As you will quickly discover once you get here, there are a lot of tourists in Thailand, and a lot of Thai culture is now oriented around serving those tourists. This tour gave us a peek behind the curtain to see what Thailand was like before hordes of tourists descended on it. It was one of the more memorable things we did in the two weeks we were here.
Sak was a great guide, very professional and friendly. He brought us to two villages and you can tell he has genuine relationships with the people there. They all like him and as a result we’re very welcoming to us. Everywhere we went people were offering us food and inviting us into their homes.
One word of warning I’ll give is that there aren’t really any activities planned. There’s nothing to do, per se. This is a strength, since you get to see people in their day-to-day lives. However, your experience will vary depending on what day/season you go. There wasn’t much happening in the first village we went to, so we just hung out and walked around and cooked a traditional lunch over an open flame. In the second village, people were celebrating the Hmong New Year, and invited us into their celebrations, which was fun. If you go during the rice harvesting/planting season it looked like there would be a lot more activity.
My only criticism is that we had to pay for everything in cash. Like a lot of stuff in Thailand, they don’t take credit cards.