Striking Development of Remote Areas in Northern Thailand

Today I write this from Amphoe Bang-ma Pha, Mae Hong Son Province, my favorite area of Thailand.  Bang-ma Pha town (Soppong) is about 180 km northwest of Chiangmai but 4-5 hours by bus because of the mountainous roads.

I did the trip on motorbike, stopping in Pai (44 kilometers southeast of here) on Sunday to overnight, and I arrived here yesterday morning.

Whenever I think about visiting Thailand, this is where I ultimately want to be.

I first visited the area during Christmas of 1989.  At that time, the roads from Soppong up to the caves at Tham Lot and Ban Mae Lanna were strictly dirt and quite treacherous even with 4WD.  Electricity was by expensive gasoline-operated generator, but most people used candles and flashlights for light after sundown.

Now both those routes are paved all the way, and both villages have electricity on Thailand's grid.

I can't say that I had a front row seat to these developments, but I've visited here countless times over the years, so every new thing that's built--from government offices to schools to hospitals (all the things we take for granted in the west)--is quite memorable to me.

The iconic 7-11 convenience store, for me, rather defines and epitomizes the development of Thailand over the past couple decades since there wasn't even one such store in Thailand in the late 1980s.

Beginning roughly 20 years ago, the gigantic CP Group of Thailand started to open 7-11 stores in Bangkok and Chiangmai, Thailand's second-largest city.  Before long, there was a branch or two, or more, in every town and city in the land.  (There are at least four in tiny Pai alone.)

So I couldn't believe my eyes when I drove into Soppong village yesterday and saw that 7-11 has arrived here, too.  My first thought?  "Amphoe Bang-ma Pha has joined the world."  My second thought?  Hard to describe, but it was something of a mixture of sad and wistful.

Soppong has long moved past being the definitive one-horse town it was in the '90s. It's at least three or four "horses" and gaining more by the day.

There are more guesthouses than before, and some of them--like mine--are a little more upscale.  There are many more coffee shops and restaurants, and where there used to be only two or three mom and pop stores selling all types of general goods, now I see perhaps twice that many.

To the best of my recollection, there were no shops selling brand-new motorbikes, even a decade ago.  Now there are at least two.

And the building boom continues.  I see a multi-story behemoth--probably shophouses--going up just 100 meters from my room.

With "development" of a relatively remote area come new types of problems.  For example, now that it's the rainy season, the late afternoon rains that come like clockwork every day also bring high winds that cause trees or mountain debris to fall on power lines, bringing temporary electric outages just at the time of day when demand is highest.  This happened both nights I spent in Soppong, so people still rely on candles and generators.

The owner of my resort told me that in the old days when the power went out, the electric company didn't care too much about getting things up and running again quickly because "there wasn't so much development as now and not nearly as many customers as now."

But with the growth of Soppong over the last 10-15 years, more people demand that the work crews get out there and restore power as soon as possible.

The 3-4 outages I witnessed over two nights lasted from about 15 minutes to as much as 90 minutes or so.  My first night here I saw one of the work crews working almost right outside my door.

Yesterday I saw a very large crew, perhaps two dozen strong with five or six trucks, working on a stretch of downed power lines about five miles west of Soppong.

While development has undoubtedly brought numerous benefits to the mostly hilltribe peoples who live here, I can't help but feel--from my privileged farang perch--that part of the charm of this place was that it presented certain challenges, that it took some gumption to get here and a certain resilience to stay.

How strange to feel so ambivalent about development!  The locals benefit a lot, of course, but how much will they lose in the long term?  Farang who have seen post-Communist economic wreckage, post-manufacturing "rust belts" in the West, and a massive Chinese economic powerhouse becoming one of the world's major-league polluters may be right to ask such questions.

But do we have the right to demand that China clean up its act, or that certain developing countries forgo certain kinds of developments?

I think the best we can do is try to set an example to the world with careful, sustainable development models that developing countries can eventually emulate.