Fire Break Construction Ceremony Chiang Dao

The sign says, roughly,

Celebration/Ceremony to Open the Fire Break - Mae Ba Sao and Mae Khong Sai

People and the Forest Can Live in Sustainable Harmony

Communities of Mae Ba Sao and Mae Khong Sai Subdistrict: Mueng Khong District: Chiang Dao Province: Chiang Mai

March 23, 2551

(they use the Buddhist calendar)

The ceremony was just up the road on the left where the fire break begins. I'll jump ahead here to show the ending where everyone ceremonially swept the dry bamboo leaves off the trail.

I was a little confused about the purpose of the ceremony and the efficacy of the fire break, so at lunch today I ask those sorts of questions. Essentially, the villages maintain a six meter wide fire break for 30 kilometers. The part you see at the end here was merely ceremonial. The intent of the ceremony was to show government officials who came that the hill tribe people can live in harmony with the forest. All the posters (I'll show some in later posts) talk about things like sustainable farming and global warming. I'll also do a post on bamboo here - showing a number of the things that the villagers made of bamboo for yesterday. Bamboo grows in abundance up there and is totally recyclable.

Infomekong has the following on Karen farming:

There are two main types of farming: slash and burn and paddy. Slash and burn farming involves clearing an area of trees and then burning the underbrush. The burning process adds minerals to the soil, which helps crops to be grown. Unfortunately, the negative aspects outweigh the positives. This process strips the soil of essential nutrients and leads to more erosion, therefore, only allowing crops to be grown for a few years. As a result, the Karen have begun to utilize the process of paddy farming more often than slash and burn. Instead of installing an irrigation system, a paddy farm is flooded by a close river in order to water the crop.

Note: Infomekong is an evangelical site. I have personal problems when people of one religion try to convert other people to their religion. I find it curious how they can write on their site,

...the Thai government started oppressing the Karen community by trying to convert them to become more Thai-like

without any irony. How is conversion to Christianity a better cultural diversion than conversion to Thai culture? I'm not at all defending what the Thai government has done. It is not unlike what has been imposed on Alaska Natives by both church and government schools. At its worst you get results like those Tony Hopfinger reported in his Newsweek story of sexual abuse of students by priests that I linked and which came out last week in an expanded version in the Anchorage Press. But I think the information - aside from where it veers into missionary work - is useful. But be warned.

Hilltribe.org writes:
;
Traditionally the Karen live at lower elevations than the other hilltribes and although they still practice slash and burn, unlike many hilltribes they live in permanent villages and have been aggressive in developing environmentally sustainable terraced rice fields. These factors have allowed the Karen to become much more integrated members of Thai society. The Karens living at lower elevations almost universally have Thai citizenship which has allowed them to buy land and to have access to free secondary education, luxuries other hilltribes do not yet have.

Much of the Karen population in Thailand and Burma is Christian and has been for multiple generations. Christian Karens are very strong in their beliefs.

The people in these two villages are all Thai citizens, and as later posts will make obvious, they are Buddhists. A key issue for these villages is that they live inside forest land that is government land. One of the programs of the organization I'm working with is to help the villagers get title to the land they live on. Inviting the government officials to take part is an attempt to have them see that these villagers are not going to destroy the forest.

Fire Break Construction Ceremony Chiang Dao 1

We were up for the sunrise again - our ride was going to pick us up at 8am. (The first picture is the sun through the trees, not a fire.)




And of course I was going to look for birds. You can see why it's so hard to get good photos. You can hear them, but often you can't see them unless the move. Can you find the one in this tree? They don't usually sit in such a prominent place.
All I knew is that some other NGO people from Chiang Dao were going to pick us up. It turned out we were picked up by tv cameramen who drove up from Bangkok to cover the event. So it will get coverage beyond this blog. It should, now I have to double check with Ped (I've been spelling it Pet here, because that's how it's pronounced in English, but Ped said it was with a D not a T. But in Thai a final D is pronounced like T. So should I spell it the way he does or the way my English speaking readers are more likely to read it correctly?) to see if he was joking when he said I was the media coverage. He had to have known about these cameramen, or is there another NGO involved who arranged that? I have no idea.

Here's a minute or so of the hour ride to the village.

Chiang Dao Big Tree

Coming back from the cave we saw a big tree. Not just any big tree, but one that reminded me of the big tree behind my house in Kamphaengphet long ago. So I looked through the pictures I digitized and found one that had that old tree in it. I've posted this picture before when I wrote about Kwai, but I wonder how many people noticed the tree in the background. This time, forget the kwai and the two people and notice the tree.







To show you how big this tree is, J agreed to stand at the bottom - where the yellow arrow is pointing. And then we discovered there were quite a few of these trees in the area, but we didn't see any quite as big as this one. But here's another that was pretty big.

Chiang Dao Cave and Temple

The temple was built right alongside the cave. This is the entrance to the cave. There are two men standing in front of the sign. But in Thai it said, "Entrance Fee 10 Baht." While the Thais often use Western numbers, they do have their own numbers, so ten looks like: ๑๐. Below that, in English, it says, "20 Baht Fee for Electric Bill." So the foreigners have no idea they are paying double what the Thais are paying. Basically, I have no problem with that. Most foreigners in Thailand have incomes considerably higher than Thais and they do need money for upkeep and Thais shouldn't be prevented from going to places like this because of the high entrance fee.

There's a small shrine just inside the cave. Then, if you want to go further, you have to hire a guide for 100 Baht (about $3). Our guide had a kerosene lantern and a delightful sense of humor.

The spots on the ceiling are bats. They were a lot easier to catch on camera than the ones outside our window. Later we saw what we decided was a bat flyway near where we were staying. We saw groups of bats fly by for the five minutes we watched there.

There came a point where the guide pointed to a small opening and asked if we thought we could go through. It was maybe two feet (2/3 meter) high. The other option was to return the way we came. She assured us it was only 1 meter long. The picture is after the hard part. No problem. But then a couple of rooms later, there was another tunnel that was five meters long, but by then there was no turning back.

Here's the fishpond in the temple grounds next to the entrance to the cave (in the background).

Yang Tone Farm Stay Chiang Dao 3

It's now Sunday evening. I've just gone through what in the old days would have been rolls and rolls of film and video. I've got a dozen posts here. Yesterday seems like a week ago. And these will all end up in reverse order on the blog to confuse things further.

Anyhoo, since it was only yesterday that I was gushing about Yang Tone Farm Stay, I'll finish that and move into Day 2 when we moved to the Chiang Dao Nest #2.

Here's the dining room where magic was performed back there in the kitchen.

Here's the cottage we stayed in.


Our front porch. There really were no mosquitoes, here or the dining room.


I'm in the bedroom shooting the sink in the bathroom.


The shower. Even though everything is made of traditional materials and much in traditional ways, the bathroom uses them in non-traditional ways.


We even had a guard frog who showed up in different interesting spots in the bathroom.

It was a hard decision to make to move on to our second night's housing. But we had reservations, it was closer to the cave and temple, and our Sunday morning ride was expecting to pick us up at Chiang Dao Nest #2 which was right on the road to the village we were going to Sunday.

Yang Tone Farm Stay Chiang Dao 2

This place is incredible, the food is amazing, I can't recommend it highly enough. And we got here by accident, the place we'd found on line was full and sent us here. They have a fancy website that their son created. But he doesn't check the email regularly. Call and leave your name. They speak some English, but slowly. Be patient. It's worth it.

Sweets after breakfast - which is whatever you want. I had a great bowl of Jok - a common Thai breakfast of boiled rice with various things in it. Well, it's not quite boiled rice. J had sunny side up egg and toast with jams made from fruit at the farm - mangoes, starfruit, langan.
This is the host Sriboon, the absolutely sweetest woman you will ever meet. And a great cook. And when she saw me taking lots of pictures she showed me special orchids to shoot. A magazine article about this place says her philosophy is giving people a chance to rest and get in touch with nature. Helping a guest find peace is more important than making money. Everything was just perfect, if you like nature, quiet, birds, and authentic Thai style (with modern plumbing.)
This is her husband Suwit. His English is quite good. He studied in the Philippines. Their son went to the University of Nebraska and works at the royal botanical gardens near Chiang Mai. I'm sure he learned a lot here at the farm. Suwit drove us over to the Nest this afternoon.

Papayas just outside our room

Joan says this is a heliconia and google images confirms it.

We aren't sure what this bird is. The book has several different birds that had parts that were right, but not the whole bird. There were a group of these. It had a black head and bib like a roufous treepie. It had a long grey tail with black stripes like long tailed sibia, and it had a red beak like a red billed malkoha. The green billed malkoha has a similar silhouette in the book, and is in this part of Thailand, but has green beak. Also, there are a couple of swallows. I've given up on identifying swallows because the colors are so hard to see when they are flying high above.

Mango orchard.

Big leafless tree, waiting for the rain.

Yang Tone Farm Stay Chiang Dao 1

The mountain just grows up from the plains, silhoueted by the pink sky, hazy in the late afternoon smoke.
As it got darker, we could see bits of flame. The point of Sunday’s event is to mark a new program where the farmers on the hill, Karen hill tribe people mostly, will begin building fire breaks. There is a lot of controversy about slash and burn agriculture which various hill tribes have practiced for generations. But today as the world has moved ever closer into their territory, they have less room, and the smoke from their farming impinges on the people in the cities more and more. In these days of global warming, the practice comes under greater scrutiny.
The giant orange moon rising just after we arrived.
The sun rising almost in the same place this morning.


We stayed at the Yang Tone Home Stay Farm because the Chiang Dao Nest, nearby, was full Friday night. Now we've moved to the Nest, which has wi fi, but the adapter plug that changes my three pronged Mac plug into a two pronged plug is the wrong size. I left the one that works in our apartment in Chiang Mai. So I only have about two hours of battery left.

The Yang Tone is incredible and I'll do a separate post on that. If you are in Northern Thailand, do what you can to stay at least one night at Yang Tone Farm Stay.

At breakfast after walking a couple hours around the farm watching the birds and flowers. See also the next post on this great little place. You can tell, if I like a place, I'll let you know, and this place is really special.

More Birds and a Squirrel

Today I saw the source of the strange bell like bird calls - a pair of racket tailed drongos flew by. It was them. But I couldn't catch them on camera. And the Koels were flying by in pairs as well. I guess it is spring.

And the doves. And for Anonymous, and Bird Anonymous, there's even a fuzzy shot of the coucal in the video with its tail. And audio of a racket tailed drongo at the end.

Spring 2008 - 99F and climbing

Suddenly there was a surge of visitors to this site today. It turned out that Google.co.th has What Do I Know? listed second for the search term "First Day of Spring".

That has as little meaning here in Chiang Mai, where it is in the hot 90s (My Computer says it's 99F, but the 30% humidity makes it fine with me), as it does in Anchorage where, according to my computer, it is 22F.

They are all being directed to last April 26 which I dubbed the real first day of spring when the temperature got up to 65F in Anchorage.

I've finally gotten my sense of purpose here - last week actually - and I've been developing lists of outcomes and tasks that relate to the plans the organization wrote as part of getting their grant. It is getting close to the end of the grant and people here are feeling a little overwhelmed with what they all have to do, including writing reports.

One thing I'm contributing is getting them to see that the goals are not just either/or - either you reach the goal or not. Rather, we can look at at how much they've done toward reaching the goal. So, for example, they are supposed to gather information for about ten villages. Rather than saying, "No, we haven't done that" because they don't have everything for every village, I've divided it up into villages. Then for each village we're listing the steps in this process. Set up an intitial meeting, pass out the questionnaires, get official land documents, etc. When they look at it this way, there are two advantages:
1. They can see how much they've actually done as well as what specifically they still need to do. (They know all this, but it is different when it is written down on paper and you look at it.) I've already started with one person to calculate the time he will need to do everything that is left. (At least the things we've identified. It is much less overwhelming than he thought. He's typed it all up in Thai and is already checking things off.)
2. When they report what they've accomplished to the funding agency, they now have all the steps along the way to report. They've been thinking either/or and haven't thought as much about all the work that goes up to getting to complete. So even if some goals haven't been completed, they can show they are 60% or 80% complete with a list of all they've done.

The reaction seems to be pretty positive to this approach. The boss is clearly pleased.

Other activities - I faxed in our absentee ballot applications today. When I asked about using the fax yesterday, E. pointed to a box - she'd just bought a fax machine. So we set it up yesterday evening and I got the forms in today.

Sunday, the organization has a big event up in one of the villages north of here. They have initiated a program of building fire breaks in the mountains with one of the hill tribes that has traditionally used slash and burn agriculture. I'm not completely sure whether the slash and burn techniques will still be used and how the fire breaks contribute. In any case it is a big deal and several people have been out of the office in preparation. I'm trying to arrange for us to stay up there at a small resort Friday and Satruday night where the birding is supposed to be very good. Then we'll get up to the village Sunday morning somehow. Things will work out one way or another.

Swinging Bulbul and White Rooster

I pass this rooster, and his friends, every day when I ride to the office.

And I caught this red whiskered bulbul from our balcony enjoying this swing. He came back for a second round.