Hill and dale

The trek, a plus overall, was more arduous than we had anticipated. Our fears that it might be "too touristy" were groundless. Remember Outward Bound? What about Camp Crozier, the early Peace Corps "confidence-building" camp in Puerto Rico, aptly named for the first Peace Corps volunteer to die overseas? Then, of course, there were William Holden and Jack Hawkins in "Bridge on the River Kwai," sweating, grunting and hacking their way across Burma and much of Thailand.

But I exagerate. The trek was simply, as advertised, a rugged three-day hike. No piece of cake, but doable for most of the 14 backpack-toting trekkers and two guides in our initial group. The guides were local hill tribesman in their early twenties whose first language was Karen, Thai second. They spoke serviceable English, the lingua franca for the French, Scot and Swedish couples, four Koreans, one Belgian, one Australian, plus Joe and---tagging along on the trail---me.

I thought the Swedes, in their fifties, would fade before I did. Beefy and florid, the husband looked like an excellent candidate for a heart attack. But I had forgotten that serious trekking is in the European DNA. Most of them scamper up and down the Alps and Dolomites as effortlessly as Americans hop into SUVs with names like Explorer.

But it was I who, near the end of the first day, opted for a girly-man "short cut." This meant that for the final segment of the day's travels I was placed upon a motorbike behind a man smelling unmistakably of rice wine and to whom I clung as he bounded up and down jungle trails to the "homestead" where we all spent the first night.

If I were 31, I would have been embarrassed. But I am no longer 31, as I was often reminded. If our chief guide, a sunny fellow aptly named Sun, had asked me one more time, "Are you okay, bapa?" I'd have poked him in the eye with my bamboo walking stick. But his concern was genuine---Thais are the most visibly empathetic people I've ever met---and when I inquired about the motorbike option for significant portions of the second- and third-day activities, this was easily arranged.

It seemed as though 80 percent of the walking was uphill---shouldn't it have been 50-50?---and Joe and several of the Europeans also found it demanding. The air was thick and the sun diamond-bright, as in Africa. The trails, used by hill tribe villagers for moving themselves and their water buffalo about, wound through groves of banana and loganberry plantings and, more often, tall forests and high bamboo thickets. On some terraced hillsides were rice paddies, brown and dry until the May monsoon rains arrive. Our route often paralleled a gushing stream, from which some farmers had diverted water in PVC pipes for plots of soybeans, kale and onions. Our rest stop was by a multi-tiered waterfall of stunning force and beauty. We could hear its roar a half mile before we got to it. We bathed in the sandy pool by foot of the lowest fall and cooled off. That so much water was cascading through these mountains in the dry season was an indication of the vastness and lasting effects of the spring monsoon deluges.

Joe pointed out that we should not have been surprised by all the clambering up and down, for this was a "hill tribe" trek. Thailand's chao khao---"mountain people"---make up under one percent of the country's 65 million population. Many are not Thai citizens. They are former semi-nomadic people from Burma, Laos and as far away as Tibet who are now being gradually integrated into Thai society. They are distinguised by their languages that bear no resemblance to Thai and by the clothes the women wear, black with horizontal stripes of pinks and purples. They are also darker-skinned than southern Thais, who value light skin (you don't see Thais darkening themselves on the beaches), and they sometimes make fun of the tribespeople as hillbillies. Many chao khao are also Catholic instead of Buddhist; at some point the French got at them.

Thailand, unlike its neighbors, was never colonized. The beloved King Chulalongkorn, on the throne from 1868 to 1910, kept the European powers at bay using what the British writer Basil Hall Chamberlain calls "protective mimicry"---modernizing on your own terms before somebody does it for you on theirs---and by ceding parts of Burma to Britain and much of Laos and Cambodia to France. (Chulalongkorn was the king in "Anna and the King of Siam" and the musical "The King and I." Thais consider these popular farang entertainments crude caricatures and Yul Brynner ludicrous.)

The Karen village where we spent the first night of the trek was lovely. Spread over a high hill, the farming hamlet was a mix of traditional Thai bamboo houses on stilts with woven leaf roofs, and newer dark plank houses with corrugated fiberglass roofs, built with the help and encouragement of the government. The newer houses are solider, safer, more healthful, and they last. They have the traditional wide overhang and spaces between the verticle planks and under the eaves for good ventilation. The big one we stayed in---the extended family who lived in it apparently doubled up elsewhere---had a semi-detached kitchen of such clever design that the smoke from the cooking fire on the low floor was drawn instantly up and out under the eaves. A solar panel---devices sponsored by King Bhumibol---stored enough battery power for two florescent tubes to light parts of the interior, albeit dimly, from sunset until around eleven.

Joe and I watched Sun cook the trekkers' evening meal. Over a wood fire, a single large wok rested on a tripod of bricks. By candlelight, three scrumtious dishes were prepared in the wok, one by one, all with local produce that had been grown organically, another government initiative. First came cucumber soup, then Thai green curry, then stir-fried mixed vegetables.
Rice, also grown in the village, had been cooked in a pot earlier. (In the room where Joe and I and the French couple slept, under mosquito netting and atop mats on the floor, there were a dozen or more immense sacks of rice, apparently a season's supply.) It didn't take Sun more than an hour to put together this simple but perfectly executed meal, which was served by candlelight on a long, low table on an upstairs porch. Most diners sat on floor mats, cross-legged, backs erect, and others of us (the Swedes and I) did the best we could. (Joe referred to this tableau as "lotus-position dressage.")

The evening's entertainment included clapping games and laughter around a campfire the guides built, and Sun's jolly and often successful attempts to get the trekkers to try the local rice home brew. (Shyly, we demurred.) Earlier, Sun had told Joe he wished he didn't drink so much. Alcoholism is an apparent real problem in rural Thailand. The prep cook for our dinner was another of the guides, a younger guy who slugged down some rice wine at every opportunity. While he was slicing vegetables, he looked away briefly and deftly vomited away from our dinner. One of the women helping out casually cleaned up the mess. No fuss was made. Mai pen rai.

Before we went to bed, Joe and I walked under a sky so devoid of light pollution that the constellations became brilliant in the way the ancients must have seen them. You could imagine how people looked up, found order in this reliable show that felt so near, and thought surely it had to be connected to human events. And by believing in this connection sometimes made it true. (During a financial crisis in the 1990s, a Thai prime minister had his birth date---and astrological sign---officially changed and notified an astrologer. It didn't help.)

Post-lights-out sounds included one of the Korean girls, I think, weeping softly as she returned from a trip to the single WC (about which the less said the better). She seemed unable to locate the Korean encampment and, in the darkened funhouse-like maze, perhaps feared she would climb into someone else's. Joe said he heard someone throw up, probably from the rice wine; I guessed the Scot or the Aussie. Then there was distant snoring, then nothing---until the cock crowed and the dogs began to bark, and it was time for day two.

After a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bread, pineapple and watermelon, the trekkers set off at ten. Some had slept poorly and seemed apprehensive. Brazenly, I lolled about for another hour before my chauffeur arrived. He was an altogether pleasant young man who had not been drinking. I eagerly leapt aboard his motorbike, like Audrey Hepburn behind Gregory Peck in "Roman Holday," except larger. Within an hour, I was at the campsite for the second night. It was a sun-dappled glade by another waterfall with traditional bamboo houses, cool and comfortable, and with bottled water and banana chips to snack on. It was in this exquisite spot where I wrote the words that you just read.

Joe and the rest of the trekking party staggered in around four. They had been reduced in number to seven, not through death or grotesque injury---to my amazement---but because some of the original 14 had opted for a single-night adventure and were now on their way back to Chiang Mai, our Paris. All the trekkers said it had been a hard go. Henry, the Scot, had fallen and hurt his hip. Bo and Lena, the Swedes, were discussing the motorbike option for day three. Joe was soaked with sweat and said I had chosen wisely. I did miss, he said, a hill-tribe hamlet untouched by the modern world (pictures soon). The trekkers happily refreshed themselves under the waterfall as the guides made preparations with a wok and a wood fire for dinner at six.

Our congenial group---Henry and Lika, Bo and Lena, the Aussie Alex (a plumber who traveled half the year), Phillipe, the lifeguard from Lieges, Joe and I---sat at a picnic table that came up to our chins and dined on green curry and a pumpkin stir-fry. The meal had been prepared by the previous night's prep cook (yes), and the pumpkin dish---a few of the ingrediants had been lost along the way---was not up to the standard to which we had become accustomed.

After dinner, we sat by the fire as the temperature began to drop. Then it dropped some more. Then still more. We were high up---5,000 feet? 6,000? So by the time we left our sandals at the door of the trekkers' sleeping house (Thais find wearing shoes in a house disgusting, like walking on the dining-room table) and slipped into our slender sleeping pouches, we knew we were in for a chill. Few slept well, or in some cases at all. The green curry had been busy, so when I made my way at 1:20 a.m. out to the WC (about which the less said the better-II), others soon followed. Flashlight beams sliced through the jungle night as in a film-noir manhunt in a swamp. It was quite beautiful in a Fritz Lang in the tropics kind of way.

[What does it mean that so many of the cultural touchstones I think of for describing the trek are filmic? Probably that my trekking knowledge and experience are limited. But that's not all. Some people come to the East to learn to be contemplative. To me this has mainly meant trying to recall the lyrics to "Mad Dogs and Englishmen (go out in the midday sun.")]

Day three was still rough for the trekkers, but by lunchtime the hard part was over and the pure fun began. On the morning of day one we had had a wonderful elephant ride at a camp for retired logging elephants (see pix). Day three finished up with a one-hour bamboo raft ride---three trekkers and an oarsman to each 30-foot raft---down a fast-moving but altogether agreeable stream, with much splashing and laughter and crashing into other rafts and a few overturnings. Pure Thai sanuk.

Then, an hour later, smelly Chiang Mai looked and smelled good.