Life (and Death) in Thailand

There are layers of existence for people here in Thailand, from the brief vacationing families who hardly leave their tourist resort boundaries, to the locals living in remote villages who know little of the outside world. Shannon and I are coming as close to seeing (perhaps slightly even experiencing) the local communities of northern Thailand, and it's a wild, alien place.

To begin with, it's much more violent than I had originally imagined. We've fortunately not not been involved in anything unusual or difficult, but talking with people who've lived here for many years and learning more about life here, it can be a scary place to be at times.

Right now, we're in a small village called Tham Lod - mostly bamboo huts and farmland. It's nice, quiet, and everyone we've met has been incredibly friendly. Yet the owner of the hostel and the workers who've been there for a while have plenty of stories about people dying and being murdered. I started reading the owner's book, which begins with him being wrongfully accussed of murdering one backpacker only to have another dead person's whereabouts being linked with him and his buisness. Asking a hostel staff member a bit about this, he mentioned that while that story was rather unusual, things have a way of happening out in the middle of nowhere. A few years back, a Dutch tourist dies in a cave Shannon and I had only hours earlier crawled out of. The week prior to our arrival, a few local Thais had been murdered, and their bodies found in a large sinkhole outside of town. This story became really interesting when it turned out the limited search and rescue crews in the area were not available for some time, and it was the various trekking guides and tour staff who had to retrieve the bodies.

You may also have heard of the two Canadians shot in Thailand only a month or two ago. The man died, the woman survived, and the police officer who shot them is expected to be set free and be back on duty soon. While there are a few stories on how things happened, the version backed by the most evidence is the one where a drunk off-duty police officer tries to get friendly with a Candian girl, her boyfriend tells him to get stuffed, and as things go the way they do when people have been drinking, the officer shoots them both. Shannon and I just left the town this happened in, Pai, a few days ago.

In smaller towns, where authority and justice seem to be nice ideas that don't necessarily get followed, it's quite a different world from that at home, or even the one touched on briefly while traveling. Now, all this doesn't make being in Thailand unsafe - even the shooting in Pai could have been avoided if cooler heads and common sense had prevailed (or so I believe). And from conversations with other travelers, Thailand is one of the safest countries in the world when it comes to assault and robbery, especially for females travelling alone. But it for locals, for people living within the rules and law that seems to apply in small villages where no one knows what happens outside, it seems to be a scarier place. Today, walking into town after hearing all the stories from the folks living here, I even noticed all the road signs I passed had bullet holes through them. In the few days I'm here in Tham Lod, not much it seems will happen, but I bet as you look over longer and longer timelines, this small village can be a pretty wild place.