Thailand Trek

Beloved --
The first sound in the Karen village--after the dogs and roosters--was the steady thumping of a human powered rice mill. The rice is placed in a hollowed out wooden round (a little bigger than we would have when splitting firewood) and a see-saw with another piece of wood is repeatedly pumped up and down by the operator. The woman we met doing this was at it for over and hour, stopping periodically to empty out the wooden "mortar" into a winnowing basket. For all her hard work, she wound up with about 10 pounds of useable grain. We saw several of these machines throughout the village and some of my companions helped pump the see-saw for a bit, discovering that it was hard work. (They also helped unload a pickup filled with firewood.) Coffee, we were told by our guide, has recently been introduced as the cash crop in this mountainous area--replacing opium.
The young boys in the village played a curious game with wooden tops about the size of baseballs. The objective seemed to be to knock the spinning top of the previous player as far into the woods as possible with your own top and then giggle. (But then again, try to explain baseball.)
We departed the Karen village around 9:00am for what would be our longest day of hiking. The highest pass was around six thousand feet with vistas across the tea and coffee plantations towards Chaing Mai city. To the west were the mountain passes leading to Myanmar and to the northeast Laos and peek-a-boo sightings of the mountains of southern China. We encountered several Hmong tribal members heading up trail toward their villages. We finally arrived at our second hill-tribe village at dusk on January 28th.
I love you and miss you all,
Jim