• Thailand – Karen Village Trip Diary – Day 6

    27Jul
    Categories: Personal, Photos Comments: 0

    We had a breakfast of requisite rice and toppings. An added delicacy of which I partook was dried deer skin. It tasted just like one would think deer skin would taste: hard, chewy, and rather like leather. It was impossible to entirely break down into comfortable pieces, so at one point one had to merely take a drink of water and swallow it.


    Gee playing with a dried deer head that was laying around the place


    Me, examining my badly sunburned hand (from the motorbike trip around the mountain) and subsequent peeling

    We then went around to people’s houses and prayed for them. When we got to one person’s house, he asked us to change the language on his satellite TV receiver from English to Thai. We located that setting in the menus, but it inexplicably refused to change.




    The family from the house we stayed at


    Unique set of doors they had



    Gee changing the batteries in this old man’s treasured possession–an old, little, pink clock. He didn’t know how to change the batteries and get it to work again and he was so delighted when Gee got it working!



    A young lady who spoke English


    Right before they left, they gave each of us a Karen shirt. We were really kicking ourselves then that we had asked to buy shirts at the other village! People in this village had been visiting the other village, had seen that the other village had given gifts, saw that were interested in shirts, and then gave us shirts! Needless to say, we thanked them profusely.

    We then bounced back through the atrocious roads (they thanked us specifically for coming to visit them in such a hard to reach place) to the main road.


    On the way out, we stopped at the village’s fields




    We drove at a dizzying rate of speed around the mountain curves on the main road with tires squealing. Gee has driven the entire time. Katrina has been taking her daily dose of motion sickness pills. We also listened to several episodes of Adventures in Odyssey (which we have been doing throughout the trip). We soon came to top of a mountain pass and with a little lookout, so we stopped to take pictures:






    We soon came to a good sized town (Mae Hong Son) and looked for a restaurant to eat lunch. It was already 2 in the afternoon and some of didn’t feel like eating just before supper. So, some of us ate and some of us didn’t. I recharged my prepaid cell phone and the two star-struck lovers called their girlfriends in the States, waking them from a sound sleep. We then visited a Buddhist temple (Phrathat Doi Gongmoo) in the area (of a more Burmese style). We also went to a market to restock food and stopped at an internet café to check our email.


    Phrathat Doi Gongmoo




    View from Phrathat Doi Gongmoo




    Me, taking pictures

    We then resumed our journey on the main road, out of town. We passed a lady whom we asked for directions to the village. We went to the village and she arrived about 5 minutes after us. The village was just on the main highway, only several kilometers outside of town. She happened to be a Karen path-follower who was our host for the night. We spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing on the rice mats in their house. We firmly entrenched the Karen word for shampoo (which we were giving out in large quantities) in our minds that afternoon. It sounds just like the English phrase “Some will be cool.” It is sub-woo-bee-col. They were quite amused by our repeating the word “shampoo” over and over again. They soon fed us supper and off to the meeting we went.

    This organization definitely felt the urban influence of being so close to the city. The women were not as modestly dressed and one of the y@rp requests was the youth wouldn’t get into drugs and alcohol.

    One of the nicer effects of urban influence was the modern improvement of having an electric light in the bathroom! Very modern! The house that the ladies stayed at was even more advanced! They had an in-house-outhouse! It was an outhouse that was a lean-to the house.

    We guys stayed at the shepherd’s house.

    Quote of the Day

    “It was a privilege to be with. Keeping elder brother first! Y@rp forus. Dad bless you!”
    -Craig’s very scatterbrained entry in the organization’s guestbook (“Dad bless you!” was his only complete sentence with correctly spelled words. What made it funnier was that it was so totally unlike him. He is very intelligent, a good speller, and fairly meticulous with grammar.)

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