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Published: October 13th 2005
Karen Villager
hard at work...An hour from town, a battered old sign in indecipherable Thai just past the bridge is all I have to go on. I turn off the tarmac road, pausing briefly to comprehend the steep rutted mud track disappearing into the forest. Time for my 100cc Honda dream-machine to go off-road. Slip sliding through the forest steering with my feet, the back wheel sprays orange mud about the place and demonstrates a worrying penchant for the valley floor. The further I go the boggier and swampy the conditions become, it hasn’t rained for over 24 hours so it is now well overdue. Menacing black storm clouds loom on the distant tropical hills, drawing their plans against me as I reach the point of no return. If it rains on this surface I’ll be lucky to walk out, let alone ride - leaving me no choice but to carry on a few more kilometres in an attempt to take refuge in the village.
The entrance to the village is an impassable quagmire of water buffalo pools and foot holes. I park up the bike and wade through to the first collection of wooden houses. Apprehensive faces begin to peer from behind windows
and doorways. In no time a dozen kids have gathered at a safe distance mirroring my every movement through the village, until I turn to face them and they dash for cover. A few of the adults demonstrate their worldly bravado by approaching and greeting me with hands pressed together and a small bow, or ‘wai’. Courteous confidence in these otherworldly introductions works best. If I seem uncomfortable and lost they will become uneasy and nervous. After a few of the older men have their picture taken and see the results the ice is broken and curiosity begins to overcome their fear. No begging, selling or exchange of ideas; just plain intrigue on both sides. A harmless interaction. Though if that were to happen a couple of times a month, it would soon become tiresome, they would begin to resent the contact and it would be seen as an invasion of their privacy.
With the light diminishing and the black clouds now overhead, I’m clearly pushing my luck, and make the decision to risk the trip back to the main road. The kids follow my every movement back in single-file through the quagmire to my bike and wave me
Buddha
Sukhothai goodbye.
Expecting rain any minute, every metre covered is a victory and a step closer to home. The route is now primarily downhill and my added haste results in a few slippery accidents before the last descent and my Honda comes shooting triumphantly out of the forest from the timeless world of the hill tribes back into modern Thailand like a cultural howitzer. My bike picks up speed on the tarmac, if it rains now I’ll be soaked to the bone but I’ll make it home…I feel elated - bring it on!
(This a sensationalised description of actual events and shows just how much I craved a little adventure after the previous two and half weeks of banality;-)
The village was somewhere off the road between Mae Sariang and Chiang Mai. I’d travelled the previous week up from Bangkok to Sukhothai, the ancient Thai capital and headed west to the Burmese border at Mae Sot, a largely uninteresting, once slightly dodgy wild east black-market smuggling town. Then skirting the Burmese border I headed north; picturesque rice paddies stretching away to the rolling blue-green hills that marked the border to my left. Before long we join those very
hills in the songthaew, or pick up, I travel in, shared by a young Muslim boy and his grandfather, a Buddhist monk and a Christian Karen tribal woman, who demonstrates a mesmerisingly compassionate beauty. Her face is as wide as it is long, the shape complemented with beautiful Asiatic eyes; her three daughters, miniature versions of how she once looked. We pass a picturesque Karen tribal village, the primitive organic wooden architecture of their huts nestled beneath forested limestone cliffs make them look almost as if they have grown from the earth during the rains. The village seems to go on forever hemmed in by the road and the cliffs, and surrounded ominously by barbed-wire its entire length. For the truth couldn’t be further from my naïve and romantic vision; this is a refugee camp, filled with Karen people fleeing the oppressive Burmese Military Junta and herded into reserves by the Thai government.
Further along my route was Mae Hong Son ‘the Switzerland of Thailand’ - which is a very accurate description since ‘Matter horn’ and ‘Mae Hong Son’ both have 10 letters - an irrelevant link, but the only one I could decipher, but hey what do I
feast on those...
great in Papaya salad apparantely. But at 25 cents each I thought a little pricey for something that roams free range in most bathrooms. know? Mae Hong Son is the home to the “long-neck” Karen women, who wear stacks of brass rings around their necks which stretch their necks and render the biting of their own toe nails virtually impossible. This practice is now very rare in Thailand, but thanks again to the repressive Burmese regime, a new stock have arrived from Burma and are housed in refugee camp/zoos where tourists pay 5 euros to take pictures of them and congratulate themselves that this money goes towards keeping this dying tradition alive and of course keeping these people locked up for their exotic amusement. Choosing to forego further donations to some rich Thai entrepreneur’s humanitarian-tourist-trap I struck out once again towards the Burmese border on my now ubiquitous moped, passing through a few mixed tribal villages where your presence went entirely unnoticed, apart from one guy who we spoke to whilst sheltering from the rain complaining that, due to the rainy season, he’d only had three tourists stop by at the ‘real coffee guesthouse’ that day.
At this stage the reality dawned that ‘off-the-beaten-track’ in Thailand didn’t necessarily mean fewer tourists, but simply no 7elevens, and Soppong, the next town we stopped at
Golden Huts, Pai.
The damage done after the floods. was just such a town (sadly I’d have to forego my chocolate milk for at least a couple of days). It was already mid-afternoon when we arrived and since it hadn’t rained yet the clock was ticking. Remembering my first romantic interaction with a hill tribe community I decided to drive as far away from town as possible and then head off-road into the unknown. As we entered a far off village, the children scattered and the women bowed in greeting; the countryside in that area was sublime and, for the first time on my trip in Thailand, the rains never came that day and they haven’t reappeared since.
Next up was Pai, by far the touristiest place in the North so far. Whereas the previous towns were Thai with lots of tourists, this was tourist with lots of Thais. I’d had it on good authority that ‘Golden Huts’ down by the river was the best place to stay. Upon arrival however, it seemed a little worse for wear - in fact, most of it seemed to have been washed away in severe floods over the last two months.
I don’t know whether it was the season or
the floods that had kept the tourists away, but it seemed like the town, which on the surface seemed to exist entirely for the service of tourists, was barely ticking over. Worst of all it seemed that there wasn’t actually anything to do - so why the entire tourist infrastructure? Why did so many people (used to?) come here? I had to investigate: In the Rough Guide 2002 it states “There’s nothing special to do in Pai” In the Lonely Planet 1995 “there’s not a lot to see in Pai,” though in the Lonely Planet SE Asia 1999 this becomes “a mildly interesting, somewhat remote kind of place.”
However, Let’s Go SE Asia 2003 takes an entirely different angle by claiming “artists draw inspiration from the astoundingly picturesque town. Behind the scenes however, a clandestine heroin and opium culture has come to the attention of local authorities…”
Could it be that up until 2003 Pai was so dull it drove people to smack? Or could it simply be that until people started using smack the town just seemed uninteresting and now because of it, they could see, that it was in fact astoundingly picturesque? I was still confused?
To further my research I went in search of smack heads but only managed to find a smattering of alcoholics, some colourfully dressed hill tribe women selling psychedelic tourist crap (a clue??) and a load of run-of-the-mill backpackers who seemed to wander around town as baffled by it all as I was, and whose only obvious addiction seemed to be internet cafes? Maybe it was simply that the tourist infrastructure itself attracted tourists? a home away from home, a little oasis in a foreign land? Birds of a feather flock together?
On Saturday night we went to the most happening bar in town ‘BeBop,’ which contained two dozen Thais and an Austrian bloke. Fortunate coincidence, since England had just hammered em one-nil, unfortunately he was unaware of this fact and claimed ‘most people in Austria didn’t even know what a football looked like’ before leaving with his Thai ‘girlfriend’. Now we had just fifteen minutes of party time left until the 1am chuck out time, which we spent with the remainder of the Thais - certainly not the type of experience you’d expect whilst on holiday in Thailand;-)
No Ok, seriously, Pai has become a leg on the
Asian nomadic social scene. Those people who corrupted me in Goa earlier this year sent me here; unfortunately, this just isn’t the right time of year. Hey, you’re not a smack head, are you Patrick?
Then onto Chiang Mai, the second largest city in Thailand and the capital of the north, absurdly described in one guidebook as feeling like an overgrown village (and that wasn’t written by Marco Polo?).
Walking around Chiang Mai after dark you’ll soon find that the bars cater almost exclusively to single men in search of a twenty dollar girlfriend, or a bit of I&I (Intercourse and Intoxication). The fact that this practice occurs so openly and not behind closed doors and is so informal, is because the men really want to believe that the women they are with has connected with them in some way, they are having fun after all, and it is not simply a financial transaction. The teenager girls around here just seem to like overweight old baldy men!
It won’t be a revelation to learn that prostitution is a massive industry in Thailand, ever since American soldiers posted to Vietnam in the sixties and travelled here for I&I.
But America’s defeat at the hands of the Viet Cong and subsequent pullout in the early seventies was bad for business. So the World Bank, the tourist industry, and the Thai government got together to attract a new clientele: deprived and unloved western tourists who deserved better treatment from their aggressive, demanding and unfeminine women back home. The rest, they say, is history, and the upshot of all this is that the economy has been steadily growing as have the hundreds of thousands of young girls being trafficked from Burma as sex slaves. The Asian women’s customarily low status is being exploited to the hilt, to the extent where girls are even sold into prostitution by their own families for less than a hundred dollars. Of course, all this extra money hasn’t narrowed the gap between rich and poor. In a world where people have become commodities even in the west - where salaries equal worth, many uneducated village girls here find that prostitution is a form of work they can easily enter - it has become a career option.
Educated westerners vilify Islam for its treatment of women, where stories of maltreated Pakistani women appear in the western media
Karen man.
Nibbling on something? on a daily basis. Some even argue it is a justification for war. Isn’t it time we began to look at how the west supports such a degrading pastime in South East Asia, and stop being so blatantly hypocritical?
Tomorrow I will leave for Burma and cross the border at Mae Sai, where many of the trafficked girls are brought across. Mae Sai is a breaking-in station, where men pay handsomely for virgins, where the girls are seasoned by being repeatedly raped until they submit to their future destiny as prostitutes, before being sent further south to Chiang Mai, Bangkok and Pattaya to start their new careers.
Thailand has some of the friendliest people I have encountered anywhere in the world, ‘The Land of Smiles,’ no less. Maybe it is time we stopped taking the piss out of them, before they stop smiling?
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Chris/California
non-member comment
Thanks
Well done. Photos and story interesting and personal. Just right. I, too, hope the Thais will find more of the good than the bad from the West.