Mountain Trek

White and squirmy, its taste of coconut milk surprised me when I bit into it. The cricket I ate in Mexico had been so bitter compared with the mildness of this bamboo worm . On our six hour hike, one of our guides had gone off and gathered dozens of bamboo worms with his machete. For the past four days, we have been trekking with guides from the Mirror Art Group in the mountains of Northern Thailand, from hilltribe to hilltribe, staying with hilltribe families along the way.
Day one we stayed in a small Aha village, and were very lucky (or very unlucky we came to feel around 4 a.m.) to have arrived the evening of their New Year celebration marking the end of the rice harvest. The celebration entailed dancing, banging drums, and singing around a fire from dark until well into dawn the next morning—thus our frustration in the midnight hours as we tried unfruitfully to sleep with thin bamboo walls in the small window of opportunity we had between the time we left the celebrations and before the rooster were set to begin their wakeup call. The dances were performed to scare off spirits; because men must leave the confines of the village in order to work the rice paddies throughout the harvest, once the harvest is complete any spirits that follow them back in through the village gate must be frightened away. When we arrived, our families fed us well: the wonders one can do with little more than fresh vegetables, rice, a fire pit, a wok, and a mortar and pestal. Then they adorned us in traditional Akha garb for the festivities—ankle covers, head dress, and all—and we headed for the town center to dance around the blazing fire. The dances were simple, more or less just stepping together in a circle, but I’ll be damned if those elderly Akha women didn’t keep their vigor well until five a.m.! I’m sure that “whiskey lady,” walking around with a free flowing bottle of whiskey and a shot glass making sure everyone had had their fill, helped to keep spirits lively.
The next day our wet, rugged trudge through the forest was wonderfully balanced by the two hour elephant ride the rest of the way to the Lahu village, but day three was by far the most intense. We were in the mountains with no other human in sight from our start at 9 a.m. to near the time we reached the Jahu village at almost 4 p.m. Starting at 900 meters, we hiked up the mountain reaching 1500 meters and then decended to the secluded village on the other side.
The Mirror Art Group is a non-profit, non-government organization working in Chiang Rai. Through a number of projects, they help the peoples of the area make a better life for themselves while still retaining their cultural identities. They organize numerous advantages for the surrounding hilltribe communities, such as a television station with their local news, volunteer teaching, help achieving Thai citizenship, fundraising, and cultural experiences that help other Thais and tourists understand the hilltribes’ unique ways of life while creating pride for the hilltribe peoples in their traditions. All of the guides with us had themselves grown up around Chiang Rai in hilltribes. Their ability to navigate through unmarked jungle and their use of a machete as if it were a mere extension of the were impressive. But most impressive was their ability to understand the Thai language, English, and multiple hilltribe languages, all unintelligible between each other.