Monthly Archives: January 2013

It is my birthday and I am on a bus ride from Chiang Rai. These past two days have been spent on the move. It will be interesting to see how we react to Laos (lazy people, a Singaporean backpacker told us yesterday), as both of us timed out of slow paced country life in 2.5 days in Tha Ton.

Yesterday, we awoke early and took a boat trip on the Maekok River with The Expat Family and visited two hill tribe villages. I was a bit full of myself because I’d booked the tour with the boat folks directly, rather than with a tour guide or guest house, saving us thousands of baht and the annoying distraction of a guide. We motorboated on a long-tail boat away from Tha Ton for approximately one hour, hiked around a Lahu village for an hour, got back on the boat for 20 minutes, then hiked up a hill to an Ahka village for an hour, then took the boat the remaining 40 minutes back to our hotels.

Here are the highlights of the trip from my perspective:
– seeing Ms. Expat Teacher grinning with delight at the positively chilly temperatures of the morning boat ride.
– enjoying the relatively non-exploitive nature of our visit. Certain tribes – I am sure the Professor will blog about this – are basically coerced to remain in their villages for the tourist trade. On our visit, it was clear that the men were all out farming or fishing, that the women were engaged in their usual occupations, nobody was wearing their traditional dress (which is gorgeous but no longer everyday wear), and the place had certainly not been cleaned up for us. The Lahu women did want to sell us handicrafts, and I happily bought a few and paid full price – one woman was so happy about that that I felt conflicting emotions for bringing such joy with $3.30. But people just smiled and waved at the Akha village, except for the old woman who showed us the hilltop church,which she assumed we had come to see.
– I actually did like seeing the church. It looked like a missionary’s fantasy, and probably was. Its walls were bamboo slats. The roof was corrugated tin. A pretty but ragged multicolored cloth star and flags decorated the outside, along with the wooden cross. The inside looked cool and dimly but warmly lit from the sunlight peeking through the slats. There were plank benches, a dirt floor, neat stacks of books and other religious paraphernalia. Outside, there was a spectacular view of the river valley, the farmland and the mountains beyond. Sad I didn’t see the gates that are supposed to accompany such villages, though – they apparently have human figurines with exaggerated sexual symbols to deter spirits from entering the village. Perhaps this village was fully converted, or we didn’t look in the right place. Oh well- I suppose we would have seen it were we meant to.
– We DID see an orchard of rubber trees, though! It was so neat, each tree had a cut and a little chute in it, like those used for maple sugaring, with a black rubber bowl below catching the white gluey goop. Such orchards in SE Asia, by the way, caused the collapse of the rubber boom in the Amazon. The trees originated there but then were smuggled out so rubber could be acquired more cheaply.
– Also, we saw bamboo forests. Can’t wait to get in one. So beautiful.
– our boatman, Doh, who seemed like a stand up guy, and who waited patiently for us while we hiked and explored.
– people who fish the river by dumping a lot of rocks in their boats. Can’t figure out what they are trying to get, yet.

Professor: and we saw a spider nearly the size of The Private Eye’s head!

After our boat ride, we said au revoir to the Expat Family. We had a wonderful lunch at our guest house, Garden Home. (btw, much better food, much better atmosphere than anywhere else we ate in Tha Ton.) We caught a bus to Mae Chan and had a lovely conversation with a Singaporean hippy backpacker. We caught a passenger pick up truck to Chiang Rai, and had a lovely conversation with a Chinese geek backpacker. I am going to send them both postcards from the states; the Chinese fellow’s address is a bit terrifying in its level of detail and what that represents.

We weren’t even 24 hours in Chiang Rai. But that’s ok, as we got a lot out of it, including a very educational visit to a hill tribe museum, a delicious dinner at a hot pot place in what looked like a garage, a flower show of wonder, and an actual laundromat.

– The Private Eye

PS – one more way Burning Man is like SE Asia: the long driveway of Wat Tha Ton is lined with humorous philosophical sayings.

The lucky, lucky Thai. I had thought San Francisco was lucky – New Year celebrations full of dancing to great beats all night long, followed by Chinese New Year (parades, downtown treasure hunts, and dancing all night long in Year of the X masks). But the Thai apparently celebrate three or more New Years, the former two followed by their own in April.

We spent the earlier part of our Eve biking around the city and chatting with a monk at a wat. The temple sponsors these free monk chats as a way to help the monks practice their foreign language skills. The one we talked with appeared quite young. He had been a monk for six years, was from Laos, spoke reasonably good English, and was interested in American football – there, I am afraid we failed him, though he seemed to like hearing about San Francisco. For our part, we asked him a good deal about philosophy that was a bit difficult in translation, and then I asked him about the life of the Buddha. I had actually never read the whole story of the life of the Buddha, and I doubt I could have picked a better way to learn it. We missed a lot of the detail, but then, 47 years of adventures spreading his message after his enlightenment is a long time to accumulate stories! I will not forget the way the saffron robed young man told us he did not know how long he would be a monk (all is impermanent), or how he rolled his eyes when he searched for the words to tell us that the prince had never seen old people, sick people, dead people or monks until he left his palace that fateful day.

Later, the Professor and I parted for a bit, so he could explore some more and I could chill out with a book. It was then that I made the discovery of the ladder to the roof of our guest house. I climbed over a guard rail blocking a door-way to nowhere on the fourth floor, up the ladder onto the roof, and watched the sunset over the western hills and the golden needle of a chedi lose its glow as the light receded.

The Professor returned in a state of excitement. It was awesome out there, he said, and I should come as soon as I could.

I cleaned up and donned as practical and sexy an outfit as I could muster – backless black tank top with a halter front and some drape, baggy cream colored insect repellent pants, black sneakers, blue glow in the dark necklace, big eye makeup, spiky hair, head lamp. Sexy is a bit hard on a backpacker wardrobe, which consists mainly of clothing appropriate for either church or hiking.

We went out into the night and it was in fact awesome. Chiang Mai was hosting a big open-air market and celebration at Thae Pae Gate, the eastern gate of the Old City and just steps for our guest house. While people could drink in bars and restaurants lining the road, the streets and sidewalks and plazas were booze-free by decree ( “Chiang Mai 2013 celebration: Be Happy without Alcohol!”), so the scene was not at all sloppy. People were already lighting up beautiful floating paper lanterns and launching them into the sky, and it was only 6:30 pm or so.

We walked around the market and ate wonderful food, dumplings and fried fish and cake. We then returned to the Cocktail Cycle and spent a happy few hours talking to fellow travelers, such as Chloe and Graham on our left and Lisa and Tom on our right, who both turned out to be from the same town in the UK but had never met before. The former were were traveling for a year following Graham’s completion of military service, living and working their way around the world. Then those four left to eat and play the game of do-you-know, and we were joined by the couple from Toronto we had met the other day. We enjoyed a drink with them and they told us that you can purchase the flying lanterns to release yourself.

The idea was irresistible. We bought a pretty light blue lantern for 35 baht, and borrowed a lighter from a Japanese couple who were very startled and pleased when I sumimasen-ed them. (“excuse me”). Our lantern slowly inflated, a Thai man told us ok, we held it above our heads and wished our quick wishes, then released it… And it rose, was blown by the wind, and got caught on the branches of a tree. It was only tenuously caught, but it remained there for a few seconds, and I was worried.

But the same Japanese man who lent us the lighter went and shook the tree, and it went whimsically off into the sky with all its fellows. And who should we run into but Henry and Katherine, the young Malaysian-Australian couple we had searched for a room with the day before! Katherine told us that the purpose of lighting the balloons is to send off the bad things of the prior year, and so I hoped our balloon was prophetic – that though we would have trouble releasing our sorrows, we would have help, and we would ultimately soar. I am not complaining about our lives, which are both fortunate and happy, but we have struggles as all people do.

We talked with them for a while and had some delicious roti, and then I proposed that we all climb on the roof of our guest house to watch the lanterns and the fireworks. As I climbed off the ladder and on to the roof, I emerged just below a converging stream of lanterns. Launched by various celebration points around the city, they flowed into the sky and were brought by the prevailing wind into a mighty river of light. Punctuating this river were fireworks, some of them almost directly over our heads.

This is where we were at midnight. As The Professor said, it was the most beautiful New Years we had ever seen, and perhaps our happiest one since 2008.

Occasionally, we could see a burnt-out lantern in the sky, grey but still glowing in the moon-light and the city-light. They continued to flow on the currents of air, but in strange shapes as the wind pushed them, now a fish, now a fortune cookie.

We climbed down the ladder and were inside just before one of our landladies, a sweet pair of Japanese women, came up the stairs on a round. We wished each other a very happy New Year!

We parted ways with Henry and Katherine and went on a bike ride, looking for fun. Despite asserting my direction sense, which is usually good!, I brought us east instead of west, through a mass of traffic and exploding street level fireworks, to a cool bus-bar and finally, by accident, to the only trance club in town. As elsewhere, New Years is a cheesy night on the dance floor, though, so we danced to electro pop for 45 minutes and then called our evening a success.

Happy New Year to all of you!

– The Private Eye