Travelers' Tales Thailand: True Stories (Travelers' Tales Guides) Page 32
The shy and retiring Akha construct their villages at high elevations to escape neighbors and provide privacy for opium cultivation. Primitive wooden figures flanking the village entrance gates are carved with prominent sex organs to ensure fertility and ward off evil spirits. Don’t touch these talisman gates or the bamboo spirit houses scattered throughout the village.
—Carl Parkes, Thailand Handbook
I felt blind when I entered the dark house. The bamboo floor swayed lightly under my feet. I was relieved when Apu motioned for me to sit down. She was preparing rice and vegetables, and when my eyes became accustomed to the slanted rays of light that filtered through slats in the walls, I offered to help. She put a knife and some greens on a chopping block before me. I methodically began to perform my task. Moments later, Apu swept aside my dainty movements and finished it with three well-placed chops of her machete. A fierce squawking outside was silenced by a loud “thwap.” Chicken for dinner. Azo brought the gutted carcass inside.
We ate from a low bamboo table on the men’s side of the house. Serving bowls in the table’s center held cooked greens, bamboo shoots, the chicken dish, and hot chili sauces. We used chopsticks and Chinese flat-bottomed spoons, taking turns to scoop food from the common bowls. Reaching into baskets set on the floor, we grabbed handfuls of steamed rice and molded them into little cakes before taking a bite.
After the meal, the small table was moved aside. Rice and food that had fallen on the floor were swept through a wide crack to the ground below, where pigs and chickens gobbled up the remains. A perfect eco-system, no garbage.
Some neighbors came to meet the farang. We sat, staring and smiling at each other until I retrieved a child’s toy from my pack. A ball on a string hung below a plastic cup; the proper toss would place the ball in the cup. The toy was passed round and fierce competition ensued. Later, I joined the women on their side of the house while the men lit a small kerosene lamp, lay back against their bedrolls and smoked.
The Swing Festival started the next morning; it was a harvest celebration that marked the beginning of the Akha New Year. Men of the village gathered at a high promontory in early morning fog to build a tall swing from four saplings stripped of bark and branches. After planting the four poles in a square, they shimmied up and lashed the tops together into an arch. They hung a swing from the center of the arch, choosing the heaviest from among them to test it.
We went to the headman’s house and drank a bowl of fragrant rice whiskey with breakfast as young people gathered outside. The teenagers rhythmically pounded large sections of bamboo against a flattened tree trunk, making a steady beat to accompany their songs. For three days, the Akha wore their finest traditional clothing and stayed home from the fields. One by one, each villager took their place on the swing, singing a New Year’s song as they teetered over the cliff. Teenage girls swung tandem and flirted with young men. On the third day, Apu brought me to the swing. She helped me balance on the narrow seat and pushed me off into the sky. I leaned my head back and sang the swing song, imitating the words I had heard a hundred times in the hours I’d stood watching. When I came back to earth, a toothless old woman wearing heavy silver neck rings nodded and drew me to her side. I’d made a new friend.
Then the festival was over and it was time for work. Apu left her finery hanging on pegs inside the bamboo house, slipped on her oldest homespun jacket and pulled a pair of torn men’s trousers underneath her skirt. She placed a fitted hood on her headdress and chose work clothes from my pack for me. Geert rigged large baskets on either side of a child-sized packhorse. Apu gave me a bamboo-and-rattan basket to carry, showing me how to support it with the woven tumpline across my forehead. It was an odd sensation, hanging the basket from my forehead instead of my shoulders.
We followed winding paths away from the village, up a hill and along the top of a tree-covered ridge. Apu stopped along the trail to harvest fresh greens and bamboo shoots for dinner. She darted from side to side, checking traps she had set days before. On one steep hillside, she sang out a triumphant cry. A trap had been triggered, and she ran for the prey. She lifted the log that had smashed the animal, and held it up for us to see. The scaly carcass was about a foot long, covered with crawling white maggots.
It had been dead too long. Geert and I covered our noses against the sickening stench. Apu smiled and patted her stomach, reassuring us that it would be tasty to eat. “No, no!” we responded. We held our noses, pantomimed bad stomachs from eating something so foul. She laughed merrily, lopped off a giant banana leaf with her machete, wrapped the animal in the leaf, and tossed it into the basket behind her back.
She reset the trap, showing us how the log would crash down on the next animal to pick at the bait tied to the Y-shaped trigger. We adopted the sound she used to imitate the falling log as the name of the stinking carcass that had been its victim. We called it the Blap.
We tried to reason with Apu. She should throw the Blap away. It was no good. She laughed and walked on ahead, singing an Akha song in her bell-like voice. Geert and I hung back, muttering.
“She can’t cook that thing, it’ll kill anyone who takes a bite!” I said.
He smiled, “Shouldn’t we try to be good guests and eat it? Apu must know what she is doing.”
“Listen,” I retorted, “when Ano shot that iridescent jungle beetle out of the tree with his slingshot and roasted it on the fire, I ate it. I ate the chicken feet and the pig and the dog meat during the festival. And I never once complained. But I’m not going to eat that…Blap.”
We arrived at a terraced hillside and set to work, hacking corn off stalks with machetes and tossing the ears over our shoulders into the carry-baskets. I got accustomed to swinging the heavy blade and quickened my pace. But the increasing weight of the corn in the basket pulled my head back until I could only stare straight up at the sky. I stumbled along straining my eyes to spy the next ear from the corner of my vision. Apu spotted my predicament and scurried over, relieving me of my burden with a suppressed grin. It was time for lunch.
Apu unfolded our midday meal from banana leaf wrappings and opened a round basket packed with the nutty-flavored mountain rice. She lit a fire, let it burn down, and tossed the Blap onto the smoldering embers. Several minutes later she pushed the blackened thing away from the coals with a stick. Once it cooled, she peeled the scales from the carcass, smiling and nodding, telling us again how delicious it would be. She wrapped it again and returned it to her carry-basket.
I was relieved to avoid eating the Blap. But I feared it was only a matter of time before the beast appeared on our dinner table. As we shucked corn during the afternoon, I repeated to myself, “I am not going to eat that thing no matter what.”
When we returned from the day’s work, Apu sent me down to the village shower. Bamboo pipes sluiced water from a spring into a narrow gorge. Certain times were reserved for women to wash, others for men. The Akha girls laughed shyly when I arrived; I followed their custom and wore my sarong while showering. Afterwards, we fought mock battles with the children who’d come to fill their containers with drinking water.
I was suspicious about the dinner that simmered on the fire when I returned. Geert leaned across the divider from the men’s side of the house and said, “Don’t worry, she got rid of that Blap thing. It’s fish for dinner tonight.” I vowed to ask about the Blap before every meal.
By the light of the kerosene lantern, Apu slapped one rigid arm on top of the other and told the story of the Blap. Then she mimicked my head tipping back under the strain of the carry-basket to another round of laughter.
“How many days’ walk to my home village?” I was asked in sign language.
“Not possible to walk,” I pantomimed. “You must fly over the ocean.” I took out my notebook and drew a picture of an airplane. Everyone seemed perplexed; they had seen planes up in the sky, but they were so small. How had I gotten inside?
Life slipped into a familiar routine. I spent most d
ays working with Apu, harvesting and shucking corn. She sang Akha songs as we walked toward the fields and taught me the names of plants and flowers. One afternoon on the path back to the village we heard a terrible roar. Apu vaulted into the brush and dragged me behind her. The entire jungle seemed to shake as an elephant came charging past, hauling a felled tree that was chained behind it. A “flat-lander” man ran behind the elephant with a whip. We huddled among the leaves, waiting for the spectacle to pass. Apu took me off the path and showed me a logging camp. It was the only time I saw the smile disappear from her face.
For several days, I stayed home from the fields, bouncing our neighbor Abu’s baby as she wove cotton cloth. She outfitted me in her extra clothes; the open black jacket, trimmed in white seeds and red beads, was a bit short but fit fine over my t-shirt. The gathered skirt barely covered my thighs. The towering headdress weighed several pounds and swayed each time I moved, its silver coins, buttons, and beads tinkling beside my ears. I joined a group of chattering women trimming headdresses, tying on dyed monkey fur and chicken feathers and making brightly colored pom-poms from store-bought yarn.
I lost track of time. Life flowed in an unceasing pattern of work, each day rung in by the sound of the foot-treadle mortar, husking mountain rice for breakfast.
Finally, I had to leave. Everything seemed poignant that last day, even the gray monsoon clouds that rolled in across the valley. We returned from the fields a bit early for my special farewell feast. Once again I marveled at the mysterious array of delicately seasoned forest plants, meats, and fish that had been stir-fried, pickled, or smoked over the men’s hearth. I swept the floor after dinner one last time. Later, we played the ball and cup game that had become our favorite.
The next morning I packed to leave. Azo sharpened my knife on his special whetstone, indicating that no journey should be initiated with a dull knife. The two women, Apu and Abu, strung white seed necklaces with tiny dried gourds trimmed in colored yarn. Tears clouded my eyes when they placed the farewell amulets around my neck.
We took some last photos; Apu imitated a farang by posing Western-style and mugging for the camera. In gestures and a few Akha words, I thanked her for her hospitality, her friendship, the lessons she had taught me, the delicious meals she’d cooked.
I have watched the hill tribes in their homes, and I am always struck, as I was then, by a sense of the continuousness of their lives.The women particularly seem to live out one long, undifferentiated chore: cooking and washing, sewing and weaving, milling and winnowing, suckling and mothering, and so on. I’m not saying this is good—I’m not like the Dutchman, who wanted his tribespeople picturesque and underdeveloped —but it seems to be a part of the tribal psychology. The farang life is measured into compartments: work, leisure; day, evening; what I am now, what I will be later.The tribespeople just keep on keeping on, slow and practised and implacable, expecting nothing more than the turning of the day, and of the seasons, and of their lives, after which brief turnabout they join the wider omnipresent wheeling of the ‘ancestors,’ whom time no longer needs.
—Charles Nicholl, Borderlines: A Journey in Thailand and Burma
Her face cracked an impish grin. She pantomimed a question about the farewell dinner. “Did you like it?”
“Yes, very much,” I patted my stomach. “Delicious.”
She tipped her head back and chuckled, lips exposing her red teeth. She patted her stomach, showing the sign for delicious again and again. Then, she gave me a devilish smirk. She slapped one arm down on top of the other—Blap!
Thalia Zepatos is a political consultant, traveler, and writer who lives in Portland, Oregon. She is the author of Adventures in Good Company: The Complete Guide to Women’s Tours and Outdoor Trips and A Journey of One’s Own: Uncommon Advice for the Independent Woman Traveler, from which this was excerpted.
It’s up to farangs to adapt to the customs of the hill tribes and not to make a nuisance of themselves. Apart from keeping an open mind and not demanding too much of your hosts, a few simple rules should be observed:• Dress modestly, with long trousers or skirt and a t-shirt or shirt.
• Loud voices and boisterous behaviour are out of place. Smiling and nodding establishes good intent.
• Most hill tribe houses contain a religious shrine. Do not touch or photograph this shrine, or sit underneath it.
• Some villagers like to be photographed, most do not. Point at your camera and nod if you want to take a photograph. Never insist if the answer is an obvious “no.” Be particularly careful with pregnant women and babies—most tribes believe cameras affect the soul of the foetus or new-born.
• Taking gifts is dubious practice; writing materials for children are very welcome, but sweets and cigarettes may encourage begging.
• Smoking opium on a trek is a big attraction for many travellers, but there is evidence of increased addiction rates among hill tribe villagers who are regularly visited by trekkers.
—Paul Gray and Lucy Ridout, The Rough Guide Thailand
STEVE VAN BEEK
Sin, The Buffalo Man
On a two-month journey down Thailand’s largest river, the author finds refuge with an isolated tribesman.
IN THE DUSK LIGHT, THE HALF-NAKED MAN STOOD IN SILHOUETTE, blocking the trail through thick vegetation. The moment I said a tentative “Sawasdee, Khrap?” (hello), he pulled a longknife and set his feet in a defensive stance.
It was a logical reaction for an old man deep in the jungle where few strangers set foot, but it caught me by surprise. In the pale evening light, the longknife, freed from its bamboo sheath, glowed with deadly intent as its owner barked in Thai, “What do you want?” I quickly explained that a border patrol soldier upstream had told me I might find a night’s accommodation in the old buffalo herder’s hut.
“Why’d he tell you that?” he muttered in an agitated voice. “He had no right saying that. Go away. Get out of here.”
The sight of the knife should have compelled me to “get” but I had nowhere to go. High in the hills along the Burmese border, night held many threats, most of them two-legged since hill tribesmen had long ago hunted out the tigers and other beasts that had once stalked the tangled forests. To calm him down, I explained quietly in Thai that I was on my way down the Ping River and had gotten soaked trying to wrestle my way over a five-meter-high weir. I had paddled this far in search of shelter and the herder’s hut was the only thing I’d encountered.
His fierceness wavered a moment at the words “paddled.” “Paddled? Paddled what?” he demanded.
“A boat. Paddled a boat,” I said, repeating the words pai rua (paddled).
“Nobody paddles a boat in this jungle,” he said, scoffingly. “Where is this boat?”
“Down at the riverbank,” I said, pointing down the thickly treed slope.
He peered for a long moment in the direction my finger pointed but obviously could see nothing. His attitude had changed, however. The knife was still up but now he was shifting from leg to leg, his curiosity piqued.
“Let’s go see,” he said, finally. “You first, I’ll follow.” The wariness was still there but he sheathed his knife and I breathed a little easier.
We stood on the bank of the rushing river as he ran a gnarled hand over the hull of the teak skiff. Nodding approvingly, he said, “Nice boat. Don’t see any this far north.” Straightening up, he said, “Stuck, huh? I don’t have much out here. This is the jungle. You’ll have to sleep in a lean-to. I only have curry and rice, but you can have some of it.” Home free.
On the way back up the hill, he said “You startled me. Nobody comes out here except to make trouble. I have nine water buffalo and they are worth a lot of money.” He said it, not in apology for his actions, but as a statement of fact about a hard life.
For most of the year, Sin Phoma, a Shan tribesman, lived with his wife and three grown sons in the village of Muang Ngai, two valleys away. While the garlic ripened, he spent the three months in the ju
ngle letting his buffalo fatten on the luxuriant grass that grew amidst underbrush made lush by monsoon rains. His eldest son often stayed with him but had gone out hunting the day before and was not expected back until the next morning.
Like many hillmen, Sin Phoma was short and sinewy, browned by years in the sun and used to taking care of himself. In a small patch he had cleared among the tall trees, he had erected bamboo thatch walls on posts one and a half meters off the ground and capped with a thatch roof. Access to the porch was by a log notched with steps. It was obvious from his exertions in climbing it that he was no longer young.
“Sixty-three,” he said with a smile when I asked him. “Old already. That’s why I have to be careful of strangers. There are black-hearted people in these hills,” he said, sweeping his arm across the silhouettes of the ridges. “They wouldn’t hesitate to kill me to steal my water buffalo.”
Down in the Central Plains, water buffalo were rapidly disappearing, replaced by small tractors that didn’t get sick and could power irrigation pumps and small farm trucks. Here in the north, buffalo were still valuable as draft animals, and sources of milk and meat.