The Northern Thai Trek

We'd have been fools not to partake in Northern Thailand's top visitor attraction: trekking. We signed up for a private four-person, three-day two-night trek with the Axners and a designated guide.

Pan, our gentle, all-knowing Shirpa (playable by a young Pete Postlethwaite) picked us up from our hotel and drove us to the elephant training grounds (read: elephant school). They begin education at age six, reach their peak education at age eighteen, and retire to the tropical woodlands at age sixty-five - much like us humans. They have an abundance of free roaming space and live richer lives than many humans (so don't feel bad when you see the video we captured of the elephants doing their little dance). We rode on elephant-back for an hour through varying terrain, then we began our trek.

The first day was a three-hour uphill trek to a small village where we stayed the night in a "farang" (white foreigner) cabin. Pan cooked us a feast of soup, chili paste, and stir-fry, and we crashed after several hands of rummy.

• 1:00 AM: Cock-a-doodle-doooooo! Cock-a-doo! ...a chorus of roosters perform a medley of varying lyrics, intonations, and gusto. Interesting to witness.
• 1:05 AM: We lose interest.
• 1:30 AM: Ahh, silence. Sleep at last.
• 1:50 AM: Chorus begins next verse. Repeat every twenty minutes until 7:00 AM.
• 7:30 AM: Breakfast, discuss beheading the village roosters.
  

The next day held a seven-hour trek, mostly uphill, through varying terrain - woodlands (reminiscent of Northern Minnesota), rainforest with parasitic strangle-vines and orchids, meadows of green tea bushes, and a sprawling bamboo forest. Wild banana trees were scattered throughout - if you opt to peel and eat one of their fruits, mind the seeds). Pan mentioned the possibility of sampling some authentic Thai moonshine (fermented from corn) at the destination village.

By 4 PM we arrived at our next accommodation, Baan Pha Daeng - a tiny Lahu village. We slept and ate in a charming bamboo and thatch hut on stilts with a private porch, adjacent to similar cabins. If you view it from the front, you can see a half-obstructed view of the landscape behind it; though the bamboo paneling represents privacy, frosted bathroom glass would suppress more sights and sounds.

We ate another of Pan's tasty Thai candlelight suppers, and he made good on the moonshine - it was warming, reminiscent of sake, and could probably fuel a small go-cart.

We turned in for bed two hours after sunset and lied on our backs on the floor of the bamboo hut, under our mosquito nets. At the risk of sounding pedantic and overly-sentimental, this is our account:

We could hear through the bamboo panels to the adjacent huts, and we could share in their evening episodes with our eyes closed: a teenage mother frustrated because her crying infant wouldn't feed, a nylon-stringed classical guitar strumming basic, open chords, a woman pouring used dishwater from her stilted porch onto a family of chicks, Pan speaking quiet Thai with a Lahu village elder.

The village finally fell silent for the night, the stray and wild dogs of Northern Thailand held a brief forum of howls, and then all that remained was the ring of the cicadas, phasing in and out of unison.

Hours later, the dogs and roosters reminded us that they, in fact, owned the morning, and we were merely members of their captive audience.

In recounting our other Southeast Asia experiences and sharing in Baan Pha Daeng's humanity, we had acquired a colorful, albeit rudimentary, understanding of life and culture in this corner of the world.

Though we suffered a nigh-sleepless night with a morning hike ahead of us, we were already comforted by the memories we'd created on this leg of our trip, and we regretted nothing.

We ended our trek yawning under the sun on a bamboo raft.

Eat some snow for us.

Chiang Mai, Thai

Chiang Mai is in Northern Thailand, close to the Burmese border. It attracts tourists for two reasons: authentic cuisine and rustic excursions. We've partaken in both.

We attended a culinary class at the Chiang Mai Thai Cookery School, the first Thai cooking school established in Chiang Mai. Historically, we cooked "Thai" stir-fry a few times a week in our household, mostly from macro-ingredients. Having attended the class, we're now armed with an arsenal of curry-paste cunning and culinary techniques. Perhaps you, fair reader, shall someday witness the fruits of our classwork.

Because the class spanned eight hours and seven dishes, we were stuffed to the brim with our own concoctions. We were almost too full to eat the last dish, but it was sticky rice pudding with cane sugar and coconut milk - so clearly, we made room and went back for seconds.

The Night Bazaar (open nightly) and Sunday Night Market with stretches through the old city, offered some good souvenir opportunities and great street food (still diarrhea free, by the way). There we encountered the "Rock N Roll Power Bracelet" (at left) which we had to purchase. It shall serve us well for the remainder of our travels.

Sunburnt in Bangkok

Welcome to our home country of Thailand. We have a few simple rules we'd like you to follow during your stay:

• Don't speak poorly of the president or the ruling party. Don't mock the imagery of him that we've hung on every lamppost - if it helps, just avoid looking at the lampposts altogether.
• Don't point the soles of your feet at people, or at images of the Buddha.
• Bow out of respect with your hands in prayer at your neck. Bow win entering and leaving. On second thought, just keep bowing - especially when you're not sure whether or not to bow.

We followed these rules in an effort to appear respectful, and we think it worked quite well for us.

Bangkok is a zoo. To expand this metaphor: zoos are smelly, crowded, somewhat flashy, and of course, packed with more sights than you can see in a single day. Zoos also have cheap unnecessarily expensive food, and zoos have people leaning against lampposts lying to you that an exhibit "doesn't open until 2 PM" and offering to drive you somehwere else in a three-wheeled open-air taxi and charge you a handful of dough for his services. Well, zoos don't really have that last part, but Bangkok sure does. Even if we hadn't read about that scam beforehand, we'd have known better.

The grand palace and "wats" (temples) we visitedin Bangkok were gold-tiled and quite garish. Inside the Wat Phra Kaeo (the holiest Thai temple) sits the Emerald Buddha. Well, it's technically Jade, but the monk who unearthed it mistook it for a more precious stone - thus, the moniker. They change the Buddha's clothes thrice a year to comply with the seasons. It was still dressed for the wet season, so the statue wore a golden gown. I think it was inconsiderate of them not to throw in a wee little golden umbrella. I suppose it's hard to pray to a dude holding an umbrella, though. O' the plight of the Buddha!

The hilight of our morning was our authentic Thai herbal massages - an hour of pressure-point full-body massage with some scattered rub-downs with hot, menthol-soaked rags. Ours for only $16 apiece!

We had some beers with an Australian chiropractor and another American traveler. Chiang Mai and its neighboring village "Pie" (sp?) in Northern Thailand came very highly reocommended. We may have to alter our itinerary accordingly once we return to Thailand in two weeks.

We spent an hour at an off-the-map temple/graveyard, where a man sold us a plate of banana segments and two long sticks ($.10 total) and we fed dozens of turtles in the temple's ponds! We did this until our bananas ran out; it was more fun than we'd like to admit.

After walking the markets and climbing the Golden Mount to get a high-altitude view of the sprawling city. We didn't appreciate the city any further, but it did satisfy our innate urge to climb things. We actually discovered that we had these innate urges as we made the climb. The delights of self-discovery! Ahem.

We hit the hay early that night after a Bangkok canal ride and a dirt-cheap five-course Thai dinner. Let's go to Cambodia.