RAMUWAN
AN ENTHRALLING CHAM BANI FESTIVAL

Ramuwan is the most important festival in the cultural and spiritual life of the Cham Bani, or Muslim Cham. These enthralling people are direct descendants of the ancient Kingdom of Champa, which ruled in central and southern Vietnam for 1,500 years before being annexed in 1832 by the Vietnamese Emperor Minh Mang. Today, the Cham Bani live in the Vietnamese provinces of Ninh Thuan, Binh Thuan and Phu Yen.

The festival of Ramuwan takes place during the entire ninth month of the Islamic calendar, when celebrants fast from sunup to sundown. Before the holy month begins, the Cham Bani spend three days worshiping ancestors. They visit cemeteries to cleanse and decorate graves, thus inviting the ancestors back home for celebration such as the rice offering ritual. People in traditional costumes decorate their villages and attend frequent contests, games and cultural performances as a way to consolidate solidarity and mutual support in the community. During the fasting month, the Cham Bani practice body purification rituals and participate in ceremonies at the mosques with Acar monks while wishing for fertility, prosperity, happiness and bumper crops
 

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Launched on February 25 by Trek Magazine, aka Trekmag, the “Trek of the Year 2019” contest brought together ten candidates for ten trips around the world operated by France’s most prestigious trekking agencies. On March 16, at the Destination Nature exhibition in Paris, Trek Magazine announced Terres d’Aventure as the winner of the Grand Prize “Trek of the Year 2019” for its trek “Haut Sékong, in the heart of Katu country,” rewarding the research and reflection done together with Secret Indochina.

The Haut Sékong trek leads through the ephemeral world of Upper Xekong, located in southern Laos in an Annamese cordillera marked by rugged landscapes, long southward-oriented mountain ridges, deep valleys, impetuous rivers, uninhabitable forests, and mythical groves. This is an adventure across a wild land that forms a natural barrier to the uncertain influences of the world beyond, an unseen Laotian small Amazonia. The journey is a chance to immerse yourself in the lost paradise of the southern Proto-Indochinese Katu, who practice slash-and-burn cultivation, animism, shamanism, and buffalo sacrifices while nurturing a close spiritual connection with the jungle, which they call the “house of genies”