Every year when the weather drops in the winter months, the gorgeous Northern hills of Thailand flood. Not with water, but with Bangkok licence plates. Glistening new SVU’s, Minivans, Tesla’s and the like, make their annual pilgrimage to admire the crisp beauty of the hills each winter.
Without a doubt this place, where I make my home, is stunning. Mountain peaks eclipsed by clouds rising up behind perfect rice paddies glimmering in the orange sun. Enough content to fill the Lonely Planet articles quota or a travel Instagram feed for another year.
Occasionally such content will feature actual people, usually an old uncle or auntie smiling wearing a straw hat, often hawking some local product or demonstrating some handicraft.
It’s always shocking to me when Bangkokians tell me that Northerners are so friendly. “Really?” I think… “But they hate you…” It’s often quite true. I remember while having a haircut last winter talking to my barber of many years. Outside the traffic was visibly piling up. The aforementioned sparkling new cars with Bangkok plates. “It’s so bad this time of year I don’t even go outside” she told me. “To be honest with you, I can’t stand them, I can’t wait for them to go home”.
This sentiment is pretty common among those occasional humans in the straw hats. Life in the scenic North may sometimes be aesthetically beautiful, but the lived reality is quite the opposite.
I wish I could live there, the visitors will sometimes say. I wonder what kind of life they imagine in their heads. Waking up late, wading in the cool paddies, lazing under the houses in the afternoon, those serene peaks always lackadaisically watching over them, perhaps? Oftentimes too it’s not just the urban bourgeois who take part in this fantasy, so too do the foreigners be they western or Asian, dropping in and out for a quick taste of the slow life, even those on the left are just as guilty of drifting into such romanticism as everyone else.
It can be hard to reconcile places like this with the poverty that surrounds them. This idyllic setting often allows a revisionist idealism to enter in. Yes the people are poor, but look how beautiful it is. Look how happy they seem. This is dangerous thinking.
There’s a reason the villages are empty of young people, there’s a reason that grandmothers care for the infants of absent parents, there’s a reason why it’s always old uncles and aunties in those pictures, there’s a reason why Northern women are synonymous with sex work and men with taxi drivers or security guards.
When those dreamers dream of the glimmering paddies do they dream of generational debt? Do they dream of backbreaking labour? Of thick annual smog? Of the underfunded and overcrowded hospitals? Probably not.
Life in beautiful places is so often beset by poverty. Think of the fisherpeople on Tonle Sap lake, the flower pickers in Cameron Highlands, the rice paddy waders working in Bali. This is not written to guard beautiful places from those who don’t live there, rather it’s written to guard against idealistic complacency itself.
