It’s that nagging sensation that pervades what we vaguely call ‘modern life’. It’s there, somewhere in the background like a dull distracting hum or sheathing us with an imperceptible film separating us from the world. It’s that feeling that somehow something is lacking, strangely hollow. That feeling of that we’re dislocated and failing to really engage with the moment. That sensation where, like Strawberry Fields without the woozy psychedelia, nothing is real.
It’s often modernity itself that we point to as the source of this malaise. The malevolent fug leaks, we suspect, from TV, the internet or the phone twitching in our palms. Alienation, we suspect, emanates from the forces of work, capital and media.
And this sensation only gets worse when try to escape it. Perhaps its something in the awful irony that that all those suspicious things actually allow us to head off to the exotic, the unspoilt, get back to nature and try to find ourselves.
It’s exactly that uneasy sensation i’m feeling at a table in a guest house in Thailand’s Chang Mai. We – that’s to say a few European backpacker types and me – have all signed up for a two day trek advertised as an ‘Eco sensitive tour … an experience for life’ that promises ‘spectacular scenery’ and ‘friendly colourful tribes’. It also promises ‘no other tourists, no drugs, no rubbish, pure nature’.
But before we voyage into the primitive, we need prepping, like those stories where time travellers are told not to stray from the path for fear of altering the future or Star Trek’s Prime Directive (“No interference with the social development of said planet”). Our guide lays down the rules: ‘Don’t wear skimpy clothes, don’t take pictures without asking, do bring warm clothes and water. And no, you can’t charge your phone’.
We meet early the next morning and drive out of the city past golf ranges and vast gated communities with names like Royal Creek 2 before the strip malls begin to give way to paddy fields. We stop at a market whose picturesque ruralism is only besmirched by a Tesco on the other side of the road.
Then we trek. 4 hours up into the hills, in quite some heat with occasional jungle for shade. Though, it must be said, at strategic points we come across cool boxes manned by locals with cardboard menu’s of Coke, beer and crisps.
In the afternoon sun we arrive in the village. We walk past primitive huts on stilts, their roofs made leaves folded over bamboo. Chickens scratch around the roots of exotic fruit trees. Though the lush foliage we glimpse a red shirt – perhaps some of the colour we’ve been promised. As we round the bush, it’s colour alright, but the all too familiar synthetic Pantone 485 of a Manchester United shirt greeting us.
We walk on, greeted by a couple of guys at a crossroads. I awkwardly shake hands, point to myself and say ‘Sam’. I feel like I’m doing this well, like I’m acting just the way one should when one encounters a tribesman, all smiles and over exaggerated gestures.
We reach what will be home for the night and our guide slips off. We find ourselves alone with each other, and inevitably start performing our own stereotypical roles: the serious Eastern European, the earnest German, and, I suppose, my own role: the cynical, flippant, supercilious Englishman.
After dinner, our guide comes to sit with us, saying that he’ll take us up to visit his friend, the Head Man. He says we’ll be able to ask him about the village and about life in the mountains. It feels like we’ve earn’t this somehow, like we’ve behaved in such a way to warrant such a special audience.
Come the time, we troupe up the hill to a small hut, take off our shoes and climb a ladder. into a room thats something like an attic lit by a bulb powered from a car battery. There’s a fire burning in a hearth to one side. Warming himself next to it and propped against a post is the Head Man himself.
We sit in a circle, and the Head Man offers us tea. His wife emerges out of the shadows of the hut to pour from a blackened pot into bamboo cups. It might be authentic but it doesn’t go to well, as hot tea leaks from their sides. The Head Man doesn’t seem too concerned and gets his wife to swap them for less atmospheric mugs.
There’s an awkwardness as we all seem to contemplate how on earth this cultural exchange might work. The silence is broken by fantastic belches from our hosts. Then the wife, who seems to know the drill starts asking questions: “What do you eat in your country? What do you have for breakfast?”
‘Toast’ I answer, which seems a disappointing cultural revelation, but, it turns out, I’m just finding my range.
“What do people do in your country? Are they farmers?” She asks as though she knows exactly how to push our cultural buttons.
I find myself describing a world where everyone works in big buildings, spend the day sitting in front of computers regardless of their job. How farms are giant fields harvested by satellite controlled robotic machines. I feel a little like C3P0 in the Ewok Village. And it feels just as staged. We’re all in on the act, playing parts that were written a long time ago when industrialisation and colonisation invented the idea of primitive. And its an act that happens here three times a week as group after group of authenticity seekers troupe up the very same ladder to meet the Head Man.
At the same time, this is a real village, a real hill tribe and a real way of life. And if being primitive – or rather being a place onto which we can project fantasies of authenticity – is part of its economic reality then who are we to argue. Perhaps the only authenticity we can ever really encounter is the reality of our own cultural machinations. And that its the awkwardness and ironies in this suburban jungle that we really find a truth: that the myths of primitivism are as deluded as our myths of modernity.