In the pick-up truck we travelled to Baan Hua Tung, which is a typical northern Thai village and looks like a little French country site town. This is the village we would stay in for the coming week. We had a warm welcome by the villagers and ate our lunch together. After lunch we got introduced to our host families, we stayed in pairs of two with different families. When we were settled in the home-stays we got a tour through the village where we saw people making baskets, huge frogs and we walked through the rice fields. In the evening we cooked together with our host family and had a campfire with them. The houses where we stayed were much bigger then expected, we thought we would stay in houses with no luxury at all, but these houses are more developed they even have some luxury equipment like mobile phone and TV. Only the bathroom reminds you that you are in a community, we have to shower with a bucket of freezing cold water. The next day we started with a nice Thai breakfast which means rice, actually this was quite nice. After breakfast we went to see the communities proud, the bamboo where they have huge bamboo trees * foto* Next we visited the community forest where a few different local guides told us everything about the different spices and threes they planted. We had lunch in this forest with all the people who came with us (this where a lot) our lunch consist of rice, meet and egg packed in a banana leaf. After lunch it was time to work, we helped building a dam in the river which means filling bags with sand and stacking them in the river.
The evening started with a diner we prepared with our host family and eat this together in the local meeting place. After the diner a cultural show was performed by the children of the village, in very nice traditional clothes different dances where performed, especially the little boys stole the show with their butterfly dance.
The last day of being a tourist was very active, we had a few jungle tracks the first one was to a cave which was pretty though. This cave was not like any other touristic caves, we literally had to clime and crawl in the cave to get through it, we were quite happy to see the light again, it was certainly very adventurous. We walked back to the hill tribe community where we had our lunch, we were invited in a hut to enjoy some local whiskey and eat pig in blood, this didn’t seem very nice to us, this man had killed a pig this morning as ritual and still had the blood on his t-shirt. We started the second jungle track to see the waterfall this was again a adventurous track, we had to climb over rocks and jump across the river but the waterfall was nice to see. That night we slept in a resort in Ha Nao which was very beautiful, that night a cultural show was planned but we where the main actors our selves, we had to dance in traditional clothes around the campfire.
The next days in the community we really lived their way of life, help them with cooking, making baskets and create nice flowers. While we stayed in the village a member of the community died, which means the whole community comes together for two evenings to pay respect, during these nights we had to help serving food to all the community members. For our research we interviewed these days our host families to get more information regarding to the food experience. On December 21th we had to leave the community and P’Pai took us to a Thai silk farm, an umbrella factory and a silver jewelry factory which was all very interesting. After the home-stay experience we got a change to relax in the hot springs and the last activity on the program was to visit the Wat Doi Suthep temple situated on the top of the mountain, we had a beautiful view over Chiang Mai city (if you look through the smock). During the days after the home-stay experience in Chiang Mai we had two appointments. One with TAT office and one with the office of Tourism and Sport to interview them regarding to our research. With Christmas we had some days off and planned to do nice activities together. We were wearing our Christmas hats everywhere to have the Christmas feeling as much as possible. On Christmas eve we went out for diner with P’Pai and he also took us to a nice club.
On the first day of Christmas we went to the Chiang Mai Zoo which is a very nice place to visit. After this we were invited to have a Christmas diner at Peter’s house (a colleague of CBT-I), this was a very nice evening and we also got some presents. On the second day of Christmas we hired some scooters to tour around Chiang Mai, we saw a lot of nice things in the area and drove through some small villages. That evening we cooked our own diner, which of course was delicious. Our last day off we booked an active tour including elephant riding, wild water rafting, bamboo rafting, visit the orchid farm and the longnecks and the big ears hill tribe. This was yet again a very nice day. The next days we have to prepare ourselves again for our second home-stay in Baan Hua Tung and also for our mountain hiking on new year, we will clime the Chiang Dao mountain.
