K’Vang, as he prefers to be called, spent the next hour or so explaining everything he touched as we left the pines and pushed through thick jungle.

This was the plant that girls in his tribe used to powder their faces. This was the tree no one ever burned because the smoke made women sterile. This was the lu-li leaf he planned to rub on the pork belly stashed in his bulging pack.

K’Vang, who speaks English and Vietnamese as well as his native K’Ho, works under a park program that provides eco-tourism opportunities to the ethnic minority tribes who first settled these mountains.

That morning, he’d hired a 21-year-old corn farmer named Kon Sa Ha Ret to run our camping gear up the mountain (specialty footwear: a pair of rubber rain boots). We caught up to him at our destination a little after lunch time. I took a two-hour nap while our tents were pitched in a small bluff on the Lang Biang Plateau — the coolest place in southern Vietnam, climactically and otherwise — and awoke to the smell of barbecue.