Blog: Ecotourism

In the hills of Thailand reside many ethnic minorities in small villages. These villages are poorer and less economically developed than the cities (something true in Western nations too, of course). Many of the male villagers farm for subsistence while the women make handcrafts to sell to tourists in markets down in the cities.

The village we visited is populated by White Hmong, a large minority group in mountainous Southeast Asia including China, Thailand, Laos and many other countries. As with most ethnic minority groups, their history includes many periods of oppression, though today relations are good (from what we could tell). I wanted to ask our tour guide more about the relations between ethnic groups in Thailand, but this was the kind of question that the language barrier—the tour guides all spoke English, but not extremely well—made difficult.

The roads are very windy and hilly, and so we had to switch to a pickup truck to get there. Thailand being a prosperous nation, there were several signs of modernization coming to even these remote villages. Along the road, crews were installing a drainage system to keep the road usable during the rainy season. The children now attend a school, paid for by the Thai government, to learn Thai (in the past, many Hmong spoke only their language and could not communicate with other Thai) and history, science, etc.

At all of these villages, upon first sight of tourists several women would put out their handcrafts to sell. We often felt a need to buy some goods because unfortunately, the villages do not usually benefit economically from the tour groups except through selling goods. While tourists pay a lot of money to tour operators, that money does not directly reach the village, though ecotourism groups and government agencies have begun to organize programs to change this. We tried to ask our travel agents about the impact on the village prior to our trip, but the language barrier again interfered.