Well, I'm finally back in Chiang Mai after nearly a month of constant motion. Getting up at 5 AM every day to move on to the next town is not my kind of vacation, but it was enlightening and gave me some new side projects to work on. (Anybody know a good place to find funding for an AIDS orphanage? I need about $40,000.) I saw bits of pretty landscape in my wanderings, but mainly I enjoyed talking to various folks in some startlingly difficult situations. I was variously mistaken (unintentionally) for a doctor, a missionary, a soldier, and an Australian. I ate things I would prefer never to eat again (Betel leaves are most unpleasant). I got very sick (by my rather fragile standards, not theirs) on three occasions, and even talked politics with far more people than I expected to. I caught wind of an unfortunate amount of raw sewage but also walked through beautifully terraced rice paddies and saw some manmade landmarks on par with the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower.
I'll post more details when time permits, but in the meantime here's a photo of three Karen children, lifelong residents of the Mae La Oon refugee camp, a cheerful but unthinkably crowded patch of otherwise unusable land in east central Thailand. This is the first photo of processed from about 1100 that I've taken in the last three weeks.
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