The Long Way Home: Hill Tribe Trek

Last time we left off as we were whisked away from our guest house to start our 3-day trek to visit the hill tribe villages in northern Thailand!

We got a quick introductory video on the Mirror Foundation, the NGO that ran the trek and homestay program and met our guides.

Is it still a tree fort if it's just on stilts?  Stilt fort?

Pe’ was our official guide, spoke some English, and ended up being our cultural ambassador. Belu was her cousin and our actual guide, spoke no English but seemed to be the expert on the routes, medicinal and edible herbs, and the one carrying the machete.  Dum was the dog that followed Pe’ for security.

Left to right, top to bottom: Pe', Belu, Middle Child, Dum

Forest herbs being applied to Eldest's scraped knee.  Worth noting: when Dum got bit by another dog she used off-the-shelf disinfectant

This is totally a trail.  Totally.

We discovered that the boundary between hot season and wet season is not “mild” season – rather it means each day is either 100F or pouring rain. The first day was former, and we suffered mightily (especially whichever adult was carrying Danger Monkey). We had Lunch and rest stops in field houses, built near the farms so that farmers can get started early. We had to do a fair amount of bushwhacking with the machete to get through some overgrown trails (this is not a busy season, even for the locals), and once had to partially disassemble a bamboo animal fence to get through. Pe’ was unconcerned, and didn’t think the cows would escape.

Yup.  Definitely a trail.

It turns out bamboo and banana leaves can be used to build basically anything.

There were butterflies *everywhere*.  How novel to experience a fully functioning ecosystem!

We were told the rains were late this year.  Bad for farmers, but good for hiking.

Mist on the mountains.

 

Agriculture in the region we were trekking through was primarily subsistence, although some villages had started to farm cash crops and sell one of their two annual rice harvests. Later, when we asked about the traditional houses and buildings made of teak, bamboo, and grass we were told that the people preferred “strong houses” because they didn’t need to get rebuilt every year or two, but building strong houses takes money, which takes cash crops, which takes space, which means clearing jungle, which means losing the nearby resources needed to build traditional houses. So it was sort of a one-way transition.

Fish ponds.  Rice paddies were between harvests, and not yet flooded.

Even though it looks like wild jungle, this is basically all managed agriculture.

The distinction between traditional villages and “economic” ones (we think she meant “commercial”) was pretty stark. The first village we stayed in, with the Lahu tribespeople, had no electricity and the only running water was from rain cisterns a little ways up the hill. The Akha village was a little more integrated with the local economy, and actually had electricity after about 8 PM and the chief wore a gold wristwatch.  We stayed with the village chief in both places, and were put up in the nicest buildings available.  Though honestly the field houses seemed just fine, and actually let the breeze in much better. 

Our Lahu homestay.  Kitchen on the left, bedrooms up above, dogs and laundry underneath.  The big open windows let the swallows that nested underneath the house fly through and eat mosquitoes.

Dum is a very good boy

Keeping a healthy distance away from mama duck

In each village we were treated to some traditional dancing, with everyone bringing out their fancy traditional outfits and doing a few dances and songs. It wasn’t exactly the right season, and the outfits were awfully hot. This literal song-and-dance routine, in addition to the whole home-stay program, has become a common way for hill tribes to make a little extra money without having to sacrifice traditional ways of life.

Eldest trying on the traditional Lahu ceremonial costume.  The joke will be on us when we find out later that she accidentally got married that morning.

Late-night dance in the Akha village.

Photo op!  The small boy insisted on being front and center.

Village life itself was pretty laid back. There were chores of course, and during the day the village emptied as the villagers all went out to the fields to tend rice seedlings or collect bamboo shoots in the forest, but there was still plenty of relaxing and talking into the evening after the sun went down. About 50% of village concerns appeared to be dog management, trying to keep various packs of dogs where they were supposed to be and/or not fighting with the other packs of dogs. The dogs were security, mostly from animals. The first night one of the village dogs found a poisonous snake in the gutter, which a village woman unceremoniously clubbed to death and threw down the slope for the chickens to eat.

Must try all the rolling toys

The mountain tribe food was more or less unlike anything we had ever had, and was universally amazing. Some notable examples were “Galangal”, whose boiled stalks tasted like pumpkin pie spices and whose flower buds are spicy like chilli peppers, “barrab”, a salad made from chopped pig wrapped in wild mint leaves (normally served raw, but also amazingly delicious cooked to a safe temperature), banana flower fritters, pumpkin curry, whole-chicken soup full of organs and feet, sugar-sweet pineapple straight from the field, infinite bananas, and every village has their own spicy paste made from chilis, small river fish, and whatever other aromatics were within 100 meters of the kitchen.

Breakfast was about a dozen different sticky rice, coconut, and bean concoctions.

Lunch stop on the first day, in the middle of a banana plantation

Pe' sets the table

Making desert.  Roasted coconut, wrapped in sweetened rice-flour dough, steamed in banana leaf envelopes.

Utensil use varied by tribe.  Akha use sticks, Lahu (pictured above) eat mostly by hand.  Also: a kitten under the table.

Best meal of the trip.  Barrab, pumpkin curry, galagal stalks and flowers, forest garlic, wild mint, and other aromatic leafy things that we never found out the names of

More of the same for breakfast, but also with steamed baby pumpkin vines!

After lunch (and after waiting out the hottest part of the day in the hammocks pictured above) we hiked up the mountain to a waterfall.  We were told later by one of the villagers (Atto, who had lived in Bangkok from age 5 until 25 and spoke pretty good English) that we saw "the best one".

As bridges go in rural northern Thailand, this one was pretty good.

Cool and refreshing

The next day we headed back to the hustle and bustle of the slightly-less-primitive villages and cosmopolitan Chiang Rai.  The car and driver that were supposed to bring us the last leg of the trek back to the Karen village for a weaving demonstration wasn't answering his phone, so Pe' called up her niece to come bring us some more water and drive Eldest back on her motorbike.

"Look Ma, No Helmet!"

The rest of us eventually made it back as well, and found Eldest had already been taught the basics and had generated about an inch of serviceable cloth.  Everyone got in on the project and we hung out through a rainstorm. The littles played make believe games in motorcycle helmets and Danger Monkey got her hair done by Pe’s niece.

Danger Monkey's job is to eat ALL THE FRUIT

On our way back to our guest house we took a detour to visit the White Temple, and all three kids got their first ride in the back of a pickup truck.

In the distance: GIANT WHITE BUDDHA STATUE.  It is unrelated to the White Temple.

On second thought, let us not go to the White Temple.  'Tis a silly place.

Abandon all hope ye who enter here

When life gives you temples, paint that shit gold

 The trek and homestays were a pretty amazing experience, and we talked about how it's good to re-calibrate your assumptions about the range of human experience from time to time.  A lot of the things we think we need seem more frivolous than they did before, and Michael deeply appreciates his cushy desk job after imagining life working a pineapple plantation planted on a 60-degree slope.  But the time spent in the villages also reinforces our belief that people are basically people the world over. The Akha chief's daughter was heading into Chiang Rai to have a baby the day that we left, and we waved goodbye as she was packed into the family truck along with a week's worth of food and clothes.  We had danced and eaten with her sisters and mother, our kids played with her older children.  Even though we had basically zero common language, it highlighted the foundational humanity that connects us all.

The Long Way Home: Chiang Mai

We had thought that the northern Thailand leg of our trip was going to be a single blog post, but we couldn't figure out how to narrow the variety of experiences down into a sane number of words and pictures.  So here's the first half!

We started our short 3 days in Chiang Mai with a relaxing mid-afternoon dip in the pool in the shadow of an old Chedi.

This was basically the photo on hotels.com that sold us on this place

French fries are part of a complete breakfast.

Then we set out to explore the town on foot. We were staying just outside where the city walls used to stand (some of them still do, but are not particularly well preserved), and strolled into the old town to check out some of the “must-see” temple complexes. Chiang Mai was a planned regional capital of the Lan Na empire that was built about 650 years ago, and is just about as dense with amazing stuff as Bangkok but with a lot less noise and smog. We frequently found ourselves diverting into random temples that were as beautiful and elaborate as anything that we saw anywhere else and ended up spending the rest of the evening just exploring.

This wasn't even on the map.

A beautiful evening for giant golden spires

"Rainy Season" = "No Crowds"

Reminded us of Angkor

The locals were exeptionaly welcoming and friendly, Elizabeth and Danger Monkey struck up a conversation with a woman who was at the temple for her daily prayers, but they declined to wait an unknown amount of time for the monk to show up and lead them in meditation. We did eventually make it to Wat Chedi Luang, a historically significant 14th century temple that was damaged in a 17th century earthquake, before getting a bite to eat at a small restaurant specializing in northern Thai cuisine. Michael was adventurous and got the pork-and-chicken-blood soup.

The next morning we had a cooking class, complete with a visit to a local market. By this point we have seen kind of a lot of Southeast Asian wet markets and tried to skip, but to no avail. We got a quick intro to ingredients where we did learn a little bit about Thai cuisine ingredients (which just goes to show that the world is fractal... the closer you look the more you’ll find!), and we let the kids run loose with a hundred Baht each (about $3 US). Eldest picked up some tea, Middle Child got a huge sack of dried mango, and Danger Monkey got a bag of deep-fried pork skin (“skin pops” was apparently the best translation). Then we went to the class itself, and had a blast and learned a ton about Thai food preparation. Big takeaways for us: dark soy sauce is 30% soya sauce, 70% molasses. Massage your noodles in the dark soy sauce before cooking for that even brown color, smash your lemongrass with the side of your knife to get the flavor out, pre-cook the potatoes for massaman curry, throw the pad thai noodles in dry, highest heat all the time, more peppercorns is more better. The resulting food was some of the best thai food we’ve ever had.

All other knives are inferior to this knife.

Helping!  She also peeled the garlic - her favorite kitchen activity.

Yum.

After an afternoon break at the hotel, we negotiated various fares with different “bus” drivers to go to

Google Maps is the universal language

Wat Phrathat Doi Suthep, the temple at the top of the nearest mountain. Every city of any size in Asia has a unique dominant transportation system, and in Chiang Mai they were the “Songthaew”, red pick-up trucks with a covered passenger compartment on the back, with no set route or fare. It was low season so we found a parked one and chatted with the driver, but the standard process is to basically shout at the drivers where you want to go and if that’s the direction they’re roughly headed you can hop in the back. We had to change rides at the edge of town for reasons that are not particularly clear, especially since for the way back we had one driver who brought us all the way from the temple back to our hotel... but we all still had to swap vehicles at the same spot (Michael’s guess was that it had something to do with anti-congestion regulations limiting access to the city center based on license plate digits, requiring us to hop in a truck that was allowed into town that day).

This is actually much safer than the modes of transportation that came later.

At the top of the mountain we hiked up the 300 steps past long undulating naga serpent sculptures to a Buddhist temple that was founded to house one of Buddha’s shoulder bones. The story goes that through some magic, while the relic of was being transported across Thailand to be given to a king, it miraculously split into two bones, each of which regrew into a whole bone. The local king decided to build a temple around one of them, and so tied it to the back of a white elephant and released it into the jungle. The elephant wandered up the hills into the mountains until it found the best spot, circled around it three times, and then laid down and refused to move. Or died, depending on which version of the story you hear. The temple was built on that location, and now pilgrims can circle the Chedi three times to bless their offerings before presenting them to the wide array of Buddha statues and shrines.

So shiny.

We all made small offerings to a wall of donation slots for different causes, to a recreation of the Emerald Buddha (another relic with a similarly suspicious origin story), to write our names on a golden cloth that would be wrapped around a Buddha statue, and some sort of sticky sculpture to which you could adhere coin offerings. Finally, our family was led in a Buddhist mantra by a monk and then blessed with holy water. The flavors of Buddhist philosophy that have gained a foothold in the US are largely devoid of the “carnival religion” atmosphere of Hinduism and Asian Buddhism, and it is hard to convey just how chaotic the temples feel and how participatory they are, even for lay people like us. 

Danger monkey wrote the number "3" in Chinese, because she is 3.  And it is easy to write.

Persistence

Of course it is necessary for every child to ring every bell

There was nothing on top of the platform, sometimes the pillars are the point.

We also found a couple of scenic overlooks and figured out where we had been in Chiang Mai from our eagle’s eye vantage point, and made our way back to town after picking up a couple of souvenirs of traditional northern Thai clothing.

It's a real-life map!

The next day we had a lazy morning, and were picked up by a car and driver for a 3.5 hour ride to Chiang Rai.

Chiang Rai is a market town – it exists almost exclusively as the place where farmers sell food and buy the things they can’t (or don’t care to) make. We explored the town itself the day we arrived and visited the Hill Tribe Museum – two or three rooms on the 3rd floor of a community center with 12-year-old information about the opium trade – and found the statue of the warrior-monk from Chiang Rai that (briefly) unified this part of Thailand. We were in basically the furthest-north settlement of any size in Thailand, so tourist attractions were a little thin on the ground.

Even Wikipedia couldn't tell us why this statue needed *2* whole platters of pigs heads and bottled water

The next day we checked out of our guest house, leaving them with nearly all of our luggage and a basket of dirty laundry, and set out in the back of a pickup truck for the start of our hill tribe trek – 3 days of hiking through the mountains visiting traditional indigenous villages.

The most hotly contested swing in Thailand