| Soppong Mae Hon Son Province, Northern Thailand |
Thailand |
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| Soppong seemed to be the same as I had left it a year and a half before. Sunny, the wonderful, jolly trekking guide still ran his soup shop on the main street in town. He still had two adorable sons and a lovely wife. He still had friends around every corner and still cooked the best trail food I've ever tasted. Lisa and I went on a trek with him for three days and two nights. Here are some photos from the trek. |  |
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| Would you like to read more about Hilltribes? | Sunny and family | Lisa with the morning moon |
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Our first stop on the trek was the Lisu village Nong Ba Cham about half an hour up the road from Soppong. Sunny is friends with the school teacher and we brought pencils and notebooks as gifts. Lisa also had a stash of stickers much to the children's delight. I saw quite a bit of Direck, the schoolteacher in the next few weeks. He invited us to come back for a big sporting event held on the school's new athletic field the following week. We did. |
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We were hiking along a dirt road about 2 hours out of Soppong when we came up on this rise. Sunny looked at the mountains in the distance for a moment, and simply labeled them "Burma". Sunny was born there, still has family there, and knows first hand the awful things the military junta does to the good people there. |  |
| Davis posing with Burma | Lisa posing with Burma | |
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A few kilometers later we were walking in silence, enjoying the jungle sounds and smells, when suddenly a huge crash erupted in the underbrush off to our side. Lisa and I froze, hearts pounding, and then Sunny started yelling "taliban!" and ran back up the road. We lumbered behind him as fast as we could in our backpacks, but Sunny's big grin gave him away. The joke was on us, as it was going to be for the remainder of the trip. The crash, of course, was from a stone he had thrown to get our attention. I remember him playing a similar gag on me the last time I hiked with him 2 years ago. He used to yell about tigers, not the taliban. | 
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Lisa brought jigsaw puzzles and stickers as gifts for kids. On the second night of the trek we stayed at a Karen village where the kids and grandma took intrest in the puzzles. One puzzle was the image of a kitten, the other was a tiger, and the grandma pleased herself by repeating the word "tiger" under her breath. |
| Morning in a Karen village |
 Karen woman holding some nice socks |
As a gift for the host housholds that took us in during our trek, I brought along some socks. These aren't just any socks, they were designed by my mother, for more info see socklady.com. The Karen lady who received the gift was pleased, although a bit sheepish about posing for the camera. We bought some shirts she made, they're lovely. | 
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| The rest of the trek was beautiful, over hills and down through stream beds. We took off our boots and cooled our feet in the crystal waters. Sunny stood by, wearing plastic shoes he probably paid 2 dollars for, and smiled at the silly foreigners. He had countless stories to tell, and many of them involved clients who would come trekking with him and asked him for long and hard hikes. Inevidably Sunny would be the only one left standing in his stories, a point that he would make not out of egotism, but plain fact. He could outhike just about anyone, he'd been doing it most of his life, and it doesn't look like he's slowing down anytime soon. |  |
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| As we hobbled back into town, Sunny took us to his soup shop for some fried noodles and pineapple shakes. This soup shop became rather familier to me in the weeks to come. I visited Sunny and his family there daily, and many of our adventures would begin and end there. For more pictures and stories, go to The New Years Festivals. | Davis and Sunny at his soup shop | |
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| A Second A Day Productions |
© Randall Davis Wakerlin 2004
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