A week or so ago we hopped aboard a bus, and headed 5 hours northeast to Nan, a mountainous province bordering Laos. We were visiting our friend Amalia, an Italian anthropologist who is researching the forest conservation/slash-and-burn cashcrop agriculture conflict.
We arrived for the weekend of the final dragonboat races along the Nan river, and the typically sleepy town of 25,000 was abuzz with a big festival market along the river.
Though the highlight of our weekend visit was a motorbike ride up into the mountains. Amalia was interested in checking out the scene in some areas she hadn’t visited – we had heard there were some isolated villages, so we decided (laughingly) to invoke our inner-old-school anthropologist, and go in search of the ‘true natives’.
We climbed the main road for 30km out of Nan town, then turned onto a stunning sideroad the ran along the spine of the mountain ridge. It is amazing to think this is corn country in Thailand - the landscape is a far cry from the Cartesian flatscape of Iowa. Too steep for any machines, the corn - all large-kerneled feed corn for the cattle industry - is hand-picked.
We parked at the end of the paved road, then walked a couple km to a village for noodles and shelter from a passing rain cloud. The cook there told us we had overshot the Mabri village.
Perhaps I'll let Fee tell the rest, including listening to an older gentleman, dressed only in dustly loin cloth, vent about his role as spokesman for a 'model village'. Stay tuned for more...
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