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.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
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?
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
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.
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.
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