The sound of muffled pounding woke me from my sleep, like the rhythmic beat of a native drum.
I sat up in my sleeping bag and peered through the thin mosquito netting across to our Thai neighbor's grass hut. A tiny fire illuminated her workplace, the same as half a dozen other huts within sight.
The 13-year-old girl was pounding rice for the day's meals. Her muscular leg stomped down on the log beam that caused a pestle to strike a deep bowl containing unhulled rice.
For an hour she must do this, every day, to hull about 2 quarts of rice. Hard work for a young woman. Our guide, Phenta, told us last night on our tour of this hill tribe village that the 13-year-old was just married.
This fact amazed my 11-year-old daughter, Sierra, (two more years!) who found the Far East culture of Thailand far different from her own middle-class life in Pennsylvania. But then, nearly everything in Thailand was amazing.
The country isn't the typical destination for a family adventure, I'll admit, but my girlfriend, Susan, moved there on business and invited our family to visit. I was intrigued by Thailand and announced that if I were going alone, and traveling around the globe, I was staying much longer than a "long weekend."
Perhaps my family should consider accompanying me, I wondered aloud. My very cautious husband, Todd Gladfelter, read the guidebooks, listened to doomsayers and feared the worst when it came to contracting diseases. But we did our homework, ordered a few shots, bought a box of 1,000 alcohol wipes and a few quarts of antibacterial no-water hand soap, (one quarter of which came home) and left the rest to trust.
Trust was what I had to call upon when the work elephants with the heavy chains around their necks and feet arrived at our hut a few hours after we woke. The mahout, or elephant driver, with a cloth wrapped loosely around his head, turban-style, tattoos up and down his arms and rolled-up smoking leaves between his teeth, made eye contact with me and motioned for my young son. He wanted me to lift 9-year-old Bryce up over the elephant's head and put him in the basket behind him. We were off for a half-day ride through the jungle.
This was part of our three-day adventure in the deep mountains of northern Thailand, which our guidebook billed as "the most authentic Hill Tribe adventure you can find."
Maesot Conservation Tour drives tourists five hours from Mae Sot on the most winding, nauseating mountain road to the village of Umpang in Tak province. Besides riding elephants, you hike from village to village on ancient dirt foot trails and raft through a lush canyon full of hanging gardens, waterfalls and monkeys.
The mahout bounced on the elephant's neck and sang to her in an eerie chant as he drove. The elephant's baby followed close behind, and we occasionally stopped for her to nurse.
We rocked and swayed with the animal's large, purposeful steps. The big, leathery ears flapped back and forth across our lower legs while our feet rested on the animal's great head as if it were a footstool. Orchids hung from the trees and were easily visible at that height.
The mahout turned around, and with his stained and missing teeth, smiled at us, unable to communicate in any other way. He took my son from the basket and placed him on the elephant's head in front of him. Bryce turned and beamed at me, and I knew I had made the right decision to bring my family to this wonderfully strange country.
Advance arrangements
Months before, I contacted the Thai tourism office in New York to get information. They advised me to study guidebooks and decide which places and activities most interested our family. The agent would hand over our itinerary to an English-speaking cultural and academic travel service in Thailand, called Trikaya, based in Bangkok, who would arrange everything and charge us a blanket fee.
We were met at the airport by a guide, in our own rented van (a sign stating "Ms. Cindy Ross" sat on the dashboard, making us feel like diplomats) and were driven all over the country.
Hotel reservations were prearranged (including breakfast) and tour reservations made for the lump sum of $3,000 for four people for an entire month. This included not only a guide, but a driver, gas and entrance fees for most attractions.
We took care of our own lunches and dinners but these amounted to literally pennies -- the finest buffet lunches in the best hotels cost $1.50. Most of the hotels we stayed at were rated three and four stars.
Even the flights were less expensive than flying to, say, Switzerland. The children did not fall apart during the 24 hours of flight time, as we feared, but were continually entertained by movies, meals, games that the flight attendants handed out and their own busywork. This included a month's worth of schoolwork (one of the best times to visit Thailand is during the American winter).
As we entered the Karen village along the Mae Klong River on our elephants, a young girl was fishing, a man was kneading soapy laundry on a flattened log and a pig was rooting in the mud -- normal village goings-on.
Phenta and his helpers set up camp in Thilosu National Park by the river. We would be sleeping in a tent tonight instead of a "guesthouse," as in last night's village. Phenta placed burning incense punks and candles around the perimeter of our dining tarp and proceeded to cut cups and hot chocolate stirrers out of bamboo for each of us, much to the children's delight.
We watched as they sliced our evening's vegetables with a machete, the tool of choice in the bush. After a delicious five-course dinner consisting of soup and a variety of spicy vegetable dishes with rice and noodles, my kids began to play the game "rock, scissors, paper."
Phenta taught them the words in Thai, and they were amazed to learn that all the way around the world, this simple child's game is also played. Things like this illustrate, even to a child's mind, that the world is not so big and we are not so different.
Movie stars
It wasn't long before word got around in the village that guests were there, and residents started arriving for a look. Our fair skin and light hair was an oddity to these brown-skinned Thais. They love it and strive for it.
In the cities, we saw people wearing long sleeves and long pants in 90-degree weather, even wool balaclavas on their heads to shield them from the sun. They ride their motorbikes with a magazine in an extended hand, in attempt to keep off the tanning rays.
People came up and petted our children's faces, touched their hair. They are so interested in American Caucasian children that many asked for the kids' autographs and to take individual pictures. My kids felt like movie stars.
We walked around the village, watching the pigs and chickens that roam freely and live under the huts on stilts, eager to snag any food that falls through the bamboo floors. Families cooked supper on open fires. Women sat nursing babies, embroidering cloth, winnowing rice. They smiled shyly at us, and my kids squeezed our hands and said, "Pennsylvania feels so far away."
At the school play yard we stopped for a try at a Thai top game. We all fumbled in an attempt to throw and spin the big wooden top, causing the Thai children to giggle. None of us needed to speak Thai or English when there was the universal language of laughter to share.
Our friend, Susan, had told us before the trip that the hill tribe children are very poor and that it would be nice to bring along any outgrown sweaters or long pants. (We saw an old man wearing a high school varsity jacket with the words "Cheerleader Coach" embroidered on the back.)
Phenta found a family shiv- ering in the 40-degree evening air, and each stood in line to gratefully claim an article of clothing. Throughout our visit, the kids recognized their clothes on happy, playing children and they knew the clothes would be valued and passed down for many years. Sierra said to me, "I can't believe how much we have compared to them."
The next day on a hike, our guide made bamboo hiking sticks for our kids, bamboo pop guns using rolled-up wet newspaper as ammunition, and large thermoses using cross sections of the plant. When the kids began to wilt from the heat, the guide showed them a wide-leafed plant to use as an umbrella. So much kindness was shown to our children in a country that truly values young people.
Eating 'floating lotuses'
After our three-day backcountry adventure, we drove to the Golden Cottage in Mae Sot. Maesot Conservation Tour owners, Boong and Boon Kasomsan, have opened their family farm for a taste of traditional upper-class farm life. The large bamboo house has a central eating place at large round tables with wedge-shaped floor pillows.
We ate little balls of sweet potatoes in coconut milk called "Floating lotuses," while wild lizards called chinchooks squeaked in the night. Like every other night spent away from a hotel, whether camping or in a guesthouse, we slept beneath mosquito netting. We rarely encountered the pests, however, and did not get a single bite, because it was the dry season and it had not rained a drop for many months. So our fear of contracting malaria at that time of the year was nearly groundless.
During our trip, we also toured the fascinating remains of ancient cities in Ayutthaya and Sukhothai historical parks, visited Buddhist temples (with the monks in their saffron-colored robes and flip-flops), hiked through national parks, visited Susan in Chiang Mai and used the centrally located capital city of Bangkok as our regrouping site. Baiyoke Sky Hotel, the tallest hotel in Thailand (94 floors), welcomes children, and the breakfast buffet on the glassed-in 78th floor was always a delightful way to start the day.
There is another world in the southern part of this long, diverse country -- the sun-drenched tropical islands -- and we did not want to miss it. We flew to the large island of Phuket and then took a high-speed boat to the remote Similan Islands off the west coast in the Andaman Sea.
The Similans are considered Thailand's gems because there is no development and the nine islands are owned and operated by the national park system. Only two of the islands have camping and bungalows, and a tiny restaurant, where a few Thai women stir up delicious food in their woks for about $1 per entree.
The islands are popular with divers because the reefs are rated as one of the 10 top dive sites in the world. But most divers charter boats that remain close to the harbor. That leaves the islands virtually deserted.
Our family does not dive, but the snorkeling on the islands is unbeatable, so we rented gear from our escort boat for the duration of our three-day visit.
Some say the Similan Islands offer better snorkeling than most diving spots in the world. The reason for this is the abundant and shallow reefs that allow natural sunlight to penetrate the clear water (with a visibility depth of 30 meters), so the colors of the fish and coral are lighted naturally.
The reefs and marine life begin only yards from the white-sand beaches, so even young children and poor swimmers can enjoy this underwater world usually reserved for divers only.
Todd and I kicked through this silent world with the kids, pointing to giant clams, brightly colored parrotfish, eels and huge sea turtles. At one point, we swam through a school of silvery blue fish.
Dozens of hermit crabs come on the beach every evening, and the 5-foot-wide fruit bats that hop around high in the trees, along with the swinging gibbons that holler in the early morning, caused my son to remark, "This is my favorite place in all of Thailand."
Bizarre islands
For Sierra and me, that honor went to our final destination, the Phanga Nga Bay on the east coast of Phuket, made famous by Leonardo DiCaprio's movie The Beach.
Some 160 islands explode out of the sheltered Phanga Nga Bay. These are not typical islands but limestone pinnacles that look like inverted mountains. They look like giant sentinels, row upon row, making this one of the most bizarre seascapes on earth.
Many of the islands have hidden lagoons, called hongs, which are surrounded by unbroken rock cliffs. The only way to get into many of them is through caves that open and close with the tide. Some openings are so narrow that you must lie horizontally in your kayak while the ceiling passes inches from your nose.
Our tour operator was John Gray's Sea Canoe, a Thai-owned company started more than 20 years ago. The company is founded on sound environmental principles. Guides study the tides and pick the best islands to explore; they are naturalists as well.
We spent three days circumnavigating islands with limestone cliffs, overhangs and undercuts. The extreme low tides expose table coral, sponges, giant jellyfish and sea urchins. Endangered white-bellied sea eagles, with their 6-foot wingspans, worked the reef, diving for fish.
We paddled up estuaries and explored wild, rare mangrove forests, we studied rock paintings on 1,000-foot island walls, and delighted over mud skippers, a strange terrestrial fish. We spent one night on Ko Panyi, which has a Muslim village with a Thai restaurant and bungalows run by locals.
When we kayaked the perimeter of the islands, we each took a child in our rigid, sit-on-top boats. But when we entered the caves, we used inflatable kayaks, and our only job was to shine a flashlight on the glittering stalactites and the thousands of bats on the ceiling. The guides do the paddling, so the delicate rock formations are not harmed.
Inside the hongs, the beautiful songs of the vibrant bird life hushed my children. Then a family of young monkeys hopped down onto the lower branches of a tree, eager to take a closer look while their parents scolded them high on the cliff above us.
One monkey couldn't judge his own weight and bounced on a flimsy branch, breaking it and landing him in the water right by our boat. Another curious monkey slowly spread tree leaves apart with his little hands and peered down at the kids, only a few feet from their faces. My kids could hardly contain their joy.
After the kayaking trip, we sped across Phanga Nga Bay. The islands receded in the mint green light, the full moon rose orange over the water. Cold and snow awaited us back home.
The kids hung over the bow, wind whipping their hair, squealing when they saw flying fish alongside our boat -- a parting gift from amazing Thailand.
Sierra, beaming, turned to me and said, "I don't want to leave Thailand, Mom. A month wasn't long enough."
That's the mark of a stellar vacation.
When you go
Getting there: United Airlines and British Airways offer service from BWI to Bangkok, and other flights are available from Dulles Airport in Washington. Plan on at least 24 hours of flying time.
Tour operators:
Maesot Conservation Tour, 415 Soi Tangimchiang Maesot, Tak 63110 Thailand
011-66-532-818 (calls to Thailand from the United States must start with 011, the international calling code)
a1travel@hotmail.com
* Small trekking group that offers three-day, two-night trips into remote Umpang for about 2,500-3,000 baht, or $60-$70
Trikaya Cultural & Academic Travel Services, 2411 Rajah Villa Ladproa Road, Wangthonglang, Bangkapi, Bangkok 10310
662-530-5383
* Will help plan your trip and make all the arrangements, including providing you with a van, driver and English-speaking guide. Prices vary on length of stay and group size.
Sea Canoe Thailand Co., P.O. Box 276 Phuket 83000 Thailand
66-76 212-172
info@seacanoe.com
* Offers day trips and overnight expeditions.
John Gray's Sea Canoe Thailand Co., 124 Soi1 Yawarat Road, Taladyai, Muang, Phuket 83000, Thailand
66-76 254-505-7
www.johngray-seacanoe.com
* Offers day trips and overnight expeditions.
Lodging:
Baiyoke Sky Hotel, 22 Rajprarop Road, Rajthevee, Bangkok 10400
660-2656-3000
www.baiyokehotel.com
* Thailand's tallest hotel. Rates from $80.
Information:
Tourism Authority of Thailand, c / o World Publication, 304 Park Ave., South, Eighth Floor, New York, NY 10010
212-219-4655
www.tourismthailand.org
* For inoculations, my family received tetanus and hepatitis A vaccine, and my husband and I got an additional polio booster.
An ideal day
6 a.m.: Wake up in a hill tribe bamboo guesthouse to the sound of hundreds of crowing roosters.
8 a.m.: Speed up the Mae Klong River in a longtail boat to a natural hot springs. Village women come to sell us cloth bracelets with sewn beads and seeds.
11 a.m.: Go further up the river to an elephant camp. Lunch on rice and spicy veggies in an open-air pavilion while watching elephants get bathed in the river.
Noon: Follow a porter taking your family into the mountains on a trek. Marvel as, with his knife, he hacks a bamboo hiking staff for your daughter.
4 p.m.: Camp in a hill tribe village. Watch your kids play with a wooden top and a string with the village kids. Laughter is the common language.
6 p.m.: Feel your appetite build as your Thai guides cut up veggies with their machetes for dinner. Sit on a plastic mat with candles and incense burning, sipping cocoa in a bamboo mug. Watch the kids catch minnows in the river.
-- Cindy Ross