The next morning continued at a leisurely pace. My mood was caught somewhere between enjoying the tranquility and an underlying restlessness, aching to get to volunteering already. I had become so used to travelling alone and only following the beat of my own drum that idle time felt like wasted time, especially in an exciting foreign country where I could be helping and exploring. Api picked up on my slumped mood and helped by listening to my disappoints. At least, the laundry I'd been doing to pass the time would be dry soon.

A few hours later, we headed over to a nice looking hotel for a tourism conference. Api and I were asked to join Som-o even though most of it would be in Thai and we'd basically just be there for show. Months working in a school run by Thai administration had conditioned me to the routine and given me the ability to sit gracefully on the floor. As a result I could smile through ceremonies where I understood maybe twenty percent of the content, including the English parts.

Once we entered the large, air-conditioned conference room, just a touch late, the panel discussions commenced. Som-o was kind enough to explain the event to us afterwards, but for most of it were just sitting ducks. The discussion all involved ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which would be in full swing by 2015. The past year, the staff at our school had introduced us to the idea and we used ASEAN countries as themes in our summer camps. My contributions entailed organizing Burmese and Malaysian influenced games and crafts for all the students in the sweaty, non-air-conditioned gym.

ASEAN, much like European Union,  opened up borders and allowed free movement for citizens of the member countries. Borders with Myanmar and Laos would open up more and Chiang Rai would essentially become the gateway to Thailand from the North. This meeting's agenda entailed sustainable community-based tourism to protect the local and hill tribe people while still benefiting economically. Som-o went up on stage with some other program leaders for a discussion their successes to date with the Akha organization to preserve culture and attract international volunteers for home stay visits (hence why we were probably there).

After a pretty good free lunch, we sat down to group discussions. Again, it was all in Thai aside from the one or two people interested in mine and Api's role in this whole ordeal.  A man who had designed a website to help travellers arrange home stays in local villages showed us the site he was putting together called 'Local Alike' and I really liked the idea. I would probably chose to book a stay with them next time I went out and visited Northern Thailand.

By late afternoon, we returned to the Akha house. More visitors, friends of Som-o and Api, stopped by to visit. The couple, an Akha man and a younger Japanese woman, came back from the hospital where doctors and nurses had been tending to their premature and sick baby. Poor Miki had only given birth days ago and was still sitting on a pillow to ease the pain. She had started her Thailand adventure as a volunteer and then fell in love with this man, choosing to leave her home and family behind. They were both nice and pleasant people.

Her husband gave me his business card after he expressed that my one week stint would hardly suffice to really learn much about Akha culture. I agreed with him and felt a bit guilty had been simply to help a community and not also to learn about their culture. His village could offer a more in depth look at the Akha culture, should I be interested. I thanked him and hung onto the card in case I came back up North to visit. We wished good health to their burgeoning family before they headed back to the hospital.

Som-o's wife and teenage son came by and we headed out to their village to volunteer. The trip wasn't complete without stopping at the market for food, a hardware store and a warehouse to pick up bag of cement.

Our drive took us right into the mountains, so far West we could have spotted Myanmar, had the smoke dissipated. I learned a new thai word, 'Doi', meaning mountain based the fact that half the towns had the word 'doi' in them. Som-o confirmed my theory. I jotted the new word in my little language notebook to remember for later.

We kept driving up the winding roads. When we finally began our descent down a more local road, a large stone sign announced we were at the Akha cultural school. We had arrived! Som-o's wife, Nueng, jumped out and opened the gate for the jeep. Right at the front, a two story house served as both a home on the top level and an office on the main level. There was a nice little patio under-hang where we'd eat breakfast at the wooden table with tree stumps for chairs.

My room or guesthouse was down the hill past the large tamarind tree. I had my own mosquito net, a real bed, electricity and even a bathroom with running water. Pretty decent digs for a village accommodation. I freshened up, wandered the gardens and met them up the hill to head over to his brother's house for supper.

The drive took less than five minutes, but I could see how walking back up the mountain road at night could be less than desirable. Two dogs greeted us along with sounds from the chickens and a few cows in their front yard pen. One of the dogs reminded me of my beagle, who I missed dearly, so he received a lot of puppy loving during my visit.     

We entered the kitchen first and it felt more like a garage or basement than a space where we'd want to cook and eat. The concrete walls and floors worked nicely to cool down the hot weather. There was a burner to cook on with a wok pan in the far corner as well as a wood stove. Everyone set to work preparing part of the meal from the veggies, to the sauces to the meat. Som-o's son ran up the stairs to the living room area to watch TV. Som-o and Nueng laughed and declared he was such a city boy. I asked to help out and they gave me some spices to crush, which I did, only to learn the following day how to do it properly.

I helped Som-o set up the table, which was so lightweight and small they had it hanging from the wall. The bamboo weaved table sat about 45 centimetres off the ground and was hardly big enough to hold the six or seven food dishes being prepared tonight. Small bamboo stools went around the table as well. Nueng and Som-o's sister-in-law, Aum, were the last to make it to the table.

Aum dished everyone up a bowl of sticky rice she had prepared that morning out of the cylindrical cooler and passed us each a spoon. I watched others dig in with their hands and spoons to get small portions of curries, meats and vegetables. There was no plate to fill up so we just ate a little at a time. I watched Som-o ball up his sticky rice in his palm and then dunk it in some of the spicy sauces.

"Try these," he said next, gesturing to a large tray of vegetables and leaves. "Jungle vegetables. They're picked fresh, today." He used the leaf as a spoon and ate the spicy chilli paste like candy. "It's a little bit spicy. Nit noi pet, you know?"

I laughed and nodded. 'Nip noi', a little bit, had easily worked its way into my vocabulary along with 'pet', 'spicy'.

"Akha food is not like Southern Thailand. Do you like som tam?"

"Yes," I answered. Papaya salad, som tam, had been one of the staples I could buy on the streets outside my apartment and it's sweet, spicy and tangy flavour was pretty nice as long as I didn't get cocky with the number of birds eye peppers I agreed to. 

"We make som tam too. Do you like Bangkok som tam?"

I smiled. "Yes, it's very good."

"Here there is not so much sugar. More Salt and spice. I can not eat the food in Bangkok, too sweet!"

"I like the sugar. Sweet is nice."

Som-o laughed and pulled out a 1.5 litre water bottle with somewhat opaque liquid. There was a clear ball floating inside with the texture of an unpeeled grape, which looked a bit like an eyeball. If I hadn't lived in Asia in the past year, I would have been freaked out, but I knew that it was just a lychee fruit, fermenting away in that bottle of moonshine.

It wasn't my first experience around moonshine. The first time, in the middle of the end of term madness of due dates and twelve to fourteen hour work days, my friends and I had taken to drinking away our weekends. We had bar hopped a bit and after some margarita and kamikaze slushee pitchers, beer towers and even a haircut for a few of us, we stumbled down a street to a vendor my friend Jessica had found one afternoon.

The lady running the liquor chart had four large jugs of moonshine that she had named one, two, three and four. My friends Sam and Dave thought that they could handle the four and kept going until the concerned Thai woman and her husband cut them off. The whole experience also came with pickled mango among other items. I had a good buzz going from the earlier bars so I declined.

Weeks later, Sam asked what happened after we left the stand and I laughed asking if he was serious. He had completely blacked out, while me and his wife Jessica tried to get the him and Dave into a cab. We headed for Dave and his girlfriend's apartment so he could pass out on their couch for about thirty minutes when we decided to call it a night.

While, I doubted that Som-o's moonshine was the 'four' from Bangkok, I still took each shot glass with caution. It was sweet and almost tasted like something I would want to drink. Just a little strong. Luckily, there were no blackouts of pass outs for the rest of the night. I just sipped a water and pretended to know what was going on in both Thai and the Akha language until we were all tired enough to go back to Som-o's home.