Echoes of the Golden Triangle
This is a journey through Thailand’s restricted frontier areas one February in the early 1990s, as recalled by recently found film-based photos.
There’s a special kind of magic on the back of an of an old photograph. Before digital metadata and GPS tags, our memories were anchored by the faint, purple dot matrix ink of a Fujifilm mini lab code. For me that code is gibberish, but it has become the key to a long vanished world.
From The Riverside to the Remote
Living in Thailand in the 1980s and 1990s was a study in total contrasts. One night we were having dinner and watching dancers wearing gold leaf and silk under a teak pavilion at The Oriental Hotel’s Sala Rim Nam restaurant, at that time the pinnacle of refined Bangkok elegance.
We took our film cartridge to a Fujifilm center to have the photos developed, as we also did after our big adventure.
A few days later we were in a different world entirely. The 7 digit phone numbers on the photo folder were our last link to the Big Mango as we headed North, into a different world, Mae Sai and the mountains of Mae Hong Son.
There were no motorways, or decent highways, and paved roads soon gave way to rough red earth tracks, accessible only by 4 wheel drive jeeps. The ‘civilization’ of Bangkok felt like it was ten thousand kilometers and another era away.
The Permitted Path
In those days, you didn’t just “go” to hill tribe villages. The border was a tinderbox of geopolitics and the shadows of the opium trade. We needed government permits, a four wheel drive jeep which could tackle the harsh terrain, and importantly the company of an army ranger to get us through the frequent and quite thorough military checkpoints.
The Akha Encounter
We weren’t prepared for what we found, a ramshackle line of bamboo and wooden buildings in the clouds, lined up alongside a steep muddy red track road, with no infrastructure that we could see.
There were no men around, just a few women in traditional Akha clothing. Not worn for us, but just their daily wear, including the distinctive headdress heavy with silver coins and tassels, and several of them were smoking long wooden pipes.
There were a few children who hid from us at first, but felt braver when they saw candy being handed out.
This was a genuine, remote, and apparently self sufficient community. Visitors were very rare, there were no shops to buy anything from, they asked nothing from us, and they viewed us with some curiosity. For us an intriguing experience, but for them it would only be a few short years before their lifestyles changed completely, and a real culture was lost forever.
The Photos
I took these photos with an Olympus camera, they’re completely genuine, but of course not very clear due to the standard of photography at the time, aging, and needed to be scanned. AI has not been used in anyway.
Unfortunately, the negatives have gone, lost to time, but prints remain, faded, but vibrant with the truth of a moment when the only way to see it is to be invited (or allowed) in by those that guarded it.
After many years of sitting in a box in our storeroom we rediscovered these gems. The codes on the back of the pictures led us to the place and time we took these amazing shots.
Here’s a bit of forgotten and unknown Thailand. We hope you enjoyed reading our little reminiscing.