Head For The Hills -- Trekking In Thailand -- Jungle Trails, Rivers Lead Wayfarers Into Life Of Tribal Villages

I could see the skinny old red rooster through the gaps in the bamboo walls of the hut. He was just a foot away, fussing in the dirt in the grey dawn light.

The rooster glared, then unleashed an ear-shattering crowing, almost blasting me out of my sleeping bag.

I wanted to wring his scrawny neck. But I settled for hissing at him and wiggling my fingers menancingly through the slats of the wall. It wouldn't be too wise for a foreigner visiting a remote village in Thailand to start killing off the family fowl.

A half-dozen of the rooster's comrades took up the manic crowing, ushering in another day in Hui Nam Dang, a village of 300 people of the Lisu tribe tucked into the tangled forests and mist-blue mountains of northern Thailand.

Until the roosters made sleep impossible, I'd been sleeping in the headman's hut. Sleeping fitfully on a hard wood platform, my mind tossed by images of this ancient new world unrolling before me on a trip to Thailand's hill-tribe villages. My four day-trek to four tribes' villages was a highlight of a two-week trip around Thailand last month. It would take me about as far from my usual life as I could get . . .

I would dance with villagers around a fire on an starlit night. Ride an elephant to one village, ride a bamboo raft down a swirling river to another. Make paper airplanes for children who hadn't seen a TV or bathroom, much less been on a plane. Watch a man snack on live, squirming grubs dug out of a plant. Sleep in a room with a half-dozen strangers and share an outdoor tap and a latrine with a village. Get a bone-cracking massage from a stern tribeswoman. Go to bed each night by candlelight. And get up with the damn roosters.

Dancing with the headman

The headman of Hui Nam Dang village dances around the fire in front of his hut, plucking a mournful, insistent tune on his banjo-like instrument.

Two dozen villagers clasp hands and move in a slow, stately circle around him. They draw our group of a dozen foreign trekkers into their dance. Take two steps sideways, cross over the feet, bend and step back. The little girl holding my left hand giggles as I keep mangling the steps.

Around the fire, the dance and jokes and stories go on for hours in the velvety night. Our tour leaders translate; little merriment seems lost in the translation.

The dawn chorus of roosters makes it a short night. I line up at the tap to wash my sleepy face. A cluster of curious kids watches me. But I want to play, not be watched: I start to make paper airplanes.

The planes are a hit, and a half-dozen soon are winging across the dirt yard between the huts. One fiendishly clever little boy pokes his into the rekindled fire and flings it, smoldering, toward the woven-grass siding of a hut. A big sister grabs it. Another American trekker pulls a bottle of bubble mix out of her pack and blows a stream of glistening bubbles over the children's heads. They leap, laugh, and pop the bubbles.

The headman's wife, somehow immaculate in her embroidered dress of red, green and black cotton panels, keeps an eye on it all as she sweeps the pounded-earth floor of her hut. She dusts the pedal-powered Singer sewing machine, a prized possession. Household life is basic: mats for sleeping on, a shelf and peg for clothes, candles for light, an open fire for cooking. An old calendar with pictures of Thai pop stars for decoration.

I dig a postcard out of my backpack for her, of my hometown, Seattle. She peers at the shiny photo of downtown highrises and the Space Needle, and tacks the postcard onto the wall of her hut. We smile goodbye, across our worlds.

Sweat and a snack

A dozen Americans, eight porters, a couple of guides. Our little tourism army moves in single file down the narrow, red-dirt trail that twists away toward the next village.

Skinny dogs skulk out of our way. I dream of revenge upon any rooster that crosses my path, but none shows. Villagers' fields of corn and mountain rice, grown dry, not in paddies, shimmer in the bright morning breeze.

I look for the opium-producing poppies, the cash crop of some hill-tribe villages. Drug-making and drug smuggling still endure, certainly in nearby Burma (called Myanmar by its military rulers) where jungle laboratories churn out heroin. Burma is just 20 miles away, over the misty mountains.

But it's peaceful here along our trail, and I see no poppies. Just butterflies and the occasional lizard cross our path, then disappear into thickets of bamboo.

Our walking route among these 3,000- and 4,000-foot-high villages isn't particularly hard. It's the day's mounting heat that hurts in this moistly green, tropical forest. We're soon soaked in sweat. A few villagers zip past, going twice our pace despite wearing only plastic sandals or thongs on their feet.

We take a break in a shady grove, flopping down to rest. A porter decides it's time for trail mix, tribal style. He whacks down a bamboo stalk with his knife, digs some inch-long, plump white grubs out of it and pops a wiggling handful in his mouth. We groan. He grins. And swallows. Then smacks his lips to tease us.

An American trekker tries to sample the grubs. He places a couple of squirming ones on his tongue. But he can't make himself swallow.

We walk on, dripping sweat, for a few hours. Then the elephants come to our rescue. They're waiting for us down by a river, ready to take us for a ride.

Portage by pachyderm

"I'm drunk," our mahout, the village man who trains, rides and lives with his elephant, cheerfully announces.

One mahout and two trekkers ride each elephant. To get onto their backs, we teeter out on a narrow bamboo platform as tall as an elephant's eye. The animal nudges his head against the platform; then it's up to us: we must walk across the elephant's head and neck to get to the little wood bench, just wide enough for two people, strapped onto his back.

It's my turn. I step gingerly onto the giant beast. Its flesh and muscles shift like thick Jell-O as I walk on it. I lurch to the bench. These Asian elephants are about 10 feet tall, smaller than their African relatives, but it seems very high.

I've never been so close to an elephant. I lean down to touch its back. It feels warm and dusty, iron-strong underneath the skin's wrinkled folds.

Our jungle parade begins, a half-dozen elephants carrying a dozen thrilled but uneasy-looking foreigners. We splash across the shallow river and along a muddy trail: each elephant foot leaves a pothole a foot deep.

The mahouts straddle the elephants' necks, directing the animals with words, body pressure and an occasional thump with a stick. Not our mahout. He's turned backward, facing us, more interested in chattering with my riding companion, a tour leader who's fluent in Thai and English. The mahout laughs uproariously at his own jokes. Then he starts crooning a love song.

I get the giggles. How did I end up in the Thai jungle riding an elephant with a drunken driver? But I'm laughing from nervousness, too, gripping the seat as the elephant plods down a steep stretch of trail, pitching us forward.

Even when the trail is level we lurch from side to side, up and down as the elephant lumbers along. But our mahout rides fluidly, effortlessly, a leg draped on each side of the animal's neck. And though he's drunk, he's in control, barking an instant reprimand when our elephant tries to stray off the path.

One of the other mahouts is not in control. He's asleep. He's stretched out on his elephant's head, knees tucked under its tablecloth-sized ears. "This guy is snoring!" laughs Louise Sloan, an American trekker who's one of his passengers.

The mahout soon awakens from what must have been a very liquid lunch. Our lunch waits ahead at a thatched-roof hut by the rice fields. Our speed-walking porters have gotten there first and are cooking another elaborate meal over an open fire. Soon we're devouring a steaming, delicious chicken curry.

I secretly hope it's this morning's noisy rooster we're eating. Or at least a close relative.

Lodging on high

We're back in the saddle again, lurching through the jungle for another hour to the village of Pa Kao Lam. I feel like an invading white colonial, arriving by elephant. Perhaps I should be carrying a white parasol, like the English ladies of 19th-century India.

That night we stay in one of this Karen tribal village's bigger huts, a three-roomer. Here the houses are elevated on posts, above the mud and the pigs and the chickens. It's better off than last night's village, with several dozen houses strung out in a jungle clearing, a primary school, a one-bed clinic with a few medicines, and two other households hosting foreign trekkers. But life remains primitive: still no electricity, an outdoor tap for water, open fires for cooking, the wood houses barren.

Perhaps it's the elevated houses that keep us more separate from these villagers, or perhaps it's the impact of the overwhelmingly unfamiliar hill-tribe culture that keeps us apart. Whatever. Tonight there's no dancing with the headman, and little playing with the local kids. Our trekkers' group turns inward, sharing our own jokes and stories late into the night.

Cock-a-doodle don't

What's with these roosters? Here in Pa Kao Lam some crow at 2. a.m., some at 4 a.m. I roll over and check my watch by flashlight at each screech, amazed at their crummy sense of timing.

I've staked out my sleeping turf in a corner by the wall. It gives me a bit of privacy, at least on one side, in this room where a half-dozen other trekkers are stretched out inches away from each other on thin pads on the plank floor.

Smoke from the cooking fire in the next room still hangs in the air. Someone's snoring, obnoxiously loud. In the next hut, its thatched roof just an arm's length away out our glassless window, a baby cries and is immediately soothed by her mother. I fall back asleep looking out at the sky shining with stars.

I awaken at dawn to another infernal chorus of roosters, screeching to each other from one end of the village to the other.

"I can't take it," groans trekker Marlin Darrah as he crawls blearily out of his sleeping bag. "First, let's kill all the roosters."

The river route

A Buick in the driveway in the American suburbs, an elephant chained outside a hut in Pa Kao Lam. Both mean the good life. Elephants help the villagers pull logs out of the forest and earn them money by carrying around trekkers.

We won't ride elephants today, though. We'll ride rafts to the next village.

A broad, swirling river is a minute's walk from Pa Kao Lam over a low rise. We washed our dust-shrouded hair and bodies in it last night, the current so swift we could barely swim upstream.

The rafts await. They're jungle basic, made from 20-foot long bamboo poles, fresh cut from the forest and lashed together with twine. Once we get to the next village, the rafts will be knocked apart and the bamboo used to make furniture. The ultimate in recycling.

Our raft is only as wide as my outspread arms, and the warm, muddy water laps between the green bamboo poles and over my feet. Our backpacks hang from three chest-high bamboo sticks wedged upright, the better to keep them dry.

Each raft can carry two big Americans, or three not-so big ones. Plus two or three sinewy porters who, unlike us, pack no excess flesh. A porter stands at each end and uses a long pole to push off the sandbanks and steer the raft through some short, but churning, rapids.

We float past a woman fishing in the river, a toddler splashing naked. Water buffalo, drinking in the shallows, raise their heavy-lidded eyes and curved horns and watch us drift by. We pass a drowsy thatched-roof village on the river bank, a place to hide away for a lifetime. The sun beats down; we dip feet in the river to cool off.

Our tropical voyage ends at the sandy shore of Pong Ngaen. This village of the Lahu people is our lunch stop. It's the poorest and most subdued we've seen, a sun-baked home to a handful of families. Abandoned houses of families gone to cities for work are rotting back into the jungle. A man with a twisted, useless leg hobbles down the dirt path. Even the roosters are quiet.

But the village kids come alive when they spy our tour leader Chris Gold, a regular visitor. He lives in Thailand, is fluent in Thai and immersed in Thai and hill-tribe culture. He's our cultural liaison, our passport to beginning to understand Thailand.

The kids pile onto Chris' lap, impishly trying on his dark glasses, his baseball cap, his watch. He discreetly checks over one little boy to make sure he's healthy, that he's getting enough to eat, has no skin infections. As we leave, heading for the trail to the next village, the children run after him for one last hug.

Hands-on experience

A simple wooden arch, a man's height, spans the trail leading into the village of Ban Pan Dao. Carved wood statues, half-lifesize, of a man, a woman and children are propped up beside it in the bush.

This is the spirit gate. In the Akha tribal world, it stops wandering spirits, malignant spirits, from entering the village.

We straggle into the one-street village in the late afternoon, tired but in good spirits after our day of rafting and walking. A dozen bamboo and grass huts edge the packed-dirt street. The Akha women stand in their doorways, a bit daunting in their tribal finery and their stern gazes.

The older women - 35 is old in this hardscrabble village - each wear the traditional headdress, a tight black cloth cap hung with silver balls, beads, red and yellow tassels and sometimes century-old Indochinese coins. The younger women have abandoned the traditional clothing; they wear loose skirts and T-shirts.

We flop onto the floor of a hut, sweat and red dust staining our shirts. Soon a half-dozen village women surround us, selling bracelets and earrings. It's tourist stuff, made of cheap metal that will probably turn green in a month.

I don't care. The jewelry has style, and I like these tough women. Besides, they need the money. Their men are in jail on drug charges or working in cities; the women keep the families and the village together.

I start buying from one woman. I get sharp looks from a half-dozen others.

"You buy from her? You buy from me." With their few words of market English they're insistent yet dignified. "Here. You want this. And this." I agree. I buy something from each woman for a few dollars, spreading my money around. The ladies loosen up; they start smiling when I show them a photo of my daughter and husband, at home in Seattle. They pull out a photo of themselves to show me.

At dusk the women melt away to their huts for dinner. Later, a half-dozen village children come to sing to us. Their mothers return to watch us. Having trekkers in town - a group like ours comes through perhaps every few weeks - is a big event.

An Akha woman pokes me in the ribs. "You want massage?" I nod yes. My tired muscles could use the traditional relief. Three other village women snare three other trekkers. We bargain, half-heartedly, agreeing to pay the equivalent of $4 each for an hour's massage.

The women lead us to the back of the hut. We stretch out on the floor on our stomachs, side by side and fully clothed. A flickering oil lamp is the only light, casting the women's shadows onto the woven-grass walls.

The Akha women bend over us, the medallions and beads on their headdresses clinking as they pummel our bodies. One stretches my arm by bracing her foot in my armpit then pulling, hard, on my hand. She works her knee along my spine. Jerks hard on my toes and fingers to crack each joint.

I'm on the edge of pain, yet strangely relaxed. My stiff muscles and mind are surrendering to this unspoken, hands-on intimacy.

We groan; the Akha women chuckle. The pigs snuffle in their pen out back. The cicadas trill ceaselessly, even though it's been dark for hours.

Then I hear a rooster, clucking raspily. He's somewhere close, just outside the hut. He crows, loudly. I laugh. I don't care anymore. It comes with the territory.