mountain trip: (part 2) prisoners for Him

our team took a trip to the mae hong son, a small village in the mountains of northern thailand, to put on an english camp for the local children. this is the second part of our story in a multi-post series telling about our trip and the things we did. it’s early friday morning after a long overnight trip up the mountain roads and we've just unloaded ourselves off of a tiny bus into the darkness of the morning at a place that they told me was supposed to be a bus station.

we're all tired, not many of us got rest, but i am in high spirits because of the amusing events on the ride up to the mountains. i learn that jenny's uncle will be picking us up after his shift... which seems to be not for another 4 hours or so. well, we have some time so we start walking. i think we were going to go stay at a temple and just grab some shut eye for a bit but that plan failed some how. i wasn't asking too many questions, but i do know that after we walked a few blocks one direction we turned around and headed the other way. eventually we cam to a police station. jenny's uncle was a police officer and instead of waiting for him we decided to go meet him. anyway short story even shorter, we spent the night at the prison (no not in the cells... although i kind of thought that would have made for a cooler story). i unsuccessfully did my best to catch some z's. i was too lazy to dig out my thermarest so i just leaned against my pack and listened to my ipod. a few short hours later we rose to go eat breakfast with jenny's uncle at a shop in a near by market area. it was soup of some kind that's all i really remember. then robert told us to look around and buy some food for lunch since we wouldn't have it provided for us in the village we were going to. no problem right? well, this wasn't quite your local h.e.b. it was kind of nerve racking knowing that i had to find my lunch in a foreign market place, not knowing the language or half the things being sold. if i chose to play it safe and just grab a light snack then i'd have to go a whole day on the mystery soup of the morning and the cornetto i bought for the bus ride. drew and i browsed the narrow aisles of venders looking sheepishly at their wares. we bought some fruit and meet up with the rest of the group who was buying some fried chicken and sticky rice. getting some for ourselves we headed back to the police station. we packed all of our bags and our persons into the small pick up belonging to jenny's uncle and took off for the first village.

driving up the mountain roads in the crisp morning air was a good refreshment for one on so little sleep. we came to a place where the road ran along a river and stopped at what seemed to be a guard post (apparently we were spitting distance from the burmese boarder). we could go no further by truck because the road a long been washed out by the river it followed. so we made our way down a slope and hopped in a long-tail boat. the river ride was even more scenic than the truck ride had been and we were all wide-eyed as we cruised past the abundance of greenery. reaching a small sandy shore we unloaded our supplies and walked a short distance to the village. jenny's uncle, our ambassador of sorts, led us to the small school. it reminded me of stories my mom had told me of her early education in buffalo valley, tennessee. there were about 20 students probably from the ages of 6 to 15 all taught by the same teacher in a one or two room building with a large open area in front. the kids were very shy and spoke hardly any english, but we started to play games with them, doing our best to explain the concepts with our fellow thais as translators. this was were i felt more at home playing with kids comes more natural to me than befriending college students. we ran around and had some fun and then we passed out gifts for the children and their families. afterwards, we had our market meal at one of the houses and most of us ended up taking a nap to make up for the bus ride.

after we were well feed and well rested we made our way out of the village back to the boat. traveling on we made our way to one of the long neck villages. it was pretty cool to see in person a culture that most only see on the discovery channel or the travel channel, but i felt like too much of a tourist. i don't like feeling like a tourist. i'm pretty sure that if you came up to me and said, "hey john, (or marty... or any other of my many names) you're such a tourist.", i would take offense. it may sound odd, but my mom knows how much i hated doing touristy things on our family outings. she thought it was me just trying to be cool and not be seen with my parents but it was more about not liking tourist. now i am all about traveling to interesting places which is what one might say a tourist does, but there's a difference between being a "tourist" and traveler. tourist are pretentious and ethnocentric. they are demanding and inconsiderate. basically their existence continually increases the cultural divides that cause problems in our world. ok ok that last part may be stretching it but let's just say that to me tourist is a four letter word...erm... with "ist" on the end. anyway our trip to the long neck village was exciting but it did kind of put an itch in me so i wasn't saddened that it was somewhat short lived. as we cruised along in the long-tail boat back to the truck at the guard post my mind drifted to other things. it had already been an exciting day, but it wasn't over yet. we still had a temple to go to and i had more cornettos to eat.