A Florida Cracker in King Bhumibol's Court, Part 3: Chiang Mai Daze, Chapter 2: Passing Time

Gonna grease through the rest of my days in CM here right quick, so bear with me. This is long overdue.

I spent a total of three weeks in Chiang Mai, the first of which was ardently spent being turned down from job after job. There were a couple of days where I had the opportunity to revisit Wat Doi Suthep and offer my services to a monk friend of Berm’s, teaching English to the dek wat, or the children of the temple, little monk dudes between the ages of 8 and 12. Apparently, most Thai men serve some time in an ordained temple at some point in their life, usually at a young age. The duration of this service was traditionally 4 years, at which time they would be ordained nen, or novice monks, or return to their lay life, although that time has decreased recently. Most guys I talk to who have already served only do it for a week or two.

This was a damn unique experience, getting up to the temple around 4:30 in the a.m., chatting with some of the kids, following them around the temple grounds as they went about their chores, some of them armed with iPods, and attempting to sit in with them during their meditations, which lasted around 4 or 5 hours until about noon (I had to be gently nudged awake from my own meditations, but the monks were cool and didn’t judge). The lessons were simple conversational skills and a little writing, held in the afternoon, but a little difficult to get through since the dek wat weren’t allowed to eat any solid foods after twelve o’clock, which meant I couldn’t eat any solid foods, as I had promised to follow suit with their daily routine. After the two days were up, Berm’s friend told me he’d love to have me back on a regular basis, but the children would leaving the temple for a month on vacay. “So, could you come back at the end of October?”
“Yeesh! The end of October? I’m sorry, I would love to, but there’s no way I can go a whole month without some kind of income. I’ll probably need to find some other work,” I apologized to him.
“Oh, we wouldn’t be paying you. You’d stay up here on the mountain, and live off of the alms of the dek wat. But don’t worry; the donations are usually pretty generous, especially for Wat Doi Suthep.” I don’t think I need to tell you how this conversation ended. Let’s just say that I think they were looking for somebody who was a little more willing to adhere to the Ten Precepts.

My second week was spent making up for those rejections; plumbing the depths of pleasure and finding more and more creative ways to spend my money and numb the already growing sense of desperation at not being employed (“Jesus Chricycle, did I really come over here without a job? Was I just whistling Dixie, telling my mom she didn’t have to worry about me finding work once I got here?”) Standard outlets of leisure would not suffice in these circumstances; I mean I was in Thailand, dammit. I’d already visited most of the clubs, bars, and venues around town, treated myself to fine dinners at exotic restaurants, and exhausted the anticlimactic massage parlors. I’d fed elephants on the street, gazed out from the summit of Doi Suthep, and got my ass handed to me in takro. Naw, I needed an adventure; raw experience. And opium seemed like a good place to start.

A friend of Berm's agreed to take me up into the mountains to visit a few of the tribal villages populating the country-side, source of the hippity-hops I now sought. On the way up into the hillsides, we passed Doi Suthep and the winter palace residence of the King himself. Before we reached our destination however, we were deterred by herds of people headed the opposite direction, warning us of massive flooding and subsequent landslides that made travel, and thus opium smokage, impossible. Chiang Mai had been subject to a deluge of rainfall in recent days, so this was not unexpected, however unfortunate. So, I headed back downhill, empty-handed, unemployed, and agenda-less. I vowed not to waste any time moping around, and decided to bump-up a little trip I had planned to visit a farm on the Ping River, which runs through the heart of CM. I was to stay there a couple of days, earning my keep by helping to gather many of the fruits and vegetables that were sold to several riverside restaurants back in the city. I would also learn the ancient methods of harvesting that lifeblood of all Asia, the tiny grain that makes Uncle Ben smile so much: rice. I saw it as an opportunity to see some of the rural surroundings of CM, a little stroll back through time if you will, to see what life was like way back when. If anything, the trip would provide me a short break from the smothering, debris-layered CO2 of the city.

I arrived at the farm via scorpion-tail boat shortly after noon, with the sun at its apex and on a day when the gods ironically decided to turn off their torrential faucet, bringing the whole of their heliocentric fury down on my sweaty brow. It was my hottest day yet in Thailand, and a precursor to what I was in store for over the next year. The farm was a charming little plot, medieval though it was, situated right on the river with groves of trees and gardens spilling over every acre of land. I was the only guest which gave me ample time to myself, something I was looking forward to after my first week or so in the big city.

It was sweaty-balls hot out on that farm, and even without the opium I had planned to accompany me, it was mind-numbing work. Though after getting the initial morning-gripes out, and after finding my rhythm, mind-numbing turned into mind-cleansing, and at the end of each day I had a clearer head than I could remember ever having in recent years. I picked a plethora of fruits and vegetables: mangoes, apples, morning glory, lemongrass, papaya, finger-bananas, galangal, ginger, cashews, corn, carrots, onions, garlic, jackfruit, dragon fruit, star fruit, tamarind, guava, kiwi, rambutan, jujube, pomegranate, stinky durian and several others I’d never even heard of before. I was able to sample some of everything, either raw or in various noodle and rice dishes that were prepared for every meal. Unfortunately, the menu wasn’t without meat, and the meat came from the farm just like everything else. I say unfortunately, because just like all the fruits and vegetables I dined on, I was given the opportunity to harvest the pork that I ate as well. Not wanting to look squeamish in the eyes of the farm residents, I followed a smiling fellow into the yard behind the kitchen, where a little pen housed two little squealing bodies, looking more like pot-bellied pigs than the rotund, pink hogs I had envisioned (I think you can see a picture of one on my Facebook, poor little bastard). He was a hill pig; I was informed, and very common to northern Thai dishes calling for pork. The grim process I imagined was much more gruesome than what I was actually asked to do. I basically led the little guy over to a miniature-guillotine, secured his unsuspecting little noggin in place, and then brought the swift resolution of the French Revolution down upon his little hoggy head. Don’t worry, those are the only details you’re going to get, because I situated myself so that my farmer friend couldn’t see my face, and therefore couldn’t see that I had my eyes closed until all movement from the hog had ceased. My supper that night was bitter-sweetly delicious. The next day, after a fitful sleep full of dreams of talking pigs, I headed back up-river to CM and Santitham.

After a relaxing day and night back home, I attempted a jungle-trek, something Chiang Mai is famous for amongst backpackers. This excursion was cut short for the same reason my opium hunt was cut short. The stretch of jungle my troupe and I were set to visit was saturated with mud-slides, and after half a day on a two-day trek, the company was accosted. I don’t know where the little suckers came from; we’d only been in ankle-deep water, but all of a sudden we were laden with leeches of a large variety. They must’ve fallen out of the trees, or developed a wicked vertical; either way they were suddenly all up in our shit. I’ve never been sucked on by a leech, and while they didn’t hurt so much, it was pretty fucking disconcerting pulling the little bastards off your skin. I was tangling with an unreasonably large and stubborn leech, when a blood-curdling scream jolted the twelve or so trekkers I was joined with. Turns out one of the girls had discovered a leech in a very, shall I say, Stand By Me spot, after which she demanded that our guide return us to the base camp. Her hysterical insistence soon began to wear on several others of the group, especially her boyfriend, and that was the end of my jungle trek.

Back home at Santitham, I decided to lay low at the guest house for the next few days until my departure to Koh Tao, an island paradise I had planned a trip to as a birthday present to myself. Sitting around the guesthouse, I happened upon a Spanish lady by the name of Amelie. She was in CM attending ITM, one of the massage-training schools, and staying at Santitham. After a couple bottles of wine after dinner one evening, I convinced her to do her homework on me. During the massage, we planned on visiting the Night Safari together the next night. The so-called “Night Safari” was a bonafide zoo on the outskirts of town, the “Safari” consisting of an auto-piloted tram that drove visitors past several dismal-looking, artificial habitats, shining bright lights on the sleeping animals, all of which you can see at the SFCC training zoo. I assume the “Night” part of the Night Safari was devised to try and mask the very miserable lives these animals must lead. On the tuk-tuk drive home, after chastising the Thais for glorifying such a shitty “attraction” with elaborately ubiquitous advertisements, I convinced Amelie to join me on my trip south to Koh Tao that I would be taking in a few days. I told her it was a Mecca for scuba-divers the world over, and how cheap it was going to be to get certified, after which she happily signed on. We researched plane tickets together, and after a couple more days of preparation, we were off. I remember contentedly sitting on the plane, happy to have a travel companion, excited and a little jittery about my upcoming underwater adventures. How little did I know.