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Welcome to Pai
It is......I think?"Almost Heaven, West Virginia
Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River.........
...Country roads, take me home
To the place where I belong
West Virginia, Mountain Mama
Take me home, country roads"
And so this unforgettable refrain goes.
When I was around three years old, my parents thought it would be a good idea to move to Third Worldish West Virginia. (An American state where infant mortality rates and gross income have long been ranked amongst the country's worst.) My parent's decision, for reasons not entirely clear to me, was in the spirit of the times of course, in the early 1970s. We got water from a stream, paved roads were nowhere to be found, our toilet was an outhouse and we got some of our food from the surrounding forest. Some of my first coherent images of life took place in West Virginia. They were also some of the earliest memories I have of my mother. As John Denver at one point says,"All my memories, gathered 'round her." I am quite sure he is talking about the place, but for me nature and mother, as relative mysteries to me, can sometimes feel like the same thing. It is strange though,
at that time in my life, it is nature and its creatures and not my mother that I recall most vividly. That is outside of one time when, due to crappy dirt country roads, my mother and I got stranded in a pickup truck on a winding dirt road up a mountain on the edge of a precipice.
Mostly I remember sensing fear at that time. But for most of my recollections, nature's overwhelming dominance, snakes and animals in general are some of the first things that are conjured up when I think about that time in my life. In terms of unspoiled and seemingly endless wilderness, West Virginia truly was, "Almost Heaven," and it was most certainly full of country roads. On the other hand, my dad was always there to bring stability to the situation whenever he was most needed. I remember him at work in the West Virginia wilderness. He always seemed much more comfortable there than I did. Although I am not foreign to such a setting, my fears and restlessness in such a "country" milieu still reside deep in my unconscious.
Last week, on my new journey with no dad to look over
me, I never really completely faced these fears; but I did not turn away from them either. I did my best to engage with the "wild" combining ignorant curiosity with two primary tools, my motorbike to tame the roads and Thai language/communication skills to engage the locals. This engagement with culture distilled most of the fears I had. Only the few moments when I felt completely alone on rather isolated roads did some uncertainty briefly resurface. Thankfully, my Honda scooter was a projection of the nomadic juggernaut within me, slowed from time-to-time but never fully stopped from place to place.
My most recent adventure took me into the natural abundance of North-Western Thailand. My trip triggered some memories of the ruggedness in West Virginia more than a few times. The morning fog and mist that disguised but did not hide rolling mountains and hills fed the fragmented memories in my mind. It wasn't just the landscape but many of the people who are also quite distinctly rugged but also friendly. Although I don't remember any of the local West Virginians at all, the pictures my dad took of them certainly evoke a toughness and simplicity driven by challenging surroundings.
On the Road to Pai
I met the coolest Thai electrician at work here. He had been to San Francisco and was happy to take my picture with the water buffalo. The people in the province of Mae Hong Son in Thailand, like West Virgina then and probably now as well, are viewed as some of the most "backward" in Thailand. Past warlords, like the infamous Khun Sa fattened by the opium and heroin trade, provide it with a kind of "outlaw" status as well. The drug trade in fact, brought great wealth to the provincial capital at one time. Now its prosperity appears quite distant like my memories. Development of the provincial capital seems to be a caught in a time capsule from about ten years ago. Many of the locals I talked to reveled in their relative isolation especially the owner of my guesthouse who was formerly involved in the sketchy gem and mineral trade from Burma before the market collapsed. At the same time, Lek, his name, seemed to take great pride in his past showing me pictures with a rifle in his hands amongst ethnic Karen soldiers, all the while sipping on his beer with his friend from Thailand's Border Patrol Police (BPP). The same joy in simplicity, was exhibited by Suriya, the construction foreman, who was working at a meditation camp with monks from Burma and
Yunnan in China. He taught me how to cook some Shan food, tua nao, and how to meditate properly, all in a matter of an hour. He seemed absorbed and content with his lifestyle out in the sticks.
Mae Hong Son province in Thailand sits on the border of Chiang Mai province and the troubled country of Burma. As such, Mae Hong Son, like the neighboring Burmese provinces, is the most isolated and certainly the most heavily forested of Thailand's seventy-six provinces. Sixty percent of the population is an ethnic minority with many originally or recently escaping from Burma. People here carve up mountainsides to make a living and survive in what is Thailand's most sparsely populated province. Distinct from but similar to urban areas, where you have gentrification, modernization and suburbanization of the land mass, Mae Hong Son showcases a nascent transformation of the forest and valleys with its own form of gentrification, manifested in agriculturization and villagization. Locals roam the highways, fields and mountains with hand tools and other equipment designed to hack away at the uncountable trees, weeds and earth that are obstacles to human settlement. Watching these men and women stroll through the countryside almost
The first people I met in Pai: Nurses!!
I stopped at "Sunset View" restaurant as soon as I arrived to eat. May and her friends and her mother and I were the only ones to enjoy the view of the valley from the deck here. Most amusing is that half of them are from Bangkok...on holiday helping their mother. parallels businesspeople doing their thing in cafes, offices and along the streets of the city. Carving up these mountains and hills they tend to use the most basic tools. It was not poverty I thought of but hard work and productivity, a necessity for survival in this environment. Their tools might not be the most efficient economically, but in terms of energy efficiency they are probably much closer to the modern mantras of "sustainability" than the vast majority of modern urban dwellers, myself included. Most of the population in the countryside, of all ages, work their bodies hard and with limited resources. So it is understandable they are often selfishly finding ways to move slowly and methodically in order to conserve energy.
Last week, I took my Honda Scooter across nearly 600 miles of often sublime but brutal terrain. Paved, potholed and dirt covered roads that often get muddy and slick during the current rainy season here traverse the numerous mountains, valleys and rivers of Mae Hong Son province. The loop I followed started and ended in Chiang Mai province. I slept in Pai, Bang Mapha, Mae Hong Son's provincial capital and Mae Saliang over the course of six
Leading me into the Musser village
These boys escorted into the village....and barely let me leave hours later......hanging forlornly all over my motorbike and asking me if I was coming back tomorrow. They also made me feel like a rank amateur pilot along these muddy roads playfully zipping along as I plodded behind them. days and passed through a great many more one gas station towns. Many of the towns stopped serving gas by 8pm. Now I don't want you to think life was brutal for me, but I want to stress that as a traveler I pushed myself to do and see as much as I could with a bare minimum of convenience. Since the most interesting cultural aspects are found in the mountains or along unpaved roads, I really had no choice. On the other hand, the winding, curvy and steeply paved but smooth roads, often above or inside clouds of mist, provided a rush as the wind rushed into my face and swept me around, over and through mountains skirting rivers, rice paddies and colorfully decorated ethnic minorities such as Lahu, Lawa, Lisu, Hmong, Karen, Akha and Shan. Women and the elderly, riding on motorbikes, in the back of pickup trucks or walking along the many country roads, especially favor visually loud ethnic dress. It is the only province in Thailand, I know of, where diverse colorful hill tribe dress becomes blase after a while, Bangkok's tourist zones excluded. It does however become self defeating as distinguishing which dress is which
becomes a little bit like trying to remember the personalities of all the infinite number of beauties you pass along the streets and rails of Bangkok on your average day.
In the end, I didn't come to any revelations about my past in West Virginia or about my mother. What I did learn was a unique appreciation for the resilience and ability of mountainous landscape to resist or at least delay human civilization's encroachment if on a very limited scale. With my scooter, some of the most remote places were still unreachable. And many of the road conditions, especially during the rainy season, got worse and worse the further away you got from the main paved pathway circling through the province. I slipped and fell in the mud more than once. But the local residents are much more resilient and dependent on surviving there. Despite what was, and still is, quite thick forest, huge swathes of land have been cleared for villages and agriculture, though not yet on a scale of corporate efficiency as far as I could tell. Almost desolate looking hillsides thrust themselves into your face from different points of the landscape. While I was there rice
planting season had just begun. Crops such as garlic, often grown in between the end and start of rice season, were seen drying out and ready to be shipped to the market in many villages. Fields cleared for corn, soybeans and potatoes were frequently visible as well. I even got to witness the annual rice planting in one village I came upon. Many people really did make me feel at home and that I found to be most what I was looking for. If only Mae Hong Son was the place I wanted to stay and not just be and if only the people there were my family, I would really have been right at home.....wherever that is.
I wrote a journal for the whole adventure but I will just sketch an outline here. I will let pictures tell the rest of the story of the numerous people and environments I met along the way. The people out in Mae Hong Son are often more than happy to give you the time of the day and that is what is most refreshing and invigorating about them. They seem to have all the time in the world even if they
are busy. My first encounter was with Sathit or (nickname Sun), the ranger at hot springs and geyser I visited on the way to sleepy but touristy Pai some 200km from Chiang Mai city and my last encounter was with a couple of lottery ticket sellers from Isan at a gas station between Mae Saliang and Chiang Mai. My journey ended in Chiang Mai after filling up my tank seven times and getting nearly 60 mpg on the way to completing the journey. I spent probably $25 USD on gas and less than $100 USD, all expenses included on the entire trip. It was a solo journey but I never felt alone. The roads and the mountains seemed to belong to me as the high tourist season has passed. Mostly, when I encountered people rather than nature, I met locals. This was a delight as the few tourists I did meet, like the nice elderly couple from Denmark, were unexpected and pleasant. Mountains, rivers, waterfalls, streams, cliffs, pine trees, big trees, skinny trees, tall trees, fog, mist, rain, insects in abundance, birds, pigs, cows, agriculture, villages and above all country roads sheperded me along my journey. The roads like the
landscape had yet to be completely tamed and that "wildness" perhaps was what made them so able to inject bursts of energy and wonder into my itinerant moods. They did indeed take me home to another time, if temporarily so, to a place I thought I remembered and missed. Like the radio in John Denver's song, the journey reminded me of something "far away."
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