This isn’t a crash-course in language. This is a roving tour of favored quotes from my eight weeks in Thailand.
“Thanks for getting that snake out of the bungalow last night.”
Jace heard something chewing, and got out of bed in the middle of the night to patrol. He had to cross the whole room to get to the light switch, and only after he’d flipped it on did he see the snake on the floor—a small, black snake that arched up from the floorboards near his feet. He shoved his camera bag between the snake and his feet just before it lunged, biting at the bag several times. He opened the door and used a mat to nudge it outside.
The consensus seems to be that it was a baby cobra. We continued to get thumb-sized cockroaches, but that was the snake’s only appearance. Perhaps they battled it out.
“Do you think those are children, or monkeys, we’re listening to?”
From high up on the face of Thaiwand Wall, so named because it’s pillar-like structure defines the skyline like the Eigerwand does in the Alps, you can still hear cries, almost a siren-woop and half laugh or sob. The jungle is full of sounds I can’t name from animals I don’t recognize, and I’ve never managed to match this sound to a living thing. It’s a bit maddening, to know it’s all out there and I have no idea what any of it is.
“Do you need help getting the vines off?”
Leo was climbing up and over the edge of the cliff on an often-neglected face of Diamond Cave. It was the last climb on the face, and the jungle had taken over the wall next to it. So when Leo missed a move high up and peeled off the wall, he crashed into the tree. When he swung from the branches back onto the wall, he was so wrapped in vines and covered in leaves that it looked like I was belaying a bush.
He began a slow, calm speech in Italian, those rising and falling tones and arching vowels dropping softly. Angelo, who was beside me belaying Joe, began to laugh.
“What? What?” I asked.
“He’s talking to God,” Angelo replied. “You know the whole God-dog thing...”
This is, apparently a common exchange among angry Italians. Leo hung there and picked the vines and leaves off himself before finishing the climb.
“So for the next move, you turn around and reach out onto that stalactite.”
There are plenty of climbs that involve holds on stalactites. Hand holds or ways to brace between the rock and the stalactite and get a rest, or options to step away from the wall and onto the stalactite, stemming, as they say. But there’s a route on the Tonsai beach that takes the cake. It involves climbing up onto a ledge, turning around and putting you back to the wall, then reaching out with both hands and grabbing bulgy holds on either side of a stalactite that’s just barely within reach.
I was stretched out in a cartoon character’s move, waiting for a piano or an elephant to drop on my back. Then quickly moved a foot over and climbed up the stalactite, and turned back around to finish the climb on the wall. It was unreal.
“Do you have enough gas to make it to the embassy?”
It sounds a little post-apocalyptic, World War III-ish, until you connect it to the reality that when you rent a motorbike, it comes with an empty gas tank. And that we were only heading to the embassy to drop off my application for my visa to India.
“Dude, I think she’s kicking your ass.” “I think she’s been kicking my ass the last couple days.”
Yeah, this is an ego builder for me. I’ll spare the parties involved, but let’s just say my crimp technique is coming along nicely.
“A ripe mango… The gods don’t eat better than that.”
Among all our laments for the food we encountered in the Thai countryside—chicken foot soup, guts stew, fried liver and possibly fried chicken hearts—we took a moment for homage to the best of the best. With three mango seasons a year, there is almost always a ripe mango to be found. And for this, we are thankful.
“We’ll have the garlic and onion frog.”
I’m not sure there’s a really great way to have frog, that it matters if it’s garlic and onion and not curry powdered, because the flavor is basically irrelevant when you bite down and everything in your mouth crunches. You take another look at a similar piece and realize, yeah, that was the rib cage. I’d recommend the legs over the rib cage any day. Far easier to separate the meat from the bone there.
“Traveling through Southeast Asia is a bit like playing chess in an earthquake. You could plan your moves out, but there’s no guarantee the pieces will be in the same place when you come back for them.”
I’ll get the hang of it sooner or later. Probably later.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Two nights in Bangkok
I woke up in Bangkok after taking a night train from Chiang Mai to one of the train porter opening the curtain to my berth and saying, “Sorry! Will arrive in Bangkok in 17 minutes.” Which was long enough to change clothes, brush teeth, repack and be waiting as the train pulled into the station.
It was a gray, drizzly morning, which goes well with gray, gritty Bangkok. At a quarter after 7am, little is open to provide a map, but I was hot and sticky, sweating in five minutes, so I caved and took a tuktuk to Khao San Road, backpacker central. Khao San Road in the early morning hours looked like the leftovers of a lengthy frat party. The streets were piled with garbage and there were people already—or perhaps still—drinking beers. Rats the size of bunnies bounded over the refuse. Homeless-looking backpackers shuffled down the streets in small herds. They looked other worldly, or every worldly, dressed in their amalgamations of clothes gathered from various street vendors.
I took a place on a side street off Khao San, still close to the chaos but stepped back a bit from it. It was a little more expensive than I’d been looking for, but a lot of the cheaper guest houses were booked, and this one had a rooftop swimming pool, which was my first stop after checking in. The post-hangover crowd hadn’t yet started gathering there, so I had the deck almost to myself to do some yoga and the pool near empty for swimming laps.
By noon, vendors were filling up Khao San with cheap t-shirts and sandals, carts to sell fried noodles and chopped pineapple, mango, and papaya. And the hustlers were out. In the first half hour I spent on the street, I heard most of the scams listed in the Lonely Planet guidebook.
I spent a few hours paying visits to some of the temples, passing by the Grand Palace in favor of seeing the Reclining Buddha, so big the temple that houses him, Wat Phra Chetuphon, must have been built around him. Temples in Bangkok are noisy, busy places, but each has a unique set of sounds. In Wat Phra Chetuphon, a row of 108 bowls line a wall, and for 20 bhat you get 108 coins and drop one in each of them, so the temple is perpetually ringing with the sound of coins hitting coins or the metal bottom of the bowl.
At the temple near Khao San, Wat Iam Voranuch, the sound is of mallets ringing metal bells. The bells are said to bring good luck. You ring the bell and wait and listen until the end of it’s ring, and that teaches you patience, and with the patience comes luck. (Or perhaps, you could say, luck comes with patience.)
Across the river (the ferry to get there costs three bhat), Wat Arun has a tower that affords a wide view of the city from a walkway that circles it halfway up. Look out and there’s Bangkok, it’s sprawl of gray roofs and the jagged skyline of skyscrapers. They’re not clustered together, but spread apart to the skyline looks like the jawbone of a Thai person: a tooth, a space of bare gums, another tooth.
I headed through that mess on the Bangkok Sky Train, and on the opposite side of town, met with an editor of a Thai news website. She’s in the middle of a trial for lese majeste, or injury to the king—in Thailand, it’s illegal to say anything negative about the monarchy. It’s the third time she’s been in court since the publication launched in 2004. (I’m not running her name or the name of the publication here just in case.)
As we sat down and I asked her, “How’s it going?” and she dove right into updates on the trial. The accusation came late last year, but the trial could drag on until the end of this year, or possibly even into next year. That’s a long time to wonder if you’re going back into house arrest or will be otherwise detained.
I asked her also about women in the media in Thailand, and she said that there are probably more women than men working in the media, and certainly more women graduating from universities and with higher exam scores, but management is still predominantly male. Sound familiar to anyone?
But what makes the difference for her publication, she said, is not whether or not it’s run by a woman, but the mission of the publication itself. Their goal has been to provide a truly objective approach to reporting in Thailand. It’s part of what makes her feel like she’s still as much a social activist as an editor, she said.
“Give people the Internet and they will free themselves,” she said. Even without it, she said (and we were talking about North Korea now—the Bangkok Post ran a story this morning on how North Korea’s leaders are sure they won’t see the uprisings Libya and Egypt have because their people don’t have access to the Internet), humanity has a power to rise up. Are big changes coming to Thailand? I asked, and she nodded, a serious expression on her face. Maybe a separatist movement in the south, where violence continues though we hear nothing of it. Maybe other things. But give it five or 10 years, and the country could look quite different.
We parted ways just as the street lights were turning on, and I hiked across town for a bit just to peer in at the street vendors.
And then I stopped—I know no one will believe this—in a mall. (Andrea, darling, you would have been in heaven. Prada, Chanel, all those stores, right there for browsing…)
I was looking for a movie theatre, having heard that Thai movie theatres can be quite swanky. So I played that game of walk up to the ticket counter and buy a ticket to what’s starting next. I Am Number Four. Oh yeah.
And it wasn’t all that different. Except before the movie started, they played a short film on the king, and everyone in the theatre stood to “pay their respects” to him. The only word I understood from the song, a floating, aria-esque piece, was his name. And that’s probably all the more I needed. The film shows him doing ordinary things like taking a walk in the woods, but always with an entourage, and of course with a camera watching. One scene—it looks like he’s coming down some stairs and nearly trips, and the men flanking him both reach out a hand. He caught himself and carried on, but what an odd clip to include.
When traveling, my mother always goes to the botanic gardens and the aquarium, and I always go to the National Gallery, which was where I spent Sunday afternoon. The first gallery the desk attendant pointed me to was the king’s gallery. There’s a room full of paintings of monarchs, and then a room of paintings by monarchs, including the current king and his predecessor. King Bhumibol’s paintings, a vaguely impressionistic portrait of an old woman and an abstract with musical instruments, both from the 1960s, show some study of the European painters from the first half of the century. That abstract work looks to borrow subject matter from George Braque, but with the color scheme of Henri Matisse. A red hand grips a gold trumpet, an orange hand clutches a brown clarinet, and both are tangled up in a red, black and white keyboard and a green trombone, all of it over a background of orange, yellow, green and blue. It’s an effort to put sound into paint, to capture jazz on the canvas (which is more Piet Mondrian).
I spent my last night in Thailand wandering through the street markets, nibbling freshly cut mango and then splurging on a taro ice cream dipped in chocolate and rolled in almonds.
Today, Monday, I’m packing up and heading to the airport. I’ll be sleeping in New Dehli tonight.
It was a gray, drizzly morning, which goes well with gray, gritty Bangkok. At a quarter after 7am, little is open to provide a map, but I was hot and sticky, sweating in five minutes, so I caved and took a tuktuk to Khao San Road, backpacker central. Khao San Road in the early morning hours looked like the leftovers of a lengthy frat party. The streets were piled with garbage and there were people already—or perhaps still—drinking beers. Rats the size of bunnies bounded over the refuse. Homeless-looking backpackers shuffled down the streets in small herds. They looked other worldly, or every worldly, dressed in their amalgamations of clothes gathered from various street vendors.I took a place on a side street off Khao San, still close to the chaos but stepped back a bit from it. It was a little more expensive than I’d been looking for, but a lot of the cheaper guest houses were booked, and this one had a rooftop swimming pool, which was my first stop after checking in. The post-hangover crowd hadn’t yet started gathering there, so I had the deck almost to myself to do some yoga and the pool near empty for swimming laps.
By noon, vendors were filling up Khao San with cheap t-shirts and sandals, carts to sell fried noodles and chopped pineapple, mango, and papaya. And the hustlers were out. In the first half hour I spent on the street, I heard most of the scams listed in the Lonely Planet guidebook.
I spent a few hours paying visits to some of the temples, passing by the Grand Palace in favor of seeing the Reclining Buddha, so big the temple that houses him, Wat Phra Chetuphon, must have been built around him. Temples in Bangkok are noisy, busy places, but each has a unique set of sounds. In Wat Phra Chetuphon, a row of 108 bowls line a wall, and for 20 bhat you get 108 coins and drop one in each of them, so the temple is perpetually ringing with the sound of coins hitting coins or the metal bottom of the bowl. At the temple near Khao San, Wat Iam Voranuch, the sound is of mallets ringing metal bells. The bells are said to bring good luck. You ring the bell and wait and listen until the end of it’s ring, and that teaches you patience, and with the patience comes luck. (Or perhaps, you could say, luck comes with patience.)
Across the river (the ferry to get there costs three bhat), Wat Arun has a tower that affords a wide view of the city from a walkway that circles it halfway up. Look out and there’s Bangkok, it’s sprawl of gray roofs and the jagged skyline of skyscrapers. They’re not clustered together, but spread apart to the skyline looks like the jawbone of a Thai person: a tooth, a space of bare gums, another tooth.
I headed through that mess on the Bangkok Sky Train, and on the opposite side of town, met with an editor of a Thai news website. She’s in the middle of a trial for lese majeste, or injury to the king—in Thailand, it’s illegal to say anything negative about the monarchy. It’s the third time she’s been in court since the publication launched in 2004. (I’m not running her name or the name of the publication here just in case.)
As we sat down and I asked her, “How’s it going?” and she dove right into updates on the trial. The accusation came late last year, but the trial could drag on until the end of this year, or possibly even into next year. That’s a long time to wonder if you’re going back into house arrest or will be otherwise detained.
I asked her also about women in the media in Thailand, and she said that there are probably more women than men working in the media, and certainly more women graduating from universities and with higher exam scores, but management is still predominantly male. Sound familiar to anyone?
But what makes the difference for her publication, she said, is not whether or not it’s run by a woman, but the mission of the publication itself. Their goal has been to provide a truly objective approach to reporting in Thailand. It’s part of what makes her feel like she’s still as much a social activist as an editor, she said.
“Give people the Internet and they will free themselves,” she said. Even without it, she said (and we were talking about North Korea now—the Bangkok Post ran a story this morning on how North Korea’s leaders are sure they won’t see the uprisings Libya and Egypt have because their people don’t have access to the Internet), humanity has a power to rise up. Are big changes coming to Thailand? I asked, and she nodded, a serious expression on her face. Maybe a separatist movement in the south, where violence continues though we hear nothing of it. Maybe other things. But give it five or 10 years, and the country could look quite different.
We parted ways just as the street lights were turning on, and I hiked across town for a bit just to peer in at the street vendors.
And then I stopped—I know no one will believe this—in a mall. (Andrea, darling, you would have been in heaven. Prada, Chanel, all those stores, right there for browsing…)
I was looking for a movie theatre, having heard that Thai movie theatres can be quite swanky. So I played that game of walk up to the ticket counter and buy a ticket to what’s starting next. I Am Number Four. Oh yeah.
And it wasn’t all that different. Except before the movie started, they played a short film on the king, and everyone in the theatre stood to “pay their respects” to him. The only word I understood from the song, a floating, aria-esque piece, was his name. And that’s probably all the more I needed. The film shows him doing ordinary things like taking a walk in the woods, but always with an entourage, and of course with a camera watching. One scene—it looks like he’s coming down some stairs and nearly trips, and the men flanking him both reach out a hand. He caught himself and carried on, but what an odd clip to include.
When traveling, my mother always goes to the botanic gardens and the aquarium, and I always go to the National Gallery, which was where I spent Sunday afternoon. The first gallery the desk attendant pointed me to was the king’s gallery. There’s a room full of paintings of monarchs, and then a room of paintings by monarchs, including the current king and his predecessor. King Bhumibol’s paintings, a vaguely impressionistic portrait of an old woman and an abstract with musical instruments, both from the 1960s, show some study of the European painters from the first half of the century. That abstract work looks to borrow subject matter from George Braque, but with the color scheme of Henri Matisse. A red hand grips a gold trumpet, an orange hand clutches a brown clarinet, and both are tangled up in a red, black and white keyboard and a green trombone, all of it over a background of orange, yellow, green and blue. It’s an effort to put sound into paint, to capture jazz on the canvas (which is more Piet Mondrian).
I spent my last night in Thailand wandering through the street markets, nibbling freshly cut mango and then splurging on a taro ice cream dipped in chocolate and rolled in almonds.
Today, Monday, I’m packing up and heading to the airport. I’ll be sleeping in New Dehli tonight.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Fighter boys, the temple of horrors, and the fighting monk
Tate and I are chronologically incompatible. I’ve never known two other human beings with quite the knack for just missing one another that we’ve demonstrated in the five months that we have, well, not known one another, but known of one another and wanted to complete the equation. We missed each other in Colorado in October (oh, and for the three decades both of us have lived there previously, within in blocks of one another at times, but in different years). We missed each other in southern Thailand in January. I arrived in Chiang Mai just as he was preparing to leave, and couldn’t even call him at a time he could pick up his phone. I burned through pocket change trying to reach him from pay phones all over the city and never got more than the call back service, for which I had no return number to provide.
So when he invited me up to a small town near the border to spend a few days at a muay thai training camp and meet at last, I knew the likeliest result was that I’d get waylaid by any number of inconveniences. I was sure to get accidentally shipped on to Laos, delayed by days or weeks, or otherwise misplaced or detained in ways only imaginable by the travel gods of Southeast Asia. But I said yes, and only had to move my arrival time back twice and for a grand total of four hours. And Tate was there, in the flesh, motorbike at the ready, when I arrived at the bus station in Chiang Kham.
Tate’s a freelance writer, photographer, and videographer. A fighter, an adventurer, and, I’m fairly certain, based on the stories he tells—and I mean this with no offense—a trouble-seeker. He’s got nearly enough almost died, chased a criminal, chased by a mob, lived in a slum, fought the tiger, wrestled the crocodile, conquered Rome stories to keep a story addict like me entertained for days. Which is good, since he’d volunteered to do just that. Another freelance writer I’d spoken to about this trip and travel writing referred me to Tate because he’s spent so much time in Southeast Asia and sold stories about it. He's currently working on a film about muay thai—well, OK, it's about a lot more than that, but that's all I'll say (he's pictured here showing the boys some of the video he's shot of them).
We could have just had a cup of coffee. Instead, he took me in for a weekend, gave me his bed and slept on the floor of a cement room in a boxing gym.
Every morning, I awoke to the sound of the boys, aged about 10 to 16, who live there training as fighters getting up for their morning run. At 6am, the trainer starts knocking on their doors, and he knocks until they grunt in response. The noise escalates from there, then it quiets down for the half hour they’re out running through the rice fields. It hits record decibels when they return and start throwing punches and kicking one another and the punching bags hanging from two-by-fours. They train for a couple hours, go to school, and come back and train again in the afternoon.
They start training as young as 8, and fight almost as soon as they start training. Their bodies develop to make them leaner, stronger, more resilient fighters. Tate wrapped his knuckles on a shin of one of the 16-year-olds, and it sounded like knocking on wood.
The boys speak almost no English, and neither does anyone else who lives at the gym, with the possible exception of the gym owner’s daughter. So Zak came to join us, to translate for Tate so he could finish his interviews with the gym owner, his wife, and the boys. He met Tate when they were living in the same building in Bangkok years ago, living lives, they say, of quiet misery punctuated by the rants of a Noam Chomsky-esque character living in the building with them and offering spare work to Tate.
Zak had a writing assignment, so Tate and I went adventuring, and wandered over to see a temple near the gym. The temple grounds are close enough that I could see the flicker of monks in their orange robes walking through the trees from the end of the gym’s driveway. The temple grounds look like an oddly assembled statue garden with the statues of Buddha, Ganesha, a random military figure, and monks all facing different directions so you're left strolling a labyrinthine path through the grass just to try to see them from the front.
The temple itself looks fairly normal, and though I hadn’t seen the webs of string in any temple, I’ve heard they’re typical. But statues of humans in grotesque agony bracket the temple. Full-body statues of a man and a woman covered in lesions with leeches all over their bodies, held on leashed by towering demons, stand in the temple’s courtyard. Along either side of the outside of the temple there’s a row of torsos, yellow and dripping orange blood, their lolling tongues stretching to their waists, some skewered by weapons or holding a bottle, it’s mouth toward their lips, some with swollen bellies splitting open, and all over, covered in leeches.
There’s plenty I don’t know or understand about Buddhism, and what on earth these statues are doing there is certainly on that list.
My image of Buddhism grew again the following morning, when we went to see the fighting monk. We were out of bed by 3am, and loaded into the back of the gym owner’s pickup truck at 3:30am, covered in blankets and still half-frozen, heading to pay our respects at his temple, then follow him on his rounds through Mae Sai. Of course, we didn’t know that’s what we were headed to do. We’d been told only that we going to see the fighting monk with a few of the boys, the gym owner and his wife.
We paid a chilly visit to his hilltop temple, then headed into town. The fighting monk was horseback in the parking lot in front of one of the main city government buildings, and the line that stretched away from him was so long I confused it briefly for a parade route.
People were lined up to bring food, water, juice, and money to drop into his bowl. It barely touched the bottom of his bowl before he scooped it out and passed it on to a man holding a large sack next to him. The sacks piled up, and money piled up.
After over an hour and a half there, he headed out into the street and took donations along the way to a market across town, turned around and headed back. There was a pause, in which he and the gym owner and his wife and their entourage apparently had cake with some of the city bureaucrats, while we walked through the city market, had coffee, napped in the shade, and ate through an entire watermelon. And then he reappeared in a smaller, neighboring village, and presented them with a gold platter of money, wrapped in clear plastic and tied with gold ribbon, which is pretty much the way all the offerings to monks are prepared. It must have been just a small portion of what he’d collected that day. Individual villagers also received amulets and bracelets. Then the monk went to hand out a little money to each villager.
“How much will you get?” He asked (Zak translated). “It doesn’t matter. Because you will be happy with whatever you get.”
He distributed a 20 bhat bill with a red marking on it meant to be interpreted as whatever numbers you think you see there, a good luck totem for prosperity, to each of them, and even to us, the foreigners watching from the back row.
Because the gym owner is affiliated with the fighting monk, the back of the pickup was piled with some of what was collected in the way of food offerings. Cookies, crackers, ramen noodles, cand, and a few bags of uncooked rice separated and set off to the side. We were invited to take whatever we wanted on the drive back, and two of the boys hopped in the back immediately to dive into it. We were all crushed together, half buried under these bags of junk food. Then we repositioned, moving the food inside, except the rice and some bags of corn cobs, plus two bags carrying live chickens, which the boys had brought with them for their afternoon at the monk’s temple, and the four boys in the back of the truck. For a while, it was slightly less crushing than all the food.
As the sun set and it started to cool down, we dug out the blankets we’d wrapped in that morning, and the boys slid from their various perches around the back of the truck deeper into the bed. They became like origami children, folding on top of themselves and one another so that all those legs and arms and heads and even the bagged-up chickens disappeared under the blankets. Only Dia stayed awake through the whole drive.
And we, we watched the stars come out, the fires on hillsides—it’s coming into the height of the dry season and the bamboo has gone brown and shed its leaves, which looks like a covering of straw across dark, dry soil, and burns like it too. Then we unfolded, far more stiffly and slowly, when we arrived back at the gym. Had a quick dinner—some of the donated ramen and canned fish, plus eggs. (This weekend was also a gastronomical adventure. I was served stews with chicken feet, red ant eggs, and guts—all on separate occasions, of course.) Then stretched ourselves out flat, joyously, and slept.
So when he invited me up to a small town near the border to spend a few days at a muay thai training camp and meet at last, I knew the likeliest result was that I’d get waylaid by any number of inconveniences. I was sure to get accidentally shipped on to Laos, delayed by days or weeks, or otherwise misplaced or detained in ways only imaginable by the travel gods of Southeast Asia. But I said yes, and only had to move my arrival time back twice and for a grand total of four hours. And Tate was there, in the flesh, motorbike at the ready, when I arrived at the bus station in Chiang Kham.
Tate’s a freelance writer, photographer, and videographer. A fighter, an adventurer, and, I’m fairly certain, based on the stories he tells—and I mean this with no offense—a trouble-seeker. He’s got nearly enough almost died, chased a criminal, chased by a mob, lived in a slum, fought the tiger, wrestled the crocodile, conquered Rome stories to keep a story addict like me entertained for days. Which is good, since he’d volunteered to do just that. Another freelance writer I’d spoken to about this trip and travel writing referred me to Tate because he’s spent so much time in Southeast Asia and sold stories about it. He's currently working on a film about muay thai—well, OK, it's about a lot more than that, but that's all I'll say (he's pictured here showing the boys some of the video he's shot of them).
We could have just had a cup of coffee. Instead, he took me in for a weekend, gave me his bed and slept on the floor of a cement room in a boxing gym.
Every morning, I awoke to the sound of the boys, aged about 10 to 16, who live there training as fighters getting up for their morning run. At 6am, the trainer starts knocking on their doors, and he knocks until they grunt in response. The noise escalates from there, then it quiets down for the half hour they’re out running through the rice fields. It hits record decibels when they return and start throwing punches and kicking one another and the punching bags hanging from two-by-fours. They train for a couple hours, go to school, and come back and train again in the afternoon. They start training as young as 8, and fight almost as soon as they start training. Their bodies develop to make them leaner, stronger, more resilient fighters. Tate wrapped his knuckles on a shin of one of the 16-year-olds, and it sounded like knocking on wood.
The boys speak almost no English, and neither does anyone else who lives at the gym, with the possible exception of the gym owner’s daughter. So Zak came to join us, to translate for Tate so he could finish his interviews with the gym owner, his wife, and the boys. He met Tate when they were living in the same building in Bangkok years ago, living lives, they say, of quiet misery punctuated by the rants of a Noam Chomsky-esque character living in the building with them and offering spare work to Tate.
Zak had a writing assignment, so Tate and I went adventuring, and wandered over to see a temple near the gym. The temple grounds are close enough that I could see the flicker of monks in their orange robes walking through the trees from the end of the gym’s driveway. The temple grounds look like an oddly assembled statue garden with the statues of Buddha, Ganesha, a random military figure, and monks all facing different directions so you're left strolling a labyrinthine path through the grass just to try to see them from the front.
The temple itself looks fairly normal, and though I hadn’t seen the webs of string in any temple, I’ve heard they’re typical. But statues of humans in grotesque agony bracket the temple. Full-body statues of a man and a woman covered in lesions with leeches all over their bodies, held on leashed by towering demons, stand in the temple’s courtyard. Along either side of the outside of the temple there’s a row of torsos, yellow and dripping orange blood, their lolling tongues stretching to their waists, some skewered by weapons or holding a bottle, it’s mouth toward their lips, some with swollen bellies splitting open, and all over, covered in leeches.
There’s plenty I don’t know or understand about Buddhism, and what on earth these statues are doing there is certainly on that list.
My image of Buddhism grew again the following morning, when we went to see the fighting monk. We were out of bed by 3am, and loaded into the back of the gym owner’s pickup truck at 3:30am, covered in blankets and still half-frozen, heading to pay our respects at his temple, then follow him on his rounds through Mae Sai. Of course, we didn’t know that’s what we were headed to do. We’d been told only that we going to see the fighting monk with a few of the boys, the gym owner and his wife.
We paid a chilly visit to his hilltop temple, then headed into town. The fighting monk was horseback in the parking lot in front of one of the main city government buildings, and the line that stretched away from him was so long I confused it briefly for a parade route.
People were lined up to bring food, water, juice, and money to drop into his bowl. It barely touched the bottom of his bowl before he scooped it out and passed it on to a man holding a large sack next to him. The sacks piled up, and money piled up.After over an hour and a half there, he headed out into the street and took donations along the way to a market across town, turned around and headed back. There was a pause, in which he and the gym owner and his wife and their entourage apparently had cake with some of the city bureaucrats, while we walked through the city market, had coffee, napped in the shade, and ate through an entire watermelon. And then he reappeared in a smaller, neighboring village, and presented them with a gold platter of money, wrapped in clear plastic and tied with gold ribbon, which is pretty much the way all the offerings to monks are prepared. It must have been just a small portion of what he’d collected that day. Individual villagers also received amulets and bracelets. Then the monk went to hand out a little money to each villager.
“How much will you get?” He asked (Zak translated). “It doesn’t matter. Because you will be happy with whatever you get.”
He distributed a 20 bhat bill with a red marking on it meant to be interpreted as whatever numbers you think you see there, a good luck totem for prosperity, to each of them, and even to us, the foreigners watching from the back row.
Because the gym owner is affiliated with the fighting monk, the back of the pickup was piled with some of what was collected in the way of food offerings. Cookies, crackers, ramen noodles, cand, and a few bags of uncooked rice separated and set off to the side. We were invited to take whatever we wanted on the drive back, and two of the boys hopped in the back immediately to dive into it. We were all crushed together, half buried under these bags of junk food. Then we repositioned, moving the food inside, except the rice and some bags of corn cobs, plus two bags carrying live chickens, which the boys had brought with them for their afternoon at the monk’s temple, and the four boys in the back of the truck. For a while, it was slightly less crushing than all the food.
As the sun set and it started to cool down, we dug out the blankets we’d wrapped in that morning, and the boys slid from their various perches around the back of the truck deeper into the bed. They became like origami children, folding on top of themselves and one another so that all those legs and arms and heads and even the bagged-up chickens disappeared under the blankets. Only Dia stayed awake through the whole drive.
And we, we watched the stars come out, the fires on hillsides—it’s coming into the height of the dry season and the bamboo has gone brown and shed its leaves, which looks like a covering of straw across dark, dry soil, and burns like it too. Then we unfolded, far more stiffly and slowly, when we arrived back at the gym. Had a quick dinner—some of the donated ramen and canned fish, plus eggs. (This weekend was also a gastronomical adventure. I was served stews with chicken feet, red ant eggs, and guts—all on separate occasions, of course.) Then stretched ourselves out flat, joyously, and slept.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
The Gold Buddha Count
Stumble out the guesthouse door and into the street, and Chiang Mai is a tangle of traffic, posters for trekking tours, and temple doors. I’ve lost count of the gold Buddhas, the ornate temple facings, the times I’ve scrambled for my wrap because a monk is approaching and he isn’t supposed to see bare shoulders. There’s a layer of religion across the town, but mostly there’s a veneer of tourist industry. Trekking with elephants? Trekking with waterfalls? Trekking to waterfalls? Biking to waterfalls? Rafting waterfalls? Massage? Pedicure? You can get a foot massage on the street—you can get your cocktail on the street, too.
Actually you, dear tourist, can get most anything you’d like on the street. The storefronts are multi-story cement and plaster fronts buffered from the traffic by mere inches of sidewalk. Still, shops often move a portion their contents onto the sidewalk, so walking across town means ducking tables of brightly-colored merchandise.
And the people love us. Or seem to. Never before have I been in a city where the people literally stop me on the street to ask where I’m from, where I’m going, what my name is. They tell me who their friends are, caution me away from some of the tourist companies running treks in the jungle, point me toward one thing and away from another. On Valentine’s Day, one of them asked me, almost mid-conversation, how to spell “love.”
I spent an afternoon just wandering in and out of temples, taking photos and talking to anyone who started to talk to me.
But I found the people I wanted to talk to at a set of tables off to the side of one of the larger temples in town. Temples organize “Monk chat” and advertise it as a way for tourists to learn about Buddhism. In a practical sense, it’s a way for the monks to practice their English. So I went to talk to a monk—a real, live monk, the kind I’m supposed to step into traffic to avoid coming into contact with on a sidewalk. And, it allows the monks to practice their English.
And that's how I met Garong, who has been a monk for the last seven years. It's a chance for him now to get an education without paying to go to a university. His focus area: English.
Our conversation went like that of any two strangers at first. Where are you from? What do you do? Then we roamed into other territory, like the two kinds of Buddhist meditation, one for focusing on your breath, which he said is for knowing true happiness, and one for focusing on what’s happening in the world around you, which is for knowing the truth of nature.
He also asked about Valentine's Day, what the holiday meant. I told him it's about romantic love and he nodded. There should be more times to recognize the other kinds of love, he said, the loves that lead to kindness instead of the love that leads to desire. (Profound for 21, right?)
Must be all the meditation, though I have yet to figure out how they meditate through all the residual noise. I hear motorbikes ripping by every 10 seconds.The urban environment has left me a little shell shocked. So much pavement and so many people. Back in a city, I do city things: I buy things I probably don’t need and browse bookstores endlessly, looking at but not buying books I probably do need.
So, to cope, I go climbing. I met a couple partners through the partner finder board on at rock shop just down the street—yes, my guest house was selected for its location. Brandon and I got to play that fun game of, I’ll tell you where I’ll be and what book I’m reading, and you walk up to a stranger and ask if you’ve got the right person. Surely there won’t be two people here with Collapse on the table. He’d met Dan. Dan had a rope, and (no, Dorothy, this isn’t America anymore) we rented quick draws (for non-climbers—there may be places in the States that rent quick draws, the carabiners and webbing used to protect climbs in sport climbing, but if there are, I’ve never seen them) and motorbikes.
Yes, motorbikes. The cliff is about half an hour outside town. Initially, the drive feels like a pleasant cruise through the countryside, passing the rice paddies faithfully attended by farmers in broad hats and tall boots, but it’s just long enough to vibrate your hipbones into a steady ache.
Crazy Horse Buttress, is, well, a bit crazy. The climbing is wild. In 30 meters, a Crazy Horse climb will rotate through multiple personalities, swapping weird side pulls for a jug haul roof, traversing stalactites, and shoving itself into a corner. Easy 5.8 climbing becomes suddenly steep, tricky 5.10b climbing—for two moves, and then it’s over. If it's all one kind of climbing the whole way up, it's probably tiny holds on gray dagger rock. Before that rock has worn down, it looks like climbing over the top of a pipe organ, toes poised on the rim of each tube. When it's broken down a bit, it's more like climbing on bell curves turned upside down. You aim to get your toes and fingers in between the pointy bits. Definitely a change from the glass-polished climbs in Ton Sai.
Still, any climbing is better than no climbing. It's better, I dare say, than any number of gold buddhas.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
An episode in which plans change
So the universe said Chiang Mai. Or rather, the universe said, “Here’s a test of your patience. Spend three days trying to get to where you want to be. Be open to changing your itinerary, revising all your plans, and going with your gut—at 5am, standing on an unknown street in Bangkok.”
After attempting for two days to find and book a bus ticket to Kanchanaburi, I ended up on a bus bound for Bangkok, expecting then to take a bus to Kanchanaburi. After a few days, I'd bus from there to Chiang Mai. But 14 hours on buses provides plenty of time for thinking, including mapping out an agenda, and counting days, and realizing that it had not, actually, been five weeks since I arrived in Ton Sai. It has been six. And now there are a mere two weeks between me and Visa expiration. My list of things to do in Kanchanaburi was good… but my list of things to do in Chiang Mai included rock climbing. And was, in general, longer. So the choice made after fitful sleep on a bus rolling across Thailand was Chiang Mai.
From that unknown street, I took my first tuktuk ride to the Bangkok train station and booked a ticket on the 8:30am train to Chiang Mai. That gave me a few hours to buy a cup of coffee and take a table at a cafe on the second floor of the train station, overlooking the passenger waiting area, and write out my new itinerary on a napkin from the coffee shop.
The train station tripped memories of the semester I spent in London, stumbling through Victoria Station on Saturday mornings, so desperate for coffee and pasties we’d risk missing the train just to stop for them. The station was already busy at 6am. Waiting passengers were lined up in red plastic chairs in sets of four—four chairs, a narrow aisle, four chairs, a wide center aisle, four chairs, a narrow aisle, four chairs. They all face the same direction and look like they’re practicing for their impending travel, their two trains lined up at the starting line before breaking off for different destinations. As I walked to my train, the national anthem started to play, and everyone stood up or stopped walking--or walked just far enough to get out of the pouring rain, waited while it pealed out. The world on pause.
The moment it stopped, they took off again, the train attendants (like flight attendants) ahead of me clacking along in their high heels.
We cruised through Bangkok suburbs, passing shacks squeezed along the railway lines and people who emerge in miraculously clean clothes from those squatting shelters. Then housing gave way to tall grasses, then hours and hours of the luminescent fields of rice paddies, where the reflection of the sun off the standing water makes the blades seem to glow. Seven hours into the journey, the sound of the train engine changed as we started to head uphill, chugging laboriously. The track wandered among steep hillsides and flickered in and out of tunnels, at times so close to rock walls and the encroaching jungle they would have been easy to reach had I put a hand out the window.
We passed skeletal forests, bare-limbed trees with the sun setting behind them. Red and yellow leaves still clung to some trees. It looked autumnal, but it was like a brief visit to the season. A glimpse at the month of October.
After nightfall, my head too full and stomach too empty to read, I started pacing the train. Enter the Australians, a trio of university students on holiday standing on one of the train couplings, smoking and drinking beers. They’d invited every English-speaker they met that day—and there had been plenty as they had trolled the train cars earlier, searching for the beer now in their hands—to join them for dinner. I got the invite, a scrawled note with the restaurant's name and address.
Another tuktuk scrambled my brain driving circles through Chiang Mai, slamming around corners in dark, narrow alleyways, carting me to an area of town thick with guesthouses and signs for tourist treks. I dumped my bags, emailed home to let people know I was not, in fact, going to Kanchanaburi, and then headed out to walk through the Sunday Walking Street on my way to dinner.
This street market takes over downtown and is so thick with people it's like the holiday-shopping shuffle every step of the way. I tried working through the crowd, got lost, got slowed down, and finally hailed yet another tuktuk and flashed him that scribbled address.
Away we went, once again around the back alleys and racing by the river until I was deposited at the restaurant, taking a seat at a riverside table for 10, and soon enough lost in conversation with strangers.
After attempting for two days to find and book a bus ticket to Kanchanaburi, I ended up on a bus bound for Bangkok, expecting then to take a bus to Kanchanaburi. After a few days, I'd bus from there to Chiang Mai. But 14 hours on buses provides plenty of time for thinking, including mapping out an agenda, and counting days, and realizing that it had not, actually, been five weeks since I arrived in Ton Sai. It has been six. And now there are a mere two weeks between me and Visa expiration. My list of things to do in Kanchanaburi was good… but my list of things to do in Chiang Mai included rock climbing. And was, in general, longer. So the choice made after fitful sleep on a bus rolling across Thailand was Chiang Mai.
From that unknown street, I took my first tuktuk ride to the Bangkok train station and booked a ticket on the 8:30am train to Chiang Mai. That gave me a few hours to buy a cup of coffee and take a table at a cafe on the second floor of the train station, overlooking the passenger waiting area, and write out my new itinerary on a napkin from the coffee shop.
The train station tripped memories of the semester I spent in London, stumbling through Victoria Station on Saturday mornings, so desperate for coffee and pasties we’d risk missing the train just to stop for them. The station was already busy at 6am. Waiting passengers were lined up in red plastic chairs in sets of four—four chairs, a narrow aisle, four chairs, a wide center aisle, four chairs, a narrow aisle, four chairs. They all face the same direction and look like they’re practicing for their impending travel, their two trains lined up at the starting line before breaking off for different destinations. As I walked to my train, the national anthem started to play, and everyone stood up or stopped walking--or walked just far enough to get out of the pouring rain, waited while it pealed out. The world on pause.
The moment it stopped, they took off again, the train attendants (like flight attendants) ahead of me clacking along in their high heels.
We cruised through Bangkok suburbs, passing shacks squeezed along the railway lines and people who emerge in miraculously clean clothes from those squatting shelters. Then housing gave way to tall grasses, then hours and hours of the luminescent fields of rice paddies, where the reflection of the sun off the standing water makes the blades seem to glow. Seven hours into the journey, the sound of the train engine changed as we started to head uphill, chugging laboriously. The track wandered among steep hillsides and flickered in and out of tunnels, at times so close to rock walls and the encroaching jungle they would have been easy to reach had I put a hand out the window.
We passed skeletal forests, bare-limbed trees with the sun setting behind them. Red and yellow leaves still clung to some trees. It looked autumnal, but it was like a brief visit to the season. A glimpse at the month of October.
After nightfall, my head too full and stomach too empty to read, I started pacing the train. Enter the Australians, a trio of university students on holiday standing on one of the train couplings, smoking and drinking beers. They’d invited every English-speaker they met that day—and there had been plenty as they had trolled the train cars earlier, searching for the beer now in their hands—to join them for dinner. I got the invite, a scrawled note with the restaurant's name and address.
Another tuktuk scrambled my brain driving circles through Chiang Mai, slamming around corners in dark, narrow alleyways, carting me to an area of town thick with guesthouses and signs for tourist treks. I dumped my bags, emailed home to let people know I was not, in fact, going to Kanchanaburi, and then headed out to walk through the Sunday Walking Street on my way to dinner.
This street market takes over downtown and is so thick with people it's like the holiday-shopping shuffle every step of the way. I tried working through the crowd, got lost, got slowed down, and finally hailed yet another tuktuk and flashed him that scribbled address.
Away we went, once again around the back alleys and racing by the river until I was deposited at the restaurant, taking a seat at a riverside table for 10, and soon enough lost in conversation with strangers.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
OK, universe. Whatever you say.
The first lesson we were taught when we, the yoga teacher’s training course of April 2007, arrived at the ashram was to let go of expectations for our spiritual path. We were counseled to drop our images of what this training regime would look like, how we would feel, and what our swamis would be like. It’s smart, from the perspective of the organization; they wouldn’t want a lot of yogi dropouts who complained that it turned out a month in an ashram in the Bahamas means a lot of mosquito bites and an affordable vegetarian diet on an island in the Caribbean is quite heavy on starch. The path to enlightenment does not always look the way we expect; even the ashram’s founder, Swami Vishnudevananda, had a surprising love of ice cream.
But expectations are easy to build and tough to let go of.
I had a game plan for this trip. A mapped out route, an itinerary, goals, and yes, expectations. And I had a desperate want to spend a month at the ashram for the program I was trained in. I emailed them in December, before I left, requesting space. And they said then it was too early to book for March, and I should write again in February. I emailed them on February 2. Already, they have no space available.
So. At the end of the month I’m heading to India. I still plan to go to Rishikesh. But where I’ll be living, who knows.
Meanwhile, I'm rolling the dice again, leaving Ton Sai at last. It's time and an urge for the unknown has started to blossom. I’m heading up north on Feb. 11 for Kanchanaburi to dig in history for a while, to Chiang Mai to trek in the hills, and, soon enough, to India. Bring on the jungle.
As I take down all the little things I’ve strung up in my bungalow here—the dresses I've hung from randomly placed nails, the shells collected on the beach that now line the windowsill, and packing everything up, I’m also dismantling my own agenda of lessons I’d hoped to explore and goals I’d planned to meet. I’m forced to surrender to the one lesson faithfully beating me over the skull: Let go of your expectations.
But basically, I’ve started to get the feeling that I’m not the one driving this bus. I’m in the front seat wildly snapping photos while someone else steers.
The virtues: Loyalty
Kickoff at 7am and a dearth of hot wings changes the experience of watching the Superbowl a bit. Something akin to dedication has to get these Steelers fans out of bed early, watching football over their eggs and toast. We were on cushions on the floor instead of couches and easy chairs, and this early in the morning, slouching too low means easily drifting back to sleep. Foreign nationals who wandered in got an education on American football rules.
They’re a part of the tribe of the fan (there’s a “terrible towel” on the premises, a yellow towel designed for frenetic spinning by fans). Of eight or 10 bodies present, half of them were also in “Thaitanium Project” t-shirts. And when the game ended, most of them loaded up into a boat to go rebolt climbs on the other side of the peninsula.
Practitioners of a virtue that is often cut down in favor of personal achievement and individual success. They’re loyal to a team, and loyal to a cause. Loyal to ideas beyond themselves.
And even if it wasn't a win, it was still a good game. Right guys?
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