BACK IN ENGLAND sooner than expected

Sorry for the long silence; blogging censored in China. And no internet at the temple anyhow.

I left the Taoist temple in the mountains. After nearly 2 months. 

It was mostly a physical martial-arts training, and not what I expected nor what I wanted. That's what it boils down to: I (re)discovered that martial arts aren't really my thing. The temple setting was very beautiful, however, in gorgeous forested mountains, and the masters genuine.

I guess I had hoped for a lifestyle of Tai Chi-type forms, chi-kung type exercises, and meditation, and a gentle pace of life with much depth and silence. Daily ceremonies and a sense of spiritual community.

Instead, it was mostly a hard physical training. Which is fine, it's just not what I came for. It included daily strength training (push-ups, sit-ups, jumps, etc), kicks, punches, and kick-sequences. And 'da gong', which is basically hitting yourself and being hit by others, harder and harder, every day, till you graduate to being hit with bamboo switch, benches and logs, and so on. It's great if you want to be a martial-artist. It's supposed to be very good for your immune system too. It hurts a lot. You start off being hit in the stomach and move outwards from there to other parts of the body. Very strange....though you get used to it after a while. Mostly, I didn't enjoy it.

I also didn't enjoy the fact that everyone, including the masters smoked, often almost chain-smoking. Except for 3 of us, who passive-smoked instead. And the TV was blaring most of the time in the only shared space, including during meals. The atmosphere was just not conducive to the kind of meditative mind that I was interested in developing.

There were some chi-kung type 'longevity' exercises. I liked those. Eventually we started learning some Tai Chi-type forms, and there would have been more of these if I'd stayed. But:

No meditation hall. No meditating together. No daily ceremony together. Not even at meals. I had no sense, on an average day, that we were living in a spiritual community, because nothing 'spiritual' was going on. There are lots of reasons for this, and I don't really blame anybody. It just wasn't making me happy, and it wasn't really my thing. So, after staying very open-minded for as long as I could, and putting up with a fair bit of suffering, I left. It wasn't an easy decision.

I can see that if you like a 'hard' approach, it could work. The masters are clearly highly skilled in martial arts and apparently highly advanced in spiritual practices too, though I didn't get much contact with that. It's reasonable to imagine that if you stayed and suffered long enough, you might be led toward enlightenment and Immortality (the aim of Taoism). If you're very, very lucky. 

I started to see it as a trade-off: 5+ decades of very hard, bitter training for a slim chance of Immortality which is partly fate-determined anyhow, or, 5 or so decades of lay life in Samsara, or as Taoists call it, the World of Red Dust. In the Red Dust, I might be captive to my ego, but I will probably live a relatively balanced life of joys and sufferings, and have a good chance at relative happiness. In the temple I was not happy. So I've taken my chances in the choppy seas of Samsara. If the storm really brews up, I could always swim back to the temple.

Now I'm trying to work out what to do next. And dreaming of going to South Africa to pursue tracking.

On the brink of China

My last night in Thailand. Leaving for China tomorrow morning.
Alas, I've not caught up with the stories I wanted to share with you from Laos. I hope to do so at some point but can't see when now, as I keep accumulating more stories and can't keep up with myself.
The experiences in the village in Laos were /amazing/ and inspiring, and confirm for me all the 'romantic idealizations' of traditional villages that turn out to be realities, that I saw when I was in Ladakh in 1998 and 2000, too. Idyllic indeed. Mindblowing, actually, what human nature /could be/, in fact, usually has been throughout human history. Sorry you missed it; my fault; even the camera-robbery story lies unfinished. Perhaps I'll publish even the draft/notes version so you can get a gist.
And then there was the story of getting struck at by a cobra the day before yesterday... and all sorts of little gems like it that, I am fearful, will just fold quietly into the sediment of forgotten memories.
Who knows what China will bring for me. Please wish me luck and other nice things. Love to you all.

Luang Prabang, Laos: Some vignettes

French architecture in Luang Prabang: (yawn) Yeah, and you can see more of it and better in France.

Big group of beerswiller tourist men all with identical broad-brimmed conical traditional woven-bamboo rice-paddy hats...and beers.

Badly behaved tourists in singlets (USA: wife-beaters), read showing too much flesh for what's appropriate, with water pistols like huge bazookers, so big they need shoulder straps to carry them, thinking they are taking part in Laos culture during the splashing fun of the New YEar celebrations. The idea is to splash each other with water to wash away the yuck of the past year and cleanse for the new one, and you're supposed to get permission from the splashee. These tourists didn't really get it, bashing little boys with high-pressure shots while they were utterly defenseless, turning the whole thing into a violent/fight/dominance activity and setting utterly wrong examples to the local children; and reflecting terribly on the rest of us foreigners.

The Japanese girls wandering around through the bustling floodlit night-market with shorts so short you can see their buttocks. Now, I couldn't complain personally, but it's totally out of order to be doing that in Laos where women don't even consider it appropriate to show their shoulders, let alone their thighs, and god forbid anything more.

A friend's sister who sells French baguette sandwiches on the main street in Luang Prabang, absent one day because she'd eaten barbecued fish from the alley market and got very sick. Damn, that's where we had dinner last night. Suspicious of everything after that.

Wanting sticky rice for every meal and even in between, even on its own, so totally delicious and satisfying, I didn't want any other sort of rice or carbohydrate. I am already missing it so much. It's unprocessed and apparently much more nutritious than most other rice varieties.

Trying strange candies in the market.

Trying fried (or steamed) cicadas, liking them...but not being able to finish the whole bag.
Trying bee larvae....well, I thought it was honeycomb....and I didn't know you're supposed to fry them....not daring to try the ''dried'' squirrel.

Every day, noodle soup. Noodle soup. Noodle soup. But only when the sticky rice has sold out.

Noodle soup with something different in it, a different animal...I eventually discover it's buffalo. And something that looks like seaweed but is too chewy, and turns out to be a buffalo organ...something big, white, with lots of little spikes, and called nyoo or nyoh in Lao. Any ideas anyone? I don't know my cooked bovine organs.

The German drug-dealer who is safe because he sells to the police too, and lives peacefully in Luang Prabang importing from all over the world. And pushing quite insisently on my friends. Yes, try these pills. They are ya-ba. My friend had no idea that that is the local name for crystal meth. In fact, despite having been a regular cocaine taker herself, she hadn't heard of crystal meth. She thought they must be ecstacy. Luckily she didn't take him up on his free promotional offers. But she had a good look in his large briefcase he carries with him, full of opium and skunk. Next time she saw him, he reminded her that 'the shop is open any time'. He is currently importing equipment to begin the cultivation of cannabis in Luang Prabang itself. Contributing to progress and bringing modernisation to the people of Laos, one of the poorest and most traditional countries.

The Chinese want to do that too, but mostly not through narcotics. They are apparently pumping dollars...or RMB...into Laos, of course I'm sure they want it as a satellite state but in the meantime there's a rumour that they are facilitating the clearing of rainforest for palm oil 'biofuel' plantations (which will make global warming much worse...ask my Dad about it) and flooding the food markets with cheap goods...which in Luang Prabang may be helping reach demand or may be ousting local producers, I just don't have the info to say. But it did make me wonder about my joyful feeling that the food was local and organic.

The old British expat who designs and develops hotels in Luang Prabang but cares deeply about what's happening to the place. Says it's all going to shit, greed has arrived now, the authorities will expand the airport (which currently holds 2 propeller planes, and that's it, and you just walk out on the runway) so that it will carry 737s and 747s, yipee, goodbye to Laos feeling different, goodbye to anything traditional or nonWestern that they-and we- might value, hello McDonalds!
Great, let those postcards be all images of the past and mere picturesque, not still how Laos is today. Welcome to the new Thailand, the new America. God. It's so unconsidered. So hurried. So desperately sad. Anyway, without more context I won't go on about that, it starts a whole huge discussion. Just read ''Ancient Futures" by Helena Norberg-Hodge and you'll get the picture.

The expat turned as some boys filed past us along the riverbank towards the bridge, smoking. He nodded in their direction, pointing out that they were smoking at 11 or 12, and would be making their way into town to beg from tourists or learn how to rip them off. Yep. He's right. Well he would know, anyhow, he lives there.

''Is there any hope?'' I asked him directly; "Can you see any way that something different could happen here in Laos, something more positive?"

"No."

We then walked past a beachside restaurant on the Mekong whose owner or tout tried to usher us in; however, it's early enough in the development of the tourist trade here that the fact we were disinterested in his menu but friendly to him meant he was still willing to be friendly back, and I just felt the pain of knowing that in a few years he won't bother to be friendly back if we don't want to buy; I've seen it everywhere along the tourist trail in Thailand, India, South America, you name it. Just past him on the path was an old spirit house in the trees with fresh offerings, and next to it, a big pile of stinking litter and the smell of something dead.

We walked through the ''craft village" now full of mansions and SUVs and little girls who won't give you a fair price on a bottle of water. A group of 5 of them stormed the older girl who was shopkeeper, who had told me 2000 for a water--a fair price-- and prevented her from selling me the water. I knew enough Lao to hear them demanding her, ''say 5000", ''no, 7000!" ''No, 5000"....these are more than I pay in a town-centre store for a bottle 3 times the size. Until the middle-aged owner turned up to see what the fuss was about, I simply could not buy a bottle of water. These girls were 7 or 9 years old. How depressing is that. The next generation.

Fucking Police

Luang Prabang, Laos: So far, I have made 5 in-person visits to the Police Station in Luang Prabang attempting to get a simple police report for the robbery of my camera and money so that I can make an insurance claim. Not much to ask, you'd have thought....but no, no police report has yet been granted us. WE wrote THEM two detailed reports of the events, but they have refused to give us *any* documents--despite repeated asking.

I went on Monday, and they told me to come back today; I went today at 11.30am, the man working in the office said they were 'not working' till 2pm, so I went back at 2pm, but no one was awake, so I went back at 2.30 and was told to come back at 3.15, when we had to wait 45 minutes while they watched an old American film and a football game, as we waited for the particular officer we'd previously talked with to arrive. When he arrived he did say that they were investigating the case, which was something, but told us although he might be able to help us with the camera, not with the stolen money, and his boss would have to sign the report or we couldn't use it, and his boss wouldn't be there until 10am tomorrow so we would have to come back AGAIN at that time. Of course, I doubt the boss will be there then either. It's my last day in Laos. I don't want to spend all of it, like I did today, waiting and being told to come back to talk fruitlessly with the tourist police.

I am being very patient and giving them as much benefit of doubt as possible....but this tries my patience, and Luisa, my friend who had her expensive camera and more money stolen than me, is naturally fed up. The police officers know when we're leaving town and I am concerned that they may just put off writing the report until we have gone. GGRRRRRR bureaucracy.

Up Laos creek w/o a camera, Ch.4. Robbed at midnight

pls note: about to leave for china so this post unfinished, bulk is in note form...sorry...climax is missing...

The hike to the Hmong tribal village of Ban Pha Yong was not particularly strenuous but the air was opaque with smoke from the slash-and-burn agriculture clearings being prepared for the upcoming rainy season, and so humid that by the time I arrived at the house of our host family, every piece of my clothing was drenched with sweat and could be wrung out to produce streams of salty fluid, and if I stood up after sitting, an embarrassingly deep puddle was left behind. All unwaterproofed documents were about to become papier-mache, so I gingerly hung them to dry in a tree.

On the way, we had passed entire scenes in which I could detect no sign of industrialization; houses and fields without so much as a plastic bag or modern T-shirt in sight. Idyllic is the word that fits, although its overuse reduces its sharpness.

We passed a woman spinning silk with an old bamboo loom, a woman distilling homemade whisky from a drum, the distillate dripping down a bamboo stem into a bottle; and an old man gardening in black tribal traditional dress, with cool and stylish 3/4-length traditional black fishermens' trousers and the classic broad conical woven-bamboo rice-field hat. Pink and grey buffalo grazing the fallow, local pig varieties barely bigger than a large cat, and lots of chickens whose plumage was identical to the wild forest Jungle Fowl, the ancestor of all domestic chickens.

(check notebook)
arrival and staring
food and household
the robbery..... and immed aftermath in next chapter with shaman in title...incl cryig, song angry, teams sent out to exits, etc.
the village organizes...with tangents about our excursions, scenes, experiences, the showers,
Walks, incl hunter--crossbow and gun and target practice
Mending the puncture and the baby w scissors, wiping bottom etc.
Watching toddlers w sticks, toddlers falling over, older sisters carryng
The sad story of the boy with the motorbike
CHECK DIARY and notepad
Observations anthropologically/cf conversation w dad/cf Ladakh

The parting dinner on Friday night w formal speeches and kids kept out
inviting us back; lots of apologies. Song and threats of murder and torture!
Teaching English to Ja-the, kids respect of the books, as if never seen before, hand s behind backs
Breastfeeding
Snotty kids
Handwashing
The last breakfast, shaman chant/cell phone of trader fr China
3-4 chickens killed, necks flopping in her hand
Chicken for breakfast, cleansing ritual then blessing ritual
Sacred egg
Women crying, Ja-the sullen
Women accomp to edge of village,
jealousy of female bonding, am I withdrawn/isolating?
Want more imaginative ways of interacting for nexttime...board games, photos, jokes/tricks, etc. Photos of things from my country, counter-development materils!
Bau leads us out under his protection ALL THE WAY to the road!!! Then turns around and goes back with nothing! A good 3 hour trek, jungle like Kaeng KRachan.

Bus stories. Sleeping, faces, deep blackness/capable women, leaning on each other, boy and sister, drunken chap lolling, getting wet together, beautiful women, baby w apparent spots...boy w father, w fever?

No-one smoking, but som LaoLao/beer sometimes, but wise
Food!!! Really good! Sticky rice etc, forest rat, sugar cane, green bananas...

The fishing expedition, fence-mendin, non-verbal communcation working like Ladakh
these people know how to be around each other, know how to livei n communityu
Washing our clothes for us, just becuase: no individualisation of labour
I washed my own dish after noodle soup...must have seemed very strangeindeed

The picknick
The wood-collecting trip, then waterfight w sexy Ong

Up Laos Creek w/o a Camera: Chapter 3, across the river.

In an even smaller wooden boat, Song (our Hmong tribal guide), Luisa and I voyaged 25 minutes down the Nam Ou river on Tuesday morning and got out on the far side at a Lao Lum (ethnicity of the lowland Lao farmers) village. There we stopped for a quick pit-stop to eat some bananas, chat to the local women and staring children, ask questions about what we saw, and for Song to buy a couple of packets of sweets (candies) 'to give to the children in the village'.

Luisa and I didn't approve of giving out sweeties to village children on multiple counts (their dental health being high on the list, followed by litter, and the encouragement of begging tourists for treats, and the bad image of tourists being rich powerful providers of desirable treasures that come from outside...etc)---but Song insisted that it was OK, and bought them anyway. As it was, I never gave out any, and it was more often Song himself who did so. As he was a Hmong tribesman and we were going to a Hmong village, I had to give his judgement the benefit of my doubt and go along with the flow.

From that moment onward I became 'Louis' (pronounced as if French) as it was much easier to say than 'Roy', so we were now Louis and Luisa, which of course tickled us.

Children and adults stared at us, but instead of staring back I smiled and nodded, which humanized us and forced them out of the stare into realising that oh yes, we were people too, just people, a little different, that's all. The children usually got shy and smiled back but hid their faces as I personally acknowledged each one; the adults would nod and break into a smile and speak a greeting, if I'd not already done so in their language. Sabai-dee (more or less, 'I wish you ease and well-being') is the generic greeting in Lao language, the lingua franca of the country and mother tongue to most urban and some rural ethnicities; in Hmong you say 'Nyozhong'. But a nod and a smile do the trick just about everywhere, breaking ice with all except the most shy or stunned staring children. But they'll probably smile next time.

We asked about the knitting one woman was doing; she was making a fishing net by hand. Not many places still do that, as they are cheap to purchase in nylon, but time-consuming to make yourself. Even for us to show a respectful curiosity in her craft clearly had an impact that contributed to her self-respect and pride rather than detracted from it, as we were clearly impressed and admiring. Of course, we could have had the opposite effect if we'd interacted differently, as, of course, a lot of tourists unintentionally do. We told her it was beautiful. It was.

I asked Song in detail about the rooves, which have fascinated me whenever I've passed villages ever since entering Laos. From a distance the most obvious sign of outside influence in remote villages is the replacement of (at present usually only some, not all) traditional thatched rooves with corrugated iron ones. I asked Song what the motivation was to replace them, and weren't corrugated iron rooves much hotter and noisier in the rain? He explained that it was a status symbol to replace your roof with a metal one, and that was the only motivation: too keep up with the neighbours in what is apparently already becoming a materially competitive environment, modern things being inherently impressive, possibly mostly because they are costly. Conspicuous consumption (which divides people, of course.) He said that yes, iron rooves are much too hot, and also, they are expenisive: whereas grass or bamboo rooves are absolutely free and 'from the natural'. I told him how thatched rooves are considered very attractive in England, but that people don't know how to make them any more, and so they have become very expensive indeed, and only the richer people can afford to maintain thatched rooves on their homes. He related this to the group of local women and they laughed, seeing the irony. It was a beautiful counter-development moment, where we could show people that they could think differently if they wanted and value what 'progress' is telling them they should discard, despite the fact that it's more practical, cheaper, and ecologically sound.

Up Laos creek w/o a Camera. Ch.2 Muang Ngoi, & various tirades

For a town on an asphalt road that is the only gateway to the boats to Muang Ngoi (Tourist Central--'Laos style), Nong Kiaw is an amazingly 'nothing' town, most of its roads dusty dirt, and um...most of its roads being, like, one actually, that comes off the one narrow potholey asphalt road. You know those postcard images of the vertical Limestone Karst mountains in southern China, that erupt like mushrooms out of the watery ricefields? Well, that's the scenery around Nong Kiaw, too. Nong Kiaw has perhaps 2 rustic guesthouses, and a few shops, all of them without shopfronts, just a room without a front wall, opening onto the street, displaying goods on wooden shelves or tables. All packaged things mostly imported from China or Thailand, and then a number of items important to rural people like agricultural hardware--tools, ropes, and the like.

Luisa and I wandered down the one street and saw that the few spirit-houses that were visible (all forms of spirituality having been banned or greatly constricted by the communist regime) were homemade, and given corrugated iron rooves like the humans' houses. They were very simple affais, often just a little platform with some food offerings--not like the mass-produced, gaudily painted paired spirit-houses or opulent spirit-mansions seen all over Thailand. Yes, Laos is a poor country. And yes, this means that much of the beauty of the way things are traditionally done has not been lost (yet). The fact that spirit-houses are hand-made enables each family to pour their craft-energy, if they have any left over, into their personal connection with the spirits they believe in, rather than just buying a pre-packaged and standardized spirit-house made in a spirit-house factory in Thailand (yes, these exist: you see parking-lots full of cookie-cutter spirit-houses for sale along major highways all over Thailand. I guess the concepts of mass production and mass consumption wiggle there ways into everything everywhere, if you let them in.) Spirit houses are just one (ironic and to me culturally quaint) example of how meaning, creativity, personality, and diversity are lost in the industrialization process.

Enough moralizing. More later ;)

We took the boat from Nong Kiaw to Muang Ngoi, a simple handmade wooden affair like all the others, with an outboard motor attached. There were local passengers as well as tourists. I met, as you do, some travellers I'd met previously in distant locations. There were pink water buffalo grazing and mostly submerged in the shallows (as well as grey-brown ones), the odd white egret, gorgeous forest, groups of jumping, splashing naked tribal children gleeful in the water, women wrapped in sarongs washing, the rhythmic whistle of the captains of row-boats training for the 17-village race upcoming in 4 days, a funeral procession bringing a coffin down to the water with gong-baring monks, and the normal--but utterly amazing--images of farmer-fishermen in traditional dress paddling with handmade paddles their handmade fishing-boats, clad in traditional dress with the classic Mekong conical bamboo sunhats. It's still here! It's still happening! All of this is gone, gone, vanished in Thailand, only found on postcards. It is so poignant to see these images in Laos, knowing that the tourist industry here is exploding and unless some careful and wise decisions are made, the sustainable traditional communities with all their independent and diverse lifeways will be gone, gone, vanished in Laos, too, and confined to the historical postcards, and all the remarkable features of their ways of living harmoniously in community, of raising sane and healthy balanced children, of living without polluting or destroying the landscape, will become the unbelieved stuff of legends, just romantic fantasy, nothing that people actually can do, and human nature will mean individualism, selfishness, as it already has come to mean for us in America and Europe.

So I am torn. I want to tell you about my experiences. I want to share the beauty and the inspiration that these people and this country, Laos, have poured into my lap: And yet I know that by publicizing Laos further, to you as potential tourists, and by travelling here myself, am I not contributing to its destruction? Should I tell you to come here now before the traditional things are gone, so that you can carry the lessons of these traditional cultures and what is really possible for humanity out into the world......or should I tell you to stay the hell away from here if you care about humanity? Answers welcome: write a comment or shoot me an email.

Muang Ngoi, Tourist Central, is still a pretty village. The buildings are still made entirely of bamboo, for the most part. The 'road' through the village is just dirt like the rest of the place. But indeed, every other building is a guesthouse with bamboo bungalows, or a tourist-oriented restaurant. There are heaps of touts for the guesthouses or for tours to trek to tribal villages to stick cameras in peoples' faces and help destroy their cultural independence, or see a waterfall, or see a cave. Cave/village/waterfall: just things to look at, just photo-opportunities really. People may be involved, but they're just picturesque and third-worldy and brown people and they are illiterate and don't speak English so kind of not real people anyway, and you wouldn't want to stay there in the village for long, there's no proper toilet etc etc. Sorry to be cynical. I've just watched a lot of tourists and seen how they behave. It's a bloody shame that most of them aren't your best cultural embassador, or even respectful.

Thinking like this I repeatedly ask myself why I am any different from all the other tourists. Why my desire to visit a traditional, remote village is any more legitimate or any less damaging than theirs. And in a way it's not, of course, and I am no different, and so my criticism of their behavior is also, somehow, an investigation of my own motivations and what I consider acceptable for *me* to do, too.

What I have found (not for the first time) is that all it takes for me to feel comfortable with my participation in this thing called tourism is something called RESPECT. Apply it in all situations, at all moments, using lots of caution and awareness as seasoning, and something is transformed and becomes a beautiful experience for all concerned. I enjoy myself, and feel comfortable with my conduct and interactions: and I can see from the faces of the locals that I interact with that they are enjoying themselves too--they often seem surprised (and delighted) at the way this foreigner is treating them, even with things so simple and basic (you would have thought) as a polite greeting and smile. Apparently it's not that common from tourists, or it wouldn't produce such enthusiastic and surprised responses. Of course, it's very sad that this sensitive respect isn't the baseline of all intercultural tourism. And I am very aware that tourists don't, mostly, intend any harm. They are just not really paying attention, not really seeing the local people around them, and not watching what other people do. Not behaving as if they were guests in someone else's home--but as if they own the place, and even then, as if they don't respect it.

Simple things as an example:
Tourists sit down on steps in front of a streetside table-stall, not noticing that by doing so they prevent locals from getting to the stall and so reduce the business received by that seller. Why not just sit down /next/ to it instead of blocking it? Locals are too polite and forgiving to say anything.
Tourists who walk into temples forgetting to take their shoes off, or not having discovered (or noticed) that it's disrespectful to go in with so little clothing on.
Tourists who wear very very short shorts and bare their shoulders: locals don't do this and it's uncouth, have they not noticed, or don't they care?
Tourists who think it's funny to buy water pistols bigger than anyone else's and attack people with them, turning what's supposed to be a gentle, playful water-splashing celebration symbolizing cleansing for the Laos New Year, into a quite unpleasant and disrespectful water-fight, squirting the water directly into people's faces, including children's, and splashing moped-riders (dangerous), and setting a very bad example.
Tourists who ON empty market-stall tables pointing the soles of their feet at passers-by. Not only do locals not climb on the tables but surely the tourists must have read the basic rule in this part of Asia that it's very rude to point your feet at anyone. No local EVER does that. Come on guys, it doesn't take much, and if you keep behaving in these ways, Laos is going to be as full of the ugly side of the tourist industry as Thailand in no time.
These are just a few examples, all from today.

So, carrying with me the tools of respect, caution, friendliness, and watching what other people are doing, I decided I wanted to go to a tribal village and stay there as long as possible, to actually live people's lives there a little, helping them out in the fields in exchange for food and somewhere to sleep. 'As long as possible' meant only 4-5 days, unfortunately. On the first night in Muang Ngoi I found a Hmong tribal guide who seemed nice enough and spoke quite good English, who worked for the government tourist company, which gives a good percentage back into local communities, and who was prepared to take us to some friends of his in a Hmong village only accessible by foot, to stay with the family for a few days. Moreover, his price was very reasonable. He was at first confused that I only wanted to see ONE village, and wasn't interested in visiting the waterfall that every other tourist he'd ever seen went to.

Luisa, the Spanish woman, decided to come with me and Song, the Hmong guide. We left the next day, at noon on Tuesday 8th April.

Up Laos Creek without a Camera: Chapter 1. The bus station

After seeing the remote tribal villages from the touristy 'slow boat' on the well-beaten 2-day trip down the Mekong River from Chiang Khong in Northern Thailand to Luang Prabang in Laos, I felt an inner urge to get to a remote village as soon as I could after my arrival in Laos. Luang Prabang is a small, pretty town, but very touristy and rather dull, there being little to do except enjoy some nice temples and wander around watching other tourists. Of course, the food markets are always interesting and still, after 5 months in the region eating only local foods, I find plenty of vegetables that are unknown to me, although I have tried just about all the fruits I can find.

I spent 2 days in Luang Prabang disoriented and organizing logistics, and then took an early morning bus from the public bus station to a town called Nong Kiaw which is the last town with a road on the way to the fabled Muang Ngoi, a pretty village on the large Nam Ou river only accessible by boat: A pretty village that now, I discovered when already on the bus, has become well and truly trodden by the tourist trail, the Lonely Planet guide even saying that in so many words. If Lonely Planet puts it in that language.....well, I started to wish I'd chosen a different destination.

At the bus station my Spanish friend Luisa and I were the only foreigners. As I've written previously, foreigners simply don't take public buses, they take the triply expensive air-conditioned tourist minibuses and suchlike, thereby missing out on one of the most enriching (and physically uncomfortable) parts of travelling in foreign countries. Public bus journeys provide wonderful insight into a country and its people, and the lack of foreigner-to-foreigner babble on the bus and one's inability to verbally communicate very much in the local language means that you can properly take in the visual feast of the passing scenery and the colourful turnover of local people cycling through the bus...what are they carrying? How do strangers interact in Laos culture in the forced immediate close physical proximity of a full bus? What are their attitudes towards one another and to the world around them? How do children behave? What kinds of people get on and off where? Can you start to make patterns of prediction based on how people dress as to what kind of place they will alight?

By the time our bus departed two quiet, well-informed Dutch travellers had joined us making a total of four foreigners and the rest assorted rural Lao people.

But before we even left the bus station I had a moment which cracked open my mind and set me on fire.

There was one young woman at the bus station evidently waiting for her bus who was tall, elegant, and looked completely out of place: she was clad entirely in traditional tribal dress. She wore a long narrow black skirt and a kind of black jacket or blowse adorned with many silver discs, and some sort of headdress that I can't recall. She stood out from everyone else in the grace of her garments and gestures. I don't know what tribe she was from (Akha perhaps?) but she looked a little bewildered and uncomfortable in this city context. Yet she had a distant look in her eyes that stopped my mind and fascinated me: she moved with a power, a command, a wild and independent freedom that was palpable and captivating, and that I have only seen in women from remote villages, women who know how to bring life from the earth around them with their own hands, women (and men) who are thereby free from the 'umbilical cord' of urban civilization that so constricts most of us Westerners. Although she seemed uncomfortable in the bus station, this tribal woman had a kind of power that made my heart pound. She knew what most of us do not; she knew how to make life: how to support a family deep in the jungle using her wits and skills; how to craft clothes, grow food, husband animals, build houses, facilitate births, raise children intuitively, make baskets, live in community, and all the myriad other skills that peasant villagers' take for granted, but that are life-arts that Westerners have usually lost---and that so many of us in the alternative movements are trying--without role-models--to re-learn from scratch. Somehow, with her feet grounded on the earth she deftly tilled and her head held high in fierce pride, it seemed as if this tribal woman looked through and over everything around her at the bus station.

And what is even more remarkable is that she was a *young* woman, in 2008, in a major Laos town, still wearing full tribal dress! Traditional dress is usually one of the first things a culture loses as Westernization starts to spread its greedy fingers into a community. And usually it is the young people who lose it first. Somehow, she had chosen to keep hers. Who was this woman? Where was she returning to? What was she doing in Luang Prabang?

Luisa later spotted an apparent husband and child with her; neither of them were in tribal dress but already jeans and T-shirts. Yes, as Helena Norberg-Hodge writes with such insight in her fantastic book, 'Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh' , it is the young men who are the most vulnerable to cultural change--who feel backward and in their adolescent search for identity and acceptance, try to be 'cool' following new, media and tourist-influenced role-models, typically wearing jeans, black T-shirts or leather jackets, and sunglasses; smoking, drinking and riding motorbikes...hanging out on street corners self-consciously dragging on cigarettes...you know the package. It is sad. You don't see that in the traditional villages, where young men have a role, a place in the community, and a sense of meaning and identity that fills the space otherwise occupied by teenage angst and acting out. I have seen it, so I am convinced. Boys who aren't embarrassed to help their mothers, or to show affection to their younger sisters; who have no concept that it isn't 'cool' or good for their image to help with caring for the neighbours' toddlers.

If the mere bus station offered me this, what would I find if I reached a traditional village?

Out to lunch...or dinner: Adam is tempted by Eve

Last night the beautiful Eve took me out for dinner. Perhaps I am innocent, but it's not clear what her motivations are, exactly.

She took me to a restaurant so dark inside that you could barely find your way across the room; we sat in the most remote, romantic corner which was also right beneath the air-conditioning box, so it was chilly in my polo-shirt. The dim lamp was low over the table and we had to lean towards each other and shout because the music was so loud, loud enough to be a nightclub. I was the only foreigner in sight.

I met her, of course, through Sandy the pick-up artist, who was trying the other day to get her into bed, but unusually, failed. Eve is from near Chiang Mai, and works long hours coordinating exports of hyacinths and teak. She is always on her cell phone to some client, getting home from work late in the evening, missing lunch (our dinner was her lunch), flying to the other end of the country, speaking English to some clients, and in addition to Thai, able to speak the northern Lanna dialect, some Cambodian (Khmer) and a smattering of Mandarin Chinese.

She struck me as intelligent and discerning, mature and professional, wry and centred, respectable but possibly mischievous when no one's looking. She responded to Sandy's flirting but always with this amused expression as if she could see straight through his tactics, which, she told me, she could indeed. And yet, she was hanging out with him...and with me. For what, exactly? She said, temptingly, that she was looking around for a boyfriend, but not in a hurry. She seemed to just be being friendly, but then last night dressed to kill, smelling sumptuous, and chose such a romantic setting, ordering me more drinks when I'd finished the first, and often looking about with this odd little smirk on her lovely face. During dinner I came to expect that she'd suggest we go out somewhere afterwards, but then she informs me that she has to pick up a friend and drop me off.

She tells me her brother is a pick-up artist just like Sandy, and she likes to go and look at women with him in clubs. What did she think of his behavior? 'He can do what he wants.' Through all her respectability something about the smirk interested me. It transpired that she'd had an Australian boyfriend for a while, among others. Apparently she found it difficult that he didn't trust her. Her face remained innocent and sincere when I asked, wasn't she a bad girl too, sometimes? 'Oh no,' she insisted. I nudged her wryly, disbelieving. Eventually after the third nudge, she couldn't contain her composure, broke into a giggle, and said unwillingly, 'sometimes. Sometimes.'

Apparently, she has at least five suitors at the moment.

And she does /such/ a good job of maintaining her air of sophisticated, respectable, desirable unavailability.

She is called Eve, because she is the first woman, the oldest child of all her siblings and cousins, and so, the oldest grandchild too. I am also the oldest sibling and oldest grandchild. She said I should be called Adam. That would make us Adam and Eve. Hmmm...

Chiang Mai, N. Thailand; some vignettes

Sandy, the native Hawaiian/Australian pick-up artist, who has several dates a day every day, and, just for one example, met a beautiful woman walking past on the street by offering her a ride on his moped at about 1pm, got her number and called her later, and had slept with her by 5pm. Not unusual for him.

Driving up the mountain on my hired motorcycle with an astoundingly beautiful Lisu tribal woman on the back of my bike, on our way to the temple. Sandy had picked her and her (also stunning) friend up the night before. She was from a village in the remote Northwestern Mae Hong Son province, speaking Lisu first and Thai second; she showed me how to pray and make offerings in the gorgeous Doi Suthep temple; I followed her lead walking ceremonially three times around the large chedi (stupa), offering incense and candles and flowers, praying, and divining my fortune using numbered sticks shaken in a cup until one falls out. Her slow, faltering steps in her high heels as she walked down the long temple entrance staircase guarded by gigantic serpent-dragon statues with glossy ceramic scales like bits of tea-pot inlaid with mortar. The way she said thank you for every tiny thing like a well-trained child, and rode on the back of my moped effortlessly, as if it wasn't moving, holding onto nothing and fiddling with her handbag.

The Sunday crafts market, when the streets are closed to vehicles and there was a band of blind musicians busking and lifting their half-open eyes upward as they listened to each other; once only the drummers continued as one guitarist quickly adjusted his harmonica and the other talked on his cell-phone; I suppose they're used to being blind but their coordination of objects around them was impressive, and the music arresting.

Being 'used' by the two beautiful Thai girls who invited us from their gold Mercedes to got to an exclusive, private Karaoke club with them; 'we'll have a good time' they told us; they got the four of us a private room with plush sofas and own DJ...and then asked us to pay for it, the price being 10 times more than our initial understanding.

The woman working at a dirty, humble streetside restaurant with wobbly tables on the asphalt who just so happened to have a PhD in insect immunology from Sheffield, England.

Finding the exit to the tourist bubble: closer than I thought.

Sick of the tourist bubble in Bangkok but unable to see the door--my only guide is Lonely Planet which IS the tourist bubble; if you talk to anyone they only know about the inside of the tourist bubble; they don't even know a Thailand outside that bubble exists. Yet I'd seen the outside in Phetchaburi, a town effectively without any foreigners in it, and thus no tourist industry. Now here I was stuck in it again. However, before I'd even left Bangkok for Chiang Mai, there, in the public bus station, I found the exit: I was outside the foreigner-bubble. It had all the elements of fascination, awkwardness, hyper-self-consciousness, linguistic difficulty, and emotional discomfort that comes with having stepped outside the tourist bubble, alone. There was a gigantic hall with large areas of rows of chairs for waiting, and crowds of people milling around: and not one foreigner in sight. It was exhilarating. Clearly, foreigners don't take public buses (which are much cheaper and less prone to robbery), but pay through the nose for travel agents to arrange special tourist buses, get their bags stolen often and are ripped off. Clearly, most tourists don't even /read/ their Lonely Planet guides (myself included, mostly) as all the public bus info is in there, and warnings against ripoff tourist buses. It was exciting to have been able to dip my toe outside the tourist bubble with so little effort, and sit there on the edge of my discomfort, being stared at and staring. And scribbling constantly in my journal or rummaging incessantly through my backpack, as befits my role as a backpacker.

The tourist bubble, it seems, is more than merely a matter of beaten paths along popular and well-infrastructured routes. In Bangkok's Khao San area, which is the total epicentre of Thailand's massive tourist industry (it's biggest industry by far), you can, if you know where, walk a mere 10 metres down an alley, and be back in 'real' Thailand. There are umpteen whole restaurants where you /never/ see a foreigner, right there in the centre of Khao San. It's astounding how foreigners simply don't, for the most part, explore. Above all, they don't walk. Should you venture a block or two from Khao San road, you don't need to know about the alleys to escape the farangs (foreigners), there just /aren't any/. It baffles me, the strange way in which the tourist bubble works. Even if I depend on Lonely Planet, I've discovered, I can still see a Thailand relatively untainted by the tentacles of the tourist industry, and relatively free of the crouds of beerswilling Brits, Aussies and Israelis.

Vignettes 2

The beautiful 'Lady-boys' (transexuals) who stand like prostitutes on street-corners in short skirts with dainty handbags and call out, 'Where you go darling?'
They also walk down the street past my hostel at about 5 in the morning: just before the monks come out walking to beg for their food for the day.

The hordes of disastrously beautiful Israeli women tourists who are the epitome of unavailable, as they tell us they would never consider dating a non-Israeli man. Pity.

The contrast between the swish clean Westernized shiny gigantic malls and a block away the khlong (canal) taxis of Old Bangkok, which used to be called the Venice of the East. These boats carry more people than a bus, and are fast and efficient, and cheap. Their routes are limited now as many canals have been closed, but they are still heavily used by Thais and there are always a few bewildered looking tourists on them too. Today, having taken them several times before, I knew the routine and felt like a past master, sliding to one side or the other depending on which side of the khlong the boat stops at next to make room for new passengers; pulling up the fabric splash-shield as the boat sped up; feeling relaxed. Two older British tourists looked anxious, confused, and clearly didn't understand how the whole thing worked, and didn't know when or how to get off. That was me recently; but it's interesting to watch 'fresh' tourists from the outside. They really do look clumsy and out of place.

The Americans who don't know how to cross roads without pedestrian crossings. They wait on the curb expecting something to happen. 'So...you just cross any time?' one woman asked me bewildered. There was a zebra crossing (white stripes) but no traffic stops unless you step into the street. 'Yes, whenever you want,' I told her. She was confused. An older Thai man beckoned her across at an appropriate moment.

The joke of walking one block away from the tourist zone of Khao San Road area and suddenly seeing not a single foreigner: Apparently, tourists don't walk. Not even 50-100 metres. Or even just walking to the end of the block, in some cases, or down an alley, where there are entire outdoor restaurants with not a single foreigner sitting in them, but stuffed full of Thais. The food is more authentic, excellent, and about 1/3 of the price, or less, than in the 'tourist' restaurants. It's beyond me why tourists don't eat in these places.

The young tourist man screaming 'HELP! POLICE! THEY STOLE MY BAG! POLICE! POLICE! SOMEBODY HELP! HELP' --over and over again, and everyone, tourists and Thais, just either walking past or staring at him. I couldn't bear it so went up to him and talked with him. He was beyond listening. A Thai woman at a streetstall said 'Maybe you should not shout because people will think you are crazy, and go to the police: it is better.' But he kept shouting, beside himself. The apparent thieves stood at hand, visible through the open doorway and glass wall of their shop.

The young Swedish fellow who laughs and says 'it was totally worth it' when he describes how he broke all his promises to himself about what he wouldn't do in Thailand: Use drugs, get a tattoo, have sex with a prostitute.

Desperate, limbless beggars next to stalls that sell specifically, only extremely specialized luxury items: one sells a particular kind of puzzle-piece lampshade; another sells only fire-whirling (poi) equipment.

How I become used to 'Westernized' Thailand-- the fact that there is no traditional dress left in Bangkok (except the hats street-sellers wear), and that materially Bangkok is very Westernized, with almost everything mass-produced and mechanized--and then I go from the tourist zone to the major central shopping malls at Siam Square, and notice that everything, even huge advertizing boards, is written in English, and that most of the models are white Europeans...and I feel like it's going too far. This is Thailand. Why in English? Because it's cool? Who's it for? Most people in the mall are Thai...And models: Thai people are extremely goodlooking; why use massive images of Marilyn Monroe and other white blondes? It felt racist and culturally offensive to me.

Nonetheless the mall has a huge spirit-house outside it that is sparkling and always has people holding incense and praying in front of it, and is brimming with models of animals: it is the spirits of the animals, apparently--especially elephants, also dogs-- that are honoured and prayed to here, usually by women in business-suits.

The way most tourists don't 'see' Thai people, at least in the tourist zone. They walk into a shop and ignore the shopkeeper, who is always ready to greet them with a smile and a traditional 'wai' bow of respect; the tourists act as if the Thais aren't even there. They browse and leave without eye-contact or a simple nod of thanks. When I'm shopping with a friend I find myself doing these polite basics for them, as it only seems like a kind of (unconscious) racism otherwise, as if only foreigners are human. I do'nt understand how they can seem to be friendly and respectful to other foreigners, but not to Thais: I'm sure they don't mean it, but it is blatant. As one friend put it, it's as if 'the brown people are invisible'. But they're not. They're right there, and they're really nice--actually often a lot nicer than other tourists.

I think this kind of attitude--tourists' unconscious (or conscious) rudeness--creates a lot of the unpleasantness of the tourist trade, encouraging tourist-oriented Thais to rip off foreigners or lose the smiles and generosity that I've seen elsewhere in Thailand, occasionally becoming rude and, in the case of drivers and agencies, deceptive. Having visited the tourist bubble now, I see how the vast majority of tourists don't meet any Thais who aren't employed in the tourist trade. In this way, are tourists really seeing Thailand? Or are they just seeing the ugly reflections of their own cultures and attitudes?

Stung all over my head by jungle bees

As pointed out by one friend, this is another of those 'wow' stories that if not careful sounds like you're showing off and trying to impress other people with how cool your experiences have been. I tell it more because I'm laughing at myself. The jungle yielded a number of such stories; analyse my reasons for telling them any way you will. I hope they're at least entertaining; that's my main intention.

Camping in hammocks strung between saplings deep in the untouched jungle in the mountains towards the Burmese border, Ashton and his men (and a couple of women) gathered wild plants as they could to supplement the meagre fare their porters had brought with them. Their campsite overlooked a brook frequented by the dangerous but elusive wild Gaur and Elepant, and at night they huddled around the campfire to the often inexplicable chorus of jungle sounds, including the crying of a pair of tigers around the camp....

OK enough of that tone. All of the above is true but it's unnecessarily dramatic. We had Thai jungle guides with us as the three of us didn't know the terrain and weren't familiar with all of the dangers. There were always at least 3 guides with us, sometimes four, and sometimes SEVEN guides for three tourists. Hmmm. So that doesn't make us sound so intrepid, does it.

One day I went off to poo, as you do, not too far from camp because of the tigers, but not too close because of the people. This resulted in a rather well-pooed circle at a certain distance from the camp, so you had to watch where you were stepping, as the leaf-litter, though deep, was light and fluffy and you might step through it onto something you didn't want to.

After making my deposit to the Jungle Nutrient Bank, I stood up and took two steps to stand behind a tree to do a tick-check, not wanting to get the uniformly fatal endemic Tick-Borne Encephalitis sooner than necessary.

Suddenly I felt painful sharp stings all over my forehead, ears, and near my eyes. I must have stepped into a jungle bees nest, though I didn't open my eyes to check, and I brushed whatever it was off my face as fast as I could, blundering backwards through the brush, keeping my head low, trying not to panic, and expecting any moment to be swarmed by them and that I'd have to scream and run for my life. However, the attackers chose not to pursue any further; no swarm descended on me. But in the process of my enthusiastic swiping to get them to stop stinging my face, I had knocked my glasses off into the leaf litter. Cautiously I opened my eyes, without moving, and tried to spot my glasses; I knew they couldn't be far away, but of course, I couldn't see them. I looked closely, but they were no-where to be found.

My stings smarting, I wandered with pounding heart and raised adrenaline back to camp, and calmly told the guides I'd been stung all over the head by bees. They shrugged; only one spoke English, but despite the fact that I told them in Thai, I guess my calm body language communicated that it wasn't too much to worry about. So much for getting medical attention. I suppose these particular bees, or wasps, or stinging ants, or whatever it was that swarmed me in that moment, were not going to be life-threatening. Fortunately I had a spare pair of glasses and dared to tip-toe back to the bees' nest site and with their help, found the original pair. Phew!

Bitten by a possibly rabid dog

On Tue, March 4, 2008 15:00, Roy Ashton wrote:
I'm in a bright yellow room with a too-bright computer screen that hurts my eyes. 5 different loud pop-musics are cacophoning around me in this internet cafe that's evidently for Thais not tourists as the price is much too low, 15 Baht an hour instead of the 180 Baht an hour I paid 2 days ago. Back in Ranong, mainland town, sooner than expected. I was just getting into the peaceful rhythm of a wonderfully slow and replenishing life on Koh Chang, 'elephant island', a good hour's ferry-ride from Ranong, capital of Thailand's least inhabited province, in the South of the country just across the river from Burma/Myanmar.

One of the quietest islands left in Thailand I'm told. Like they all used to be 15 years ago. Double-bed bungalow for 150/night, own shower and loo. 40 mins walk from the nearest shop which is v. minimal, and one of two on the island it seems; only two internet terminals, both someone's laptop and mega-expensive. Brahminy Kites soaring everywhere, saw a sea eagle and a fairy bluebird and lots of Oriental Pied Hornbills. It was magic, like the family summer holidays of my childhood when my brother and I would just spend all day doing nothing and/or exploring nature. All I did was go for walks, watch birds, lie in hammock, eat good food, dip in ocean, write in diary, meditate, chill out. It was exactly what I needed after nearly 2 weeks of cough/cold and lots of stress of various kinds. I finally understood why people like going to the beach (there was no-one on it and the sea was warm, the coast was covered in rainforest or banana and rubber trees).

So of course I wanted to stay as long as possible. However, my friend ironically wanted to leave as soon as possible. She was restless, saying 'there's absolutely NO-THING going on here!'

I guess it's really taught me how I'm just not an urban person and plenty of quiet and rural space is wonderful for me. On all our childhood summer holidays in France my brother Kim and I did 'nothing' and yet we loved it and it was the best thing all year for me as a child. We just played outside, birdwatched, chased lizards and butterflies. We needed nothing more. I realise that I still don't! As I am a birdwatcher and tracker nature is endlessly fascinating. For me, every gecko, every large flying beetle, every sunbird or raptor is a source of wonder and interest that is very sustaining and fulfilling. Anyhow, I had pursuaded my friend to stay until the next day.

So today, with some sadness, I got up early to enjoy the most of my last day on the island. I got up with the light, around 6.45 am, and took my binocs and empty backpack to walk the 40 mins to the nearest shop (one of only two) to buy some water that wasn't overpriced like it was at our bungalow-resort (half the price actually). But just as I got to the driveway to the shop, 6 dogs attacked me suddenly. I wasn't too phased being somewhat used to this show of agression; usually some gesturing and arm-waving is enough to dispel them, though you have to keep looking behind you as they always try to creep up behind you and bite your achilles' tendons. Bastards. Never turn your back!

Dogs here are Jekyll-and-Hyde characters for sure, being lazy and charming and friendly during the day, but teaming up in evil bloodthirsty bands to terrorize the neighbourhoods at night, barking maniacally and attacking people readily, especially foreigners, who they can apparently smell are from out of town. The 6 or so dogs this morning were led by two dominant ones who were apparently more Hyde than Jekyll, or whichever way it would be having never read the book. The big grey one came too close and wasn't frightened enough of my gesturing. I kept walking as this usually works,but the path was narrow and soon they were around me. I kept the grey one at bay by facing it but this allowed his number two to get me from the side in a quick movement that was too fast for me to respond to while still fending off the alpha.

Before I knew it the brown one had bitten me in the right shin, hard, and it hurt a lot. There was a slow-motion moment when I knew its face was coming too close and there was nothing I could do about it like in a bad dream, but it was soon over. Then the whole clan left in a rush, running away.

Hit and run. Bastards.

I quickly examined the damage. There was a wet shiny saliva-soaked patch on my thin trousers. I pulled them up to see an already deep purple bruise and a clear graze with scarlet blood already present. Fuck.

I took my zip-off trouser-leg off and with unsalivated bits of it wiped the wound in hope of removing any superfluous rabid saliva that had decided not to grace my bloodstream with its presence. I paused there feeling nothing, utterly rational, totally calm. What do I do now.

"Sprachen Sie Deutch?" "Ein Bischen." "Magen Sie etwas fur die Wunde?....."

It was a middle-aged German couple who had seen the whole event and offered me Iodine for the wound which I gratefully accepted. I was clearly very adrenalized but acting calm and rational. Suddenly my German was good enough to communicate; we had the entire conversation in German; amazing what adrenaline will do. I told them I was afraid of Rabies and asked the man whether he thought there was a danger, he said no but you never know. The couple had watched the grey and brown dogs attack various people and knew of their biting 4 people in the last month alone, yet the shopkeepers do nothing.

At the shop I went and saw a man about a dog but although he looked at my wound he did indeed do nothing. I bought the water from him and tried to find a stick for the way home but on reading my body language the man offered me a nice long heavy cane which I gripped like a sword and then, feeling a lot of anger and hatred towards those dogs and knowing that I'd beat them in a fight if I had a stick, I actually wanted to meet them again on the way home. At the same time I kept looking behind me and glared daggers and hackles at every dog I saw, them all being now evil vampires pretending to be all cute-and-pathetic lazing in the sun. But no dogs attacked me on the way home.

I considered for a small moment what to do. I knew I had one hour to get treatment. I could not rationally assess the risk or what to do and needed to talk to someone I could trust and in English. I needed to talk with my friend. She's a nurse, she would bring me down to earth, she would tell me whether or not I was overreacting or whether I should get to a hospital right now even if it was annoying and inconvenient. Without thinking any further I headed home fearfully, hating dogs, avoiding eye-contact, resenting the fact that I couldn't appreciate the walk or the birdcalls any more, that I didn't care about the tracks any more or whether I'd miss some new species; I saw the best view ever of the very secretive and hard to see Greater Coucal but didn't even stop to look; this was life-and-death. So much for a peaceful last day on the island.

About half way home I realised that the 40 minute walk would use up most of my hour-left-to-live, hour-to-get-immunoglobulin. And that there was a nurse or doctor marked on the map I'd seen. But it was too late to go back to the shop; what would I do if my friend wasn't at her bungalow?

I got back, at last, all shaky and feeling horrible. Having not drank a drop despite the heat and fast walking with heavy 6-litres in my pack plus binocs and birdbook. The people there smiled at me. Insanely, I smiled back as if nothing was awry. My friend was not at home. What was I going to do?

I needed to talk to someone. I couldn't think straight or act clearly. I knew the risk was probably low but couldn't let go of the fact that I should be taking some action here.

Although avoiding panic, I saw my mind distort the situation through fears and this made simple decisions difficult. Suddenly it was the biggest deal to go and talk with the hotel reception people and scary and I didn't want to set anything in motion and then I wouldn't let myself NOT do it and so I was caught in this paralysis of fear and self-punishment at my inability to act in this urgent situation.

I sat on my balcony drinking water, waiting for my friend, eating some food. I washed the cut with soap and water and put on tea-tree oil. I waited some more. I left my friend a note saying I needed to talk with her. I agonized and struggled with myself. I was reminded of times when I have been unable because of some kind of fear trigger to reach out for my basic needs. I was caught in one of those frozen moments. I could not act. Yet I knew that not acting was choosing on some level to die: or at least to take no action which might result in death. But I could not act and I felt I had to give into that. I knew it was insane; I knew I was choosing to die for no reason, but there was this immense barrier to overcome in myself to tell anybody and strange as it might sound, I just couldn't do it.

It occurred to me that this was some kind of denial. I jsut wanted to go to sleep and forget about it all, to calm down. I lay on my bed under mosquito net and relaxed but ddin't let myself lose consciousness, I stayed present. I reflected that my fate was on some level out of my hands and this helped me relax. I put back on the Buddha-shaped protection necklace (worn by everyone in Thailand) that I'd taken off last night and not worn all day (interesting...hmmm...) and that gave me a palpable shroud of relief. Then somehow I could do it. I went and talked to the people.

My friend didn't turn up but I saw a Thai doctor who happened to be nearby and had the wound cleaned twice more with alcohol then with iodine stuff that was supposed to be antiviral too. Everyone who saw me encouraged me to leave the island on the 2pm boat and go to the hospital, have to shorten story as internet shutting, basically I did and got one jab ....
---------------------------------Written 4th March.------------------------
.....and since have had another. I am still alive and feeling no worse for the wear.. that's the story so far...

Market forces

I walked to Bangkok's Chinatown yesterday, through the visible street-smoke, resenting the fact that mere respiration is toxic here. I picked my way through alleys absolutely crammed with stalls absolutely crammed with electronics pieces; both ready-to-use and parts for assembly, and including miniature workshops where people were assembling computers and audios beside roaring traffic and heavy smoke from pork barbeques, with fans blowing above their seats that have no shielding cage (so look where you step!)

Chinatown looked no different to my untrained eye than other parts of Bangkok except for the fact that writing is in Chinese as well as Thai and there are more Chinese shrines inside the shops and lots of gaudy fat Buddhas or cartoon-smug pink doll-children figures. I really have so little understanding of what I'm looking at that I feel ashamed to call myself a traveller there. When I feel that ignorant I feel as bad as the other tourists, and am probably just as likely to cause offence unknowingly. Of course I am very respectful as much as I know how to be, but inintended offence is, I suppose, just a risk I take of being in another country.

The floors of the markets, especially the food stalls, are constantly wet, presumably from washing the food; in the meat, seafood and fish markets you never know quite what is splashing you; drips come from above half the time, which I think I've concluded are usually condensation from airconditioning in buildings overhead, but I also got sprayed a number of times by catfish or eels fighting to bury their gills in the last remaining millimetres of water in their trays.

Large buckets of baby turtles or, should you fancy one instead, full of big warty toads. Mmmm. Don't make a pig's ear of your display of pig's ears. Awful offal. Did I have the guts to ask what the guts were from? Did I get cold feet looking at all the cold feet of chickens or other animals?; feet are popular to eat apparently. It's fantastic to see people use all parts of the animal, and that there is no squeamishness around doing so. There were a number of grey nobbly masses that I couldn't identify; I think they may have been parts of brains or an organ turned inside out.

There are people grinding coconut milk (made from the hard part of the coconut plus water, not from the coconut juice), and whole stalls full of containers of strange coloured pastes, presumably thing like green and red curry powders, but I don't know how to understand the answers to the question 'nee keu arai krap?' -- what is this? Stalls of fried bananas, roasted bananas, baked bananas, but NEVER mashed bananas; red bananas, whitish ones, green ones, yellow ones; long ones short ones fat ones thin ones and any of various combinations of the above.

Typical snacks stalls are 2-bite sized thin portions of pork being barbequed on bamboo sticks over beds of charcoal, often also fish or chicken done likewise, accompanied by sticky rice if you want it (a rice variety from N.E. Thailand/Laos, eaten by the poor people of those areas as a staple, but ironically a treat for people elsewhere including foreigners; it is long-grained, and steamed, and sticks together in a well-textured lump like African porridge (pap) or Tibetan barley-dough (tsampha /ngamphe), but the single rice-grains are still visible and separable; it's quite different from overcooked normal white rice. As another snack, it's often sold sweetened, with a sauce of sweetened coconut milk, and mango slices.

Then you've got the stands that sell soups, those that sell fried rice and phad thai noodles, etc etc...and they're all mobile, pushable on wheels. The cooking ones typically appear and disappear in one spot at particular periods of the day, but there are a lot that are pushed around all day, usually selling fruit: pineapples, sold whole and more commonly chopped up in a little plastic bag with a bamboo skewer to feed yourself; papaya, durian, watermelon, pomelo....You soon learn what a good price is and I refuse to buy what I consider overpriced as I can generally find it at the typical price nearby.

OK, so I tried durian, openmindedly, and it was pretty disgusting. I think my problem was that I expected something fruity, and while sweet, it is more like potato or avocado in texture, but of course then there's the legendary stink on top of that. I almost couldn't finish my portion. It's expensive too, so although it was worth trying, I doubt I'll bother again, although I'm told it varies greatly with ripeness.

Having worshipped jackfruit in a previous blogpost, I can add with experience now that jackfruit varies considerably and it's actually quite difficult to find a good one; I was lucky that time and have only found jackfruit equivalently delicious on one occasion since. It's usually too firm, so rubbery, and not juicy enough, with thin rather than rich flavour. Which is a shame as I usually expect ecstacy again.

However, I recently discovered mangosteens, which on my first try were set to be my new infatuation. They look like tiny eggplant/aubergines, but round, and deep matte purple. About the size of smallish tomatoes. But they are hard and almost barky. The 'skin' is a good centimetre thick, and thick and fibrous, much more woody than that of an orange. It's very bitter and to be avoided. Inside it, however, are virgin white crescents of amazingly juicy flesh reminiscent of a lychee but a more mouth-watering flavour and usually no pit/pip, and not as rubbery in texture as a lychee (no lychees aren't rubbery, but imagine something even more juicily collapsible.) The flavour has to be experienced to be believed.

However, like everything that's bought fresh and grown locally by small producers from diverse genetic stock of local varieties, mangosteen varies, and you get more or less interesting ones. It's wonderful though, in this globalized world, to discover delicious fruits that for whatever reason really haven't made it, or not consistently, onto Western supermarket shelves. There is still an 'other' out there, still an 'exotic'; difference hasn't yet been erased by McDonalds (although there's one two blocks from here and here I am in an internet cafe using Microsoft). Sure, difference seems to be on its way out, and tourism and Westernization seem set on destroying many aspects of what used to mean 'Thai'. Other travellers tell me to go to Laos now while it's still not commercialized; however, I met two English travellers who said that in Laos they couldn't avoid the cartels of taxi-drivers/hotels who had monopolized whole towns to prevent travellers from getting good prices and to effectively outlaw renting of bicycles so that tourists are unable to avoid using the taxi-mafia to get anywhere. They told me of hotels where every day of the week shows a different American sit-com series, be it Friends one night, and (I don't even know the names of others) on other nights....Of course, globalization has already come to the poor, backwater country of Laos, which most Westerners have never even heard of. The 'get there before it's gone' attitude is of course a major force in making it disappear. All of that depressing stuff aside, on a personal level it is still a joy to discover tropical fruits I've never seen nor heard of....even though telling you about them is probably a globalizing force in itself.

Human grime

After a week in the tourist trap of Bangkok's Khao San Road, I'm ready to get out of this place. I have a sore chest from the pollution and my throat feels like I've been smoking 20 a day (not that I've ever done that, but after feeling the effects of just a puff or two on one, I can imagine).

There are always new people to see-- tourist-watching is possibly even more interesting than watching Thais at this point. International backpacking is clearly no longer a phenomenon of Western Europeans; I've met travellers from Morocco, Korea, Singapore, China, Japan, Argentina, Brazil, etc. And heaps of Israelis.

It is fascinating to watch the diversity of travellers' tastes, styles, attitudes. There are lots of try-hard 'cool' types--ravers, hippies, self-conscious fashion victims. Then there are the typically Australian or British beer-swilling types (they do little else except often seem rude to Thais and assume Thailand to be like any other Asian country.) I was with a few last night; they bought drinks and then refused to pay for them, and stole the glasses; they kicked the taxi when the driver offered his lowest price that they still thought was too high (it was actually the lowest I've heard for that time of night); they shouted at the taxi-driver all the way home; one of them offered him drinks while he was driving and constantly messed with his radio and radio-settings despite everyone's protests to stop; it was embarrassing to be identified with this race.

It's not surprising the owner of the guesthouse I'm in is grumpy and rude to foreigners; this is all she sees, and them bringing back prostitutes nightly and drunkenly. We're always an ambassador of our country and our culture and race when we travel; I'm not moralizing when I say so, it's just how it is. It's so disrespectful to misbehave like that and so much worse in someone else's country where you're a guest. It's sad. But it's /really/ common, and it's not only the beerswillers who are unpleasant, rude or disrespectful to Thai people. I suppose it's a racist thing, partly.

It backfires too, of course. We travellers get conned and ripped off, so it becomes a vicious cycle of hatred and exploitation. The owner of my guesthouse is rude and unpleasant and unhelpful, and doesn't clean the rooms properly, and the place is disgusting. It's not necessary for somewhere to be disgusting to be cheap, surely. There's little expense in basic cleanliness, and that's all that's required. It's only polite to the guests.

I'll tolerate a certain level of grime if the sheets are clean, for a good price. But there's a good price and then there's just an unacceptable room. I have been in one that I learnt to accept for the past week. 150 Baht for a bed and a fan, with holes mosquitoes can get in, cracks in the walls that let in light from the corridor, a bed that is the shape of a basin, and a couple of hooks on the bare walls, and a fan that works. The fan was nice. Everything else was barely OK. But better than camping, so I was content. I didn't mind the ant highways going over my backpack or the piles of flying-ant wings that accumulated in a corner or the gecko shit on the walls or the wasp on the inside of the penetrable mosquito screen. It's a shame they never clean the walls though; there are all sorts of stains of god knows what, and peoples' cigarette ash in nooks, and I think it's just unnecessary to leave them there. It would also cost next to nothing to put in a waste-paper basket and a shelf, but hey.

Today my friend Monique is arriving, so I arranged a room with two beds. This is almost the same size as the room I was in before, so even less floorspace (if you can call it that) around the beds, and the beds are narrower. There is only one window (the previous room had two, being on a corner), with a worse view, looking at people's lower halves under tables in the restaurant just metres from the window, and no privacy. And everything is a little bit grosser. However, the price is DOUBLE the previous price at 300 Baht. I always thought the whole point of sharing a hotel room was to reduce the price per person. However, I was kind of desperate to find a room so I took it dejectedly and somewhat resentfully. All the more reason to get out of Bangkok. For the same price or less in Phetchaburi you can get a huge room with two double beds and an en suite bathroom with an amazing view of the river and enough space to do not only yoga but a dance class in your room. And welcoming people at reception. Rather attractive prospect at this point.

Vignettes

Bangkok.

The umpteen very beautiful hookers on the arms of unabashed white men, everywhere.

Rats in the sink in my guest house. I can see the lights outside through the many cracks in my walls. When neighbours open their doors I jump, thinking its mine. My friend was kept awake by groaning prostitutes in the next room. The men complain that the grumpy hotel-owner insists they pay an extra 100 Baht if they bring a prostitute back with them.

My mattress is U-shaped, not from being squashed but from /wear/.

I'm in an internet cafe run by Israelis and full of VERY VERY LOUD Israeli tourists, shouting in Hebrew all at once; the default websites and the keyboard are in Hebrew. It's strange after being among the quiet, gentle Thai people. All the Israeli tourists cluster here in inpenetrable bundles in this place and the one next door, creating a strong bubble of Israeli-ness, a little island of Israeli culture, and in it I can see what it might be like to be on the outside of a dominant culture, as I feel clearly out of place and in the minority, and no-one tries to include me. I've seen similar British/US clusters elsewhere, but not in Thailand.

Tuk-tuks (motor rickshaws) zooming past with big sleevless Australians pointing their feet out of the side (very rude in Thailand, to point your soles at anyone).

Thais and foreigners swaying and waddling drunkenly down the road.

The old toothy Thai woman who sells mango and sticky rice on our street, who was angry at me when asked for a fresh mango that hadn't been sitting in the sun for ages, assuming I was trying to swindle or screw her over like presumably so many tourists must.

All the 'oppressively cool' young 20-something tourists, so clean, so sexy/macho, so fashion-conscious, able to look perfect even when backpacking. Try-hards, I've heard them called.

The Japanese tourists who all manage to look simultaneously modern yet elegantly Asian in their particular style of travel-clothing.

Walking miles and miles to find a market with fresh fruit; feeling the smog and exhaust painful in my lungs.

So hot I just lay naked on my bed and dripped in the middle of the day, waiting.

A sudden friend with intense connection for 2 days, now she's vanished to Cambodia, maybe never to be seen again.

Plans that look so solid suddenly wobbling and fading as visas look uncertain, people don't answer phones, jungle guides vanish into the jungle when they're supposed to be taking you on a trek...

Bangkok's noise starting to get to me after 4 days. Peace or respite no-where. Spending hours in my hotel room wondering what to do next and staying out of the chaos, confused and uncertain. Stepping outside into the street and feeling bombarded. Wondering what I'm doing here, really.

Trying for hours to get answers about simple questions like how long can I stay in Thailand, how many times can I make visa-runs to the border, or can I even do that at all. No travel agent can tell me; the British embassy could not; the government tourist information cannot; what the hell? Surely tourists wonder about that all the time, how long they can stay? The immigration bureau phoneline is a closed death-loop of recorded messages, the operator option, if you can ever find it, just leading back to the recorded main-menu. The immigration office is one and a half hours away, and I'm not convinced they'd give me the answer either.

Happy to see a monster

As I sat on the balcony this morning, eating tropical fruits and watching birds in the one little wild-like overgrown wetland spot in the centre of town, I knew life was good. I watched a small monitor lizard (still well over a metre long) approaching me, unaware of my proximity; I watched another larger one, almost as big as me, doing its morning sunbathe/meditation/sit-spot high in a tree. Birds landed right next to it apparently unaware or certainly unconcerned by the monster.

I watched some of the most skulking birds in full view because of the time of day and my quietness; I learned more about the routines of particular individuals within my view, having sat at the same spot yesterday. I saw two new species that I've never seen in my life before, too, which is always a joy; one was a shrike which is a small predatory songbird also known in some places as the butcher-bird because it has the macabre habit of impaling its prey on thorns or barbed wire foreating later. You see its larder of pierced and hanging grasshoppers, frogs, worms, even small mammals for the larger species. Predators are always more exciting to watch.

I had space and time for myself and I was in a natural place, feeling secure, no pressures, wild beings for company and constant interest. Life was good. That's why I need to have a naturalist/tracking job; I feel good quickly in such a situation.

Following the tiger

Well, for those who don't know, the first phase of my journey in Asia is over, as I've finished the env. ed. teaching thing in Thailand. It was often fun as well as fulfilling, but I'm really glad to be recovering my own rhythm and enjoying solitude, freedom and space.

Plans are rapidly filling up the rest of my time in Thailand; I'm helping out in a homeschool program for international kids next week in exchange for a little Thai tutoring, then a friend is coming out to Thailand and we're travelling together for a month, and then I'm still looking for a voluntary placement with a conservation group to do some Animal Tracking for my final month here.

I've been to the rainforest mountains near Burma /Myanmar a couple of times in a National Park, the biggest in Thailand, Kaeng Krachan, and tracked some of the few remaining wild elephants there. We were also blessed with seeing a leopard, a very unusual sighting in the thick Thai forests, and somehow I knew it was significant 'medicine' but I'm not sure how.

We also trekked down the river high up where it was still clean enough to drink, wading through it much of the way and finding tracks and sign of the almost extinct Siamese Crocodile, which was amazing of course. And as the landscape channelled and funnelled us down the river valley, and we could only take one route because of the lie of the land and the thick forest, it was clear that other animals could only take that route too; out in front of us was a tiger, and we were helplessly on its trail for quite some distance. We were apparently catching up with it as the tracks got fresher and fresher, till they were only 2-3 minutes old (according to our guides) and still filling with water. At one point two of the group saw movement in the undergrowth and then heard a loud splash behind them just as we were crossing the river for the umpteenth time. Soon after that the guides decided it was time we stopped for a break to......well... give the tiger a little space. They are deadly of course, but I was disappointed not to see it.

The forest was beautiful and very moving, like something out of a dream. I told our head guide that England used to be like that, covered all over with mature, lush forest, but that it's been 5000 years since the Wildwood was intact (yes, it's officially called that in the academic literature!) An idea came to me to gather a tiny piece of my surroundings whenever I entered a moment or experience of particular power, beauty or insight; a pinch of dust or tiny bit of leaf from sacred moments, all kept together in a little pouch or something. But every time we found something amazing I kept forgetting this idea and taking photos instead, or just enjoying it. I really wanted to find a little pebble from inside a fresh tiger track. As we were tracking the tiger, each time we found a stretch of visible tracks I'd get wrapped up in taking photos and forget. We stopped seeing the tiger's tracks and thought it must have gone behind us, but eventually, we found one, single, final track. At last, and just in time, I remembered, and now I have a small red and white stone from between the toes of a fresh tiger track. That's my kind of souvenir :) And it's a good feeling to be connected with the tiger without killing it for one of its claws or body parts. I've seen those on sale in Bangkok; yes, poachers are still out there hunting them.

COMMENTS

If anyone's reading this, please leave comments---including very short ones like 'huh' or 'mm' or 'hi'---just so I know I have an audience!

Land of Smiles

It's a cliche, but it's true.

Today a man leaned out of a lorry and called to me as he drove past, not for any reason, just to smile at me. After experiences in India and Peru, this kind of no-strings-attached, pure friendliness is almost unbelievable. But it's everywhere.

The Thai smiles are big, broad, open, and warm. They are so unconsidered, unscheming; they feel so genuine. It's enough to give you a high (.....and especially when they are pretty girls :)).

Why don't other countries adopt this beautiful habit? It's effortless, and spreads joy. And it's possible even in sizeable cities, as I've experienced in Phetchaburi and Bangkok.

Thailand has proven to me that friendliness in Asia, and to foreigners ('farang'), can be pervasive and genuine and free. This is /such/ a gift, and a gift that will last me a lifetime.

It's also amazing how quickly it becomes normal: how many mopeds passed me today with beautiful smiles, waving, just for the joy of welcoming a stranger?

Jackfruit and Seafood; the 'farang' tastes Thailand

January 3rd, 2008
We're back in Phetburi, our home-base town, after the Xmas/New Year break. This is a 'proper' Thai town, not catering to tourists but to Thai people; here there is no internet place I've yet found with a microphone headset so I can use Skype.com to make phonecalls, however, this nice guy who runs a little internet place just 2 mins walk from us, who's called Adneg, has said in a few days he'll get me a headset, he's already checked out Skype this morning and downloaded the software; this is wonderfully kind of him; hopefully I'll be able to make calls by some time next week. We'll see what 'a few days' means in Thailand. (Report, Jan 16th: it really was only a few days, 3 or 4.)

So far Thais areunbelievably prompt, usually an unnerving 5-10 minutes early, but thatcould be just the school teachers. This makes any habitual or unexpected tardiness on our group's part rather embarrassing.

I have had time for the first part of today for peace andrefreshment. I went for a walk to the military base by the river, where they let you walk among their trees and lawns, as it's the site of one ofthe past king's palaces; I explored a new part of town and found someChinese Buddhist temples (which were locked), got stared at a lot,explored a fantastic food market I'd not seen before that, except for plastic, must have looked like it does now for many centuries, and bought a breakfast of Jackfruit (which needs a more elegant name...let me find out the Thai name....khe-nun. Not much more elegant.) The market was mostly seafood and vegetables;there are umpteen fruits and vegetables here that I don't recognize and have no context for; I can't tell if they're a fruit or a vegetable, or what on earth you might do with them. These range from ones that were on the far edges of my awareness before, like jackfruit, longan, durian, dragonfruit and pomelo, to others so strange that I can't remember them at all; some bizarre and some so bland-looking that they might as well be potatoes, but are clearly not. There are at least 4 very common but very different kinds of bananas, all incredibly more delicious than what we have in Europe. But I was told yesterday that there are many tens of typesof banana, including lots of different flavours and colours, in Thailand alone.

The Thai teachers took us out for dinner last night: seafood on the beach. Honestly, I thought most of it was pretty disgusting. I've discovered (probably thanks to Mom's lifelong aversion to it) that seafood is the one food-type that I really don't like, other than liver, kidney and offal. We had mussels, which were pretty gross, squid, which was more visually and conceptually disturbing than anything else as the taste wasn't strong, prawns, which I've grown used to and can palate, sea catfish, which tasted OK but is a bottom feeder and I couldn't help thinking of the pollution, and, on another occasion, octopus (fortunately deep fried and dried so not too bad) and clams (apparently same as cockles) which were worse than mussels. Frankly, I'd rather just not have to deal with any of these alien foods. Some of them tend to come with spicy sauces, luckily, which disguise some of their inherent nauseagenesis.

I should add that I was trying to be as open minded as possible and did at least try everything.

My breakfast, however, was a lot better than my dinner. This morning I procured, by luck, 20 Baht of a particularly good Jackfruit. I skulked past my roommates and hid on the upstairs balcony to avoid sharing any and to savour it in undisturbed rapture. The jackfruit is worth describing. It's hard to liken it to anything else. In outer appearance, it's ugly. It's huge--about 2 feet long, give or take a foot of variation, and mottled mouldy green, covered with small scale-like bumps, making it look like a reptile. It's about 8-9 inches wide. I suppose it looks like a gigantic, elongated lychee, but green-brown.

Inside, it has a white inedible pulp that cradles bright yellow-orange fruit flesh in units the size of a kiwi, that are peeled out by hand from the rest of the fruit. These edible parts look like fleshy orange flower petals, and each piece closes around a large (1-inch diam roughly) stone. When you buy jackfruit on the street the stones have been removed and you just buy the delicious petal-like flesh part. Its taste and texture are, quite simply, orgasmic.

I ate my bagful this morning slowly, savouring each peace with awe, wondering how I would describe the experience. To liken it to anything belittles the flavour of jackfruit, but I'll do so seeing as you don't have one to try. The flavour is exotic and tropical to a Western palate. It tastes like the most delicious flower smells; perhaps honeysuckle. It has all the deliciousness of the best pineapple with a little mango thrown in and then the delicate perfume of something akin to lychee. It is juicy but firm at the same time: The texture is like a lover's lips, which adds a special element to the eating. The texture is somewhat like mango, but without any of the stringiness; firmer than papaya and without the risk for powdery dissolving. It's smoother than peach, less watery than plum, less slippery than mango. No matter how warm the fruit is, jackfruit always feels refreshingly cooling.

After my fruit breakfast this morning, I felt, for the first time in a while, really nurtured by my food. It was enough to move me to a religious kind of gratitude to the universe for this wonder: the jackfruit.

ABOUT THIS BLOG (1)

Hello friends and family, this blog deserves a little explanatory introduction, but that will be coming in due course and not yet. In the meantime, I should let you know a bit about how I plan this thing to work: rather than write to a vague, anonymous, generalized audience like I am now, I've decided to work it like this: I will write to friends as motivated (or usually, if they write to me, as replying is fun) and then excerpt sections to post here. So, if you see something posted here that you thought was being written personally to you, you're right, it was being written just to you, but then I decided to use those paragraphs here too, as other people might like to read them. Don't worry, they'll be carefully edited to remove private material!

The sacred in Thailand

Visited some temples today, and felt the thundering of the great spirit before me; I'm starved of that sense of contact and need to nourish it in my life. Thailand is filled with physical reminders of the sacred--lots of Thai Buddhist temples, sure, and monks, but also churches and mosques and Chinese temples and shrines, and then they have an even older but ubiquitous tradition of honouring the earth spirits and ancestors through building little 'spirit houses' (on single pillars, about the height of a person or a little taller altogether, the house itself just 1 or 2 feet in height and width) whenever a new building is built, so there is a spirit house (or two) for every human building. You see them everywhere, and along the roadside as you drive, because the tradition is that to honour the spirits (read: to respect the earth's sacredness) you have to give the spirit house the best location on the property such that it is prominent and never in the shadow of the human building. Offerings are made at these spirit houses every day, beautiful strings of flowers and bits of food, water, incense. It's really neat.

Another thing that appeals to my natural, earthen sense of the sacred is the way that certain big old trees are honoured by having colourful ribbons tied around them near the base, to honour and protect the 'angel' that lives in them. This is also the case for some of the really big old termite mounds. It's cool how these ancient animist traditions persist alongside and among Buddhism and other religions here.