The good people of Rishikesh

I’d heard horror stories before I left India about how difficult travel here is. Extraordinary, and extraordinarily challenging. People stare, grope, pickpocket, swindle you out of your money, soak up your time touring you around. And I saw a bit of that in Dehli, certainly. Our taxi driver tried to detour us to convince us to stay in a hotel where he’d get a commission for having dropped unwitting tourists off, and a rickshaw driver tried to pass off a 10 rupee bill so tattered it was barely recognizable. So yes, India can cheat you.

On the flight to India, the Indian man next to me saw me reading up on Uttarakhand in my guidebook.

“Are you going to Uttarakhand? I’m from there,” he said. I replied that yes, I was going there. He repeatedly asked if I was meeting with a group, going with a group, had a group of friends. No, no, no, I said. Alone.

“Oh, I would not do that,” he said, a horrified look on his face. He wrote down his cell phone number and his work phone number, saying to contact him if I had any trouble, and told me not to keep anything in my back pockets.

I started to explain that I knew women who have traveled in India alone and been fine. That I’d just traveled all over Thailand alone. He couldn’t hear it, and added his email address to my methods for contacting him.

But, I was sufficiently concerned. Was I crawling into a den of thieves with money dangling from my pockets?

It appears… so far (knock on wood), that this is not the case. The people here are incredibly friendly. I’m alternately greeted with “Hari om” or “Namaste” walking down the street—OK, half the time, that’s the replacement for “Can you spare any change?” but still. Children dance in front of my camera, calling, “Take my picture! Take my picture!”

I do and flip it around to show them. I love that moment of them smiling at their own image. Kids here break all the rules—they play with fire and they stay up late, they swim into foot traffic like sharks to pitch items for sale: “Buy a picture?” and they dance with strangers. They’ve got this remarkable spark to them, like they already know too well what it means to be human, how lucky it is to have a human life and how quickly it will pass.

There’s a certain degree of “Huh. Weird,” to some of this. I’ve had about a dozen people ask to have their picture taken with me, and that’s weird. Half the guys in an eight-man posse hiking a trail to the Shiva Temple had to have their photo taken with me. I was at a ghat, the stairs to the Ganges, writing and a man brought his daughter over to have her picture taken with me.


A man at a chai stall near the Shiva Temple, where we stopped for tea while waiting for the jeep to fill up so we could catch a ride back to town, walked his son over and held his son’s hand out and commanded his son, “Say hello.”

I shook his small, limp fingers and smiled at him while he stared at me. His brother curled into his shoulder and cried when I took their picture and he still looks a bit worried, like he’s not sure what the after effects of having touched a white girl will be. Aw, not so celebrity-esque.

But then there’s the oh, it all works out in the balance attitude. I’d stopped for an after-dinner apple samosa (let’s talk about things that are really going to aid enlightenment…) and chai with Patrick, and went to pay and had nothing but a 500 rupee note for a 30 rupee bill.

“Next time,” the clerk said. “Just pay next time. Maybe next year.”

“Next year? I’ll be back tomorrow,” I said. I’ve seen him do this over and over again (I was back the next day to pay off my tab and then some…). He’s just not concerned about it.

I was sitting by the Ganges at dusk, watching the water turn iridescent as the night came on, and one of the tourist police officers came down to where I was sitting and asked, “Are you OK?”

“I’m fine,” I said. He warned me against staying down there in the dark alone, and walked with me for a while along the bank, until I was near the stairs to the road. He asked where I was from, and if I was doing yoga, and what kind. I said ashtanga, and he replied, “You can do ashtanga? Show me.”

“Right here? Right now?” I asked. We were on a sandy stretch, but it was getting a bit dark and I wasn’t really feeling like playing trick pony.

“You’ll just have to take my word for it that I can do it,” I said.

So yes, there’s a bit of misogyny. A man on the train laughed when I said I’d just finished a master’s degree, and when I got on the bus, the man charged the white man ahead of me double fare and me nothing because he just assumed I was with him.

And OK, so I did have an episode with a particularly persistent Indian man staying in the room across from mine. I don’t think I’d ever literally shut the door in the face of a man who was still talking to me, before that moment, but there it is. And still he pleaded at the door and then came around to the windows, calling “Please miss…” begging me to come outside to talk to him for five minutes. He went so far as to peer in my top shutters (I’d already closed the lower ones—my windows look onto a balcony anyone in my hotel can access). I cried, “No,” and slammed them shut, flipped off the lights, and used my ipod to light my way to the bathroom to brush my teeth.

I swear as I was lying in bed, I heard him say, “Good night, boo” from outside. How he picked up “boo,” I wouldn’t dare ask.

Street scenes

My laptop is full. Yes, full. No more memory. That's how many photos I've taken. So, time to share. And edit. Mon dieu...

Getting centered in Yoga Central

It only took a train that started from a station packed body to body with people, a bus that felt more like a carnival ride, and a jarring tuktuk to arrive at the circus of spiritual seekers that is Rishikesh: Yoga Capital of the World. The night I got here, the valley was ringing with chanting until midnight. There’s the city proper of Rishikesh, and then the spiritual corridor, shoved up the Ganges River valley north of the city, where the ashrams and yoga centers are concentrated. And that corridor is split into two: Lakshman (or Laxman) Jhula, the more backpacker-esque area, and Ram Jhula, where most of the ashrams are. The Ganges runs its own shade of blue-green and the river itself is mesmerizing. It’s difficult to not stare at it.

Not that we could see it in the dark. What we could see in the dark was a posse of people singing karaoke kirtan (Sanskrit chants) at a stage bedecked in pink and yellow Christmas lights. And a series of men at guesthouses that had no rooms available. I’d met a man on the train to Haridwar who was also headed to Rishikesh and searching for a place to stay for the night.

This little city straddling the Ganges is stamped with the signs of people searching for higher ground—temples, shrines, ashrams, the incense and prayer bead and other assorted accoutrements of the devout. The bookshops are predominantly spiritual texts. Street vendors hawk all the tools necessary to step your way up the ladder of enlightenment. Prayer beads and incense and books written by men in orange robes, some of whom must have started as those men I see in my walks along the Ganges, pacing its banks and staring into the water like they’re reading its surface, living in earth huts and shacks as close to the banks as the river’s regular flooding will allow, letting their hair and their beards go wild.

And yoga here is what trekking was in Chiang Mai; signs hung on every post and bare scrap of wall advertise for places to go, ways to practice, teachers to learn from, teacher training courses to take, retreats to attend, intensive courses to take, lectures to listen to. The city constantly rings with chanting and the much less enlightenment-encouraging blare of horns on jeeps and motorbikes. Forget Hindi, Urdu, English, whatever; the horn is the primary form of communication in India. Drivers honk to let pedestrians, cows, dogs, cats, and monkeys know they’re approaching, getting closer, passing, and have passed.

Patrick, who I met on the train, was here two years ago, and knew where to look and what to look for. We paced all over town the next day, and he pointed out everything from good yoga classes to the best place to get chocolate balls, told me the ashrams have filtered water and will let you fill your bottles for free, and gave the all clear on the street chai. Men stand at these little carts with a fire blazing and will bring the milk to a boil right in front of you. The chai is sweet and rich, sipped from little glasses, and the perfect prelude to a morning yoga practice. When the weather was cold and rainy those carts stayed open all day, as tightly squeezed together on the main street as Starbucks coffee shops are in Portland. Now that the weather has started to warm up, more of them have switched to juice, which is hand cranked through a juicer crushes sugar cane with lemon, mint and ginger.

I’m staying in a room at a guesthouse that happens to have a stunning view of the Ganges. I can lie in bed and watch the sun set over the water. And I have hot water. At least, from one of the taps. It pours into a bucket. The showerhead runs nothing but cold water. So the question now is, “Which would more greatly encourage spiritual enlightenment? Watching the sun set with my head on a pillow and bathing with hot water (even if it is from a bucket), or surrendering windows, outlets, and any hope of warm water and moving to the ashram at the far end of town that does occasionally have rooms open up?”

I splash myself off in the mornings, and then head to a studio that faces the Ganges for ashtanga yoga classes. The “sweet pain,” as the teacher calls it, I felt after the first couple classes is diminishing. For those two hours every morning, the noise of the traffic, the push and pull of people, and even, for a few moments, the chatter of my own brain vanishes. And that, I think, is the real point.

India, oh, India

Everything about India blurred together for most of the 24 hours, with just a few images crystalizing. I arrived at almost midnight, collected bags, paired up with another woman headed into town and split a taxi. She’d even invited me to take the second twin bed in her room at the guesthouse she’d booked. Having had visions of wandering the streets of downtown Dehli, homeless and contemplating sleeping in the train station, I said yes.

The taxi ride from the airport was a blur—or maybe that was the streak of the red lights we blew through because those, apparently, are optional. Even after midnight, the city is busy constructing itself. Dump trucks moved along in trios, marching like soldiers toward progress. Rows of rickshaws were stacked together like grocery carts. Fires burned in sheet metal shelters. The nicer places look like Anasazi cliff dwellings, stacked, cement squares with ladders to access them on the outside. The alley to the guest house Victoria had booked was narrow and dark, with a stream of water running down the center. We ducked under a metal gate and walked down a hallway to a door with a sign on it that read “No room.” But they know her—Victoria has volunteered with Tibetan refugees in India for six years, and stays at this guest house in the Tibetan corner of Dehli every time she passes through town—and, literally, had a key with her name on it.

The neighborhood was buzzing before I was out of bed, the sounds an overlay of American music, Tibetan drumming, which has a metal ring, people shouting, and men spitting. Oh yeah, you can hear spitting from the second floor.

My first glimpse of Dehli by daylight was from the rooftop of our guesthouse. The neighboring rooftops were strung with Tibetan prayer flags, some of them wind-flapped to rags, their colors gone and only traces of the black dye of their inscribed prayers.

It’s quite cold, and I hugged into my morning coffee at a table beside monks and friends of monks. The restaurant looks out on the Yamuna River, silver to match the gray morning sky, and a row of small garden plots and riverside shacks. Women in saris topped with long shawls attend to their business walk among the shacks, and children play in empty garden plots. The occasional cow strolled through.

I’ve got nothing in the way of cold-weather clothes, so we went out scouting the markets, but they’ve got little in the way of cold-weather clothes either. The hawkers work ceaselessly. They try to call you into sari shops as if the words coming out of their mouths will be the first you’ve heard of the possibility of buying a sari. As if you didn’t see the mannequins in window after window draped in fabrics so heavily jeweled they could drag an ordinary Indian woman to the ground. A man selling USB sticks approached Victoria and me, and seemed to think that our “No, I don’t need that,” was just our fierce bargaining technique. As he followed us down the street, the cost of 32GB of memory dropped from 1,000 rupees to 250 rupees (it’s about 45 rupees to 1 USD), at which point he declared that was his last, best price. When we laughed and shook our heads, he vanished.

The press of people is constant. Try to slow down or stop without stepping far enough to the side—shoving yourself into a doorway or into an alley—and they will push right through you. Stand at a counter without knowing what you want to order and they’ll do the same. And yes, they stare like they’ve never seen a white person before, which is impossible because there are literally busloads of them moving around the city.

We were searching for a thick pashmina for me, something to wrap around my shoulders to stay warm, but had no luck. My only purchase was a couple of Indian sweets, one flavored vaguely of nutmeg and the other trying for, I think, lime and chocolate, topped with a layer of thin silver flake.

And after all that, I did my buying in Majnu-ka-Tilla, the Tibetan area, where I found a thick, yak’s wool shawl (No, Mom, my nose isn’t cold anymore), and spun my first prayer wheel. Each spin sends thousands of rounds of “Om Mani Padme Hum” toward the heavens, invoking the blessings of Chenrezig, embodiment of compassion.

Thailand-ese

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.

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.

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.