Our first excursion out of the city area of Chiang Mai was to the Hmong hilltribe, tourist village of Doi Pui. Tourism was promoted there by the government to get the Hmong away from their dependence on the opium trade. There was a small garden of opium poppies located in the village garden area despite the fact that, according to our guide, opium is the "only illegal plant in Thailand." We saw some Thai military men at the village, but they appeared to be sightseeing just as we were. Our guide told us that the vendor population had soared since the government first began promoting the village as a tourist location. Indeed, the popularity of the village was reflected in the number of vendor stalls that numbered as much as forty. There were Hmong handicrafts for sale as well as some products from Tibet and Burma. Many of the villagers dressed in Western attire though some of the women vendors also had traditional attire on and a few children were dressed in Hmong clothes more best suited for celebrations (or tourism).
One day, we took a tourist trek to see the Golden Triangle, Chiang Rai, and several hilltribe villages. Together with our driver, a Thai tourist guide, a young couple from Hungary, a single young Japanese man, and an older couple from Yorkshire, England we set out early in the morning in a van. The Hungarian couple, who could speak fluent English, were on a three-week trip to Thailand and look as if they were on their honeymoon. The Japanese man spoke little English and was constantly referring to a guidebook that was written in Japanese. The Yorkshire couple was retired and had traveled rather extensively. I spoke briefly with the man from Yorkshire about Northern Ireland, and British and American international history. He made a distinction between the British people and British imperialism by saying that it was the landed aristocracy of old who were responsible for the Imperialist Age. He added that the lessening of class distinctions in England was the most significant change taking place in contemporary Britain. Then he tried to justify British imperialism by saying that "at least Britain built up the infrastructure in places like India." Even his wife, who up to this point seemed to be in agreement with his general line of argument, interrupted to question this weak justification. When I persisted in my criticisms, he tried to divert the topic to American history and the injustices done to the American Indian. When he found out that I agreed with his criticisms in this area, he decided to talk about racism in America and center on African Americans. Again I said that racism was a serious problem, but that America had to be the most ethnically and racially diverse nation on Earth. I added that the politics of power and ethnicity-racism-sexism was another issue that was far from being effectively dealt with in America. He was defensive of British imperialism in Africa as well, but it seemed that despite his keen intellect, his defense was colored more by his brief experience as an unwanted white tourist in Kenya than any objective analysis of the historical problems germinated during the British Imperial period there. He and his wife had lived in Northern Ireland and he said he was partly of Irish extraction. He defended the British position there stating that the British didn't want to be there, but felt a moral responsibility to avoid letting a conflict escalate to the level of the contemporary Yugoslavian conflict. He said the British treatment of the Catholics in Northern Ireland was not particularly wrong considering the level of lawlessness that existed in the state.
We stopped in a village where women and young girls sold small baskets of quail eggs to visitors after the eggs were lowered into a geothermal vent by a pole. Walking along the river that borders the village, in the direct of an animist shrine, I saw two dead, large owls tied to some poles with a string around their necks, and their wings spread apart as if to be dried. Further on, I saw a woman washing her dishes on a deck (which was supported by stilts) in the back of her home which stood about ten feet above the river where she dumped her dirty water. The shrine seemed to center around a large, rounded boulder in a field which had yellow and blue clothe (about a foot in width) tied around it. There were three smaller boulders to the side of the larger one, but they were unadorned. At the shrine, there was an umbrella; four poles stuck into the ground to make four corners enclosing the shrine area with some clothe hanging from them; poles stuck into the ground with a cross pole attached to the top of them from which flowers hung, and tables with offerings of food and drinks.
We visited villages of the Akha, Hmong, and Lu Mien hilltribes where tourism was being promoted by the government to partially supplant the income previously gained through opium production. According to our guide, opium poppies were the only plant that was banned in Thailand. He maintained that the men which were absent from the villages we visited were not off tending to hidden opium fields, but were working on other cash crops such as corn. It was difficult for us to accept this explanation though after we had learned that raw opium could be sold for 300,000baht ($12,000) a kilo, and hilltribe peoples in Thailand were now forced to go to Burma to purchase the outlawed product. He had also explained that opium was an integral part of some hilltribe societies. It was used as a narcotic during ceremonies, as a medicine, and even considered a necessity for a woman's sexual fulfillment (it was placed on the male's penis during coitus).
The Thai border with Burma was quite busy. Our guide explained to us that Burmese men were quite distinctive because their skin was darker than a Thai man's and they wore longhis (sarongs). I was taking a couple of pictures of a Burmese family on the bridge that separates the border checkpoints of the two countries when I saw a Thai border guard walk up to them and kick them as if they were trash on the sidewalk merely because they were loitering. The Burmese were allowed to go into Thailand but were not allowed to go beyond five kilometers past the border. The average Burmese salary at the time was said to be equivalent to about 400baht ($16) a month.
Some Thai Vocabulary and City Names:
CHIANG RAI: CHIANG=CITY; RAI=THE KING WHO HAD CHIANG RAI BUILT
CHIANG MAI: MAI=NEW, CHIANG MAI=NEW CITY
because CHIANG MAI had been built after CHIANG RAI.
PRINTER-FRIENDLY FORMAT
