Well This Critter Seems Friendly: Travels of October

The other American lads arrived loudly – boisterous and cocky after a week of travel. The guest house shook under their swagger, all four floors, and after a commotion they were settled in three rooms. I had my own room on the first floor, where the Internet and books were, but I had been in area more than a week. A thin sixtyish man with whom I had been discussing books conjectured to me in a conspiratorial tone after the hubub passed: “Americans, I’ll bet.” (All eye brows and elbows, wink wink)

I sat in one of the wicker chairs in the concrete lobby next to the shelves of books where it smelled like wet cigarettes and there was a lingering sweetness of mildew.
“Yessir. Those are my buddies,” I confirmed, but in the way one might claim an errant pet. (“Yessir, that’s my dog who just shat on your porch.”)

I couldn’t tell if he was American or Canadian, or if he remembered I was American, despite that he had asked me whe we first met, “American or Canadian?” (To which I answered American.) The owner of the guest house was Scottish and the thin sixtyish man was one of a cadre of expats who I saw coming and going from the rooms where people stayed for a few weeks to a few years. There was a healthy expat community in the neighborhood which owned guest houses, bars, used book stores and liked to use “we” in recognition of some brand of expat solidarity. Most were wizened and wrinkled from constant baking in the South East Asian sun, and they dressed comfortably in linen and cotton and drank often. It seemed like a nice way to live, though most looked much older than they were or much younger – I couldn’t quite tell for sure. But there was always a bit of the so-you’re-still-living-in-your-parents’-garage type of feeling to their life style from my point of view – which has unfortunately been influenced by my experience and opinions derived from the latter.

The sixtyish man and I had been discussing a book by Steven Pinker on language as a window into meaning (don’t ask me how we got onto that topic) when the man put a succinct period on our conversation by trying to make racial joke concerning inner city black people. It was one of those truly awkward moments when the generation gap widens to a chasm as worn and weary racial stereotypes are dragged up and presented as humor with a good natured grin. Crickets chirped, the wind blew, and there was a nervous cough off in the bushes. When I failed to take up his cue the conversation collapsed. He said his good byes and good lucks and went up stairs to pack his bag for a two-week excursion south. Good luck to you, too, I said, and turned back to my reading.

A few of the Americans had showers and quality time with the head as the rest of us took in snooker at a local hole called “Friends Bar.” With cooperation from the beers, an open discussion on traveling with diarrhea, and how the gods of pool had blessed us with neither luck nor talent, I enjoyed the good fortune of familiar company after a week of solo travels (in Thai, bai pom diao — going as a man alone). Somebody scratched the eight-ball, bringing another excruciating game to a close, Kyle began smoking his cigarettes, and the floor was opened to the recounting of travel stories.

The six of them had lived large on the island Koh Pi Pi and the mass of their wallets and brain cells (due to alcohol intake) took a collaborative nose dive, which leveled out shortly after arriving in Chiang Mai by train. On their trip to Pi Pi, Gwin told of how their group of strapping lads met a pair of elegant ladies who hailed from the emerald isle of Bridgette on their fast boat from the coast.

“They were hot, dude,” Gwin explained. “They said they lost their cameras and they wanted pictures. So they asked us if we could take pictures of them and then send them along via Facebook. So basically I was like, ‘You want us to take a bunch of pictures of you… AND be Facebook friends?” he paused and then looked around at his audience for affect.

“So I was like fuck yeah! I’ll take a bunch of pictures of you! Well, I didn’t say that, exactly. But, I started shooting pictures of these girls and they were just posing away. I was eating it up. I mean these two were attractive. We invited them to hang out later that night. You know, we told them a bar, told them we’d show them a good time. They actually showed up! Everything was going great until Kyle and Gregg met these Irish dudes. I was talking to one of the Irish girls and for some reason I was just like, ‘Dudes!’ and I went to drink with the guys. So these two beautiful Irish girls are just drinking alone at the bar while we’re bro’ing out with these drunk Irish guys, howzing Bacardi mixers, and they’re telling us to come stay with them in Ireland and we’re saying yeah yeah of course we’ll stay with you and then finally the girls are like, “Peace, I guess” and they left. We didn’t even care! We were such idiots. But, whatever dude, we had f’in fun. We have so many places to stay in Ireland, now.”

In Chiang Mai, they planned to participate in the local foreigner tradition of securing rubberbands to their feet in order to launch themselves from an elevated platform and bounce jubilantly from earth to sky earnestly yelping, “Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!” I participated in just such an activity two years before, thus I opted to travel further north to a town called Pai, in order to hire a guide who would take me into the jungle where the hill tribes dwelled. On the third morning after they had arrived I rented a motorbike and road the four hours north into Mae Hong Son province.

I took a road that was curved and green. Rice paddies floated by in panorama. Rain fell and made the road sizzle and then steam. Thick mountain trees paused and separated to reveal more mountains that filled everything below a sky that resembled gobs of soap foam thrown on an azure tile floor. The sun was warm and the air was even cold in places. Four hours folded into passing. Pai was right there, just like I had stepped into the next room, and I sat down to have a coffee and thought: “I would very much like to experience that again, if not for a little longer.”

I’ve described Pai in many ways – artists’ enclave, quirky darling of backpackers, and foreign food capital of Thailand – but it’s also darn friendly. After I procured a room from a lovely gentleman named Mr. Jan I went to town in search of grub. A blond tallish (taller than me that is) backpacker passed me on the road and nodded,

“Hi,” he said, smiled, and walked on.

“Howdy,” I said and tried remember if I had passed him on the road, but I had not. He was just pleasant enough to say hey to a stranger – well that was nice. A dread-headed girl the height of a bar stool passed on my left and offered another hello, which I returned with a smile. On the corner a Thai bedecked in dreads down to his belt was selling Bob Marley related objects from a small table. He sat on a low stool below a small square mirror with a caption that read, “Are you ting-tong?”

I placed my hands together and offered him a wai, which he returned and I decided I liked Pai people. I should tell you that in Bangkok if two white people pass each other more often than not they avoid eye contact, as if seeing another white face reminds you of your own foreignness, perhaps it destroys one’s sense of originality. I don’t know. Anyway, people don’t say hi as much.

I dropped by a trekking office I had researched the week before and set up a meeting for the next day with one of the guides. The owner was a Thai. His features struck me as Native American (or at least the image of Native Americans I have: long black hair, strong jaw, and athletically muscled). Later on I’d see him riding a dirt bike as if it were a horse, putting him a head taller over every other person on the road and with a growl and a spit of dust he was off on some type of business. I ate a burrito for dinner and watched a live jazz band made of Thais who dressed with sixties-hippy-sensibility, and the singer was the most beautiful 40/50-something woman I’ve ever seen. She wore a long white cotton dress and tied a piece of white cloth around her hair and there was something faintly Parisian about how her lips wrapped themselves around her words. She held the microphone like you or I might hold a flower as you empty its vase in order to replace the water. I left before the jazz was over, quite content to go to bed after a long day.

Chah was short with close-cropped hair and a round cookie kind of face. He smiled easily and even as we were bargaining over a price for the trek on which he was going to lead me, his eyes could not hide his effervescent nature, his plain kind of good will.

“You have no more people on your trek? Just you?”

“Just me.”

“You have no more friend who maybe would like to go?”

“Khun diao krap. Just me.”

“Oah! You speak Thai?” Cha spoke Thai and English deep in his throat giving his accent a heavy pleasantness.

“I speak Thai.”

“[Something in Thai]”

“Yep, you bet.” I hoped I hadn’t just agreed to a hundred bucks a day.

“Oh good. Most foreigners don’t like to eat that. Makes them very sick in the belly — throw up everywhere.”

“Oh jeez, yeah, I eat that all the time.” What am I going to have to eat?

“Actually you’re the only person that likes that I’ve met, I think.”

“The only one?”

“Yep. Just you.”

“No one else?”

“Khun diao. Just you.”

Chah quizzed me further on my limits: what I would and would not eat (anything), did I enjoy walking (which we would do much of), sleeping (very little of), did I own a sleeping bag (I did not), had I been on a trek before (this would be my third), and did I really enjoy eating [thai phrase] (oh yes, yes, yes — very much!). Chah preferred sleeping outdoors to sleeping in the villages. He went hunting and grilled or boiled his prizes in the jungle using bamboo for both cooking pots and utensils. He was born in a Karen village, and could speak each of the three major hill tribe languages: Karen, Lahu, and Lisu (Definitions). I, on the other hand, spoke enough Thai to usually find myself in situations of gastronomical distress (No I love it, I do! Mmmm mm!). Alas, in the quest to be understood the joke is most often on you, but it’s also a major ingredient of the fun.

If you had been privy to the journal I kept on the trek — say you were one of the rangers who reported to the hypothetical sight where my last words would have been something like, “Oh, this critter seems friendly!” — your investigation may have been hampered by this dribble:

“Dark now. Two candles in a Karen hut reserved for tourists.(1) Second trek.(2) Tired. Thinking of home.
Six hours of walking. Started in Pai, Chah and I; the trail was hardly a trail most of the time. Pushed and tore through fibrous underbrush – twigs, thorns, burrs, barbs, etc — mud and leaves clinging to my legs. By the river we checked ourselves for leeches, the oozing brown and white leeches with teeth, small at first, but then they grow with the intake of your blood. Mostly they itch. On the top of the mountain we ate Pad Thai from plastic sandwich bags. Cha fashioned chopsticks out of green bamboo. After lunch we walk, walk, walk. No more leeches but plenty more mud. Around two we come to a place in the jungle where I hear a machine working away in off in the blinding trees. Chah says it’s for making homes, he does not know the English word for it. Do I want to see it? Tired, but I say okay. We leave the trail and descend onto a slope, I walk carefully because I’ve already fallen six times. After five minutes we come upon the machine. Two men standing on and under a platform made from tree logs and lashed together with sapling bark, working a large two-handed saw. They are cutting a felled tree trunk into beams. Chah seems to know them. They talk. I try to keep my footing on the muddy slope. We leave after a few moments, back into the trees and onto the trail.

We come to a village in a clearing. Smells of cow dung, sounds of pigs and poultry…roosters. I shower in a latrine stall, water is icy, floor is a concrete puddle. Wash my hair, my legs, my feet, wash my sandals. Dry with my damp towel. I still feel dirty, but very much refreshed.

Only 3 p.m., we walked to quickly, but it was only the two of us. Tomorrow there will be three, Chah says. His friend has a long gun. We’ll hunt. We’ll sleep in a hut out in the corn field. I will cook for you — locun(4) food. Now, I will take you to the Karen caves. Chilly, damp. In and out with our flashlights. I’m sweating again. It’s getting dark now. Chah takes me to watch a Muay Thai fight on his uncle’s television. The electricity comes from solar power. Five or so Thai men are in the hut, most without shirts; I can’t tell who Chah’s uncle is, or if he is even there. We don’t watch for long.
Dinner is yellow curry soup with potatoes, a pumpkin bread/omelette sort of dish, sweet and sour chicken with vegetables, and pineapple, tea, two glasses of Lao Lao whiskey, the local moonshine. After dinner, Chah takes me to his friend’s hut. He and his wife sit on the floor. His wife is dressed in a traditional smock of red, green, and blue vertical and horizontal patterns on black. A cloth is piled on top of her head. She cooks hahmoo — food for pigs — consisting of pumpkin, cucumber, and corn grinds. It’s dark so the only light is that from the coals and two candles. She plunges a wooden stirring stick into the charred pot which is boiling over festive coals. The hahmoo is stirred, it bubbles, breaking fissures in the heavy concoction like hot mud as steam rises. Water spills over the lip and hisses on the burning wood below. We drink green tea in bamboo cups, poured from a tin kettle, also charred black.

We returned to Chah’s uncle’s hut, which was a bit larger than the last. Same cooking apparatus: a raised, rectangular base, bordered by wood moulding, inside contained sand and a ring of charcoals. Four posts at each end of the rectangle support a platform above the fire, through which the smoke pours; pots are stored on top. Lao Lao is brought out along with boiled peanuts. We take shots from a measuring glass and eat the peanuts.

An older woman opens a pot that has been on the fire and takes out a chicken, its feathers shiny and lustrous with orange light. A half hour later a young girl — pretty, wearing a Lee Jeans pink shirt — returns with the chicken de-feathered, now a scrawny, drawn looking creature with a beak agape and dark holes for eyes. She holds it over the fire until its skin roasts brown. We pass whisky around until we are drunk, and we go to bed.

Second day and there are three. This is Cha’s friend who owns the long rifle. Cha has been talking about him (the long rifle and drinking whisky, usually together) since yesterday. This rifle is about as long as its owner, Somchai, 23, wooden stock, long thin black barrel, barrel loaded with birdshot, spring locked breach, wadding paper, percussion cap, ram rod — a modern musket. When the gun is shot there is a loud, satisfying boom.

Thick pancakes, bananas, dragon fruit, and melon for breakfast. We load up and amble into the forest around 10 a.m. (much better than our 7 a.m. start the day before). Somchai and his long rifle leads. The trail which is wide enough for a pick up truck goes steep and the sweat pours in. Somchai, me, then Chah, we march — flat foot after flat foot on the steep upward slope. Once it levels out we stop and Chah cuts down a young sapling to fashion a sling shot. He ties on a pre-fab rubber band with strips of sapling bark. With the sling shot Chah is able to kill a song bird, which we’ll have for lunch he says. The bird is tiny in Chah’s large hand: yellow and green feathers, a wet, red wound on its belly where the stone struck it. I look at it and I’m glad I didn’t kill it.

Somchai spots something in the trees and starts off in a crouch with his rifle. I hunt him with the lens of my camera. He flits in and out of the trees periodically through the LSD screen. He makes multiple stops to aim before he stops one final time, takes aim and boom, smoke. He runs and I lose him in the bramble. A few moments later he returns to the trail with a large black bird held up triumphantly in his hand. He lays his rifle against a tree and begins the task of removing its feathers right there on the trail. It strikes me how small the bird is without its proud plumage.

We come to a waterfall and a stream where Somchai and Chah build a fire to roast the birds, boil water for tea, and cook a canned soup in hallow bamboo Chah has cut from off the path. Chah cuts the now featherless black bird from its neck to its bottom with a pocket knife and pries open the ribcage. The heart, lungs, stomach, and intestines are revealed in surprising anatomical correctness and completeness.
When the birds are roasted and the soup boiling we wash our hands in the stream and begin to eat, using broad jungle leaves as a ground cloth, and half sections of bamboo as food containers. The birds taste like chicken, the soup tastes like potatoes and beef with a dash of red curry. The tea tastes like hot water. We clean up and set off.

We arrive at the field where we are to sleep that night some hours later. Darkness will not come for at least another three hours. We wash ourselves in the stream. When we are done there is a fence to be climbed, a hundred yards or more of winding path through the middle of a corn field — corn stalks seven to eight feet high — and a shack in the middle of the clearing. An old man and his wife live in the shack, three dogs, a cat, and a cluckery of chickens (including a few roosters) to keep them company. The shack is lean-to type construction with a slanted roof, wooden boards nailed horizontally and vertically make the walls, and raised off the ground to leave a space large enough for the animals to crawl under for protection against the elements and the old woman.

The old woman is a small creature, maybe four-feet tall, and hunched from years of heavy work. She is small, but she wields a terrible stick, which she holds high above her head like a rushing samurai to drive off the dogs when they try to get into the hut to investigate the wonderful smells within. When she grabs her weapon she clucks at them, “Shud, shud, shud!” and often the sound is enough to make the animals scatter. Every once in a while a dog will venture too near and the thwack of the stick on their back sends them howling into the cornfield. But they always return shortly thereafter.
Money changes hands and Chah tells me we’ll have chicken for dinner. Would you like to shoot it? I say yes. I just want to shoot the gun. He shows me the hen which is underneath the hut pecking at dirt. Do you see it? I cannot, because there is some obstruction blocking my view. I say no. At this point Chah says nothing more, probably waiting for me to see it, but I’m not sure of what to do. Do I drive it out? Is spying the chicken some kind of test? I stand motionless and then its clear I won’t be shooting this chicken. The old woman grabs feed as Chah, the old man, and I stand back. Somchai takes up his rifle and waits as the chickens are lured out to peck at the feed the old woman has strewn about in the open.

My heart beats in my throat as Somchai takes aim at a particular hen who is pecking at the edge of the corn. BOOM and the chicken screams and the rest of the animals scatter momentarily, but they are all back feeding in the same places in a short amount of time, as if nothing at all had happened. Maybe I was the only one who saw something new.
We go inside to have tea and the body of the hen is tossed by fire pit. The old woman takes up her perch by the door and lets fall her stick every time a curious snout pokes through the door to take stock of the dark blood on the floor.
It’s dark by the time we finish dinner and a tarp is placed outside the hut and two candles are lit. The old man has left to get more Lao Lao, which we finished during dinner. It’s more than an hour before he returns, by which time to moon has climbed into the sky and everything is bathed azure. From the hut we can see the entire clearing below, blue and clear and cold. I’m swathed in a blanket and I wear my rain jacket. We pass around shots of Lao Lao in age order: the old man, Chah, myself, then Somchai. Before long we begin singing. First the old man sings a haunting Lahu song in a raspy voice that resembles a goose honking. Chah takes up the song in his smooth tenor, backed up by Somchai, and I’m haunted by it. I try to learn the words but the melody reminds me of what the Who’s sing in “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.” I sing a few English songs for them. By midnight we’re well drunken and in bed. By 2:30 a.m. I’m up again with the roosters. They’ve climbed onto the roof and they are cockadoodling at the moon. “Cockadoodledoo! Listen to me, I’m a rooster! I’m a rooster who crows at the moon! Cockadoodle-fucking-doo!” By 3 a.m., my dreams turn from walking through glades to brutally murdering roosters.

The next day finds us walking through more fields. Periodically we stop and Chah cuts up cucumbers that are growing in the fields for us to eat. They’re cool and refreshing. Somchai leaves us to return home after lunch, and we arrive at another village after six hours of walking at 3 p.m. It is considerably easier than our first day, but we are still bone tired. My sandals are mud caked and my feet scratched up and bleeding in places, but I’m worse for wear. We wash up and I spend the afternoon talking to a cadre of village girls who are quizzing me in their best Thai where I’m from and who my family is. I answer them as best I can, which is surprisingly well, considering how badly I can butcher the language.

We kill nothing else for dinner. Instead we eat ramen noodles with fruit and sticky rice. We’re staying a beautiful house. Stairs from the road lead to a platform that’s open, where dishes are washed and laundry hangs. Another set of stairs leads to a raised part of the house where the family sleeps in three separate rooms, and there is a space where meals are prepared and eaten. Like other villages the electricity for this house is provided by solar power. The family has a small television and dvd player. After dinner we are in the kitchen room, smoke from the fire pit wafts into the rafters, and we are drinking green tea with the father. The father speaks a little English but mostly falls back on Thai when he cannot say something. I am getting most of what he is saying to me, but I ask Chah to help me with translations some of the time. The father asks me if I have a girlfriend, and I say I do — though his daughter is very beautiful — I’m not looking to leave this trek with a bride. (Sometimes it is merely easier to bend the truth than to explain why you can’t marry their daughters, despite their beauty.)”

The next morning only the two of us would walk to the road where we would find our bus back to Pai. I’m sorry young daughter of the nice man who hosted us. Yes you were beautiful, but we walk much faster with only two. Three would only slow us down, and surely you would have wanted to bring your things with you, slowing us down even more. In the end the way it was proved better, more beautiful even. Two began and with two it ended. Two plus a bride-to-be could never have provided the necessarily balance. Furthermore, such a development would require another entry and I am out of words.