Hill Tribes and Spanish Card Players

Chiang Rai itself holds little special appeal. It is a four hour bumpy bus ride north of Chiang Mai, which has beautiful scenery along the way for compensation. Chiang Rai does have the advantage however, of being the gateway up to the famed Golden Triangle. Burma, China, Laos and Thailand all collide in the Triangle where opium production and smuggling, although diminished, still take place. During the French Indochinese colonial period, Paris sanctioned opium production and later the CIA did too, during the Vietnamese and Laotian wars of the 20th century. Crop substitution programs have replaced the poppy flower with tea bushes but the mountainous region still holds its romantic appeal. The opium interest is not in Chiang Rai itself but in the hilltop villages further north populated with primitive tribes. It was to one of these, Doi Mae Saelong, near the Burmese border, that I caught a local bus which fortuitously had on board several very friendly Spanish, Italian and French backpackers heading the same way. The vegetation of Mae Saelong is more alpine with fragrant pine forests rather than sweaty montane jungle. Doi Mae Saelong is unique in Thailand, in that it looks like a Chinese village, rather than a Thai one, due to the Yunnanese refugee settlers that have made it their home. There is very little to do apart from hike in the hills and try their local aromatic teas. I had therefore planned for this to be a day trip, but fate and serendipity had a different plan. I was told the last bus back to Chiang Rai left at 5pm which would have been perfect except that it was really 3pm. I walked about 8 kilometers to a local road junction but could not for love or money get a lift and so had stay in Doi Mae Saelong for the night. I rejoined the EU contigent and we had an early evening trek of serene beauty through the locals hills to watch the sunset. As night fell, we could see wispy white smoke emanating from the local thatched villages and hear tuneful singing as the farmers returned home from tilling the tea fields. If you had closed your eyes, you could have been in Africa. That evening I was introduced to the trump card game 'El Presidente', which is as easy to win as it is to lose and is as addictive as it is hilarious. By the time the proprietor of our guesthouse amiably forced us out of his open air bar, the inconvenience of being a hundred kilometers from my bags seemed, and was, inconsequential.

The local muezzin and roosters had a competion to wake the village earliest and the muezzin won at 4.45am with his mournful call to the Muslim faithful that "prayer is better than sleep". The villagers all seemed to agree and his call heralded a bustle of activity for the local market. It was pointless to try and sleep, so I rose and wandered around the village admiring the pre-dawn enthusiasm of the hawkers and colourfully dressed buyers who descended from the hills to acquire pig's trotters, myriad vegetables, dried plums, roasted cashews, fresh river fish, locally made pungent cigarettes and above all golden, fried fritters which appeared a Sunday morning speciality. I was only tempted with the fritters dripping with honey, which were justifiably popular.

Munching on sticky fried batter, from the high vantage point of the town, one could see hundreds of miles across the folding, forested valleys below with sporadic thatched huts dotted here and there. Deep pools of misty cloud clung defiantly in patches, like fugitives hiding from the solar policeman who would inevitably appear. All too quickly dawn had become morning and it was time for the bumpy return journey to Chiang Rai where my landlord was the none the wiser for my unexpected overnight absence.