Thailand

Chiang Mai                The cabbie, strong and jovial, knuckles jaded from bare-knuckle boxing, convinced us on a direct ride to CKS airport. Quick ride and only one major accident, right in front of us as a car was thrown up onto the guardrail by a speeding van.                Delete flight memory. Crash down land (terminology only) into CQX, the small, but still international airport of Chiang Mai, Thailand. Small indeed. Haven�t experienced like this before. Walk straight off the plane into glowing sunlight and on into immigration/baggage check/exit all-in-one.                �Where to?� asks the new cabbie. And where-to indeed.                It�s all set. Ready for us. 1-2-3 and it all fits into place. Whisked to W----- House and a pretty woman hooks us up with a room, organizes a city day-trip, a jungle trek and sends our passports out for Lao PDR visa induction. Service shining.                Who put this place in the world? Holy prayers remembered and forgotten. Burnt hole bedsheet and other accidents. Read the large print and you won�t get burned. Breathe in breathe out. What was that sound? Sounded like a gunshot to me. Eyes wavering. Can�t even remember which finger. Pulse < 60. Phase out.                Phase in again.                Buddhas of all sizes. Carved, and created. Feeling like I�m dying not really (since we came to live). Wondering if someone really is dying just down the hall.                �I don�t know what it was.�                Sleeping. No response. No intention to be heard anyway really. Chiang Mai. Turned out to be a door. All this heat, buckled wood, gunfire egressions and forced entries. (It�s an ongoing feature).

Doi Suthep in the morning. Day trip in effect. Friendliness in all direction. Buddhas. Bells. Overlooking the city. Don�t overlook it�s beauty. A cloudy day. Bandit heads lost in time and now found sanctuary at Wat U-Mong. Towering Chedi to the sky, a marathon just to walk its circumference. Small lake at the bottom of a hill and rumors of turtles. (We couldn�t find the stairway, but we really weren�t looking). Carved caves, dark and cool for peaceful worshippers and peaceful worship.                Forest walk through small paths and pagodas, prayers and proverbs reminded on trees. �Virtue is more valuable than a university degree.� Sweet smell of incense and dank mossy tunnel. �Education is the guide, knowledge is the key.� Moistness in the air and it can�t be avoided. A hot day with clouds coming. It�s shady throughout the path walk, but hot drip sweating through loose limp cotton. Cold drinks and loving thoughts. �Read not only books, but man also.�

Silk, lacquerware, jewelry factory factors, respectively. Overpriced, yet more informative. Nothing the night bazaar couldn�t offer for cost fractions. Pouring rain on egression from the jewelry barn. Explanations of a million different gemstones. Questioning just how much ivory is still carved into trinkets. �They�re farmed elephants,� she tells us. Makes sense, recalling that man�s quest for ivory has artificially selected for tuskless Asian elephants. Wild ivory in Asia a thing of the past. Artificial natural history.                Late night returns to the guesthouse. Fellow collapsed in front of the television with our key. Night bazaar having offered an evening of delicacies, bagged fruit shakes, and barter on the street-side market. CD booths pumping out the CD-R tunes with full-colour inserts and no regard, worry, acknowledgement nor knowledge of commercial copyright laws. Bootleg clothes with designer imprints and even designer labels at rock-bottom deals. Again, no worries. Same, same. Jungle Trek                A two-hour ride out of Chiang Mai, hot moist day for a trek. French becomes the majority tongue, as far as the population of this sawngthaew goes. Two Parisian graduate students, an Austrian French major and her silent friend, two Thai trek guides, Alya and I, and a Dutch cab-driving polyglot. Into the hills and greenery we go, winding roads and infrequent but occasional luxury cottage-like homes.                One more hour on the exemplary dirt road of all dirt roads. Divots, bumps, and landslide washouts all along the way, often hardly wide enough even for one lane. The jungle reaches out and tears at the sawngthaew�s framework.                Reach a village for short lunch break before the trek. Remote, but still technologically sated with the occasional satellite dish. Comfort and calm before the storm of a hike. Up and down, the worst right from the start. Heavy packs, replete with pineapple (mine), each trekker contributing to the greater good of later�s dinner. Quieter than one would expect, birds rare in their eerie absence. Large millipedes scamper across the earth and clay, coiling up at the vibrations of our feet. Cicadas scream through the air, filling in the misplaced ornithological niche. And then the storm comes. Not lightly at first, but straight to the point and direct tempest with miles to go. Feet become heavy with reddish mud-clay. Everyone takes at least one spill, the paths turning to turbulent muddy landslides and small quiet milky rivers. Earth and rain take over, each of us mud-caked and drenched, reaching that point where you stop worrying about getting wet and just take it, accepting defeat in a futile battle for dryness. Context predicts it�s the time for trench foot.                Rain lets up leaving a hard way ahead. A million leaves drip down on sweaty rain-soaked hair. Mud cakes exposed skin and salves insect bites and ankle-high underbrush abrasions. Giant moist mushrooms abound. A living hive of wasps in mid-construction. Deathstar drones fly out and attack passers-by. Sweat pours into eyes and the trek goes on, tired and heavy. On occasion, the jungle opens up to a clear field of rice paddies, silent and curious evidence of life in the middle of nowhere.                Over four hours after setting off on foot, we reach �the untamed authenticity of Thailand�s Northern hill tribes.� Isn�t this what all trekking companies offer? We have come a long way though, and have the cuts and bruises to prove it.                As authentic as you�d expect for a small 10-family village living off the land up in the jungle: we are essentially ignored. What else could one expect? These people wake up at dawn and farm their rice all day, going to bed shortly after sunset, occasionally sacrificing an animal or leaving a sacrament to one of many spirits in tradition of animist beliefs. What interest do they need in foreign affairs? They go about their business. The younger crowds interact with a game, a type of wicker-ball hacky-sack played over a net like volleyball. The smaller children come around for candy, ingenuously procured earlier in the day, but no doubt a commonality. The trek company offers some of the cost to the village, who in turn ensure clean water and a sleeping quarters for us.                A potentially treacherous walk down to the local waterhole allows those of us not completely exhausted to expend any remaining energy in a quick cleanup and rinse-out of rusty-stained clothing. Care to only place skin in well-flowing water. Not only does this make it look cleaner, but avoids threat of everyone�s favourite bloodsucker. The French fellow picked up a less-than-symbiotic leech of a leech en route. It squirmed in plasma-swelled satiated agony, as its anti-coagulant still played out its pharmacological role on the guy�s calf. Blood-red blood poured from a tiny circular aperture. No one had expected to become prey. Only metaphorical vultures circled the camp, eyeing the weak and wounded.                Allowing water to wash over tired and swollen feet, the Austrians strip down to bikini underwear and there�s a carnal orgy of mosquitos, cicadas and miniature waterfalls. They disappear. Lost into a jungle of lesbian silence and dream. It�s a tiring hike back up the hill to the village. The tribe members do this every day, carrying large casks of river water.                We set up wicker blankets and damp, mildewy sleeping bags in a thatch-roof three-walled structure raised up on stilts. Any line or jutting nail or beam becomes practical for hanging out wet, muddy clothing. Large, palm-sized spiders blend into the wood all around our sleeping areas. Mosquito nets come in handy, if not against their intended felon (which tend not to bother my less-than-delicious skin), then at least against these camouflaged arachnids. A spider bite can put a nice itch and swell to things. I speak from experience.                As night falls, dark as ebon in the new moon equation, a green curry and mushroom dinner is cleared up and we are educated by the guides of �the ways of the Karen�.                Children go to school in a neighbouring village, a one-hour walk from this one.                �Two hours for you guys.�                Then we have some recreational Thai lessons. Neung, sawng, saam, sii, and slowly the weary trekkers go off to bed, a small bottle of Sang Som rum ebbing towards its bottom. The village is quiet and no one stirs.                I�ve set time with the guide, and we disappear up into the privileged regions of our host�s home where a make-shift opium den has been set up. A rickety ladder-climb up to the loose wooden floorboards. I lie down on a blanket, resting my head on a flat dusty cushion as the scruffy tribe member mixes in ash and rolls a black pinky-finger-length bar of hard sticky opium. Rumors of Papaver somniferum growing amidst the tall stalks of cornfields. There is no worry of any intervention on this black, mute evening.                �Where you come from?�                The man, speaking clear simplified English asks a few basic questions in a few brief lone moments. When the guide returns, he is mainly silent again. Get-to-know-you time is over and the three of us get to business.                The guide and I speak of many things, our whispers trailing off into the night. Christian missionaries cannot be avoided. They penetrate as far as non-Christian humanity can thrive. The Karen man shows some pamphlets written in Thai script. There are scowls and understanding through gesture and expression. The night is soft and haunting. Towels are hung around us, creating �rooms� on an otherwise single open wooden space. Children sleep only heartbeats away from us. The man with Addiction rolls small pills of opium into balls and places them onto the wood bowl of the long pipe. As the candle burns the sweet black smoke piles into lungs with a subtle haze and sickening old-candy-like taste. The opium melts down like lava dissolving its own progenative volcanic structure. Melts away into sweet smoky nothingness. Buddhism makes the vocal scene, animism close behind. The missionaries were definitely not welcome, and definitely made no impact on this tribal society. Our voices blur. Ideas become pictures in cool candlelit air. No stars. Not a sound. Subtle and sudden. Coughing over my last smoky exhalation.                Close to plummeting down the ladder, back to firm ground. Only several steps to an invisible bench overlooking the cosmos all around. Nothing but quiet in every direction. �Good night.� Sitting outside, forever. Back in �bed,� dissolving into wooden atmospherics and more silence. No one even snores, ever.                So quiet it�s awake.                July 1, Karen Village. Blue bliss...fired skyward. Flagrant fragrance of almost midnight. Time for pleasant dreams in a village of beautiful peasants. We�d walked for moments until the rain kicked in. Laughter all around. Acoustic flavours of frog, cicada, even snoring pig and nestled chick. The children are asleep. With nothing to fear. With nothing, but time on their side. Peaceful walk to the village next door so many many moments away. Soaring to another neck of the woods in a navigation built for two.                Visions of places I�ve been before...and I am there again. Not suddenly, but slowly, floating from one scene to the next familiar location. Bright light and full scenery engulfs my first-person presence. Trees sway and the birds are alive again in this new territory of dream subsistence. Quiet and full-on travel through beautiful areas of the world. These are not dreams. Mosaic of lost time forces cleanest air in and out of the lungs. Magic new moon light empty and dissipates with twinkling stars hidden in the indigo black sky. Flashlight torch battery off, no more than a glimpse of light when the dark night air brings in bright lucid vision. Never falling asleep and never waking up, morning just blends into existence with creeping light.                Waves of nausea creep in, and a most intense headache. All the land�s hangovers balled into one brief intense occasion. I vomit and nod off to a restless nap, waking to vomit again. Everyone sleeps still. Water down. Water straight back out in garden hose projection. A woman of the hill tribe hangs clothes watching me expressionless. Agony with no way out but acceptance. Dehydration with no way out buy finite replenishment. This has to end somehow.

Nausea slowly, ever slowly ebbs with small sips of water and toast. Plain, moistened toast. A new morning. We set off. Continue this jungle roaming. Jungle looming in all sides, mountains roll off endlessly at clear zones. Only hills and mountains roll, roll, and roll. Millipedes by the dozens, coiled in defensive delight. Dry again, the land. Clothes dusty and sweat-engulfed. Skin musty and coated with dried dead skin and sweat, only barely remedied by a cold wash-off in a beige waterfall pool.                The two-day trek is merely the three-day constricted into two days. Same distance and activity, less rest.                At some hour come to a huge clear area, rice paddies all around. Small bamboo huts on the hills, and the odd speck of human being taking a break in a wooden rest lean-to. Others going about the rice fields, ankle-deep in irrigation water. Rain mist sprinkles down all around our damp bodies. The road. Haven�t seen a road in so long. How quickly you forget. Just survival out there. Nausea to the thought. Cold drinks.

Collapsed on a sawngthaew bench, whisked away to the next event. No more walking. No more. Walking has become a horrible nightmare, stumbling at each step. No support left. No communication with muscles and nerves. Blisters atop more blisters. Scrapes and cuts open to the pestilence of the humid open jungle.                ....Elephant ride time. A pleasant change from peripatetic marathon. Along the banks of a small river of rafters we travel, step by stump-like elephant-foot step. You ever hear an elephant scream? Groans low and painful rasping. What did s/he do to get whacked in the head by the guide? He smacks it several times at the top of the skull with an ice-pick-like tool, shouting angrily in local dialect. Each time, the elephant, merely walking the path as it should, shudders a low, trunk-generated guttural moan as the impact echoes through its skull cavities. A low-toned dull echoing pop. No more elephant rides after this one. Up and down small, but very steep hills, holding onto the metal frame for fear of falling right off.                River rafting time. Another aspired-for rest, but the man hands me a pole, and I�m set back to work. Long bamboo pole pushing off the river-bottom to guide and steer this even longer bound bamboo raft. Wet and fresh. Taxing on the biceps, but rejuvenating cleaner water and great fun. Into rapids we plunge and even down tiny waterfalls.                �Can you swim?�                The guide is having a great time. We crack up onto a mid-river rock, the raft jutting up sideways with the current. We must all dismount into the cold rushing water to pull the raft off into open water.                Dirty, wet, hungry and exhausted return along busy, dusty, exhaust-grime roads to Chiang Mai. Sleep. Heavy on the REM, for a few days to come.

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