DAY 10: HOMESTAY WITH THE LAHU🎄
It has been more than a year since I started my backpacking adventure, and almost the same time since I stopped updating my journal. I found all kinds of excuses not to plasm my thoughts into ‘paper’, but today something clicked. Today, I have decided to commit to this exercise of introspection and dig into my memories to bring back the main highlights of yhis last year.
In this entry, I resume the journey at Chiang Mai. That morning, my french friend @lilian.aoust and I got up early to embark on a 3 days expedition into the nearby mountains. We thought we would be part of a large group but it ended up being just the 2 of us. On the way there, we stopped to do water rafting, which sounded very promising but ended up being quite disappointing as the river was no more than a couple feet deep, and the boat moved extremely slow.
Soon after, we got introduced to our guide, King Kong, who guided us through a short hike into one of the villages that inhabit those remote hills. There, they assigned us to a family that would host us for the following nights. What made it interesting was that the only English word they could pronounce was ‘‘Hello’’ whenever they wanted to catch our attention. King Kong was our only chance of communicating with them, but he didn’t stick around for too long. Nevertheless, we had a great time. We watched the sunset while getting a Thai massage from one of the elders of the tribe, I woke up with the roosters to see the sunrise, we hiked, and I tried for the first time drinking water from a river using my LifeStraw (it sucked!). The rest of the time, I mainly played with the kids of the family, helping them with some English homework and learning about the different minorities that inhabit Thailand. In particular, we were in a village of the Lahu, and coincidentally, that night, they were celebrating their New Year. We gathered around a stick in the middle of the main square. The kids played with fire crackers, the elder played some weird looking instruments and the rest, we danced in circles for hours.
Before we left I asked them for a family picture :)