Tuesday, December 16, 2008

#33: Don't Happy Be Worry

Week 33 - Mae Hong Son Province, Thailand

THE FESTIVAL: was a jubilant ejaculation of light and sound as hundreds of Thais, Burmese and various hill-tribes converged on the town to show their thanks to the Water Goddess by chucking as much plastic and styrofoam shit into the rivers and lakes as they possibly could. Then they shot off some fireworks, made the sky into a fiery sea of floating lanterns, bought some more plastic stuff, threw the packaging into the lake, and went home.

Job done.

By the way, "Water Goddess"? Um... I didn't know they had one of those in Buddhism. Er. Ahem. Well. Well, they don't, per se, but Thai Buddhism isn't so much "hey, let's study the Buddhist teachings and live our lives by them" as it is, "hey, let's use the most ridiculously superstitious parts of Buddhism, pile it in with some Hinduism, Chinese astrology, numerology and good ol' animism, and see if we can win the lottery with it". Hence: the commitment of most Thais to Buddhism is bringing eggs and flowers to the temple when they've done something wrong, and then putting more eggs and flowers in the dollhouse outside their home to appease the house spirits (every single building in Thailand, from the lowest shack to the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, has such a spirit dollhouse). Up north, the superstitiousness is strongest, and people continue to put scarecrows outside their house to ward off ghosts and make sacrifices to the Rice God.

Digression aside, Mae Hong Son was a perfect little town. The festival was fun and full of colour, and I got to throw my $1 bag of fireworks around like an eight-year old with a year's supply of red cordial coursing through his veins. The air was crisp and cold and excellent for long walks up the terraced walkway scaling the mountain to the temple to watch lanterns being launched into the night sky, and teenage monks clad in their orange robes surreptitiously gambling with their friends behind the cover of trees.

Wheeling motorbikes about the hills the day after, wrapped in beanies and sweaters, was something incredible. The road took us out along narrow ridges and across jagged ledges; we stopped at a cave full of sacred fish who are believed to be vegetarian - Thai families line up to throw them carrots and lettuce. Best of all was the English sign above the cave - "The cave is teeming with a crap species of fish" (presumably they meant "carp"). From there out past small villages full of screaming children to the last village on the map, Ban Rak Thai.

Ban Rak Thai was originally Mae Aw, and was basically a settlement of anti-communist Chinese soldiers arriving into Thailand as refugees after being booted by Burma several decades ago. The change of name (Ban Rak Thai means "The Village That Loves Thais") was probably a publicity stunt to save a bit of face. Nowadays it's the last town on the road before a sketchy dirt track leads out to a 'No Foreigners Allowed' border crossing with Burma. It remains a very Chinese sort of place, and we sat for endless cups of Oolong and Jasmine tea before the encroaching darkness and freezing temperatures sent us rolling back down the map. Past the screaming children, past Shan villages of solemn women in traditional clothes and grim-faced men with large knives strapped to their backs, past national parks of peaceful lakes surrounded by cliffs and forests of pine, back to Mae Hong Son and a warm bed before our morning ride to Pai.

Pai is the kind of town you get in every country - the Byron Bay, the Vang Vieng, the Queenstown - a drawing point for travellers of all kinds, where you trade great parties and food and nightlife in exchange for relentless Americans with bullhorn voices and all kinds of tacky, shitty merchandise being shoved at you from all angles (though the 'Don't Happy, Be Worry' climate-change-awareness t-shirts were a highlight).

Unfortunately, our trip unintentionally co-incided with the cremation of HRH the Princess, who died a year ago and whose body has been on display to the public since. Now, since she was getting cremated, HRM the King decided to declare a dry weekend across the nation. No alcohol. Enforced sobriety. In the town where the nightlife was the only attraction. Balls.

We did what we could. Erin and I enrolled in a cooking school and spent the days whipping up gigantic bowls of green curry, pad thai, kao soi, laab tohu, panang curry and mango sticky rice - Erin with her trademark elegant artistry, me with my hand held with increasingly frustrated force by the lady teaching us in her back kitchen. Adam hired a bicycle and set out to get lost among the rice paddies, finding his way to another ex-communist village and a waterfall in the jungle.

We got by. And by our last night, cracks were appearing in Pai; alcohol was slipping through, to great rejoicing and gnashing of teeth. Wandering the streets late at night, we were adopted by Pom and her sister, who had started a campfire in the middle of a frontyard that didn't belong to them in the middle of town and were busy drinking and cackling around it like wild children. Pom was excellent; she had emerged from a tragic past of dead husbands and divorce to become an awesome force of drunken destruction. She was a fantastic combination of the cool girl from Chasing Amy (her standard greeting was "Hey, fuck you, man") and some sort of Russian transvestite (addressing everyone as "honey" or "dah-link") and just sweated class as she stumbled about the campfire with a whiskey bottle in hand, complaining of how she couldn't see the stars and dreading going to work at her massage parlour the next day.

The night got out of hand. Adam went through a fence and fell five feet onto his back. We somehow ended up attached to a Thai rastafarian who couldn't speak a word of English but whom we knew as The Pixie Child; he passed out onto Erin's lap before disappearing in an explosion of fairy dust. Then an extremely drunken Irishman went to hit Erin on the head with a blue rubber flipflop after an impassioned argument about Catholocism; the thong made it within inches of Erin's forehead before the Irishman slowly and gently teetered over on his side, falling straight to the floor and taking several beer bottles with him. Then a Scotsman yelling at us because we hadn't heard of some religious lady named "Anoon"; eventually we worked out he was saying "a nun". He settled down. At some point, we went home.

And awoke, a couple of hours later, to a cacophony. Behind our bungalow, at the Muay Thai gym, pasty Brits with exaggerated fantasies of themselves as Thai martial arts superstars were throwing each other around the ring and making exaggerated grunting noises while the clanging of flab against metal echoed off our thin bamboo walls. Off in the fields, a symphony of roosters were competing for the title of "Rooster Most Likely to be Violently Strangled by Lachlan". And, just to add a touch of surrealism, a hidden man had set himself up in the reeds by the river with an alto saxophone and was shooting through his particular rendition of the classics with as much volume as he could muster.

It was time to leave Pai.

So. Soon: I will collect my friend Kev from Chiang Mai airport. Then: an adventure.

Lachie.