We had dinner on Sunday with Mo Tejani and last night with Sasha Alyson. Mo is the American writer I mentioned in an earlier posting who wrote a memoir called "A Chameleon's Tale" (not "A Chameleon's Life," as I previously reported). Mo first came to Thailand as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1970s, was smitten with the place, then settled here about ten years ago after a career with a variety of international aid agencies. Now he does journalism and is at work on another memoir.
A big, easy-going Indian-American (originally from Bombay, his family was expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin in the early '70s), Mo is sharp and funny on the Thailand he adores and says he will never fully understand or be part of. He says he's a citizen of the world now. Affectionate and forgiving about Thailand's foibles, Mo is scathing about the corruption and incompetence he witnessed year after year in US and other aid programs. Too few of them, he says, looked for trustworthy local people to carry out manageable step-by-step projects. They relied instead on gigantic, sometimes demented, schemes dreamed up by the World Bank or USAID. Mo agrees that Thailand's ousted Prime Minister Thaksin was a dangerous crook. But he says Thaksin got some excellent programs going: micro-loans; grants to villages for self-help projects; expanded health care for the rural poor.
Mo is also amusing about the American young backpackers traipsing around Thailand whom we have ourselves observed with dismay. These are not the serious trekkers. They are the thousands of often bratty kids who come here to party. They congregate in packs and tend to be clueless about local mores and etiquette. Their obliviousness on environmental matters made news a few years ago when a popular backpacker novel, "The Beach", about a shallow yuppie who finds meaning by becoming a shallow backpacker, was filmed here with Leonardo DiCaprio. The movie-makers themselves destroyed a forest and an entire beach while filming, and the normally patient Thais were so outraged that the project was nearly shut down.
Also unamused by the packers (we've had two consecutive bash-the-American-young-fests) is Sasha Alyson, the founder of Alyson Publications, the pioneer in American publishing for gay readers in the mid-seventies. Sasha sold his Boston-based company to Liberation Publications, the outfit that puts out The Advocate, about ten years ago, started an adventure travel company, then sold that before moving to Chiang Mai in 2003. He had a Thai boyfriend, and while that relationship didn't last, Sasha's enchantment with Thailand did. He says now that "I'm here to stay."
We much enjoyed our reunion with Sasha last night. We hadn't seen him since a visit to Pittsfield more than ten years ago. With him for a dinner of tom kha gai and green curry at MD House--The Delicious Restaurant was Sipon, a young Laotian, with whom Sasha has founded Laos's first significant publishing house. When he first visited Luang Prabang, the pleasantly somnolent former Laotian royal capital, Sasha saw that the only books in Lao were boring school books put out by the communist government. Otherwise people had to read in Thai or English. Sasha's strong suspicion that a great hunger existed for books in Lao has been borne out by the steady sales of the eight or so titles now available from Big Brother Ant Publications. So far, it's children's books in Lao or Lao and English. A broader list is in the works. A small NGO backed the project initially, but now Sasha is funding the expansion himself. Farang volunteers help out, too. Joe asked if the backpackers pitch in, but Sasha said no, it's older people, including an American computer whiz and his wife. They were tourists who walked in off the street one day and stayed. We'll meet them when we arrive in Laos later this week.
Notes about this blog: no more postings until we get to Luang Prabang. Tomorrow we go by bus to the Thai border, stay overnight there, then continue on Thursday by slow boat down the Mekong, stopping overnight somewhere and arriving in LP late Friday afternoon.
Thank you to Bill Ullman, now the blog's official copy editor, at a rate of 4 baht per day. He told me how to spell exaggerate, Liege, etc. (He was disappointed that people here don't appreciate Yul Brynner, Ullman's "favorite Thai.")
Thanks, too, to Frank Kelly for e-mailing all the lyrics to Noel Coward's "Mad Dogs and Englishmen (go out in the midday sun)", including the immortal line: "The natives grieve when the white men leave their huts/Because they're obviously definitely nuts!"
Monday, January 29, 2007
Sunday, January 28, 2007
More trek pictures
Retired elephant camp
Elephant with trekkers
Elephant camp
Water buffalo in dry rice paddies
Trail view
View from camp---day one
Bull with typical wooden bell
Grandmother and granddaughter chewing betal nut
Husband and wife splitting bamboo for leaf roof
Leaf roof and side
Fallen tree bridge
Joe hydro-massage
Trail view
First night quarters
Sun cooking dinner
Second night dinner
First night dinner
Philippe bargaining for moonshine
L'il Cinder
Third day waiting for breakfast
Second day breakfast 
Welcome back to Chiang Mai
Wat-sponsored "ambulance"
Street food---quiche-like dish cooked in banana leaves
Cooking class---Joe's own Penang curry
Bugs to eat
Palm reading
Seated monk
Monk novices and Boy Scouts at watMonks accepting offerings
Monk funeral
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Hill and dale
The trek, a plus overall, was more arduous than we had anticipated. Our fears that it might be "too touristy" were groundless. Remember Outward Bound? What about Camp Crozier, the early Peace Corps "confidence-building" camp in Puerto Rico, aptly named for the first Peace Corps volunteer to die overseas? Then, of course, there were William Holden and Jack Hawkins in "Bridge on the River Kwai," sweating, grunting and hacking their way across Burma and much of Thailand.
But I exagerate. The trek was simply, as advertised, a rugged three-day hike. No piece of cake, but doable for most of the 14 backpack-toting trekkers and two guides in our initial group. The guides were local hill tribesman in their early twenties whose first language was Karen, Thai second. They spoke serviceable English, the lingua franca for the French, Scot and Swedish couples, four Koreans, one Belgian, one Australian, plus Joe and---tagging along on the trail---me.
I thought the Swedes, in their fifties, would fade before I did. Beefy and florid, the husband looked like an excellent candidate for a heart attack. But I had forgotten that serious trekking is in the European DNA. Most of them scamper up and down the Alps and Dolomites as effortlessly as Americans hop into SUVs with names like Explorer.
But it was I who, near the end of the first day, opted for a girly-man "short cut." This meant that for the final segment of the day's travels I was placed upon a motorbike behind a man smelling unmistakably of rice wine and to whom I clung as he bounded up and down jungle trails to the "homestead" where we all spent the first night.
If I were 31, I would have been embarrassed. But I am no longer 31, as I was often reminded. If our chief guide, a sunny fellow aptly named Sun, had asked me one more time, "Are you okay, bapa?" I'd have poked him in the eye with my bamboo walking stick. But his concern was genuine---Thais are the most visibly empathetic people I've ever met---and when I inquired about the motorbike option for significant portions of the second- and third-day activities, this was easily arranged.
It seemed as though 80 percent of the walking was uphill---shouldn't it have been 50-50?---and Joe and several of the Europeans also found it demanding. The air was thick and the sun diamond-bright, as in Africa. The trails, used by hill tribe villagers for moving themselves and their water buffalo about, wound through groves of banana and loganberry plantings and, more often, tall forests and high bamboo thickets. On some terraced hillsides were rice paddies, brown and dry until the May monsoon rains arrive. Our route often paralleled a gushing stream, from which some farmers had diverted water in PVC pipes for plots of soybeans, kale and onions. Our rest stop was by a multi-tiered waterfall of stunning force and beauty. We could hear its roar a half mile before we got to it. We bathed in the sandy pool by foot of the lowest fall and cooled off. That so much water was cascading through these mountains in the dry season was an indication of the vastness and lasting effects of the spring monsoon deluges.
Joe pointed out that we should not have been surprised by all the clambering up and down, for this was a "hill tribe" trek. Thailand's chao khao---"mountain people"---make up under one percent of the country's 65 million population. Many are not Thai citizens. They are former semi-nomadic people from Burma, Laos and as far away as Tibet who are now being gradually integrated into Thai society. They are distinguised by their languages that bear no resemblance to Thai and by the clothes the women wear, black with horizontal stripes of pinks and purples. They are also darker-skinned than southern Thais, who value light skin (you don't see Thais darkening themselves on the beaches), and they sometimes make fun of the tribespeople as hillbillies. Many chao khao are also Catholic instead of Buddhist; at some point the French got at them.
Thailand, unlike its neighbors, was never colonized. The beloved King Chulalongkorn, on the throne from 1868 to 1910, kept the European powers at bay using what the British writer Basil Hall Chamberlain calls "protective mimicry"---modernizing on your own terms before somebody does it for you on theirs---and by ceding parts of Burma to Britain and much of Laos and Cambodia to France. (Chulalongkorn was the king in "Anna and the King of Siam" and the musical "The King and I." Thais consider these popular farang entertainments crude caricatures and Yul Brynner ludicrous.)
The Karen village where we spent the first night of the trek was lovely. Spread over a high hill, the farming hamlet was a mix of traditional Thai bamboo houses on stilts with woven leaf roofs, and newer dark plank houses with corrugated fiberglass roofs, built with the help and encouragement of the government. The newer houses are solider, safer, more healthful, and they last. They have the traditional wide overhang and spaces between the verticle planks and under the eaves for good ventilation. The big one we stayed in---the extended family who lived in it apparently doubled up elsewhere---had a semi-detached kitchen of such clever design that the smoke from the cooking fire on the low floor was drawn instantly up and out under the eaves. A solar panel---devices sponsored by King Bhumibol---stored enough battery power for two florescent tubes to light parts of the interior, albeit dimly, from sunset until around eleven.
Joe and I watched Sun cook the trekkers' evening meal. Over a wood fire, a single large wok rested on a tripod of bricks. By candlelight, three scrumtious dishes were prepared in the wok, one by one, all with local produce that had been grown organically, another government initiative. First came cucumber soup, then Thai green curry, then stir-fried mixed vegetables.
Rice, also grown in the village, had been cooked in a pot earlier. (In the room where Joe and I and the French couple slept, under mosquito netting and atop mats on the floor, there were a dozen or more immense sacks of rice, apparently a season's supply.) It didn't take Sun more than an hour to put together this simple but perfectly executed meal, which was served by candlelight on a long, low table on an upstairs porch. Most diners sat on floor mats, cross-legged, backs erect, and others of us (the Swedes and I) did the best we could. (Joe referred to this tableau as "lotus-position dressage.")
The evening's entertainment included clapping games and laughter around a campfire the guides built, and Sun's jolly and often successful attempts to get the trekkers to try the local rice home brew. (Shyly, we demurred.) Earlier, Sun had told Joe he wished he didn't drink so much. Alcoholism is an apparent real problem in rural Thailand. The prep cook for our dinner was another of the guides, a younger guy who slugged down some rice wine at every opportunity. While he was slicing vegetables, he looked away briefly and deftly vomited away from our dinner. One of the women helping out casually cleaned up the mess. No fuss was made. Mai pen rai.
Before we went to bed, Joe and I walked under a sky so devoid of light pollution that the constellations became brilliant in the way the ancients must have seen them. You could imagine how people looked up, found order in this reliable show that felt so near, and thought surely it had to be connected to human events. And by believing in this connection sometimes made it true. (During a financial crisis in the 1990s, a Thai prime minister had his birth date---and astrological sign---officially changed and notified an astrologer. It didn't help.)
Post-lights-out sounds included one of the Korean girls, I think, weeping softly as she returned from a trip to the single WC (about which the less said the better). She seemed unable to locate the Korean encampment and, in the darkened funhouse-like maze, perhaps feared she would climb into someone else's. Joe said he heard someone throw up, probably from the rice wine; I guessed the Scot or the Aussie. Then there was distant snoring, then nothing---until the cock crowed and the dogs began to bark, and it was time for day two.
After a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bread, pineapple and watermelon, the trekkers set off at ten. Some had slept poorly and seemed apprehensive. Brazenly, I lolled about for another hour before my chauffeur arrived. He was an altogether pleasant young man who had not been drinking. I eagerly leapt aboard his motorbike, like Audrey Hepburn behind Gregory Peck in "Roman Holday," except larger. Within an hour, I was at the campsite for the second night. It was a sun-dappled glade by another waterfall with traditional bamboo houses, cool and comfortable, and with bottled water and banana chips to snack on. It was in this exquisite spot where I wrote the words that you just read.
Joe and the rest of the trekking party staggered in around four. They had been reduced in number to seven, not through death or grotesque injury---to my amazement---but because some of the original 14 had opted for a single-night adventure and were now on their way back to Chiang Mai, our Paris. All the trekkers said it had been a hard go. Henry, the Scot, had fallen and hurt his hip. Bo and Lena, the Swedes, were discussing the motorbike option for day three. Joe was soaked with sweat and said I had chosen wisely. I did miss, he said, a hill-tribe hamlet untouched by the modern world (pictures soon). The trekkers happily refreshed themselves under the waterfall as the guides made preparations with a wok and a wood fire for dinner at six.
Our congenial group---Henry and Lika, Bo and Lena, the Aussie Alex (a plumber who traveled half the year), Phillipe, the lifeguard from Lieges, Joe and I---sat at a picnic table that came up to our chins and dined on green curry and a pumpkin stir-fry. The meal had been prepared by the previous night's prep cook (yes), and the pumpkin dish---a few of the ingrediants had been lost along the way---was not up to the standard to which we had become accustomed.
After dinner, we sat by the fire as the temperature began to drop. Then it dropped some more. Then still more. We were high up---5,000 feet? 6,000? So by the time we left our sandals at the door of the trekkers' sleeping house (Thais find wearing shoes in a house disgusting, like walking on the dining-room table) and slipped into our slender sleeping pouches, we knew we were in for a chill. Few slept well, or in some cases at all. The green curry had been busy, so when I made my way at 1:20 a.m. out to the WC (about which the less said the better-II), others soon followed. Flashlight beams sliced through the jungle night as in a film-noir manhunt in a swamp. It was quite beautiful in a Fritz Lang in the tropics kind of way.
[What does it mean that so many of the cultural touchstones I think of for describing the trek are filmic? Probably that my trekking knowledge and experience are limited. But that's not all. Some people come to the East to learn to be contemplative. To me this has mainly meant trying to recall the lyrics to "Mad Dogs and Englishmen (go out in the midday sun.")]
Day three was still rough for the trekkers, but by lunchtime the hard part was over and the pure fun began. On the morning of day one we had had a wonderful elephant ride at a camp for retired logging elephants (see pix). Day three finished up with a one-hour bamboo raft ride---three trekkers and an oarsman to each 30-foot raft---down a fast-moving but altogether agreeable stream, with much splashing and laughter and crashing into other rafts and a few overturnings. Pure Thai sanuk.
Then, an hour later, smelly Chiang Mai looked and smelled good.
But I exagerate. The trek was simply, as advertised, a rugged three-day hike. No piece of cake, but doable for most of the 14 backpack-toting trekkers and two guides in our initial group. The guides were local hill tribesman in their early twenties whose first language was Karen, Thai second. They spoke serviceable English, the lingua franca for the French, Scot and Swedish couples, four Koreans, one Belgian, one Australian, plus Joe and---tagging along on the trail---me.
I thought the Swedes, in their fifties, would fade before I did. Beefy and florid, the husband looked like an excellent candidate for a heart attack. But I had forgotten that serious trekking is in the European DNA. Most of them scamper up and down the Alps and Dolomites as effortlessly as Americans hop into SUVs with names like Explorer.
But it was I who, near the end of the first day, opted for a girly-man "short cut." This meant that for the final segment of the day's travels I was placed upon a motorbike behind a man smelling unmistakably of rice wine and to whom I clung as he bounded up and down jungle trails to the "homestead" where we all spent the first night.
If I were 31, I would have been embarrassed. But I am no longer 31, as I was often reminded. If our chief guide, a sunny fellow aptly named Sun, had asked me one more time, "Are you okay, bapa?" I'd have poked him in the eye with my bamboo walking stick. But his concern was genuine---Thais are the most visibly empathetic people I've ever met---and when I inquired about the motorbike option for significant portions of the second- and third-day activities, this was easily arranged.
It seemed as though 80 percent of the walking was uphill---shouldn't it have been 50-50?---and Joe and several of the Europeans also found it demanding. The air was thick and the sun diamond-bright, as in Africa. The trails, used by hill tribe villagers for moving themselves and their water buffalo about, wound through groves of banana and loganberry plantings and, more often, tall forests and high bamboo thickets. On some terraced hillsides were rice paddies, brown and dry until the May monsoon rains arrive. Our route often paralleled a gushing stream, from which some farmers had diverted water in PVC pipes for plots of soybeans, kale and onions. Our rest stop was by a multi-tiered waterfall of stunning force and beauty. We could hear its roar a half mile before we got to it. We bathed in the sandy pool by foot of the lowest fall and cooled off. That so much water was cascading through these mountains in the dry season was an indication of the vastness and lasting effects of the spring monsoon deluges.
Joe pointed out that we should not have been surprised by all the clambering up and down, for this was a "hill tribe" trek. Thailand's chao khao---"mountain people"---make up under one percent of the country's 65 million population. Many are not Thai citizens. They are former semi-nomadic people from Burma, Laos and as far away as Tibet who are now being gradually integrated into Thai society. They are distinguised by their languages that bear no resemblance to Thai and by the clothes the women wear, black with horizontal stripes of pinks and purples. They are also darker-skinned than southern Thais, who value light skin (you don't see Thais darkening themselves on the beaches), and they sometimes make fun of the tribespeople as hillbillies. Many chao khao are also Catholic instead of Buddhist; at some point the French got at them.
Thailand, unlike its neighbors, was never colonized. The beloved King Chulalongkorn, on the throne from 1868 to 1910, kept the European powers at bay using what the British writer Basil Hall Chamberlain calls "protective mimicry"---modernizing on your own terms before somebody does it for you on theirs---and by ceding parts of Burma to Britain and much of Laos and Cambodia to France. (Chulalongkorn was the king in "Anna and the King of Siam" and the musical "The King and I." Thais consider these popular farang entertainments crude caricatures and Yul Brynner ludicrous.)
The Karen village where we spent the first night of the trek was lovely. Spread over a high hill, the farming hamlet was a mix of traditional Thai bamboo houses on stilts with woven leaf roofs, and newer dark plank houses with corrugated fiberglass roofs, built with the help and encouragement of the government. The newer houses are solider, safer, more healthful, and they last. They have the traditional wide overhang and spaces between the verticle planks and under the eaves for good ventilation. The big one we stayed in---the extended family who lived in it apparently doubled up elsewhere---had a semi-detached kitchen of such clever design that the smoke from the cooking fire on the low floor was drawn instantly up and out under the eaves. A solar panel---devices sponsored by King Bhumibol---stored enough battery power for two florescent tubes to light parts of the interior, albeit dimly, from sunset until around eleven.
Joe and I watched Sun cook the trekkers' evening meal. Over a wood fire, a single large wok rested on a tripod of bricks. By candlelight, three scrumtious dishes were prepared in the wok, one by one, all with local produce that had been grown organically, another government initiative. First came cucumber soup, then Thai green curry, then stir-fried mixed vegetables.
Rice, also grown in the village, had been cooked in a pot earlier. (In the room where Joe and I and the French couple slept, under mosquito netting and atop mats on the floor, there were a dozen or more immense sacks of rice, apparently a season's supply.) It didn't take Sun more than an hour to put together this simple but perfectly executed meal, which was served by candlelight on a long, low table on an upstairs porch. Most diners sat on floor mats, cross-legged, backs erect, and others of us (the Swedes and I) did the best we could. (Joe referred to this tableau as "lotus-position dressage.")
The evening's entertainment included clapping games and laughter around a campfire the guides built, and Sun's jolly and often successful attempts to get the trekkers to try the local rice home brew. (Shyly, we demurred.) Earlier, Sun had told Joe he wished he didn't drink so much. Alcoholism is an apparent real problem in rural Thailand. The prep cook for our dinner was another of the guides, a younger guy who slugged down some rice wine at every opportunity. While he was slicing vegetables, he looked away briefly and deftly vomited away from our dinner. One of the women helping out casually cleaned up the mess. No fuss was made. Mai pen rai.
Before we went to bed, Joe and I walked under a sky so devoid of light pollution that the constellations became brilliant in the way the ancients must have seen them. You could imagine how people looked up, found order in this reliable show that felt so near, and thought surely it had to be connected to human events. And by believing in this connection sometimes made it true. (During a financial crisis in the 1990s, a Thai prime minister had his birth date---and astrological sign---officially changed and notified an astrologer. It didn't help.)
Post-lights-out sounds included one of the Korean girls, I think, weeping softly as she returned from a trip to the single WC (about which the less said the better). She seemed unable to locate the Korean encampment and, in the darkened funhouse-like maze, perhaps feared she would climb into someone else's. Joe said he heard someone throw up, probably from the rice wine; I guessed the Scot or the Aussie. Then there was distant snoring, then nothing---until the cock crowed and the dogs began to bark, and it was time for day two.
After a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bread, pineapple and watermelon, the trekkers set off at ten. Some had slept poorly and seemed apprehensive. Brazenly, I lolled about for another hour before my chauffeur arrived. He was an altogether pleasant young man who had not been drinking. I eagerly leapt aboard his motorbike, like Audrey Hepburn behind Gregory Peck in "Roman Holday," except larger. Within an hour, I was at the campsite for the second night. It was a sun-dappled glade by another waterfall with traditional bamboo houses, cool and comfortable, and with bottled water and banana chips to snack on. It was in this exquisite spot where I wrote the words that you just read.
Joe and the rest of the trekking party staggered in around four. They had been reduced in number to seven, not through death or grotesque injury---to my amazement---but because some of the original 14 had opted for a single-night adventure and were now on their way back to Chiang Mai, our Paris. All the trekkers said it had been a hard go. Henry, the Scot, had fallen and hurt his hip. Bo and Lena, the Swedes, were discussing the motorbike option for day three. Joe was soaked with sweat and said I had chosen wisely. I did miss, he said, a hill-tribe hamlet untouched by the modern world (pictures soon). The trekkers happily refreshed themselves under the waterfall as the guides made preparations with a wok and a wood fire for dinner at six.
Our congenial group---Henry and Lika, Bo and Lena, the Aussie Alex (a plumber who traveled half the year), Phillipe, the lifeguard from Lieges, Joe and I---sat at a picnic table that came up to our chins and dined on green curry and a pumpkin stir-fry. The meal had been prepared by the previous night's prep cook (yes), and the pumpkin dish---a few of the ingrediants had been lost along the way---was not up to the standard to which we had become accustomed.
After dinner, we sat by the fire as the temperature began to drop. Then it dropped some more. Then still more. We were high up---5,000 feet? 6,000? So by the time we left our sandals at the door of the trekkers' sleeping house (Thais find wearing shoes in a house disgusting, like walking on the dining-room table) and slipped into our slender sleeping pouches, we knew we were in for a chill. Few slept well, or in some cases at all. The green curry had been busy, so when I made my way at 1:20 a.m. out to the WC (about which the less said the better-II), others soon followed. Flashlight beams sliced through the jungle night as in a film-noir manhunt in a swamp. It was quite beautiful in a Fritz Lang in the tropics kind of way.
[What does it mean that so many of the cultural touchstones I think of for describing the trek are filmic? Probably that my trekking knowledge and experience are limited. But that's not all. Some people come to the East to learn to be contemplative. To me this has mainly meant trying to recall the lyrics to "Mad Dogs and Englishmen (go out in the midday sun.")]
Day three was still rough for the trekkers, but by lunchtime the hard part was over and the pure fun began. On the morning of day one we had had a wonderful elephant ride at a camp for retired logging elephants (see pix). Day three finished up with a one-hour bamboo raft ride---three trekkers and an oarsman to each 30-foot raft---down a fast-moving but altogether agreeable stream, with much splashing and laughter and crashing into other rafts and a few overturnings. Pure Thai sanuk.
Then, an hour later, smelly Chiang Mai looked and smelled good.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Whatevah
Joe is over his bug, our hill trek is set to start tomorrow, and today we set out for the Chiang Mai zoo. It's about four km from the center of town, so we flagged down a red taxi and agreed on a fare of 40 baht. The driver picked up another three passengers along the way, some Thai schoolgirls, then pulled over about halfway to the zoo and announced to us, "No go zoo." We were instructed---with a smile---to climb out. The driver didn't charge us anything. Plainly he had gotten a better deal. Were we incensed? Nope. Mai pen rai.
Mai pen rai means don't bother or never mind. It's a kind of Thai manana (tilda over the first N), isshi negga (Ethiopianists will get this), what the hell, whatevah. It means, these things happen and let's move on as best we can. It's partly a way of adjusting to the daily realities in places where the machinery doesn't hum along as well as it does in Amsterdam. It probably also has elements of Buddhist non-confrontationalism and acceptance of life's vicissitudes.
Mai pen rai crops up a lot. I wrote a long blog post a few days ago that refused to go anywhere. At my request, the Thai kid running the Internet cafe came over to help me. And when he somehow managed to make the whole thing I had written disappear without being posted, he chuckled and suggested I try a different computer. Mai pen rai. Our hotel, the Top North, has an odd system of parceling out rooms. The owners seem to want to keep the place full, so if you show up and they've got an empty room they'll give it to you. And once you're in, you've got squatters' rights. They don't know when Joe and I are leaving and haven't asked. But some people do apparently make reservations and show up expecting a room. I have witnessed some poignant scenes at the front desk. Mai pen rai.
A corralary to mai pen rai is keeping a jai yen. That's a cool heart, meaning even temperament, instead of a jai rawn, a hot heart, meaning hot temperament. To lose your cool in Thailand won't get you anywhere. The Thais just find it embarrassing and start looking for an exit.
Joe and I have adjusted nicely to mai pen rai. He is naturally patient, and I had run into variations of it previously in Peace Corps days and know how to turn it on and off. Also, we're in Southeast Asia for three and half months, so we're in no hurry. Anyway, there's something soothing about being among people where the level of social tension is so low.
Do Thais repress a lot of anger? Probably. They've got their kick-boxing---one Thai a week dies from this sport---and their highway mayhem. The country has the highest road-accident fatality rate in the world. (We've seen entire nuclear families lined up on motor scooters. Joe says it looks like the children are the airbags.) The driving is skillful, but its aggressiveness is not so Buddhist. And a recurrent line in news stories about bus crashes is, "The driver fled the scene." Mai pen rai.
We made it to the zoo---just flagged down another paddy wagon. It should have been a good zoo but it wasn't. Although the animal enclosures were cageless---using moats and spaces to separate the viewees from the viewers---the territories seemed too constricted and the animals were listless. But it was hot and so were we.
In Zimbabwe, seven or eight years ago, Joe and I met a Peace Corps volunteer working in animal preservation. When I told her how thrilling it was to see "zoo" animals out in the wild, she argued that zoos have their uses, too. They educate and sensitize people about the importance of these animals, and then these people support programs like "Save the Elephants." True enough--- though in Chiang Mai we just wanted to save the zoo animals.
Here's more mai pen rai. Problems at the disastrous new Bangkok airport keep piling up. Now it's not just cracks in the taxiways but in the runways, too. I quote from today's Bangkok Post: "Admiral Theera said the cracking was increasing, including those found at the northern end of the eastern runway and the southern end of the western runway. The immediate solution was to advise pilots to avoid cracked areas.... He admitted that dodging the cracks would inconvenience the pilots and that partial closure of the runways to facilitate repairs might be necessary." Meanwhile....
Here's a more reassuring quote about Thailand. In 1923 Somerset Maugham visited Bangkok. He came overland from Rangoon and arrived feverish with malaria. The manager of the Oriental Hotel told Maugham's doctor to get him out of there, as his death in Bangkok's finest hotel was not what the hotel wanted. Maugham survived---for 42 more years---and wrote wonderfully about Bangkok's wats. He could have been writing about Chiang Mai's. This is what we see every day.
"They are unlike anything in the world, so that you are taken aback, and you cannot fit them into the scheme of things you know. It makes you laugh with delight to think that anything so fantastic could exist on this somber earth. They are gorgeous; they glitter with gold and whitewash, yet are not garish; against that vivid sky, in that dazzling sunlight, they hold their own, defying the brilliancy of nature and supplementing it with the ingenuity and the playful boldnesss of man. The artists who developed them step by step from the buildings of the ancient Khmer had the courage to pursue their fantasy to the limit; I fancy that art meant little to them, they desired to express a symbol; they knew no reticence, they cared nothing for good taste; and if they achieved art it is as men achieve happiness, not by pursuing it, but by doing with all their heart whatever in the day's work needs doing."
Mai pen rai means don't bother or never mind. It's a kind of Thai manana (tilda over the first N), isshi negga (Ethiopianists will get this), what the hell, whatevah. It means, these things happen and let's move on as best we can. It's partly a way of adjusting to the daily realities in places where the machinery doesn't hum along as well as it does in Amsterdam. It probably also has elements of Buddhist non-confrontationalism and acceptance of life's vicissitudes.
Mai pen rai crops up a lot. I wrote a long blog post a few days ago that refused to go anywhere. At my request, the Thai kid running the Internet cafe came over to help me. And when he somehow managed to make the whole thing I had written disappear without being posted, he chuckled and suggested I try a different computer. Mai pen rai. Our hotel, the Top North, has an odd system of parceling out rooms. The owners seem to want to keep the place full, so if you show up and they've got an empty room they'll give it to you. And once you're in, you've got squatters' rights. They don't know when Joe and I are leaving and haven't asked. But some people do apparently make reservations and show up expecting a room. I have witnessed some poignant scenes at the front desk. Mai pen rai.
A corralary to mai pen rai is keeping a jai yen. That's a cool heart, meaning even temperament, instead of a jai rawn, a hot heart, meaning hot temperament. To lose your cool in Thailand won't get you anywhere. The Thais just find it embarrassing and start looking for an exit.
Joe and I have adjusted nicely to mai pen rai. He is naturally patient, and I had run into variations of it previously in Peace Corps days and know how to turn it on and off. Also, we're in Southeast Asia for three and half months, so we're in no hurry. Anyway, there's something soothing about being among people where the level of social tension is so low.
Do Thais repress a lot of anger? Probably. They've got their kick-boxing---one Thai a week dies from this sport---and their highway mayhem. The country has the highest road-accident fatality rate in the world. (We've seen entire nuclear families lined up on motor scooters. Joe says it looks like the children are the airbags.) The driving is skillful, but its aggressiveness is not so Buddhist. And a recurrent line in news stories about bus crashes is, "The driver fled the scene." Mai pen rai.
We made it to the zoo---just flagged down another paddy wagon. It should have been a good zoo but it wasn't. Although the animal enclosures were cageless---using moats and spaces to separate the viewees from the viewers---the territories seemed too constricted and the animals were listless. But it was hot and so were we.
In Zimbabwe, seven or eight years ago, Joe and I met a Peace Corps volunteer working in animal preservation. When I told her how thrilling it was to see "zoo" animals out in the wild, she argued that zoos have their uses, too. They educate and sensitize people about the importance of these animals, and then these people support programs like "Save the Elephants." True enough--- though in Chiang Mai we just wanted to save the zoo animals.
Here's more mai pen rai. Problems at the disastrous new Bangkok airport keep piling up. Now it's not just cracks in the taxiways but in the runways, too. I quote from today's Bangkok Post: "Admiral Theera said the cracking was increasing, including those found at the northern end of the eastern runway and the southern end of the western runway. The immediate solution was to advise pilots to avoid cracked areas.... He admitted that dodging the cracks would inconvenience the pilots and that partial closure of the runways to facilitate repairs might be necessary." Meanwhile....
Here's a more reassuring quote about Thailand. In 1923 Somerset Maugham visited Bangkok. He came overland from Rangoon and arrived feverish with malaria. The manager of the Oriental Hotel told Maugham's doctor to get him out of there, as his death in Bangkok's finest hotel was not what the hotel wanted. Maugham survived---for 42 more years---and wrote wonderfully about Bangkok's wats. He could have been writing about Chiang Mai's. This is what we see every day.
"They are unlike anything in the world, so that you are taken aback, and you cannot fit them into the scheme of things you know. It makes you laugh with delight to think that anything so fantastic could exist on this somber earth. They are gorgeous; they glitter with gold and whitewash, yet are not garish; against that vivid sky, in that dazzling sunlight, they hold their own, defying the brilliancy of nature and supplementing it with the ingenuity and the playful boldnesss of man. The artists who developed them step by step from the buildings of the ancient Khmer had the courage to pursue their fantasy to the limit; I fancy that art meant little to them, they desired to express a symbol; they knew no reticence, they cared nothing for good taste; and if they achieved art it is as men achieve happiness, not by pursuing it, but by doing with all their heart whatever in the day's work needs doing."
Monday, January 22, 2007
Toot toot
It is Monday and the hill trek has been postponed. Joe has a stomach bug. He is gobbling Cipro and guzzling fluids, and the situation has already stabilized. He should be fit by tomorrow.
This morning I went down to PM Tours to cancel our participation in the trek. Miss Nu, the nice lady who called me a girl, was there. I told her Joe was ill and we would have to postpone. Mimicing Joe's chief symptom, Miss Nu bent over and asked, "He go toot-toot?" Yes, I said, he has done so, in the night, more than once. And she produced a package of powder for replacing electrolytes. Are there ANY occasions where the Thais employ euphemisms? Not to our knowledge.
Have I spelled electrolytes correctly? Should mimicing have a K in it? Still more mysteries.
Thank you to Sydney Lipez, Barbara Wheaton and Bill Ullman for coming up with sources in the U.S. for galangal root. You're all in for it now!
It's a day of R&R. Joe is lying in the sun by the hotel pool, by the coconut palms (and German ladies smoking French cigarettes), and I'll go join him. A nice way to recover from anything.
One other thing: at lunch today, also by the hotel pool, I overheard a German (I think) woman complaining to her Buddhism teacher that she had come to the East to find wisdom, and she hadn't gotten her money's worth. She was pretty convincing, too.
This morning I went down to PM Tours to cancel our participation in the trek. Miss Nu, the nice lady who called me a girl, was there. I told her Joe was ill and we would have to postpone. Mimicing Joe's chief symptom, Miss Nu bent over and asked, "He go toot-toot?" Yes, I said, he has done so, in the night, more than once. And she produced a package of powder for replacing electrolytes. Are there ANY occasions where the Thais employ euphemisms? Not to our knowledge.
Have I spelled electrolytes correctly? Should mimicing have a K in it? Still more mysteries.
Thank you to Sydney Lipez, Barbara Wheaton and Bill Ullman for coming up with sources in the U.S. for galangal root. You're all in for it now!
It's a day of R&R. Joe is lying in the sun by the hotel pool, by the coconut palms (and German ladies smoking French cigarettes), and I'll go join him. A nice way to recover from anything.
One other thing: at lunch today, also by the hotel pool, I overheard a German (I think) woman complaining to her Buddhism teacher that she had come to the East to find wisdom, and she hadn't gotten her money's worth. She was pretty convincing, too.
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Eat bugs---part 2
Corrections (Joe is looking over my shoulder):
The fish sauce went onto the grasshoppers but not the grubs. Grubs are better crispy. The roach-like thing was a cicada, Joe thinks. He says now we are looking for lightly battered, deep-fried pandas.
In an earlier entry I said 10,000 tourists a day arrive in Thailand. The actual number is 30,000. Ten thousand of them are from the West.
A mystery we are trying to solve: Our health is generally good, but Joe's nose is running and we both have occasional bouts of spaciness. It's not the altitude; Chiang Mai is only about 1,200 feet. Is it the sun? The incense in the air? The green curry soup we have become addicted to? And what about the exhaust from the tuk-tuks, thousands of motorbikes and "red-taxis" (pick-up trucks outfitted like paddy wagons that you flag down to negotiate a fare)? These vehicles seem to have no emission controls, and a kind of black-lung fog hangs over the city like something from a 1950s bad sci-fi flick. Joe just noted the hundreds of farang trustafarians on the streets here---it's a kind of Chiang Mai Summer of Love---and wonders if the atmosphere is a result of a kind of constipated spiritual heat inversion. We invite speculation about this additional mystery of the East.
Joe, who had his excellent all-day curry-making class today, also asks: Does anyone know where fresh galangal-root is available in the US? This is urgent!
Tomorrow (Monday) we head for the hills. More when we return.
The fish sauce went onto the grasshoppers but not the grubs. Grubs are better crispy. The roach-like thing was a cicada, Joe thinks. He says now we are looking for lightly battered, deep-fried pandas.
In an earlier entry I said 10,000 tourists a day arrive in Thailand. The actual number is 30,000. Ten thousand of them are from the West.
A mystery we are trying to solve: Our health is generally good, but Joe's nose is running and we both have occasional bouts of spaciness. It's not the altitude; Chiang Mai is only about 1,200 feet. Is it the sun? The incense in the air? The green curry soup we have become addicted to? And what about the exhaust from the tuk-tuks, thousands of motorbikes and "red-taxis" (pick-up trucks outfitted like paddy wagons that you flag down to negotiate a fare)? These vehicles seem to have no emission controls, and a kind of black-lung fog hangs over the city like something from a 1950s bad sci-fi flick. Joe just noted the hundreds of farang trustafarians on the streets here---it's a kind of Chiang Mai Summer of Love---and wonders if the atmosphere is a result of a kind of constipated spiritual heat inversion. We invite speculation about this additional mystery of the East.
Joe, who had his excellent all-day curry-making class today, also asks: Does anyone know where fresh galangal-root is available in the US? This is urgent!
Tomorrow (Monday) we head for the hills. More when we return.
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Eat bugs
A good farang introduction to Thai life and society is "Thailand Confidential," by former Rolling Stone editor and writer Jerry Hopkins, published by Periplus Books in Singapore. The title and cover are sensational, but Hopkins is sensible, honest and affectionate about the country he moved to and married into 15 years ago, and still doesn't pretend to understand. Hopkins has a chapter urging people to emulate the Northern Thais and include insects in their diets. He points out that cattle-grazing is destroying the rainforests, and almost all the world's soy goes to feeding livestock. Humans who eat bugs are the people of the future.
Yesterday we were ambling around Chiang Mai and came to a fair on the grounds of a wat (temple). Chiang Mai has more wats per capita than any other Thai city, and funds are raised through donations and events like this colorful assemblage of food stalls under the tamirind and frangipani trees behind the whitewashed temple walls. One vendor was selling bugs to eat. We wish to survive on this planet, so we got busy. Among the fried items heaped on platters were grubs, big grasshoppers, little grasshoppers and larger roach-like creatures. We purchased for 30 cents each small bags of grubs and small grasshoppers. The vendor asked if we wanted sauce with our insects, and we said sure. She squirted what turned out to be a soy-fish sauce concoction into each bag. She also provided little sticks for retrieving our snacks.
It's an acquired taste, and we may not acquire it. The grubs were crunchy, like mini-Cheet-Os, except beige instead of irridescent orange and not so salty. The earth-colored grasshoppers were crispy, too, but the predominating flavor was the fish sauce. Fermented fish sauce is a staple here, as it is across SE Asia, and is mostly used sparingly, as a flavor enhancer like salt. It also turns up in Thai salads, often with green mango. I confess that we did not eat all of our bugs, as we do our green mango and especially our green curry soup. (Before we started eating bugs we'd fallen into a culinary rut. For three consecutive days we ate lunch at "MD House---The Delicious Restaurant." There we had the green curry soup with its baby eggplants that are not much bigger than peas and its fresh green peppercorns still on tiny stems. Today Joe is taking a course on cooking Thai curries.)
A local visitors' guide announces: "Chiang Mai (New City), the Northern Capitol of Thailand, (often referred to as the Rose of the North), was founded by King Mengrai at 4 a.m. on the 14th April 1296." My theory---and Poe, who was here for a few days, agrees---is that astrologers came up with this date and time. Thai Buddhism is interesting in the way it accepts modern science unqualifiedly---creationism will not be found in Thai schools---and at the same time incorporates unscientific or even anti-scientific ancient beliefs such as astrology. Poe, a thoroughly modern Thai man, toots his horn three times for good luck when driving past a temple. When the new Bangkok airport was being built (on a cobra swamp), construction problems were endless. A spirit house was built to placate the spirts displaced by the terminal. When problems only got worse, Thai experts were called in. They recommended a larger spirit house. (It didn't work. The airport, which opened in September, is an international embarrassment: cracked taxiways, bad air, overcrowding. The duty-free shops, owned by cronies of deposed Prime Minister Thaksin, take up so much space that a Bangkok Post columnist has called BKK "a department store with air service.")
Yesterday, outside a wat, Joe and I had our palms read. The elderly Thai man doing the forecasting spoke enough English to inform us---Joe first, then me---that we were both destined to be long-lived, healthy and rich. I.e., Americans. He also declared that Joe did not work with his hands. I don't know how he missed all those filings and chunks of metal.
Joe and I remain outside most Buddhist and animist beliefs. However long we stayed, we would always be strangers here. While we subscribe to Buddist ethics---basically Eastern variations on the Golden Rule---the spiritual and mystical aspects are alien to our Western rationalism. Reincarnation, good or bad, won't happen to us. And yet we love being near this way of seeing the world. We went to Wat Prah Singh yesterday while a ceremony of some sort was in progress. (Anyone can enter a temple of this universalist religion; just leave your sandals at the door.) Monks in their orange robes were chanting their monophonic prayers, and it was mesmerizing. Later in the day we rode out to Doi Sutep, a Buddhist shrine atop a mountain six miles northwest of Chiang Mai. A dazzling gold stupa gleamed under the blue sky, and dozens of gold Buddha statues---and a strangely glowing green one---received offerings of incense and lotus blossoms from the many hundreds of pilgrims who had come to this holiest of Chiang Mai's shrines. Doi Sutep was established in the 14th century when a relic of the Buddha miraculously duplicated itself in a town wat. The duplicate was placed atop a white elephant and carried out to Sutep mountain, where the elephant died and a wat was built for the relic. At the central gold stupa, pilgrims walk around the base of the tower touching small bells and chimes as they go, so there's a constant jingling and tinkling, as well as an occasional deep bong from one of the nearby big brass bells being struck. It's all a wonder. And for all my rationality, this charged yet placid spectacle feels far closer to reaching the mysteries of the universe than does a roomful of Presbyterian kids singing "Jesus wants me for a sunbeam," my own long-lost spiritual teachings.
We heard a good monk story. All Thai men are expected to spend a month or two as monks, but they don't always leave the world entirely behind. A young monk approached a tourist (a friend of Candace the caterer). The monk seemed to ask, "Do you have a secret?" Respectfully, the tourist said, "No, it is you who have the secret." Again, the monk asked, "No, no, do you have a secret?" And the tourist again replied, "No, YOU have the secret." Then the monk made himself clear. "No, I am asking, do you have a cigarette?"
Plans: tomorrow we go on a three-day trek in the Karen hills northwest of here. It is said to be quite beautiful, and we asked for a trek that is minimally touristy (as if were were anything but tourists). I asked the travel agent if this trek might be too strenuous for me. She said, "No, there are shortcuts for girls." Afterwards, I asked Joe, "Did she really say there were shorcuts for girls, meaning me?" He had heard it too. We have yet to figure out when it's appropriate to be direct and when to be indirect in conversation with Thais. There is a culture of machismo here that I would have thought precluded a travel agent's calling me a girl---apart from my not be very girlish. But it may have been a simple statement about physical capabilities. Anyway, for a man to be called girlish here is not all bad. Last night we went to a movie at the University of Chiang Mai. (It was Tony Bui's sad, beautiful "Three Seasons," about Vietnam's dispossesed.) Afterwards, an outdoor dance recital we passed that had the audience cheering seemed at first to be lovely young Thai women in traditional costumes performing traditional dances, until we realized that they were in fact lovely young Thai men in traditional dresses. The Thais are entirely comfortable with gender-bending. But on the trek I'll still make a very poor girl.
Yesterday we were ambling around Chiang Mai and came to a fair on the grounds of a wat (temple). Chiang Mai has more wats per capita than any other Thai city, and funds are raised through donations and events like this colorful assemblage of food stalls under the tamirind and frangipani trees behind the whitewashed temple walls. One vendor was selling bugs to eat. We wish to survive on this planet, so we got busy. Among the fried items heaped on platters were grubs, big grasshoppers, little grasshoppers and larger roach-like creatures. We purchased for 30 cents each small bags of grubs and small grasshoppers. The vendor asked if we wanted sauce with our insects, and we said sure. She squirted what turned out to be a soy-fish sauce concoction into each bag. She also provided little sticks for retrieving our snacks.
It's an acquired taste, and we may not acquire it. The grubs were crunchy, like mini-Cheet-Os, except beige instead of irridescent orange and not so salty. The earth-colored grasshoppers were crispy, too, but the predominating flavor was the fish sauce. Fermented fish sauce is a staple here, as it is across SE Asia, and is mostly used sparingly, as a flavor enhancer like salt. It also turns up in Thai salads, often with green mango. I confess that we did not eat all of our bugs, as we do our green mango and especially our green curry soup. (Before we started eating bugs we'd fallen into a culinary rut. For three consecutive days we ate lunch at "MD House---The Delicious Restaurant." There we had the green curry soup with its baby eggplants that are not much bigger than peas and its fresh green peppercorns still on tiny stems. Today Joe is taking a course on cooking Thai curries.)
A local visitors' guide announces: "Chiang Mai (New City), the Northern Capitol of Thailand, (often referred to as the Rose of the North), was founded by King Mengrai at 4 a.m. on the 14th April 1296." My theory---and Poe, who was here for a few days, agrees---is that astrologers came up with this date and time. Thai Buddhism is interesting in the way it accepts modern science unqualifiedly---creationism will not be found in Thai schools---and at the same time incorporates unscientific or even anti-scientific ancient beliefs such as astrology. Poe, a thoroughly modern Thai man, toots his horn three times for good luck when driving past a temple. When the new Bangkok airport was being built (on a cobra swamp), construction problems were endless. A spirit house was built to placate the spirts displaced by the terminal. When problems only got worse, Thai experts were called in. They recommended a larger spirit house. (It didn't work. The airport, which opened in September, is an international embarrassment: cracked taxiways, bad air, overcrowding. The duty-free shops, owned by cronies of deposed Prime Minister Thaksin, take up so much space that a Bangkok Post columnist has called BKK "a department store with air service.")
Yesterday, outside a wat, Joe and I had our palms read. The elderly Thai man doing the forecasting spoke enough English to inform us---Joe first, then me---that we were both destined to be long-lived, healthy and rich. I.e., Americans. He also declared that Joe did not work with his hands. I don't know how he missed all those filings and chunks of metal.
Joe and I remain outside most Buddhist and animist beliefs. However long we stayed, we would always be strangers here. While we subscribe to Buddist ethics---basically Eastern variations on the Golden Rule---the spiritual and mystical aspects are alien to our Western rationalism. Reincarnation, good or bad, won't happen to us. And yet we love being near this way of seeing the world. We went to Wat Prah Singh yesterday while a ceremony of some sort was in progress. (Anyone can enter a temple of this universalist religion; just leave your sandals at the door.) Monks in their orange robes were chanting their monophonic prayers, and it was mesmerizing. Later in the day we rode out to Doi Sutep, a Buddhist shrine atop a mountain six miles northwest of Chiang Mai. A dazzling gold stupa gleamed under the blue sky, and dozens of gold Buddha statues---and a strangely glowing green one---received offerings of incense and lotus blossoms from the many hundreds of pilgrims who had come to this holiest of Chiang Mai's shrines. Doi Sutep was established in the 14th century when a relic of the Buddha miraculously duplicated itself in a town wat. The duplicate was placed atop a white elephant and carried out to Sutep mountain, where the elephant died and a wat was built for the relic. At the central gold stupa, pilgrims walk around the base of the tower touching small bells and chimes as they go, so there's a constant jingling and tinkling, as well as an occasional deep bong from one of the nearby big brass bells being struck. It's all a wonder. And for all my rationality, this charged yet placid spectacle feels far closer to reaching the mysteries of the universe than does a roomful of Presbyterian kids singing "Jesus wants me for a sunbeam," my own long-lost spiritual teachings.
We heard a good monk story. All Thai men are expected to spend a month or two as monks, but they don't always leave the world entirely behind. A young monk approached a tourist (a friend of Candace the caterer). The monk seemed to ask, "Do you have a secret?" Respectfully, the tourist said, "No, it is you who have the secret." Again, the monk asked, "No, no, do you have a secret?" And the tourist again replied, "No, YOU have the secret." Then the monk made himself clear. "No, I am asking, do you have a cigarette?"
Plans: tomorrow we go on a three-day trek in the Karen hills northwest of here. It is said to be quite beautiful, and we asked for a trek that is minimally touristy (as if were were anything but tourists). I asked the travel agent if this trek might be too strenuous for me. She said, "No, there are shortcuts for girls." Afterwards, I asked Joe, "Did she really say there were shorcuts for girls, meaning me?" He had heard it too. We have yet to figure out when it's appropriate to be direct and when to be indirect in conversation with Thais. There is a culture of machismo here that I would have thought precluded a travel agent's calling me a girl---apart from my not be very girlish. But it may have been a simple statement about physical capabilities. Anyway, for a man to be called girlish here is not all bad. Last night we went to a movie at the University of Chiang Mai. (It was Tony Bui's sad, beautiful "Three Seasons," about Vietnam's dispossesed.) Afterwards, an outdoor dance recital we passed that had the audience cheering seemed at first to be lovely young Thai women in traditional costumes performing traditional dances, until we realized that they were in fact lovely young Thai men in traditional dresses. The Thais are entirely comfortable with gender-bending. But on the trek I'll still make a very poor girl.
Friday, January 19, 2007
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Bad and Good Farangs
Farang is the Thai word for Westerner. Unlike "ferenji," in Africa and the Middle East, it carries no overtone of contempt. Which doesn't mean that there aren't any contemptible farangs. There are---we've run into some. A Canadian woman named Patsy at our hotel in Hua Hin hadn't heard that in Thailand it's rude to converse by hollering. Across the hotel pool, beer bottle in hand, it was: "Hey, Joe, whaddaya know!" Some of Patsy's fellow countrymen on the overnight train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai last night were even worse. In the compartment adjacent to ours and the one beyond that were six or so Canadian Hell's Angels (or so we supposed---we didn't check their IDs). That they were Canadian Hell's Angels doesn't mean they were nice Hell's Angels. They were not. When they loudly declared our car a "party car," before our 5:45 pm departure, we knew we were in for it. They had brought along alcohol, ice and a Thai floosie.
To the rescue was an unlikely figure. Around ten o'clock, our compartment mate, Candace, a caterer from Townsend, WA, traveling with her husband Ray, charged next door and demanded that the revelers "Stop it! Stop it now!" Amazingly, they did. Though not before hurling obscenities at her and warning they were going to find out which hotel she was staying at in Chiang Mai and they were going to "get" her. But this was a woman who had catered Seattle weddings---she and Joe had stories---and so for her Hell's Angels were a just another challenge in complex human relations.
Ray and Candace were good fun, and we plan to meet again here in Chiang Mai. It's one of the nice things that happens when you travel second class in remote places. You meet like-minded people who, if you were back home, might become friends. Ray was wary of us at first---Who are these two guys?---but we soon said something insulting about George Bush, and then he relaxed. He said he felt a little guilty about it, but he thought he could never like anybody who supported this man who had hijacked our country from us.
Ray and Candace, in their sixties---he looks like Fred Astaire, she like a bright-eyed Gloria Graham---come to Thailand yearly to enjoy its food, climate and personality, but also for its health-care system. Thailand has no universal system---the poor end up in public hospitals that sound as bad or worse than those in U.S. cities---but for the insured and the middle and upper classes, Thai medical care is superb. And, by US standards, it's cheap. Even with hotels and air fare, Ray and Candace save large sums by flying to Bangkok for annual physical exams and for the care and treatment they need. Ray had a knee replacement and new choppers. Candace had a Botex update.
Second-class travel has its uses, but we learned a lesson today about third class. From the Lonely Planet Guide, we'd picked a "budget" hotel in Chiang Mai---400 baht, about eleven dollars. After checking in, however, we decided "mid-range" better suited our shelter needs---some quiet, minimum sanitation---so tomorrow we'll move to a $23 hotel. It's a shameful betrayal of my world-travel roots---"We're the Peace Corps! We ride with the people!"---but there will opportunities to rough it in Cambodia. So for now the hell with that.
Chiang Mai was Thailand's eleventh century capital. Now it's a university and tourism center. From here, tourists arrange treks, visits to the Mon and other "hill tribes," and they take cooking classes. Joe plans on taking a Thai cooking class and maybe a multi-day trek while I write. We also plan on connecting with Sasha Alyson---of Alsyson Publications renown---who lives in Chiang Mai and is helping some Laotians set up the first Laotian publishing house over in Luang Prabang. Sasha gets back from Laos next week. Around the same time we'll meet Mo Tejani, a Peace Corps old boy who was sent here by the US Government in the late '70s and discovered that Thailand was where he belonged. We found Mo through John Coyne---the Peace Corps center of the universe---and I was charmed and moved by his memoir "A Chameleon Life," about Mo's Muslim Indian family's expulsion from Idi Amin's Uganda in the early 1970s and his search for a safe home in the world.
We are happy and well and pleasurably over-stimulated. Joe has taken wonderful photos, and he is trying to figure out a way to get some onto this blog. Your eyes will pop.
Dick
To the rescue was an unlikely figure. Around ten o'clock, our compartment mate, Candace, a caterer from Townsend, WA, traveling with her husband Ray, charged next door and demanded that the revelers "Stop it! Stop it now!" Amazingly, they did. Though not before hurling obscenities at her and warning they were going to find out which hotel she was staying at in Chiang Mai and they were going to "get" her. But this was a woman who had catered Seattle weddings---she and Joe had stories---and so for her Hell's Angels were a just another challenge in complex human relations.
Ray and Candace were good fun, and we plan to meet again here in Chiang Mai. It's one of the nice things that happens when you travel second class in remote places. You meet like-minded people who, if you were back home, might become friends. Ray was wary of us at first---Who are these two guys?---but we soon said something insulting about George Bush, and then he relaxed. He said he felt a little guilty about it, but he thought he could never like anybody who supported this man who had hijacked our country from us.
Ray and Candace, in their sixties---he looks like Fred Astaire, she like a bright-eyed Gloria Graham---come to Thailand yearly to enjoy its food, climate and personality, but also for its health-care system. Thailand has no universal system---the poor end up in public hospitals that sound as bad or worse than those in U.S. cities---but for the insured and the middle and upper classes, Thai medical care is superb. And, by US standards, it's cheap. Even with hotels and air fare, Ray and Candace save large sums by flying to Bangkok for annual physical exams and for the care and treatment they need. Ray had a knee replacement and new choppers. Candace had a Botex update.
Second-class travel has its uses, but we learned a lesson today about third class. From the Lonely Planet Guide, we'd picked a "budget" hotel in Chiang Mai---400 baht, about eleven dollars. After checking in, however, we decided "mid-range" better suited our shelter needs---some quiet, minimum sanitation---so tomorrow we'll move to a $23 hotel. It's a shameful betrayal of my world-travel roots---"We're the Peace Corps! We ride with the people!"---but there will opportunities to rough it in Cambodia. So for now the hell with that.
Chiang Mai was Thailand's eleventh century capital. Now it's a university and tourism center. From here, tourists arrange treks, visits to the Mon and other "hill tribes," and they take cooking classes. Joe plans on taking a Thai cooking class and maybe a multi-day trek while I write. We also plan on connecting with Sasha Alyson---of Alsyson Publications renown---who lives in Chiang Mai and is helping some Laotians set up the first Laotian publishing house over in Luang Prabang. Sasha gets back from Laos next week. Around the same time we'll meet Mo Tejani, a Peace Corps old boy who was sent here by the US Government in the late '70s and discovered that Thailand was where he belonged. We found Mo through John Coyne---the Peace Corps center of the universe---and I was charmed and moved by his memoir "A Chameleon Life," about Mo's Muslim Indian family's expulsion from Idi Amin's Uganda in the early 1970s and his search for a safe home in the world.
We are happy and well and pleasurably over-stimulated. Joe has taken wonderful photos, and he is trying to figure out a way to get some onto this blog. Your eyes will pop.
Dick
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Tourists---Dick, Jan. 14
We were under no illusions when we planned a three and a half month trip to Southeast Asia---a nanosecond in these cultures---that we would ever be anything but tourists. We're especially aware of being tourists in Hua Hin, because it is a tourist town. It's Playa del Carmen with Thai flavor: high-rise hotels along the Gulf of Thailand's wide, white beachs, "spirit houses" at the entrance to each hotel to placate the natural spirits displaced when the buildings went up; open-air markets with food and souvenir stands, except instead of burritos and Mayan pots, it's coconut balls with sweet corn in the middle, gold-Buddha images and portraits of the Thais' beloved King Bhumibol, the jazz-playing monarch who has held Thailand together for 60 years as parliaments and military regimes have come and gone; daily sunshine and a post-sunset aubergine afterglow, but with no cold fronts to move in and send tourists looking for sweaters, for here we are so close to the equator that it's always warm, or bloody hot.
Tourism is Thailand's chief hard currency earner. Ten thousand tourists arrive every day. Most are from East Asia---China, Korea, Japan. The others are mainly from Northern Europe. In Hua Hin (pronounced Wah-Heen), Scandinavians are in the tourist majority. They congregate mainly in the restaurants that advertise "Europen food," and they appear happy and well fed. The appearance and manner of the ladies on the beach at the Sofitel has led us to rename it the SophieTuckerTel. We walked through the lobby of the Marriott. The place is a Disneyfied version of Thailand. You expect to hear "It's a Small World, After All" come tinkling out of the ceilings.
We're staying at a smaller Thai-family-run hotel, the Subhamitra, three blocks from the beach. It is pleasant and has a nice pool and costs $22 US a night. The foreign-owned beach hotels cost 10 times that amount. We have alternately walked about and lolled about, always looking forward (a Wheaton trait I have picked up) to the next meal. Yesterday we had for lunch a green curry soup so exquisite that we went back and had it again for dinner.
Our sight-seeing in Hua Hin has included a visit to a mangrove swamp in a national park. Poe drove us out there last week. It's a demonstration project by the government to show the environmental necessity of these filtering systems. Poe was appalled when we got there to find that the swamp next to the park had been drained by developers. It's the ongoing Florida-ization of Thailand, and a price will be paid. (In the late '70s, unrestricted logging led to floods in Thailand that killed tens of thousands; logging was halted way too belatedly.)
Yesterday we hired a tuk-tuk---a big, motorized, filth-belching rickshaw---and went out to the "monkey mountain" just before sunset. This is a high hill on the outskirts of town topped by a Buddhist shrine and inhabited by (a) rather enervated gray monkeys and (b) vendors.
Nothing in Thailand seems to have gone unexploited for the tourist dollar. I'm reading Ian Buruma's keen and flavorsome "God's Dust," reportage on East and SE Asia in the late '80s. He was here during the government's Year of the Tourist, when Thais were instructed to "smile a while." Every conceivable feature of Thai life was seen as a potential tourist attraction---temples, ceremonies, holidays. When the old walled city of Chiang Mai began drawing visitors, other walled towns were urged to put up hotels and restaurants. One town constructed a fake wall.
The Hua Hin locals always hope their favorite haunts won't be discovered by the tourists. Poe and Simon took us to a restaurant outside of town that was down a dark, dusty road between a canal and the railway line. I asked, "Have you brought us out here to murder us?" Soon, however, we parked and crossed a rickety foot bridge over the canal to a delightful assemblage of small, open-sided thatched huts. Each dining party had its own hut. Highlights: fried morning glory vines (nobody's morning glories will be safe when Joe and I get back to the Berkshires) and a luscious duck-pattie salad.
Tomorrow we'll have been in Bin Hua for a week, and we'll head north. This has been a perfect place to regroup from jet lag and from our five days in Bangkok of temples and the strains and pleasures of Thai city life. We'll take a morning bus to Bangkok, then the overnight train to Chiang Mai. (Yesterday a bad train crash near Hua Bin killed three and injured many. Simon advised us to take a car near the center of our train, in case it is struck from either the front or the rear. Poe is always bemused by these farang-to-farang admonitions. More on these two lovely people later.)
Tourism is Thailand's chief hard currency earner. Ten thousand tourists arrive every day. Most are from East Asia---China, Korea, Japan. The others are mainly from Northern Europe. In Hua Hin (pronounced Wah-Heen), Scandinavians are in the tourist majority. They congregate mainly in the restaurants that advertise "Europen food," and they appear happy and well fed. The appearance and manner of the ladies on the beach at the Sofitel has led us to rename it the SophieTuckerTel. We walked through the lobby of the Marriott. The place is a Disneyfied version of Thailand. You expect to hear "It's a Small World, After All" come tinkling out of the ceilings.
We're staying at a smaller Thai-family-run hotel, the Subhamitra, three blocks from the beach. It is pleasant and has a nice pool and costs $22 US a night. The foreign-owned beach hotels cost 10 times that amount. We have alternately walked about and lolled about, always looking forward (a Wheaton trait I have picked up) to the next meal. Yesterday we had for lunch a green curry soup so exquisite that we went back and had it again for dinner.
Our sight-seeing in Hua Hin has included a visit to a mangrove swamp in a national park. Poe drove us out there last week. It's a demonstration project by the government to show the environmental necessity of these filtering systems. Poe was appalled when we got there to find that the swamp next to the park had been drained by developers. It's the ongoing Florida-ization of Thailand, and a price will be paid. (In the late '70s, unrestricted logging led to floods in Thailand that killed tens of thousands; logging was halted way too belatedly.)
Yesterday we hired a tuk-tuk---a big, motorized, filth-belching rickshaw---and went out to the "monkey mountain" just before sunset. This is a high hill on the outskirts of town topped by a Buddhist shrine and inhabited by (a) rather enervated gray monkeys and (b) vendors.
Nothing in Thailand seems to have gone unexploited for the tourist dollar. I'm reading Ian Buruma's keen and flavorsome "God's Dust," reportage on East and SE Asia in the late '80s. He was here during the government's Year of the Tourist, when Thais were instructed to "smile a while." Every conceivable feature of Thai life was seen as a potential tourist attraction---temples, ceremonies, holidays. When the old walled city of Chiang Mai began drawing visitors, other walled towns were urged to put up hotels and restaurants. One town constructed a fake wall.
The Hua Hin locals always hope their favorite haunts won't be discovered by the tourists. Poe and Simon took us to a restaurant outside of town that was down a dark, dusty road between a canal and the railway line. I asked, "Have you brought us out here to murder us?" Soon, however, we parked and crossed a rickety foot bridge over the canal to a delightful assemblage of small, open-sided thatched huts. Each dining party had its own hut. Highlights: fried morning glory vines (nobody's morning glories will be safe when Joe and I get back to the Berkshires) and a luscious duck-pattie salad.
Tomorrow we'll have been in Bin Hua for a week, and we'll head north. This has been a perfect place to regroup from jet lag and from our five days in Bangkok of temples and the strains and pleasures of Thai city life. We'll take a morning bus to Bangkok, then the overnight train to Chiang Mai. (Yesterday a bad train crash near Hua Bin killed three and injured many. Simon advised us to take a car near the center of our train, in case it is struck from either the front or the rear. Poe is always bemused by these farang-to-farang admonitions. More on these two lovely people later.)
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Saturday Wha Hin - Joe
The food in Thailand seems to express all that the Thais keep subdued under their cool and gentle exteriors. Brash and complex with texture and color, it is varied and evocative of a world that seems thousands of years deep. It beckons you to come in further, and before long you begin to imagine, if they like it, why you shouldn't give it a try? The swallow saliva beverage, good for your skin. After all, why, with all the tasty choices they have would they waste a snack? Made from unsuspecting swallow nests and rock sugar, it was not in fact gross, but like so much else curious. Spent an afternoon at the local market with our friend Poe who wanted to give me a cooking lesson in his home. What an extrodinary experience. There was nothing harried about the experience. We bought some flowers, some green curry paste (unlike Indian pastes, Thai pastes are made from fresh ingredients pounded in a mortar and pestle), fish sauce and a plastic bag filled with some home made chili paste. We bought vegetables: grape sized eggplants, plumb sized eggplants, garlic cloves the size of peas, kaffir lime leaves, galangal root, lemon grass, sweet basil and lemon basil, kale, limes, coconut milk, beautiful prawns and tiny clams and some pork and chicken. All this for under $10. Back at Poe's around 5:00 pm we sit out doors on a straw mat on the deck and prep the vegies for the meal. I take orders and before you know it we are actually putting the meal together. In about 30 minutes he has created 5 dishes all tasty and distinct. The four of us each take a portion of rice and then 1 spoonful of an item at a time, and we devour all the food. Dinner is followed by some local pineapple, white and sweet, developed by the king who has a summer palace here. Next 2 kinds of custard, one coconut and one with palm sugar. The most memorable thing of all was plain sliced papaya with sticky rice. Stop what you are doing and have this combination immediately. Yum, everything is in tiny portions by American standards.
In Bangkok we were zipping up the Chaia Phrya river in a long tail boat and bobbing past us were clumps of water hyacinth. To me they seemed like fellow travelers looking for a place to get caught up and perhaps put down shoots. So for now we must bob on. More later.
Joe
In Bangkok we were zipping up the Chaia Phrya river in a long tail boat and bobbing past us were clumps of water hyacinth. To me they seemed like fellow travelers looking for a place to get caught up and perhaps put down shoots. So for now we must bob on. More later.
Joe
Thursday, January 11, 2007
First entry continued
I was talking about the food and then went off to eat some. We just had lunch at Poe and Simon's house south of town. It's a gorgeous Bauhaus job, open and airy, with tropical trees and flowers climbing in and out of its many openings. More on them later.
Back to Bangkok: Joe will talk a lot about food, so I'll just say that the culinary highlights so far have been the deep-fried watercress and the luscious soups---including tom kah gai (coconut and lime chicken soup) made with actual fresh galanga root that is unavailable in the US. Oddest delicious dish: fried morning glory vines. Worst culinary idea we've heard about but haven't tried yet: bird saliva soup.
Politics: We're trying to decipher this. The September military coup that ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was popular at the time---he's a crook, apparently---though the new year's eve bombings in Bangkok that killed two and injured dozens have caused a loss of confidence in the new military-backed government. Shinawatra supporters are believed to be behind the attacks. Today's Bangkok Post reports on a poll that says 64 percent of Thais are "furious" with the bombers. Two political certainties: the king, on the throne for 60 years, is revered; the crown prince is not. Stay tuned.
About you-may-be-wondering: Yes, Bangkok is the sex tourism capital of the world. It's quite a spectacle. While Thais apparently employ sexual intercourse for purposes of procreation, sex here is mainly one of the higher forms of play. And Thais love play---"sanuk." The poor pope would fall over dead. This sounds and is refreshing, but the resulting commercial aspects of unfraught sexuality are unnerving. Child prostitution is rare here and severely punished, but at 18 and over it's anything goes. We visited the renowned Patpong district of Bangkok, where bar girls fire ping pong balls from between their legs at cheering audiences and are readily available for hire after the show. Joe and I chose, however, a venue called Dream Boys and took in what the Thais, with customary elegant simplicity, call a "fuck show." Let me just say that in the annals of gay low spectacle---Provincetown, eat your heart out!---this "choreographed" multi-actor performance achieved a kind of hilarious majesty I had not dreamed possible. And Andrew Lloyd Webber's music has finally found the venue for which I believe it has long been destined.
Back to Bangkok: Joe will talk a lot about food, so I'll just say that the culinary highlights so far have been the deep-fried watercress and the luscious soups---including tom kah gai (coconut and lime chicken soup) made with actual fresh galanga root that is unavailable in the US. Oddest delicious dish: fried morning glory vines. Worst culinary idea we've heard about but haven't tried yet: bird saliva soup.
Politics: We're trying to decipher this. The September military coup that ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was popular at the time---he's a crook, apparently---though the new year's eve bombings in Bangkok that killed two and injured dozens have caused a loss of confidence in the new military-backed government. Shinawatra supporters are believed to be behind the attacks. Today's Bangkok Post reports on a poll that says 64 percent of Thais are "furious" with the bombers. Two political certainties: the king, on the throne for 60 years, is revered; the crown prince is not. Stay tuned.
About you-may-be-wondering: Yes, Bangkok is the sex tourism capital of the world. It's quite a spectacle. While Thais apparently employ sexual intercourse for purposes of procreation, sex here is mainly one of the higher forms of play. And Thais love play---"sanuk." The poor pope would fall over dead. This sounds and is refreshing, but the resulting commercial aspects of unfraught sexuality are unnerving. Child prostitution is rare here and severely punished, but at 18 and over it's anything goes. We visited the renowned Patpong district of Bangkok, where bar girls fire ping pong balls from between their legs at cheering audiences and are readily available for hire after the show. Joe and I chose, however, a venue called Dream Boys and took in what the Thais, with customary elegant simplicity, call a "fuck show." Let me just say that in the annals of gay low spectacle---Provincetown, eat your heart out!---this "choreographed" multi-actor performance achieved a kind of hilarious majesty I had not dreamed possible. And Andrew Lloyd Webber's music has finally found the venue for which I believe it has long been destined.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Auspicious hermit outside temple at the Grand Palace
It seemed right that getting to the other side of the world we followed a route that an astronaut might take. After the Tuesday night commuter flight down from Logan, our Korean Air 777 hurtled off the JFK runway at 1 am Wednesday, banked to the northwest, and just kept going. Over the Adirondacks, Toronto, the Canadian plains and Rockies, Alaska, the Bering Straits. Then south over western Siberia, much of China, and into Seoul 14 hours, two meals and one ambien after leaving New York. The entire ride was in darkness. January 3 was a black hole. The only things visible out the plane window were the moonlit snowy mountains of Russia. We could have been Chill Wills in Dr. Strangelove. We landed in Seoul at five Thursday morning. Wednesday had happened to other people farther south.
A word on Korean Airlines: it is excellent. The cabin crew are lithe, self-possesed Korean women in shades of pale green, with stiff pretty ribbons sticking up from their heads, like J.J. Newberry Easter baskets. Before beginning their food and other services, they bowed in unison to the passengers. It's a phenomenon we had not encountered on Delta, or on Southwest out of Hartford.
During the 12-hour layover in Seoul, we took a guided tour of the Incheon harbor area near the airport. It's not one of the garden spots. But the young woman who led us and 6 or 8 other tired travelers on and off a Hertz van was cheerful, and good at keeping us awake without actually swatting us with pine boughs. It was 50 degrees in Incheon, as we stopped and peered at a fish market, then an "unspoiled" beach, then a small Buddhist temple said to be quite old. We sampled some Korean pumpkin candy.
The five-hour flight to Bangkok felt long, because we were so eager to GET THERE. By the time we landed at 9 Thursday night, we had been traveling for over 36 hours. So as we emerged from Thai immigration, we were plenty thrilled to see a man holding a sign reading "Richard%2
A word on Korean Airlines: it is excellent. The cabin crew are lithe, self-possesed Korean women in shades of pale green, with stiff pretty ribbons sticking up from their heads, like J.J. Newberry Easter baskets. Before beginning their food and other services, they bowed in unison to the passengers. It's a phenomenon we had not encountered on Delta, or on Southwest out of Hartford.
During the 12-hour layover in Seoul, we took a guided tour of the Incheon harbor area near the airport. It's not one of the garden spots. But the young woman who led us and 6 or 8 other tired travelers on and off a Hertz van was cheerful, and good at keeping us awake without actually swatting us with pine boughs. It was 50 degrees in Incheon, as we stopped and peered at a fish market, then an "unspoiled" beach, then a small Buddhist temple said to be quite old. We sampled some Korean pumpkin candy.
The five-hour flight to Bangkok felt long, because we were so eager to GET THERE. By the time we landed at 9 Thursday night, we had been traveling for over 36 hours. So as we emerged from Thai immigration, we were plenty thrilled to see a man holding a sign reading "Richard%2
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