We spent three days walking through the mountains just west of Chiang Mai, visiting two Karen People villages, and staying in homes of Karen people both nights. Our head guide was James, a great guy that guided Susie 5 years ago when she took a similar trek with a group of teenagers. James had two assistants: Michael, who is a member of the Karen tribe, and BB, who may also be a Karen tribe member, I don’t recall. BB is deaf and illiterate, but is a hard worker and funny guy. Michael spoke broken English, but enough to explain most things he attempted.
We traveled by Songthaew (a small pickup truck with bench seats inside the enclosed bed), and stopped three times on the hour-long trip to the starting point: the first stop was at a local market to buy fruits, vegetables and some meat and spices as provisions for the trip. The second stop was at the outskirts of James’ home village where we picked up lunch (a delicious fried rice meal), and the third stop was to give most of our provisions to some waiting Karen People who used mopeds to get the food to the two places we were going to eat dinner/breakfast and spend the nights. After being dropped off at the starting point, we hiked on trails through rice fields, across streams, by waterfalls, through forests, sometimes through neck-high grasses, past elephants, fields full of strawberries or Chinese broccoli or passion fruit orchards, mango trees. We hiked to several waterfalls where we ate and sometimes swam. For two nights we stayed with a different family in two different villages We had amazing meals prepared by James using the family’s wood-fired cooking stoves, and pans. Rice, noodles, curries, fresh vegetables and fresh fruit, soups, hot chocolate, lemon grass tea it was truly great food. James also made other food for the local families (much spicier than ours), and they would also eat up anything we didn’t eat. The first village was more developed, as they had created a large farm and sold their fruits and vegetables at market. We had actual mattresses to sleep on there (although very firm), and a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling of the main room of the house. The second night we stayed with a family group about a mile outside of the second village. We slept on bamboo mats supported on a raised platform constructed of larger bamboo poles. Even with a couple skimpy sleeping bags under us for cushioning, it was not comfortable. Having a rooster start crowing right outside the shelter at 4:00 am didn’t help either. This second family had no electricity, no cash crop just sustenance farming and hunting and gathering, plus a few weavings for sale that were done by one of the women and some bracelets woven from scraps that the kids were selling. They were quite poor but happy. There was one dispute when the children wanted to go fishing, but there was only one hook/line for all of them. A hook and line kit costs about $0.30 in town. Since Michael was going to come back past that family at the end of our trip, we arranged for him to bring back several fishing kits for the family.
Chickens just wander around the homesteads pecking for food and pooping at random. Not very sanitary, but you also didn’t have to be careful about throwing away food scraps or bits of food thrown out with the wash water, the chickens took care of that. Pigs were kept tied up under some houses, and there were also Asian cows around, kept in a pen in wealthier villages but just hanging around outside of the homestead at the second homestead.
While walking through the forests James and Michael explained medicinal and food uses of various plants. Michael ate some ants and a grub that he found along the trail. They had us try several fruits from random trees we passed. On the second night, Michael and the father of the family went hunting and brought back a flying squirrel, a small snake and bird all of which Michael had killed with a sling shot. In the morning, they plucked the birds feathers, charred the skin in the fire, scraped the charred surface. For the squirrel they just charred it in the fire and scraped of the blackened surface. The squirrel, snake and bird were then chopped up, and put pretty much all of bits were cooked up in a stew for breakfast. A far cry from Cheerios.
We didn’t run across any other foreigners on our trek until we got to the last waterfall which was just a 5 minute walk from a road. Lots of foreigners there. After cleaning up a bit in the waterfall, we walked to the road where we met another song tao that took us to a restaurant for lunch (again, really good inexpensive food) and then to a location where we took a 40 minute trip down the river on a bamboo raft. The water level was low, and the raft was about 20 feet long and 5 feet wide. The four of us sat on the raft while our guide used a bamboo pole to guide the raft while standing on the front. It took a lot of skill to guide that raft over low spots and between rocks.
We returned to Chiang Mai by Songthaew, collected the rest of our possessions at the tour company offices and then were taken to our next location, a beautiful AirBnB on the edge of the old town.
Next up, playing with elephants. At least that was the plan.
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