A Hilltribe Evening

We left Chiang Mai early, six of us crammed into the back of a pick-up, along with several sacks of rice, blankets, oil, medical supplies, writing pads and pencils, and a sack of footballs. We were travelling to a Karen village a hundred kilometres west, four thousand feet up in the mountains that straddle the border between Thailand and Burma.

The Karen are the largest of the ethnic minorities that live in this part of the world. Commonly called hilltribes, their mountain communities stretch from Vietnam and Laos in the east, to China and Burma in the north and west. The Karen in Thailand number around 300,000; 50% of the total hilltribe population.

Our destination was Ban Ton Neu, a small village of about three hundred people, twenty kilometres from the volatile Burmese border, although previously in this part of the world, political borders have meant little to the indigenous population. Most hilltribe communities in Thailand are now well established, but their nomadic culture used to mean uprooting and moving the complete village every seven or eight years, once the local soil had been exhausted through slash and burn agricultural methods.

After two hours driving down Highway 108 we pulled up for a break in the small town of Mae Sariang, a typically scruffy small northern Thai town, with a population made up of a cross section of several different tribal groups. From Mae Sariang we headed southwest, leaving the tarmaced road as we wound our way for the next two hours up the dirt tracks that scored across the mountains.

Our arrival in the village created a great deal of excitement, a crowd of children quickly gathered, and for the next thirty six hours this group would literally be watching our every move, fascinated by these ungainly long nosed foreigners. We were introduced to the Pu Yai, or village headman, who took us to the ‘guesthouse’, a bamboo hut on high wooden posts attached to the neighbouring building by a bamboo veranda. Most of the other buildings in the village were the same, although a few sported shiny new metal roofs.

After dumping our packs and an introductory glass of the local spirit, we set off for a stroll over the hill into the next valley, where the view was of hills stretching to the horizon in every direction. The hillsides were covered in early secondary growth; the original forests having been cleared over the years, only now beginning to return to the natural vegetative state. Although we were firmly into the opium growing areas, the only crops to be seen were of less innocuous types. We were to learn more about opium cultivation and it’s role in hilltribe culture later that evening.

Back in the village a meal was being prepared in our honour. Three villagers had a pig tied to a tree stump, and as we approached one of the villagers killed the pig with a sharp blow from a machete to the back of its head. The carcass was then butchered as we sat and watched from the steps of a nearby hut, our repulsion tempered by fascination.

As the sun set the temperature dropped rapidly, by the time it was dark we were all sitting around the fire which the pig was roasting over, wrapped up in fleeces and caps, knocking back several more glasses of ya dong, the home brewed rice spirit which is found throughout south east asia, doing everything possible to keep the chill away.

By the time that our food was ready, we were all quite merrily chatting away with the villagers. That none of them spoke English, and that none of us spoke Karen was not a problem, the strong rice spirit broke all of the language barriers.

We ate in traditional style sitting cross legged on the floor of the headmans hut. The pig had been augmented with several large bowls of rice, stir fried vegetables, and yet more rice spirit. All of this was eaten with our hands, again in traditional style; the men ate while the women served, political correctness not yet having reached this part of the world. After eating, we were led to a house at the far end of the village. Here we were to have our first lesson in the use of opium. Removing our shoes and entering the hut we were greeted by the sight of three men sprawled on mats in front of an open fire in the centre of the room. In the gloom behind the fire we could make out several sleeping forms - the wife and children of our host.

We introduced ourselves as best as we could, and settled our business. We were to pay twenty baht a pipe, were to relax and treat the house as our own. We joined the others on the floor, and watched our host prepare the pipes. Nimbly moulding a pea sized ball of raw opium, spearing it with a long pin and holding it just off the flame of a candle, plunging it into the bowl of the pipe as it sizzled and hissed. The smoke seemed cool, and had a distinctive acrid tang. One long slow pull, hold it and then breathe it out slowly, lie back.

After several pipes we mastered the ritual and relaxed as the opium started to have an effect. We smoked six or seven pipes each. My main memory of the evening was when I left in the early hours to go back to our hut to sleep. Coming out into the fresh night air, I looked up at the sky, the stars were brighter, bigger, and so near that I felt I could reach them. I sat down, spellbound, and stared into space for an unknown period of time.

I woke up the next morning at dawn, frozen, even though I was in a sleeping bag wearing two T-shirts and a sweatshirt. In truth I was woken up; as the first rays of light crept over the mountains, a cock started crowing at the other end of the village, this set off his neighbour underneath the house next door, the pattern continued until the whole village was cock-a- doodling away. Underneath our hut a dog started barking, which set off all the other dogs in the village. The doorway to the hut was half covered by a blanket, but in the gap above the blanket four children were staring at us in our sleeping bags, presumably we’d had a crowd all night as well. It was obviously time to get up.
I went outside and stood next to the fire that somebody had already lit. At this altitude it was pretty cold until the sun came up, and the mist restricted vision to fifty metres. A villager that I recognised from the opium hut appeared with steaming mugs of tea, which we drank by the fire as the rising sun burnt off the mist and started to warm the air.

The day started after a breakfast of tea and fruit, we then went off to deliver the supplies that we had brought from Chiang Mai. This took much longer than expected. At every house we were obliged to have a glass of the evil home brew whisky. Luckily most of the houses were so dark I found it quite easy to pour most of the contents of each glass through a crack in the floor. There was a wedding in the village that day and this whisky drinking was part of the celebrations.

Our final task was to deliver the notepads, pens and pencils to the local school. All were gratefully received by the one teacher, but were not as welcome as the footballs that we had kept hidden from the children until the last moment.

The journey back was as arduous as the journey there, probably worse as we all had headaches from overindulgence the previous night. Mae Sariang felt as if it was a large town as we passed back through; the previous day it had all of the attributes of a small backwoods settlement, and arriving back in Chiang Mai we felt as if we had travelled hundreds of years from Ban Ton Neu.

*Photos from this trip can be seen here