Thailand--Vacationland with Computers

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Part 8
January 21 Chiang Mai
It always seems to take a couple days to adjust to a new country and begin to appreciate what it has to offer rather than what it lacks from where you just had been. The transition from India to anywhere is bound to be hard, as nowhere is likely to be as sensory laden as India. So Thailand seems almost too comfortable--clean, modern, catering to tourists. After a couple days though, we are beginning to lose our guilt about how easy it is and learning to enjoy the more relaxing lifestyle of Thai travel.
This should have been harder, as our last days in India had their share of challenges. Our flight from Ahmedabad to Mumbai, meant to ease our transit, turned out less ideal when the flight was delayed 3 hours, getting us to Mumbai airport at 11 p.m. (without a real dinner), from where it was an hour to the hotel we reserved, which was full. They recommended a cheap hotel "only 5 minutes away," which it would have been if our taxi driver had only known where to find Marine Drive, the huge main road along the seafront. Instead, he drove 20 minutes through lines of encroachments with people literally sleeping in the streets as our driver peered out to locate this recommended hotel. Finally, he asked for directions back almost to where we began, and about 12:30 we climbed the dingy stairs to Bentley's Hotel (perhaps not so coincidentally named much like the venerable low budget Bentley House), to be met by the scraggly bearded night guard who helped us climb over his bed on the floor to get to a surprisingly clean but small room with two twin beds that would have to suffice.
This hotel proved sufficiently pleasant once the quite numerous staff arose in the morning and the shared bathrooms let us meet a load of Indian travelers (apparently this isn't the big European luxury hotel), and since we had to get up at 2:30 am that night to catch our 5 o'clock flight, we figured this was more than adequate.
So with too little sleep, we set off to Bangkok, fortunately dozing for almost the whole 3 and half hour flight, arriving in Thailand at 10:30 am. Taxiing into the city in an air con, leather seated, new Toyota, past flat screen billboards and countless late model cars, made us realize we were not in India anymore. After spending part of the day connecting with a friend of a friend who lives in Bangkok who was quite gracious in greeting us, we decided to take the night bus to Chiang Mai and keep on the odd sleep schedule now that we were in a groove. So at 8:30 pm, we slumped into our extra wide, super VIP seats, received our blankets and snack packet from our bus stewardess, and promptly fell asleep for the vast majority of the 10 hour trip, arriving here at 6 am to puzzle out a place to stay. This proved rather harder than we expected, but we have now settled into a lovely spot complete with pool, for $10 a night. Even better, our friends from Morocco who owned the Riad in Meknes (if you have been keeping up on your blog reading) are staying in the same place! We knew they would be in Thailand when we were, but the coicindence of ending up in the same guesthouse out of the hundreds here (let alone being in the same town of the many in Thailand) makes one believe in some kind of higher power.
Being in Thailand makes me wonder when and how a country reaches the tipping point from destitute poverty to general well being? It seems to be about much more than about money--it seems like it is more about attitude--the decision to try to keep things clean, to not throw garbage just anywhere on the ground, to have someone pick up trash and clean the streets, to have all citizens agree to make an effort towards greater order and neatness. But obviously, it is not just attitude, or maybe attitude is a luxury that money can help buy.
What separates India from Thailand (besides about $5,000 in per capita income, a gap which was much smaller not so many years ago)? A tiny part might be Buddhism and a culture of access to water for rituals, including cleansing. But a larger part, I think, is population (and relatedly, density). There are far fewer people in Thailand (incidentally, there are about 3 times as many tourists here per year than in India). Spreading the economic gains of development, and developing a commitment to some sense of national, or at least regional, goal, is infinitely easier here (not to mention the power of the generally well respected King to help with moral suasion). In India, even if you could get a few hundred million to value some common goal, such as environmental awareness, you still have 100's of millions who are ignoring this effort, and you still have a political system that despite (or because) of its democratic traditions, is seen as rife with corruption. The task of change in India can seem so insurmountable in scale and scope that it seems almost not worth trying. Hence, those committed to change, I imagine, must do so on a focused and local level, often in ways that benefit a few and have little effect on many. This, I think, is what is working in India with the new economy, with its pockets of great success, but apparent lack of impact on huge numbers of India's populace.
Thailand, by contrast, has reaped the bounty of development with a leap into the high technology modern world, even becoming an economic center for Southeast Asia to build on its successes. All this is probably wonderful for most Thai, whose living standards have improved over time, and for travelers, this makes life quite easy and cushy as we travel the smooth roads in fancy buses to towns with high speed internet (and wifi) all over and with tasty western baked goods we have come to crave while in Israel and India (not to mention the absolutely exceptional Thai food that costs about $1 per dish). Add to this the Thai massage schools, mountain bike tours, treks, shopping, bars, etc. and you feel downright decadent here. This is a bit odd coming from India, but we are coming to accept this is the reality we will just have to enjoy while we can.

January 24 Chiang Mai
We are almost exactly 5 months into this trip with 4 months left. I am feeling like the time is all too short and like we could go on doing this for another year or so. Koby is still less enamored with the idea of being away from friends and school and home, but for the most part, travel seems to suit us well and it is not hard to feel our days are full of interesting experiences.
Part of this may be that we have really entered vacationland here in Chiang Mai. This city of 2 million revolves around tourism and has a remarkable ability to absorb masses of outsiders (including something like 40,000 missionaries I am told). With so many visitors (or foreigners who seem to be here indefinitely), there is no shortage of things to do. Every third shopfront seems to be a travel agent ready to organize treks or cooking classes or rafting or elephant shows. As frequent are food options, from the hard to pass by Thai restaurants and stalls to Italian, American, French, and the more attractive bakery/health food choices (bridging this gap with whole wheat bread and loads of chocolate cake). Then there are a slew of English bookstores, coffee shops (Starbucks has the prime corner locations here as well), Haagen Daz, motorbike rentals (no license or experience needed), massage centers, clothes stores, and, of course, bars featuring cheap beer and the assorted seemingly creepy industries here that accompany the drinking scene.
And perhaps because of all this, it is easy to develop a social network in town as you connect with English speaking fellow travelers who all share at least the two common conversations starters of where are you from and where have you traveled, which can then branch off into other terrain, including, of course, the small world "coincidences" of meeting someone who worked for Outward Bound and knows all the same folks we do. After meeting folk one place, it is not too hard to run into them again and again, so you can soon feel like you have your own little community in far off Thailand.
We are taking advantage of the local offerings, having just finished an excellent 3 day trek up north that seemed relatively far off the tourist circuit. Like most organized adventures when traveling, there was a large element of complete uncertainty as only the most basic agenda is communicated, and that in this Thai accented English that is tough to grasp even with the most fluent speakers.
The trek began with a pickup truck ride with our 4 fellow travelers (couple of Brits, Swedish guy, German woman, all about 30ish) and our guide "Jackie Chan" (a nickname I had trouble making use of). We thought we heard this was supposed to be 40 minutes, but it was more like 2 hours, interrupted for a visit to a waterfall (which usually can be a forced march for a view of dew touched jungle greenery but here was an enormously fun, near vertical, barefoot walk in the waterfall which flows over surprisingly grippy limestone that was hard for our adult minds to trust wasn't spiked with slippery algae lurking in some hidden pocket (Koby had no trouble believing in his superpowers and ran up and down the waterfall reveling in the warm water splashing all over him)).
Once out of the truck, we were met by colorfully attired Akah women pushing their wares on us for sale (and showing off their beetle nut and tobacco blackened teeth). This tribal group has its own interesting customs, including infanticide for multiple births (believing one is the devil) which has largely been abolished) and marriage by simply eating an egg and chicken leg--a clear blow to the wedding planning industry.
It was a couple hours of fairly hot jungle hiking to the camp, a large bamboo sided, dirt floored structure next to a stream (reminding us how cultures with access to water seem to have an easier time with cleanliness). Somehow, they manage to get beer, soda, and ice to all these remote feeling locations, so this was plenty civilized and the food was excellent. The next day we hiked through more dense bamboo forest, up and down ridges and in and around stream beds and along elephant paths indicated by the pizza size footprints marking the way. After a lunch of noodle soup cooked on the trail and served with a machete made bamboo ladle, 4 elephants ambled up the narrow path to take us downstream. Seated on a wooden platform atop the elephant's back, this is less comfortable than it is amusing. You sort of joggle along, stopping fairly often for the elephant to rip off a tasty bamboo snack with its trunk (or even to clear away an overhanging branch when directed).
When the terrain became more open and flat, our mahout (elephant driver) offered to let us drive, which entails sitting atop the elephant's head, legs splayed wide behind the elephant's sizable ears. There is not much to hold on to (although the saddle is behind you to grab in an emergency) but the elephants keep their heads amazingly level and you can soon learn to balance well enough, despite the scratchy feel of their skin and hair. Koby was quite in his element (others thought he must have been a mahout in a prior life) and he drove for almost an hour while his driver relaxed behind and slingshot rocks into the trees for target practice.
The elephants drove us to their village, Pan-Haw, a refugee community of Da-Ra-Ang, who had fled from Burma/Myanmar and settled in this former opium smugglers village that was abandoned in the last decade with the Thai government's crackdown on drugs. The village consisted of about 50 bamboo huts built on stilts, with a bevy of small chickens, dogs, and children wandering about (as well as some scrawny pigs in a pen and our elephants resting near one of the several elephant platforms). The economy of the village was centered on growing beans and corn and rice, mainly for their own consumption. Before dinner, we had a lively game of soccer--the universal language--with the local boys, while the girls played a jumprope game with a large rubber band. After dinner, the local girls gave a dance and song performance by firelight (having no electricity in the village or anywhere nearby) which was one way to make it okay for us to be philanthropic without simply begging.
The next morning, the local ladies set up their small stores on the ground around where we ate, and then split all the earnings as were leaving. This unforced shopping felt like a welcome chance for organized philanthropy, as we could pay what for us was nothing (2 dollars for just about everything) and feel like we were helping give these folks a little income to spend as they will.
Finally, we walked the couple hours out to the road, where we caught our bamboo raft for a two hour float downriver, before boarding our pickup for a couple hours of open air driving back to Chiang Mai (and chocolate cake and wireless internet access and swimming in the pool). Today, cooking school; tomorrow mountain biking, then perhaps on to Laos.

PS So now we have internet with usb and wifi nearby and camera connections and then the blog site has a snafu today that wont allow pix. Sorry. They would have helped this entry with some nice pix of elephants and cooking, etc. Will try to send entries more regularly.

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Comments

[Heather Morrison]

Greetings!
Rick, Elaine, Manya and Coby- I am so glad to hear of your good times in Thailand! I have just received information on how to connect to your website, so I am catching up on entries since August. I couldn't help but notice that you are in Chiang Mai right now, and I miss it so! Did Po greet you in Bangkok or was that another friend of a friend? I don't often get to email while at home (no computer) but will eventually check back again. Sherman and I are planning to spend a year abroad in 2-3 years with Willow before she starts school. We don't want to travel, but settle in one country and culture for a year's work. Let me know any suggestions of type of work (education, research, theatre) or places. Good food is paramount! Enjoy your travels! Heather