Lisu Village

One of the experienced that I did enjoy while staying in the Lisu Village was taking a hike into the hills nearby and searching for medicinal herbs and plants used traditionally by the tribe for healing purposes. This hike I did during the morning before the heat of the afternoon with Susanon and two other guests, a dutch girl and Canadian girl, I met at the homestay who dropped in my third night. Was quite interested walking through a small forest into the hills and having various plants pointed out. Most of the clearings and hills were burned out apparently to make space to grow crops. Didn't see any animals or wildlife, probably mostly due to the burnings. I heard if you keep hiking for into the hills for 2-3 days u get to some very interesting areas, spots where monkeys, elephants, and tigers still exist. Also would be poppy fields back that far, otherwise they are non-existant from the gov't making opium illegal.



Another interesting guest who stopped in my second night in was a Polish woman in her 50's. I believe her name was Eva, she had recently came to Thailand after having lived in Varanasi, India for two yrs with her daughter, an artist. In Varanasi she explained that she was studying Japanese, a seemingly random place to study the Japanese language. As Varanasi is one of the main cities I want to visit when I travel to India in one month I was glad to have met Eva and gotten some valuable insight and information from her. Not too often that I have met Polish travelers during my four months so far, let alone a woman in their 50's backpacking solo. Just previous to stopping into the Lisu village she had done a 20 day Vipassana meditation retreat at a monastery north of Chiang Mai.



I expected the experience to be a bit more primitive than it turned out to be. While the tribe, particularly the women, still wear their traditional colorful attire typical to their respective tribe, they have also embraced alot of what would be considered modern society. While I was inside no more than five of the hilltribers dwellings, it seems as though many of the villagers have acquired televisions, dvd players, and cellphones. In addition they all pretty much own motorbikes and some own pickup trucks and automobiles, although not many. Here and there I noticed satellite dishes around dwellings and it seemed like all homes were wired for electricity. Everybody was pretty friendly in the village. It wasn't exactly the kind of homestay experience that I was expecting however. I thought it would be more inclusive of the whole community, but for the most part meals involved sitting with the family I was staying with and eating some of their homestyle cooking, which was quite delicious. One night dinner including small little shrimp that Susanan had collected from one of the nearby streams. The next night they included cooked ants or ant larvae, I wasn't exactly sure which. Tasted pretty normal with salt and spices cooked in with it.



While they possessed alot of these modern devices and luxuries, it wasn't as though anyone was living in any kind of luxury. Many places were still on the dirt without flooring overlaying the earth. Others were pitched off the ground, helpful during monsoon season and times of rain and flooding. The main road through the village and up into the higher villages was paved, otherwise all the side roads were dirt with much trash littering the place. Lots of chickens and roosters running all over

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