Thailand -- Trekking Into A World Of Challenges

MAE HONG SON, Thailand - I knew, beyond a doubt, that we were Someplace Else when they killed the pig.

Our host grabbed it by a leg and, as it squealed with fear and pain, bludgeoned it with a piece of firewood. Then, holding its snout closed with one hand, he stepped on the hapless creature's throat until it suffocated.

This was to be our dinner.

This was not an adventure for the fainthearted.

Our trek into the primitive villages of Thailand's hill tribes had started earlier that day in Mae Hong Son, a small, pleasant resort town near the border between Thailand and Burma (which now calls itself Myanmar).

For three days and two nights, my companion, Mary, and I would leave behind showers, plumbing, electricity and "farang" (the Thai word for foreigners of European descent). We would be completely dependent on our guide, Jack Saw, a member of the Karen tribe, as we explored the world of the hills.

Six hill tribes - Karen, Lisu, Lahu, Akha, Yao and Hmong - have populated the Thai hills for the past 300 years. Each has its own language, customs, crafts, costumes and beliefs. While there are Buddhists and Christians among them, most are animists and believe in spirits. Many aren't even Thai; they came over the mountains to escape Burma's oppressive government. It is a complex subculture, existing on the outskirts of modern life.

In just one day, we traveled far from picturesque Mae Hong Son and far from our very first Lisu village where a beautiful girl, perhaps 20 years old, in a bright tribal costume waits for tourists to take her picture; an elderly woman stitches up bright colored wristbands and purses to sell; and children know enough English to beg tourists, "Five baht?" (The baht is the Thai currency.)

The girl, says an obviously smitten Jack, is a "first-class girl" - both beautiful and a hard worker. Jack, a middle-aged widower, would gladly marry her if he could afford the 30,000 baht (about $1,200) her hand would cost him.

But after this village, the truck in which we are riding drops us off in a grim, dirt patch of a town - devastated by heroin, Jack informs us, and now controlled by the army - and we continue our trek on foot.

Our destination is the Red Lahu village where tribes will congregate this week to celebrate the new year. There will be music, dancing and whiskey, says Jack.

But first, there is the climb. It is March, the beginning of the hot season. The thickly forested hills are tinged with brown. Wearing sneakers and hiking boots, carrying day packs with clean socks and underwear, fresh water and some toiletries, we can barely keep up with Jack, who traipses along in an army jacket and flip-flops.

When we stop to admire the long, rolling view, he points out mountains that mark the border of Burma, the site of years of fighting between the Burmese and the Thais.

Between feeding us information about the area, Jack tells us stories of "farang" who have been robbed, raped or murdered on treks. It is difficult to know how to react except to silently assure myself that I could easily hurt him - as with most of the people of Thailand, he is small and delicate.

After a couple of hours, hot, tired and wearing the red dirt of the hills, we reach the village, a collection of wood-and-bamboo huts on stilts. Pigs, chickens and threatening-looking dogs roam untethered. Small horses are tied up in the shade under the huts. Children - runny-nosed all - stare as we pass.

Jack brings us to our hosts' home, a tidy hut where we are served much-welcome hot tea brewed over a fire built in sand in the main room. It is dark and almost cool inside. The bamboo mats on which we will sleep are in one corner. In another is a shrine to the house spirits, a high platform hung with strips of pork and colored streamers. Sunlight filters through slits in the woven walls.

We drink our tea, lulled by the sounds of the animals - nosing about in the muddy puddles that form under every porch, where dishes are dumped and washed - and the voices of men discussing who-knows-what in their unfamiliar tongue. The family goes about its business tending the fire, children and animals.

We take a walk around the village. Compared with others, the hut in which we are staying seems to indicate relative affluence, and our host's children are far cleaner than many of those who clamor to look through the viewfinder of my camera.

It is shortly after we return to the hut that the pig is killed. Our host - his lips stained black with the betel nut that many like to chew - walks around the rest of the afternoon with dried pig blood up to his elbows.

After whispered consultation we tell Jack, apologetically, that we don't eat pork. We do not tell him that we are afraid of becoming ill from meat prepared under such unsanitary conditions. He is flustered - he no doubt bought the pig and had it slaughtered for us - but fixes us a vegetarian meal.

Firecrackers have crackled all day in anticipation of the night's festivities. After dark, the party begins in a central spot in the village. It centers around a lantern-lighted altar decorated with streamers and three pig heads. Around this, the villagers dance to a tune in a minor key played on a multi-tone flute - the same dance to the same tune around and around and around. Occasionally, someone grabs a drum and beats on that.

The village headmen are young and solemn. One has an infant in a sling around his body. A little away from the dancing, men pass around the whiskey. The dance becomes more spirited as the whiskey is consumed.

We watch a while, then return to our hut to sleep. In the distance, the flute plays its mournful tune as the dancing continues into the night.

I wake early the next morning and lie quietly, watching our host's daughter start the day's fire on the wood stove, put a pot of rice up to steam, and scrub the wood floor of the hut with a damp rag. "The all-purpose rag," Mary and I call it, as it is used to wipe noses, faces, hands, floors and feet. The flute music, which stopped for a while overnight, resumes.

When he awakes - with a hangover - Jack reveals that a dog

bit him on the leg in the middle of the night. Our host has tied a piece of string around his wrist to ward off illness, but Jack seems skeptical. He accepts the bottle of antiseptic I offer. Still, he does not remove the string.

After breakfast and a wash in the communal spigot - shared with children hauling water to their huts - we press on.

We pass fields farmed by the Lahu village. All the tribes subsist on "slash and burn" farming, cutting down and burning the natural vegetation to clear the fields. When the soil is depleted, the tribe moves on.

Poppies are the tribes' primary cash crop. Some grow but don't smoke the opium, others do both. While opium addiction is a problem, says Jack, the introduction of its derivative, heroin, has been more devastating yet. A joint Thai-German government project encourages the tribes to grow other crops, but no mere vegetable can bring in anything near the profit that a good poppy harvest can.

Jack gathers a few poppies and cuts some slits in a seed pod from which a thick, white sap oozes. This is opium.

We hike through bamboo groves and teak forests and up to mountaintops. Finally, we arrive at Jack's village, where his children live with his elderly in-laws and where he lived with his wife until her death, three years ago, from asthma. His father-in-law once was the village headman, and his hut is large, the main room built entirely of smooth, dark teak.

This is a larger village than the last. It has a school and even a small store where we are able to buy warm bottled water and Coca-Cola.

But we are hot and tired and the combination of these factors, the strangeness of the adventure and the barrage of primitive conditions, runny-nosed children and squalor has started to wear on Mary and me. We sit on the porch, trying to smile at a filthy young woman, a dirty towel wrapped around her head, one dirty breast exposed, and her toddler daughter, also grubby and without pants.

And suddenly, we are overwhelmed. We walk down to the river to wash. As we try to scrub the tenacious red dirt from our clothes, we decide to tell Jack that we're ready to go back, we have had enough.

But it is too late, he says. It's an hour's walk to the nearest town, and the last bus leaves in 30 minutes.

We cannot face the porch again, so we sit down on a tree root in the packed-earth chicken yard.

And, rather than cry, we laugh.

We laugh about the pig and about the all-purpose rag and about mucus, which has become a recurring theme. We laugh at my white cotton shirt streaked with red dust, at our dirt-caked feet. We laugh at the grubby rice cake that Mary tasted when a little girl handed it to her the night before. When she handed it back, the girl threw it forcefully to the ground, indicating that SHE certainly wouldn't have nibbled the nasty thing.

We laugh at ourselves, two giant (to the villagers) "farang" sitting in the chicken yard laughing like loons.

We laugh until tears run down our faces and we are short of breath. And then we feel better.

As the sun starts to set, we join Jack's mother-in-law at the window of the hut to admire the peaceful view. She hawks and spits out the window. We do not laugh, although we want to.

We sit on the floor to eat and the children gather around us. I distribute several small boxes of crayons and drawing pads, and the children pounce, a semicircle of little, shiny black heads. They draw furiously while we watch.

A couple of older girls tell us the children's names and write them in Thai. They all make us gifts of drawings of flowers and houses and people, textured with the same kind of elaborate and complex patterns that decorate Thailand's temples.

Then Jack's little daughter and a bashful friend get up and sing and dance for us, their little hands like birds fluttering in the air.

Thank goodness we didn't leave.

The night is excruciatingly uncomfortable. The bamboo mats are hard and it is cold.

In the morning, we sit with the family around the stove, like "farang" families gather around the breakfast table.

Later, returning to the hut after washing up, we pass the village's three monks, walking single file on their way to the village's Buddhist homes for their food. They stop at one house and stand silently in a row as a little girl comes out, bows, and scoops rice into each of their bowls. Then they march on to the next house.

When it is time to leave, we shoulder our packs again and start trekking down the road. Just when we think we are too hot and tired to take another step, a truck comes along and we hop in the back with a group of Lahu boys on their way to town to buy whiskey for the coming night's new year's celebration.

The truck takes us to the town of Soppong, where we catch the bus back to Mae Hong Son, which now seems like a bustling city.

The day after returning to the United States from Thailand, I went out for breakfast in a suburban restaurant. Surrounded by women in makeup and tight jeans, men in sweatsuits and gimme caps, and plates laden with food, I knew - without a doubt - that I was someplace else again.

------------------------------- IF YOU GO -------------------------------

-- Choosing a guide: Treks into Thailand's hill tribe villages operate out of Chiang Mai, Pai, Mai Sariang and Mai Hong Son. There are dozens of trekking companies - particularly in Chiang Mai - but all things are not equal when it comes to companies and their treks. Shop around, ask questions, talk to other travelers. Choose a company registered with the Tourism Authority (ask to see their badge) so that if things should go seriously awry, you'll have somewhere to turn for retribution.

Good questions to ask are if the guide speaks English and at least a couple of hill tribe languages; how many people will be on the trek (we were able to arrange a trek for two plus guide, and much preferred it that way); whether you're likely to encounter other groups along the way (the Golden Triangle - where the borders of Thailand, Burma and Laos meet - is heavily trekked). Try to feel out the company as to whether it takes an interest in the welfare of the villages or if it just uses them as a way of parting "farang" from their baht.

Treks are anything from one day to a week or more, with varying levels of difficulty to the hiking. Some are by elephant, some by raft, some combinations of the three. We thought we were pretty hearty and three days would be barely enough. But we actually found the experience physically and emotionally wearing (which is not to say unenjoyable) and were glad we had booked nothing longer.

We were well pleased with Don Tour & Tribal Trekking - 77-1 Khunlumprapas Road, Mae Hong Son; (053) 611362 - and particularly with guide Jack Saw. Three days cost less than $200.

-- Things to bring: Small gifts for the villagers are appreciated, particularly useful ones such as thread, needles and safety pins and medical supplies such as aspirin, antiseptics and anti-fungal creams. Crayons and drawing pads for the kids are a great icebreaker.

You will want purified water (I bought some every time we came across it en route); comfortable hiking shoes; flip-flops (shoes are not worn in the huts); soap, towel, toothpaste, etc.; clean socks and underwear. We kept our hands clean and germ-free with a supply of packaged moist towelettes, and credit the alcohol in these, the gamma-globulin shots we had before leaving, and caution with preventing so much as a tummy ache.

-- Good reads: For fascinating insight into the hill tribes, look for "Hmong Voices" (published by Trasvin Publications) and "A World Apart," (published by Silkworm Books), both by Jon Boyes and S. Piraban. These contain enlightening interviews with villagers. "A World Apart" also contains a glossary of hill tribes phrases. I found my copies in the Suriwong Book Center in Chiang Mai and in the Bangkok airport.