A haphazard chronicle of my inevitable misadventures during a year in Vietnam and points east.

p.s. I'll be pitifully grateful if you send me email during my exile: TravelerKaty@hotmail.com

October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 February 2006 March 2006 May 2006

 
Mae Hong Son, Thailand

Mae Hong Son, the capital of Thailand's northwesternmost (is that a word?) province of the same name, has more tourists than Mae Sariang, but it's still very quiet in the off-season. It's in a typically lovely mountain valley with a wat up on a hill to which you can climb. I did, sweating off two pounds in the process, and the views were spectacular.

In order to see a bit of the countryside around Mae Hong Son, I rented a motorbike. Using the feeble photocopied hand-drawn map given to me upon arrival at the bus station on my first day, my aim was to visit Mae Aw, a Kuomintang village atop a mountain not far from the Burmese border.

Now, I'm embarassed to admit that I don't know thing one about the KMT, and my visit to the village did nothing to correct my ignorance. After a couple hours of gorgeous scenery and nervewrackingly steep uphill driving (made challenging by the crappy powerless motorbike I rented), I arrived in a village with practically no people. Sure there was the usual complement of kids playing in the roadand women observing from their porches. But sadly, during my brief visit I witnessed no aging revolutionaries drinking Thai whisky and reminiscing over the glory days of their misspent youth. Today Mae Aw (whose Thai name, Ban _____, amusingly means \'Thai Lovers Village') is pretty much the same as all other fairly prosperous Northern Thai mountain villages -- lots of young families, wooden houses and farmers.

On my way up to Mae Aw I visited another impressive waterfall, Pha Sua. Happily, I made it up and down this trail without encasing myself in mud. My way back down the mountain was decidely wet, so I detoured onto a side road in the hopes of finding a shelter from the deluge. After waiting out the worst of the flood I found myself at some sort of botanical gardents. According to my makeshift map I was at some sort of Summer Palace, but as there were no signs in English, no tourists, no English speakers and no palace in sight, I can't be sure that was my actual location. What it looked like was a beautifully manicured park, with gazebos and meeting areas, large greenhouses full of flowers and plants, and a rose garden atop a hill. I wandered in solitude for a while, responding to workiers who would call out "Hello Foreigner" in Thai, then headed back to the motorbike.

My final stop of the day was Tham Pla National Park, more commonly known as Fish Cave. This was not a cave I had to walk into, thankfully, but a truly weird cave into which hundreds of giant carp faught to enter. The streeam ran out of the cave, and in a couple of spots there were holes in the rock where you could look down and see the carp struggling upstream into the dark, ten deep as they struggled for position. Tourists, or rather "tourist", since I was the only one there, drop in bags of fruit and seeds and watch the fish go insane.

Well that's it for Mae Hong Son. A bit boring in the telling, I realize, but I can't always have exciting adventures.

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren
posted by Katy at 9:59 PM