels.  There was even a freak show of sorts, a circle concealed by hanging tarps where, for 5,000 kip, I watched a man pick up a heavy bucket of water with his mouth and shuffle around for a minute or two.

The most popular vendors were the enterprising Chinese tradesmen who sold a variety of plastic guns.  By evening, nearly every boy between the age of 3 and 13 was brandishing a silver pistol, pump action shotgun or scarily realistic AK-47. 

Even the novice monks couldn’t resist the array of weaponry, sneaking away from the temple to buy cheap air rifles that shot plastic pellets.  That night, back in town, two barefoot monk brigades chased each other down the main drag, giggling and yelling KaPow, KaPow, KaPow. 

The next morning it was cold enough to see my breath during the walk to the bus terminal, where I caught a mini-bus over the mountains to Luang Namtha.  At one stop, in a mountain village just beyond the pass, an ill-tempered old lady tried to sell us a freshly killed civet cat, cursing and spitting when none of the passengers showed interest.