It is my birthday and I am on a bus ride from Chiang Rai. These past two days have been spent on the move. It will be interesting to see how we react to Laos (lazy people, a Singaporean backpacker told us yesterday), as both of us timed out of slow paced country life in 2.5 days in Tha Ton.

Yesterday, we awoke early and took a boat trip on the Maekok River with The Expat Family and visited two hill tribe villages. I was a bit full of myself because I’d booked the tour with the boat folks directly, rather than with a tour guide or guest house, saving us thousands of baht and the annoying distraction of a guide. We motorboated on a long-tail boat away from Tha Ton for approximately one hour, hiked around a Lahu village for an hour, got back on the boat for 20 minutes, then hiked up a hill to an Ahka village for an hour, then took the boat the remaining 40 minutes back to our hotels.

Here are the highlights of the trip from my perspective:
– seeing Ms. Expat Teacher grinning with delight at the positively chilly temperatures of the morning boat ride.
– enjoying the relatively non-exploitive nature of our visit. Certain tribes – I am sure the Professor will blog about this – are basically coerced to remain in their villages for the tourist trade. On our visit, it was clear that the men were all out farming or fishing, that the women were engaged in their usual occupations, nobody was wearing their traditional dress (which is gorgeous but no longer everyday wear), and the place had certainly not been cleaned up for us. The Lahu women did want to sell us handicrafts, and I happily bought a few and paid full price – one woman was so happy about that that I felt conflicting emotions for bringing such joy with $3.30. But people just smiled and waved at the Akha village, except for the old woman who showed us the hilltop church,which she assumed we had come to see.
– I actually did like seeing the church. It looked like a missionary’s fantasy, and probably was. Its walls were bamboo slats. The roof was corrugated tin. A pretty but ragged multicolored cloth star and flags decorated the outside, along with the wooden cross. The inside looked cool and dimly but warmly lit from the sunlight peeking through the slats. There were plank benches, a dirt floor, neat stacks of books and other religious paraphernalia. Outside, there was a spectacular view of the river valley, the farmland and the mountains beyond. Sad I didn’t see the gates that are supposed to accompany such villages, though – they apparently have human figurines with exaggerated sexual symbols to deter spirits from entering the village. Perhaps this village was fully converted, or we didn’t look in the right place. Oh well- I suppose we would have seen it were we meant to.
– We DID see an orchard of rubber trees, though! It was so neat, each tree had a cut and a little chute in it, like those used for maple sugaring, with a black rubber bowl below catching the white gluey goop. Such orchards in SE Asia, by the way, caused the collapse of the rubber boom in the Amazon. The trees originated there but then were smuggled out so rubber could be acquired more cheaply.
– Also, we saw bamboo forests. Can’t wait to get in one. So beautiful.
– our boatman, Doh, who seemed like a stand up guy, and who waited patiently for us while we hiked and explored.
– people who fish the river by dumping a lot of rocks in their boats. Can’t figure out what they are trying to get, yet.

Professor: and we saw a spider nearly the size of The Private Eye’s head!

After our boat ride, we said au revoir to the Expat Family. We had a wonderful lunch at our guest house, Garden Home. (btw, much better food, much better atmosphere than anywhere else we ate in Tha Ton.) We caught a bus to Mae Chan and had a lovely conversation with a Singaporean hippy backpacker. We caught a passenger pick up truck to Chiang Rai, and had a lovely conversation with a Chinese geek backpacker. I am going to send them both postcards from the states; the Chinese fellow’s address is a bit terrifying in its level of detail and what that represents.

We weren’t even 24 hours in Chiang Rai. But that’s ok, as we got a lot out of it, including a very educational visit to a hill tribe museum, a delicious dinner at a hot pot place in what looked like a garage, a flower show of wonder, and an actual laundromat.

– The Private Eye

PS – one more way Burning Man is like SE Asia: the long driveway of Wat Tha Ton is lined with humorous philosophical sayings.