It is early morning. The sun seeps through the haze hanging over the surrounding mountains and throws a swathe of light the colour of a monk’s robe across the small lake in the village. A Thai man who looks to be in his late 40s approaches, introduces himself and, with a little coaxing, begins to reminisce about his early years in this valley in the far northeast corner of Thailand which he left 55 year ago

“The road from Chiang Mai to Mae Hong Son has 1,864 turns. I counted them on my way back up here. Amazing, isn’t it ?

            “No! No! You misunderstand me. It’s not amazing that there are so many turns. There’d have to be if a highway is going to climb over all those hills. I mean,  the fact that there is a road at all: now that’s amazing. When I left here there wasn’t any road.

            “My mother and father and older brother and I moved away from here on the backs of elephants in a caravan through the teak forest. Know what I remember about that seven-day ride? Going up one hill and down another, up one mountain and down the next. And all the time the hairs on the back of my elephant’s neck were like needles sticking into my leg. That 13-hour air-conditioned bus ride now is pure comfort by comparison.

            “Mae Hong Son gets its name from a training camp for fighting elephants which was down by the river a long time ago. I remember the work elephants. They were parked like trucks in front of the old two-storey houses you still see all around town. I used to go up to those giant beasts and swat those legs that seemed like tree trunks. No one seemed to mind. The elephants were pretty well trained. Probably better trained than I was then!

            “Of course, the town has changed. It’s bigger now and the streets are paved. It was a lot dirtier 55 years ago, I would imagine, but when you’re a kid, you don’t notice things like dust. We used to play down by the lake. Went swimming. I’d grab hold of a big turtle and let it do all the work while I hung on. That was fun.

            “Or we’d catch some fighting fish, put them into bottles and set them next to each other. Soon the fish would change colour, mostly bright blues and reds like anger, until one of the fish backed down, making his owner the loser. We’d toss that one back into the lake and try again for a winner. The fighting fish are still here. I saw them in the water just this morning.

            “This temple, Wat Chong Kum, named after the lake, is where I went into the monastery for a month just before we move to Bangkok. Let’s go in and take a look .

            “Careful! This floor is slippery. I used to take a running jump onto apiece of cloth and slide along, when the older monks weren’t looking, that is. Over here is where I slept. Right on the floor. No mat, just the dark wood floor. It didn’t bother me then, I was so young. Ah, but the mosquitos! Not so many around now. Probably because it’s the dry season. We weren’t supposed to kill those little pests, and I didn’t, you know, as long as I was inside the wat. Pardon me for two minutes while I say a few words to Buddha over here.

            “Thanks for waiting. Now, what have we hanging here on the wall? Must be an old photograph of this temple. Same stack of roofs. You can see the Burmese influence. It hasn’t really changed much over the century, has it?

            “What do you say we take a walk up that hill there to Wat Phra That Doi Kongmou? Maybe take an hour. Wecan take our time. Let’s go by the Zigzag route they’ve put in. Years ago there were some stairs behind Wat Mouy To. I noticed that the two singha are still standing there.

            “Singha? That’s a lion like you see on the beer bottle label. I can still drink from 10 in the morning to 10 at night and I don’t get a hangover. Really. Only difference is that now I drink only one bottle of Singha the whole time.

            “The stairs to the top went right between those two big statues. Not much left of the steps now. Climbing it would be like exploring some ancient ruin, I suppose. A fellow could probably pick his way up to the top, but it’s a little steep for someone my age.

            “I remember when we used to run up and down those steps, no problem. We used to carry water to the temple togain merit. During Songkran, the New Year water festival, we’d carry it all the way to the top only to throw it over each other. You know kids.

            “Let’s stop and take a breather. There’s a road for vehicles going up now, but it doesn’t seem right to me to make a pilgrimage to a temple in the back of a van. Look! You can see the whole village from here. Sure has got bigger. That cemetery over there used to be at the edge of town. That’s where thy buried my younger brother. He died of smallpox. Me? I didn’t even get sick. How do you explain that?

            “Of course, there wasn’t the airplane runway beside the town then. Now a person can fly from Chiang Mai in half an hour. But I don’t know. I kind of like to see the scenery getting here. There’s still a lot of teak forest left. These leaves are not teak, though they look a lot alike. You might call it Fool’s Teak. Folk round here use these leaves for wrapping food. Maybe you noticed down at the market.

            “You know why there’s a temple way up here? I don’t know if the story is true or not, but when I was a child I heard that a bunch of bandits lived up here. Every so often they would swoop down on the village and take what they wanted. After several years of this, the villagers decided something had toe done.

            “Some proposed wiping the nest of thieves off the top of the hill, but fighting was never a strong point for these villagers and the bandits were well armed. Then a monk suggested they build a temple on top. When a temple is built, The grounds are made sacred. The bandits from the Shan tribe were all Buddhists. They would not live on sacred ground.

            “So the ground was blessed and the bandits left, End of problem, Except there was no way to get  water up the hill to the monks, but that wasn’t a problem either. It gave the townspeople a chance to earn merit. Now they have a pump.

            “Look at this! A new stairway. Think about it. Every bit of this work is done by volunteers building up merit. Nice work, don’t you think?

            “Finally…the top. Phew! I don’t know if I’m going to want to walk up this hill again. But anyway, here we are. Now we have to circle the stupa three times and give alms.

            “Okay, that’s one time around. Two more to go. See that tree over there, the cashew tree. It must be a hundred years old. I used to climb it when I was just so high.

            “There, that’s twice around. One more. Oh! I should have taken off my hat! Well, it doesn’t matter.

            “Those balls over there are used to make the ground holy. They are hand chiseled out of hard rock, then covered with gold and buried deep in the ground all around the temple area. I wonder how many places in the world have ever stopped a fight by building a place of worship on the potential battleground.

            “That’s three. Finished. Now we can rest. Then we’ll go back down and I’llshow you where they caught and killed a tiger right in the middle of town. It must have been two metres long. Everybody in the village was offered a piece of that tiger to eat. Sure, I ate it. It was supposed to bring strength and courage.

            “Today, I’ll settle for a Singha.”