Nights are boring here, so I’m in bed early, which means I’m up at 8. After a leisurly breakfast at one of the few farang cafes, I walked around town for an hour looking for a place that rents mountain bikes. There isn’t one. So I was forced to rent a motesai.

That turned out to be the best decision I made on this trip, and I had a blast tooling around on my 100cc Honda Dream. As usual, the journey was better then the destinations, thaam bplaa (fish cave, aptly named), and a “Long Neck” Karen village.

These people have a bad deal. They are refugees from Burma, and as such, cannot get Thai passports or ID cards, so cannot leave Mae Hong Son province to find work. Non-Thais living in the “Land of Thais” are treated like dirt.

But the strange-looking women, with their golden bands around their giraffe-like necks, are exotic to the Thais as they are to us. There is a Thai TV commercial where a guy is chatting online with a girl, and asks for her picture. He’s excited as he watches her pretty face appear. Suddenly her long golden neck appears, and he screams. Then it cuts to the “Karen” women with CGI necks in a modern, clean computer lab in the hills.

And her's wasn't even the longest

I don’t know what the commercial was for, but reality is nothing like it. The last thing the Karen need is a computer lab. The government doesn’t do much, if anything, for them, since they aren’t Thai. There was a school, but I wonder if the government paid for it? The kids weren’t wearing Thai school uniforms.

The town itself was pretty big, and made of wooden shacks. Not a single Long Neck woman was to be seen. I paid my money, and entered the zoo part of the village, where a few women in full regalia lounged about by souvenirs they were selling. Even though they all let me take their pictures, and even smiled, I still felt uncomfortable walking around with my camera.

Apparently, most of the entrance fee actually goes to an armed Karen insurgent group in Burma. It’s a shame, because the refuges need the money more than some rich warlords.