In the 1980s, Pai was an unknown village no more than dot on the map in northern Thailand, without paved roads or accommodations for visitors. A traveler in Chaing Mai suggested we visit this laid-back village surrounded by jungle and opium poppy fields. I was traveling with my boyfriend and another traveler, and arrived looking to experience the hill tribe culture. We talked with locals until we found two young men willing to take us into the hills, in exchange for supporting their opium habit. 

Our first few hours on the trail led us to a Chinese refugee camp inside the Burma (now Myanmar) border. There were no border crossings or delineation between Thailand and Burma, but at that time, we knew it was illegal for us to be there, but then so was the entire refugee camp and all of its inhabitants. We were offered pig blood which we refused and our guides bought a bag full of opium  and a pocketful of tobacco.

From then on, they packed and lit their pipe every 30 minutes for the following three days. After six hours of bushwacking through thick jungle with no sign of trails, we arrived at a village of bamboo and palm leaf huts on stilts. We were officially off-the-beaten path. The inhabitants welcomed us, touching our skin and hair, and marveling at our clothes and shoes. They invited us to climb the bamboo ladder into one of the huts where they started a fire in a pit at the center of the floor and began cooking rice. They passed an opium pipe around the room like it was a box of See's Candy that everyone naturally helped themselves to. 

The women cooked and the men smoked. When the rice was ready, they added spices to it for themselves and our guides, and sugar to ours as a special treat. They were very proud of their sugar.

Apparently opium makes you throw up - don't ask me the amount or timing of this hurling - but after dinner, anyone who had to hurl simply split the bamboo flooring with their fingers and spewed their upchucking rice between the floorboards to expecting pigs below.

We slept on the bamboo without covers and hacked our way to a private spot in the jungle when we had to relieve ourselves.

My dad was a musician, and I grew up east of Los Angeles with late-night jam sessions and jazz players from across the tracks, beating bongos and smoking  Mary Warner my parents tried to coverup with sandalwood incense. My dad gave up music and we moved to Newport Beach, California where only one dark-skinned person attended my high school and she was a foreign exchange student. She said the biggest difference between the US and Brazil was how we treated our dogs. We practically set a place for them at our dinner tables.

At Humboldt, on the screen in an auditorium the first day of an anthropology class, I stared at a slide of a nearly naked family squatting around a fire in front of a community of stick houses with straw roofs. The next image was a closeup of a man with a painted face, feathered headdress, and a cassowary quill through his nose. My professor was in the photo. The realization that these people were hunting with bows and arrows in modern times, while my greatest stretch had been moving to a hippie commune, blasted my curiosity to the moon. That was the moment my family’s dream of me becoming a secretary evaporated. All those typing classes gone to waste.

I've visited the Olpopongi Maasai Cultural Village north of Arusha in Tanzania a few times. It's lovely to be recognized by these warm-hearted greeters who noticed when I change my hair style.

I've shared tea with "Bibi" (grandma) who readily smiles for a camera, but doesn't speak a word of English. Bibi was 82 when I first met her in 2010.  When I returned in 2012, my translator told me said she was 87.  I didn't ask at my next visit.

On my first visit, I watched the locals slit the neck of a goat and bleed it to death, catching and drinking the blood without sharing. We had goat for dinner, then danced around a bonfire like we all came from the same parents. We sang until the fire burned out. We taught them Kumbaya and they taught us Sigogo. 

My sleeping quarters were inside a traditional elephant-dung hut with a bed of branches covered in goat skins, and a clean sleeping bag.

Our guide Freddy walked us away from the village on day two, over dry ground for a bush tour to show us ant hills and plants that any medicine man would covet. He slashed spiny branches from our path and made spear-throwing look easy. He insisted I try my hand at throwing his spear, then in the sweetest voice you've ever heard, said the village would starve if they had to rely on my hunting skills.

I stayed with a photographer on Saint Kitts and and had the amazing good fortune to be invited on photo shoots with her. We covered most of the island by car, stopping at what I thought were secret spots. But later riding the public bus across the island over several days, I discovered these secret spots were on the bus route and hopping on and off of busses gave me the same photo opportunities as did a private vehicle - plus I got to talk with more locals, who consistently welcomed me equally as the charming folks of Nevis. ​