Mae Hong Son by Motorbike part 3: Longnecks and tea tasting

Warning: this is another long post

Here's the route map again for those of you with short memories


Day 3: woke up at 5am to roosters in Ban La Up (you may remember the "chickens for an alarm clock" post), feeling well-rested despite the early morning wake-up call. We had to wait for Daeng to wake up - he stayed at the clinic drinking with his buddies long after we left - so we took a quick ride up the hill to a lookout point. The village has the most beautiful view of the surrounding mountains.

Breakfast in the village (leftovers)

Today our final destination was Mae Hong Son, a town quite close to the Burmese border (everyone uses Burma and Myanmar interchangeably, Burma seems to be the more common term). Lots of driving today; doing the route by motorbike takes longer than in a 4WD so we didn't stop off at as many places as Laura & Stacy did, but for me the actual driving was a large part of the fun. You see, feel & smell more on a bike, you're exposed to the elements (sun, rain and wind are all out to get you) and you really feel like part of it all, rather than just passing through.

We had our first (and luckily,the only) breakdown! Daeng's bike got a flat tire and we had to stop seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Someone told us there was a mechanic shop a few kms down the road so off he went on my bike, only to return later with a handful of tools - the mechanic was the only one working today and couldn't leave his shop. Daeng had to remove the tyre by himself and bring it to the shop for changing - Daeng who had never changed a tyre in his life. He managed ok though, and before long we were on our merry way again :)


We stopped at a small town for lunch, pad thai for 30B and waited out another downpour. That afternoon it kept raining on & off; the higher elevation areas are definitely getting more rain than the lower areas, it's visibly noticeable in the plants & ground.

When we were around 30km out of Mae Hong Son we took a turnoff to a small boat pier. To get to the Huay Pu Keng long neck village, you have to go about half an hour down the river in a longtail. I was the only farang that day, so had to charter a longtail just for myself and Daeng (an expensive exercise, I wasn't too happy about the surprise cost and grumbled all the way to the village but hey, when am I gonna be here again?)

The long neck village itself is quite small, maybe 25 houses (cf 200 houses in Ban La Up). The long-neck women are a Burmese tribe called Kayan, they are mostly refugees that escaped a terrible life of extortion and persecution in Burma (the government doesn't recognise their ethnicity and they don't have any rights) and are now living in small villages in Thailand. There is a lot of debate about these villages; on one hand they have escaped the Burmese government but now they are effectively living in a human zoo; tourists pay an entrance fee to come and see them and take photos of their neck rings, and they try to sell you all sorts of scarves and other touristy crap as well. It's a fairly good income for them, there are plenty of tourists in the high season (i.e. not when I was there - I was the only farang in the village) but is it at the cost of their dignity? After visiting the village I'm still undecided.

So the result of them being in a tourist village is that all your photos look extremely posed and bored. I wanted to talk to them a bit more, get some real emotions instead of blank looks. The ladies themselves were nice enough but desperate to sell me things. There were a few young children wearing rings and with stretched earlobes that also tried to sell me things, but kids being kids soon got bored of it and started playing/bickering amongst themselves. I played with the kids for a while.

this lady appears on a lot of postcards

notice the earlobes

The boat ride to the village was quite pleasant as well, through more beautiful scenery.

That night we stayed in Mae Hong Son, in a guesthouse owned by a guy who runs a bar up the road that Daeng knows. We effectively rented out the whole house instead of just a room in a guesthouse, it was realy cool! It was decorated with all sorts of antiques, I had my own very spacious room with 4-poster bed and mosquito net. There was a gas stove for cooking and everything :) Only 400B for the whole house was a bargain!

Mae Hong Son town is quite nice, it has a small lake in the middle and is quite compact. We walked around the small night market in the evening where there were lots of tribe ladies selling handicrafts. I bought a cool purse made of strips of fabric sewn together into a pattern for 30B (about NZD$1.30). Every stand was selling exactly the same thing, I don't understand why one doesn't think of something different to set themselves apart from their neighbours??

The next morning we visited the hilltop temple for a view of the town. MHS is sometimes called the town in the mist, because the mountains are covered with clouds and mist for 3/4 of the year. And of course, what trip to SE Asia is complete without a few monks? Here you go!

Today (day 4) we drove even further into the mountains to Ban Raak Thai, a Chinese village famous for its tea. Because of the elevation and temperature, a lot of tea is grown there. A lot of the inhabitants are from Yunnan, and the houses are all decorated with red Chinese lanterns and they have Chinese names. We tried some delicious rice green tea, ginseng tea and others that I can't remember. Again, the climate was deliciously cool and dry, I even had to wear my raincoat as a windbreaker to keep me warm!

Ban Raak Thai tea village

tea tasting

village houses around the lake

On the way out of town, we stopped at one of the plantations where people were picking tea leaves. I had a nosey and was asking the ladies about the tea they're picking, what kind of tea etc. and helped her pick tea for a while :) they were really lovely and were happy to show me what they were doing.

Picking tea
I really am a giant... or are the Thai people just teeny tiny??

That night we stayed in Pai, a hippy town and tourist Mecca about 140km out of Chiang Mai. It's quite a cool chill-out town, not much to actually see & do in town but a great place to mooch, have a drink or 3, check out the local handicrafts (same striped bags again) and get your hair dread-locked. My bungalow had a hammock out front and I dutifully tested it out - very comfortable :) and they had wifi!!!!! In the middle nowhere!! I'm learning very fast that anywhere with tourists has wifi.