The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey

by Diane Stuemer

  Our radar was totally destroyed, the VHF antenna was blown to smithereens, but through a miracle, none of our radios was damaged. Herbert was able to repair the mechanical wind indicator that had been blasted onto the deck. It was soon reinstalled, although slightly shorter, and a little the worse for wear. Our electronic wind indicator, on the other hand, no longer worked, although the rest of our wind instrumentation was fine. Our little TV lost both sound and colour, at least for several months, after which it fully recovered. And our steel anchor chain was covered with a layer of messy soot.

  One of the more dramatic personal changes that had taken place on this voyage was how Herbert had learned to handle unexpected setbacks, though I must confess, he’d had a lot of practice. Bearing in mind that handling frustration had never been one of his strong points, consider the following, an exact quote to show how my newly mellowed husband reacted to the knowledge that lightning had destroyed our expensive radar: “Well, that’s one more thing to order.”

  That was all.

  Because, in fact, it could have been so much worse. Our guardian angel really was looking after us that day.

  15

  Long Neck Ladies and Singing Apes

  Soon we found ourselves making our way up the Strait of Malacca between the island of Sumatra and the Malaysian peninsula. Our first challenge was negotiating the Singapore shipping lanes, a four-lane superhighway of the sea. Like any freeway, it had on- and off-ramps, secondary roads leading to it, parking areas, and a lot of high-speed traffic carrying raw and manufactured goods to and from the busiest port on earth.

  Mixing and mingling with these bustling leviathans and tip-toeing our way through felt something like crawling across a busy freeway on hands and knees. These fast-moving ships could crush small, slow, vulnerable Northern Magic without even realizing they had done so. It was up to us to make sure we didn’t get in their way.

  On our circle tour around the island of Singapore, we passed huge warehouses, oil and gas depots, giant shipyards, oil rigs being recommissioned, and countless ships, both anchored and under way. But by nightfall we had made it out of the shipping lanes and could happily sail during the hours of darkness without too much worry about being ploughed under by a three-hundred-metre supertanker.

  After three days, our windward journey ended up a tree-choked river, at a small marina in Lumut, about 150 kilometres north of Kuala Lumpur.

  On a sultry Malaysian morning a few days later, the five of us donned backpacks and set off on an overland trip into Thailand. Each of us was slightly bowed by our burdens, selected to match each person by size. In fact, we resembled a family of ducks waddling in single file, with heavily loaded Papa Duck in front (carrying Happy Lappy and various cameras), three little ducklings marching behind in descending order of size (carrying Magic Cards and Game Boys), and Mama Duck bringing up the rear (carrying Oreos, Mars Bars, and Honey Nut Corn Flakes).

  After a bus ride and twenty-two hours in a train, we arrived in the large, chaotic, unquestionably Asian city of Bangkok. We were in another world, a world where few people spoke our language, where the signs were written in an incomprehensible swirling script, and where no one seemed to smile.

  We found Bangkok surly and conniving. We’d been spoiled in friendly Indonesia, where smiling seemed to come as naturally as breathing. But in Bangkok we had to constantly guard against unscrupulous taxi drivers and touts. The architecture of Bangkok, however, was as magnificent as its people were sullen. We rapidly overdosed on glorious Buddhist temples and palaces, glittering golden, mirrored, and sequined marvels more elaborate and ornamented than a department store Christmas tree.

  Leaving the kids in a hotel, Herbert and I went to see the red-light district for which Bangkok is famous. The streets were crowded with tourists, street stalls, hookers, and sex shows. Curious, we went inside to see one show. The beautiful Thai girls were so sad-looking, however, that we ended up feeling depressed. One prostitute attached herself to us, trying desperately to interest one or both of us in any of her services, and did it so mournfully we felt like crying. It didn’t seem to us that any of those girls had truly chosen to be there.

  We couldn’t arrange adjacent sleepers for the train ride to Chiang Mai, the next leg of our overland journey, so Michael ended up sleeping in one air-conditioned car, Jonathan and Herbert were at different ends of another, and Christopher and I bunked together in a lower class, fan-cooled car far away from the rest. The two older boys enjoyed travelling alone and made some interesting friends. Jon ended up with a group of four young, friendly, orange-robed Buddhist monks. Two of them spoke English and were kind enough to explain their religion to Jon. He even got some expert instruction in meditation, which he claims to find useful even to this day.

  Michael also did well, befriending a group of nice Thai grannies. Herbert made friends with a tour guide. As for Christopher and me, we got along just fine with the many cockroaches sharing our less desirable neighbourhood.

  Waiting at the Chiang Mai train station for us was a breed of taxi we hadn’t met before, the songtao, a small pick-up truck with two rows of benches in the back. Our attitude towards Thai taxi drivers had become hardened after several bad experiences in Bangkok, and so we approached the waiting songtaos with faces grim and elbows up. We were wrong, however, and although we eventually used many tuk-tuks and songtaos during our stay in Chiang Mai, we never once had the kind of problem that had been the rule in greedy, grasping Bangkok. Gradually, we relaxed our guard and began to enjoy our experiences in Thailand, finding that people outside of the capital were gracious and smiling, just as we had come to expect.

  After visiting an elephant camp and participating in the annual Loy Kratong festival, in which we, like hundreds of others, lit giant rice-paper lanterns and sent them up blazing into the sky, we boarded a bus for a winding six-hour ride to the small town of Mae Hong Son, near the border with Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.

  We had come to Mae Hong Son because it was near to one of the few remaining villages of the so-called Long Neck people, actually a branch of the Karen tribe. The tribe is famous for its practice of women wearing coiled brass rings around their necks. Over time, the pressure of these rings stretches their necks longer and longer, giving them a giraffe-like appearance. In fact, x-ray analysis has shown that their necks don’t stretch at all; the weight of all that metal actually pushes down their shoulder blades and compresses their ribs, giving the impression of a long neck when it is actually their chests that are progressively deformed.

  We had plenty of reservations about visiting this tribe. The last thing we wanted was to gawk at some human freak show, yet our curiosity about this practice, and how the women felt about it, was compelling. Surely, the pressures of modern civilization would soon put an end to it, and how could we pass up the opportunity of witnessing something that in a generation may have vanished? So we swallowed our misgivings, rented a Suzuki four-wheel drive (which, like all the other rental cars we found, was uninsured) and set off into the hills.

  Lack of insurance was the least of this car’s problems: of more pressing concern was the gas pedal’s unfortunate tendency to get stuck at full throttle. That, and the fact that the brakes were in critical condition as well. Thankfully, we experienced no major catastrophes and made it to the village we sought, just a kilometre away from the Burmese border. The last few miles were painfully slow, on narrow, pitted dirt roads overgrown with foliage and crossed by small streams.

  After paying our entry fee of ten dollars per adult (our guidebook said access to the village is controlled by Kareni rebels who use the money to finance their illegal activities across the border in Myanmar), we hesitantly proceeded into a typical rural hill tribe village. It was a small collection of simple thatched huts with dirt floors and a communal pond for bathing. We were eager to snatch our first glance at these unusual women and yet at the same time somehow embarrassed to look.

  Soon, we came upon a woman in early middle
age with a small baby at her breast. She had a welcoming smile and stood behind a stall selling souvenirs – long-necked dolls, postcards, jewellery, decorative daggers. Around her neck was a long coil of polished brass, starting right under her chin and ending on the top of her chest. It was, in fact, two sets of coils, the main section enclosing her elongated neck, and a second flaring out over her collarbone. The rings forced her into an erect, slightly forward-leaning posture, and prevented her from seeing her baby, who was greedily suckling in the manner of infants everywhere. Her shoulders were markedly narrow and downward sloping.

  If we worried that it might be a freak show, or that these women were somehow miserable and abused, how different it was in reality. The woman was gracious and dignified, and only too happy to answer our many questions. (She actually removed her lower neck coils to show us, rather proudly, the bruising on her collarbone that comes from the weight of carrying her many brass rings.) As we walked around the village and chatted with many different women, we realized that, rather than looking strange or weird, they were truly beautiful in a way we had never expected. The effect of their long necks and erect posture was striking and elegant, even aristocratic.

  We saw shy young girls of about five with only a few coils, as well as wrinkled grandmothers in their fifties with the longest necks of all, every one of them beautifully attired with flowered headdresses and adorned with kilograms of well-polished brass on their necks, arms, and legs. On some of the young girls I grimaced to see that the brass leggings had created marked indentations in the flesh of their calves. The grown women typically wore five kilograms of brass, although some carried as much as ten kilos of weight on their necks and shoulders. The women polish the rings daily and never take them off, even for sleeping, except to replace them with a longer set every five years. We hefted a coil of medium size, and I couldn’t imagine wearing that heavy a burden around my neck for even an hour.

  Of course, the neck rings prevent them from bending their necks or even properly looking down. If a small boy needs attention, his mother has to bend at the waist in order even to see him. Yet none of the women we spoke to gave us any indication that they felt anything but proud of the rings and the tremendous price they were paying by wearing them. One can, of course, never know for sure.

  The highlight of our visit was meeting a beautiful young girl of fourteen, Ma Chok, who spoke English and invited us to sit down with her in the shade of the booth she was tending with her mother. Her rings were not as shiny as most, and she confessed, gigglingly, that she had been stupid – no, no, she meant lazy – and had not bothered to polish them that morning. Ma Chok had an endearing habit of covering her mouth delicately with her hand whenever she laughed, which was often. She questioned us about Bangkok, and we asked if she had ever been there, before realizing the obvious fact that even a trip within Thailand was virtually impossible for her. She giggled again and said, “No, but maybe tomorrow I go!”

  Of course, none of these women could travel anywhere – not only are they a stateless people, but their self-induced deformity would subject them to unwelcome attention and stares wherever they went, even assuming they could afford to leave their protected little enclave. Their world is a very tiny one.

  Ma Chok was intelligent and full of questions. We pulled out our photo album and showed her pictures of home. She went through it delightedly. In the end, she said she would very much like to visit our country. We all joked that maybe tomorrow she could go there, too.

  We left the village feeling touched by both the inner and outer beauty of its inhabitants. We’ve done a lot of soul-searching about whether paying to see them was a good thing or bad. Clearly, the tourist revenue allows them to live better than they ever have before and helps maintain their culture. On the other hand, it prolongs a practice that deforms the women’s bodies and inhibits them in countless ways.

  Yet, this is their culture, developed over centuries, and is it really so different from Canadian women getting bunions from years of wobbling around in pointy high-heeled shoes? I do know that the brief time we spent in this remote and time-warped village left us feeling both uplifted and privileged.

  Our guidebook enticingly called the next phase of our travels “one of the most adventurous journeys in Thailand.” It involved using little-travelled roads from Mae Hong Son south to the town of Mae Sot, where we planned to visit a private gibbon sanctuary nestled in the hills along the Burmese border. The first day, we travelled in an air-conditioned bus, but the hilly, winding roads took their toll. I spent half the trip with my head down on my knees and a barf bag at the ready, a condition shared by at least half my fellow passengers.

  The next day, we embarked on a six-hour ride to Mae Sot. After the previous day’s ordeal in air-conditioned comfort, we were a little apprehensive about this part of our journey. Our mode of transport was no longer on padded seats, but on the hard benches of an open songtao. At first we were the only passengers, but the songtao stopped frequently, picking up and discharging many interesting people. None of them travelled for more than an hour or so, and some for only a few kilometres, from one little thatched village to another, often lugging large bags of vegetables or rice. The best were the colourfully dressed hill tribe people, wearing costumes in neon colours of orange and lime green. Although clearly interested in us, they were uncomfortable coming too close to such strange-looking foreigners, preferring to hang off the end of the truck rather than sit in the vacant spots right beside us.

  We realized we really were in a different world when we began noticing huge brown deposits of the cow-pie variety in the middle of the road. Soon we passed the source – a real, working elephant, plodding along the road with a driver on its back. This beast had been hauling logs in the rainforest just as elephants have done in these parts for centuries.

  By the time we arrived at Mae Sot, we were windblown and covered with a layer of fine brown grit. An elegant Thai woman, Pharanee Deters, was waiting for us at the bus station with her air-conditioned car to take us onwards to the gibbon sanctuary she ran with her American husband, Bill. We wound for almost fifty kilometres through the picturesque hills that separate Myanmar from Thailand, passing prosperous farms and beautiful homes owned by a pantheon of wealthy Thai generals and staffed by illegal Burmese workers earning less than two dollars a day. Finally, we came to Highland Farm, perched prettily on top of a hill, looking down over orchards, rose gardens, and a small forest.

  We stayed for three days, in a beautiful little guesthouse of our own. Every morning, before the sun rose, we woke to the sound of the gibbons, and learned for ourselves why they are called “the singing ape.” The cool pre-dawn air was vibrant with a chorus of primate voices chanting “whoop-whoop-whoop, wuccka-wuccka-wuccka,” gibbon songs that made us laugh with delight and at the same time grieve for the jungle homes that were lost to them forever. Christopher formed a special bond with a gibbon he nicknamed Denny, who sat and held hands with him every evening and only reluctantly let go.

  The next day we headed off to explore the Burmese border area. Myanmar was once one of Asia’s richest countries, but now, after decades of misguided and dictatorial rule, was its poorest. Our guidebook described it as an example of how not to run a country. The result of this gross mismanagement was that virtually all low-paying jobs in Thai border areas were filled by illicit Burmese workers earning a dollar or two a day, which was a dollar or two more than they could earn at home. There had been a crackdown in the previous weeks in Thailand against these illegal workers, and we were told that this had virtually shut down all the farms in the area.

  The poor and desperate Burmese were willing to do menial tasks, earn next to nothing, and live in appalling conditions shunned by the more prosperous Thai workers. At Highland Farm, Bill Deters had shown Herbert the quarters where his Burmese workers were housed. There was one hut for the male farm hands and another for the two shy and pretty girls, fifteen and sixteen years old, who worked as maids. Both st
aff houses were depressing little cells made entirely of unpainted cinder block, with a woven mat for a door, no windows, no furniture, a hanging lightbulb, a concrete floor, and just enough room for the occupants to roll out their sleeping mats at night. Yet Bill was proud of these pitiful accommodations. He told us he treated his workers better than average. Indeed, he fed them three times a day, which, according to him, was more than most Burmese received. But he also told us that his two newly hired maids were unhappy and had wanted to return to their families. This was unacceptable, he told us, because we had been due to arrive; he needed the girls to cook and clean for us.

  Without a hint of embarrassment, Bill explained that he had convinced the girls to stay by threatening to report their families to the authorities. Thereafter, knowing that we were indirectly responsible for what amounted to the girls’ indentured servitude, we felt guilty every time we saw them. At the end of our stay – to expiate our guilt, perhaps – we left them a small gift. For some reason, we tried not to let Bill see us doing it. (In May 2002, we were shocked to learn that Bill Deters had been murdered by a former employee, along with four of his staff. Pharanee survived.)

  We jumped in a songtao and rumbled off to see the bridge to Myanmar, just five kilometres away. Everyone else in the truck seemed to be Burmese, and most of them were carrying packages. A long, graceful bridge spanned the Moi River, and crossing over into Myanmar was a steady stream of Burmese, carrying their precious burdens of Thai goods, purchased from their meagre earnings. There was no vehicle traffic at all, just this slow, single file of Burmese. There was something very sad about these stooped walkers, looking like refugees as the slowly plodded against the setting sun back to their troubled homeland. In Thailand, they were virtually slaves; back at home they were the wealthy deliverers of much-needed goods. The economy of Myanmar had so completely collapsed that not a single item produced in official government factories was actually available on the open market. As much of 80 per cent of the national economy was black market. (Burma’s richest industry is, in fact, the production of opium, and vast poppy fields in the northern part of the country are responsible for fully 50 per cent of the world’s heroin supply.)