on visiting a Kayan Lahwi Village part 2 of 2

The Tiger Temple I managed to skip, but a two-hour hike to visit a long-neck Kayan Lahwi village proved too irresistible.

The Kayan Lahwi are a hill people who live in northern Thailand. Kayan woman wear brass neck rings to give the effect of an elongated neck. Contrary to popular notions, the neck is not actually stretched. Rather, the weight of the brass rings push the collar bone down and compress the rib cage giving the appearance of a longer neck. Girls as young as four or five years old start of with several rings and then gradually increase the number of rings every year.

On the spectrum of female body modification, neck elongation may not be as debilitating as foot-binding, but it certainly subjugates women more than ear piercing.

While making my way through the village buying some of their handicraft, I realized that I was contributing to the perpetuation of yet another generation of women feeling the pressure to subject themselves to this form of body malformation.

Obviously, in Kayan Lahwi villages, the women in neck rings are the big draw. There are other villages nearby in which the women do not wear the body-altering neck rings and I am sure that these villages sell a fraction of the wares that the Kayan women do. On some level, the men and women of the village have got to know that the neck modification attracts the tourists which equates to better sales. If the next generation of girls took a pass on neck elongation, it would have a direct impact on the long-term financial well-being of the village.

By being there and buying my souvenirs, I was reinforcing that system.

I get that.

Even when the results aren’t as dramatic as women with layer after layer of brass rings around their necks, the same principle applies in every country we visit in Southeast Asia. When we travel in these third-world countries, we are engaging and participating in systems that are not equitable.

A part of me thinks it would be better to stay home.

But staying home is not the solution either. In fact, that’s even worse. While not ideal, my tourist dollars are at least doing some short-term good.

Years ago, I was having a discussion with a friend of mine about the challenges of living in an imperfect world. Lamenting the fact that he has to daily make lifestyle choices that were contrary to his core principles, he conceded “I live in a world not of my creation.”

Visit the village. Don’t visit the village. There is no perfect answer here. I live in a world not of my creation.

I realize that buying that wooden figurine today, might help put food on the table tonight, while at the same time contributing to the long-term perpetuation of an unjust system.

I get that.

I guess the key is to make sure that buying the wooden figurine from the nine year-old girl with the six inches worth of neck rings is not the extent of my engagement. I have to make sure that I partner with organizations that address the long-term challenges of these and other people groups.

I do.

I bring my camera up to my eye to take a picture of a young woman on the other side of the dirt lane. I am astounded, astonished, mesmerized, sadden, and taken aback by the beauty of what I see through the lens of my camera.

I hesitate ever so briefly . . . and then I push the button.

In my heart, I thank her.

In my heart, I also apologize for reducing her to a photo op.

I slip my camera back into my bag and go look for my two daughters.

-Jack

on visiting a Kayan Lahwi Village part 1 of 2

Just outside of Chiang Mai is the Tiger Temple at which you can walk among dozens of full-grown tigers. While they are chained to stakes, there are no bars separating you from the tigers. You are able to get so close to the tigers that you can –and may- reach out and touch them.

I moved my family to Asia so that we could rack up some new experiences. I really wanted to touch a tiger. A friend of mine went last year and I have to admit, the picture of him kneeling next to and petting a reclining seven-foot tiger with more tigers lying around in the background is pretty darn-tooting cool. What a FaceBook profile picture that would make.

Before leaving Hong Kong, I researched the Tiger Temple on the internet.

It’s controversial.

The Buddhist monks who take care of the tigers are not trained biologists or breeders. They have been accused of letting different types of tigers interbreed. There have been allegations that they have illegally sold tigers.

And then there’s that whole letting-tourists-walk-among-the-tigers thing. (In the monks’ defense, there have been no tragic incidents to date.)

So I had to make a decision.

At first I was conflicted. But in the end choosing not to go to the Tiger Temple turned out to be a pretty easy decision.

A visit to a Kayan Lahwi long-neck village -on the other hand- was an all-together different story.

High up in the Jungle Canopy

Chiang Mai Adventures

Chiang Mai

It would have been easy to just go to Phuket and plant ourselves on the beach for ten days like so many other people who go to Thailand. But we were determined to experience as much of Thailand in our two weeks as possible. It was shaping up to be a trekking vacation. The longest we stayed in one place was about four days.

After Bangkok, we headed north to Chiang Mai via sleeper train.

Chiang Mai is an old walled city and the backpacker hotel we stayed in was inside the ancient city wall. The neighborhood we stayed in was a tangle of little alleyways in which two tuk-tuks could barely pass each other.

While in Chiang Mai, we took several side excursions. We floated down a river on a bamboo raft, rode elephants, and hiked through the jungles. From the school for the blind we got massages that weren’t really so much massages as they were really painful accu-pressure.

We rode zip-lines high up in the canopy of the Thai rainforest which included tromping across several wooden walkways suspended high above the jungle floor. Granted, the zip-line experience was a little touristy, but who cares. It was awesome. We even saw a wild gibbon.

-Jack

Picture: it is pretty standard for Thai restaurants to have a pair of these carved figurines on either side of the entrance. They are called sawadee-ka ladies, which simply means "welcome ladies." We brought one home with us as a reminder of all the good Thai food we've had in Thailand and in Hong Kong.

Overnight Sleeper Train pictures

Slow Train

It’s always a balancing act putting together a vacation that’s going to have a little something for everyone. The challenge is multiplied when you’re traveling with another family. The weeks leading up to Christmas break were a flurry of emails between Hong Kong and Florida as we worked out the details of our pending trip.

As different plans were put on and then taken off the table, there was one item I quietly hung onto. I parried, I deflected, I cajoled. And then finally, we booked our overnight sleeper train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai in the north. You can’t spend fifteen days in Southeast Asia and not do at least one overnight sleeper train. The train ride from Bangkok to Chiang Mai is an ambling, twelve-hour ride through the Thai countryside. For about the same price you could fly which would take about an hour. But why would you want to do that?

Two weeks before we were scheduled to leave, we finally attempted to book the train tickets, but by then the first class berths were all sold out. These would have given us four-person cabins with doors that latched and locked. Instead, we booked second class tickets. The seats that were on either side of the aisle converted into one bed and then a hinged bunk from up above swung down into place. The porter came by and hung up green curtains that were designed to block out the lights and give us a modicum of privacy.

I think the train topped out at about fifty miles-per-hour and probably averaged about thirty. It should come as no surprise that the safety standards on a Thai train are a little different than The States or Europe. For my adventure-seeking brother-in-law, this meant he could descend the three steps leading out of the train car, hang on with one hand, and hold his camera with the other while getting pictures of the girls hanging their heads out of the window of the moving train car.

Try doing that on an airplane.

Khmer. Wat Pho?

We were visiting the Wat Pho temple in Bangkok. As I am sure you know, the Wat Pho temple was built several hundred years ago by people who were part of the Khmer kingdom.

This gave rise to the following exchange between me and my twenty-year-old nephew.

Me: “Hey, Austin”

Him: “Yeah.”

Me: “Khmer.”

Him: “Wat Pho?”

Both: “Ha ha ha ha ha.”

Everybody else: nothing but eye rolls.

The more often we did this little exchange, the funnier it got.

Hey there Cuz

For years my cousin David lived in the city of Chicago while I was living in the suburbs. Sadly, we never managed to connect in all that time.

David recently moved to Thailand after he married a girl from Bangkok. And we of course moved to Hong Kong. Ironically, now that we are both on the other side of the world and living 1071 miles from each other, we made the effort to see each other.

After multiple emails back and forth and a tricky phone call on a Thai cell phone, we managed to finally meet David and his wife Benz on the platform of the train station. We rode Bangkok’s skytrain to the north side of town and spent the afternoon together at the Chatuchak Weekend Market which is supposedly Southeast Asia’s largest market.

It sure looked like it.

Although some of it's covered, it's essentially a sprawling outdoors bazaar and had just about anything a person could want.

We spent a pleasant afternoon shopping and getting caught up with David and Benz.

Fun, but it sure would have been a lot easier to coordinate a cup of coffee in a Starbucks back in Chicago.

Pictures of Bangkok by KT

Pictures of Bangkok by JVN