Retail Detail


11 - 15 Jan, Ian

The last few days began with one rare holiday purchase and almost ended with another. The first was a bowl that I bought in a small silver factory that we visited on our way from Sukhothai to Nan. The factory was across the street from a shop and has an arrangement under which the shop buys silver and gives it to the factory workers, who are all farmers making some extra money for themselves in their down time. This is, according to Nui, another example of the king's initiative to encourage rural people to stay in their villages. Whatever is made in the factory is given to the shop for sale; the workers get paid a commission based upon the weight of the silver and from the vague information that I could extract it seems that this amounts to about a third of the sale price.

It was totally informal. There were about half a dozen people scattered around a covered workshop and we wandered up behind them and watched as they made beads, plaited chains, filed links, hammered pea-size shells and painted and fixed necklaces. The girls were obviously intrigued by it all and the workers seemed happy for us to watch. Afterwards we crossed over the street to hit the shop, which had the air of a drop-in centre for the women of the village, who sat around doing the books when they weren't serving us. The girls all bought pretty jewellery. My interest was in the silver bowls, and I chose an older one - made 60 years or more ago, they said - with a Naga figure repeated six times around the outside. When I was in Fez I had admired the ceramics that had patterns that repeat seven, nine or even 11 times - this being wilfully awkward to accomplish - but I think that those symmetries are particular to Arabic culture and I haven't seen them here. Nui preferred the new bowls to the old ones but once I'd chosen mine they sent it over the road and one of the silver workers cleaned it up to look like as shiny as new. This involved burning it with a blow torch, dipping it in acid and scrubbing it with some kind of nut five or six times. Now we just have to get it home without damaging it.

We arrived at Nan later on Wednesday and checked into a reasonably nice hotel. In the evening we went out for dinner, and the girls dressed themselves up beautifully for a fancy meal. Nui found us a car and we drove to - Tesco!! In fact, it was a Thai/Japanese-style fast food franchise inside a Tesco called MK. We sat at a table at which they plugged in a heated bowl that was filled with chicken stock. This was the cooking medium for an assortment of ingredients that we selected from a laminated menu; we chose baby sweetcorns, morning glory, straw mushrooms, scallops, prawn balls, fish and beef, rejecting jellyfish and pig intestines. This was served with green noodles. Nui made the indisputable claim that this food was much healthier than the KFC round the corner and the less obvious boast that MK is very popular. Having subsequently had another meal out in Nan and two hotel breakfasts, the appeal of MK here is more understandable - Nan is the first place in Thailand where we've had bad food. Seeing the "chef" in our hotel tip a can of Carnation into the tray of scrambled eggs has cured me of my liking for them.

After our MK meal I had a saunter around Tesco: it seemed unreal to find one here and I had to put my fingers in the side, so to speak. The range of products is completely different from Tesco at home but the branding is the same, and over the next few days when we visited the most remote places we kept seeing incongruous Tesco-packed fish sauce, bottled water and so forth.

From Nan we embarked on a jungle trek. We picked up a new local guide - a youngish chap known to us as Mr Det - and were driven to our starting point, auspiciously passing a man riding an elephant on the way into the hills, and set down by the roadside at an unmarked bend. The first 30 minutes were surprisingly brisk and steeply up-hill. We stopped only briefly so that Mr Det could show us that you could pick up and eat leaf ants, but I'd already had enough of the food in Nan to try more. I suspect - and I'm sure that I'm right - that they forced the pace at the start to see if we would drop out. Indeed, after half an hour we stopped and Nui yelled out at the top of her voice in Thai. Apparently she was telling the driver who has waiting by his van that he could go. When I asked Nui whether all of her clients enjoy this trek she replied that it was "50-50": half of them like it, while the other half drop out, and she can tell, she claims, within 15 minutes whether her party is going to be able to make it. 50 per cent seems like an awfully high drop-out rate for an integral part of an expensive customised holiday, but it's not that surprising when you see how this company works. They guard information about the itinerary with the paranoia of the military, although I've come to think that it may be tied up with the fact that 95% of the population believe that suffering is caused by striving for any sort of objective. Whatever the reason, if the customers don't know what they're going to be doing a proportion of them wont like it. Ordinarily, we would have been far pushier at getting information (such as where we would be staying) before committing ourselves for the month, but with a year's worth of travel to book our attention to detail did slip. Luckily, the itinerary has suited us well, although we would have an easier time with the girls if we could get the same level of info about what's coming up each day as Nui can give us when we visit the wats. It's easier to find out about the last eight centuries than the next eight hours.

Our first day of trekking continued up hill until we reached an altitude of 1,650 metres and then we descended sharply for the remainder of the day. We lunched at a spot where about a month ago a tiger had slaughtered a cow; Nui had seen the tiger poo (identified by the cow fragments) when she came previously. The jungle itself at this height had a gentle woodland character, and being autumn here many of the trees were red or russet. We saw no large animals, but again there were many exotic butterflies. There were also some stretches where we had to walk through trees and bushes absolutely covered in spiders. Individually, they weren't too gruesome (we saw a much more impressive individual later in the day), with pea-size bodies and quite spindly legs, but the number of them was a little freaky. Nui tells us that they cluster together at night for warmth. Personally, I was unperturbed by the spiders, and much more concerned that they could all apparently find enough to eat.

In all, on the first day we covered 12 km, which took us about five hours. Over the past couple of weeks I've been wondering about the feasibility of arranging an independent multi-day walk in Thailand and this day convinced me both that it would be feasible and rewarding, and that I would need a guide (let me know if you're interested).

We arrived into a Hmong village where our tour operator rents a guest room in one of the local houses. We were by no means the first westerners that the locals had seen - in the high season our operator apparently brings up to three parties a month here - but we still seemed to have entertainment value, particularly to the local kids. Perhaps this is not too astonishing given the other recreations I could observe - chasing a tyre with a stick, running up and down the street, kicking the dogs... Many of the dogs have short ears or no ears at all: cutting them more and more is used as a progressive punishment for the dogs if they molest the chickens or otherwise annoy their owners.

The village itself was very picturesque since most of the houses were made with wood and bamboo under tidy thatch. This is changing as it is in every peasant village in the world under the influence of the most pervasive architectural innovation of the past thousand years: the concrete block. For the past decade or so it has been illegal in Thailand to fell the wood in the jungle that has been traditionally used to make houses. Moreover, legally produced timber is prohibitively expensive. The upshot, of course, is that every new house is now made from concrete blocks, and so if Zoe and Heidi ever bring their children here the wooden villages will have disappeared.

As well as the homesteads the people themselves here make the place comfortable for visitors. The kids may treat you as an amusing alien but at least most people smile. When you walk into a place like this friendliness, suspicion or hostility would all be understandable and there's no way you can know what you'll encounter; here we met friendliness. I hope my photos from here capture it. Again, I find myself being much too diffident to get many of the shots I'd like. For example, there was a guy walking through the village with a long plank balanced on his right shoulder and an even longer antique-style rifle in his left hand. He probably would have smiled for me if I'd asked, but I balked. Nui on the other hand is always encouraging me to stick my lens towards everyone and everything, and here it seems that I should.

Mr Det cooked us dinner, which we ate by the side of the house. We weren't at all surprised when little kids came and grinned at us through the gaps in the bamboo fence, but it was more disconcerting when four women old enough to be their grandmothers came and stood over us as we ate. Nui told us that they had handicrafts to sell, and after dinner we bought a patterned handkerchief from each of them. One of the women returned later with a gift for us - a marrow-size vegetable that Mr Det and Nui said was like a cucumber; sadly it was heavy and we had to leave it behind. Just after we turned in for the night a guy who it transpired would be yet another guide - Mr Pa - came and showed us a scaly creature that we think was an armadillo; the girls passed it around and it hung by its tail from a stick.

We were tired and went to bed early. "Bed" was a thin mattress on a concrete lino-covered floor with mosquito net canopies. We all settled into the one room, and Nui joined us later. Getting to sleep was not so easy as all the evening noises of the village swam around us: chickens, people and the TV in the next room. Despite the rural poverty of the village most people, like the campesinos of Ecuador, invest the little that they earn in a TV. One or two of them also have a flat-bed van, and there is a road into Nan, although it tracks a much more circuitous route than we walked. As well as the noise I had a headache, which lasted on and off for some days and had the same character as the withdrawal headache I got when I did a one month detox a year or two back. Since I was now going without coffee, milk and wine (though not tea, eggs and beer) it could be the same phenomenon. Nurofen and a couple of hours of Corsican polyphonic music and then Nellie McKay on my iPod helped.

The next morning we awoke to the early cycle of village sounds and this time it was totally welcome. Again, there was the buzz of chatter, and again there were countless chickens. There was also a Chinese song being played over and over, which had a pleasing hypnotic effect similar to that from Hung Up that I wrote about recently; I wished I'd made a better effort to track it down.

The Hmong people only came to Thailand in the last 30 to 50 years, having fled southern China to escape Communism. They have also diffused into Burma and Laos. They're not Buddhists but Buddhism and respect for the king is being inculcated into them in Thailand, as we discovered when we went to the local schools. First, we visited the primary school. Lessons kick off at about 10 a.m. but the kids are dropped off whenever the parents make their way out to the rice fields, and by 8:20 there were already about a dozen or so of the 80 pupils running around. The school day at the next school up starts with a little ceremony at which the children assemble in lines on the sports field and sing songs as a couple of the older boys raise the Thai flag. The songs, inevitably, praise the king and the Lord Buddha. This happened while we were there, and the most impressive aspect of it was that it took place with next to no adult supervision - only one teacher stood passively at the back of one of the lines.



The school also had a computer room and a library. We looked round one of the classrooms, which was empty apart from a couple of little ones sweeping the floor and a gaggle of girls who followed us round. On a wall chart we discovered that there are actually 28 vowels in the Thai alphabet, not 26 as we were told at Sukhothai or 22 as we were told originally. I'm trying to understand how it is that educated Thais don't know this beyond doubt, but I haven't worked it out. As a side note, you may be interested to learn that Thai has no tenses: I've tried to think of a circumstance in which they're actually needed but can't yet.

After our impromptu trip to school we set off on our day's walk. This was much longer (22 km) but flatter, and full of interest. We had to wade through 18 creeks and the wetter environment made for a junglier environment. We walked through dense thickets of bamboo as well as forests of teak trees that have huge leaves. There was scrambling and a river pool to swim in at lunch time. And while there were still no tigers there were plenty of fun bugs (more butterflies, a big scary spider, a preying mantis, crabs...).

Now with three guides (Nui for Thailand, Mr Det for Nan province and Mr Pa for the Hmong area) I was reminded of a comment from one of my good friends (John) that I'm turning into an imperialist - with the difference that I was carrying the heavy bag. In fact, Mr Pa pulled a few faces about the weight of my rucsac. Compared to what many people carry it was quite light, especially considering it had four people's gear in. But as he grimaced at it I realised that it must appear to him very decadent to have so many casual belongings. Earlier we'd visited his house and it had been far more basic than the Thai house we'd been round before. Inside was a single room, maybe 15m square with a very irregular earth floor. Tiny bedrooms were walled off in two of the corners, each of which had a raised level floor. Apart from a few sacks and some simple belongings hanging off the bamboo and wood walls the only conspicuous possession was a TV with a DVD player underneath, in front of which was placed a solitary metal-framed chair.

We were out for seven hours and all enjoyed it. Finally, we arrived at a remote cluster of chalets, where we spent our second night. Again, we had thin mattresses on a concrete floor under the protection of mosquito nets; this time we also sprinkled powder around to discourage the biting ants from homing in on us. In the late afternoon we relaxed looking out over the lawns and bougainvillaea, and at night we ate under a full moon by a fire that Mr Det built up. When we turned in I staved off the headaches with Jack Johnson - his soft acoustic sound reminds me of Chet Baker. We slept well enough despite the cold and the night rain occasionally leaking in on us.

The third day was easier - just a 1 km hike back along the river, where we were met by the raft providers. Mr Pa had scuttled back off the previous afternoon and was replaced by a raft steerer, who didn't say a single word. We rafted for a couple of hours or so along the river, shooting several runs of rapids, some of which drenched us. We took lunch on a little beach and swam to cool off. Since I gave my camera up when we got in the river we inevitably had some terrific bird sightings, including three or four super-close kingfishers. (I tried to find the Charles Olsen poem on-line but couldn't - anyone know how to get it?) Incidentally, the notes I made about cameras the other day were well born out this week. I would have loved to have a fast SLR to try for a flying butterfly snap (there's no real chance with my Olympus) but more significantly if I had an SLR I doubt that I would have hauled it through 35 km of jungle. Another John friend of ours emailed to agree with the blog: he previously owned a Nikon F1 himself and resolved never to buy another after it was stolen in Tahiti.

By late afternoon we were back in our hotel in Nan, now upgraded to the executive floor, and with a western bathroom and thick mattresses it seemed the height of luxury. I had a two hour traditional Thai massage, having held out until we got to this place on the recommendation of Nui. It was very physical, almost gymnastic, and at the start as the masseuse concentrated her full body weight through her thumbs into points along my leg and hip I wondered whether I'd have to wimp out. When she started cracking my toes I was glad I only have twenty digits, though perhaps also sensing that this made things too easy for me she did them all twice. She walked up my legs holding onto my upturned feet for support (remember Lucy Lui walking on Tim Curry in Charlie's Angels?) and walked slowly on all fours along my legs and back. While the leg treatment was frankly painful, the back, shoulder and neck massage was excellent. I've had a reasonable amount of physio on my back and shoulders over the years and this massage was like a power version. Afterwards I felt fantastic all over, and would do the same every week or two if I could. Especially for only 300 bhat (about £4.50) plus tip for two hours.

The next morning we stopped off at Wat Phumin before leaving Nan, where there are some great murals, some of which depict un-Buddhist hell scenes. Later in the morning we visited an elephant conservation centre and took in a show. It began with a display of the elephants' logging skills (pushing, rolling, dragging and lifting logs, singly and in pairs), during which the commentator, who was alternating Thai with English, boasted that these were useful working procedures rather than circus tricks. Next, two of the elephants each painted a picture while others played a tune on musical instruments. Hmm. Afterwards we had an hour long elephant ride, sitting in paired seats with a driver sitting atop each elephant's head. It was hot so we had ice creams after - seeing a couple of greeny white ones I was hoping for apple flavour; when I enquired it turned out that the first was coconut and noodle (the local standard apparently) and the second was green pea. I had vanilla.

Yesterday night we arrived in Chiang Mai. I'll write more about this next time. For now I'll mention that we hit the Sunday night street market and while the girls all bought lovely skirts I almost bought a pair of wooden dragons. In the end they didn't seem quite right. Ruskin (I'm 95% sure it was him, but keep 5% open for William Morris) wrote that you shouldn't give house space to anything you don't know to be useful or believe to be beautiful: these certainly weren't useful and ultimately I wasn't sure about the beauty. I have one more acquisition that I'm very keen to make here, and that I should have been able to pull off by now. I wont say what it is yet for fear of jinxing it.


Posted: Mon - January 16, 2006 at 10:21 AM              


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