AND WHEN: they were only halfway up, they were neither up nor down. Which makes for a nice song, but is not so much fun when you're stuck halfway up the highest mountain in Thailand, with no public bus up the 47km road to the peak. And being laughed at by national parks officials for believing the rumour that such a bus existed. After three hours on tuk-tuks, pickup trucks and motorbikes, it makes one feel pretty dejected. So we stood, and waited for something to happen.
Of course something happened. Something always happens, especially here, high above the humid plains. This particular something was a manic middle-aged Thai woman named Lanna, who proceeded to load us into the back of her ute and charge up the mountain at a furious pace, swinging wildly around corners beyond which postcard-perfect mountain vistas loomed with smug satisfaction.
Lanna was a beautiful, kind person. But she was also mental. She had some kind of connection to Thai embassies; she was keenly fluent in English, French, Thai, Japanese, Mandarin and Cambodian - a fact she showed us (to considerable applause) every time she spotted a suitable tourist sitting about. She had lived in Japan, France and the Cote d'Ivoire. She was travelling with her Japanese friends, showing them the sights; she said that she picked us up "out of love" and spent the whole day talking about our newfound friendship. And at every place we'd stop, she'd watch us wander around the waterfall / summit / visitor centre, and then, with a timing that seemed to have no relationship to whether everyone had finished looking, or whether people were in mid-sentence conversation with her, she would bark, "Okay! Let's go!" and everyone would pile silently into the back of the ute like we were illegal migrant workers being trucked to our next cleaning job.
She left us in much the same dazed confusion in which she'd found us, deserting us on a street corner in town with vague directions to a bus, barking "Okay! Let's go!" to her Japanese friends before blazing away down the dusty road. By the time we knew what was going on, we were on a bus to Mae Sariang, in the far northwest of the country, not two kilometres from the Burmese border.
It had been difficult to leave Chiang Mai, though we'd all been there a fairly long time. The city was a great, vibrant place to spend your nights, and the countryside around was bursting with perfect green valleys filled with mist. The day before we headed to our fate with Lanna, Erin and I hired a bike and went up the slopes of Doi Suthep, the mountain which lurks behind Chiang Mai like a beautiful criminal. Past the temple that crowns the peak of the mountain, where stalls were selling cups of fresh strawberries; past the Winter Palace, where the royal family will soon be in residence. Past all that, over potholed roads, then gravel roads, then dirt roads, then a barely discernible track of mud and rock, to a tiny village clinging to the slope.
Towards the edges of northern Thailand, the populations of all the neighbouring countries begin to bleed together; you start to see villages of Lao and Burmese peoples. On top of that, there are the hill-tribes - the Shan, the Karen, the Lisu, the Hmong, and many others - people of the fourth world, who belong to no nation, without Thai citizenship, wandering from China to Myanmar, Thailand to Laos to Vietnam. The people in this village were Hmong; they were mostly kids, chasing skinny chickens around the spare wooden houses and riding motorbikes about the rough-as-guts dirt tracks that circumnavigated the settlement. We hung out for a while, wandering about the village (noting that here, on a mountain and several hours ride from any settlement of note, was the first Christian church we'd seen outside Bangkok - hill-tribes are one of the very few places in Thailand that missionaries have had any impact). Then back, stopping along the dirt track at a coffee plantation owned by an eccentric Californian who owned several parrots, including a 40-year old macaw as large as a dog. Below, the Hmong women picked coffee beans in their traditional tribal dress, all shy waves and toothless smiles.
In Mae Sariang - a tiny town squeezed elegantly between the mountains and the river - we hired bicycles and rolled aimlessly through villages alive with the sound of country music blasting loud and proud from tinny radios. In the evenings we wrapped ourselves in whatever sweaters and beanies we've been able to gather together - Erin lost her gloves in Chiang Mai and Adam's beanie flew off on the way down Doi Inthanon - and drank whiskey by the river, while (of all things) gangster rap played over the deck and fell into the lapping of the river along the shore.
The mountains are spectacular: it is thrilling to feel cold again, for the first time since - oh, let's see here, August 2007? - and our eyes are blazing, and the blood is pumping thick through our veins, and today we are in Mae Hong Son, by the lake, and it is the Loi Krathong festival, celebrating the Goddess of Water, and there are blazing lanterns flying through the air, and candles floating in the lake, and we have a bag of fireworks for which we paid a dollar and which I am itching to throw at something.
And everything is great, and I hope everything is great with you.
Lachie
Of course something happened. Something always happens, especially here, high above the humid plains. This particular something was a manic middle-aged Thai woman named Lanna, who proceeded to load us into the back of her ute and charge up the mountain at a furious pace, swinging wildly around corners beyond which postcard-perfect mountain vistas loomed with smug satisfaction.
Lanna was a beautiful, kind person. But she was also mental. She had some kind of connection to Thai embassies; she was keenly fluent in English, French, Thai, Japanese, Mandarin and Cambodian - a fact she showed us (to considerable applause) every time she spotted a suitable tourist sitting about. She had lived in Japan, France and the Cote d'Ivoire. She was travelling with her Japanese friends, showing them the sights; she said that she picked us up "out of love" and spent the whole day talking about our newfound friendship. And at every place we'd stop, she'd watch us wander around the waterfall / summit / visitor centre, and then, with a timing that seemed to have no relationship to whether everyone had finished looking, or whether people were in mid-sentence conversation with her, she would bark, "Okay! Let's go!" and everyone would pile silently into the back of the ute like we were illegal migrant workers being trucked to our next cleaning job.
She left us in much the same dazed confusion in which she'd found us, deserting us on a street corner in town with vague directions to a bus, barking "Okay! Let's go!" to her Japanese friends before blazing away down the dusty road. By the time we knew what was going on, we were on a bus to Mae Sariang, in the far northwest of the country, not two kilometres from the Burmese border.
It had been difficult to leave Chiang Mai, though we'd all been there a fairly long time. The city was a great, vibrant place to spend your nights, and the countryside around was bursting with perfect green valleys filled with mist. The day before we headed to our fate with Lanna, Erin and I hired a bike and went up the slopes of Doi Suthep, the mountain which lurks behind Chiang Mai like a beautiful criminal. Past the temple that crowns the peak of the mountain, where stalls were selling cups of fresh strawberries; past the Winter Palace, where the royal family will soon be in residence. Past all that, over potholed roads, then gravel roads, then dirt roads, then a barely discernible track of mud and rock, to a tiny village clinging to the slope.
Towards the edges of northern Thailand, the populations of all the neighbouring countries begin to bleed together; you start to see villages of Lao and Burmese peoples. On top of that, there are the hill-tribes - the Shan, the Karen, the Lisu, the Hmong, and many others - people of the fourth world, who belong to no nation, without Thai citizenship, wandering from China to Myanmar, Thailand to Laos to Vietnam. The people in this village were Hmong; they were mostly kids, chasing skinny chickens around the spare wooden houses and riding motorbikes about the rough-as-guts dirt tracks that circumnavigated the settlement. We hung out for a while, wandering about the village (noting that here, on a mountain and several hours ride from any settlement of note, was the first Christian church we'd seen outside Bangkok - hill-tribes are one of the very few places in Thailand that missionaries have had any impact). Then back, stopping along the dirt track at a coffee plantation owned by an eccentric Californian who owned several parrots, including a 40-year old macaw as large as a dog. Below, the Hmong women picked coffee beans in their traditional tribal dress, all shy waves and toothless smiles.
In Mae Sariang - a tiny town squeezed elegantly between the mountains and the river - we hired bicycles and rolled aimlessly through villages alive with the sound of country music blasting loud and proud from tinny radios. In the evenings we wrapped ourselves in whatever sweaters and beanies we've been able to gather together - Erin lost her gloves in Chiang Mai and Adam's beanie flew off on the way down Doi Inthanon - and drank whiskey by the river, while (of all things) gangster rap played over the deck and fell into the lapping of the river along the shore.
The mountains are spectacular: it is thrilling to feel cold again, for the first time since - oh, let's see here, August 2007? - and our eyes are blazing, and the blood is pumping thick through our veins, and today we are in Mae Hong Son, by the lake, and it is the Loi Krathong festival, celebrating the Goddess of Water, and there are blazing lanterns flying through the air, and candles floating in the lake, and we have a bag of fireworks for which we paid a dollar and which I am itching to throw at something.
And everything is great, and I hope everything is great with you.
Lachie
