Day 1 – Tribal Experience

We started off the day with the bus ride to Chiang Rai, stopping midway at a hot spring. It was a great place to warm up for our interviews (pun intended) – not too crowded and everyone looks friendly. We found that having the Chiang Mai University (CMU) student attached to us was extremely critical to our interviews because the locals cannot understand English and Chinese proficiently for an interview to be carried out properly.

We next proceeded to the hill tribe village to visit the hill tribes. It was an eye-opening experience where we were able to learn about the various tribes living in Thailand’s hills, the history and culture associated with them. I learnt that a smart businessman (or businessmen) actually had this idea of gathering the various hill tribes, putting them into this one area and marketing this as a tourist attraction. The first time I saw this was in Taiwan where I visited this cultural centre which basically was a congregation of various Taiwan indigenous tribes and we had cultural performances, followed by sales pitches of the tribal products. On one hand, this benefits the tribal people, providing them with an income and also allows them to live nearer to the city, in this case, to Chiang Rai city. It also allows the tourists to learn more about the tribal villages in the hills without visiting the hills and villages individually. Will this result in the erosion of their culture over time? Will their culture evolve such that they try to earn more money from the tourists by modifying their performances or even the tribal products? We interviewed two ladies, one from the Yao tribe who could speak Chinese and one from the Karen tribe (long neck tribe). Both gave positive comments about the influx of Chinese tourists and how it has benefitted them financially. It was exciting to learn about the long neck tribe because the people were always featured in television and this time I had the opportunity to visit them face to face. I learnt that the brass rings were super heavy (they had actual rings and they weighed about 5kg, the heaviest going up to 15kg). The long neck we see is actually the compression of the collar bone and the rib cage of the women, not the actual elongation of the neck. Seems quite intimidating to do that to little girls from the age of five. Hm…the things we would do for beauty…

Next we went for a walk in the night market. This was nothing compared to the Sunday Walking Street in Chiang Mai we visited the day before. The Sunday Walking Street was extreme chaos, whereas the Chiang Rai night market had ample space to walk and a small crowd. Seeing those stalls, I wonder how they survive financially. It was fun seeing the products sold and tasting the food.