Week 18: Thailand Pt. 2 (Chiang Mai, Pai, Chiang Rai)
Chiang Mai is expat central. The city had the modern yet cozy feel of San Francisco with the intermittent interjection of buddhist aesthetics. I was staying just across the street from the old town, which was separated from the surrounding city by a tranquil moat reflecting street lights and passing traffic. Hostel Muan, recently constructed by a group of young hoteliers using contemporary, post-modern interior design and quippy copywriting on its signs, cardkeys, and bathrooms to match. I wandered the night market briefly after dropping by bags off, a dizzying, crowded affair where westerners dragged their feet deciding which souvenirs were coming home with them.
So many of the merchants were selling goods from the same manufacturers and suppliers under different tents. I wondered how many unique products were actually being offered, how large the market would actually be if duplicate goods were consolidated or limited to just one tent. Differentiating between mass-produced crap capitalizing on the west’s eastern fetish and high quality, hand-crafted goods took more effort than I was capable of that night. I retreated to my hostel, exhausted from the long train ride into town and the excessive amount of human activity at the market.
I made conversation with a Swiss woman named Laura over breakfast the next morning. Laura recently transitioned into studying literature in graduate school after working in finance for the past two years. She and I were both making our way towards Pai in a few days but had little planned for our time in Chiang Mai, so we brainstormed some activities together while doing some sightseeing around the old town.
Laura and I piled into the back of a pickup truck later that evening, along with five other travelers from different hostels, for a five-hour cooking class a few kilometers from the city center. Our lesson was taught by a Thai woman named Nancy who spoke proficient english and had a phenomenal sense of humor. Nancy began by walking us through the local farmer’s market and teaching us about common ingredients used in thai cuisine before taking us back to her home. Her front yard had been repurposed into a student kitchen. We dawned orange aprons and chopped up all the vegetables and herbs we learned about a few minutes earlier, before crowding around a cluster of small stoves and transmuting our chopped ingredients into five dishes in total: green curry, spring rolls, pad thai, tom kha soup, and mango sticky rice. Nancy joked that a woman who couldn’t use a mortar and pestle well was doomed to live alone while demonstrating the appropriate technique (which bore a striking resemblance to a handjob).
Laura and I were up early the next morning for a trek through a nearby national park. A van picked us up early in the morning and drove us to the trail-head an hour south, where we were led by a lanky guide with long, black hair through a mellow, three-mile hike. Our guide pointed out different plant life along the way, making a brief pit stop at a beautiful waterfall to swim along the way. My skin welcomed the spring water after two days in the humidity without a shower and vibrated with freshness when I emerged. Near the end of the trail, we stopped at a small village nestled in the park that grew its own coffee to try their local product and eat dinner. Our last stop was at the peak of one of the park’s mountains, where two large pagodas served as tombs for a queen and king. They housed traditional Buddhist illustrations and I learned the canonical, mythological tale of Siddhartha becoming the Buddha.
When Laura and I returned, we received much needed massages for an hour for just $4. We wound down at a bar built into the street that let us DJ with their laptop while we drinking one of the strongest Mai Tais known to man. Laura would be driving four hours north towards Pai by moped the next morning. I took a minibus instead.
The minibus weaved through the hills, back and forth, back and forth, creating the perfect atmosphere for anyone prone to nauseousness to lose their lunch. A Chinese tourist behind me did, and we had to pull over for a few minutes while he emptied his stomach. Pai is nestled in the basin of tall mountains coated with trees (much like Rishikesh). The town has become the hippie enclave of Thailand, overrun with mostly white tourists who want more meaning from the country than can be found on Khao San Road. The density of elephant pants per capita is much higher here.
I arrived at my hostel, Suan Doi, around the same time Laura arrived via scooter. We set our belongings down, rented some mopeds from the hostel, and got some pizza together while planning what we’d do with our four nights in town. We started at a small fishing pond nearby full of trout and piranha and provided good wi-fi and beer for guests waiting for their fishing line to snag. After an hour and a half of failed attempts, I finally had a big one on my line. An Israeli guy came from a different group came by and calmly talked my through the dance of reeling in a fish: letting it pull, tightening my tension, bringing it in. We netted the large trout after what felt like a five minute tug-of-war, and the first fish I’d ever caught was in the palm of my hands. I was elated (and released it afterward).
Laura and I cruised to the top of a nearby viewpoint shortly afterwards for an amazing sunset and panoramic view of the beautiful countryside (cover photo at the very top of the post). Later that night, over dinner and breakfast the next morning, I got caught in multiple political discussions about socialism, the looming threat of fascism if capitalism remains unchecked, and the logical fallacies underpinning libertarianism with a guy from Boston developing his own cryptocurrency and a few progressive women from Canada. In contrast, the rest of that day was spent straight chilling, and I finished writing a piece on California’s fading paradise (inspired by all the travelers and locals I’ve met that dream of living there). I’m a fun guy, I swear.
The next day I spent some time exploring Lod Cave with Laura and a woman named Hope. We were lead by a guide with a propane lantern who said a silent prayer before entering and exiting the cave, which was full of impressive stalactites and stalagmites. We boarded a bamboo raft halfway through, floating just inches over a river that ran through the cave while a large school of fish all rushed to the surface in search of food. Lod Cave was enjoyable, but the real highlight of the day was the hour long ride both there and back, which took us through the countryside and made me feel a more intimate connection with my surroundings. Some of the curves were sharp and required keeping our wits about us (so many people at the hostel had bandaged arms and legs from accidents that it was almost a running joke), but as long I remained present, the drive wasn’t too harrowing.
When we returned, we met up with a really fun group of Californians (the most I’d been around since being back home). A local bar served psychedelic shakes and they’d all had some. I felt a contact high of sorts, laying on the raised patio with them, having humorous conversations before heading to the night market afterward to try local, freshly cooked food for three dollars or less. We hung out around a campfire back at the hostel and enjoyed one another’s company. The good vibes were tangible (as much as it pains me to non-ironically type that sentence and read it back to myself).
The hostel offered free yoga classes every morning, which made starting each day in paradise even sweeter. Laura, Hope, and I invited the yoga teacher, Cat, to join us for breakfast after class where we had a satisfying meal and conversation on the morality of intelligent life in the universe and what it “should” or “shouldn’t” achieve. Clearly in the right head space for it, we went off to acquire some mushroom shakes of our own. We downed the purple, grape flavored concoction and prepared ourselves for the come up back at the hostel: getting water, changing into comfortable clothes, and applying sunscreen before responsibility became a foreign concept.
Slowly, the wood patio began to breathe, the present expanded, sounds started to last a lifetime. I slowly became aware of my body, how locked it was, along with the nauseousness that usually accompanies a come up. After a few burps and a few stretches, I was feeling much better and thoroughly embedded in my trip, taking in the hostel’s beautiful landscaping, the banana leaves gently swaying, waving at me in the distance, a giant, white buddha statue sitting atop a hill in the distance, gazing calmly at the paradise below. We christened the patio we laid on the “Paitanic”, our pirate ship cruising along the greenery that surrounded us.
Laura opened up about her relationship with her mom and some of the revelations she was having while traveling, finding her own way, and learning to be vulnerable. Cat was a phenomenal listener, empathizing deeply, catching and responding to smaller details I had missed and using them like passwords to get Laura to go deeper. After what was probably an hour or two of hanging out, more people began to join our ship, drastically altering the atmosphere (since we hadn’t established a space of openness or intimacy with them). I noticed myself becoming increasingly anxious and retired below the deck (so to speak), relaxing in a hammock that hung suspended from the elevated patio. Cat came down a few minutes later and announced she was headed to the field behind the hostel. I asked if I could join and she obliged. I was in a Miyazaki movie, following Cat through the dirt path and out into the open field. She wore a loose, laced, dark beige tank top, light blue denim shorts, brown sandals, and a tan sun hat. Her confident movement as she waded through tall weeds towards an open patch of dirt, enclosed by hills and mountains as far as the eye could see, reminded me of the protagonists in the virtuoso’s films.
Cat is awaiting a decision from her grad school applications. She wants to get an MFA and write fiction that celebrates psychedelic experience while making it more accessible to a general audience. We picked up the conversation we had over breakfast regarding the responsibilities of intelligent life, which naturally lead to how we should operate politically. We so often forget that the answers to the most complex problems are right in front of us. The information we consume make the issues seem so large and unapproachable that we become paralyzed, unsure of our own agency and where to start. But all we can ever do is work with what’s in front of us, which, politically speaking, means getting involved at the local level first and foremost. How else could you begin? Where else would you begin? There’s a reason you don’t hear this idea on the news. They can’t profit from it.
We moved into a conversation on compassion and the importance of healing one another in a society, which lead us to question whether pure, true malice existed and if a society could quarantine it in a humane way. We both agreed malice had to exist as a reference point for us to understand morality. We could feel it within us, since we weren’t separate from the spectrum of morality, but part of it. Good and evil were were codependent, creating the struggle that gives life meaning. Creating the tension for this drama this called life. Like actors, we must play our part resolving this conflict, aware that the whole thing is a show. That’s our job, and we’re rewarded for doing so. We feel this intuitively when we do good for our peers. We know this intuitively when the karma comes back around. As we came to these conclusions, Cat was physically acting out, visualizing the concepts with her hands and arms, one up and down, eventually leveling out and balancing on both sides with her eyes closed. She was feeling every concept mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually. “You really feel.” I told her. “That’s it? No verb, no noun? Just feel?” “Yeah.” “Thanks, so do you.”
Cat taught me some Qi Gong, the warm-up routine for Tai Chi that she learned from a master in China during her year-long stay there. Each set of movements was part of a never ending flow, the trick was learning how to dive in. I had to coordinate each motion with my breath in order to understand the routine, like a physical riddle. We practiced together for an hour, feeling each movement. We had both completed our yoga teacher training around the same time, and it was fun applying some of the breathing principles we’d learned from one ancient practice and seeing how it applied to another.
After our Qi Gong practice, Cat opened up about struggling with the perfectionist inside that kept her from vocalizing her thoughts as much as she’d like. I asked if I could pry, leading her through a small set of exercises I had picked up in Los Angeles meant to address emotional blockages which partially involved yelling, howling, and making ugly sounds, allowing her to get more comfortable with anything not meticulously manicured that might come from her mouth. We dug into some old memories, touching on the nature of parenthood a little bit, trying to understand why our parents did the things that hurt us as children, when we were too young to see them as people with needs too, and how we could heal ourselves with this new understanding. Cat laid out a sarong as the sun set and we began to come down. We shared a cigarette filled with Peruvian tobacco, my first since New Year’s Eve.
The moon’s path was short, briefly appearing as a thin crescent before disappearing behind the mountains and bringing the constellations into view. We headed back to the hostel for dinner when it got a bit chilly, sharing a table with a hippy family on vacation with a mother so cross-faded she couldn’t sit up. I headed to be shortly after helping her back to her room with her son.
My last full day was spent exploring the west side of Pai with Shannon (one of the Californian girls), Sonia (a new arrival from Colombia), and Cat. We visited to a waterfall and meditated in its caves for 10 minutes, walked across a holy bamboo bridge that spanned a mile over terraced farmland, allowing monks to get from their temple to the main road, and walked inside of a fissure called the Land Split where a kind farmer serves homegrown sweet potatoes, peanuts,and banana chips to guests exploring his property. We ended the evening watching the sunset at Pai Canyon and improvising on a harmonica that Cat brought. It was my first time driving a moped with someone on the back, and that someone was Cat. What better way to end a budding friendship than to put your passenger in the hospital. I was a nervous, but I meditated for a few minutes, telling myself “You got this,” but also “Don’t fuck this up.” The day went off without a hitch, and I gave thanks to the universe along the way, grateful to be cruising through serene country with a gem of a human on the back of my scooter.
I left Pai without much fanfare the next day, giving all of the friends I’d made a quick hug before heading towards the bus station. I spent the next 7 hours in transit, cutting through the windy roads that brought me here and towards Chiang Rai.
I spent the next day visiting the city’s famous White Temple, its white tiles blinding you as you crossed into it, forcing you to squint. The temple grounds were full of sculptures and intricate murals that mixed Buddhism with pop culture by one of the artists I’d seen at the Bangkok MoCA. But the real reason I was there was to catch a slow-boat down the Mekong River into Laos.
A van was waiting for me at 6 a.m. the next morning.
