We boarded a long, skinny boat powered and steered by an old car motor at the end of a long metal pole. We zipped down the river to arrive at a famous “Longneck Village.” We were greeted by a woman with brown skin refined by 50 or 60 years of age, with twinkling eyes and a smile spreading wide across her face, wearing bright pink, yellow, and green traditional garments and golden bangles that had worked at lengthening her neck since she was a small girl.
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Sutthi chatted with her while I tried not to stare. I longed to get a good hard look at her long neck, but I was very wary of peeking too much. She beckoned to me to sit beside her to take a picture with her and then dressed me up with a traditional headband and a golden necklace facade that ties in the back with ribbon. She is probably among the most photographed women in the world, I thought. We were grateful for her warmth and eager to repay her for humoring us by purchasing some scarves she wove by hand.
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I’ll admit, I was paranoid and overly analytical about this exchange with the women in this Longneck Village. Couldn’t it be considered rude and disrespectful to come to this village to gape at these women like they are zoo animals, I wondered? Then again, I think they are proud of their longneck beauty and happy to present themselves to visitors who have heard of them from around the world. Sutthi wasn’t bashful about admiring the women and asking them direct questions about their tradition. I bet they appreciate him being comfortable and direct rather than awkward and shy about it. I just hope they aren’t feeling annoyed or exploited. I’m glad that at least they make some money selling their wares to tourists.
The longneck tradition is growing extinct, with fewer mothers compelling their daughters to don the heavy golden bands. After all, it presses the clavicles down rather than stretching the neck taller, which weakens the spine and the neck. The price of beauty! Most of the longneck women have moved out of their rural villages down into the cities where they can make more money off of tourism.
Upon arrival in Pai, Sutthi joked that if we stayed here too long, pretty soon we would be walking around barefoot, tatted, with long, shaggy hair and riding motorbikes with no helmets. That illustrates the immigrant hippie/hipster population in Pai for you.
We’d heard excellent things about Pai, but I was a little bummed when beer-drinking backpackers were easier to come by than Pai natives. The locals certainly know how to pander to young tourists, passing out flyers for the party at the Rasta bar, advertising two-for-one happy hours, displaying catalogs of bamboo tattoos, and dressing up as sexy cowgirls and inviting you to try their Texas barbeque.
Not until I fed bananas to elephants myself, all up close and personal, did it hit me how crazy it is that an elephant’s nostrils are so far out at the end of her trunk! I was mesmerized by the trunk acting like a hand to grab the food, curl under itself, and deposit the snack in its shriveled orifice of a mouth. Elephants are one of those animals you feel warm kinship with and empathy toward when you peer into their human-like eyes. Their fuzzy heads of hair also aid my imagined personification of them. Their average lifespan is longer than that of a human. Pregnancies two years long and concentrated mothering until the babies are four or five years old limit the number of children they can have. I didn’t feel compelled to mount and ride these guys. I was content to keep popping bananas, like they were peanuts, into their hand-like trunks.
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Sutthi expressed his bitterness toward the trampling effects of tourism, especially on nature, pointing out “Resort, resort, resort…coffee shop, coffee shop, coffee shop. Too many resorts! Too many coffee shops!” He did his best to show us the hidden gems of nature still surviving. All very beautiful, but I wish I had found a way to communicate that we were more interested in meeting the people of these hill tribes.
I wonder, though, if it is unrealistic to hope for authentic encounters with hill tribes. We don’t want to be voyeuristic, and we don’t speak their language. Does a tourist with enough confidence, charisma, and wherewithal stand a chance at enjoying true immersion in hill tribes these days? Do they mind our visits? Sutthi set an itinerary for us that didn’t allow us to take a whack at this, besides the coffee and longneck villages. I hope to return to North Thailand to try my hand at getting to know the people of Thailand’s hill tribes.