Thailand Guide

Trekking around Mae Hong Son

There's no getting away from the fact that trekking up and down Mae Hong Son's steep inclines is tough, though the scenery is magnificent. Most of the hill-tribe villages here are Karen, interspersed with indigenous Thai Yai (Shan) settlements in the valleys. Heading east, where many villages are very unspoilt, having little contact with the outside world, is preferable to the more populous, less traditional west; to the southeast, you'll be able to visit Hmong and Karen, to the northeast, Lisu also. In the latter direction, if you're very hardy, you might want to consider the five- to six-day routes to Soppong or Pai, which by all accounts have the best scenery of the lot.

About a dozen guest houses, independent guides and travel agencies in Mae Hong Son run multi-day treks.

Poy Sang Long festival

Opening time: First weekend of April

Mae Hong Son's most famous and colourful festival is Poy Sang Long, which celebrates the ordination into the monkhood, for the duration of the schools' long vacation, of Thai Yai boys between the ages of seven and fourteen. Similar rituals take place in other northern Thai towns at this time, but the Mae Hong Son version is given a unique flavour by its Thai Yai elements.

On the first day of the festival, the boys have their heads shaved and are anointed with turmeric and dressed up in the colours of a Thai Yai prince, with traditional accessories: long white socks, plenty of jewellery, a headcloth decorated with fresh flowers, a golden umbrella and heavy face make-up. They are then announced to the guardian spirit of the town and taken around the temples. The second day brings general merry-making and a spectacular parade, headed by a drummer and a richly decorated riderless horse, which is believed to carry the town's guardian spirit. The boys, still in their finery, are each carried on the shoulders of a chaperone, accompanied by musicians and bearers of traditional offerings. In the evening, the novices tuck into a sumptuous meal, waited on by their parents and relatives, before the ordination ceremony in the temple on the third day.

"Long-neck" villages

The most famous – and notorious – of the Mae Hong Son area's spectacles is its contingent of "long-neck" women, members of the tiny Padaung tribe of Burma who have come across to Thailand to escape Burmese repression. Though the women's necks appear to be stretched to 30cm and more by a column of brass rings, the "long-neck" tag is a technical misnomer: a National Geographic team once X-rayed one of the women and found that instead of stretching out her neck, the pressure of eleven pounds of brass had simply squashed her collarbones and ribs. Girls of the tribe start wearing the rings from about the age of six, adding one or two each year up to the age of sixteen or so. Once fastened, the rings are for life, for to remove a full stack would eventually cause the collapse of the neck and suffocation – in the past, removal was a punishment for adultery.

In spite of their handicap (they have to use straws to drink, for example), the women are able to carry out some kind of an ordinary life: they can marry and have children, and they're able to weave and sew, although these days they spend most of their time posing like circus freaks for photographs. Only half of the Padaung women now lengthen their necks; left to its own course, the custom would probably die out, but the influence of tourism may well keep it alive for some time yet. The villages in Mae Hong Son where they live are set up by Thai entrepreneurs as a money-making venture (visitors are charged B250). At least, contrary to many reports, the "long necks" are not held as slaves – they are each paid a living wage of about B1500 per month – though their plight as refugees is certainly precarious. Since 2005, the UNHCR has been offering permanent resettlement in third countries for about twenty Padaung. However, the authorities in Thailand, where the "long necks" bring in a huge amount of tourist dollars, have refused to sign the necessary paperwork on a technicality.