Ban Wang Hin

Ban Wang Hin is a small farming village in Tak province on the east bank of the mighty Ping River. When we rode into town, and Sing yelled in thai to everyone we passed, "my new friend!" Everyone laughed and yelled back. There's not a white face for many miles, and i doubt many of the kids have ever seen an actual white person. I actually made a couple kids cry, they were so freaked out. But they came around. Wang Hin is very poor, and people live in organized squalor, but they are in no way self-conscious about it. In fact, everyone seems very content with everything, and i never saw anyone upset. Quite the opposite.

Thai farmhouses are like big one room treehouses on stilts with corrugated tin roofs. The women hang out on platforms and hammocks under the houses during the day, talking and eating and looking after children. Sing and I did your typical farm things- hauling big sacks of rice around, sawing an oil drum in half to make a fire pit, burning things, delivering pig parts, tending pigs, choosing a fat one for the slaughter. I don't know how you tell really- they all looked fat to me.

Once every 20 minutes or so, someone suggests eating something, which is fine with me. Besides fruit (mangos, bananas, lychee, takowp (a delicious berry), oranges, tangerines, coconut), there's sai ko (thai sausages), fried chicken, spicy collards, noodle soups eaten with sugar and chilies, papaya salad with crab legs, all manner of pig parts (here- want some pig?) , and my personal favorite, Miang, which is this sweet rolled oats kind of concoction that's rolled up into a banana leaf.

Everyone all wanted to talk to me, but no one speaks a shred of english. They all wanted to know where i was from, how old i am, and if i had a girlfriend- in that order. I wonder what the preoccupation with girlfriends is all about over here. One of the farmgirls, Oo, followed me around the whole time, enamored of me. She told me in thai that she loved me within five minutes of meeting me. Then she asked me if i loved her too. Whoa, girl- fast women around here. Bao, bao! (slow down!)

Once they got used to me, everyone was very warm and treated me like family- so much that they let the kids crawl all over me in the morning and didn't care if they were screaming right next to my mat. Well, i guess we gotta wake up sometime.

Next weekend, i'm going back to Tak to meet up with Singcha and the boys again, and we're going camping in Western Tak, near the Burmese border. Thailand's biggest waterfall is there (6th biggest in the world). We also (if i understand correctly) are going to stay at the homes of the Karen people, Burmese hill folk. They still use elephants as work animals. Sweet.

check out the pics