We had heard from other travelers, including my dad remembering his own trek thirty years ago, that the hill tribes outside of Chiang Mai couldn’t be missed. We found a private guide, Sutthi, who was happy to drive us up to and around Mae Hong Son and Pai.
We began with a brief trek through the mountainous forest, with stops at waterfalls that sprayed us in welcome. A local guide showing us the way pointed to trees that had been hacked at by insensitive visitors; sap would seep out and they would torch it to produce a small fire show. These hacked trees had been tenderly bandaged with cloth by our guide’s fellow tribe members to send the message that such careless treatment of nature was impermissible.
When the trees finally parted, we discovered rice paddies and flower fields bending and folding with the hills and valleys. No opium or marijuana is grown openly here. These hill tribes used to be mass producers of poppies until the Thai government and police, under international pressure, firmly quashed the industry in recent decades.
A local tribe woman brewed us up a cup of locally grown coffee, boasting about its superior quality due to its berries growing in the forest rather than in a bio-homogenous, exclusively coffee field. Starbucks was buying the local coffee here until this tribe grew tired of the corporation’s overbearing presence and asked them to leave. They are proud to keep more of the profit by selling it more independently now.
Sutthi bought a banana leaf packet of sticky rice, custard, and fresh mango for us. Love at first taste! You can have it for breakfast or dessert. My mental calculation tells me that I can have it three times a day, then?! And we did.
We drove through literally 1,864 curves in the road, a number boasted on signs along the way, to get to the secluded small city of Mae Hong Son. We visited their mountain-top temple, distinguished from others we have seen by its decorative silver tin, intricately punched with holes, lining the layers of roofs. This is the temple style of Burma (also known as Myanmar), the country over the border to the north, from which most people here immigrated. In Christianity, we say that humans are made in the image of God. At this temple, it’s switched; Buddha is made in the image of the people, with red lips dyed from chewing on beetle nut (the local version of chewing tobacco), also evident in the red streams of spit on the sides of the road.
Mae Hong Son was a bit of a ghost town in what was now low season. We retired to our resort, made up of bungalows hiding among the forest. Brangelina stayed here! They looked out at us from five picture frames on the reception desk. It makes sense Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie would prefer such a quiet resort in a quiet town away from paparazzi — except for the hotel staff-turned-paparazzi who copped photographic evidence of their stay here.
