Northern Thailand, October to November 2021

Introduction

This is the first expedition Zomia Collective mounted under its own name, twenty days between Bangkok and the hills around Chiang Mai in the autumn of 2021, and it is the least productive journey in the collection. Nothing collected on it carries the trip code. The seed that was offered to patrons that December came through the network rather than off the road, and this report exists to say so plainly and to record what the twenty days did establish.

The party was two. The route ran from Bangkok north to Chiang Mai, out to the ridges above the valley, and on to Doi Chang and Mae Chaem before returning. The survey method was the one we had at the time, which was a drone and a pair of eyes on a ridge, and the limits of that method are most of what the trip taught.

Itinerary

1. 24 October 2021

   Bangkok

   Arrival, and the contacts the trip was arranged through.

2. 30 October 2021

   Chiang Mai, the ridges above the valley

   The first ridge work, under rain cloud. Seven frames carry this date.

3. 31 October 2021

   Chiang Mai, the ridges above the valley

   A rain-hazed morning from the same ground.

4. 7 November 2021

   Mae Chaem

   Written up the same day in a post that is still behind the Wix paywall.

5. 12 November 2021

   Return

The survey

The ridges above the Chiang Mai valley, 30 and 31 October

Two days were spent working ridge lines above the valley floor with the drone, in weather that closed in on both of them. What the frames record is the shape of the country rather than anything growing in it: forested slopes falling to a flat plain, a reservoir in the trough between two ridges, and rice in every stage from standing green to cut stubble.

No cannabis appears in any of the thirty-one published frames from this trip. That is the finding, and it is not an artefact of what was kept: the drone was looking for stands from above at a season when a mature plant in northern Thailand should have been visible, and it did not find any.

Doi Chang

Mae Chaem, 7 November

What came back, and what did not

Nothing on the accession register carries THAI01. The Thai material offered to patrons in December 2021 (Thai Mango, Kroeng Krawia, Foytong, Tha Sala and Erawan) came through Piano’s and Thut’s contacts and carries a sourcing note naming who it came through rather than a trip code. This report is here to stop the December post being taken for the harvest of this expedition.

Conclusion

Twenty days, two people, and no seed on the register. The method was the problem. A drone finds a field of rice easily and a few hill plots under canopy almost never, and a fortnight of ridge work without a local grower to walk in with returns landscape photography. Every trip after this one was arranged the other way round, through somebody who already knew where the plants were, and the contrast between this report and the West Bengal series is mostly the contrast between those two methods.

What the trip did establish was the network. The people met in Bangkok and around Chiang Mai supplied the December list and the introductions that made the 2022 and 2023 Thai journeys work.