Songkrunk '52, or, Exploring Thailand By Cupcake

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This will be my first time writing in over a month and I think it’s fair to say that at this point, any and all attempts I had in updating this blog with some sense of consistency have more or less completely failed. Looking back, I realize that in my last entry I made no mention of the fact that I was headed back to Thailand for two weeks in April to celebrate Songkran and explore the north-western part of the country. Well, I have just returned from said trip and now find myself sitting down to hammer out what will likely be a photo-centric blog entry, as accompanying the written details of this journey are 100 photographs most gratefully compiled from the cameras of Charlie, Tricia, Gina, and Michelle. I have tried to place them in more or less the order that they occurred but, to be honest, the whole trip was one big blur. Alright, enough dilly-dally, let’s do this:

Upon arriving in Bangkok, we were greeted by thunderous rains that poured well into the night and picked up again the following morning. Thus, our first day in the city was complimented by a shin-deep level of water that collected in many of the streets, including the tourist-saturated Khaosan and Rambuttri. I suppose with the country on the brink of Songkran, the New Year’s “water festival”, it seemed only fitting. I should explain Songkran a little before getting into the events that transpired. Thailand’s New Year is celebrated for three days each April by a festival in which everyone in the country tries to soak everyone else in the country with copious amounts of water. Temperature-wise, April stands at about the hottest month of the year in Southeast Asia, so one might consider this form of celebration a convenient drenching. This being our third New Year celebration after traditional Jan 1. and Vietnamese Tet, my six roommates in Vietnam and I planned on traveling to Chiang Mai, Thailand’s old capital city in the North, to celebrate Songkran with five friends from my LanguageCorps group and five more of their friends from previous or subsequent LanguageCorps groups in Thailand. Needless to say, it stood to be quite an affair. Tricia suggested that we make team shirts to a.) display pride, and b.) help identify bodies at the coroner’s office. Posed with the question of a team name, we went with the first idea that happened to pop into my head one afternoon while biking home from work, listening to a song by Lil’ Wayne: SONGKRUNK!!!

I learned two cultural facts about Thailand during my first day back in the country that I found slightly-to-moderately baffling. First, Bangkok is the Westernized name for the city locals refer to as Krung Thep. However, it seems that locals have grown lazy and stopped addressing the city by its REAL name, which is (deep breath): Krungthep mahanakhon amonratanakosin mahintara ayuthaya mahadilok popnopparat ratchathani burirom udomratchaniwet mahasathan amonpiman avatansathit sakkathattiya witsanukamprasit. This roughly translates to...“City of Angels”. No comment. Second, how many of you out there were aware that Thailand is not in fact celebrating the arrival of 2009 this year? They are not celebrating 2008, nor are they celebrating 2010. No, this year, Thailand celebrates the arrival of the year 2552 as it seems Thai calendars measure from the beginning of the Buddhist era, putting them 543 years ahead of the Western world. This means that as Britain was muddling around in the Hundred Years’ War, Thailand was testing its Y2K backup systems. My head hurts.

Southeast Asians are, in general, fanatical about football (soccer, of course), and Thailand is certainly no exception. Through our near daily viewing of English premiership matches, Charlie and I have developed a loyalty to Fulham FC and, in particular, the team’s attacking center-mid Clint Dempsey, who is probably the most prominent American non-goalie playing in Europe’s most talented league. We took advantage of “jersey alley”, near Bangkok’s National Stadium, to hunt down a FFC jersey and emblazon it with the name and number of our hero. I suspect in five years we will be seeing these on the backs of Thai kids all over the country. Call it a hunch.

As it turned out, we arrived in Bangkok right at the forefront of the riotous protests initiated by activists who wished to see the prime minister ousted. The protests turned violent the night we left for Chiang Mai but in truth, none of us were aware of this fact until we saw the news playing on the big screen at the train station. We had initially planned to catch a train to Chiang Mai but had to settle for a sleeper bus due to early train bookings for Songkran. This was fortunate as protesters barricaded many of the railways out of Bangkok and the train station was in pandemonium with passengers trying to collect refunds or compensations for trains that were now canceled. Leaving the city that night felt a little like leaving a war-zone, and it made me wonder what kind of environment we would be returning to in a week and a half.

We arrived in Chiang Mai at about six in the morning and upon finding our guesthouse, we were informed that we could not check in until later that morning. But, really, that was the last issue on our minds because it was the first day of Songkran and time to get wet! The guesthouse had organized a trip to the proprietor’s village and we all piled into the back of a pickup truck with squirtguns and buckets in hand. Roaring down the freeway, dangling precariously out of the truck bed, Team Songkrunk left a trail of saturation in its wake. No one was spared; mothers, children, even animals felt our watery wrath. We arrived at the village in sopping fashion and were shown how to make a local Thai dessert that looked a little like a chocolate cow pie; fortunately, it tasted nothing like it looked. Afterwards, we were led to a table where sat four enormous jugs of homemade Thai whiskey and, upon being thoroughly instructed by our host to consume every last drop, merriment quickly ensued. As glasses clinked and inhibitions weakened, we found ourselves fending off attacks from the local village children, who employed a particularly sneaky form of guerilla water-fighting. However, with some gentle coaxing (i.e. a dunk in the drainwater bin), we recruited the feisty locals and staged several attacks on neighboring dwellings, pillaging and plundering, squirtguns in one hand, glasses of homemade whiskey in the other, until the battle ended with a filthy, overly-intoxicated mud wrestling match in the driveway. Team Songkrunk had left its mark. After returning to the guesthouse, everyone stumbled out into the city and promptly lost their way, and along with it, their dignity. The first day of Songkran concluded by individual members of our party returning to the guesthouse alone and taking inventory of what had been lost, stolen, or damaged during the blurry afternoon. One of my clearest memories of that first day is the sudden realization that I was no longer the possessor of a cell-phone and the realization immediately following that all things considered, I really couldn't care less.

The next day, second day of Songkran, we headed down to the center of Chiang Mai where there was a sort of impromptu parade taking place around the city moat. We fought our way through the mayhem, picking up free drinks along the way at roadside stalls. When we arrived at the moat, we found a small flat-bed truck that seemed to have once held water-throwers but was now abandoned and offered the perfect vessel to commandeer and navigate our way through the crowds. The driver was only too happy to captain the float and we quickly began to scoop water from the two big blue barrels on the back of the truck and generously apply it to the faces of just about every passerby. However, soon enough the barrels were dry and, looking around, we could only deduce one (semi)logical place to adequately refill them: the moat. The Chiang Mai moat is actually more a cesspool of chunky brown water and is clearly off-limits to any levelheaded prospective swimmer. Of course, this was an observation that occurred to me halfway down on my hasty plunge into the moat water and, with the help of Chris and Josh, those barrels were refilled in no time. At one point or another, the notion that we were now essentially slinging feces at other people struck me as unfortunate, but in the spirit of self-defense, I don’t think it’s any worse than being pelted by ice cubes thrown by drunk Australians, a fate suffered by more than one of our crew. We must have jumped into that moat water close to ten times, arduously refilling our barrels, cementing our legacy as the most disgusting Songkran participants in the history of the event. Ironically, it was on the one non-productive jump into the muck that it all went wrong. Tricia, upon commenting on our filthiness, deservedly received a shove from Chris over the moat edge and they both toppled gamely into the sludge. I couldn’t resist the opportunity for another splash around and so I leaped in, only to receive the nasty surprise of reaching the bottom a mere two feet below the surface; whereas the moat was about nine feet deep virtually the whole way around, it seems I had found the one jagged concrete step that sat a fair deal higher than the rest of the moat floor. Needless to say, the following took place in this order:

-A nice deep cut carved into the bottom of my foot from my ill-fated leap.
-A nice hobbling walk home through filthy streets with bare feet since my sandals had made their way out of my possession long ago.
-A nice swollen, pus-filled infection the following morning due to moat water and street filth. In short, probably the easiest infection ever contracted.

The last day of Songkran was a hungover affair and we found ourselves outside of Mike’s, a nearby burger joint and primary source of sustenance for Team Songkrunk, eating fast food and lazily dousing drivers who had the unfortunate lack of foresight to roll up their car windows. I sat with my foot in a bowl of ice water and a squirtgun dubbed “Mightiness” by a fading sticker on the side. The next day I would travel to the hospital and receive some antibiotics, a $24 medical bill, and an eye-rolling from the doctor, but in that moment, on the steps of Mike’s, enjoying a greasy chicken steak sandwich and watching James unleash a tsunami from his bucket onto the cringing heads of two brave souls riding a bicycle, my thoughts kept coming back to the indisputable fact that Songkran has to be, bar none, the greatest holiday ever.

After waving goodbye to our friends who had to return to work in Bangkok, Charlie and I caught a bus north to the small, tourist-friendly town of Pai. Accompanying us was Josh from my LanguageCorps group, a well-built Scotsman named Richard, and Gina from Texas, who, as it happened, I shared a strange connection with. As a teenager, Gina had lived in Portland, Oregon for a time, where she had been a member of her high school rowing team, the very same rowing team that Kristin, one of my best friends at University of Oregon, had been a member of. I swear, this world is shrinking by the minute. Anyhow, we arrived in Pai and once checked into a $3/night guesthouse, made our way to the bike shop and rented some hogs to explore the countryside with. The rental owner asked Gina and I if we minded a bike that was “pink in color” and with a deft shake of my head, I found myself cruising around the backroads of Pai on a motorbike that I had no choice but to dub the moniker "Cupcake". During our two days in Pai, we discovered several interesting attractions and landmarks located a short ways from the town:

A hot springs was located about 10 km south of Pai and provided a nice soaking pool where those who found themselves chilly in the 90-degree weather could go and warm up. Several of the pools were bubbling hot and it seems locals often make the journey here to hold egg-boiling parties. Personally, boiling my eggs in a pot on the stove is reason enough to celebrate but, as one might say, whatever floats your yolk.

After getting lost in a hillside Chinese village and turning around at numerous dead ends, we eventually found a waterfall that featured scrambling rocks for those of us who had not sacrificed the ability to scramble for cheap thrills in sewage water. Sigh. Ever the enthusiast, Josh got a little carried away and ended up stepping on and breaking a pipe that likely supplied half the neighboring village with running water. As we made our way towards the bikes, a group of Thai men ran past us shouting, pointing at the broken pipe, at which point we made a break for it and squealed our way out of the parking lot and back down the hill to Pai.

We made a stop at Tham Lod, a massive cave located 40 km west of Pai. I was somewhat weary as I feel I’ve been let down by caves in the past (e.g. Machu Picchu’s “Magic Cave”, which I suppose is legit if your idea of “magic” is a peace flag and a circle of hippies on ‘shrooms holding hands and speaking in tongues). But Tham Lod is the real deal. It features countless caverns, ladders, corridors, and pits that can all be explored with a lantern, or, if unwilling to part with 150 Baht, a woefully underpowered but trusty headlamp. Many of the labyrinths we felt our way through were so dark that if the headlamp were switched off, it was impossible to detect a hand when held in front of ones face. The fact that there were more or less 50 million bats madly fluttering about at the top of the chambers at all times only intensified the eeriness of the pitch blackness. When we reemerged into the sunlight, we discovered our heads and shoulders were generously splotched with gobs of white gunk. Two things I learned at Tham Lod that day:

1.) Caves are dark
2.) Bats poop a lot

Richard decided to head back to Bangkok and then onto Koh Tao for a diving course, and so as a group of four we made our way three hours west to the town of Mae Hong Son; Gina caught the bus while Charlie, Josh, and I made the journey by motorbike. If I emphasize one thing to you in this whole rambling incoherent narrative, let it be this: in terms of things in my life that have been truly, indescribably breathtaking, the motorbike drive from Pai to Mae Hong Son ranks only behind my birth, which I admittedly do not remember, and my death, which has thankfully not yet occurred. It is one thing to see rural Thailand from behind the window of a car or bus, but to be in the open, cruising up hillsides, through rice-paddy valleys, alongside glittering rivers, handing out candy to village children fishing by the side of the road, it is something so overwhelmingly sensual and freeing that I forced myself to pull over occasionally just to take it all in. Many times I found myself driving through countryside completely hidden from any sign that the outside world is experiencing the 21st century (or the 26th, if you’re a purist) and my thoughts would drift to fantasies of turning a corner in the road and spotting a herd of brachiosaur grazing on some treetop leaves. Riding a motorbike for three hours gives you all the time in the world to think about things and, really, at this point in time, I don’t think I would mind if I never drove a car again for as long as I live.

Mae Hong Son is a nice little town, similar to Pai except less tourists and more bugs; it’s a tradeoff, I suppose. Also, like Pai, there are many interesting destinations to travel to that do not lie too far from the town itself. On our first full day in Mae Hong Son, the four of us motorbiked to a rural village that is famous for its inhabitants; the women in this village belong to the Thailand “long-neck” community. As small girls, these women are given several heavy brass rings that fasten around the neck and, in time, the rings squeeze the collarbone and upper-ribs downwards to create the appearance of an elongated neck. Unfortunately, these days it is hard to find such communities that haven’t used this culturally unique practice to cash in on tourism. That said, our visit was well worth the price of admission and because we had driven a little further to a village outside Mae Hong Son, we happened to be the only tourists on this day. We found the villagers mostly relaxing in the afternoon heat, splayed out, sleeping, playing guitar, crafting jewelry or carving wood. Several children ran about and welcomed our presence with big smiles and shouts of, "Hello! Hello!". One girl who already had her rings was trying to tune her guitar and after I spent a couple minutes helping her, I sat her down and taught her to play, “Come as you are”, the Nirvana song that somehow ends up being every aspiring guitarists’ first song, even a Thai village girl with rings stretching her neck. As a Seattleite, I couldn’t feel more proud.

The next day, Gina and Josh headed off to enjoy an elephant trek and rafting experience, some photographs of which I have included among the others. For whatever reason, I really have no desire to ride an elephant; it could be an associative memory I hold of the time I rode one in India while suffering mind-numbing diarrhea. Just a thought. Anyhow, in that vein, Charlie decided to take it easy for a day to rest for a prospective trek in Chiang Mai and so it was me, Cupcake, and miles of unexplored road to conquer. I opted to make the journey to Mae Aw, a mountainous town in the very northwestern corner of Thailand, only 1 km or so from the Burmese border. The drive was a nerve-wracking one indeed, as it felt like the road ascended at such an angle that I might actually tip over backwards down the mountain. The wind picked up and there was a noticeable chill in the air by the time I finally began my descent into the plateau on which Mae Aw sits. Simply put, the town is gorgeous in its seclusion. I drove through the place a few times and maybe saw ten people in total. A rippling lake creates the town’s centerpiece and a nearby field was grazed upon by horses, the first of which I had seen in Thailand. Walking around, it was hard to avoid those, “I can’t believe I’m really here, right now in this moment” thoughts from infiltrating my mind but, honestly, with a face full of wind, at the top of a mountain, in a rural Thai village, a stone’s throw from Burma, I couldn’t believe I was really there, right then in that moment.

And really, that’s it. We made an equally breathtaking drive back to Pai, returned our bikes, and traveled back to Chiang Mai by a bus that was driven by a man who was surely enjoying the effects of marijuana. It was nice to see the old capital through sober-vision and we spent a day and a half exploring a hillside Wat, as well as visiting an orphanage and gorging ourselves at an incredible buffet, experiences I would detail further had my last two blog entries not been about visiting an orphanage and gorging. After catching a sleeper train back to Bangkok, which I regrettably have no pictures of, we spent one last night on Khaosan road, drinking and dancing into all hours of the night, and then just like that, it was time to catch a taxi to the airport and fly ourselves back in time to Vietnam, or, as I like to call it, Thailand 40 Years Ago. It’s amazing how varied my two trips to Thailand have been and it sheds some light onto just what an incredibly large and diverse country it is. There really is so much to see and, for a teacher earning a wage in Vietnam, so little time to do it in. But I have a sneaking suspicion that I will be back and believe it, the first thing I will do is head to Pai to reclaim my trusty Cupcake. Together, we can see the unimaginable.


Check out five pages of pictures below:

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