If there's a Holy Grail of the travel world, it's the untouched village. Travelers have fetishsized this concept — a distant, isolated town where foreigners are unknown — for ages. The only sure requirement is seclusion: you have to be able to say, "I was the first Westerner they ever saw."

In an age of cheap airfares and increasing affluence, the untouched village is getting rarer and rarer. The closest I've found is Muang Noi, in northern Laos, and a quick google search reveals even that little heaven has been 'discovered.' Of course it has. There were guesthouses when I visited.

But visiting, which at the time could only be done via an expensive boat trip up the Mekong River, was such an ordeal as to give Muang Noi a distant, end of the world quality, an atmosphere cemented by its natural surroundings: one of the most beautiful valleys in Southeast Asia. In either direction were dark green mountains, tufted under innumerable layers of jungle overgrowth. They were broken by the occasional bare rock face or upthrust limestone mountains, which seemed to have emerged from the impressionist imagination of a Chinese silk scroll painter.

The narrow mud walkways between the thatch huts were decorated with the detritus of the area's bloody history: spent bomb casings from the Vietnam War and the not-so-secret bombing of Laos sideshow, a show of force by the U.S. Air Force aimed at destroying the nearby Ho Chi Minh Trail. The Air Force failed in this regard, but it did manage to provide enough dud ordinance to provide all of Mung Noi with makeshift pathway steps and flower pots. Surrealness is a hollowed out shell filled with garden mulch and frangipani.

At night, Muang Noi was dead, in the most alive way imaginable. The night sky was like looking through the window of a space shuttle; the stars were immediate, countless and bright. The mountains and river were cool, black and ominous, and the jungle was screaming with bird song and the chorus of a nocturnal drama played out between bats, owls, panthers, monkeys and tigers. The next day, while I was hiking in the surrounding hills, a hunter emerged from the jungle: naked to the waist, as dark brown as a chocolate bar, an ancient rifle slung over his shoulder and a clutch of dead, black squirrels hanging from the barrel. He smiled, his teeth bright against his wooden face.

In the flicker of a candle-lit dinner of a duck slaughtered an hour earlier, I asked my guide, who had accompanied me six hours upriver from Luang Prabang, about the future of Muang Noi. As he began to reply, a cow bell thunked in the darkness.

"The people here are about to decide. They are meeting now — the bell is calling them — to discuss if the tourists are worth it. They have purposely opened their village up, but they are still unsure if the travelers will be good or bad for this place."

The next day we walked to an even more remote village. There was truly nothing here except uncluttered beauty, and I realized then that there are plenty of untouched villages everywhere in Asia. But they are so alone, and so devoid of tourist facilities, that no one takes the time to leave the track and find them. And the people know they are isolated — they complained to us about the lack of clean water, medical services for their children, and good roads so they could get to hospitals. One traveler's secluded heaven was a local's lonely hell. But the locals still seemed to eschew Muang Noi's tourism marketing.

"Maybe you come back here?" an old woman asked.
"Maybe," I said.
She nodded. But her 'maybe' was as heavy as mine, and it seemed she was as unsure as me as to whether my, or anyone coming this way again, was a good thing.