I have been a guide for many years in Chiang Mai and in Chiang Rai. Ten years ago we have build our guesthouse, our dream (guesthouse) next to the home-village of my wife’s family.

CHIANG RAI – In the hill tribe villages of northern Thailand, no door (or kitchen) is closed to a stranger in need. The mountainous province of Chiang Rai is home to about half a dozen ethnic hill tribes, driven out of China and Myanmar by persecution and civil unrest.

Among them the Akha, Karen and Lahu live an isolated existence, preserving tribal customs, spiritual beliefs and languages and offering down-to-earth rural hospitality. Most have little more than a rice field or a few pigs to call their own, but they gladly offer what they have. Inviting wet, bedraggled strangers into their home to cook a BYO meal is just

When you will visit mydreamguesthouse you will meet me, Nan, and my family.

I was spending two days exploring these rural provinces with Chiang Rai local Anan (Nan) Kodo, and I couldn’t have picked a better guide. An entrepreneurial Karen tribesman, Nan is the owner of My Dream Guesthouse, a collection of huts built on the banks of the Mae Nam Kok River overlooking a startlingly green vista of tropical gardens, pineapples and rice fields.

When he is not tending the guesthouse or his young family, Nan takes visitors on bespoke hill tribe tours, and with his sculpted cheekbones and beatific smile he’s proving to be Mr Charisma. Wherever we go, villagers stop what they are doing to chat, guffaw at his rapidly delivered jokes and welcome us into their homes. The “Nan effect” might have something to do with his impressive knack for languages (“I can speak all hill tribe dialects – Lahu, Karen, Akha, Lisu …”), but his boyish enthusiasm for life is endearing.

As we trek from the river into the steep foothills of Mae Yao, through jewel-green rice terraces and dense jungle, Nan bounces ahead, pointing out medicinal plants and rattling off facts about various tribes. Did I know that Karen people, despite a penchant for smoking tobacco, often live to 100? I did not but, according to Nan, their age is attributed to a pesticide-free diet and lots of yoghurt.

Under Nan’s tutelage, I’m well-versed in all things Akha by the time we reach Ban Apa, a rural village tucked into the mountainside. Within moments of our arrival we are being followed by gangs of small, giggling children and waved at by Akha women wearing elaborate headdresses festooned with silver, old coins and colourful pom-poms. Nan stops to greet a man sucking tobacco from a long silver pipe, who accompanies us to examine the town’s swing.

Of all the Thai hill tribes, the Akha are the most spiritual. The annual swing festival, when every villager takes turns to oscillate gaily on a huge bamboo swing, is one of many tribal ceremonies held to appease spirits, give thanks to the harvest and ward off evil. “The Akha sacrifice a dog whenever they build a house,” adds Nan with matter-of-fact cheerfulness, striding away before I can raise my eyebrows.

It’s a similar scene at Ban Yafu, an isolated hamlet set high among the slopes at 1000 metres, home to the Lahu tribe. Villagers live an agrarian life harvesting rice and rearing pigs. Some have converted to Christianity, but most worship ancestral spirits and a deity called Gui’Sha.

I have been a guide for many years in Chiang Mai and in Chiang Rai. Ten years ago we have build our guesthouse, our dream (guesthouse) next to the home-village of my wife’s family.

“And do all these tribes get along?” I ask, imagining God, Gui’Sha and spirits elbow-jostling in the heavens. In response, Nan simply beams. “You see the bamboo, the palm tree and the pineapple?” he says, pausing to point at a thicket of trees rustling in the breeze. “They grow together and live peacefully – just like the Karen, Lahu and Akha.”

Tonight we’re staying in the village and our hosts – a young couple with two small sons – are waiting. Pa Na is clad in faded blue Shan-style trousers, with sharp Tibetan cheekbones and a high-pitched laugh. His wife, Na Ne, wears a T-shirt, patterned sarong and rubber sandals. They welcome us warmly as Ja Nu, a village elder, hobbles down the road, waving his walking stick and grinning from ear to ear. “He always comes to see me,” Nan says, smiling with pleasure.

Like all Lahu abodes, the house is made from flattened bamboo and set high on stilts with a thatched roof and porch. The family’s livestock – chickens, piglets and an overweight sow – live beneath the house.

The village isn’t completely cut off from civilisation, however. A small shack sells Thai sweets and soft drinks. A town noticeboard features posters of solemn-faced political candidates. There’s even a formal decree, written in Thai, noting Ban Yafu’s official population of 165. But even with government assistance such as solar panels and a one-room school, life here is far from modern.

As dusk falls and smoke coils from the rooftops I leave the family to stroll into the foothills, watching villagers return from a day working the fields. Women emerge from the jungle hauling banana baskets on their backs; a strap across their forehead bears the weight. Others squat on their haunches, washing dishes in plastic buckets. Another heaves a pail of banana trunk mash over to a trough hewn from wood. She tips the contents out and six pigs fall upon it with guttural snorts.

When I return, the men have assembled in the kitchen. Pa Na has taken charge of tonight’s meal, slicing meat with a machete and directing Nan to chop vegetables for a curry of coconut, beans, galangal and garlic.

Chiang Rai local Anan (Nan) Kodo

In Lahu households men are expected to pitch in with domestic duties, though should they object the tribe is fairly casual about divorce. According to Nan, it’s quite common and requires no lawyers, paperwork or hysteria – merely a pig and 150 baht ($5), payable to the village chief. “Liz Taylor would approve,” I quip but, unsurprisingly, no one gets the joke.

All families cook indoors, which dries out the bamboo and keeps mosquitoes at bay. My offer to help, however, is met with a swift chorus of disapproval. Guests must not lift a finger! It’s also considered terribly polite to let visitors eat first and, despite my protests, I find myself tucking in before everyone else.

Later that night, Na Ne and her sons slip behind a bamboo wall to sleep. Nan stays on the balcony with Pa Na to drink beer and they talk well into the night. Beneath a swathe of mosquito net strung from the beams I shut my eyes, listening to pigs snicker beneath the floorboards. Morning is a sensory riot of squawking roosters, the chopping of fruit and the scent of burning bamboo.

After a swift breakfast, we set off early in Nan’s jeep with Pa Na along for the ride. We plan to explore the most isolated parts of the mountains where hill tribes live amid misty contours of coffee and tea plantations, and plum and lychee fields. But in these highlands the weather has the final say. Soon, thunder clouds blacken the sky and fat raindrops splatter against the windscreen, transforming the dirt road into a muddy purgatory. I peer nervously from the window at the treacherous valleys and, as the jeep lurches and slides, I’m not the only one feeling uneasy.

“Pa Na is scared,” Nan says, a mixture of amusement and concern in his eye. I turn to see Pa Na crouched in the back seat chewing his thumb, most likely praying to God, Gui’Sha and any spirit he can think of. The deluge soon forces us to pull over; our plans for an outdoor lunch are abandoned. We’re stopped near a village when the elderly Akha man with betel-stained teeth appears. Safe and dry inside the home of our new friend, Pa Na busies himself cooking our lunch over the large, open fire pit.

Nan squats on the floor, cracking jokes in Akha dialect, much to the old man’s delight.

I perch on a wooden stool, popping pieces of spicy pork into my mouth and contemplating the warmth and generosity of these simple folk while also marvelling at the miniature United Nations before me: the Karen, the Lahu and the Akha. Three tribes in harmony together – just like the bamboo, the palm and the pineapple.

Staying there Bungalows at My Dream Guesthouse from 300 baht ($10) a night. Nan, an English-speaking TAT-licensed guide, offers three-day tours from 2800 baht a person including Chiang Rai transfer, accommodation and meals.

See mydreamguesthouse.com.

Requests for reservation, booking, tours, trekking and transport please contact:

Mr. Nan at:  

 

 

The hill tribes and their unique culture have been on the backpacker’s Southeast Asia itinerary for decades.

 

Chiangrai Times – The Kok River is a central expressway into the heart of hill tribe country. Rushing down from Myanmar and through Thailand’s northern mountains to the city of Chiang Rai, its banks and the surrounding slopes and valleys shelter hundreds of villages of a half-dozen major tribes — Lahu, Lisu, Karen, Hmong, Yao and Akha — which in turn are subdivided into many smaller groups.

Akha Hill House, a rustic guest house operated by an Akha

These communities range from secluded mountain hideaways reachable only by foot or four-wheel-drive, to roadside attractions where tribal people dressed in elaborate traditional costumes pose for photos and peddle handicrafts to busloads of tourists.

The hill tribes and their unique culture have been on the backpacker’s Southeast Asia itinerary for decades. This has led to widespread exploitation by unscrupulous tour operators, as well as rampant drug abuse and prostitution. In recent years, luxury resorts have also sprung up.

So if you’re looking for some sort of primitive time-capsule village, you’re out of luck. But this remains a place of breathtaking natural beauty, with a fascinating blend of cultures coexisting at close proximity, and there are a growing number of opportunities to visit the hill tribes on their own terms.

One of these is Akha Hill House, a rustic guest house operated by an Akha community in a mountain hamlet 14 miles (22 kilometres) west and 5,000 feet (1,500 metres) above Chiang Rai. Village headman Apae Amor runs it and employs many of the villagers. A portion of the proceeds goes toward tribal educational programs, he says. It’s also highly affordable. The most basic rooms at Akha Hill House start at about $10 a night, and free transportation is offered to and from Chiang Rai in the back of a pickup truck.

Located in the heart of Chiang Rai City, Akha River House offers cosy accommodation

Or, you can opt to go by water, as I did. I caught a long-tail boat from the public dock on the outskirts of Chiang Rai for a noisy hour-long ride up the river, called Mae Kok in Thai. The once-a-day public boat is 100 baht (about $3.25), though you could spend a lot more chartering a private boat that would stop wherever and whenever you want. I had the boat to myself when other tourists disembarked at a riverside elephant camp.

As the boatman chugged up a waterway swollen by monsoon rains, I sat near the bow and took in a landscape in a million shades of green: fields of corn and rice planted at impossibly steep angles; limestone peaks covered in jungle. There were small villages of bamboo and wood houses, people fishing the shallows with nets, a huge white Buddha looming over a bend in the river.

I was dropped at a grassy field containing a steaming hot spring and the headquarters of Lamnamkok National Park, which encompasses the surrounding hills. My destination was a three-mile (five-kilometre) uphill walk from there. “Follow signs,” said the website. Easy enough.

After a half-hour search, I finally found a single hand-painted sign pointing up a dirt road toward Akha Hill House, and started walking. It was the last sign I saw.

But if I was lost, it was a pleasant kind of lost. The road snaked through fields and forests. Grazing water buffalo looked up from fields and chickens scampered away as I passed through Lahu and Karen villages. Asking directions was a challenge. I can usually manage enough Thai to find my way, but many people here, particularly the elderly, speak tribal languages.

Eventually, a smiling young guy with a motorbike offered a ride back to where I’d gone astray. Like most men in these parts, he carried a sheathed, machete-like knife on his hip for cutting bamboo. After a wild bumpy ride on the back of his bike, he stopped and pointed up a steep track that I’d walked right by an hour earlier.

The ladies of the Hill Tribe playing music and doing a tribal dance

The home stretch was a quadriceps-busting climb along a stony brook, past flooded terraces of young rice plants to a Lahu village where the road suddenly dead-ended. A narrow path continued through open fields, offering panoramic views all the way to Myanmar. Finally, after cresting a saddle between two forested summits and descending through coffee and citrus groves, I arrived at Akha Hill House.

The guest house sits at the edge of an Akha village, perched at the head of a curving valley on the slopes of Doi Hang mountain. Most houses are still made of traditional bamboo, raised on stilts with covered outdoor platforms. But a few concrete houses have appeared, and even a handful of satellite dishes poking from the thatched rooftops, signs that despite the Akha’s reputation as the most impoverished of the hill tribes, this particular village is more prosperous — and modern — than some.

A retired American couple staying in Akha Hill House and volunteering as English teachers at the village school proffered that the lack of signage might be a way to ensure steady work for local guides.

The accommodations are rustic. My room was a mud and wood shack with an electric fan, cold-water shower and mosquito net draped over the bed. But it was perched on a steep slope with a spacious balcony that offered an amazing view. The common area has cold beers and inexpensive, tasty food, especially after a long day on the trail.

The Akha share this lovely vale with a Chinese village where some of the wooden houses are decorated with red paper lanterns. Together, the two villages have no more than a few hundred people living among rushing streams, hillside orchards and a sprawling tea plantation.

Hidden high up in the Chang Rai mountains, the jungle retreat of Akha Hill is a hidden gem of tranquility.

Many Chinese nationalists came south from Yunnan Province when the communists took power. Some settled in the border region where Thailand, Laos and Myanmar meet — the notorious Golden Triangle, once epicenter of the world’s heroin trade. Both the hill tribes and the Chinese were prolific growers of opium poppies, but an aggressive government eradication campaign has led most fields to be replanted with coffee, tea and fruit, though the continued use of primitive slash-and-burn agriculture can be seen in the blackened stumps amid the greenery.

These days, tourism pays the bills. Apae Amor and several other village men are registered guides who can arrange mountain treks of up to seven days, by foot, elephant or bamboo raft, as well as sightseeing tours of the temples, museums and other sights of Chiang Rai Province.

The beautiful Huai Kaeo waterfall is a 15-minute walk from the village through the dripping jungle. The falls plunge over three drops, each with a swimmable pool at the bottom and plenty of big rocks to sit on and read a book or listen to the sounds of the forest. Climbing another 30 minutes on a muddy track will bring you to an open summit that offers more stunning views of the countryside.

One day, walking through the village toward the falls, I heard the familiar sound of Christian hymns sung in the unfamiliar tones of the Akha language. It was Sunday morning and churchgoing villagers were inside a little wooden house of worship.

Like most of Thailand’s hill tribes, the Akha started in southern China and moved south into Myanmar (then known as Burma) where they were exposed to Christianity by British and American missionaries. While some tribes trace their history in Thailand over hundreds of years, the Akha are more recent arrivals, crossing over from Myanmar over the past 50 years to escape persecution by that country’s military rulers. Even today, their brand of Christianity is blended with traditional animist beliefs and ancestor worship.

The beautiful Huai Kaeo waterfall is a 15-minute walk from the village through the dripping jungle.

The Akha are perhaps most famous for their traditional dress. The most decorative of the hill tribe costumes, it is highlighted by colorful embroidered fabrics and headdresses intricately decorated with beads, feathers, shells and silver coins. These days, you are more likely to see Akha women in traditional dress selling trinkets at the Chiang Mai night bazaar. Most here dress in sarongs and flip-flops; the men wear T-shirts with logos of their favourite English football teams.

This is not a place where the outside world has been kept at bay, nor is it a tourist trap where bygone village life is re-enacted for the benefit of visitors. But it is a wonderful place to spend a few days relaxing amid stunning natural wonders and learning a little bit about a vanishing culture. That is, if you can find it.

AKHA HILL HOUSE: http://www.akhahill.com/. Located in the Doi Hang subdistrict of Chiang Rai Province in Northern Thailand. Proprietor Apae Amor also operates Akha River House, in Chiang Rai city, and offers free rides (in the back of a pickup truck) at 4:30 p.m. daily from there to Akha Hill House. Taxi fare from Chiang Rai Airport to the village is $20-$35 each way. Room rates range from $5 a night for wooden hut with outdoor shower to $35 for “VIP bungalow” with air conditioning, cable TV and Wi-Fi. Air Asia, Nok Air and other discount carriers often fly from Bangkok to Chiang Rai for under $100.

 

Breafast with a view, Lanjia Lodge

 

Chiangrai Times –Asian Oasis looks at promoting only sustainable tourism in a way to empower ethnic communities in Northern Thailand. A successful example is Lanjia Lodge located in Chiang Kong, in Chiang Rai province.

It takes approximately an hour from Chiang Rai to reach the hilly landscapes surrounding the small city of Chiang Khong. The Mekong River can be seen in a distance, forming the border with Laos. With ASEAN turning into a single economic community in 2015, the border between Laos and Thailandis becoming increasingly opened to locals from both sides of the river.

Friendly and helpful Lanjia Lodge team

Today, Hmong people represent a community strong of 155,000 individuals, representing 16% of all ethnicities living in Thailand. Most of them have been granted Thai citizenship, except older generations. Their citizenship status did not however empower them until the nineties.

This is where we intervened with the Population and Community Development Association which looks at ways to grant economic autonomy to ethnic communities, explains Rachet Wapeetha, Sales and Marketing Manager of Lodges for Asian Oasis.

Asian Oasis vows to create only tourism products which can be labeled as sustainable community-based. The company has a range of four eco-friendly lodges, three located in Chiang Mai Province (Lisu Lodge, Lahu Outpost and Khum Lanna) and one located in Chiang Rai Province (Lanjia Lodge).

“Our aim is to bring here travellers who want to have a real interacting experience with local communities. The product so far has been especially well received by European travellers who are the keenest at looking at authenticity,” says Mr. Wapeetha. Lanjia Lodge is nestled on a hill with stunning views of green mountains, paddy fields and the Mekong River. Four pavilions have been built offering twin-bed or double rooms at Lanjia Lodges, all built with natural materials such as wood, bamboo or rattan. The only concession to modernity is electricity and hot water! There is no air-con and no internet- probably a deterrent element for younger generations of Asian travellers unable to locate themselves on facebook !!

Lanjia Lodge a Must Visit

What would be a typical stay at Lanjia Lodge? It is all about knowing the local Hmong villagers by visiting the school, visiting a shaman’s home who will initiate visitors about ways to deal with spirits. It is also about trekking in the surrounding for the fittest, making batik or other handicraft for the most talented or simply enjoy Hmong-style food and traditional dances and songs from the villagers in the evening.

“We want to make locals proud of their identity and show them that by keeping their traditions, arts and way of life, they are able to make a living. The majority of the proceeds from the Lodge are reinvested into the community. This represents something between three and four million Baht per year [US$ 97,000 to US$ 129,000]. Only a small amount will be kept for marketing and sales purposes,” tells Rachet Wapeetha. A stay at Lanjia Lodge costs around THB 2,500 per night. Some travellers might find it relatively expensive. But this is also for a good cause.