The Songthaew Remains The Same

First off, congratulations to Chris and Beckie who have just got engaged - very pleased for you both !!

So it was on a Wednesday evening a couple of weeks ago that we set off for Pa Do Tha, a village in Thailand's Tak Province, on the Myanmar border inhabited by members of the Karen hill tribe. A leapfrog journey over 24 hours from Bangkok to Mae Sot, Mae Sot to Umphang and Umphang to Po Da Tha. Across rolling hills of thick green jungle in the back of a Song Thaew (literally "Two Benches" - a converted pick up truck, fast becoming my favourite mode of transport), gazing at the breathtaking scenery while the wind buffered my face. Along the 1200-odd billious twists of the Mae Sot-Umphang road and into the sort of terrain SUV adverts use for location (and most drivers of said vehicles never see). Loaded up with items such as aluminium sheeting, vast amounts of water and vegetables and a huge gas tank, ready for whatever greeted us at the other end. I shall recount the experiences we had with teaching in a later post, as this will simply get too long to read otherwise, here's all the other tomfoolery we got up to :

On arrival at the village, it was clear that they weren't exaggerating on the Go Differently website - this was very much a working, rural area - people, dogs and livestock mingle easily with each other, in and around the houses and the air is constantly abuzz with the sounds of insects in the undergrowth and in the air. 'Check your boots before putting them on' time. I knew from the time of sending the email confirming our times that this was going to be a test of my expectations of comfort, and an exercise in pushing the boundaries of them, but it's a world apart from sitting in an air-conditioned internet cafe when you have to put your money where your mouth is. I had concerns about several things when I arrived, the product of preparatory imagination, and it's interesting now to look back and see how quickly those were dissipated and then replaced by others in the first few days of the stay. For example, the availability of fresh drinking water, quality of food, being around livestock (particularly chickens) and the political situation so close to the Myanmar border (I believe some of the hilltribes had in the past been displaced by the neighbouring military).

The first evening we broke the ice with some of our guides and people in the villages by sharing some of the local moonshine and passing around photos of my own village (of sorts) and family. I think the booze is fermented using rice, and it does indeed taste a bit like Sake - with the difference that you never know just how strong it's going to be (I initially thought it was quite weak - an opinion I quickly revised). And yes, I do know that it's usually Bloody Stupid drinking homebrewed spirits, but all the others were doing it, and they called it "Happy Water", so I knew it was alright. The food was nothing to worry about either, and I'd even go so far as describing it as the best we've had on the trip so far. All done by hand (well, machete) over a wood fire over a few hours, and in the main vegetarian using 95% lcoal produce grown on the hills. Delicious. Then off to bed, which turned out to be a mat on the wood floor of the hut, which despite technically being under a roof was more or less outside. Directly above the chickens rattling about and the bellowed gruntings of the pig sty next door, fireflies dancing and flickering their arpeggiated constellations in the pitch darkness.

Life in the village was for the most part quite simple, the whole society being built around getting up at daybreak for breakfast, going out to work on the hills (or going to school) until evening, then coming home and sleeping. There are about 40 houses, one for each family. The houses are made almost entirely from locally sourced materials, mostly using bamboo (which is also used for such things such as fences, dog bowls, nail trays for carpentry and coffee cups). The families are on the whole quite large by Western standards - I asked some of the children how many siblings they had, and the average was about five or six (though my parents both come from families not much smaller than this). The society is very much a collaborative one, but it occurred to me that you would get far less specialization, and more emphasis on everyone knowing how to do things for themselves (e.g. ability to repair a motorbike, cultivate crops and cook properly with no concept that you do one or the other). Though the level of technology is at a very basic level, there are a few concessions to the march of technology in the wider world - some government provided solar panels supply each house with small amounts of electricity, stored up in car batteries and used with a single flourescent light in the evenings. The hut we stayed in for the first few days even had a handy inverter fixed on the wall which meant you could charge your mobile phone up from the wall socket - followed by a brisk 20 minute hike up the hill for network reception. We asked our guide, Su Pat, how long this had been in place. He said about a year and the effects, not all of them positive, were felt almost straight away. For example, the flourescent lights attract a much higher number of bugs and biting insects in the evening, and the opportunity for people to watch films and listen to music late into the night mean that getting up for farming gets harder and so the quality of work decreases. Transport between villages and around the hills is either by foot or motorbike - the odd 4x4 makes an appearance, but these are by no means ubiquitous. I think if there was a sudden lack of oil and fuel it would have a noitceable effect, but life could continue without that much difficulty.

From my crude observations I would guess that all the agricultural work in the area is, unsurprisingly, done by hand - I saw only a few tractors, which seemed to be used for transporting people rather than used on the land itself. Sowing the corn (which we later 'helped' with) consisted of groups of Karen villagers moving in lines up the hill, clutching parasols for shelter from the sun. Each group appoints someone to hoe out the lines of holes whilst the others threw in seeds and food, stamping it in by foot. As manual labour goes, this perhaps isn't the most strenous, but keeping it up in the fierce mid day sun and into the evening takes a lot of stamina. And water (which we drank by the litre, yet strangely the locals didn't seem all that bothered about). We joined in with this for a couple of days over the weekends, and they got to practice speaking English with us (the secret to making the day pass quickly is to natter away to your neighbour a lot). Umphang Kee seemed like a nice enough place - prettier than Po Da Tha, perhaps a bit more developed (bigger school, next to a huge grid of solar panels on the outskirts).

The atmosphere in general was very informal, in the village, school and the wider area, and it took a few days for us to adjust to this. Initially it could sometimes be frustrating to arrange something and have it not happen, but after a few days we worked that that's just the way things work around here, and everyone knows what the deal is. I think this a very pleasant way of doing things, unrushed and uncomplicated - people get up when it's light, go to bed when it's dark, eat when they're hungry. Everyone knows each other, and is comfortable with each other's company, so no offence is taken when someone doesn't turn up for whatever reason, or they just turn up on the doorstep for an impromptu English lesson. Decision making for the village as a whole is performed by a meeting with a representative (I would guess the eldest man) from each house having a say. The atmosphere in small groups of people is very, very easy going - though I obviously couldn't pick up on everything that was going on, it seemed there was none of the competitiveness or points scoring that you get in conversations at home sometimes. I don't know how often people seriously fall out with each other, or how they work things out afterwards (you can't just disappear or avoid them after all) - I would suppose that you just make sure that you don't make trouble for yourself in the first place. I appreciated the outlook that comes with people that are so comfortable around each other that there are often long periods of unawkward silence, with no need to speak for the sake of it, or just pointing and something and smiling. People say hello and smile just as a matter of course as you walk around the village - I don't know if this is the same in rural areas at home, but it made a welcome change from a population refusing to acknowledge each other. A world away from surly restaurant owners of Bangkok, or the reserved insularity of the Tube at home.

There was no shortage of insects in the area - despite preparing for this, covering myself in DEET and sleeping in trousers and long sleeved shirts under a net, I think I must have been bitten close to a hundred times during the stay. My arms looked like a pair of gherkins, dyed pink. When the work had finished on the house near the school, we moved over there to give the Old Man his house back, and discovered that we shared our residence with an army of frogs. The amphibious swines croaked and bellowed through the nights at a ridiculous volume (comparable, say, to a car alarm going off in the next street). It sounded very much like an orchestra of guiros (the fish shaped percussion instrument that, coincidentally, features heavily on the Grange Hill theme), and not completely unlike the belching competition the kids had in the morning. The frogs kept this up for a few nights, then fell strangely silent when three dogs moved in under the house ...

If you happen to get up in the middle of the night, and the sky is free of clouds, you can see the night stars more clearly than anywhere I've ever been before. The lack of any sort of light pollution or smog means you can view the refracted histories of the galaxy's raging gas giants unspoiled. Strings of photons, bending around the gravity of huge unseen masses, millions of years out of date. Spanning the sort of distances expressed by numbers so ridiculously large that, when printed or written down, cease to have any real meaning. Numbers so gigantic that when comprehension comes it brings with it a special sort of vertigo, bruising the mind and menacing the soul. Marathons of nuclear fusion, forging the heavier elements and releasing the light required for Life, yet only by the merest fraction of chance actually reaching the only known place that Life does exist. So they might be ascribed some meaning by being observed ... by a 27 year old bloke who's other senses have just told him that he's standing in a load of cow shit. How humbling astronomy is !

Early to bed, Early to rise, Makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. After two weeks extensive research of this theory, I reluctantly came to the conclusion that it is wholly untrue. However, I do think there may have been some subtle health benefits to all this - the food was definitely the best quality we've had on the whole trip (and delicious because of it's simplicity), and the clean air was a relief from the pollution of the cities. Er, apart from the wood fire lit under the hut to drive away insects. Towards the end of the stay I started to wonder how well I would fare if I had to live in an environment like this for an extended period, and how unfounded some of my initial concerns had been. There were still a few things that irritated me e.g. insect bites, no real amounts of privacy, no independance of meal times, but I realised that I had adapted to other things surprisingly quickly e.g. washing in the river, living in close contact with animals etc. My copy of National Geographic had a couple of appropriate articles which got me thinking as well. One of them was an assessment on the burgeoning problem of allergies in the increasing sterility of the developed world, and how severe allergic reactions are almost unheard of in rural communities such as this - the proximity to livestock giving young immune systems a vital kickstart, and perhaps develops them more overall.

The first weekend we were given the opportunity to bump our way along the Umphang river with the aim of eventually ending up at the Te Lor Su waterfall.The mud from the farms runs off into the river after the monsoon rains, merging slowly with the river and leading to a 70s two-tone effect for a time. The rich brown water glistened in the sun and churned in the eddies and vortices - it looked just the bit in Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory (the one made in 1971) where they visit the chocolate river and Augustus Gloop goes up the pipe. Augustus ! Save some for later !


Over rocks and under waterfalls in an inflatable dinghy, drinking cold lager at ten in the morning - this is my sort of outdoor activity. We stopped halfway at the hot springs so Dan could disgrace himself by getting covered in mud.









On to a trek through the jungle to the Te La Su waterfall, Asia's largest and 6th in the world. An incredible sight.











300m of brilliant white cascading water over limestone crags, and the best shower in the area.

















On the way back through the next day, we stopped to pick up some supplies and a load of guitars - playing some badly rendered one-handed blues in the back of a pick up and holding on to the roof with the other is the new way to travel. On arrival it was discovered that the third fret of one of the guitars was missing - back home most people would either pay for a shop repair or discard it as rubbish - here they just get out the machetes and carve a new one from the firewood - same applies for making plectrums from water bottles. After lunch we went up into the jungle on the hills to cut bamboo for the repairs on the house near the school. Um looked distinctly nervous and offered a redundant "Be Careful !" as he set us loose with a load of machetes. I enjoyed myself immensely, stalking through the trees looking for suitable shoots to hack down, while the insects took chunks out of me, glasses sliding off the nose, clambering up and down the preposterous gradient. In the end the humidity and insects proved too much and we decided to bundle up the spoils and make our way down the hill, hurling the 6-10 foot shoots down as we went. I drank a litre of water straight off as Su Pat and the others cut them to size.

They did significantly better than us ...














Friday the 2nd was my birthday, marking 27 years of confused bumbling about and talking rubbish. Dan and Su Pat made sure I had a very memorable day, made all the more enjoyable by the fact that I was somewhere that was genuinely interesting (rather that the usual plan of going to dingy pubs in Reading or London). This did not negate the need for booze, however (and given that in coincided with the end of the first week of teaching, I think it was utterly deserved). The only problem was that in order to get hold of some hooligan juice we'd have to hike 7km back to Umphang (foolishly we declined the offer of lifts on the back of motorbikes). It was a nice day for it, and the school had finished an hour early so off we went with grins that stretched from ear to ear. It took rather longer than the hour or so we'd been quoted - and I was beginning to wonder if we'd ever get there, and when we finally arrived the heavens opened and we had to hole up in the internet cafe for a bit (with beer, natch). By the time we'd got round to buying a load of cans for later (plus a few Road Beers, safe in the knowledge that the bags would get lighter as the journey progressed), it was threatening to get dark. It dimly occurred to me that our hosts might be wondering where we'd got to. Sure enough, five minutes into the return our rescue party turned up with concerned looks and motorbikes. So we got a free lift back and a motorbike race to boot, rad. In the evening a lot of people came round for a feast in the hut, and to witness a good luck ceremony for my benefit (conducted by Two Ndong Por, the Old Man that we stayed with on the first few nights) - this involved tying lots of bits of string around my wrists and smearing bits of chicken on my T-Shirt.

I was initially a bit perturbed about all this, thinking it was some sort of voodoo thing, but I noticed later on that a lot of the kids (and some of the adults) had these bands on as well, so I think it was a nice way of making me feel properly part of village life. And it's not every day you get to witness something like this (let alone be the centre of it). The only problem is that they didn't clean the chicken off my jacket and it was covered in red ants in the morning - at least they made a go of it).




The next morning I was greeted by the Mother Of All Hangovers (quelle surprise) and a proposal to hike 10km over to Umphang Kee (the next village). It was hard. Very hard. My cranium moaned the whole way. And our reward when we got there was to go and work on the hills sowing corn for the weekend. Over rickety bamboo bridges. In the blazing sun. With pythons and tarantulas to keep us company. Spleeeeendid !


Gopp found a tarantula in the fields. Fantastic. He kept hold of it all day.


















A sample of the corn used for planting - the pink dye is a sort of insecticide.



















The scene from our front door. Nice. Also the setting that saw the lads saddle up in another beaten up old pick up that wouldn't start properly. Their mission was to go and woo the girl of Su Pat's amorous designs by turning up with a load of Happy Water and guitars. So they bumped their way down the hill, to lots of cheering, expecting it to start so they could zoom off to romantic success. Unfortunately, it broke down immediately, and they all had to get out and push. Gopp and I would have helped them, but it was more enjoyable to just stand there and take the piss, and besides which we were too busy laughing our arses off to move. They did manage to get over to Umphang Kee eventually, but ended up getting far too drunk and the poor girl went off in a huff. Ahhh, people are the same the world over, eh ?

You rotten bastard ! This feathery thug and his ilk woke me up every morning at four. They sound like the Rude Boys of Slough high street, offering bellowed speculations on whether "Matty's just done one". Shut up !













Get a load of people round a fire with some guitars, and it's the best thing in the world. Funny that these lads spent most of their efforts in pursuit of booze, playing guitars and getting all moony over women. Stone The Crows ! That's the same as me ! Who knew ?!