Guiding, for him, is genuinely good work — though not quite enough of it to be anyone's only job. He also teaches at the local school, and every guide in town holds down something else besides guiding, simply because there aren't enough trekking bookings to fill a full-time schedule. When a group books a trip, the guides take turns, spreading the work evenly across everyone.
Given the choice, they'd all go full-time in a heartbeat — guiding pays noticeably better than their other jobs, and it's more fun besides. The tourist information centre they work from was founded with help from development organisations, some of whose staff still work alongside them, having trained the guides in the craft and in tourism development more broadly. That partnership recently added river rafting trips to what the centre offers, part of an ongoing effort to bring more visitors to Luang Namtha.
I consider those guidelines to be very important.
Every group booking a trek has to sit through an information meeting first — where they're going, what to bring, how to behave in villages and in the forest. Skip the meeting, and the trip is off; the centre holds firm on that. The reason becomes clear the moment tourists go exploring on their own: some villages have sacred entrance gates that are never meant to be touched, and unguided visitors, with no way to communicate properly with villagers and no context for local custom, sometimes touch them anyway, entirely by accident.
Touching a sacred gate means the village has to perform a full purification ritual, at real cost, to set things right again. He doesn't think tourists do it on purpose — just that they don't know. It's part of why the centre also works with guides drawn from the villages themselves. He's from the city and knows a fair amount about village life, but not everything, and not always the local language; someone actually from the village fills that gap far better than he can.
Keeping the environment clean matters to the guides too, and not only for the tourists' sake — they've recently cleared rubbish along the riverside so rafting groups aren't greeted by a mess, and every trekking group is told explicitly to carry their waste back to the city rather than leave it in the forest. As far as he can tell, tourism hasn't done much environmental harm here; most visitors, in his experience, come specifically to enjoy the nature, not damage it.
Contact with tourists has genuinely improved his own English, and taught him plenty about how life looks elsewhere in the world — time on the trail with a group is, more often than not, simply fun. Good tips help too, on top of a guiding salary he already considers solid. The centre also sells handicrafts made by villagers; most of the proceeds go straight back to the makers, with a small share reinvested in the centre itself.
A sacred gate, once touched, has to be made right again at real cost to the people who tend it. A five-minute briefing before the trek starts is the guides' quiet way of making sure it doesn't have to be.