M.I.A.!!
Trip Start
Aug 30, 2006
1
21
33
Trip End
Jun 11, 2007
Chiang Khong,
Thailand
Monday, December 4, 2006
I will be the first to admit that I hung around in Bangkok for too long, although it was quite a beautiful and bustling place. I simply enjoyed the routine for awhile. After all, I had been traveling consistently for quite some time. Finding myself suddenly short on money, I taught at an English camp for a couple of days. As I suspected, my teaching skills fell far short of my guitar-playing entertainment skills for Thai 8-year-olds. After making friends in Bangkok for a couple of days, I went north to Chiang Mai, the northern hub. It was a nice, 12-hour bus ride for the equivalent of about five dollars, which was pretty cool
Good Morning Chiang Khong
.Chiang Mai is distinctly set up. It has a square "old city," with at-times dilapidated city walls and a moat surrounding it. It has a huge night market that stretches for blocks and blocks, narrow walkways between stands selling everything from clothes to food to knives to luggage to general Thai-influenced bric-a-brac. My guesthouse was about a ten minute walk from this area, in a quiet neighborhood that somehow reminded me of Arizona. Dogs littered the streets, lounging around. People didn't turn on lights until nighttime.
Thai life really seems quite distilled in a way. Most shops and even some homes don't have a front wall per se--they just raise a garage door to open, and move things out to display. So the whole place, no matter what it's selling, is often open-air. It's quite refreshing. Most neighborhoods have a market as well. This consists of a tin roof covering many, many rows of stalls where people sell food of all kinds, both cooked and raw. The cooked food can be both good and terrifying in taste and smell. Foods I've tried: green mango, chicken feet (don't eat the bones!), dried prawns. Foods I haven't tried: fried grasshoppers, silkworms, dried squid, rat jerky (fur included). Eating is, as you might guess, sometimes an adventure
Our stopping point of Pak Bang, I think
. I have experienced the great feeling of food so spicy that you can barely take it, I really enjoy this for some reason, but it leaves me somehow wanting more. Don't ask how. Thailand is one of few places I know where it's cheaper to go out to eat than to buy and cook, so lots of Thais go out too (and I'm talking, 50 cents for a big meal). Rice is everywhere. Sweet coconut curry is everywhere, flavored to perfection. Carts on the side of the road are often the best places to eat.Aside from cars, Thais get around by motorbikes, various carts, and a taxi-type apparatus which involves putting benches in the back of a pickup truck and covering it. Compared to Egypt, they drive rather politely, if sometimes too fast.
Chiang Mai is also the base for lots of trekking in northern Thailand, the general term for outdoorsy stuff. So I went on a three-day trek through the jungle with a group. The group was good, and the hiking was amazing. We had a guide who was a native Karaen, the largest of the six hill tribes that still populate much of northern Thailand in between the bigger towns. So we go the scoop on the hill tribes, who are now experiencing the familiar plight of indigenous people--modernization, tourism, etc. The trip included great food, bamboo rafting, a rather tense elephant ride, and good conversation, so it felt worth it
River power, fishing power
. Although it's strange, because the jungle didn't feel like a jungle. It is December, so it gets cold at night, but things still weren't as lush and green as I would have thought. But since we were in the mountains, vegetation changed drastically as we went up and down--at the top there were more familiar-looking temperate plants, while in the valleys there were huge banana trees with six-foot leaves, coconut trees, the tall canopy and multi-leveled ecosystem that one might expect from a place calling itself a "jungle." Overall, it was quite an experience.The thing about Thailand, though, is that it is pretty well set up for tourism. Even in an even-further-north town called Chiang Rai, westerners were accomodated by a number of Western restaurants, etc. This makes me feel a little strange, as if I am being herded into tourism, but at the same time it is still different and sometimes jarring enough to be endlessly interesting here. I have had a certain unplaceable nervousness though over the last week or so, perhaps because I have less than 3 weeks to make a large circle through Laos, Cambodia, and maybe Vietnam. Perhaps it's because there's an unpredictibility to this part of the world that puts you on edge but also exhilirates you. But I think part of me is getting restless, even impatient, with the idleness of traveling. I find myself thinking a lot about "what next." As it probably has for lots of you, traveling has taught me a lot about what I want and don't want, and in a way continuing to travel means being held back from doing what I now am pretty sure I want. I am hoping to live in the moment more as I continue on here, and to keep acknowledging that sense of awe that pops up many times per day, that might be the true source of my restlessness--it's that feeling that makes me want to slow down, if only to offset the sheer overwhelming power of life and the world.
