Prior to arriving in Thailand to do Bangkok - Bali tours for Trailfinders in London I had driven overland adventures in North Africa, South America, Turkey, India and Nepal and supplemented my income by selling photos for travel brochures. On arrival in North Thailand it was obvious there were many attractions worth recording and I took an early interest in producing black and white portraits of the mountain hilltribes. At this time I always assumed I'd be off to another travel job and never expected to be in Chiang Mai 35 years later. Such is life. On one early trip I rented a motorbike from my Chiang Rai guest house and set off to look out villages from a few different tribes on a route that took me up to Mae Salong. On route I stopped at Sam Yaek village and without walking too far took a dozen pictures of Akha in the street or sitting at home on the outdoor balconies. Many years later the negatives were converted to a CD and later they were stored in a laptop where they have stayed till this day. Knowing I was doing a few day trips to Thoerd Thai and would pass through Sam Yaek I copied a few pictures onto my mobile phone with the intention of showing them to the locals and see if it was people they knew. So there I am, parked right on the main junction and I see a woman in a small shop who looks to be an age where she would have been 20 when the pictures were taken. I open the phone and started to scroll through a few shots and sure enough she recognised a woman who was still local and another who had recently died. Then she suddenly stopped flipping pictures, her jaw dropped and she said "thats my mum". Mum had passed away a few years back and this being an outlying village where cameras were almost unheard of she had no record of her mum as a middle aged woman, the same for all the other uncles, aunties, cousins, nieces and nephews. Within minutes my phone was in the hands of the top operator and she was downloading and sending these pictures to family and friends. Quire a crowd had now assembled and by the time I got the phone back I had a few new 'friends' and a lot more requests, all Akha wanting the picture of their granny or whatever. It was quite a scene. One granddaughter was in Kuantan, east coast Malaysia, married with children and sent me a thankyou in perfect English for a photo she could now show her kids. I was knocked back by the emotion a few old photos had caused and truly pleased that I'd added something to these peoples lives.
