Living in an Akha Hill Tribe village in Chiang Rai was another eye-opening experience for me. I'm sure you can see from the photo what the environment was like. Though I enjoyed the bustle and population density of Bangkok, this village was up a mountain and 15km away from the nearest town (which itself had a population of 11,000 people).
I spent a full 6 months living there, which made coming back to the UK even more of a shock than if I'd been in Bangkok. The Akha (read more about the Akha here) speak their own language, so even though my Thai was great by that point, I couldn't understand what was going on around me. I found Akha rather impenetrable; in the same way Chinese uses the letter Z a lot, Akha uses J, and I really struggled with it. Here's some of what I remember:
Ah je jon jon joy means "What are you doing?"
Oo doo ta ma means "Hello".
Jaw sah do me ah la means "How are you?"
Haw meh meh ngya means "I'm hungry".
I definitely experienced more of life and death in the village, as dinner was often killed before I ate it, though I didn't like to see pigs getting their throats cut. One notable thing about the Akha is that they enjoy eating dog. I'm an honorary Akha because I enjoy eating dog too! I can comfortably say I've eaten dog over 100 times, and it's very tasty.
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