On the first morning of my trek I met my guide, Sook, at my hotel for breakfast. He was a good guy, very earnest, and just passable in English. More importantly, he was trilingual in Lao, Punoi, and Laosang, which would cover most of the areas in which we would be trekking. He also had a most irritating habit of laughing if he didn’t understand me and laughing again whenever I rephrased the question in simpler terms. We got along well though, and I avoided strangling him because he was such a nice guy. After breakfast we walked to the market where I picked up the two necessities of trekking - a flashlight for finding a convenient place for night time ablutions (toilets don’t exist in mountain villages, or any Lao villages for that matter) and
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