Alex Wright

May 19, 2004

Into the Jungle

On Wednesday morning we hopped in back of a Toyota covered pickup truck and set out for the mountains northwest of Chiang Mai.

Piled together on rattling foam benches for the next four hours, we got to know our trek companions: two Swedish girls, a Swiss couple, a pair of French mathematicians, and a young English girl named Lizzy.

Our guide, Moon, had grown up in one of the mountain hill tribes, and now made his living leading farangs like us on treks out into the jungle.

After stopping for lunch and supplies, we set out on a long, lurching drive up the hill roads and muddy dirt tracks, off the grid and into the mountain jungle. Four hours after leaving Chiang Mai, we unloaded the truck and set out on foot.

The hiking was easy at first, along dirt roads and pathways by the hillside rice paddies. For about two hours, the only other living things we encountered were an occasional water buffalo, wild pig - or tarantula.

Towards day's end, the landscape started morphing into jungle, with the trees creeping together above a canopy of palm leaves and jutting bamboo. A rainstorm gathered in the distance. Just before dusk, we came to our evening waystop: a Karen tribe village.

The tribespeople were uniformly friendly, gracious, and seemingly at ease with Gore-Tex foreigners like ourselves. After exchanging greetings and nodding bows, our tribal hosts showed us to our accomodations for the night: a big straw hut (sleeps eight!) with a slat floor raised above the pig sty. Let's just say "sparse" is an understatement.

That night, Moon cooked us a pot of homemade chicken curry soaked in chiles, while the tribesmen rolled out a cooler full of warm beer. Having no choice but to put aside any qualms about kitchen hygiene, we dug into our bowls and savored the hot curry and homegrown rice. For dessert, fresh mango.

After dinner, we all sat along the big wooden table drinking Chang beer by the liter and warbling away into the night. A couple of tribesfolk came over and joined us. A nameless woman in a bright blue headscarf stood by one of the huts staring at me for what felt like hours, then came over and sat down next to me on the bench. We nodded and smiled, exchanging the occasional inquiring look as she sat listening intently to us - trying to understand - and smoking on her handmade pipe stuffed with banana leaves and tobacco.

In times not long past, hill tribe trekkers would smoke opium with the tribespeople during these evening visits; but the Thai government has taken measures to halt the practice, fearing for growing drug addiction among the tribes (who already rely on poppy as a major cash crop). But opium or no, we both had strange dreams that night: weird deformed faces floating in the ether. One could easily believe there were spirits among us. Or maybe something funky in the stew.

If there's one thing I learned that night, it's that a tribal village at 3:00 in the morning is ten times noisier than my old neighborhood in Manhattan. The roosters, exhibiting utter disregard for rooster convention, started crowing at 2:30 AM; wild pigs rutted around under the floorboards; cicadas wailed in the distance; while rain and leaves rustling outside all added up to a positive cacophony and a recipe for no sleep.

The next morning, tired and a little bewildered, we said our goodbyes to the tribesfolk and ambled out again into the forest. Three hours of sweat-soaked vertical hiking later, we made our way to the elephant camp.

A family of mahouts tended the elephants, who had long since given up long-distance cargo hauls through the jungle in favor of the comparatively easy life of lugging tourists up over the hiking paths.

We climbed aboard and spent the next hour or so perched atop the pachyderms as they lumbered over the hills and waded through streams, taking us deeper into the jungle.

We stopped, broke for lunch, and continued on foot for another couple of hours until we came to a bamboo raft camp.

These rafts were made of freshly cut bamboo pipes, lashed together with vines - hardly built to last, but they did their job, ferrying us over gentle rapids, past more tribal huts, elephants and the occasional water wheel.

Finally, we floated up to a roadside landing where the rafts deposited us to a waiting throng of village women and children hawking warm beer, ice cream and trinkets. We said goodbye to the ferrymen, boarded the waiting microbus for the ride back to Chiang Mai for hot showers and a long night's sleep.