Enchantment/Disenchantment

Last week, I took a few days off of work, and Julia and I took a trip up to Mae Hong Son province in northern Thailand. The goal was for me to get away from work for a few days, and for us to explore a really beautiful part of the world (you can find pictures in Picasa). For me, the trip ended up being much more than that. I've tried to take some time to delve into exactly what I found, so this is a long post, but I hope that I'm not the only one who finds it interesting.

Our first stop was Pai (actually pronounced "Bye"), a hippy-dippy tourist town four hours north of Chiang Mai where the expats outnumber the locals. Pai is famous for being a beautiful place to relax for a few days and listen to really really good live music at their many bars. It also has a large artist community that I'd heard good things about, but from what I could tell they just spent their days making really mediocre T-shirts.

Pai is a bit peculiar because even though it's in the middle of nowhere, the Thai people there speak better English than probably anywhere else in Thailand (it's exponentially better than in Chiang Mai). The owner of our guest house actually had an American accent. Of course, this is because there are SO many native English speakers around, either living there or passing through. As a result, there are fantastic, Italian-style pizza places, gourmet French bakeries, and more (no guide books recommended any Thai restaurants in Pai). Pai is a strange little island of western yuppydom inside of a poor, rural, but breathtakingly beautiful province.

In Pai, we decided to rent a motorbike to continue the trip north to Soppong and Cave lodge. After an early slow-motion encounter with a drainage ditch when the bike lost power going uphill (sorry, Julia), we cruised for about two hours through beautiful, mountainous countryside. I think "Big Sky" sums things up pretty nicely: we had beautiful, soaring views of the forested Himalayan foothills and limestone cliffs for the entire drive.

In Soppong, we stayed at Cave Lodge, which is a bit of a Mecca for outdoorsy people in Thailand. Cave Lodge is owned by John Spies, who is the foremost caving expert in Thailand. Originally from Australia, John has been living in Thailand for thirty years, originally as a beach bum (he went to Koh Samui when there was a single bar and no hotels - he and some other travelers would sleep in the sand), then as a trekking guide, and then finally as a caver and the owner of Cave Lodge.

Under John's guidance, we went on a couple of excellent day trips, kayaked through a massive cave, and watched a few hundred thousand Split-tailed Swifts fly back to their nests in Tham Lod (video here).

John has written a book about his time in Thailand that is actually quite good, and he lets the manuscripts float around the lodge. Julia and I both spent our nights sitting up in the lodge's common space, reading the dirty, water-damaged copies of John's life story (he has published copies for sale, but it's way more fun to read the original manuscript, which is held together with binder clips and has 3x5 photos Scotch-taped inside).

I have an enormous respect for John. He is truly a kind man that has really given and gotten a lot from Thailand, and has engaged this place in a way that most of the other long-term expats simply have not. Twenty years ago, John made a living here leading treks with his first wife to the most remote Hill Tribe villages (mostly Black Lahu), and his experiences there cultivated both a deep respect for their culture and a concern for their way of life.

Hill Tribe people are a bit of an uncomfortable subject for me, because I find their way of life both beautiful and tragic. On the one hand, they lead a self-sufficient life in a beautiful part of the world, and each tribe has its own heritage, language, and culture. They are famous for their incredible costumes and colorful woven scarves. Many of them practice an unusual animism that involves music, fire, artwork, and dancing to both summon and scare away spirits.

On the other hand, the Hill Tribes have been exploited by one group or another for the past half-century. For decades, they were virtually enslaved by drug lords and addiction as they grew, used, and sold opium. Now that the Thai authorities have virtually eliminated the drug from this country, the Hill Tribe people have become dependent instead on tourists. Innumerable "Hill Tribe Treks" leave daily from Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Chiang Dao, Soppong, Pai, and pretty much anywhere in northern Thailand. The treks promise exposure to beautiful ceremonies, old-fashioned ways of life, and hand-made crafts.

In truth, visiting a Hill Tribe village is a bit like visiting an American Indian reservation. The people are destitute, and whatever "culture" is on display is just that: on display. Upon walking into town, you are literally surrounded by women in traditional dress wanting to sell you woven scarves and handmade teak knickknacks.

Don't get me wrong - this isn't a polemic against Westernization (or "development") or a tirade against tourists and backpackers. Before coming to Thailand, I was given Tiziano Terzani's book, A Fortune Teller Told Me, which I find absolutely appalling. Terzani, an affluent German journalist, spends 400 pages bemoaning the proliferation of capitalism at the expense of spirituality and culture in Asia without once considering that the people who are actually living the life that he finds fascinating to observe have chosen to embrace capitalism. Terzani, as he moves about noting "money mongerers" and "spiritualess Mongolians" and celebrating cultures of centuries past, somehow neglects to note that the people's real quality of life (i.e. their infant mortality, starvation, and drug addiction rates) has simultaneously and very substantially improved.

In his book, John Spies writes about his friend, an elder in a Black Lahu villiage, who nightly laid fetal by the fire as he smoked 16 or 17 bowls of opium in order to lose his shakes, as his wife laid in another room, trying to sleep as her pregnant stomach turned hard before she gave birth to her opium-addicted baby three months prematurely. I am not ignorant enough to believe that nothing has been lost in the "development" of northern Thailand, but Terzani's paternalistic, normative condescension towards a people whose previous suffering he cannot possibly comprehend is disgusting.

I wish that this could just be me waxing philosophic, but my memories observing and wrestling with Thailand's changing cultural dynamics are my most salient from that trip north. Reading John's memoirs only compounded the problem: he engaged, connected with, and befriended Shan and Lahu people (John speaks fluent Shan) in a way that seems impossible now, when the tribes' commoditization of their own culture throws up barriers that makes genuine contact with people difficult at best. Julia and I passed through two villages in order to hire guides to take us to nearby caves, and both times I was really uncomfortable. I hate to be crude, but it's a bit like being in a zoo where the animals have chosen to be there, and somehow you've been made their unwitting jailor. It's not that I disapprove of the choices that they have made in order to support themselves without opium - it's just that when I was there, I couldn't help but feel complicit in creating a market for this cultural prostitution, and I just wished that there was some other way for these wonderful, kind people to earn their living.

[Note: As it so happens, there is. The King of Thailand has started a large-scale organic farming project that he hopes will bring sustainable agrigultural practices to the Hill Tribes that will allow them to thrive as farmers in their old way of life without growing opium. "Organic Hill Tribe Coffee" and other such products are all the rage among the expats in Chiang Mai. From what I've heard, it's been a huge success, and made a big difference in the past few years.]

Of course (of course!) this is all really a corollary of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal: it is impossible to observe an event without affecting it. The irony of all of this is that most people (and I certainly include both myself and Terzani in this category) wish that things could be the way they used to be simply so that we could see it! Because it must have been truly spectacular to see people live in a way that is so foreign, and inspiring to see them believe so deeply in something so unusual. Because isn't that why we all came to Asia in the first place? To witness something and have an experience that is truly Amasian? (Big shout-out on that one). But what can you do when your very being there prevents anything of note from happening?


John recommended washing dishes. The Hill Tribe people are known for their incredible generosity and hospitality, and will welcome you onto their porches or into their homes. John suggested that when this happens, we walk back into their kitchens and start washing dishes.

At the time, I thought he was crazy, and during those two days, I did not wash any dishes. But now I think I see the simple brilliance of that suggestion. Because how better to let someone know that you are interested in who they really are (rather than who they think you want them to be) than by helping them with the most mundane and ordinary chore of their day?

John's son is a student in Chiang Mai, and a sort of part-time, unpaid intern at Chiang Mai Rock Climbing Adventures. We ran into John's family a couple of days ago outside of the movies, as Julia and I were coming out of Wall-E, and they were going in. I promised John that I'd be headed back to Cave Lodge in the coming months, and I promised myself that I'd leave time for washing dishes.