The last time I told my tales I was eagerly awaiting a visit from Brandon, Josh and Ivania – it feels like distant history, but Ill try my hand at the historians’ art form.
The trio arrived late, on the eve of completing midterms, so we sought nourishment and then rest. We spent a couple days in Bangkok and then headed southeast towards the Thai island of Koh Chang (pronounced Chong). We played there for nearly a week, rode scooters through windy island/mountain roads, cleansed ourselves in waterfalls and observed the obscurities or absurdities of tourism in Thailand. As some of you may know, Thailand is known for a number of great adventures—and sex tourism is one that makes the cut. Though not generally the target of this attention (I’m left pondering my deficiencies) traveling with two studs collectively made us a more likely client and therefore an object of their cat calls. Brandon’s induction into Thai lady bars ended with a working girl’s tongue licking up his salt. Without need for explanation, Brandon was ready to move on ;)
We made it back to Bangkok, saw Josh and Ivania out, and then hopped on a train headed west towards Kanchanaburi where an impressive waterfall has made herself at home. We spent a few days there dancing in the streets and lounging along the river before our journey back to the concrete jungle (Bangkok). Perhaps worthy of mention, and now a chuckle is our first experience with a bag-snatch. Whilst strolling home Margit had a run-in with two guys on a motorbike. They slashed her bag (got away with a pack of celebratory American Spirits) and gashed her side. We had heard stories about bag theft in SE Asia, but up until this point had lucked out. In the end Margit had some impressive (but not serious) wounds and a more scandalous dress to strut her stuff in.
This is when things get interesting… its early October at this point, I’ve just finished midterms and Brandon leaves in a couple of days...but…dun-dun-dun: flood warnings hit and our school announces the suspension of our studies. Despite the innumerable unfortunates, including lost lives, businesses, disruptions in employment, mobility, and in some cases, food -- the Thai community I have called my own, pulled together through this difficult and long period of flooding and then recovery. At the time, however, no one was aware of how serious the threat of flooding was and honestly; I was excited about the extra week of free time (an extra week that became an extra two, four, six, and then eight and half weeks). Before I even made it home from school to share the news with Brandon he had caught wind of the suspension and was already figuring out how to extend his flight. That night we made plans to head down to southern Thailand – the picturesque teal watered paradise that you see on postcards, with the infamous Greencurryobsessions blog STAR Margit Mclaughlin.
We arrived in southern Thailand on an overnight bus. With loose plans in mind, we headed towards the climbing Mecca of Tonsai beach. A tiny little community of climbers and backpackers, Tonsai offers epic views, cheap accommodations, and a herd of beautiful bodies heading up the face of limestone cliffs. People seem to linger in this paradise for months on end, but we had to drag ourselves out after a week. Margit later admitted she cried when we left – even despite the enormous monitor lizards (striking resemblance to komodo dragons), swarms of monkeys that lingered around our bungalows, and the rats that scurried about after dark.
Next stop was a calm few days on another island called Koh Lanta, which supposedly has excellent diving (we opted out after diving out of Tonsai and not seeing much). Highlight of this island: the English woman who ran our guesthouse when she said ‘prick naam plaa’ which is Thai for chili fish water. Imagine a Queens English accent hybrid with tonal Thai and if you’re not amused, you’re probably not that interesting.
Then back to Bangkok to see Brandon out and presumably return to my studies. I was sad to see him go, but his timing was perfect. About a day after his departure I’m standing on my balcony and nearly three weeks after school is first suspended watch floodwater seep into my neighborhood. Within an hour the water levels went from dry to waist-deep and as I witness this from the comfort of my seventh floor balcony I’m torn between anxiety and amusement: Thai youngins’ seem to be under the impression the Gods have just built for them an enormous swimming pool; I watch the little ones loft about on tires (i.e. tubes) and jump off street rails (i.e. diving board) into murky depths. Being a product of sanitation obsessed western-wired ontology (although I myself, not always the most hygienic, haha), I think first of the water composition: the fecal matter, the animals that didn’t make it through the floods, the flotsam and jetsam of Bangkok routine; secondly, being a big fan of mother nature and the goodness she shares with me, I think of the pesticides, already pervasive in our waters, and now ever more mobile; being a participant in conversations about and a student of environmental justice, I agonize over the disproportionate burdens natural disaster imposes on marginalized groups of our communities (Katrina anyone?).
This is the first time I’ve ever bared witness to natural disaster. It’s not the same. Being in it. Having our apartments evacuated. Being labeled ‘flood refugees’. Trudging through 4 feet of water with your belongings on your back in a culture that isn’t your own. Trying to explain to your family that you’re safe. Knowing that your life, as a western visitor, is being prioritized. Knowing you have somewhere safe to go, the financial means to get there, and that your family is safe back in the States. There’s no feeling like this. I remembered the footage of the recent tsunami in Japan and I knew it to be real, to be painful, to be destruction, but until you witness disaster you can only imagine disaster – and trust me, they’re not the same. Most fascinating (if you can say that) about the whole experience was the resilience of the Thai people: business owners shoveling water out of their shops, standing waist deep in water and still trying to sell their goods. Street vendors and motorbike taxis still at work. Their worlds couldn’t be paused; their debts wouldn’t have understood why no money had been made.
The night before I left Bangkok I packed frantically. I watched the floodwaters inundate my neighborhood, I was told taxis could not longer enter our streets and I couldn’t handle any more exposure. I guess it was a telling experience for me – in many ways, but mostly I became better acquainted with my threshold for chaos. I walked out to the streets, bag packed and stowed on my shoulders, and as I realized the depth of the water was even higher on the main road than it was on my little soi, I nervously turned back towards home. But I couldn’t stay. I sat in my apartment and felt more anxiety than I have in quite some time (maybe since the last round of finals at UCSC..hehe). I knew I had to leave, to walk until I reached somewhere not yet inundated, so I did. I walked until I could get a taxi, went to the airport and planned to be in Vietnam the next morning.
Jake from the Seabright compound (“bohemians” as this eclectic mix of my old Santa Cruz neighbors call themselves) booked a flight out on a couple days notice and we spent a week exploring the north of Vietnam. Just a short visit, but well worth it. We were able to witness the pandemonium of Hanoi and the magnificence of Halong Bay. In Hanoi there are more scooters than ants in an underground empire (ant farms quite easily likened to the reaches of Monsanto, but at the micro scale). The roads remain unregulated, with both police and traffic lights completely absent. Traffic weaves in and out, and intersections leave you feeling like a character out of an old low-budget video game. No matter the direction you’re traveling, or the mode of transit a fierce game of chicken dictates who goes, who slams on their breaks, who swerves out of the way, and well – who goes anywhere at all. It took a full day of garnering my inner strength, procuring the brave child within, knowing that if I didn’t find her I’d be bound to the walls of my guesthouse. By the second day I was jumping in front of cars as though I had the physical strength to stop them with my bare hands if they didn’t back down. This was the most intense road experience I’ve ever had, and after some months in SE Asia, and a few points on my driving record that says A LOT. I’m pretty sure Jake spent about 50% of his time commenting on the road conditions and I’m sure had I dared to suggest a place to sit for a snack or a drink that didn’t offer roadside views he’d have declined the offer. From Hanoi we ventured maybe 6 hours east to Ha Long Bay, an UNESCO World Heritage city and home to massive karsts formations that loom over cruise ships (called junks) in the South China Sea. With a deep environmental and cultural history (although changing rapidly due to the influx of tourism) the site made for an impressive few days. Difficult, however, to visit “floating fishing villages” and see that rather than fishing in these now polluted waters, families have become fully dependent on selling goods to tourists. Small paddle fishing boats wander along side large junk boats selling Pringles at inflated prices to tourists at sea. I had collected a montage of pictures I looked forward to sharing, but my forgetfulness caught hold of me once again and I left my camera in a taxi the night before our flight back to Bangkok.
Getting back to Bangkok was weird and brief. Rather than troubling myself to get back to my apartment (where mandatory evacuations were still ordinance) I booked a flight south to Krabi to meet my beloved Margit and fellow traveler Camille. Having found themselves yet again on Tonsai Beach, I happily joined their tiresome routine: wake late in a cheap seaside bungalow, grab breakfast, have a sun session, a swim, an afternoon beer, lunch, sun, swim, and then an evening dance at one of three bars on Tonsai. We lost nearly three weeks mastering our beach bumming techniques and earned ourselves some wicked tans and maybe another wrinkle or two around the eyes from smiles and laughter. Building neck muscle, we’ve since declared. I even had my go-around with a night of bartending for Thailand’s most famous reggae artist, Job 2 Do.
Highlight of round two on Tonsai: a trip out to a local island to watch climbers solo free dive. Basically this entails climbing the face of an overhang without gear so when you tire you simply plummet into the warm waters of the Gulf of Thailand. My efforts were pathetic, but some of these humans (I’d like to think of them as machines) were unbelievable. We wrapped up the evening by setting up camp (by camp I mean a fire, that’s all) on an empty beach where we shared some drinks and a song and dance. Along side the beach was a massive cave and as the night progressed the number of people that migrated into the caves grew. From two or three, to fifteen or so, we each chanted, tapped the inside of the cave walls with random instruments picked from the cave floor, and admired our posse’s didgeridoo and harmonica players. When we tired of the cave we indulged ourselves in a phosphorescent swim caused by dinoflagellates. As you swim these critters emit an electric blue light when disturbed. You can’t see the little life forms, so it feels a bit psychedelic and painfully beautiful. We fell asleep after indulging in our packed in (and packed out) watering holes and then woke for a morning swim in the clearest water I’ve encountered in Asia. Swarming around us were fish anywhere from 2-8 inches long and as colorful as one could imagine. A truly tropical experience: we knelt in the still warm waters for hours alternating between feeding the fish pineapple chunks (which they’d eat out of your hand) and watching a few of the others attempt to cross an epically long tight rope they had anchored between two cliff faces. I’m not the best at measurement estimates but I’d say this was at least 30 meters across and was poised above the ocean and ran parallel to the beach we camped on. Most rewarding about this experience was the group’s ability to independently organize (if you could call it that =P) the trip; rather than booking through a tourist agency, we purchased a bunch of to-go food from one of the street vendors and hired some boatmen to take us out to the island (with the promise of retrieving us, we hoped…). This was without a doubt one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in all my travels thus far.
It was time to leave Tonsai though. I’m leaving out fun details about the mushroom tea party, the base jumpers that came flying down from the mountain tops every afternoon, the depth of the people we bonded with, the goodness of the shells I acquired (and am now awkwardly lugging around southeast Asia), the richness of the locally grown and ground (with pestle and mortar) coffee beans, the tasty grub provided by Crazy Mama and Chicken Mama (two alley vendors that slop up some of the best Thai fare I’ve had…so long as Crazy Mama hadn’t already smoked too many doobies and forgotten your order!), the late night dancing, the monkeys jumping us for our bananas on our walk back to our bungalow, the further bonding of us three ladies, the number of mangoes we collectively consumed, and our attempts to learn how to hula hoop and fire spin under the direction of some skilled travelers. Although each of these snippets, and of course the forgotten stories are worth telling, we had to move on from Tonsai so now I’ll move on from the subject of Tonsai (but know I left part of my heart there). Word on the street (a single dirt road without cars that leads into the jungle bungalows) in Tonsai, a mantra of sorts and a slogan slapped on tees goes a bit like this: front of the shirt “I’m leaving Tonsai!!!!!” back of the shirt “maybe tomorrow…” and after nearly two weeks of postponing our trip to Malaysia we argue it’s no exaggeration.
This diligent historian has dug through a month and a half of memories so far. Somewhere around the middle of November we severed the umbilical cord we had with Tonsai and booked a bus down to Malaysia. This being my first time in a Muslim nation, I was excited to experience Islam in a region of relative peace and liberty. Beginning our journey in the northeast, we were able to see Kota Bharu, where morality police are said to be ubiquitous here and apprehend people who engage in acts perceived immoral. Kota Bharu is the most conservative city in Malaysia, and I was reminded of this when I attempted to leave my guesthouse for dinner and was asked to move my handbag in front of my chest to further conceal my ‘lovely lady lumps’. This was especially interesting, because I am culturally sensitive and was dressed as conservative as I thought necessary – wearing an ankle length skirt, a low cut sweater (although not necessarily cold out) with a tank top under the sweater to conceal the possibility of cleavage. This same guesthouse also had signs posted that asked that tourists not use their glasses for alcohol, put beer cans in their trashcans, or interrupt prayers by coming to the office during prayer times. Everywhere we stayed, not just in the more conservative Kota Bharu, indicated the direction of Mecca for prayers and this guesthouse was not the only one that didn’t offer alcohol. This means Margit and I were naturally quite thirsty, especially when we ended up in a remote hotel where drinks were completely out of reach…well, aside from one large can of Chang beer I had been lugging around in my backpack. We savored this golden liquid as though it were…well, gold – and to us it may as well have been. We weren’t exactly having the best time in Malaysia and a cold beer always jumpstarts the spirit.
Highlights of Malaysia: crossing the border lugging bottles of liquor in each of our three backpacks after being warned of the inflated prices. We get to the border and are for the first time stopped for security checks (hasn’t happened anywhere else for overland entrance). Were waiting in line to have our passports stamped when Margit notices a security officer extract a bottle of what we presume to be alcohol from a man’s bag before letting him pass. Now if it had been just one bottle this wouldn’t be so disconcerting but with Margit’s bottle of gin, Camille’s bottle of whiskey, my bottle of red wine and a large can of Chang beer we’d say it was awkward. Margit braved the check first and when asked about the bottle they spotted on the computer screen after scanning her bag she quickly tried to spit out an unintelligible ‘gin’ in hopes of him not knowing what gin was, or not making out her words and not caring to continue the conversation. Low and behold the guard’s lips form a smile, he knows what gin is and is happy to send us on our merry way, booze in bag. Camille and I both go through the same process and if anything, they seem pleased. Surprising after the guard who stamped our passports interrogated Margit about the whereabouts of her significant other.
Other small highlights include, very briefly, the abundance and cheapness of Indian food, the history of the Straights of Malacca and the city of Malacca, the seeming livability of Kuala Lumpur (for a big city), a trip to the cinema to catch the only Malaysian film being screened that night (the popcorn, obviously), the coexistence of Buddhist temples, Islamic mosques, and Hindu temples, witnessing a group of Malaysian swimming having a swim completely veiled from head to toe, and meeting Margit’s lovely mama who flew into KL to join us in our travels for a bit.
We returned to Bangkok at the end of the month to fully move out of our apartments. The floodwaters, after lingering in the streets outside my complex for a month, had receded in most of Bangkok and street cleaning efforts were underway. The roads were being swept and large piles of debris were scattered up and down the streets. This reminded me of my hometown where once a year the trash pickup service permits families to use their curbs as personal dumps for a few days before they come and pickup all your discarded tree limbs, couches, roofing, broken bicycles, pieces of plastic, wood, timber and glass that were once something. These piles had scores of junk and scores of discarded gems and lucky finds—also similar to my hometown where homeless people (and members of my family, haha) would rummage through the junk for those special finds. Oddly, though, the town looked clean—refreshed, I’d say. Bangkok is by no means a clean place, but after a long bath and swarms of people with brooms and tractors, the town looked like a giant had generously polished the roads while I was away. A warm welcome back…warm and short that is! I came back to pack up my apartment now that we were allowed to enter them again. Three days later Margit, Camille and I were packed and on a night bus up to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand to finish up our distance-learning research papers and be fully done with our term at Thammasat University. From Chiang Mai we journeyed another four hours north to Chiang Rai where we emailed our profs our papers and hopped on a Laos bound bus. As for Laos, it’s been one of the highlights of my time here and deserves another blog entry wholly dedicated to my time there and in Cambodia where we spent a month and half backpacking. I’ll try to motivate myself to chronicle my experiences in these two most beautiful countries in the coming days, but for now this is a long update—a long chunk of time and a long bit of prose.
Today I sit here on a veranda in Chiang Mai. From the balcony littered with cushions and friendly travelers I can spot the top of an aging temple. I’ve spent the better part of my day eating and writing this entry so I do hope those that have been encouraging me to write again are pleased to know the nitty-gritty details of Jessie Rae Rudd in Asia. I’ll be here for about a month because I enrolled in a TEFL certification course at Chiang Mai University. This course basically makes me employable in most places in the world and promises me a few years of working and traveling before I think too seriously about my return to academics. I’m excited about the process, but at the same time bummed to be stationary for nearly a month after city/country hopping for awhile. Sometimes sitting still is what you need though, I suppose. I hope to get some yoga in, spend a bit more time on a bicycle, and do some rock climbing. Also, I haven’t had the chance to fully explore the north of Thailand so being here for awhile means Ill be able to check out some of the nearby cities famed for hippies, famed for beauty, famed for rural villages, and famed for dancing yourself silly, and visiting the water holes (obviously not every city is famed for each of these things, haha –pretty sure I wont find a drunken dance party in a rural village, but I’m quite happy to do it all in segment - alternating between cultural exchange/insight and getting groovy).
So, ladies and gents, I’m finally reunited with my computer, will have regular Internet access, and will get this blog up to date. This is a good step for me. I was starting to fear I wouldn’t have the motivation to return to my writing and although this was painful and I feel rusty after not writing for a while, it was also therapeutic. I’ll be available for Skype and have hundreds of pictures from Laos and Cambodia to upload so keep checking the blog and my facebook for news.
Not sure when I’ll consent to life in the States, but I love and miss everyone. I’ve been thinking about my JJ-- my bubbas--obsessively and I hope he knows how much I love him and is holding no grudges. Man’s best friend is his dog, and I couldn’t argue with that (so long as I can have a lengthy list of besties). I know that everyone I know and love understands my urge to be away, and I hope he does too.
What a little stud, eh?
