Phu Soi Dao National Park

After the last blog post, we left Bangkok for Pitsanulok, a city about halfway between Bangkok and the northernmost border. We've spent the last few days without seeing any other farang.

What happened this week started on the train from Bangkok, but there was an incident at the train station that deserves mentioning.

We saw a woman carrying a large snake, and when she spotted us she ordered the creature to fondle me. As it slithered through my armpit, Mike and I noticed that a small crowd had formed around us. The woman then handed me a smaller snake, coiled into a disk, and I accepted it. It appeared to be very sick if not dead. Five hundred baht, she said. I tried to give it back, but the crowd started yelling at me. I made out, "hai cuhn," "give to you." An old man tried to explain to me -- "No money," he shouted. At that, another man snatched the snake from my hands and ran across the street. The crowd started to disperse. After a few moments, the snake woman ran after the man who had taken her snake. I watched from a distance as she retrieved the snake, kissed it, and lifted it up in the air. Meanwhile, a man had approached Mike and given him an arm massage, by force, and then demanded payment for it. Mike gave him five baht so he would go away.

A few hours later we got on the train, where we met Chet, a Thai college senior who was headed to Phu Soi Dao National Park for some mountaintop camping. We wound up invited, although due to the language barrier I'm not sure whether he invited us or we invited ourselves.

The train arrived several hours late, and no one seemed to care about the "broken engine" that delayed us in the dark country. We got off in Pitsanulok with Chet and took a bus to another city. The bus riders were mostly cleaner and more professional-looking than the sad rabble on the train.

At our destination, Chet helped us buy hammocks and rations in the market. Then we got on a Song Thaew, sort of a protected flatbed truck, and rode through the mountains and rice fields. Mike remarked that it was nice to finally see green. To say the very least. The other colors peeked through in flecks, but otherwise our view was overwhelmed by the brightest and greenest hue of green.

We arrived at the Phu Soi Dao visitors center about 20 hours after we'd boarded the train. Chet and the park staff tried to convince us to pay someone to haul our bags up the mountain. As we refused repeatedly, they exchanged "stupid farang" smirks. The hike was 6.5 km, Chet said, and very steep. Little did he know that for us, 6.5 kilometers was only 4 miles.

We set off on the trail, which alternated stretches of uphill hiking with six steep climbs that Chet translated as "steps." It was quicker but more difficult than an American trail, which usually winds up the mountain.

Step one, the second toughest, broke us in. Then the trail declined again, taking us through crowds of thick bamboo. Chet named things for us along the way. He was sort of a poetic soul, and no flower was too meek to halt his path. Each sighting would elicit a sort of bewildered moan, as though he had just been run through with a katana. At camp, we would hear this same cry whenever a cold wind blew, or when the rice was cooked just right.

By step two we were deep in the jungle, and Chet was starting to pant. Great insects screamed at us from all sides. We felt no past and no future, only the deep green heat, the screeching of the insects, and the slow advance of the red clay at our feet.

Step six has earned a Thai nickname meaning "death." We completed it on all fours, long empty of water, long past the point when we could make speech sounds. Chet, the packless one, had given in and sent us ahead to set up camp, as the light was waning.

We reached the top and looked around. The moon glowed in a mauve sky above us, and below the land plummeted into the valley between ours and the opposing mountain. A green abyss, green-furred, with lone birds swooping back and forth across its depth. We paused a little while and admired the rounded striations in the hillsides, all rough love for the one who would latch on and lurch up, step by step astride the uncertain slope, to roll around euphoric on the once-lonesome peak.

We walked a few hundred meters more to a campground and ate Thai-style camping food -- rice with chili paste, spicy sardines, and tiny canned clams. We would continue to eat well at the campsite. A man who lived in a cabin was always cooking something with fresh vegetables, meat, and plenty of spice.

Having arrived too late to set up camp without frustration, we were invited to sleep on the cabin floor on the first night. Mike was a little indignant that night when Chet joked with another Thai about Mike declining a shower. We've gotten used to being mocked, but we wondered how they could laugh about the shower thing when their drinking water came from a river dammed with garbage.

The next day, one of the Thais at camp took us walking around the mountaintop. We reached the small obelisk that marked the Thai-Lao border. The ruins of bunkers were obscured by high grass. Thai and Lao mountains loomed on either side of us, staring each other down, themselves not parties in the peace the two countries made in 2002.

We got back and set up our hammocks, about 20 yards away from the main campground and across the river. As day turned to night, the air at our campsite went from bright red to icy blue. We got in our hammocks and tried to sleep. I'm convinced that the windchill was below freezing, and we hadn't packed for this, to say the least. Chet, who was terrified of cold weather, was missing from his hammock. I went to the cabin, thinking I'd steal his idea, but our friend had locked the doors behind him. Mike and I put on every item of the warm-weather clothing we'd packed. I had t-shirts and shorts stuffed into the hood of a rain jacket, covering my ears, and I buried my double-socked feet into my backpack. Mike wore a towel around his knees, and he wrapped a T-shirt and sheet around his head. We dreamt, but didn't sleep.

In the morning, Chet greeted us sheepishly. We told him we hadn't slept so well in days.

At 9 o' clock, we said our goodbyes and skidded down the mountain. We returned to Pitsanulok, where the food is charmed so that we cannot stop eating it.

Mike remarked recently that the trip has exceeded all his expectations. I feel the same way, except in the area of toilets. I expected them to be somewhat toilet-like, with some reasonable method for cleaning oneself. There are sometimes spray-hoses, which we enjoy, but these are few. What there usually is is a bucket beside the toilet-hole, and some kind of bowl floating in the bucket. Mike and I always talk about it conspiratorially. Have you found out what to do with the bucket yet? No, and this time there were two huge tanks of water beside it. We disagree on whether the grooves in the floor seat are for your feet or your buttocks. Nonetheless, I've come up with a working method, which may or may not be culturally acceptable.

When we were camping, Mike was too afraid to use the toilet facilities on the mountaintop. So far it seems like going to the bathroom outside is not kosher in Thailand, so Mike crossed the border and pooped in Laos, keeping his eyes peeled for armed border guards.

Thai words of the day

bon cow -- mountaintop

an-ta-lai -- dangerous

cow (rising) -- mountain

cow (falling) -- rice

cow (high) -- he/him

cow (normal) -- into

ban -- home

Note: I've bought a Thai phrasebook, but the words of the day will continue to be words that we learn by experience.

Phu Soi Dao National Park

A rare instance of a Thai human tolerating a dog.

Warming up.

Shots of beautiful Phu Soi Dao National Park.

Justin likes to smell everything.

Our Thai friend and ad-hoc guide, Chet, in one of his near-constant moments of rapture.

View from the back of a song-thaew.

The all-night train puts its riders in a strange fugue.

A crowd gathers, a snake sniffs Justin's feet. This whole event was pretty much nonsense.

Apartments in Pitsanulok.

Bangkok III

We passed a milestone on Sunday, when we were derided for America's politics for the first time. The critic was a cranky man with few teeth who wanted to take our money.

He approached us on the street and spoke in malformed pidgin English. He said he fought with the South Vietnamese in the Vietnam War, the American government abandoned him, and now he has no money. He showed us some battle scars.

Americans are very cold, he said, meaning insensitive. And always bombing (pronouncing the 'b'), all over the world.

I started to speak up, "That's my president, you mongrel!" "Let it go," Mike said.

The old man told us we should give him money. Mike offered him 5 baht if we could take his picture. He scoffed and said that would be 20 baht. There was nothing in the Lonely Planet book about bartering with beggars. I gave him 10 baht -- enough for two skewered squid or a pineapple -- and we were on our way.

Forgive us for being cynical, but we've started to mistrust anyone who approaches us with the common exclamation, "My friend!" We figure his story had about a 50 percent chance of being true.

Shop good time good feeling

That day we moved south, toward new Bangkok and into a more middle-class sector of the city. Our room went from ~$4/night each to $10/night each, but we got our own bathroom with hot water, air con, free breakfast, and there were no goddamn dogs or roosters outside our window all night long.

As we roamed around that part of town, we came across Bangkok's new eight-story shopping mall, MBK, or in English, The Leviathan. We walked in and immediately started to swoon, then were propped up by a kind of frightened daze that carried us through the mall. We had some sort of purpose here, or were we lost, no reason, no, a reason, DVDs. We had to buy DVDs to burn photos onto.

On the fourth floor we found an electronics store. Store? The western electronics store is based on the old timey general store. You walk in, old man Jones says hello, and you peruse the shovels or whatever. The Thai model is the street market, which should never have been united with modern technology. You walk in and suddenly there are no walls or exits, only an endless grid of kiosks, buzzing and flashing. Arrays of mobile phones and TV screens, glare from glass cases, people shouting gibberish at us, and it all runs together every time you turn your head or the room spins, which happens every few seconds in order to disorient the shopper.

"There's no way we're going to find DVDs here," Mike says. We turn around and there they are, as though someone heard us and whipped out a makeshift display. Mike hands the woman all his money, and we keep walking. Mike thinks he might throw up. "Can we find a way out of here?" he says. I lead him away by the elbow, into the lesser chaos of the mall proper.

Tony from Nigeria: On ladyboys, "coping," and his scam operation

We sit down on the edge of the mall's open center. A pretty woman beckons to us from a third floor shop. Is that how things happen here? Tony the Nigerian speaks up from the adjacent bench. That's no woman, he says. He tells us about his many misadventures in learning to identify Thai ladyboys.

Then he goes on to tell us about the lives of many Thai women. They outnumber men in Thailand. Often, he says, a woman has a baby with her boyfriend and he leaves her in a couple years, then she has few real skills and has to go fend for herself. Tony said they call it "coping," when Thai women go out and either sell their sex or try to find a Thai or more often farang (foreigner) boyfriend who will provide for them in exchange for devotion. We've met some Thai women who do pretty well for themselves, so we know that not all Thais live this way.

What is Tony doing in Thailand? Well, he finds Thai people with valuable ideas or crafts but little business sense, and he gets a copyright for himself, then sends the plans to his people in Nigeria for mass production. This being the case, we couldn't feel too sorry for him when he told us the story of the Thai girl whom he took back to his hotel only to have her make of with 40,000 baht while he was in the bathroom.

Chong Kao! I take care you

That night we made some great friends at a sidewalk...restuarant? There's no real word for it. Anyway, there was a policeman, Aew, a computer engineer, Namsom (orange juice), and Kare, who worked at the restaurant but drank with us anyway. There was also this little kid, wearing a plastic bag over his face, who kept running into the street and climbing onto the roof of this truck. They just called him "ling," monkey.

Namsom spoke decent English, and she helped lubricate the conversation. Many people, like Namsom, are introduced to us with a "nickname" that denotes an actual thing. The day before we met Phone, whose name means rain!

Between our broken Thai and their broken English, we could only express simple statements, which made for a sort of jubilant and innocent conversation. "Drink whiskey with you, make happy, we friends!" "American people no like war, no like army!" "Thai police drink whiskey, law good, Thai army send police shoot gun. No! Drink whiskey. Thai army bad. Police good." "I like you!"

We want to smuggle this kind of directness back to America with us. It cuts through the shit and you become friends a lot faster. "I like you. We drink whiskey

Complete and total surreality

On Monday, Kare from the night before invited us to meet up with her at MBK. She brought two of her friends and told us we were going to a restaurant on the sixth floor. We said MBK is insane, let's go outside. Mai chai, she said, we stay MBK.

Unlike orange juice, these girls had the English vocabulary of a retarded baby. I don't really konw if any medium, short of a total virtual reality experience, could render what that dinner was like.

First they ordered duck and green noodles. Kare kept putting the food in my bowl, but when I tried to put it in her bowl she usually wouldn't let me. Same with Mike and a girl named Aaa(SP?). Every few minutes they would give us each a tiny napkin. Lots more food came, course after course--black ear cloud mushrooms, squid, fish ball and fish roll-- and they put the food in this boiling pot in the center of the table.

The conversation was absolutely exhausting. We began to settle for just expressing anything that we possibly could. There was corn on the table, and Mike asked me to tell them that corn comes from America. I managed something like, "In American, eat corn first."

Comprehension was extremely taxing, and at certain points I just collapsed mentally and answered chai (yeah sure) to everything. They laughed at every single thing Mike said in Thai. Often we'd ask a question and they'd answer a different question.

Mike and I could talk to each other in code -- which I'm sure they did as well -- without their understanding. "These tricks gone stick us with the check." "Fo shizzle."

Sure enough they did, and even though we looked like high rollers paying for it, the total bill amounted to about $20 U.S. for five people. We walked around Siam square with them for a while, having more lobotomized exchanges. Time came to go home, and they tried to get us to take a cab with them, so we could pay, obviously. We said we'd be walking home, see you later.


Thai words of the weekend

Hua lok -- funny (the girls thought everything normal that we did was hilarious)
Chung kao -- cheers!
bao/bek -- white/black
ja rang kiat mai thaa ja hai nom luuk thii nii -- Do you mind if I breastfeed here?

Travel note: Today we leave by train to this other town whose name we can't remember at the moment.

Bongkok III Photos

View through a partition in the wall on a narrow street.

Old Thai market culture lives in the underbrush of American commercialization.

Black Family! Most of the actors in this movie are just dark Asians. We drank whiskey with some Thais that night, and they all knew the movie and made the face that scared Thais make in the trailer. They pointed to their dark-skinned friend and said, "Black Family!"

Ultra-colorful Bangkok traffic below the new Skytrain.

MBK made Mike feel queasy.

His majesty the king lords over his shopping subjects.

Bangkok II

We've been hanging around these neighborhoods that are removed enough from the major roads that they're relatively quiet. Our guesthouse is here. It's a lot of small streets and narrow alleys. Glass bottle shards line the top of high walls, beaming brown and green in the sun.

Dogs and cats mope around, ignored. A business, whose sign we can't read, presents only darkness, trash, and a narrow hallway in the back of the room. We wonder what goes on in these places.

The street gets covered with water, and Thais push the water around with brooms. They're always doing that. Mike thinks it's to keep mosquitos from breeding in standing water.

My favorite thing I've seen: A house on this milk-mud canal, floating or something, and there are floating stepping stones connecting the doorway to the canal bridge.

We've been eating almost exclusively from street vendors. We point to something and say in Thai, "How much?" or point to something strange and ask "What is this?" I don't know why I continue to ask this question because I never understand the response. But today I bought a drink and asked, "Ni a rai?" and to show me, she pulled some dirty crushed flowers out of the trash. It was a great drink. I'd say something more specific about my diet, but most of it is a mystery to me.

On traffic: Imagine a stampede of animals, all different kinds of animals, running away from a tornado in the east. They're trapped in this narrow canyon. Then imagine another stampede of animals, who don't even care about tornadoes, running from a terrorist in the west. Then imagine some smaller animals who have to traverse the stampedes' path at the point where they criscross. That's kind of like an understatement of what it's like to cross the street in Bangkok, where there's more yelling.


I still don't sleep much. I think it's because every time I get close, I hear myself screaming on a jumbo screen in the back of my mind, "You're in fucking Asia!" No real point in playing it cool, I guess. Same same.

Thai words of the day

a loi -- delicious
yim soi la -- beautiful smile
phone -- rain (Thanks, Phone)

Bangkok 1 Photos

View from the top of the Golden Mountain, a towering temple with stairs spiraling up to the top.



Background: new Bangkok. Foreground: old Bangkok and the canal. When the Europeans first arrived in Bangkok, residents called themselves "People of the Water" because they used the river and canals for transportation. We've been mostly hanging around old Bangkok.

Guy was pushing his cart through chaos traffic while at the same time grilling the chicken.

A beautiful moment of uncorrupted delight. Or something.

Khao San Road, where the hippies and street hustlers rule. A lot of travelers spend most of their time here and come to the conclusion that Bangkok sucks.

A street market. Sometimes I assume that things are food only because I know that's what to expect. They sell sticky green balls and smooth blue spirals. Fruit cut in intricate shapes, millions of sausages. Every part of an animal, basically, gets sold.

Thais cook bananas in lots of ways. Our favorite so far is banana roti -- banana pancakes!

Democracy monument. Motorcycles are really common because they can weave through traffic like squirrel scampering among stampeding wildebeast.

These monks were trying to fish one of their sandals out of the water with this net-stick.

You gotta be careful when you talk about the king. Best not to say anything about this one.

Buddhas sleeping outside the monastery.

Foreign people are so colorful!

Bangkok I

Sitting at a table and drinking Chang beer on Soi Rambutree, a small road in the tourist ghetto that's full of choice meat for street hustlers, we struck up a friendship with the man from the beer cart. He was clearly trying to hustle us -- something about a guesthouse and a TV -- but if we counted out everyone in Bangkok who was trying to hustle us, it would be a lonesome trip.

We spoke in mixed Thai and English, and there was a phrase the man used in moments of excitement -- "Same same!" I thought he was speaking English, so I said, "Yen yen," because I think "yen" means "same." He said no, we didn't understand. We asked him what he meant. He pointed back and forth between beers in the ice and said, "Same same!" "I walk around (marching, beer-guzzling pantomime), I meet Thai girl (subtle humping motion), I walk more (wild-and-crazy-guys impression). Same same!" Yes. Okay. Roosters cried in the tree overhead, a mangy dog yapped at us, and we had an epiphany.

If we ever felt confused or maladjusted in Bangkok, it was because we didn't understand the concept of same same. Why should I eat a whole fish on a stick? Same same! You're a bargirl, aren't you? You are. Same same! Three-legged cat? Drinking from a bag? Same same!

We said it to all the Thais we met that night. They really responded. We knew.


Thai words of the day, at the massage shop

qua nak nak--stronger
jek--painful
lak--long body