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Interlude: from the Kok river

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2009

Jonathan Falla
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Summary

I went to North Thailand for a few weeks of walking in the hills, looking for Karen. There are tens of thousands of them along the border with Burma, but I decided to go elsewhere, to find communities well away from the war. I thought it might look different from afar.

The Kok river runs from west to east across the extreme north of Thailand, neatly snipping off the Thai sector of the Golden Triangle, heart of the world's heroin trade. This was beautiful but wild country not so long ago. Carl Bock travelled here in 1881:

The River Mekok itself is little more than a mountain-stream, filled with huge stones, between which the water eddies with a gurgling sound, making the navigation difficult for the shallow canoes. The scenery along the banks is very beautiful, hills of 400 to 500 feet rising abruptly from the water, thickly clad with trees and other vegetation. During the day I saw more wild animal-life than I had hitherto seen in any consecutive twenty-four hours.

Now, from a village near the town of Fang, powerboats packed with tourists skid down to Chiang Rai in three hours, past settlements where, if only they could find a way of getting the boats to stop, they would love to sell you a Coke.

Type
Chapter
Information
True Love and Bartholomew
Rebels on the Burmese Border
 , pp. 183 - 195
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1991

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