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Dispatches #1-2 · newest dispatch · next: Laos

DISPATCH #1
Bangkok · Thursday, July 15, 1999

The first thing that happens when you get off a plane in Bangkok in July is that the air hits you in the face like a warm wet towel, and the second thing is that you realize it is never going to stop.

Twenty-some hours from O'Hare, with a change in Tokyo where I bought a can of coffee out of a vending machine just because I could. We landed close to midnight on Tuesday. I had a page of instructions from the guidebook about how to get a taxi without getting ripped off, and I followed every one of them and still have no idea whether I got ripped off. The driver had a dashboard full of little Buddhas and a garland of jasmine flowers hanging from the mirror, and he drove like the road was a personal enemy. I loved him.

He let me out on Khao San Road at about one in the morning, and it was wide awake.

Here's Khao San, for those who haven't been. It's a short street in the old part of Bangkok that has turned into the place where every backpacker on Earth lands first. It is one long block of guesthouses, cafes, travel agents, laundries, internet places (hi), and stalls selling tie-dyed pants, bootleg cassettes, silver rings, and those little wooden frogs that croak when you run a stick down their backs. Every restaurant has a TV playing an American movie, at volume, with Thai subtitles, all night. You can get your hair braided, your backpack sewn, your film developed, a bus ticket to anywhere, and a banana pancake, at three in the morning, all without walking more than fifty feet.

It is not, I know, the real Thailand. Everybody on Khao San tells you that, usually while eating a banana pancake. But I'll admit that on my first night, jet-lagged out of my mind in a country where I can't read a single sign, it was nice to have a street where everybody else was lost too.

My room is about the size of a closet, with a bed, a ceiling fan, no window and a small lizard living on the wall above the door. The lizard is a gecko and it eats mosquitoes, so we have an understanding.

Yesterday I got out of the bubble. I took the river boat down the Chao Phraya, which is the big brown river that runs through the city, packed in with office workers and monks and schoolkids in uniforms, and went to Wat Pho, which is the temple with the Reclining Buddha. Nothing in the guidebook prepared me for the size of it. It's a gold Buddha lying on its side with its head propped on one hand, and it's longer than a basketball court, and so big you can't see the whole thing at once from anywhere in the building. You walk along it like you're walking along a train. The soles of the feet are inlaid with mother-of-pearl in little panels, and each one is a picture.

Some things I've learned so far, mostly by doing them wrong:

- Take your shoes off before you go into a temple. Everyone else's shoes will be there in a pile. Yours will still be there when you come out.
- Don't point your feet at a Buddha image, or at people. When you sit down in a temple, tuck your feet behind you. Your knees will complain.
- Don't touch anybody on the head, even a kid, even to be friendly.
- The King is everywhere. His picture is in every shop and restaurant and on billboards over the highways, and people love him in a way that's hard to describe if you grew up where I did. At the movies, before the film, everybody stands up while they play the royal anthem. I didn't know, and I was the last one up. Nobody said anything. Everybody saw.
- "Mai pen rai" means something like "never mind" or "no problem," and you will hear it about forty times a day, mostly when you've just done something stupid.

I head north on the night train Saturday. My time's almost up here. More from Chiang Mai.

DISPATCH #2
Chiang Mai · Saturday, July 24, 1999

The overnight train to Chiang Mai is the best thing I've done so far, and I've done some good things.

It leaves from Hualamphong, the big main station in Bangkok, in the evening. I had a second-class sleeper, which means in the daytime you sit in a big seat facing another big seat, and at about nine o'clock a guy in a uniform comes down the car and in about ninety seconds per seat pulls them apart, folds them flat, unfolds an upper bunk from the wall, and makes up both beds with clean white sheets and a pillow and a little curtain, like a magician. I watched him do the whole car. People applauded. Okay, I applauded.

Across from me were two nurses from Minnesota, Andrea and Marianne, who just finished their first year working on the same hospital floor and saved up for this trip all year. We bonded over being from the cold part of America and sweating through every shirt we own. We had fried rice brought to our seats by a man with a tray, and watched the lights of little towns go by in the dark, and I fell asleep with the window cracked open listening to the wheels.

When I woke up, everything was green. I mean everything. We were climbing through hills covered with jungle, with mist sitting in the valleys and rice paddies cut into the slopes in steps, every step full of water reflecting the sky. A kid on a water buffalo waved at the train. I waved back so hard I hit my head on the upper bunk.

Chiang Mai is calmer than Bangkok. The old city is a square surrounded by a moat, with pieces of the old brick walls still standing at the corners, and there are temples on practically every block, some of them hundreds of years old, with monks sweeping the courtyards in the morning. It feels like a big town more than a city. I like it a lot. On Monday I rode a red pickup truck taxi up the mountain to the temple at Doi Suthep, which you reach by climbing a few hundred steps between two enormous stone dragons, and from the top you can see the whole city, flat and green and shining in the heat.

But the main thing was the trek.

Pretty much every guesthouse in Chiang Mai sells treks into the hills, where the hill tribe villages are. Andrea, Marianne and I signed up for a three-day one together, along with two guys from the Netherlands and a couple from Israel who had just finished their army service. Tuesday morning a pickup truck drove us two hours out of the city and dropped us at the end of a dirt road, and our guide, a cheerful guy about our age in rubber sandals, pointed up a hill and said "Okay, now we walk."

July is rainy season. I want to be clear about this. It rained every afternoon, and the trail was red mud so slick that we spent the first day falling down in turns, and the guide in his rubber sandals never slipped once. There were leeches. I found one on my ankle at lunch and made a noise I'm not proud of. Marianne, who is a nurse, flicked it off with her fingernail without looking up from her rice.

The first night we slept in a Karen village, in a long bamboo house on stilts, with pigs and chickens living underneath and the whole floor creaking every time anybody rolled over. The family who owned the house cooked us dinner over a fire on a clay hearth right in the middle of the floor: rice, a soup with greens, chicken, and a chili sauce that made one of the Dutch guys cry real tears. After dinner the kids of the village came and sat in the doorway and stared at us, and we stared at them, and then one of the Israeli girls taught them a clapping game and after that it was a party.

Something I thought about a lot: these villages are on every trek. Tourists come through every single day. It would be easy to act like it's a museum. It's not. It's somebody's home, and the family whose floor we slept on still had to get up at dawn and go work in the fields after we left. Our guide asked us to ask before we took anybody's picture, and to take our shoes off in the house, and not to give the kids candy, because there's no dentist for a long way. I tried to be a good guest. I don't know if I was.

The second day we walked through bamboo forest to a waterfall and swam in the pool under it, and then rode elephants for about an hour along a riverbank. I'm not sure how I feel about the elephants. They were huge and calm and seemed fine, and the elephant guys clearly knew them well, but there's something about riding on an animal that size that makes you feel like you should be asking its permission. Mine stopped every few minutes to eat a whole tree. I didn't argue.

The third day was rafting. Not white-water rafting. Bamboo rafting: ten long poles of bamboo lashed together, with a guy standing at the front with a long pole steering us down a fast brown river between jungle walls. We were supposed to stand. I stood for about four minutes. Then I sat. Then, at a bend, I fell in, and the river carried me about fifty yards before Andrea grabbed my backpack strap and hauled me back on like a fish. The guide laughed so hard he nearly fell in too.

So I'm back in Chiang Mai, clean, with the mud finally out from under my fingernails and a souvenir bruise the shape of Ohio on my hip. Andrea and Marianne are heading south to the beaches. I'm heading east. Tomorrow I take a bus to the Mekong, and on Monday I cross into Laos.

Mai pen rai.

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