The Simmy Sagas

Karen Tribe Rice Farmer

Though Thailand is smaller in area than the state of Texas, it is home to 70+ distinct ethnic minorities. The Karen group is the largest minority at 400k+ people distributed across almost 2k villages (2003 census).

The village women wore colorful horizontally striped woven sarong leg wraps. Today, less than 10% of minorities in Thailand wear their traditional dress (Perve, “The Hill Tribes Living in Thailand,” 2011). Some villages still use looms to weave cloth, but sewing machines are becoming popular.

The Karen are matrilineal and matriarchal. Women are the head of the clan, pass on the family line, and control the house’s finances.

“Who cooks?” I asked the head woman at our homestay.

“Whoever is less tired,” our guide translated as he and some men chopped our potatoes for dinner.

A Fortunate Man, Thailand Landscape

The awe-inspiring sight of rice hill farms at dawn reminded me of a quote from A Fortunate Man, the story of a countryside doctor in England who sociologically observes the lives of the rural patients he treats.

“Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents takes place. For those who are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographic but also biographical and personal” — John Berger, A Fortunate Man

I squinted out at the landscape and imagined how the Karen rice farmers related to the land, how they had memories embedded in its contours, and I wondered what it meant to them.

Thailand Hills Mid-Morning

The pure dawn’s light soon dissolved from grey shades into a lush color spectrum. A shroud of mist lingered on the hills.

Rice Farmer Heading to Work

While watching farmers as they descended into the rice fields, I daydreamed I was witnessing Sebastião Salgado’s photojournalist exhibition Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age. Watch Salgado’s The Salt of the Earth documentary to understand his transition from documenting people to grandiose landscapes.

Some farmers carried plastic jugs of a natural pesticide made from local plants. The Karen mainly farm mountain rice. Other vegetables such as carrots, potatoes, and cauliflower add to their diet with the surplus sold off, allowing the village to participate in the cash economy.

Neighboring tribes used to plant Opium poppies in these hills until the Thai government banned the plant in 1959 and followed up with The Royal Project, a program that promoted growth of alternative vegetable and fruit crops. These government initiatives were successful — opium is no longer grown in the country.

Rice Farmer with Hoe

The farmers used rudimentary handheld tools to work the land.

Giant Golden Orb Weaver Spider — R Ninan

Near a rice farm overlook we found a giant golden orb weaver (Nephila pilipes), one of the largest spider species in the world. The guide picked it up and said it didn’t bite, so I asked to hold it. There’s a fascinating theory that female gigantism may have evolved in giant golden orb weavers to reduce the effectiveness of mating plugs (males insert the plugs into females in an attempt to prevent offspring from other males).

A fellow French traveler on the trek had informed our guide that he was frightfully afraid of spiders. At one trailhead, our guide motioned for the Frenchman to go first.

He was surprised. “Why me first?”

The guide stoically replied, “I’m scared. Many spiders on this trail. You big tall white man. You go first.” Our guide often lacked information to our curious questions but overcompensated with an unexpectedly amusing sense of humor.

Breakfast with Dang

The Pooh trek company’s dog, “Dang,” accompanied us during the homestay. He knew all the trails and always showed me the way back on walks. At the end of the trek, when we were to rendezvous with a pickup truck, Dang ran ahead on the trail, returned, and picked up a leaf in his mouth to signal to us that the car was there.

Note the beautiful teak floorboards. Thailand was once the home of teak merchants, with the British never formally colonizing the area but still controlling a substantial portion of the trade.

Old Man Weaving Bamboo

We passed a village where an old man in his 60’s with a seemingly perpetual smile weaved a bamboo mat. Note the walls and flooring made of split bamboo.

Roasted Cicada Snack

The piercing sound of cicadas pursued us on our hikes. Sometimes the chorus crescendoed and faded together in unison, at other times their dynamics evened out into an ever-present chatter, lulling us as we hiked.

I came to identify another distinct buzzing sound, that of a cicada trapped in a villager’s hand, wings scraping frenetically agains the palm and fingers, attempting to escape. The villages we visited roasted cicadas with chili, garlic, and chicken powder and then crunched away. One time I saw a local walking through the village smiling broadly, holding up her clenched palm toward a passing group of villagers, and sticking her tongue out to brag about her catch.

Cooking in Freshly Cut Bamboo Vessels

We reached a bamboo shelter in the woods by a stream where we cooked our rice and vegetables in hollow fresh bamboo tubes about 10cm in diameter with lids cut out for pouring ingredients. Our guide filled the bamboo with water from a natural spring nearby. Old dried-out bamboo was used as kindling.

River Hiking — R Ninan

We finished our trek with a beautiful day of river crossings and wading upstream. Throughout the entire trek, we did not see another traveler, only local villagers and empty peaceful mountain trails.

Hills of Mae Sariang, Thailand

In the hills of Northwest Thailand near Mae Sariang, the morning fog rolls through lush forest and over corrugated and thatched roofs, touching cultivated mountain rice fields and retreating by midmorning into blue skies. The Karen tribesmen inhabit these hills, practicing subsistence agriculture and living in semi-isolation from Thai society. Only 200km to the south are the tragic refugee camps full of Karen and other ethnic minorities fleeing from Myanmar’s civil war, but here the dawn is apparently peaceful.

I joined a jungle backpacking trek near the Thai-Burmese border with a homestay in a Karen village. We departed out of Chiang Mai with a Karen guide from the Eco Pooh trek company. There were two others, my friend R Ninan and a French expat from Bangkok.

Guide Buying Cauliflower at the Market — R Ninan

We stopped at a market en route for local produce to cook on the trek. Simple fan motors with plastic bags tied to them kept flies off meat products. It was the start of mango and durian season, and I am off-camera feasting on mangoes while the guide purchased our veggies.

Starting the Trek

We drove for roughly 2 hours, past a police checkpoint and several larger-than-life visages of the recently deceased King, stopping at a roadside stand to switch from our van to a pickup truck.

We were planning to leave some luggage in the van and asked, “What does the driver do for the 3 days we are gone?”

“He close eyes. He open eyes,” replied our expressionless guide.

We buried our bags between the van seats and rode an hour in the back of the pickup before starting our trek on a dusty paved road through hilly fields. It was in the 90’s F with humidity 50%+, and we were quickly soaked.

Deforested Hillside

An abrupt change in scenery to deforested slopes spotted with shrubs and stilted houses appeared almost comical, like a scene out of Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax. Slash and burn is a traditional agricultural practice among Thailand’s hill tribes, resulting in deforestation. The Karen keep the soil erosion impact to a minimum by methods of crop rotation, systematic weeding, and fire control.

Machete Cutting Bamboo — R Ninan

A machete was our all-purpose survival tool and bamboo our all-purpose medium. Our cutlery was fashioned from bamboo — tea cups, bowls, spoons, chopsticks, and even cooking pots. The separate chambers in the stalk are watertight, and local fisherman even use them to store their catch.

Karen Hill Tribe Village

After much upward climb, we reached the first village, a motley patchwork valley of corrugated-roof houses mirroring the geometry of the farmland patchwork above.

Our guide had unfortunately underestimated the amount of water needed and asked us to carry two 0.6L bottles each while we could have easily consumed two 1.5L bottles. I learned a survival lesson — to always make the decision myself on the minimum quantity of water needed based on questions regarding length of trek and elevation gain, water availability, the weather temp and humidity, etc

Main Road Through Village

All villages in Thailand are now accessible by road or tracks and have either electricity lines or solar. Stilted houses of painted and unpainted teak and bamboo are aligned along a central dirt road.

Soccer Match — R Ninan

Shy groups of village kids dared each other to pass nearest to us. Some schoolkids invited us to join their soccer game. Dehydrated as we were, there was a thrill in playing something as universal as soccer in a village where we didn’t speak the language. They could say hello and goodbye. We gave them high fives when they scored goals and were relieved when the ball was kicked over an escarpment so that we could move on and find bottled water.

The Thai government set up schools in all villages to teach reading and writing Thai, mathematics, environmental resource management, and preserving ethnic traditions. Today, over 90% of hill tribes speak Thai.

iPhone 7+ Profile Pic of a Rooster

This majestic rooster was taking its own trek through the village.

Christianity in the Village

The blue cross by the door signifies that Christian missionaries visited the village in the 20th century.

Village Store — R Ninan

The village has only one store where the Karen can buy snacks and any goods from the outside world. Sadly, there’s a hillside on the village outskirts of discarded plastic trash. The Karen had traditionally disposed of bamboo implements anywhere, and they treat plastic the same way. Seeing the store and trash raised ethical discussions on poverty within our group — whether to define the standard of living economically or not, what is the need for money in a community with self-sufficient farming, and the importance of preserving tradition but at what cost to livelihood.

Karen Hill Tribe Household

We home stayed with a family living in a wooden stilted house with chickens and an enormous pig leisurely roaming about. There was no running water, only buckets carried from a low-waterline well at the town’s base that supported 300 people. Depending on the time of year, the well was often insufficient in its resource, and villagers got their water from food instead of drink.

A central breezeway separated the main living quarters with a tiered firepit on the left from the secondary living quarters on the right they allocated for us “white people.” We slept on bamboo mats on the teak-planked floor, covered by mosquito nets, and the roosters and other animals were free to walk underneath and crow to their heart’s pleasure through the night.

Village Woman in Cloth Turban

The Karen matriarch at our homestay wore a cloth turban that commanded authority as she walked with purpose or stood with feet planted wide, arms occupied with chores or decisively hanging by her side, observing the family and us with serious expression. The Karen are matriarchal and matrilineal with women controlling the family finances and passing the family line.

I was pleased to see both genders partaking equally in the vices of drinking and smoking. When I inquired who does the cooking, our guide translated, “whoever is less tired cooks.”

Evening Entertainment With a 5-Stringed Guitar — R Ninan

After a dinner of potato and pork stew and vegetable and tofu stir fry with rice and pineapple, we drank warm freshly-distilled rice whisky on the breezeway with our homestay’s family and friends. They entertained each other with jokes and magic tricks on a closed-looped string. Hanging on the rear wall are the bags they take to work in the rice fields.

The guide translated that the villagers were talking happily about the present, not about future wants or planning — both a formula for contentedness and short-sightedness. Some younger members watched Thai videos on smartphones.

The village had one communal guitar, but it was missing a string. The man in the red jersey sang folk songs and managed to strike bar chords far better than I did without the high E.

Matchstick Pig and Arrow Puzzle — R Ninan

The guide kept us entertained with matchstick games on a bamboo mat. Here’s a puzzle – an arrow is headed to kill a pig. Move three 3 pieces (not including the arrow) to save the pig. And no, the answer isn’t turn the other way and let the pig get hit in the behind.

While we were stumped on this puzzle, our French colleague asked “Does this tribe have that tradition of lining up the women and the men choose their bride?”

“No no, that’s not us. We have Facebook,” our guide replied defensively.

Bantay Kdei Gate

Considering that Angkor Wat was built for the Hindu god Vishnu but has since been a place of Buddhist pilgrimage, I was often confused as to whether I was looking at Buddhist or Hindu structures, even when there were well-preserved sculptures and reliefs with layers of detail and symbolism.

Here’s an architectural hint – You can tell the religious background of a 4-faced statue by what’s on their head: the Buddhist Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara (aka Lokesvara) will have a lotus while the Hindu Brahma will have a top knot. If you want to stay in the shade at the angle from which the photograph is taken, can you tell?

Bantay Kdei is a 12th century Buddhist temple within the small circuit of Angkor temples near Siem Reap. The side shown is facing South on the temple’s outer gate, but supposedly the smile of the East-facing Buddha is always happiest because East represents delight, West is mercy, South is sympathy, and North is equanimity. There are also little Buddhas lining the outer wall.

Stone Passageway

The layout of Bantay Kdei consists of three concentric walls arranged in linear fashion. The outer wall is made of rusty-red laterite and the rest of the structures are of sandstone which decays in the persistent presence of moisture. The temple has undergone significant restoration because the jungle naturally takes over the structures. The restoration efforts use blocks from the same quarry as the original stone.

The central area is a temple with galleries, dancing halls for the king, and food storage structures. Pillars are fastened to the structures with mortise and tenon joints.

Bantay Kdei Structures

To walk through Khmer temples is to feel overwhelmed with fascinating artistic detail and structural immensity.  One’s eye is perpetually met with the sight of enigmatic piles of stone blocks lying unassembled and yet unlinked to their source location and purpose. One’s ears are full of the omnipresent piercing sound of Cambodian cicadas that seem to follow the listener through the exploration of ruins.

While we’re talking about sensory experiences – watch where you step, particularly at this temple. The red ants and fire ants are everywhere and climb fast.

Defaced Buddha

In later centuries, Hindus arrived and defaced the Buddha reliefs at Bantay Kdei. Recently, Japanese archeologists also found a collection of Buddha statues that were taken from the temple and buried nearby when the temple temporarily became a Hindu place of worship.

Hinduized Buddha

In some cases, the Hindu newcomers amusingly attempted to “Hinduize” Buddha carvings by scratching in a goatee, cosmetically morphing the lotus into a bun, and redrawing the outline of the cross-legged position to legs folded upwards like a Hindu Brahmin. You can still see the original outline above. I imagine a museum on the history of graffiti commencing with ancient Hindu devotees and eventually making its way to Banksy.

Today, it is estimated that at least 90% of the Cambodian population practices Theravada Buddhism which draws from Hinduism as well as Buddhism. Angkor Wat is still a place of pilgrimage for both, and I didn’t sense any signs of religious tension.

Rural Hut

There must be at least a dozen bus companies operating between Phnom Penh and Siem Reap offering varying levels of comfort, price, reputation, vehicle size, route frequency, and number of stops. We opted to go with Grand Ibis for their wifi, nice seats at $15 each, and 6-hour trip length. Along the way, we had the opportunity to observe the continuous blend in landscape from Phnom Penh’s mini metropolis to the agricultural countryside.

Construction Materials

While leaving Phnom Penh, we got a glimpse of the capital’s supporting industries such as woodcutting, brickmaking, metalworking, bulk goods supply, and pottery. The most advanced manufacturing facilities we saw on the trip were rice processing plants that ran the South Korean Flag. Before the Khmer Rouge were in power, Cambodia was self-sufficient in food and was an established exporter of rice, timber, and other goods; today Cambodia depends on significant foreign investment which prevents it from reaping the benefits of its own natural resources, labor, and even tourism. The most shocking example is the Angkor Wat ticket booth which has been leased to a private Vietnamese company for 99 years. Not a dime you spend on Angkor Wat goes to Cambodians.

From an outsider’s perspective, the obvious areas to improve in a third world country are health, education, and infrastructure at a high level — the rest is speculation until you understand the culture. I have a strong interest in engineering/manufacturing/supply chain/design projects for local development and empowerment, and I expect it would be useful to create a mapped database of development-related resources similar to the World Resources Institute’s global Aqueduct tool for water metrics. For Cambodia, I would note the location, price, and availability of construction materials such as brick, wood, cement, and formed steel as well as the transportation vehicles available, condition of the roads, and perceived level of skilled labor. Such map-based engineering development parameters would be useful for NGO’s, research studies, and disaster relief. Moreover, this online tool could open up synergetic possibilities for humanitarian efforts such as crowd-sourcing data, NGO coordination, and accommodating the incremental contributions of volunteer tourism.

Most shop and home construction consists of corrugated aluminum, brick, and occasional ceramic tile roofing. Aside from temples, the fanciest buildings in town are glass-walled banks with 3D gold-lettered email addresses printed on the facade to market their credibility such as the one on the right. Banks in Palestine boasted similar false fronts.

Paving Cambodia’s Roads

Most of the road was paved, but some portions were having gravel poured and run over by a steam roller. Everything in the towns was coated with a layer of red dust even though we came at the tail end of the rainy season.

Rural Shed

After about an hour, the road transitioned to rural subsistence agriculture communities on cow-dotted landscapes bordered by fish farms and rice paddy fields. Near fields, all houses are built on stilts.

Haystack

In some townships, each home had a haystack in the yard for cattle feed. The hay was consolidated around wooden poles, sometimes with tires on top.

Rice Drying

Some homes dried rice on the roadside to reduce grain moisture before storage. Rice is embedded in Cambodia’s history since the region was first settled in the 3rd millennium BCE by rice farmers migrating from the north. Before the Khmer Rouge rule, Cambodia  historically had solid rice harvests, and famines were uncommon.

Side Street Entrance

There are surprisingly few side streets coming off the main highway. When there is a side street or building complex, its entrance is usually marked by a grand arch. This one might be religious because of the symbolism.

Buddhist Shrine at Bus Pit Stop

Buddhist shrines can be found in front of any kind of building in Cambodia from a city shop to rural residence to pit stop. Most are nearly identical in design and bear a striking resemblance to the royal palace architecture. Some homes had walkways with a specially constructed pedestal extension for the shrines to stand in a place of daily prominence.

Cambodian Wedding Tent

We passed by a Cambodian wedding getting set up in a pink tent with speakers blasting pleasant Cambodian karaoke songs. Pink seemed to be the color of choice for other roadside weddings we observed in Siem Reap.

Entering Cambodia Through Phnom Penh

After precisely one year since we dreamed up this trip, Chris and I are now in Cambodia, known in the 9th to 13th centuries as the Khmer Empire. Last year, after spending the summer working in Israel, we visited the ancient Nabatean caravan city of Petra and got hooked on exploring ruins. In the winter, as an extended layover after the MIT Panama Canal trip, I hiked Machu Picchu in the rainy season which involved crossing a landslide by foot and hiking 10 miles along railroad tracks in the dark until I got to the Incan site. Now our plan is to visit Angkor, the world’s largest pre-industrial city with the famed temple complex of Angkor Wat. But like all ancient ruins, there are gateway cities and gateways to those gateways that serve as a lens into local contemporary life much the same way that the ruins provide insight into the ancient civilization. We enter Cambodia through Phnom Penh and then proceed to Siem Reap from which we will explore the ruins.

Royal Palace of Phnom Penh

Phnom Penh’s most popular tourist attractions are the Royal Palace and Killing Fields. The palace serves as the official residence of King Norodom Sihamoni. The architecture is grand but not imposing like Beijing’s Forbidden Palace and reminded me of Versailles with its symmetry and trimmed trees.

Serpent Banister

The animal-inspired ornamentation held the same theme across the multiple buildings of the palace complex: polycephalic serpents on the welcoming end of banisters, bird-monkey gargoyles at the eves, and elephant trunks on the roof tiles.

Ramayan Mural

To my delight, a colorful mural of the Khmer version of the Ramayan, the Hindu epic, was painted over 600 meters around the perimeter of the Silver Pagoda at the palace. There is a very popular Indian TV series of the Ramayan that I watched when I was little – all 26 video cassettes worth – and I would like to think I could recognize some of the numerous characters in the mural. You could track the progression of the battles by the courtroom scenes that depicted who was in power and controlled which factions, though the captions were written in Khmer.

Elephant Platforms

At the palace entrance are some museum rooms. This one was full of platforms once used to ride elephants. While I at first wanted to ride an elephant in Cambodia, I read enough about the industry to realize that endangered elephants are trained through parental separation and physical torture to feed foreigners’ desire to ride them – not a good idea.

A Snapshot of Phnom Penh

I would be remiss to not point out that the poverty and lack of infrastructure is quite evident in Phnom Penh. The city is chaotic and dusty and not half as restful as Siem Reap.

Houseboats at the Call to Prayer

Chris took a run across the Tonle Sap and happened to come across a gathering of house boats and motorcycles joining together for the evening call to prayer reminiscent of what we saw in Palestine and Jordan last year. Surprised at such a large Muslim event in a country reported to be 95% Theravada Buddhist and eager to explore areas off the beaten track, we retraced his steps with a tuktuk (rickshaw) we hired for $3, and the sound of prayer and sight of bowing heads was unmistakable. We asked who lived in these boats to our Tuktuk driver, and he claimed they were Vietnamese fishermen. After gazing at the water where the Tonle Sap joins the Mekong River, listening to the creaking gantries of barges dredging out the river bottom, and wondering who was going to eat the eggs roasting on a fire at the end of the road, we turned back to our hostel accompanied by the sound of the friendly tuktuk driver’s Cambodian pop music that sounded like an oddly familiar variant of Hindi Bollywood music.