Back on the trail: Chiang Mai to Chiang Rai

I have changed my location by one letter.

This morning I bade Chiang Mai farewell with more than a little wistfulness. My feet have just finished healing up. I was just getting to know some great people there. And onward I go…

Chiang Mai really is a distinctive city. I love the laidback college town atmosphere, the plethora of temples, and the old town walls, complete with moat. Every time I saw those walls I would envision some impending Mongol invasion and feel like I needed a spear in my hand. I know, at heart, I’m still a ten year old wishing he could live in Middle Earth. You have to admit, though: any place that can feed that sort of romanticism is doing something right.

Anyway, I am now in Chiang Rai. It took about three hours on the bus to get here. My plan, such as it is, is to stay here tomorrow and catch a bus for Laos the following morning. My first impression of Chiang Rai has been favorable. The bus station is right next to a thriving night market, and there were plenty of tourists there to welcome me back to the traveling circuit. It’s a big enough town to have stuff going on and yet it’s small enough to feel peaceful, too. I keep telling myself I’m going to get back out there and explore the market further, but I’m starting to feel sleepy lying here on this hotel bed. We’ll see.

More yokel-ness ensued at the Chiang Mai bus station. With the public bus system down south, I learned that one bought a ticket on the bus itself. So this afternoon, I waited confidently until people had started boarding. Look at me, I thought. I’m so travel-savvy.

Turns out you buy a ticket at the ticket counter. The bus staff rolled their eyes and sent someone to get a ticket for me while I stood outside feeling like that dumbass tourist.

These things happen.

As for longish term plans, I have decided to stay in SE Asia and trade in my airfare to Turkey for a voucher. Once I looked at the cost of living in Istanbul and the surrounding region, it became clear to me that it’s going to be a lot more of a financial stretch to travel over there. You simply can’t beat the exchange rates here. My money goes much further.

Another factor was the weather. When I checked, it was in the neighborhood of 55 degrees F in Istanbul. That’s certainly not cold, but compared to 75 degrees here, it’s a tough trade to make. Couple this with the fact that I only packed for SE Asia and would have to buy warmer clothes upon arrival.

There is also the vague reasoning that taking off for Istanbul goes against the current of travel in these parts. The backpacker circuit has a way of pulling you along with it — it’s the path of least resistance. It feels abrupt and awkward to go straight from Thailand to Turkey. Or at least, that is my justification for the herd mentality behind this reason.

So on the one hand, it’s great to have more of a plan and to have the time/money to roam around Asia. On the other, I was excited about Eastern Europe and particularly about visiting my friend Val in Ukraine, where she is saving the world as a Peace Corps volunteer. However, I will have the voucher, and I can only use it with the one Eastern European airline, so let’s say maybe in the summertime, Val-Tron.

Overall, it feels good to be moving again. My mindset is shifting back into wanderlust mode, which is, after all, what this blog is supposed to deal with. I’m considering starting a separate blog for all the crap that isn’t related to travel. I was thinking about calling it “The ManBoy Chronicles.” (Yes, I do insist on being self-deprecating. It makes me feel better about how very, very seriously I take myself.) I don’t want to stretch myself thin, though, so we’ll see.

That’s always the last word: we’ll see. I’m seeing a coat of arms for the Ministry of Indecision in my mind’s eye… what is “we’ll see” in Latin?

Expect fewer updates for a while. Being on the move, combined with being in Laos, is going to cut down on my internet time. I am perfectly okay with that. I do not remember when I decided that daily posts were required. I continue to write every day, but I will no longer subject you all to the shit not worth sharing.

Then again… we’ll see.

Further Updates from the Ministry of Indecision

I might need to start a whole category of MoI posts. It’s one of the larger departments of my anxious, polyphonic mind. Here’s a glimpse into the murk.

I am leaving Chiang Mai on Wednesday morning. I will be going to Laos and then Vietnam. This much is certain. As for the rest… I need to make some decisions pretty soon about staying in Asia and teaching or sticking with my original plan to fly (recklessly) on to Istanbul and from there, tour Eastern Europe. If I’m going to the Balkans, I’m leaving 4 March, which leaves me only ten days to zip through Laos and the northern part of Vietnam, then get back to Bangkok and go halfway around the world again. That’s sounding a bit crazy right now, even to me.

I’m nearly ready to start applying for teaching jobs in Korea, once I get a copy of my diploma from home (still waiting on the university, but it’s in the mail). The thing is, most teaching jobs in Korea will pay your airfare into and out of the country. It’s one of the major draws of working there, in addition to high salaries and loads of other benefits like free housing. So really, I can fly to Korea from anywhere in the world, once I get a job. But, since I’m aiming for ASAP positions (like, starting within a few weeks), it would be sort of crazy to fly to Turkey, range up into Bulgaria and Romania, then turn around and fly back to Korea.

Then again, if I don’t, I’m SOL on the cost of that plane ticket.

I could try to find teaching work in Eastern Europe, which was my original plan — but then again, my original plan involved a TEFL certification that I bailed out on.

Anyway, this matter will remain under MoI jurisdiction until tomorrow. Then it passes on to the Ministry of Certainty, and from there will progress either to the Ministry of Good Decisions or the Ministry of Bad Decisions. I don’t need to tell you which one of those is the larger department.

Chiang Mai: Museum and Sunday Market

Sometimes I set out to write a blog post and I get just a little too warmed up. I write three single-spaced pages even though I know halfway through it isn’t appropriate for my audience and I’m not going to actually post it. It’s kind of a shame that I feel the need to censor myself to this degree, but it’s probably a wise move for the public sphere. Maybe if I were an established writer who could say whatever the hell he wanted without fear of repercussions, it would be different. But alas, I’m not, and, anyway, it’s not. Ask Salman Rushdie.

So here’s your censored version.

I went to a museum today: the Chiang Mai City Art and Cultural Center. In a word, it was lame. For all the bells and whistles of modern museums, and this old bourgeois prejudice that they somehow preserve culture for future generations and are therefore important, I think I idealize museums mostly because of Indiana Jones. You know, the way he would yell at those Nazis, with such fervor, “This belongs in a museum!”

Three Kings Monument outside Chiang Mai City Art and Cultural Center

So I guess I was expecting entire rooms of glass exhibits, each filled with artifacts from Chiang Mai’s rich past. I don’t know… golden buddhas, jade pottery, weapons and armor from every historical period of the past millennium. At least some prehistoric shit – spears, slings, bows, rock tools. I saw a few paintings of tribesmen hunting with crossbows.

“Show me the f**king crossbows!” I felt like yelling at the one guide I saw, wanting to shake her by the shoulders. “Why the hell did they make crossbows instead of regular old bows in 3,000 BC? Or is this just another goddamn anachronism you thought the tourists wouldn’t catch, like the Danielle Steel paperback in the stack of moldering books in that ‘artisan’s dwelling’ that’s supposedly from the 19^th century? Where are the swords and the spears? Where are the crumbling manuscripts, the golden buddhas? I want a f**king animatronic suit of armor that lectures me on Thai warfare! I want to see rubies the size of my fist and mummified heads cursed by hilltribe shamans!”

It wouldn’t have done any good, of course. That one tour guide was Japanese, anyway.

The point is, I saw maybe four artifacts in the whole museum: some broken pieces of clay pottery and an equally dull clay bracelet. Everything else consisted of signs in poorly translated English and video presentations I couldn’t bear to subject myself to. Once I punched the big red knob marked “Spanish” just to annoy the tour group behind me. The loud, grainy audio track of an anonymous Spaniard echoed behind me as I moved slowly forward, feigning interest in a cheap diorama of peasants constructing a house. In fact, if you’re into cheesy dioramas you can disregard the rest of my criticisms, because the Chiang Mai City Art and Cultural Center will not let you down.

Five-inch plastic elephants ... how cute! How educational!

This one really got me. So this enormous diorama, which takes up half the room, is supposed to illustrate that the hilltribes live... in the hills?

I want to share this painting of the king of Thailand, but I’m afraid to express any opinion on it for fear of being imprisoned for 20 years.

No comment.

This, in a nutshell, was my cultural outing for the afternoon.

Freshly cultured, I wandered out into a street full of vendors unpacking wares and setting up shop for the Sunday Market.

Inside the temple, people pay their respects.

Outside the temple, salesmen sell lingerie.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I ducked into a restaurant, one of those Thai places where the staff always seems dismayed to have a foreigner walk in. I don’t know if I was wearing that piss-ant tourist smile or if they were just irritated at me for interrupting their TV show. It was some kind of talent show and I could see why they preferred watching it to frying my pork.

First I watched a guy contort himself into all kinds of grotesque positions. This climaxed with him standing all the way up on one leg, his other one wrapped completely around his neck. He could have picked his nose with his pinky toe. (If I were his manager, I would have insisted on this as a finale.) Next I watched a guy shoot the flame off a candle with an assault rifle. One shot, and it hit only the wick.

Now this is culture, I thought. Almost as good as the Thai soap operas, of which I’ll have to post videos in a later post.

After that, I pulled out The Man Who Was Thursday and read it through to its disappointing conclusion. It was an amusing read, overall, but it started off with much more promise than it ended with. There were several jarring indicators throughout that Chesterton was shuffling between reality and un-reality, and which I suppose were meant to tie it all together. It simply didn’t work for me, though. The story hooked me early on for its absurdity and wit. The two, when carefully balanced, are a joy to read. As the novel progressed, however, the absurdity outstripped the wit until the whole thing ran far ahead of itself. Finally, desperate and out of tricks, it let out a gasp and transformed into a heavy-handed morality tale, then collapsed altogether. Gregory returning at the final banquet, in particular, set my teeth on edge. I found the paltry attempts at allegory almost as insulting as when I re-read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in high school. Even more infuriating was the kind of half-assed existentialism underlying the whole final scene. Chesterton wrote elsewhere that he was trying to capture…

…that world of wild doubt and despair which the pessimists were generally describing at that date, with just a gleam of hope in some double meaning of the doubt, which even the pessimists felt in some fitful fashion.

If he was trying to characterize that world and write from its point of view, I can say that he was as unsuccessful as his undercover detectives were in portraying themselves as anarchists.

Anyway, enough literary nonsense. (I’m thinking such passages should get posted separately as book reviews, from now on.) By the time I emerged from the restaurant, having satisfactorily abused Chesterton in my journal, the Sunday Market was in full swing. What had been half-constructed stalls and sealed ice chests an hour or so before was now a bona fide market, complete with jostling tourists and pushy merchants.

The market gets underway in Old Town.

In something of a daze, I bought a chocolate waffle with cashew nuts. I had to wait a minute or so to receive my change, much less eat my fat-rations, because the national anthem started blasting over a tinny loudspeaker at that very moment. Everyone, even the most oblivious, drunken farang, stopped in their tracks to stare, zombie-like, in the general direction of the noise. The whole scene reminded me of a DVD skipping, covered by a short interlude in which your drunk grandpa plays old military records on his phonograph. The anthem ended and the DVD resumed its forward progress. The waffle lady dropped two coins into my hand and everyone returned to life.

I pushed through the crowd to a nearby bookstore and exchanged my copy of Chesterton for Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. I’ve been binging on some videos of him on YouTube. I might post one in which he graphs the shape of every story known to man. It takes him about two minutes and it’s hilarious.

On my way back through the market, I paused here and there to take some pictures. I’ve been slacking in the photo department, so you’ll find a few more paltry attempts scattered throughout this post. I stumbled upon a packed out Wat which I found really fascinating. The market just outside it was full-on, but inside the temple, the lay service was just as rocking. I don’t mean rocking rocking, obviously, and thank God, not rocking like one of those corporate mega churches back home. A crowd of people was chanting together and bowing before an enormous golden Buddha statue. The light reflected off the gold detailing and suffused the entire temple with the kind of glow you have to call, however grudgingly, heavenly. You could feel the peacefulness of the atmosphere inside. Super high vibrational, brah.

Chanting: laypeople in back, monks in front

After that, I made my way to the edge of the madness and recruited a songthaew home. It was the first day in a while that I spent entirely away from my apartment. So now I am back, writing this post far later than I usually do. I hope I can stay awake long enough to post some photos.

Return to Kalare Boxing Stadium

The Lanna Muay Thai crew returned to a packed out Kalare Boxing Stadium last night for this week’s slew of fights.

Five combatants represented Lanna: two Thai brothers, last name of Kiat Busaba and one of them a former world champ, along with three foreigners: Arthur of the US, Pat from Canada, and Daniel from New Zealand.

The first fight went the entire five rounds and ended with a decision against Lanna’s boxer, Kiat Busaba the younger. It was a tough, evenly-matched fight and I can’t imagine the difference in points was very great. Then again, I know precisely nil about how points are tallied in Muay Thai. For example, even when a fighter throws a kick that gets blocked, his trainers and supporters in the crowd will shout “Oi!” (Or “Ole”, or some kind of noisy open vowel.) I think they do it to recognize a good hit, or simply to encourage their fighter.

The second fight was a crowd pleaser. The elder Kiat Busaba, the former champ, got off to what appeared to be a slow start. His opponent was much younger and his kicks landed with palpable force. It became apparent in the second and third rounds, however, that Busaba had been evaluating his opponent and, I think, baiting him into expending more energy than he should have. Experience, in the end, won out. The former champ came out of his corner with a fury in the third round, oblivious to the odd blow to the face, and wound up knocking the guy out with three consecutive knees to the head. The ferocity of his performance and his post-fight clowning definitely earned him some fans in the crowd.

Arthur, the third fighter from Lanna, seems to win fans before he throws a single strike. There is something immediately likeable about him, whether it is his quietness, his intensity of focus, or his strength – most likely the combination of the three. In any case, Arthur had a tougher fight than he did last week. He brought more than enough fury to win, however. Muay Thai fights often end abruptly, and after a fairly balanced few rounds, one of Arthur’s devastating hooks dropped the guy to the mat.

Pat, the Canadian, was a Western boxer before coming to Muay Thai several years ago. It definitely showed in his fight. He came out with the most hellacious punches I’ve seen in that ring yet. Darting and quick, but straight on and dangerous. His long arms make them particularly deadly.

Watching Pat added to my suspicions about Thai boxing versus Western boxing: punches are quicker and leave you much less vulnerable than kicks. It’s one thing if you’re Thai and you’ve been throwing kicks since you were six years old, but very rarely do you see a farang come in the ring and kick with much speed or strength. Speed is the main thing. Low kicks and push kicks are one thing, and I think might be useful in a real world altercation. High kicks, flashy as they are, are probably going to land you on your back and in serious trouble. Again, I don’t know anything, but it seems to me that your best bet as a Westerner is to defend against kicks and then overwhelm with strong punches and elbow strikes.

Anyway, Pat’s boxing won him the fight. I heard him saying afterward that he should have used more kicks, but I thought, “Hell man, do whatever works.” Thai fighters seem taken off-guard by powerful boxers. Usually Thais will range from kicks straight to the clinch. Hovering at mid-range and throwing punches makes for a much faster intensity than they’re used to.

Daniel, from New Zealand, proved to be an exception to the farang/punching formula. He threw some impressive and highly technical kicks. Never mind that they didn’t land. They were awesome. A couple roundhouses, one heel stomp (don’t know what else to call it), and one flying kick in which he faked with one leg then leapt and kicked with the other. This fight went all five rounds and Daniel won by decision.

So, another Friday night at Kalare, another string of victories for Lanna Muay Thai. I think Brock, an Australian training here, summed it up best this morning: “There were some wars in that ring last night.”

I still can’t articulate what is so appealing about this kind of violent spectacle, or describe the relish in Brock’s voice as he emphasized the word wars. I feel it myself, at times, but I’m finding it more and more difficult to sustain as a daily routine.

Anyway, I’m taking the day off of training. Hopefully the weekend will recharge my enthusiasm.

Backtracking

(From 19 January 2012)

It is not down in any map; true places never are.
— Herman Melville

The Gentle Reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the Gentle Reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass.
— Mark Twain

The train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai was beginning to climb the northern hills of Thailand. The jungle grew so close to the tracks that branches scraped the window next to my face. Somewhere up ahead, the engine hiccupped and its growl rose in pitch with fresh exertions. The branches scraped past my window more and more slowly until, finally, the train shuddered, stopped, and then began to roll backward.

I made a note in my journal: “Just like that, the train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai has become the train from Bangkok back to Bangkok.”

The train stopped again. I got up and followed a couple other passengers to the front of the car. I stepped out of the car onto the platform between ours and the next one and stared off into the jungle. I wondered if there were tigers prowling through it. I stopped someone rushing past.

“Does this train have a dining car?” I asked.

“No.” She looked at me. “Didn’t they serve you lunch?”

I went back to my seat and resumed staring out the window. Some Canadian guy, about my age, returned to the car trumpeting the news that there had been a mudslide up ahead and the track was blocked. I consulted my second-hand guidebook and circled the nearest town south of us which had an airport.

After ten minutes or so, the train continued rolling backward down the hill. This time the movement seemed intentional. I watched the jungle race past in reverse and looked for tigers.

We stopped at a tiny station with a sign proclaiming it Pang Ton Phueng. I watched people file past me and jump down onto the tracks, chatting and stretching. I followed. On the platform, a big, sunburned man towered over a young Thai wearing a train service uniform.

“Map?!” the red-faced man yelled. “You have map?!”

The Thai man shook his head in confusion, looking alarmed.

“What have you been able to learn?” I asked the big man. “Someone was talking about a mudslide.”

“Nah, we just broke down,” he said with a Scottish accent. “They’re sayin’ it’ll be fixed in an hour.”

“Food?” I asked the Thai, who didn’t look much older than me. He spoke no English whatsoever. I mimed bringing a fork from a plate to my lips. His face brightened and he motioned to follow, seizing the opportunity to escape the big Scot.

He led me to an improvised store being set up on a picnic table underneath a house on stilts. The woman behind the table placed an assortment of plastic-wrapped goodies on it.

“I bet you planned this,” a beefy man with a German accent was saying to the woman. “How many trains break down here?”

She smiled nervously. “No English.”

I noticed a couple big bottles of Chang, a popular Thai beer, and motioned that I wanted one. I also took a bag of peanuts. Carrying my loot back to the tracks, I thought I would be clever and pop the cap off on the rail. I set it against the rusty metal and hammered it with my fist. The top part of the bottle shattered. Other passengers stopped milling around the platform to look over at me. A couple middle-aged Thai women giggled. I shrugged and put the bottle to my lips, anyway. About half of the neck was intact, so it was fine. Nonetheless, one of the Thai women threw up her hands and ran to get me a plastic cup.

“Khap-khun-khap,” I said. (“Thank you.”) It always comes out clumsy. Thais manage to squeeze all kinds of nuances into their consonants, only half-detectable to my farang’s ears. I never manage to use the correct intonation, either.

I poured my beer and walked away from the station toward the rest of the village.

The contrast between this way-station, unmarked on my guidebook’s map, and the tourist-infested south could not have been greater. Here, you looked off into the forest and could sense a quietness beyond. There were no trails slicing through the hills; or, if there were, they did not have wooden signs in English indicating a nearby viewpoint, or pasty Europeans ambling along them with expensive cameras.

Now, if only there were tigers…

I passed two women from the train. They were pale, but neither had a camera. I was clutching my oversized bottle of Chang in one hand and the plastic cup in the other. They smiled at me.

“Might as well enjoy it, right?” one of them said. She had a North American accent.

“That’s right,” I said. “Seen any guesthouses around here? I think I want to stay.”

I wandered out onto a paved road that must have been the main thoroughfare and passed a couple houses which struck me as delightfully ordinary. A van full of Thais overtook me from behind, and I moved sheepishly to the side of the road and stopped gawking at the forested hills. The passengers in the van eyed me curiously as they passed, noting the beer and the glazed expression I feel sure must have been on my face — the vapid look of a tourist. The van moved slowly away. A little girl stared at me from the back window.

I felt myself blush. Abruptly, I turned around and walked back to the train station.

Fifteen minutes later, we clambered back aboard the train and set off north. I watched the same stretch of jungle roll by and listened to the chatter of fellow backpackers a few rows behind me. You don’t need a guidebook, second-hand or otherwise, to know the places we all go — the trail of connect-the-dot adventurers is easy to find. You hear the same names and destinations wherever you come across English conversation. I sighed and kept watching the jungle, which was fading to black now as the sun went down.

Not a tiger in sight.