Chiang Mai

Elephants Monkeys & Snakes

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A day trip north took me to an elephant training camp, monkey training school where they learn to twist off the coconuts and let them drop from the trees.

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The snake show I could have done without. “Please do me a favor,” the driver says on the way home. He stops at five different shops and factories including the Orchid Farm and Butterfly Garden so he can get a coupon for gas. The Indian shops give two coupons. But who wants to buy overpriced Indian stuff in Thailand? This has happened to before so I should have known better. Exhausted, I draw the line at the last one. Never again. At least I didn’t let them pressure me into buying anything.

Market-Going

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Tired of the Night Market for tourists, this week I walked to the Warorot Day Market…a market for the local Thais. DSC00445.JPG
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I bought delicious garlic flavored BBQ chicken for lunch with custard filled squash for dessert. Then crossing the footbridge over the Mae Ping River I walked back past upscale craft and fabric shops stopping for a mixed fruit shake at the Riverside Bar & Restaurant. There is supposed to be great live music there at night but I feel weird going by myself so I don’t.

“Letters From Thailand”

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“Letters From Thailand” is a lovely novel wrtten in 1969 by “Botan”, a pseudonym of the Chinese-born Thai female writer, Supa Sirisingh, and recently translated into English by Susan Fulop Kepner, an academic on Southeast Asian studies from UCLA.

The book is written in the form of self-revealing letters to the beloved mother of a young man who leaves rural China to make his fortune in Thailand at the close of World War II. In Tan Suang U’s starkly honest account of his daily life in Bangkok’s bustling Chinatown, deeper themes emerge: his determination to succeed at business before all else; his hopes for his children in this strange new culture that sickens him by what he sees as it’s drunkeness, laziness, gambling and sexual depravity and his resentment at how easily his children embrace urban Thai culture that is becoming increasingly Westernized at the expense of their Chinese heritage that he holds dear.

Westerners will recognize the cross-cultural themes that emerge… the desire to hold on to cultural heritage in the midst of an alien land, the stereotypes that keep groups separated one from another and the struggle of oppressed women to transcend their own culture and live life on their own terms.

“Not to eat another man’s rice but to hate him” is something to be ashamed of, Suang U learns. “I was of the opinion that a good heart was not money in the bank,” Suang U says toward the end of the book. But he learns that “two baht worth of rice with love at the supper table is a feast.” Finally, a lonely old man, after he has passed his business on to the ungrateful son that he himself mentored, he discovers that “to be alone is terrible, but it is not so terrible as to be a guest in a son’s house.”

The strongest survival instinct is self deception. After a long sorrowful road to self-discovery he is astounded to learn two things: one is that money is not the most important thing in life; the other is that what we believe does not necessarily reflect what and who we are.

“Letters From Thailand”
1969 by Supa Sirisingh
Susan F. Kepner English Translation 2002
Silkworm Books Chiang Mai
http://www.silkwormbooks.info

Reverent Inquiry

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In spite of my petty but honest day-to-day frustration with bureaucratic silliness while traveling in most developing countries, I treasure the lives of the people who ironically seem to have integrity…congruity. The way they live is understandable in relation to their history, geography economics and culture-not to be compared to any other place. Rather than judge, a friend says she tries to engage �others�� with a �reverent curiosity� to describe how she travels. I try to be more intentional-I borrow her idea and call it �reverent inquiry.� I do want to respect the dignity of those I am coming to visit without giving up my own chosen values.

Hope For Thailand

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Thousands of people have been demonstrating for several days and nights in the streets of Bangkok calling for Prime Minister Thaksin to step down. One hundred university and business leaders signed a letter pleading for the King to appoint a new Prime Minister.

Yesterday, I heard that no one knows where he has been for the last couple days. Since he is from Chiang Mai, we think he may be up here trying to get support from the rural Thais. He is getting desperate. The Bangkok Post yesterday reported that Thaksin will award several billion baht (40 baht to the dollar) to the rural villages who have shown “responsible planning” (a buy-off since there will be a reelection in April) and several million baht to victims and familiies of the 1973 military coup that left scores of people dead in the streets. Everything he does just makes the Thai elite angrier but he depends on the uneducated rural patriots for support.

No permission to confront in this culture often ends up with emotions boiling over in the end…sometimes ending in violence. However in these recent street rallies the world should be proud of Thailand… the participants, dedicated to nonviolence, have shown incredible discipline as have the police and security guards…making a peaceful but strong statement about healthy reform.

Visa Run Misery

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Every month my son Doug has to cross into Burma and come back into Thailand to get another 30 day stay in the country. If you are late it’s a $12 fine per day. It’s a racket. So this month he and Luk, his wife, took a bus south to Krabi town to get a crown placed on his tooth. Then he had a hell of a time on the bus getting north to Ranong where he crosses to Burma on a boat and back through Thai immigration to get his passport stamped. The bus stopped every few km and he got there too late to get across the border yesterday….so he had to wait til this morning and get a fine, which is a lot when you are living on the local economy.

I think he depends on Luk to get reservations etc. but she didn’t check if it was an express bus. When I have watched her ask for information I need, I notice, when I question her, that she hasn’t asked any detailed questions…just too polite to press for information. She appears very uncomfortable to ask again…too hesitant to “confront” even though she will use a very nice voice.

Late this morning I get another call from Luk complaining that Doug is angry with her. He left her in the hotel to do his three hour crossing with a request that she arrange for the bus to Surat Thani where they catch the ferry to Samui. Instead of going to the bus station for the ticket, she called and found out that there is a bus leaving every hour. But she didn’t ask if there was room or make a reservation for the next available bus. So when they got to the station at 11am they were told the buses were full until 2pm. Of course they didn’t bother to tell her that when she called. This would put them into Surat Thani too late for the ferry to Samui and meant that they would have to pay for a night in Surat.

Walkabout

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Yesterday morning I walked to the Post Office around the corner and down the street and then slowly swung a wide path through the city…dawdling in used book stores, Jonesing for all the quality crafts and household items in shop windows and reading pithy doggeral on t-shirts. By 4 in the afternoon I was hot and wet with sweat as I passed an old woman in a big floppy straw hat watering off the sidewalk. She didn’t see me until after she had managed to hose my sandaled feet and my ankles…sorry, sorry she begged. Oh no, no, I laughed. “Good big,” I said as I gave her the thumbs up. Then she laughed big, tickled at my enjoyment. Sanook!

This morning, tired of my guesthouse rice soup with pork for breakfast, I walked to a nearby hotel that offered an inexpensive buffet breakfast (with heart-shaped fried eggs) and spent the morning comparing travel notes and our respective country’s politics with a young Aussie couple at the table next to mine. I recounted that a couple years ago when returning to Bangkok after a month in India I would never have guessed that it would feel like heaven in the taxi traveling into the city from the airport. They both threw their heads back with a belly-laugh…saying that is exactly how they felt a week ago when they flew in after five weeks in India! Then we all had a good laugh remembering the way Bush limply muttered that he “had never been in India before,” when what he really meant was that he had never been anywhere before!

British Humor

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Ending the BBC news report today on the Oscar winners, the anchor noticed that the Icelandic singer Bjork was nowhere to be seen. “She was wearing the white feathered swan dress she wore her Oscar year,” he said, “and Dick Cheney shot her!”

The World A Playground?

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A friend recently emailed me asking what it is like to have all the world as my “playground.” This was my very brief answer:

Well, the best thing about traveling in developing countries like SE Asia, Africa and China is the smiles that fill the heart. Europeans generally ignore the people…very aloof…Americans are busy looking at buildings and statues and for something to buy. But if you make a cultural mistake and you smile and point to your head in Thailand and say “ting tong” (crazy in Thai) the people giggle and laugh and they love you for it because they are not used to Westerners being humble. Then the massages are wonderful $5-$8 for an hour. The food is incredible everywhere…a feast on the street…a big bowl of delicious noodle soup with pork for 50 cents that would cost $6 in the States. And if you stay in the cheap guesthouses instead of western style hotels that are exhorbitant by local economic standards, you meet wonderful travelers from all around the world. That is the fun part.

Then there is the work part. You get to practice patience and develop flexibility in dealing with inefficiency…and rules and regs that make no sense to a Westerner. You get used to the garbage and broken sidewalks with live electric wires hanging down everywhere…and the hacking and spitting Chinese. Pedestrians have no rights whatsoever so you have to watch you don’t get killed…the biggest vehicle on the road is king. You learn to be tolerant of other cultures…eg. it is considered rude in Thailand to be confrontatory and demanding. You learn that not everyone in the world wants to be American and that they love their own countries. People value their families over material things…and it rubs off.

And then you begin to notice other things. The police are not paid enough so they are always on the take and not to be trusted. Corrupt governments keep people impoverished. In fact, Prime Minister Thaksin in Thailand is being forced out of office as we speak…thousands demonstrating in the streets this week in Bangkok. I won’t even start on Robert Mugabe who is starving his own people in Zimbabwe and ought to be shot by somebody. And because of the government-controlled press, foreigners know more about China than the Chinese people themselves. I learn we don’t have it so bad in America.

So when I am in America I miss the warm-hearted people and the colorful streets and want to be here and when I am here I miss the humor, music, good roads, the efficiency and customer service (non-existent outside the U.S.) and general good governance with the exception of our foreign policy.

So briefly, that is what it is like to have the world as my playground. Actually travel is a very serious business. Besides being married and raising children, it is the most brutal spiritual work there is…needling selfish boundaries…culturing the heart. I think meditation is much less difficult!

Pico Iyer, author of “The Global Soul,” gives me great comfort. An Indian by birth, Pico was raised in England. Moved to California. Now lives with his significant other in Japan. If he can do it I can do it.

Chiang Mai Thailand

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Flew from Koh Samui on Bangkok Air (the only airline off the island because Bangkok Air built the airport) and then on to Chiang Mai on budget Air Asia.

I guess Bob is in Bangkok, but I am in the Galare Guesthouse in a cozy Thai-style building on the Ping River that runs through the city. A broadband internet cable is plugged into my laptop. I am drinking real drip coffee made in my little Starbucks coffee maker on this blessedly cool morning and listening to Leonard Cohen on my tiny speakers.

I am mid-way through “All That Matters,” a lovely book by Wayson Chow about Chinese immigrants in the 1930’s in Vancouver B.C. Most of the Chinese those days were from the Pearl River Delta of Canton China who came as merchants to Chinatown in Vancouver or as workers on the railroad.

I catch up on the news in the U.S. on BBC TV…much better coverage than we get from US media. I am following the political crisis in Thailand in the English-language Bangkok Post in the downstairs open-air restaurant at breakfast each morning. In the streets of Bangkok thousands of people have been demonstrating for constitutional reform and an end of corruption…calling for Prime Minister Thaksin to step down. And that is really something for a culture that generally disdains confrontation. Locals are hoping there will not be a repeat of the military coup in the late 90’s that left scores of students dead in the streets.

I am walking distance to the Night Market (actually a street market) that bustles with open-street cafes until midnight. I usually don’t take the Tuk Tuks in Thailand because I am tall and the ceilings of these things slant downwards making it difficult to see ahead but they are the best way to get around in this city because they can dodge through the smooth-paved alleyways avoiding all the one-way streets. I like this city. Much quieter…even the Tuk Tuks don’t sound like weed-eaters…and the traffic isn’t as nuts as it is in Bangkok and on the islands.

More farangs (White westerners) in this town than I’ve seen anywhere in Thailand (even the islands because most tourists there just stay within hotel compounds) so Chiang Mai seems to be quite the tourist destination. Tour companies offer trips to places like the national parks, elephant training camps and to the Golden Triangle where Thailand meets the Lao, Chinese and Burmese borders that is famous for the opium trade of years past. I am thinking I will take one of these trips…maybe to the Golden Triangle…and to Chiang Rai through colorful Akha, Karen, Lisu and Palong hill tribe villages.

How long can I stay in my room, I ask the smiling girl at the reception desk. Until way next month, she says laughing. Maybe I will.