Almost every single run that we go on here in Chiang Mai we do not have permission to use the land that we are on. In other countries like America, this could result in people getting shot or prosecuted for being on the land, but in our situation and likely because Thailand is a MUCH more laid back place, the worst that is going to happen is that you are going to get shouted at by whoever owns the land.
It can only really get but so out of hand with most of us because 90% of the people in our group are not Thai and while most of us can speak some level of Thai, let's just say that our language capabilities are more directed towards situations that we frequently find ourselves in such as ordering another beer or being able to navigate price structures at the markets. There are very few of us in our group that are non-Thai that are capable of having a full-on conversation with a Thai native.
This normally results in us actually being given a bit more freedom than a local would probably receive as far as if we are going to get in trouble or not because there are a lot of expats here in Chiang Mai and as far as the locals are concerned, if they see us and they themselves can't speak English, they will normally opt to just give you a smile and a head nod rather than even try to talk to you because they know that the conversation isn't going to go anywhere.
You also have to consider that when we are spotted on someone's land, what they see is a bunch of older, mostly men, that are dressed in quite silly outfits and we are clearly not trying to avoid detection and we also are never up to no good such as damaging anything or even so much as littering. A big part of what we do on our jungle runs is that many of the crew will run the trails with a bag and pick up litter and clean the place up. So a few of the places that we regularly visit the land owners are actually happy that we are there because we are doing a free service for them and we are in and out in a couple of hours anyway.
There are exceptions though and this one time the people who owned that land tracked us on our run and brought a posse with them like they thought they might have to fight us or something.
It was one of our runs in the south of the city, where we rarely go because there is very little undeveloped land or farmland down there but there is this one location that is hilly and has a bunch of water features that we used to like to go to, but now will not go to anymore after that one day.
There is a rather cool attraction in the south called "Grand Canyon" that used to be a mining area of sorts but later on someone decided to fill up the gigantic ditches with water and turn it into a water park. The park itself is nice to visit because there are some interesting views not just at the park, but also around it because there are a bunch of caves and pretty scary looking drop-offs that are the leave-behinds from the mining days as well. There is also plenty of parking nearby that we can use as a base for our runs as we do our meeting before the run and our little tailgating party afterwards.
Things were going like they normally do but something was different and I think this is what set the people off that approached us rather aggressively at the end. The Hare (The person who designs the trail without the rest of the group's knowledge of where it is actually going to go) decided it would be a good idea to get us right next to the ledge that overlooks the water park and this entailed us going carefully through some barbed wire fence to get there. I remember thinking that this was kind of pushing it because although we are always trespassing, we normally don't cross over obvious "stay out" barricades. It was worth it at the time because when you get to the edge of the water park and look over the side it is a bit scary because it is a sheer drop to the water below, one that would almost certainly injure you badly or perhaps kill you.
We didn't get too close but the staff of the park or the management almost certainly saw us with our brightly colored shirts and our silly demeanor as we trundled on past, all 40 of us or so. We were only on that property for maybe 5 minutes of the total run but because there were so many of us, it is kind of easy to understand why this would raise the alarm with the staff there. They may have been shouting at us while we were up there but it is too far away from the area below for us to realistically be able to hear them. But someone in there took it upon themselves to gather a group of tough guys to follow us, not that it would have been very difficult for them to do so. I don't think that anyone was caught up to on trail because we had one hell of a "head start" so to speak, but it's not like we were concealing where we were parked. It's pretty easy to find the source of a group when you just drive down the only road down there and look for a group of 20 or so cars that are parked somewhere and look for a group of foreign men that are all wearing brightly colored shirts.
So we had already gotten back to the start/finish point by the time they caught up to us and they brought my a dozen men with them and some of them were armed with machetes. I don't know what sort of resistance they were expecting to encounter but that is not how any of us are at all. We are more passive than anything else. At first he did a bunch of shouting in Thai, which few of us understood and even if we did it would have been all jumbled because half of them were all shouting at once. It was kind of a silly show of bravado actually but it was a little bit scary that a couple of them thought it was necessary to bring gigantic knives with them.
It was at this time that one of our bus drivers who is around 70 years old and intimately familiar with Thai arguments came in super handy. He shouted back at first and I later found out that he was not being rude but merely telling them to calm down, and to explain why the group was there to harass us. The "leader" was the spokesperson for the group and the rest of the people with him were just young men that wanted to serve as muscle if the need arose, which it was never going to with our group.
The driver of our bus doesn't speak much English so most of us left that situation not even knowing what the problem was but you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure this one out. The problem was that we had crossed over clearly marked do not cross territory and this thought had crossed my mind when we were crawling through the fence. We shouldn't have done that and as far as I know we haven't done it again since that day. Keep in mind that when we turn up to these things the participants have NO IDEA where the trail is going to go and it was the fault of the person that set the trail.
I can also identify with the trail setter though, because there is some level of pressure to do something new and different on a run and well, he definitely accomplished that. After the interruption the people in our group attempted to offer the raiding posse some beers as an apology and one of them rudely slapped the beer out of the guy's hands - this was not good and was an escalation of things that didn't need to happen. The "slapper" got reprimanded by the boss but I have no idea what was said. Two of the other members of the posse accepted the beers and were all smiles after the fact. The boss man left with a stern look on his face but also didn't accept the beer.
You need to understand that Thailand is not the wild west. Even though they turned up with weapons that they could have murdered several of us with before we overpowered him, this isn't the sort of country where you can just hack up trespassers and not have consequences for doing so. So since I had been here for many years as that point I wasn't happy about the situation, but I also never really felt like I was in any danger of dying.
The end result was that we decided that day that we were never going to return to that spot again... and we haven't. Other than the water features that we are apparently not allowed to get near, there isn't anything particularly amazing about the area and the points to the north are far more interesting.
I mean, how are you going to get and stay angry at a bunch of silly older men that are dressed in ridiculous outfits?