Last days in northeast Thailand

Nam Nao National Park is set in mountainous jungle, about two hours south of Chiang Khan. After arriving, we hiked about five kilometers up the mountain and set up camp in a cluster of bamboo. We slung our hammocks across the stalks and tied a tarp up overhead.

Whenever the wind blew, the bamboo would creak high overhead. Thick stalks rubbed against each other, and the sounds ran up and down the whole register. As we hiked over elephant dung on the trail, it sounded like the animal's trumpet. At night in our hammocks, it sounded like a stalking tiger. Later still, the cold had kept us from sleeping, and we heard in the creaking the jingle of an ice cream truck.

We stayed up late that night contemplating a tiger attack. We knew that tigers lived in that jungle, and they were no rarer than the elephants, whose tracks and droppings gave shape to the hiking trail. The fire would die out while we slept, and we would be unconscious prey hanging from a tree, wrapped up like burritos.

"If a tiger killed me tonight, I wouldn't be that upset about it," I said. "It would be a return to the natural order of things."

"You wouldn't think that way while a tiger was eating you," Mike said.

"Yeah but, when you're in a situation like that you don't really have the capacity to suffer. Your body just goes into panic mode."

"I don't think so. Not while he's eating you and you're still alive."

"He wouldn't. They go right for the neck and it's over in a few seconds."

"No way, I've definitely seen that shit on the Discovery Channel where a tiger takes down a gazelle while it's obviously still alive, and the tiger is eating its intestines for thirty minutes."

Not thinking to question that they'd occupy half of an entire program with this scene, I believed him.

"Okay," I said, "but he's not likely to attack humans anyway. We're probably too difficult of prey."

"We'd be so easy."

"I guess so."

"Haven't there been a lot of mountain lion attacks in America recently?"

"I don't know."

"I know that in California, mountain lions have been attacking a lot of people. They interviewed this guy whose face was chewed off by a mountain lion."

"His face was chewed off?"

"Yeah."

"Okay but don't you have any concept of not talking about this stuff when we're trying to go to sleep?"

"No, because then when it happens, I can say that everything happened just the way I said it would. I'll be like, yeah it's so weird, we were just talking about this exact thing happening just like this."

"Who are you going to say that to?"

"The media."

"Okay," I said, rephrasing, "how are you going to say it?"

"Well the tiger's not going to eat both of us."

"So you're just going to run away?"

"Well, yeah," said Mike, who was wrapped up in a sheet with his hands in his sleeves, "by the time I got out of this hammock you'd already be dead."

"If the tiger attacked you, I'd pull one of these sticks out of the coals and burn its eyes or something."

"Yeah, I mean that guy who got higs face eaten off said that when he was being attacked, this woman hit the tiger on the head with a stick a few times and it ran away."

"Really?"

"Yeah, but his face was still eaten off. I mean he definitely looked like Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky."

We went on to talk about the most distressing aspects, if there were any, of our dying that night. Then we curled up in our hammocks and tried to sleep. Soon after that, space-time forked, and in one direction a tiger visited our camp and ate my face off. Mike hit it on the head with a stick a few times, so it ate his intestines for thirty minutes while he was still alive. I told the newspapers that Mike had been sort of wrong about what was going to happen.

In the other reality, we lived through the night, if you can call this living. Okay,whether we live or not I do not know, but we maintain the ability to blog.

That morning we descended to the visitor's center with the intention of setting up camp off one of the other trails. You were supposed to stay at this cheesy campground next to the visitor's center, but we'd noticed that none of the rules were really enforced.

As soon as we emerged from the jungle we were accosted, as we so often are, by a group of drunk Thais. Airport workers they were, accompanied by their one-armed attorney. They asked us to eat chicken guts with them and drink some of their morning whiskey. They informed us that we must not camp off the trails because it is very dangerous. There are tigers, they said, and elephants. Worse still was the double king cobra, as wide as your thigh and as tall as a tree, which eats tigers and elephants both.

This warning was repeated to us at the visitor's center. The tiger possibility did it for me. For Mike, it was the snake. We stayed on the campground that night. We call this setup "ice cream camping" because there was ice cream for sale a hundred paces away from our campsite. I guess that when your home bathroom consists of a hole and a bucket, you don't have a great urge to rough it when you go to the woods.

Though we were lower in altitude, it was still very cold at night. November is the coldest month at Nam Nao, and it often reaches zero degrees Celsius. That night I put on every pair of clothing I had, including four pairs of boxer briefs, the discomfort of which didn't set in until later.

We managed to sleep, but it was strange. If sleeping is like plum pudding, with dreams scattered throughout the thick custard, then sleeping out in the cold is just plums. Oblivion can't survive in the low temperatures, so what you have is just closing your eyes and entering a dream, then later being roused by a dream gunshot or something.

Thai fever: The mystery of the Thai lady

We hitchhiked from Nam Nao to Khon Kaen, which has the largest university in northeast Thailand. We met in a bookstore a couple of university students , Som-O (superhot) and Tong (superfruity), whose names mean "pomelo" and "correct."

The next day we visited them at their campus, where the male and female dormitories are set behind high walls, and conjugal visits are forbidden. I asked Tong about this, and he said that Thai students do not have sex until they are married.

Tong, Som-O, and many lady friends took us out to the temple, parks, and markets around Khon Kaen's big lake. We rode a song-tiaew from place to place. The girls were still wearing their school uniforms -- black heels, black skirts, and flimsy white button-downs that only come in XXS because there's no use stocking any other size here. Besides the dark hair and apricot skin, each was striking in her own unique way, Beauty in her seven different aspects, and all of them apparently virginal. But to them, we were the objects of desire. Yes, these girls got a special thrill from big noses and long lanky bodies. If you were into this sort of thing, you might think that such a scenario only takes place while you're sleeping, and your mind culls together various elements of desire for a meeting that waking life would never allow. Except in my dreams, the molecule is never stable, and soon the bus would roll over and dump us into the oceans of Saturn, or the bus driver, a barbarian, would put all the girls in his sack and run through me with a broadsword.

But here, in real life, and now preserved among the Internet's innumerable crystals, we hung out for three days. For two nights we went to Rad Pop Society, where the bouncers searched and ID'ed all the Thais but let waved us in with a smile. On the third night, we all climbed into a box and sang our hearts out to a television. With Asian karaoke, it's easier to cut loose because the crowd comprises only the friends you rented the room with.

By the last day, Aim, who usually spoke to Mike through a third party even though she had a basic use of English, told him in the same fashion that he needed to learn Thai so he could meet her mother. We remain baffled by this. Mike and Aim didn't hold hands, let alone kiss. Though the girls go clubbing all the time, they did not "dance close," and Mike was Aim's first in this regard. Som-O, my date, seemed slightly more experienced, but that seemed to us like the difference between sixth grade and seventh. The girls were terribly shy, contributing only scant phrases to a conversation, but now and then one of them would drop a line like, "Sweet dreams...I will dream about you." The dating scene in Thailand seemed to consist of traditional Asian prudence with a veneer of imported sexy romance.

That's not to say that we didn't have an awesome time with Aim and Som-O. They were both extremely sweet and highly attractive, and unlike other Thai girls we've come across they were wholly sincere in their motives.

As for our sociological research, we concede that our sample group so far is absurdly small, but we also had some consultation.

In a drunken and clandestine interview, Tong told that to kiss a boy was right up there with "to go away...with a man...in the night." Good Thai girls did not do it until some sort of serious ritualized moment, and sex was held off until marriage. We gave Tong's perspective creedence because here was a guy who groped us to no end and who grabbed every male buttock that passed him at the disco. He would not kiss one of these guys, though, no way.

He went on to tell us that all Thais have always been pious in romance, and that going away in the night was brought over from Europe. Harder to believe. Were ping-pong shows brought over from Europe, too?

A few notes on Thai disco, as experienced at Loei's Disco Robot and Khon Kaen's Rad Pop Society

• There is no dance floor. Everyone waits until midnight and then just stands up from their chairs to dance.
• Music alternates between a DJ and a live house band, which plays the same songs every night. Most of the house band songs were in Thai, but sounded a lot like music from either Fall Out Boy or Reel Big Fish. The one English song they played was "She Has a Girlfriend Now" by Reel Big Fish.
• Rather than buy beer or mixed drinks, most people buy a bottle of liquor and share it at the table. It is the girls' responsibility to keep everyone's drink brimming at all times.
• Thais cannot drink. They made us seem like alcoholic sailors. To illustrate: With one regular-sized bottle of whiskey, the bar staff brings out ten bottles of soda water.
• I've taken to closing myself in the toilet stall when I have to pee. If you go at the urinal, someone will spot you as the farang in the bathroom and give you a massage while you urinate. That's great, except when you turn around the guy will ask for 5 to 20 baht.

Thai words of the day

Fry the bridge -- This is supposedly a translation of a Thai idiom, and it's colloquially spoken in English. It means that someone is trying to snare you by flirting, but we have no idea how this meaning is derived. Obviously there is no way to fry a bridge.

Kuai -- Weiner. Women are not allowed to say this. We asked if there was a female counterpart, but either no one would speak it or the word doesn't exist.

Mai bau -- Fuck you.

Your bow has rice -- You have accidentally put your elbow in rice that was on the table, and now rice is stuck to your elbow.