Beer Lao, Tear Out the Here, Now

Crunch and there goes the propeller. As cause and effect set us adrift on the Mekong, with no propulsion we found ourselves a pig of a vessel helplessly skating on a shiny brown rink, up shits creek without a paddle, so to speak.

The Mekong River is a phenomenon in Asia. I was glad to get up close and personal, as Hollywood had given me all kinds of misconceptions about it. One does expect Rambo to swish past with a machine gun barreling out rounds and slurring incomprehensible punchlines at puzzled village folk. I kept a keen eye and ear out, but to no avail. Guess he’s getting a bit tired in his old age.

Most passengers stood in stunned silence as we floated helplessly with the current, the sense of cautious unease before something tragic thick in the air. Me, I was laughing my tits off, and how could I not? Watching our Laos friends jumping out of the boat in their underwear in a frenzied attempt to secure us to the side and get the propeller repaired was too funny for me to keep quiet. Little light brown bodies nuding about in the water with ropes in a race against time. I imagine the view from above, a travelling Alien maybe, and his musings on the proceedings. We are just monkeys scratching our asses, caught on a raft by the turns of fate. Probably not how Darwin imagined evolution, but what can you do?

Adrift

Villages in the shadow of giants

We arrived in Luang Prabang with little incident barring our propeller once again relinquishing itself from duty and causing a chain of events that eventuated in us T-Boning another boat. A boat crash is something I will highlight on my resume, along with being in the Laos mountains surrounded by opium smoking villagefolk. What a trip, Laos is what people seek when they imagine the Wild East.

Luang Prabang is every bit a small quiet oasis from the busy rest-of-world. The pace is unhurried, the villagers are content and their movements are smooth. And as the Utopia bar closed and we barged into the tuk tuk, in this tiny isolated part of the world I was unexpectedly re-introduced to the extreme pleasure of drunken ten-pin bowling.

As we wound out of town and onwards into the early morning, I was sold on the fact that the mornings light would find me minus my kidneys and possibly chastity of my back doors. Swinging open the doors like a glaze eyed cowboy into the saloon, the light and sound gives way to a spectacle; Laos youth and travelling Europeans cheering their ten pin triumphs and defeats, embracing each other and exploding with sound and body language. What a magnificent turn of events. We went two nights in a row, it was magic.

The next day, we jumped in a mini van and spiraled up into the mountains. Clenching my jaw to hold back the nausea, I was drinkers remorse manifest in flesh. Action and reaction is not always positive, curse you Jesus. In hindsight, I look back on this innocence as an elder reflecting on the naivity of youth, for our next top was Vang Vieng to go tubing, and the unease of a hangover would be a spindly talon around my neck I would soon know with great intimacy.

Rollin

Vang Vieng is in a bubble from the rest of the modest Asian world, a bubble burped in a bathtub of culture by the insane lungs of a submerged Charlie Manson. Or maybe it is a cocoon from the world, a cocoon in the closet of your morals and standards that mutates and bursts forth a moth that destroys your regular weekend clothes. Either way, it takes a mallet and smashes your notions of Saturday night live.

For the uninitiated, you start at one end of a long river that floats downstream back into the town, occupying a large tyre tube as you make your journey onward. Along the way, lines are cast to pull you into awaiting bars, in full swing with drunken revelry, laughing gas hilarity and sexual decision tainted with post-coitus remorse. It was some of the most fun partying I have ever had.

The normal fear based social defense of human interaction did not apply here, we were unified in the fact that we were all strangers, and the only attempts at pre-status were by the staff who all did an excellent job of convincing everyone that they were nobheads. In the face of this contrast it was so easy to make friends, from bar to bar the crews grew larger and larger, lubricated by buckets, free shots and loose limbs on bamboo dance floors. Avid weekend veterans: save it and get over to Vang Vieng, I promise it will be better than a years worth of those 11 dollar beers you pound every weekend.

Some of the bars had tyre swings and high platforms to jump into an uncertain torrential river. I’d like to say I was smarter than to attempt such idiocy, with a death toll that averages 1 every fortnight. I’d like to be able to say that, but I would be lying. Sorry Mum. I not only attempted it, I loved it. It was like the watering holes of my childhood, only a bit more shit-face-ier.

Brennan, Liam and I decided to jump in at the same time, and as we surfaced from the fall downstream I realized I had swallowed half of the river. After numerous buckets my stomach signaled there was not enough room for this new introduction and I began vomiting. My two chums, affected by the vulgarity of the spectacle and perhaps some primal kinship, began to follow suit. Every time each of us thought we had finished expulsion, we were spurred on again by the proximity of each other in full swing.

Picture this, a trio of grown men bent over facing each other in a river, laughing through chunks of chunder, caught in an infinite loop of stomach contraction. We are the three wise men of an age gone wrong, and somewhere in the back of my mind I felt we may have to stay in this river spewing until we grew old, hoping that maybe the years could make us wiser. I’m smiling as I write this, as out of context it sounds insane, but in the moment it was as normal as the sky and earth.

The immediacy of something serious jerked me from the loop. Into my field of vision drifted a wayward angel. We three wise men bearing gifts of pizza chunks, vodka bile and second hand Laos whiskey stood to bear witness to our savior.

I’ve never looked into the eyes of death. I’ve only ever seen where death has been, the aftermath, a lingering vibe or scent of something ultimate. Here and now, there was something sobering as I innately remembered it written across her face and in the depths of her eyes. This woman was drowning, that reptilian part of my being told me so. The wide eyed meeting of our maker, the gentle and yet violent movement from fighting for life to forgiveness of fate. I jolted forward and gripped her by the shoulders, delivering her spluttering limpness onto the shoreline and into safety. She gazed into my soul as she said thankyou, holding back tears and most probably her registration of the event to her memory as she was quite clearly intoxicated. I wonder if she remembers how close she came to being just another phone call to the worst fears of her parents. The experience bore many strange fruits.

For instance, I had always assumed fake breasts would aid in floatation, and after this event realize that such thoughts are just an unchecked understanding of an 8 year old mind justifying the world. Watch out for those, I’ve been deep and found there is more in your reality from before you knew of yourself than you could ever know. But am I a better person for this understanding you may ask? Who cares, it’s all just a big playground. Stop being so serious all your life. And whatever you do, don’t get a breast enlargement with the assumption that it will make you more buoyant.

So after a week in Vang Vieng we travelled down to beautiful Vientiene, transitory as it was time for my crew and I to part ways. As the morning came I embraced my friends goodbye and flew off into the morning sun, back to Thailand and back to the Permaculture farm in Nong Wyang I had grown to love for a bit of peace and rebuilding. Alone again, but never truly alone. My post-breakup partying was complete, and as the date of my return to the West loomed ever closer, it was time to get my soul in line. More next time.

Amen to the cavemen

Hustling and weaving through the impregnable wall of attentive touts hawking bungalows we force our way out of this flesh prison, birthed unto the Phi Phi islands finally. Bungalow secured, we were keen to explore the hype.

I don’t know a man alive that didn’t see ‘The Beach’ and dream of island paradise, though I was instantly skeptical. To be fair, we had arrived during the wet season, evident in the streets paved with water and, of course, that peculiar moist substance falling from above. Derp. Obvious references aside, it seems there was a pattern developing. Wherever there are too many Western tourists, our vices and exclusion from our societal norms tend to incentivize the locals into situations that don’t benefit them long-term. Again, we could not get a packet of crisps without being accosted by prostitutes, the sea was awash with plastic bottles and walking the streets was a breathe-through-your-mouth exercise.

It’s hard to believe it was only 7 years ago that a tidal wave came through here and washed it all away. Men, women and children, pets and houses. Dreams, or at least memories. Though if you were not told about it you would not know, as it had only taken the industrious Thai’s 3 years before they had rebuilt their infrastructure and begun the upswing back into a tourist hotspot. Now all that was left for us was to judge first impressions for ourselves by becoming part of the problem. We grabbed a few bottles of Thai rum and whiskey and began our experiments.

Thai spirits are an experience unto themselves. They taste like they have been bootlegged in a bathtub out the back of a shack illegally, after Prajuk and his 4 kids have all bathed in it. The 2012 bathtub vintage, a hearty flavor, full of rich aroma and brewed in only the finest Thai porcelain. I swear I seen a pubic hair once, but such testimony cannot be relied upon, with the alcohol content being unregulated in these cheap bottles of muddy delight. Smeared memories, a panorama of echoing laughter, booming bass, sand, strobes and sexuality, plus the insecure feeling of not knowing where my pants had gone.

We didn’t meet too many people we didn’t already know in Phi Phi, despite the heaving droves of drunken youth in a dizzying nightlife spectacle of unbridled puberty. This extreme inequality of a male/female ratio necessitates deployment of an intense social defense. Males revert to a cave-like state with clenched fists and short tempers, whilst the girls scrum together in closed circles, tactically blocking the advances of potential suitors with effective collaborative body language. Necessarily, as the intoxication of the whole event leaves the males a side step away from clubbing women on the head and dragging them back to a cave. Play by play analysis of the whole spectacle is tiresome when all you want to do is sit around a table making new friends and laughing about life.

A visit to the beach where Leo pranced about stealing girlfriends and murdering marine life was an obvious inevitability. I counted 27 of us in a teak longboat, packed as sardines, juddering over the chaos of the ocean channel. Mounting obstacles into the cove itself, it’s obvious what all the fuss is about. Man could not dream of such things, our slumbering imaginings could never compare. I hope there is such a thing as in intelligent creator, just for the wide-eyed awe she may garner from admirers such as I in her creating something so beautiful. I’d definitely throw a few pennies into the hat.

But like most tourist traps, there is consequence for too many humans in one space. I had to remove myself from the water soon after we had begun snorkeling, the decimation of the ocean ecosystem cutting me deep. Snapped coral is such a shame. And then there was Monkey Island.

I don’t traditionally like monkeys. At best, they are nimble, inquisitive marvels of nature’s evolutionary process. At worst, they are angry little humanoid idiots capable of malice without remorse or compassion. Plus they throw their shit at each other. That’s psychopathic, and these island monkeys have been shaped by humans as such. The meeting of man and his evolutionary forebears was heralded with flying sand and rocks. Not without provocation, as the monkeys grew angrier and more bashful the more time we spent in their dominion. I stood close to Laura on the boat in a silent protest against this sort of thing, praying for our side to lose the war. I longed for a cause and effect that would leave one of these cruel boys riddled with bite marks. Is that sadistic? Maybe so. Mess with the bull, you’ll get the horns. Or more appropriately, mess with the monkey, you’ll get the rabies.

So that is my experience of Phi Phi. Sorry if it sounds a little pessimistic, but it wasn’t the most fun I’ve had, and I’m okay with that. The paradise lost destinations that guidebooks and internet message boards steer us away from are built on secure foundations of experience. One would be tempted to run head first into the place with the most people to be social and meet friends, but this is just not the way life works. Villages are friendlier than cities and pubs are friendlier than clubs. Maybe we lose a piece of our humanity with the over stimulation and poorly administrated gathering of multiple social tribes, too many animals competing for a wide range but limited supply of different objectives and resources. It’s probably quite a lot for our primal brain faculty to compute at one time; so many assessments of friend or foe in the darkness of a place unfamiliar. And all whilst intoxicated by freaky Thai bath whiskey…… Lord, the body truly is a marvel.

Blue Rooms, Goons in Lagoons while the Tunes Boom

The catamaran rocked gently against the rolling water. Teary eyed performances played on the DVD screen of America’s Got Talent unlikely underdog stories. Simon from American Idol is a nobhead, but I have to admire him; he played us all for idiots and won. His character is almost believable.

My thoughts are as a shiny ball rolling from side to side of the insides of my skull. It’s been a massive few weeks emotionally, but as the ferry pulls into port at Koh Tao, I feel old loops being untied. I’m here to get healthy in body and mind.

The first week passes by without much ado. I have little to no interaction with other island patrons, as I just hit the gym and the water and try and piece myself together. I am aware I am just a weirdo in a room on an island in the middle of nowhere, so far from home. Is this how the homeless start off? I don’t care to find out, I quite enjoy sleeping in a bedroom instead of a bathroom, and egg in a beard is not a good look for anyone. Lest we forget.

I drew up a list of things I’ve been meaning to do for awhile but have lacked motivation or life situation to complete. Top of the list is learn how to freedive, which is descending down into the ocean deep on a single breath. Moving into a more social accommodation, I book a two day course.

Freediving is all about the preparatory breathing. Bobbing at the surface, cycling deep long breaths, I grab the line and gently pull myself down into the deepness. The nerve that safeguards breathing function begins to scream at around 8 metres, though I have been trained to ignore it. At 10 meters it is quiet. And then before I know it, I am at 20 meters, lost in an expanse of weightlessness. I hold the line gently and observe my surroundings, a single white speck in another world. If a scuba diver is the astronaut of the ocean, then I must be some sort of space angel, drifting through the ether, gliding through the cosmos. In reality though, I’m just a pasty white guy with no shirt on getting punished for his hubris by stinging jelly fish. Maybe a worm at the end of a twenty meter fishing line? It must be humbling existing anywhere other than at the top of the food chain, and it’s been about twenty seconds in such a foreign place without oxygen. The surface is far, but I am at peace. What an experience.

I had started the friendship momentum, engaged and interested in people again. The homeless ethos begins to subside. People are actually good, and life begins to turn itself around. I hit bars with my new friends, dancing on the beach with enough enthusiasm to get hit on by at least two homosexuals per night. I resolve to be a bit more cooler. My gaydar calms its beeping and I reach equilibrium, interested and firey without looking himterested and fairy. I imagine the ‘beep’ sound on a gaydar would evolve to be a bit more camp. Probably a fem-sounding “hayyyyyyy”, or “mmmmm” or “darrr-ling”…... but I digress.

The full moon party date looms closer and it’s been awhile since my insanity has been sanctioned and validated by thousands of others. And with that, I book a room at Coral Bungalows. Again. And here I am, surrounded by youth a side step away from comatose, covered in fluro paint. Again. That side of it is a bit of a drag as I realize I’m not 18 anymore. I have to be told about Instagram and Pinterest by people that are younger than me, like it’s such an inconvenience for them to visit me in the old folks home and teach me how to work the DVD player. I resolve to never eat butterscotch candy just in case I accidentally slip into my twilight years whilst chatting to these kids.

The upshot is I befriend a crew who are cooler than frozen polar-bear-flavored icy pops. Brennan, Charley, Emily, Nick and Laura shine an affinity I could only find in my bestest of friends. Love is people accepting you for who you are and not wanting you to change. So when we sit around the war table playing drinking games, my stories make people laugh as I don’t feel the need to muzzle who I am truly; an eccentric weirdo. We all laugh and make merry, and as usual, the days after the madness of the Full Moon Party are the most fun. The ladyboys have garnered enough validation sexually from unsuspecting English alcoholics to stay at home, the pickpockets sit atop a pile of swag in their tin roof shacks and the hippies on mushroom shakes have enough room to dance like water flowing through a maze without upsetting the steroid swelled Australian dudes with their shirts off. Peace in the shire.

Despite the monsoon season we decide to move over onto the West side of the peninsula to visit the small island of Railay. A rock climbing mecca, we find ourselves freeclimbing into the middle of a mountain, slip sliding down vertical ropes in the wet with too many close calls to count.

To the victor the spoils, for in the center of these rock walls lay the most beautiful lagoon I have ever seen. Laying on our backs adrift in the huge pool, we all realize how awesome it is to be alive. Descending into the pool was a baptism of pure peace. I laughed heartily, overcome with emotion. It was good to clean the mud off us, three sweaty shirtless men in the jungle covered in a mysterious brown substance. The picture is suspect if you think about it.

Backstage at a Freddie Mercury concert.... Jokes

What heaven may look like

Goons in a lagoon

Railay was the island getaway we needed. The bars rocked at night, but were friendly enough for even the drunkest amongst us to wo/man the DJ booth. My memory is stained with Laura up on the decks, playing two hip hop songs at the same time, out of time. The dancefloor dispersed faster than even the worst flatulence ever could. Who even cares, we run this town.

Next on the agenda; the Phi Phi Islands. ‘The Beach’ had made these islands famous in the nineties, appealing to mans sense of island adventure. The ferry pulled into port as the rain fell down lazily. ‘Save as’ for next time.

Land Ho

Change, Rearrange, and Feeling Strange

When everything changes, change everything.

The mantra rings out in my mind, echoing off the walls in a reverberant shudder that dominoes its way down the bones of my spine. Lost in a whirlwind of feeling, the actions of an emotion suppressed, the chaos and fury of something pressurized. A painful release. I’m in Saigon in Vietnam, and it’s time for change.

Earlier that week I had been in Cambodia, marveling at the wonders of Angkor Wat and contemplating the plight of desperate innocence in Phnom Penh. Now, despondent and disheveled, I boarded a plane alone. Now as the gentle keystrokes of a soft piano, the sad tones of a story sung through trauma. Let us retrace our steps, as it has been quite some time and quite some change since I last blogged.

Last time we chatted, I had just left Myanmar, swollen with an experience that was equal parts entrapment and enlivening. I felt ensnared by the plight of a people who had lost a genetic birth lottery. I had tried to give where I could, but to no actual improvement for those concerned. It’s an exhausting concept I hadn’t prepared for. I felt as a matchstick burnt out, the light extinguished to leave a warm ember.

In lieu of these feelings, I decided it was important for my development to go somewhere a bit more temperate and comfortable and regain some sort of self control. We flew into Samui, where I adopted a natural foods diet, pumped weights at the gym and started in-roads into changing the old tapes that have been playing in my head since childhood.

Setting up positive habits and change was an important step, as up until that point I felt scolded by life like a sad preteen chastised by mother for touching his wee wee. Through my growth, I now felt I could grip my manhood triumphantly in the face of criticism, with self belief and with minimal ego. It’s uplifting. When everything changes, change everything. It’s not easy growing a pair.

Flying into Phnom Penh in Cambodia was an intense culture shock. The easy smiles of the people there shone beyond the violence of their political history. It must be a heavy cross to bear. I visited the killing fields just outside of the city, where thousands of innocent men women and children had been murdered systematically in the night by torchlight to the musical backdrop of traditional Khmer music and the slow rumbling of a diesel generator to power the speakers. It was chilling. On the way to the fields, my driver had taken me to a shooting range where I could fire a rocket propelled grenade if I saw fit. I couldn’t justify the expense, and in any way I looked at it the whole exercise seemed a tad inappropriate. It’s like playing obvious air guitar at a funeral as they belt out the final tragic song. In my mind, it’s a Bon Jovi song on the speakers, so the sadness of the situation deepened in me. My poor tortured brain, but more so these poor tortured people.

Escaping the desperation of a tortured past and, in some cases, a tragic present (I had never seen so many prostitutes) we travelled up to Siem Reap, which borders the magical temples of Angkor. My childhood dreams had long been filled with imaginings of these temples ever since my father had read to me the Readers Digest Book of Facts. The fact that it was a book of facts and not a book of Spot the Dog Goes to the Circus goes a long way to explaining why I am such a sniveling nerd. I still remember the picture in the book clear as day, and here it was right through the scope of my vision, the smirking mug of a popular old king from a moment long passed. I saw the need us men have to be famous, to have something live on after we are but ions bouncing around in an aerated earth soup. Us men, what vain idiots. Stop worrying about the time after your time, you’ve either got loads more stuff to worry about or nothing at all depending on how you were raised and what crazy hat you wear in the weekends. There are way too many life insurance ads on the box, let us fight this terrible daytime television menace with the voices of our non compliance.

Phallic

More Temples

Angkor Wat

Smiley Kings

With Angkor Wat crossed off the bucket list, our next stop was Vietnam, specifically Saigon. I’d heard great things about Vietnam, with its beaches and coast and traditional ways, its history and tales of adventure. Turns out it was not to be, there were other things developing.

Life is the combination of many small things, but every now and then these things culminate into a single moment, and the weight hangs heavy in our throats. This was one of those moments, and with a heavy heart, one single unit ripped and crackled into two separate components. We boarded separate planes at the same time, parting ways at the airport for opposite gates like the low emotional point of a chick flick minus the Dawson’s Creek theme song. No laughter, no smiles, just the incomprehensible weight of sudden and immediate change. I could not forget the experience if I tried, nor would I want to. My memory shall treat that love fondly, and I know this as much as anything else.

So to truncate and summarize these past couple of months, it’s change. When everything changes, change everything. I haven’t written in a while because I have been too busy searching and contemplating, hurting and laughing, putting one foot in front of the other and changing everything.

I had an old acquaintance tell me the other day that my experiences are no more special than the next guy, that I have not accomplished anything different or amazing or helped in any way. As she is extremely well traveled and seemingly level headed, I respected her opinion enough to pursue the question. Am I wasting my time feeling what I’m feeling in a situation that is mundane? Do I think I’m special or better or more of something than the next guy? Am I just another wayward soul, running and fleeing the inevitability of my own unhappiness?

It didn’t take me long to realize that even the most amazing adventures are mundane for someone. The guides that have toured me round these amazing scenarios have just had another day in the office. They too punch the clock at the days end for after work drinks sharing trial and tribulation. I saw in some of them the same contempt as the kids working in KFC on a Sunday, nursing others in a cushion of gravy-like magic to blunt the hangover they were too undoubtedly suffering from. How could this be that my guides were not awed every day with an office that includes the tree tops of Thai rainforests, or the temples of Angkor or Bagan, sitting in the embrace of implausibly large elephants or fishing the waters of Inle Lake with the majestic mountains as their backdrop?

And then I saw an infant in a simple food court, sitting on his father’s lap flicking a piece of plastic from a water bottle on the table with more excitement and joy than a pasty faced Korean teen with the new World of Warcraft expansion set. I realized then that everything is amazing in life if we can hold onto or remember that childlike sense of wonder. I am forever trying to see the beauty and magic in it, and hope that I am able to convey that at least at times to you through this blog. If anything, I’m doing this simply to get better at telling the story because that’s a part of who I am becoming.

My travel is secondary to the conclusions I find in myself and the lense from which I perceive the events that shape them. You can travel the whole world and it will widen your perception, but the only control you have if this is your only avenue to enlightenment is the next adventure, the next trip, the next destination. In this way, travel can become addictive, and the ever changing scenery and experiences make it easy to become cynical about the mundane, the normal, the average, even though it is just as amazing as the plastic wrapper from the water bottle. We're all just big babies at heart, "growing up" in this way is a great tragedy. I’ve seen it lots on this trip but bless them all, because it’s better than nothing.

Sad Face

Thanks for coming along, I’ll keep writing if you will keep reading. xo

Burmese daze

I didn’t know what to think as the plane descended into Yangon. The Thai faces I’d become so accustomed with seemed to have morphed into something a little more rounder, and a lot more unfamiliar. Through the porthole window lay dry fields as far as the eyes could see, with an occasional sprinkling of white oxen, like coconut shavings on a brown Myanmar cake baking at 40 degrees Celsius. A red smile welcomed me warmly at the airport, and after he tied the boot shut with elastic band and spat red beetle twice onto the warm pavement, we barged out into the traffic, heralded by the sound of angry horns and screeching tyres.

It was sweat and culture shock that rolled down my spine in this strange world far away from home as we followed our guidebooks direction into the wrong part of town. Through the taxi window I spied two people beating each other with sticks atop a rubbish heap, frustrated in their desperate outlet as bystanders barely slowed their expressionless march onwards.

The street outside our hotel

Advertisements seeking help for starving Africans would be more effective if they could capture even a small part of this experience. I gave up on politics a long time ago, and when I’d see the latest scandal of yet another MP using our tax dollars like a credit card for his own personal prostitute penis puppet show, I’d just laugh it off as a causality of an imperfect system and the fact that the nerdy kids in school didn’t get laid enough.

But this was something different. When democratic free elections resulted in a landslide civilian government, the military shackled the opposition in prisons, and when monks protested for religious and autonomous freedom, the military showered them with bullets. I’m not accustomed to such blatancy. In context, when hippies rightly protest GM crops, we shower them with water cannons, as if the rudeness of the implication that they are stinky and need a shower would deter them from their dirty protests. Our ineffective policies and politicians are miniscule in comparison to ignorance that leaves a country enslaved and starving.

Still, visiting the Shwedagon Paya was something else, with its pure golden towers erupting out of lush green gardens, and more statues and monks than you could shake a machine gun at. I was awed by the careful detail of the carvings and statues, the unsaid life efforts of ancient men. And as thick lightning clouds rolled ever closer, we booked our bus ticket to Mandalay, screaming off into the stormy night.

The Shwedagon Paya

Stupas!

I awoke in the daylight to find the bus still speeding through the countryside. When the English ruled Myanmar, they used their economics to transform it into the largest exporter of rice in Asia. In the vacuum of power that followed the departure of the Empire, this age of prosperity had long gone. Looking out the window at these dry empty fields, I couldn’t be sure if the top soil was blowing away in the warm breeze because of irresponsible economic growth, or the imposition of economic sanctions from the international community in response to oppressive governance. Either way, the bare cracked earth screamed a tragedy of lost opportunity to feed the people I saw so often malnourished.

Mandalay passed by without incident as we tired of the disparity between classes in Myanmar cities, and we booked another bus to the ancient splendor of Bagan. We boarded a taxi at the bus station in Bagan to take us to our hotel, and were not surprised when the taxi shat itself en route. Literally. This only makes sense if you realize that the taxi is a horse carriage, and this pretty much explains the pace and technological evolution of Bagan. In hindsight, it was amazing to be in a village of such heritage, history and simplicity. In the moment though, it was becoming frustrating and painfully red-raw staying in expensive hotels where nothing is as it is advertized, the electricity is intermittent and the toilets require seatbelts to stop the levitation experienced when diarrhea provides jet-like thrust after every meal.

The decision to hire a horse-cart and guide for the day proved fruitful. When I asked Maz why she had decided on this mode of transport, she said it was because the driver was “such a cute little man”, a statement which reflected all the ways in which I adore her beautiful soul. Her insight flipped the state I was in upside down, and in breaking the tradition of my thus far pessimistic review of Myanmar, this was the moment I fell in love with the Burmese people. Away from the traffic, away from the plight of the downtrodden in the city ghettos and away from the reports of mass rape and murder by military forces in the restricted areas, the everyday Burmese are amongst the most gentle and warm people I have ever met.

Our Chariot

To see the temple complexes rising into the mirage of distance like a giant chessboard is truly one of the most amazing sights I have seen. Some of the temples had perfectly preserved artwork that was over a thousand years old, visual tales of days faded just as sure as the paintings had themselves.

One of four Buddha statues in one of the temples

The chessboard of temples

The approach

It was probably the heat that kept the paintings so pristine, though it was having a taxing effect on our sweat glands, so with that we booked a flight into Inle Lake for something a bit more temperate.

Inle Lake is the unspoiled traditional paradise one might imagine the rest of Myanmar to be. The surrounding green mountains hold the lake in a gentle embrace while the thankful waters lie prostrate at the feet of these towering giants. Fishermen weave in and out of quiet reed beds, balancing on the ends of long teak boats and slapping the surface of the water with their oars, frightening fish into their nets. Being nestled amongst these ranges muffled the noise of the rest of the world like earplugs.

Villagers getting their fish on

We hired a boat and driver to take us around the villages that lived on and around Inle Lake. It’s quite an experience speeding down the main street in a teak boat, traffic seems far more tolerable when the streets are paved with only liquid. It’s suburbia on stilts, where even the tomato gardens bob calmly on the surface. I couldn’t find the exact words to describe the joy of it, maybe there is something relieving deep within us to be close to water.

Rolling down mainstreet

The main street post office

For the equivalent of $2.40 each we also attended a Burmese puppet show. Although the skill involved in maneuvering each puppet is something no less than amazingly skilled, the whole spectacle was intensely confusing for us Westerners. I liken it to the feeling of being asked to write the answer on the board in school amidst an uncontrolled pubescent arousal, with equal parts confusion and shock. Looking around the room I could tell this feeling was not mine alone, as each puppet bounced us into an ever-deepening state of insanity, to the tune of music that sounded as if an array of cymbals had been granted life on the condition their communication would be riddled with Tourettes Syndrome. I loved it so, so much.

Learning from the puppet master

Insanity creeping over me at the puppet show

Monkey Dance

So what did I learn from Myanmar? When I asked the host of our guesthouse if he thought Myanmar opening up its borders to mass tourism is a good thing, he wholeheartedly replied that for him, it is not. In spite of the terrible electrical supply, the shocking roads, and the poor food preparation standards amongst all of the other things that inconvenienced my stay in Myanmar, it was the quaint simplicity of the place that I loved the most. The experiences I enjoyed were valuable because of their differences, not in spite of them, and an ever improving consumer experience promised to erode all of it faster than you can say the word ‘Starbucks’.

In the face of such monumental economic change, I hope a thought is spared for the people of Myanmar and their way of life. I hope the everyday Burmese has a place in the dollar-sign dreams of our seemingly well-intentioned governments and entrepreneurs, even when our past experiences of such economic promises prove otherwise. In failing that, I am both grateful and deeply saddened to have experienced the land the world forgot before it was rediscovered, redefined, restored, revamped and revolutionized.

Very Daring Weary Volunteering

Sitting at Chiang Mai bus station, we couldn’t help but feel slightly abused. Five days of waterfighting and partying had left us feeling like a couple of drowned rats. I wasn’t sure if it was alcohol or moat water that I had drowned in, or which of the two had left me with such a terrible headache. My shutter speed was on slow, with human beings complex in both their intentions and movement reduced to simple streaks of color across my smudged eye pallet. I had the drinkers remorse, cue the violin.

A small Chinese man approached from my left, and with a voice as soft as his feature asked if we could watch his bags. His manner was so eloquent I hadn’t course to consider his request, but in hindsight I wonder how many of the evening news stories began like this, with a well intentioned simpleton in a transit station watching bags for a strange man.

His name was Dr. Sun, and he was travelling to the border between Thailand and Myanmar to freely volunteer his experience as a surgeon in aid of the displaced refugees that have accumulated there. Exuding a humble gratification about himself which piqued my curious nature, he happily answered my stampeding inquisitions into his practice in America and the trappings of comfort that would have come with it had he not given it all up to help these desperate people. Expecting underlying smugness from people with stories like these, I was surprised when Maz told him he was a good person for his efforts and he shrugged it off as if we had misunderstood the whole point.

“No, no, no” he said with a chuckle. “It makes me happy.”

His response set my balance off kilter, as I suddenly realized my envy of his knowledge of himself. I wondered if money even mattered at all once one has found his true calling. In context, if my only job was to deliver a Mentos to the Queen on a satin pillow biannually for a handsome reward, it’s quite possible I’d ask for an invoice so I could write the packet and the pillow off at tax time as a business expense. And even though I love and believe in the Mentos freshness and how it makes you full of life, I’d still complain about my job at the after work drinks.

With the memory of Dr Sun’s selflessness throbbing through my love muscle (my heart, before you get any ideas) we delved into the touristic delights of the Chiang Rai province. Twenty scooter minutes out of Chiang Rai lies the life’s work of one of Thailands most famous artists, Chalermchai Kositpipat, and his famous White Temple.

Chalermchai and his team work tirelessly on this complex every single day. Chalermchai finances all of the operation independently, believing that once an outside investor or benefactor inserts money into a project he expects some measure of say in the proceedings. His vision was a young sapling that had already bore healthy fruit, safe in the knowledge it would grow into a magnificent tree. I envied him so much I wanted to scratch his eyes out.

Creating balance with all this white purity is the Black Temple, located on the other side of Chiang Rai. Whereas the White Temple seemed to focus on rebirth and light, the Black Temple’s art and exhibits focus on death and darkness, with large collections of bone inspired furniture and enough taxidermy for a PETA volunteer to fashion a rope out of his own dreadlocks and hang himself from the rafters.

Having contemplated the nature of my giving, or more specifically the fact that I give bugger all, we decided to volunteer at The New Life Foundation. Founded two years ago with an aim to holistically heal addicts through counseling and spiritual practice, we were off to a great start. As a volunteer, we found ourselves fully integrated into communal life, cleaning and cooking and improving the site as a whole incrementally throughout scheduled tasks for the day.

The combination of meditation and interaction with heroin and crack addicts at the end of their rope was a confrontation. The more interaction with the residents I had, the more I related much of my internal thought process to the helplessness of addiction. They were all here because they had reached their low point and decided the only way to go was up, and such has been the ebb and flow of my life in the past also. I listened to their stories with a focus and peace that had long eluded me, even when the subject matter was raw and unforgiving. Through their pain and my full attention, I was at one with people again.

On our last day at the retreat, a monk arrived at the foundation to participate in one of the courses. As I grappled with writers block at a table alone, he quietly sat down next to me and answered his cellphone. I was thrown from my ignorance, eager to understand how this monk had found time to use up his anytime minutes in between training with his nun-chucks and disemboweling himself and others with his samurai sword.

Fully ordained, at the age of 21 he exuded more wisdom than most people I have ever met. He told me of the joy of having but the belongings he carries in two bags slung round his shoulders, and that where most people have cares and worries, he has peace and tranquility.

But the question that had burned inside me so desperately since I spied his little orange robe could not stay buried for long. When I finally asked him if he was happy, his patient reply was that happiness was just a state of mind. I hung on his every word, excited with the prospect of an answer to my midnight prayers tailor made with me in mind, gift-wrapped with a bow and a scented note signed “Love, your Funky Monky. Xo”

He said that as long as one is seeking happiness, one cannot attain it, which seemed disheartening, but do read on. In any given moment, there are feelings going on inside of all of us, and if we are striving for happiness outside of ourselves it is likely we are not acknowledging the feelings we are having inside of ourselves. He finds peace in the simple observation of the thoughts and feelings that he is having right now.

The cause of misery in many of us is our habit to condemn and judge our internal thoughts and feelings as invalid or unacceptable, using the same internal voice to judge ourselves as the voice that created the thought and feelings in the first place. This non-acceptance leads to chains of thoughts about thoughts in a spiral that becomes a prison, cascading down into the depths of our despair. Seeking distraction or solace instead of observance and acceptance of this spiral seemed to me the nature of my addictions, as well as with many of the addicts at the foundation. We forget that a large dark room needs but a candle to render it light enough to move forward.

If happiness is but a color on an infinite spectrum, then peace is the white light, the inclusion of all colors. It was the peace in Dr. Sun that showed so obviously, and his giving to the disadvantaged was an extension of this internal state. Monks and their apprentices probably seek more peace than happiness then, but that does not render happiness invalid.

Happiness is an elusive but reasonably predictable choice. To have happiness in our lives, we must simply experience more of the things in life that make us feel good whilst experiencing less of the things in life that make us feel bad. This moment to moment accounting puts us in touch with our feelings as they are right now, and is the beginning of the journey out of that darkness. It’s a no brainer, and any misunderstanding to the contrary is just the hollow voice of that spiral seeking to pull us down into our own murky depths once again. With this new understanding, I resolve to light my candle when the room seems almost too helplessly dark to continue onward, knowing that darkness is but the absence of light. It has no substance lest fear make it so.

Feeling empowered by our giving and enlivened by our new experiences, we were ready to move on. Once more into the horizon we vaulted, shooting up into the sky in a cloud of swirling smoke…… Just make sure the smoke is non narcotic and the shooting up isn’t into a vein and I’m sure we’ll all get along just fine. Badoom boom.

Lazy Nights, Water Fights and Food Delights

We'd heard stories of sleepy little Mae Hong Son before we got there. Spending a few tired days in and around the town, it became clear that the stories were true. It was sleepy and beautiful in its own right. The center of the town has a lake bordered on its Southern edge with temples, and illuminated at night made for a picturesque spectacle.

Mae Hong Son at night
And they have a small cave that is occupied by big fish. Just because.

Fish in a cave. Why not? Get into it.
The rural areas surrounding this city are famous for their tribal communities, and if you’ve seen anything about Thailand on the news or the net you’ll recognize the long neck villagers. Fantasies of my meeting with these tribes’ people have long been mythologized in my daydreams. I would enthrall the villagers with tales of trains, planes and automobiles, their giggling children would lose themselves with bewilderment in play with my hairy chest and arms, and the Chief would attempt a peace envoy between our two cultures by demanding I impregnate his daughter.

After some research, the reality became incongruent with these fantasies. I read that the tour guides have taken these villages and turned them into human zoos, with scores of snap-happy tourists passing through and barely any return to the village infrastructure more often than not. I just didn’t feel it would be an authentic experience, so even though the trip would have made excellent photos, I decided to boycott the villages. Ethical accounting of pros and cons found the cons lopsided with exploited ring-necked village folk having to deal with my plastic water bottles and huge amounts of fecal matter, all paid for outside of the village.

So Mae Hong Son was a pleasant quaint town, and we enjoyed our time not doing much at all, but who wants to read a blog about the things a person didn’t do? Bearing this in mind, we jumped on a plane that was barely more than a large toilet paper tube with wheels, wings and an engine and headed back to Chiang Mai.

We all remember those precious days at the end of the school year when our dull lunchtimes were transformed into a battleground for throwing water at each other. Those spontaneous outbursts of teenage anarchy set the stage for the onset of summer and the end of curricular oppression, like a prisoner released from bondage or the first shavings of light cutting holy ribbons through the dawn. The memory of these fights has held a special place in my mind in the 15 odd years since, but after having experienced the Songkran festival, I now realize how simple those days in the schoolyard were.

Songkran is the name given to the Thai New Year, and is quite unlike any New Years I am accustomed to. Instead of being surrounded by roving packs of Cavemen seeking an outlet for their 'Roid Rage', (which seems so typical when I scan the field of my memory), Songkran is a street waterfight with barely any steroids at all, and absolutely no rage. And to my astonishment, for five whole days and nights, people of all ages throw water at each other without the aid of alcohol or drugs. Mostly. And for almost all of those five days and nights, it is just as fun as it was in my school days, using the school fire hose as a way of covertly creating a teenage school uniform wet t-shirt competition to enliven my raging pubescent hormones.

Deep in the war zone
It was a bonding human experience. Anyone who has been to a rave or dance party will know how psychopathically communal people are when they are all on the same drugs. The walls are broken down, there is no social awkwardness, and people relate to each other with ease through a shared experience. I remember hearing stories of people who had been to such events, how they longed for normal life to mirror that sense of unity.

Street party
Sadly I can’t relate to these tales of debauchery and sin as I didn’t complete my strict training to become a kung fu master in the ancient mountains of Tibet until quite recently, but even I understood the kinship they spoke of after I experienced the Thai New Year.

Exercising my discipline as a kung fu master
Thousands of people drenching each other in the streets is an evolution of the Thai custom where people use tea to bless possessions, points of interest and people over the five days of the New Year celebrations. Although a street waterfight might seem a strange mutation of those customs, it is not unwelcome with the Thais. As the people of Thailand see this festival as a happy way for people to give blessing to one another, it does not anger them to be blasted in the face at close range and with force by a bucket of water thrown by an English skinhead. This abhorrent but hilarious misunderstanding by the skinhead is viewed as a blessing on the emergent dreams and wishes of his victims. It doesn’t matter if you are old or new, red or blue, fake or true, Buddhist or Jew, a blessing is a gift to be thankful for when given by anyone else.

Taunting my next victim
And that is what, at its core, made the festival so fun. The hilarity of shooting water at a 75 year old Thai woman dancing in the street is made funnier only because it is in retaliation to her squirting you first. Everyone smiles, traffic stops, and people dance together on the road in the midday sun, all in the name of living a better life. For five days. And the fact that it is done in good humor and without the aid of hallucinogenics is yet another reason why I love the Thais.

Street Party at Night
Don’t think it was all roses though. Being trapped in a constant waterfight did tend to lose its mystique after the fourth day, when requirement for basic necessities required attending to. Successfully picking up dry washing, takeaway food or toilet paper relies on the assumption that you will remain dry for the duration of the endeavor. Our efforts to dodge flying pails of water proved fruitless, as I surrendered to the age old process of turning used underwear inside out to maintain an illusion of cleanliness.

We also enrolled in a cooking course for a day, which involved us biking out to a farm on the outskirts of the city and learning to cook a wide range of Thai dishes in the traditional manner.

Riding my bike.... like a boss
I didn’t know that I could cook before I did this course, but now I could whip you up a curry so good it would literally change your gender. I realize now that it’s like anything: you’ve either experienced through practice the things you have learnt, or you’ve made a choice to do bugger all. Talk is cheap, and ‘can’t’ is a word we use to disempower ourselves because we don’t believe our own truth. Committing to being more than idol utterances feels truly empowering.

Me changing your gender
It makes me smile to look back and see how far I have come in such a small amount of calendar days. Killing time in a bus station reading about Chiang Rai, I sit in eager wait for my next life lesson, when I chance upon meeting a travelling volunteer surgeon that writers have dubbed “The Chinese Mother Teresa”.

Stay tuned.

Dark caves and close shaves

Gliding through the mountain passes on our way to Pai at shoulder height, floating around corners as if all of life was cushioned for our comfort. Ascending the crests on our scooter, tip toeing across the ridge lines, bombarded from all sides by streams of forests poured from the clouds and flowing like green milk down into the valleys.

Did I mention there are 762 corners on the way from Chiang Mai to Pai? Because that’s kind of important. Previously I had chosen a minibus for this perilous mountain journey, the motion sickness coupled with an oppressive hangover making the idea of doing it again about as appealing as a vasectomy performed with a spoon by Stevie Wonder. You could say I was very superstitious of the idea, but I wouldn’t.

We passed two separate minivans parked on verges, flanked by tourists spilling out of their doors for a painful reunion with their breakfasts. We tooted them cheerily with our little scooter horn, our hubris making me feel like a smug pirate. “Avast ye travelers of stormy seas! Our scooter be small but smug we be, for you’ll find no smoother ride than she!” (Works better if you imagine it sung in a pirate voice.)


Smurf Helmet

Pai is a sleepy village three and a half hours drive north of Chiang Mai. The hippy revolution died with Lennon, but there are places where the core values have evolved over time through a sense of community and lack of hard drugs, and that is how I would characterize Pai. Sure, there are people with dreadlocked beards and Jamaican-themed bum bag wallets, but this has not affected the people sense of togetherness. Pai felt like a slice of home, if home failed to shave its armpits and have a warm shower every day.

A chance meeting with a friend from our Permaculture course found us lending a hand on her emerging farm for a day. It was enlivening to see the progress she had made in three relaxed years, especially when she confessed she hadn’t even planted a seed before her decision to create her farm. It inspired me to see people making their dreams into realities incrementally. When asked how she had accomplished so much, she told us she just put in a few hours each day. It seemed such a simple wisdom, and with that seed planted (easy, now) it was time to continue with our transience.

Out of our sleepy hollow we bound, further up into the mountains seeking refuge from our lazy days of peace and love in the hippy village. Having read about the legendary adventures of John Spies and his time in the golden triangle exploring ancient caves and, more interestingly, opium production, we figured this might be our chance to clear out the cobwebs. John had built Cave Lodge out of his sweat and tears in the days before it was cool to be an Asian backpacker, and the place had a bit of a reputation.

Set on a meandering river flowing through a steep gully, Cave Lodge was everything we had hoped for. John had literally written the book on caving in the region, with the lodgings located perfectly central to all of the areas activities including being a 5 minute walk from Cave Lod. That same lazy river that rolls through the gully past Cave Lodge continues its path into the darkness of Cave Lod. If you’re confused, I don’t blame you. Try explaining it to a Thai person in Chinglish for directions and you might have some real problems.

We were happy we hired a guide as we got our first look at the gaping abyss of Lod:

Our guide smiled an honest smile, lit her gas lantern and ushered us onto a bamboo raft, which gradually surrendered to the flowing water. And then there was darkness.

There is something wise and ancient about a cave lit by the light of a flame. In the dancing flicker of the glow I felt humbled, enveloped by an old mystery. This humility lies in us as an ember, a remnant of the fires of our ancestors, and as humans I’m sure we must all have it somewhere or sometime. As our guides swinging lantern illuminated the cave wall, the lazy glow caught sight of an ancient cave painting. Stood in silent awe, I thought about the man who scaled the precarious ridge by the fire of his bamboo torch. I wondered what motivated him, sat in silence surrounded by the flickering shadows of his ancestry, to paint a deer with a bow and arrow cocked and ready to fire. I couldn’t believe a man would seek to accomplish such a feat without reason, but this reason seemed lost as time had reclaimed him and his culture.

After we left the cave, we decided to orientate ourselves by taking a scooter ride through the surrounding villages. With a tourist map and a full tank of gas we bounced our way through simple villages, sailing through mountain checkpoints past Thai soldiers with cannons taller than themselves.


Lovin it
Baby pigs trotted on the road verges and young kids laughed alongside us, two crazy Westerners enveloped and accepted in a passing instant by a culture we barely knew. Wrapped in the beauty of the moment, neither of us were quite sure when it was that we became lost.

The dirt track wound along a ridge for what seemed like forever. Our maps insufficient and the daylight steadily slipping away, I felt reality tugging at the safety blanket I assumed I had that would save me from the jungles midnight terrors. Having been kept at the top of the food chain for so long, I realized that here in the jungle my fistful of money counted for nothing, lest I throw it at a mountain lion and disappear in a comical cloud of Thai baht.

It was at this point the cave painting began making sense. That living, breathing man who scaled the ridge inside the darkness to create his depiction of the hunt did it not for visual aesthetics, nor to impress a girl or carry favor with his peers. He did it because he wanted both the times before and after his reign to know his simple but beautiful truth; he had found peace in his environment. Hunting the deer gave him both a meaning and a purpose. The gratitude that the deer were there yesterday and the prayer of them returning tomorrow were the heights of his success and his contentment. I understood his accomplishment, and peacefully envied it. What would I paint on the cave wall besides possibly a cock and balls to make the next man laugh?


What I might paint on the cave. Note: Drawing of me has a big dick.

As we pressed on into the dusk, I promised I would come up with a direction for my life. Having come to Asia to find meaning in myself, I realized that defining meaning in anything is only possible in retrospect to the choices we make. A thought without action is a flimsy existence, and to reflect on choices we haven’t made will only leave us chasing our imaginary tails.

Following our noses and breathing deep our scenario, we gradually made our way into the arms of our quaint valley bungalow, and in the flickering illumination of a halogen bulb, I plucked up the courage to dream my big dreams. I also scrawled steps to get there, small steps that I could take each day to move me closer to my visions fulfillment, and for the first time in recent memory, tomorrow made sense.

I now know what I'll paint on my cave wall when I get there. I guess the question is, do you?


Moo cows on the road


A column inside the cave


The exit to the cave

Those wonderful men in their rolling machines

Long have I foretold a mode of transport that fails to jar me into a state of nausea, so long as to warrant me pulling down my little girl knickers, kicking them into the corner of the room and applying my big boy briefs with steel staples. Accepting that it was my destiny to be crouched and contorted in a cardboard box sized seat like a Mexican immigrant took everything I had within me and more.

It seems though that through the tenant of acceptance I have found my salvation, just as the Eastern mystics promised, in the form of The Sleeper Train. I speak of the sleeper train the way people speak of something secret, something dark or beautiful or forbidden, in a whisper lest the crashing volume of normal utterance send the magnificent card castle tumbling down upon us. So if you have never experienced the glory that is the sleeper train, let me get you on board, so to speak.

Out of the sweltering midnight haze and heat you emerge, the shiny carriages of promise glistening in the stolen light of the station. The attendant greets you at the door, and you are granted your entrance to the kingdom. Inside, there are beds. Clean crisp sheets on bunk beds just like when you were a wide-eyed child. The air conditioners hum in chorus with the chiming of the air horn, cheering the gentle march onward into the night. As you creep towards slumber, the train rocks you gently, reminiscent of the distant familiarity of the movement you experienced whilst your mother was pregnant with you, the gentle to and fro that rocking chairs and swaying hammocks seek to emulate. As a sales pitch it seems rock solid, but there is more.

Any man who has been in reasonably tight jeans down an uneven road surface knows the feeling. It’s the ultimate union of man and machine. Embraced by my mistress, the train of the evening, caressed so carefully and purposefully I’m left guilty and embarrassed like a schoolboy fantasy spoken aloud, screaming out “Oh Special Express, what ways to soothe my tattered soul will you imagine next?” And if all that is too esoteric to garner understanding as to what I’m talking about, then I apologize in advance, I was taught not to kiss and tell.

Now follow in my pied-piper attempts to make the rest of my life this blissful, starting with Chiang Mai. I really do like Chiang Mai. Around the Old City there is a large stone wall and moat which forms the traffic structure for the commerce that it throbs with. It has a temple count to rival that of Bangkok, and being significantly smaller and slower in pace it is a tourist hotspot. It also has a popular University, so the city is a mish mash of monks and hipster youth. Chiang Mai: a pleasant blend of old customs and new customers.

We hired a scooter and went to one of the more popular temples atop the mountains overlooking the city. I met a lovely young Thai man and we spoke at length of meditation and our disciplines to still our minds, and he invited me to stay with him in a few weeks time at his humble home. It left me with sorrow for the loss of this hospitality in amidst our Western ideas of stranger danger. And even though I like to think of myself as open to the flow of life and relatively fearless, I cannot say that I did not picture staying at his house and awakening in the morning to a naked ice bath with a banging headache and one missing kidney. When I asked for his name I had to clarify, for I was pretty sure he said “Nob”. Nop and I laughed about it together, and even through his broken English I’m pretty sure he knew what it meant.

Chillin at the temple
As well as a temple visit, it’s also hard to spend any amount of time in Chiang Mai without being bombarded with the possibility of elephant trekking. I hadn’t claim to formal introduction with any elephants in my short time on this earth, so to consider the ethical grounds for this sort of odd-couple union was difficult. Elephants are known to be quite moody animals, and in perspective I can’t imagine that you or I would enjoy being saddled and ridden around in the privacy of our own lounge-room, let alone publicly in the Thai jungle. But then again, I probably don’t know you that intimately to make an informed judgement.

We ended up choosing Baanchang elephant park as they are saddle-free and expend a lot of energy rescuing elephants from lives of hard labor. In Thailand, it is not uncommon for logging operations to use elephants to lift felled trees onto trucks, effectively commandeering them as flesh forklifts. Baanchang uses its resources gained from being a commercial tourism operation to purchase elephants off of the logging operators. Whether this is a band-aid solution that simply empowers the loggers with finance and incentive to replace sold elephants or not I cannot be sure of, but the elephants in the park seemed content and catered for, bordering on spoilt. As I threw piles of bananas and sugarcane straight into their gaping mouths, they rewarded me occasionally with that wonderfully cliché trumpet sound you’ve heard them do whilst watching David Attenborough. As if it was part of a script. Elephants are almost too amazing.
Me and the elephant sizing each other up

An elephant can consume as much as 300 kilos of organic matter in a day. It has skin two inches thick and can live for 85 years. They are the ultimate mobile compost factories of the forest, constantly devouring vast amounts of leaf matter into a more readily digestible form for plants to consume. Confident in its monumental and integral role in the forest ecosystem, it is no surprise that when I kicked it and told it to turn left, it just flapped its ears and released gas out its arse.

I stopped cold and peered deeply into the fallibility of the human condition. I realized that we dominate and subdue our natural surroundings not because of our inherited intelligence or strength, but because in the scheme of things we are weak. Humans are the white frilly ballet dancer dress of the natural world, molly-coddled into existence in equatorial environments so amazingly gentle and abundant that the improbability of us even existing is impossible for our tiny minds to grasp. It is no surprise governments spend untold amounts of money on “offensive” weapons and label it “defense”. Misconceiving our own grandeur, we see ourselves as bullied by nature, bullied by circumstance and bullied by each other. We are the snotty nosed Columbine High nerd kids seeking retribution, scrambling to dominate not because we believe our own power, but because we know intimately our inherent weakness.

And as I lay on my semi submerged elephant friends stomach in a comical embrace of differing orders of size, I caught her gaze and understood that we were not so different. Especially when she sent an incomprehensibly large fart bubbling into the watering hole we both occupied and smiled sheepishly, the same way I used to as a child sharing the bath with my brothers and sisters. My name is Ben Connor, and I am at one with the elephants.

x

Me on the elephant right as it was farting
Maz, Me and our elephant show-off mate

Permaculture

Snap. I’m in a class, sat uncomfortably on a meditation cushion. The classroom has no walls and a thatched leaf roof, in the middle of a jungle set amongst earthbag meditation domes, pitch black silent semi-spheres from another planet, and rumor has it one of the residents spent 21 days locked inside in a meditative trance without repreve. Did I choose right? Is this the hilarious worst-case scenario we had joked about?

After I bought my tickets to Thailand, I was caught in a desperate struggle with myself, searching for something more to look forward to, as if 6 months in Asia wasn’t enough. In some radical turn of synchronicity, I had found a Permaculture course set to begin 5 days after we arrived in Thailand, on the small island of Koh Phangan. Now I have been to Koh Phangan many times before, and through these experiences I would be justified in either being intensely excited or shit my pants nervous. Here’s a picture of what I usually look like when I come to Koh Phangan:


Stop hatin, start participatin

This time I swore it would be different, so re-snap back to the moment, sat before our pleasant mannered teacher, listening with cautious intent. He tells us we will not be the same after the course, but not in the same way any snake oil salesman would. His manner is gentle, devoid of ego, and like most people who have amazing things to talk about, he listens with perfect presence. Plus, he has a ponytail and is obviously warm and inviting, (uncommon), and when he told me I wouldn’t be the same, he was dead right.

The problem I’ve always had with end of the world postulation is it is not for the everyman. Either the reasons for doomsday are unavoidable on my part, or in case of prevention, require endurance through a laundry list of actions that would make the end of the world a welcome respite. So when the Permaculturalists tell me that in order to save the world I should be getting nature to do all my work and sit back and enjoy doing bugger all, my ears prick up, and I move from slouch to attention on my impractical little floor cushion.

Basically, Permaculture is the science of understanding patterns in nature, then tweaking them to make life both easy and sustainable. Bill Mollinson had started the movement in the 80’s, and it has seen a steady rise ever since. He states that the biggest problem humans face today is not war, immigration or poverty but in fact soil, the fact that there is not much left, and the fact we are all hopelessly ill informed to do anything about it. The upshot is that we can create good soils reasonably easy, that the process is reversible, and that we can pre-empt our own collapse.

I tend to err towards the fence on the matter of the conspiracy theorist, the beauty being that it is always someone elses problem. I never had to do anything, it wouldn’t affect me even if I did have to, and most of the ‘facts’ they gave me were non observable phenomenon. If you've been molested by ET, I do want to believe you, but I will be needing a grainy, black and white camera-phone video at least, a variety of positions rewarding a definitive bonus point. But these musings are not the case in Permaculture.

Observably, it seems we have lost our connection with Nature. The process that bore us through a chain of ever increasing complexity has been cast aside, a product of a bygone era. The problem with this is that there are checks and balances, there is an accounting in this machine, and any arrears owed at the end of the month require payment more or less immediately. It is not divine judgement that will end us, but terrible accounting.

Thankfully, seeking to understand this process does not require Thai fisherman pants, dreadlocks and a sense of entitlement. I exhale a sigh of relief, mainly because I’ve had dreadlocks before and they are gross as all hell. Plus, hippies smell.

So it was a fortnight of mind expansion, and I feel invigorated with a new sense of purpose and life direction. The science of Permaculture is practical, and I now seek to create a sustainable farm. Equally beautiful is the fact that Maz is on board, her change of direction evidence of the logic and wonderful opportunity ingrained within this knowledge. There is an emptiness that has been there since I said goodbye to those carefree days swimming in waterholes and climbing trees and hello to pubic hair, concrete and western civilization. Now I see I can have the best of both worlds.

Our final night we sang songs into the candle-lit darkness and felt truly happy.

But after our two week stint, the islands seemed so tired. I felt the familiarity of escape rather than the thrill of experience, and although it’s nice to be distracted sometimes, it’s not why I’m here. So we book a train for Chiang Mai, packed our bags and said goodbye to the end of the beginning.

x



Preaching to the converted

Koh Phangan Sunset

The Beautiful Couple