Searching for Gibbons
Mae Sariang, Thailand
“Okay,” he said, “I will take you on a new trek to the animal place. Oh, many, many animals. Biiiiiggg area.”
As I sat across from this man and heard his pitch offering an adventure into an untapped animal kingdom, I remained unconvinced. My girlfriend, Lauren, was skeptical too. Maybe it was the scar across his left cheek that gave him kind of a crooked look, his hair slicked back across the scalp, ending in a mane of thin curls – his speech, like that of a smooth, used car dealer. Then again, maybe it was just that thousands of other men in Thailand spend their days and nights making similar pitches to thousands of foreigners like me.
It was after ten in the evening. I was heading in for the night when he approached me with his trekking pitch. I heard his services and countered with my own guidelines – I didn’t want colorful hill-tribe people, elephant riding, bamboo rafting, cave exploring, or any of the other over-exploited features of northern Thailand ethnotourism. I only wanted to see animals, I explained, and specifically, gibbons – an ape, native to southeast Asia’s forests, which I had cared for at a breeding center in the United States and wanted to sight in the wild.
The man was starting his company, he explained, in a region along Thailand’s controversial border with Myanmar. Principally the domain of the Karen people (he too was Karen), whose kin across the border have been fighting the repressive Burmese military junta for their own state for years. The area is a heavily-forested mountain region housing traditional, thatched-roof villages and refugees who have fled, hiding illegal teak logging operations and amphetamine labs.
I asked if he had ever been to this biiiggg, animal place. “Eight years ago,” he replied. “I used to have a teak business there.” But, as I further learned, he knew nobody there anymore, had nothing planned and had made no arrangements – in fact, he’d never even been on a trek into this area before. He sketched me a map on a napkin and described the proposed itinerary.
We would leave in the morning and drive to a small village two hours south, hire a porter to carry our food, head into the mountains on a three day, two night trek through Karen villages, sleeping in huts, banana leaves and bamboo trees along the jungle floor. We would see many, many monkeys. The lack of planning promised adventure, though it remained vague and unconvincing. Lauren opted out, but I felt there was nothing to lose. I wanted in.
Day One
At eight the next morning, a songtao, pickup truck taxi, was parked in front of the guest house waiting for me. My guide introduced me to the other member of our trek, Roberto, a 29 year-old Venetian chef. (“Whad is dis, ‘to go?'” he asked me that night. “In Amerrica, people ged deir food ‘to go.’ Say me and my friend, we eata the pizza, and there is one aslice left, and he geds it ‘to go’ – why?” I explained the term doggy bag and the practice of reheating leftovers in a microwave. He was surprised: “Theya doo this? Okay, I understand if dey give it to deir dog, or somethin, but….”). As the car drove off, Lauren waved, raising her eyebrows with a look that said, “Hope you get what you paid for – and come back in one piece.”
Two hours later we arrived at a quiet Karen village alongside the road. Our guide, Thom, asked around for a porter and after an hour of lingering around the general store, a kid my age emerged with a sack and a rifle slung over his shoulder. As we walked through the village, Thom turned to us and pointed out a cemetery. Letting out a deep, almost sinister laugh, he explained how people have been murdered by black magic forces. I glanced at Roberto and we continued on the steep narrow path into the thick, green forest.
Bamboo trees and lush plants fanned up from the floor. The occasional blooming purple, white or yellow flowers attracted dozens of different butterfly species. The landscape was soothing, but the humidity was discomforting. We walked up and down hills and after some time, we reached a clearing with four small shelters. Every Karen village – no matter the size – consisted of pretty much the same architecture: hardwood floored and palm-thatched houses, raised on bamboo stilts three feet above the ground.
The home is entered by ladder into a main room that contains a central hearth – an ash pit bordered by bamboo logs. None had electricity, machinery or the unnerving throttle of the ubiquitous motorbikes elsewhere in Thailand. The villagers are subsistence farmers. Most have a rice and chili pepper crop some distance away from the village. Around the home they grow vegetables and care for animals, which are often sacrificed to spirits, or sometimes consumed in a meal.
While Roberto and I rested, our guides prepared a vegetable stew for lunch. A local brought over a few live bullfrogs, which our porter took inside, chopped up into pieces, and added to their version of the stew. (I tried a little. Like most animal meat that’s usually written off as bizarre and gross, it tastes similar to chicken).
Continuing through the forest after lunch, periodically crossing fields with golden, parched rice stalks and red pepper plants, we’d pass Karen tradesmen bearing enormous baskets strapped to their backs – practically general stores containing everything from fake gem earrings to pots to cigarettes – who had crossed from the Burmese side and were traveling hut to hut selling their wares.
Around sunset we arrived at another village to a setting both stunning and bizarre. The cluster of huts was perched on a dark green hillside, lit by the reddish hues of the setting sun – in the background, endless and seemingly uninhabited peaks and valleys. The villagers were dressed in their colorful, everyday costume – woven cotton sarongs and V-neck shirts, dangling earrings and necklaces. All were smoking homegrown tobacco out of wooden pipes and looking at me and the Italian like we were aliens. Even the pigs and piglets, goats and goatlets, dogs, cats, roosters and plain-faced, cud-chewing water buffalo wearing wooden chimes around their necks scattered. Our guide explained that we were the first foreigners to ever visit the village.
With Thom translating we thanked and exchanged greetings with our village hosts. The ice was broken after I puffed on an elder’s tobacco pipe to the amusement of all who watched. We were put up in the village headman’s hut, a custom that over the next few days appeared to be protocol. We sat with him, his extended family and other village men by candlelight, eating, drinking homebrewed rice whisky and getting slightly acquainted. I offered two men a cup of Lipton tea. They raised up and stared at the tea bag with the same confused tilt of the head as two cave men discovering a Palm Pilot. I marveled at their bamboo rat trap and wooden musical harp like someone who, well, had never seen a bamboo rat trap.
The stories from Karen lore I heard that night were so unbelievable.
At one point that evening the headman – enjoying our company and proud by our evident interest in his culture (no doubt, quickly learning about the lucrative possibilities in tourism), suggested to my guide that he bring foreigners to the village for their upcoming New Year celebrations. As exciting as the whole experience up until then had been – like a 1950s anthropologist discovering an unknown people – the headman’s comment initiated a sense of responsibility, coupled with a feeling of guilt. Simply arriving there had changed the community forever. I had opened the village gates to tourism.
After the trip I exchanged emails with Joe Cummings, the author of the Lonely Planet Thailand guidebook, about how being the “first” somewhere initiates a possible destructive chain of change. He summed up the inherent sensitivity in ethnotourism. “The dilemma is that once you’ve gone there with a guide, and enjoyed it, that guide will turn around and use your enjoyment to solicit new clients. Thus the chain was established the moment you went there – or more precisely, the moment you developed the intention to go there.”
As the men sat late into the night drinking whisky, and the villagers asked Thom questions about current events beyond the village, Roberto and I sat in the other room, exchanging tomato sauce recipes and discussing the different cow’s milk used in Parmesan and Gran Padano cheeses.
Day Two
The roosters started up at four in the morning. While they exchanged morning pleasantries, the pigs began their oinks. The wood floor beneath my head thumped as the headman’s wife smashed wheat grains in a stone basin with a wooden plank. Thom told me that the headman knew of an area where monkeys were everywhere, and he wanted to show us the way.
We set out as a party of five, passing through villages and forest, spotting a small King Cobra and a much larger, but dead, aqua-blue one. Along the way we heard a consistent and encouraging reaction from locals when told about our ambition. “Oh, maanny, mannny monkeys there. Soo many animals, very noisy.” My hope and excitement was palpable. We abandoned our planned route (if there really was any) and followed the advice of locals. At lunch in one village, the headman offered to lead us to the same area that people all day long had been telling us about a “very noisy” area with “many, many animals.”
We were now six – me, Roberto, Thom, the porter, Headman One and Headman Two. The track was overgrown and slippery. The guides hacked down branches with machetes. We stopped frequently to pull leeches off of our shoes, socks and bare legs. By nightfall we were in a dense forest of tall fig trees and banana plants. Due to the leech problem, we abandoned the jungle floor camping plan and followed Headman Two to a nearby, abandoned shelter on the edge of a harvested rice field.
The men prepared a fire and hatcheted bamboo into drinking cups. I went out with the porter and Headman Two to hunt for dinner. We walked into the dark forest with flashlights and waded softly up a stream through overhanging branches. Watching their hands dive into the water was like witnessing illusionists perform – magically their hands fished frogs and a few crabs, which they brought back to the hut, dismembered, and ate with a spicy chili sauce. Roberto and I opted for the vegetarian meal.
Day Three
After a sleepless night, thanks to a flirtatious mosquito, I awoke to the sounds of bird songs, but no gibbon calls. While this disappointed me – I was expecting them to be next door to us – I remained optimistic, my faith bolstered by all the affirmations we’d received and the belief in my guides.
We parted with the two headmen, who unbeknownst to me had been on their way to a regional headman’s meeting. Our original group of four headed up to a ridge and then descended deep back to the jungle floor at the bottom of a ravine. We waded down a stream, hopping two foot waterfalls, meeting up with an unused muddy footpath. I was slightly encumbered by the bowed, Karen musical harp I had wrapped in a blanket and slung over my shoulder, purchased from Headman One at his village the previous morning.
Leeches sucked my damp ankles and crawled underneath the crevices amidst my shoelaces as we trekked slowly and purposefully through a scene that resembled a botanical garden exhibit with its myriad species of thick-leafed plants and twisty vines. This was it, the infamous animal playground that we’d been told for two days about.
We strained our ears over the noise of the rushing stream for the slightest indication of animal life – at this point even spotting a hornbill, the loud and majestic bird of these forests, would be welcome. Though we saw Asiatic bear tracks, deer tracks, mushrooms growing out of elephant dung – the gibbons were silent. We eventually ascended out of the ravine and into a rice field, where a local family was harvesting their crop. “You didn’t see any animals?” they asked Thom in Karen, when we stated our purpose. “Usually so many.”
More than depress me, this sucked. It was midday on our last, planned day of trekking. We had been led to believe these slippery gibbons were all over the place. Was our timing simply off? Had we arrived too early or too late in the day? Did we fail to hear them, or were we too loud as a group of four? In a last-ditch effort, we again changed our plan. On a tip from another local, we headed out of the forest and back to the main road we’d left two days before. We took a songtao five kilometers south to another village, and hiked in from there to an area where, as the now broken record declared, there resided “many, many monkeys.”
When we arrived in that village, a truck pulled up full of the regional headmen who had been meeting. One man told my guide that near his village, many monkeys lived. At that we headed further south in a stuffed pickup for another 30 minutes. When we arrived we were faced with a dilemma. We wouldn’t have time to trek into the village and the forest beyond, and still make it back to catch the last songtao north to Mae Sariang at three. The only options were either to abort the plan – and resign to a feeling of defeat – or spend another night and continue the search.
Although this villager promised we’d see animals, I was exhausted from the consistent disappointment. Besides, I didn’t really trust him. He seemed to be eyeing some income for his hospitality. He snatched money out of my guide’s hands with a playfulness that Thom didn’t seem to enjoy. I consulted with Roberto, who at the outset really was just along for the ride, having no idea (or real care) for what he was getting into. Though he soon learned that he had signed up for a gibbon expedition, he still had no idea what one was. We decided to head back to Mae Sariang. I had some months to travel across southeast Asia and could have another shot at spotting gibbons, I reasoned. I’d make it my quest.
When I asked Thom what color the monkeys were, he responded “white, black, and brown.” True. I pressed him to confirm their calls. I figured maybe he knew what he was talking about. Thom expressed how sorry and responsible he felt for the trek’s disappointment. He later told me a story from Karen lore about the British general who helped the Burmese Karen get their land during W.W.II, promised to support them after the war, but never returned to fulfill his promise. He didn’t want to be that guy, he told me.
Despite my original suspicion, Thom turned out to be a great guide and companion. He was always comfortable in new settings, seemed to be the center of attention, holding an audience of sometimes a dozen people. That gave me a feeling of ease and assuredness. His background, as it turned out, was interesting. He worked part-time for the Thai government allocating tax revenue towards infrastructure development in local villages, while making a relative fortune selling his small crop of Arabian coffee beans to Japanese businessmen. His attention for half the year was shifting into his three-week old trekking business, where he hoped to offer a range of low impact trips to suit the gamut of tourists seeking the exotic.
With the kind of spontaneity that one tends to be thankful for in retrospect, I opted in. We walked a few miles up the mountain to the man’s village, staying alert for the animals we were told often appear there. We toured the village in the afternoon, inadvertently frightening little children. We secured a guide for the next day – a neighbor said he’d take us to see the monkeys. (Later I learned his wife died in July. She gave birth to their daughter but couldn’t stop bleeding. Because it was the rainy season, the dirt track from their village to the main road was impassable. The child is now five months old).
“Oh, so maany, very noisy,” he told us. “Just heard them yesterday.” I slept that night with hope, once again.
Day Four
Our hostess told us that the previous morning a gibbon had landed on their house. No such luck for us. We walked out of the village, ascended to a ridge, and then dropped into the dense forest, following a stream at the valley floor. En route we passed a small clearing that looked like an army training camp – tree stumps arranged in rows, logs stacked in piles, even the resemblance of an obstacle course. But it was a place where young elephants are taken for basic training!
We continued upstream, ascending small waterfalls, through this area where the gibbons and hornbills should be calling, our ears strained for their noise. No sounds except for some small birds. We walked through the area and began ascending out of the ravine. Three days of trekking following a promising scent, we had come up empty. Had all these people been lying, or telling us what we wanted to hear? Had they simply wanted a piece of the tourist dollar? Was it a case of the reverse law of when you look too hard for something it further eludes you?
And then – as if omniscient forces had orchestrated the timing – we heard the gibbons calling.
Their calls are unmistakable – loud, melodic, resembling excited, pubescent kids cheering at a fireworks display. They are also monogamous and sing in male-female pairs – a choreographed duet that escalates up to a shrill crescendo, intended as a territorial warning to other family groups in neighboring ranges. Amazing. They were distant, originating back from the direction we had just walked. I had chills running up my back.
“Do you want to go back?” Thom asked.
“Of course!” I cried.
I bolted back down the hillside behind our local guide, leaping over the mini-cascades and branches. Thom was a little behind me, but caught up as we passed a big tree stump and a cigarette, still burning.
“On our way past here, just five minutes before, I leave this for jungle spirit and pray to see many monkeys!” He exclaimed.
You’ve got to be kidding me. I’m a believer.
The four of us split up into two scouting teams. I followed the local guide. We crawled up a steep slope, grabbing tree saplings and roots to pull us up, and made a beeline for the gibbons. The sounds got closer and closer, and then, through a break in the trees, no more than a hundred feet away, we spotted a family of three – mother, father and juvenile – perched in the highest branches of a large tree, swinging and vocalizing!
We watched them until they spotted us and dashed off, crashing through trees at speeds of up to 60 km per hour. We followed them around the mountainside until they saw us again. After about an hour, satisfied at long last, we regrouped and congratulated each other, climbed out of the forest towards the main road.
We were dirty, sweaty, smelly, leech-scarred and stung from nettle plants. We had trekked four days along a physical and emotional roller coaster for what amounted to four minutes of gibbon viewing. I had gotten more “colorful hill people” than the animals I sought for. But it all played out perfectly.
