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Published: October 30th 2005
If I could have crossed the border near Mae Hong Son, I would have left this country with a tempered view and an admiration for its aesthetical attributes as well as its friendly locals, but alas - frosting and sprinkles alone aren’t enough to make a bland cake into an award-winning recipe.
My first stop after Sukhothai was the border town of Mae Sot, which turned out to have little to see other than gem dealers and buckets of wriggling eels at the market, but was interesting for the mix of people. Burmese men in their longgyi (long skirts tied at the top into a knot), Muslim girls in their headscarves, Shan women riding side-saddle on the back of a bicycle, and a handful of foreign volunteers working for area NGOs provided a unique multicultural kaleidoscope. In fact, the tourist infrastructure that existed seemed mainly to cater to this volunteer group rather than to travelers passing through, as the first hotel I checked made abundantly clear. However, this was something of a relief after the prior two weeks of visiting places that seemed to exist solely for tourists, and I enjoyed people-watching in a town where everyone seemed to be
Sunset in Mae Sariang
With the Burmese hills in the backgroundgoing about their daily non-tourist-related business. Whereas the locals in the cities up to now had generally either just gone about their way without taking notice of the now common sight of tourists, or else had pounced upon them as potential purchasers of their wares, I solicited only subtle looks of curiosity from the smiling faces in this town. It was an experience that was to repeat itself frequently along the Mae Sot-Mae Sariang-Mae Hong Son trail and one that was definitely a welcome change.
Since I had left Mae Sot rather late in the afternoon, I had no choice but to take the pickup as far north as it would go for the day, though my lack of Thai and the other passengers’ limited English made it unclear where exactly this songthaew was stopping. As the pickup taxi rolled along the road towards Mae Sariang, I couldn’t take my eyes off the enchanting landscapes to the west. The road hugged the grass alongside the brown river, which provided a brief pause from the fields of green and the purplish mountains on the horizon - the earthiness of the water making the colors of the landscape and the clear
sky all that much more brilliant. It was one of those journeys where you found yourself wanting to pound on the window to the front of the cab countless times to say, “Just let me off here!” because it was so gorgeous, and yet being hypnotized into immobility by that same tranquil panorama, along with some degree of common sense, I was prevented from doing so. It was just as well, however, since the town of Ban Mai, where we eventually stopped, was no less appealing than any of those spots along the way. It was obvious the village was ill-equipped for tourists, but one lady drove along to her father’s guesthouse a few kilometers down the road, which was a lovely little secluded spot marked only by a small sign in Thai in the midst of banana trees, the countryside, and even tinier rustic villages.
The next day I reached Mae Sariang, with more of the same landscapes along the drive and a charming riverside view upon arrival. The muddy waters of the wide Yuam River and the long green grasses beyond reminded me of the scenes I conjure up imagining African riverscapes, and the mountains marking the
Cabbages and Mountains
Landscape north of Soppong Thai border with Burma provided the most delightful backdrop for the sunset. And once again, the phenomenon of the curious passersby brought a smile to my face as our eyes locked and their mouths turned up as well.
Around Mae Sariang, Mae Hong Son, and Soppong, the main focus of my activities was visiting hill tribe villages while ogling the verdant mountain panoramas and waterfalls. The towns themselves were not overwhelmingly picturesque, but the surrounding areas are hotbeds of charm and motorbike rentals are cheap for easy exploration on one’s own. The area contains Shan, Hmong, Lisu, Lahu, and Karen villages, though the proliferation of treks in the area mean that most of them are quite highly touristed, and the distinctions between the tribes have become less noticeable as many villages now contain people from a number of tribes all living together. For example, branching west off the street to Mae Aw, the road up the mountain eventually ends in a tiny one street village and a quiet lake, but even here amidst the 12 or 15 houses were three different tribes. Every family in the village is involved in coffee cultivation and production, a Royal Development project, according
Doing the wash
In many villages they seem to wash themselves and then do the laundry at the same spot. to one guesthouse owner there. Supposedly they wanted to keep the villagers from cultivating opium and designed this coffee project as an alternative crop, and the café owner boasted that the Queen had come to sample their coffee and had taken some back to the King as well. It was a slow-going business; everything is done by hand, from the planting to the harvesting to the roasting, but they do produce enough to sell to shops in Chiang Mai and Mae Hong Son, in addition to the tourists who stopped in while avoiding the afternoon rain.
After awhile the different villages began to blur together, but the ones that were most memorable were generally the hardest to reach, with the heavy daily rains rendering the dirt trails almost impassable. Among the highlights were a Karen village north of Mae Sariang called Doi Leam and a Lisu village northwest of Soppong whose name I never did discover - residents of the Shan village in the valley below it told of its existence - where tourists seem to rarely tread, based on the unjaded reactions of the villagers. The serenity of the people, who smiled and greeted us with wais as
Simple but beautiful
Landscape north of Soppong we admired the splendor of their backyards was matched only by nature’s own numenous aura. Limestone cliffs jutted out in irregular forms against the blue sky, and strolling cows provided a music of lowing and belltones, while the locals went about their way washing their clothes and their bodies out in the open and hauling in their corn and cabbage crops from the fields in large strawlike baskets attached to their backs. It was so perfectly scenic that we remained until sunset before navigating the steep serpentine road back to town, protected from potential evening showers by a canopy of bamboo trees that bowed over from each side of the path.
The next town past Soppong was Pai, a little traveler’s oasis, filled with restaurants offering Western food, cafes showing Western movies, and a range of meditation, massage, and cooking courses for the longer-term visitor. Only 30 kilometers or so from Soppong, the surrounding mountains offer the same attractions as those I had just been partaking of, but by this point I was growing weary of motorbike outings and had had my fill of the hill tribe village visits. These outings, however, are really all that Pai has to
offer, other than to hang out with a bunch of other backpackers, so it turned out to be one of the low points along my journey. The hurricane that swept across Vietnam reached this area of Thailand the 28th of September, and the effects of the floods and floating debris were evident everywhere in the valley villages, along the main roads from Mae Hong Son, and along the riverfront in Pai. I suppose Pai itself is a little more scenic under normal circumstances, but post-hurricane it provided little inside its city limits with which to impress a visitor.
From here on out, the appreciation I had gained for this slice of Thailand began to be overshadowed once again by its less desirable traits. Though I had long been interested in Chiang Mai, it was not nearly as lovely as I had expected it to be. With hundreds of temples, the moat-enclosed inner city had its charming corners, and the giant night market was impressive, but the everpresent neon signs of the multinational eating establishments lining the market streets sabotaged a potentially unique Thai spectacle, and the much more disturbing neon signs radiating from the “karaoke” bars and “massage parlors”
brought the sex industry back into the forefront of the city nightlife.
While I had obviously known beforehand about Thailand’s reputation as the world’s brothel, the enormous scale of this sex in the city - and the countryside and small towns and beach resorts, as well as the societal factors that support it, prove to be too much for me to overlook. Though many of these societal factors are widespread in many parts of Asia, and though prostitution as well as human trafficking exist all over the world, this visit to Thailand was my first face-to-face meeting with it, and this shock value has served to cast a haze on my view of what I might otherwise consider a lovely country to travel in.
The friendliness of locals and their willingness to help out with a smile when you need anything obviously makes one feel welcome when visiting Thailand. And the ease with which you can travel without fear of crime is, particularly as a female, an amazing attribute of this country. But what lies beneath all that polite and wholesome exterior, beneath the peaceful and conservative values that seem to be Thai trademarks, I find to be
Flood damage
Broken trees and debris have been raked all over this little village nestled in the valley after the hurricane brushed through from Vietnam extremely disturbing.
If you read my last blog, you have naturally garnered my wrathful spite for Westerners who visit for sex tourism purposes, and it is this kind of prostitution which is most evident to tourists and which, therefore, seems to attract the most criticism. But the fact is, that of the hundreds of thousands of girls and young women working as prostitutes in Thailand, only a small minority of them are working with the Western sex tourists. The majority of sex is bought by the domestic market, and a 1990 study showed that 75% of Thai men have had sex with a prostitute, and they visit much crasser brothels than those you see catering to Westerners in Patpong.
If you really consider that statistic, it is pretty shocking how many women are making a living - and for many, making a death - by prostitution in Thailand. While it is true that women in many parts of Asia hold a secondary status to men and face discrimination, certain elements of Thai culture make particular women more vulnerable. Most women are presented with limited options and are raised in an environment where they are expected to care for
the family and help look after their parents as repayment of the 'breast milk money.' Many village girls have much less education than their male counterparts; in fact, many girls were not educated at all in villages until a few years ago. Thai social practice of Buddhism also digresses from theoretical conclusions that women are equally able to reach spiritual enlightenment as men; society, rather, views woman’s existence as proof of bad karma in a past life, and perhaps if she achieves an extraordinary amount of good merit in her current life, she can come back as a man in the next one. The way for her to achieve this merit is to do an exceptional job at caring for her parents, and what better way than to earn money to help them out? With limited education and limited options for many of the poor classes of women, however, prostitution is often presented as their only choice.
Perhaps even more disturbing is that many women are pushed into this option by their parents themselves, and in many cases the whole community is complicit in it. In some northern Thai villages, every family has a child involved in prostitution. For
struggling families, an old farming credit method known as tok khiew, or green harvest, was used to obtain a loan using some of their unharvested crops as collateral. Unfortunately, tok khiew has been reinvented in a much more repugnant manner these days, whereby families receive money now with their young prepubescent daughters as collateral, pledging her to the sex industry where she will work off this debt. In this context it is particularly easy to understand this statement by a Thai NGO official in an Asian Trafficking report: “What it comes down to is that Thai country women are just another kind of crop.”
Whole communities are at times involved; where parents themselves are not initiating it, village leaders know which families are in financial trouble or had a divorce or death in the family, and can direct recruiters to the vulnerable girls, who may be seduced with lies of job offers doing domestic or factory work. Police and border guards are also involved and often compete for positions in red light districts, since bribery can make it be quite a lucrative post. This is not to say that all police and border guards are corrupt, just as not
Heading back after a day in the fields
Like this lady in the rear, their bags are often carried by being wrapped around their foreheads to support the weight all families would condone, let alone encourage, the prostitution of their daughters, but numerous statements by trafficked victims, voluntary prostitutes, and NGOs have reported brothels giving regular monthly bribes to the police, as well as police escorting the illegal transfer of Burmese girls into the country and down to their new brothel homes, and more horrendously, police rape and demanding of sexual favors in exchange for them not arresting the girls.
Since I have never been in the position of extreme poverty, perhaps I am not in the moral position to condemn selling a daughter to gain enough money to allow the rest of the family to just scrape by and survive. (Although in all honesty, I still hold issue with the idea that daughters are dispensable while sons are not.) And perhaps it is true that some of these families do not really realize what their daughters are getting into, how violent and dangerous these lower-class brothels are (in addition to beatings and rape, if they are lucky to ever make it back out of their debt bondage and return home, over 40% of northern Thai girls return with HIV), and that they may die there in a
slave-like existence. But what really outrages me is this: a study on Thai prostitution was done in 1990 to find out WHY some parents were pushing their daughters into the brothels, and it found that 60% of the families doing so were not suffering from this acute poverty, but rather, were “motivated by the desire to own consumer goods like televisions and videos.” !!!!!
One of the most scenic routes I witnessed in northern Thailand was the drive from Chiang Mai through Chiang Rai up to the border town of Mae Sai. Even in the rain, the clear streams bouncing over rocks and the endless indeterminate green forms of the draping foliage on the forested hillsides drew a little sigh of contentment from my lips. But the occasional glimpse of a village hut or farmer working in the rice paddies reminded me of the malaise beneath this charming veneer. As we neared Mae Sai, a town where precious 12 and 13 year old virgins are often brought for “breaking in” (i.e. repeatedly raped, beaten, and often tortured until they lose the will to resist), I wondered how many of those villagers would tune in that night for a satellite
viewing of 'Sex and the City,' while their daughters suffered the realities of that title for the TV they were viewing it on.
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anonymous
non-member comment
Hi Jen,
Great to see you blogging again. I´m just wondering why you keep backdating your blogs - where are you now and where can we expect blogs from in the future?