Not all these photos were taken in the same village at the same time. I think ‘the singer’ was from a different trip. I was walking along the mountain road when I heard the most extraordinary woman’s voice, and I could not tell from where it came. Finally, through a gap in the bushes, I saw the singer. She was singing, of course, a capella, and because the Hmong language is multi-tonal, the melody was astonishing. It was truly a magic moment. 

When I arrived in another village (the one in the first photo), I heard the sound of chanting and gongs. I found a shaman in action. He was sitting on a long springy bench with a blindfold and a ring of bells, and chanting in a deep guttural voice, the voice of a spirit. He was riding a horse into the other world. It was a healing ceremony for someone in the house. The interior of the house was quite dark, and I had no flash, and even if I had, I would never have used it in that situation. So I took a few pictures but they didn’t come out too clearly. As the shaman gathered momentum, he bounced higher and higher until I thought he was going to go through the roof.