Hilltribe village - my (im)personal experience
One of the main attractions in Northern Thailand is visiting hilltribes. I have always liked approaching traveling from an anthropological angle so I was quite excited about it.
The most "exotic" hilltribe to see in Thailand are the long-neck Karen people, made famous because their women put metal rings around their necks. Marc and I read in some guides, however, that visiting long-neck people was like visiting a human zoo: tourists disembark the bus, Karen people are lined up for pictures, tourists make donations for the pictures they took, then the tourists leave. This description didn't appeal to us so we decided against such a trip and opted for a trip to a national park instead.
In the program of our trip also was a visit to a hilltribe village. I naively assumed that if a tour guide regularly goes to a village, she must have some kind of connections established with its people. I was wrong. Our minibus stopped in the middle of a hilltribe village of a Karen tribe and we got out. There was a woman in traditional clothing sitting in front of a house. Our guide pointed to her and said to us: "Look, a Karen woman, take pictures!". The guide didn't even greet the woman or asked whether we could take pictures. Some tourists asked the woman themselves if she didn't mind to have her picture taken. Some others, including me, felt too awkward and gave it up altogether. Our guide then proceeded to march us through the village and through the front yard of private houses. Then we stopped in a gift shop and the visit in the village was over.
Hilltribes - from which hills?
While we were still "visiting" the Karen village, the guide said something that aroused my curiosity. She said: "these people are not Thai, they are Chinese. Some of them came here hundreds years ago, some others only ninety years ago. People in the village have Thai citizenship because the king granted it to them. But most hilltribe people don't. There are still some hilltribes trying to get to Thailand and it's a big problem because we have too many of them."
How interesting. On the one hand Thailand tranformed hilltribe tourism into a huge business, and on the other hand it claims that they are not even Thai and there are too many of them. After some research and a visit to the excellent Hilltribe Museum in Chang Rai I got a better picture of the situation. There are no hilltribes native to Thailand. Some of the hilltribes emigrated from China through Laos, some others came from Myanmar. They are generally not considered Thai and indeed most of them don't have citizenship. This means that they are not allowed to travel outside of the region they live in. They also have limited access to healthcare and education.
They traditionally practiced shifting agriculture but given the limited space in Thai hills and the policy of Thai government they cannot do it anymore. They used to grow opium but since the Thai crack down on drug producing they don't do it anymore (or, at least, not on commercial scale). One would think that given the booming tourism, this would become their new source of revenue. Alas, most tour companies have no partnership with the villages they visit with their tourists. So the hilltribe people only gain on tourists in whatever they can get for having their pictures taken or for selling their crafts or for begging. Many villagers don't have their traditional costumes anymore because they sold them to tourists and it is too expensive to put together a new one (some of the costumes have silver coins sewn on them, some others require expensive materials).
There are some responsible tour operations (one of them organized by the foundation behind the Hilltribe Museum) but sadly they are few and not well advertised. That’s too bad because they show that it could be done in a way to benefit the villagers, the tour operators, and the tourists at the same time.
Hilltribe village – village? amusement park? prison?
And now it's the time to spill the beans about the famous long-neck Karen Tribes living in Thailand: there are no genuine hilltribe long-neck Karen. This is the simple truth. Some Thai entrepreneurs saw a business possibility stemming from the tourists' interest in exotic hilltribes. They constructed artificial, traditionally-looking villages in the mountains, installed some refugees from Myanmar there and they put metal rings on girls' necks.
Tourists who decide to go and visit such "villages" observe that there is no industry or agriculture around the villages. Men play cards somewhere in the background and women get photographed. And there are one or two gift shops near the place where the tourist bus stops.
And at some distance from such "village" a tourist may also notice the presence of police or army outposts. Well, the pseudo long-neck people are in fact refugees without any permanent status in Thailand and are not allowed to leave their "villages". The artificial villages are sort of informal refugee camps, organized for the amusement of tourists.
Coming to northern Thailand, I was excited about seeing a hilltribe village. But after I studied the "anthropological angle" of this part of the country I realized one thing: be careful what you wish for.
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