Whoa. Two months since my last post.
Here’s my excuse:
I have no excuse.
But if I did, here’s what it would be:
Travel has spotty internet. My last post (on winter solstice, from our hot and humid Thai island) barely crawled across the electronic universe. I was afraid it was going to get stuck in The Void, and I would forever be chasing it around, wondering where my life had gone wrong, wondering where that bit of me had ended up. Sorta like Voldemort. Stressful.
Travel is tiring. Bus rides in Thailand, for example. Four bus trips of ten hours each – for you math challenged people, that’s FORTY hours of sitting comatose (not counting the hours of just waiting for the bus to show up), except for the hurried and harried 20-minute stops to chow down rice and curry at some ungodly hour of the night. (Free food at two in the morning? Heck yeah!) Then there’s the after bus ride aftermath: figuring out how to get OUT of the behemoth bus station (twice), haggling for taxis (usually), figuring out routes (mostly), finding food (always and forever amen). Oh yeah, and all the while hoping the hotel we paid for online was, in actuality, a place, and not how someone was funding their drug habit. Stressful.
And FYI, Thai busses are very different from Nepali busses. There would be no sitting comatose on a Nepali bus.
Travel is mentally taxing. Reading every section of our guidebooks (Lonely Planet) over and over again. Perusing the internet over and over again. Logging into the internet over and over again. Losing the internet over and over again. Downloading maps and guides when we DO have internet. Downloading them again when it doesn’t work. Reading our guidebooks yet again. The dearth of things to read in English is obvious. This is Thailand. And sometimes Germany. Perusing the bookshelves of our guesthouses for outstanding reading material: romance novels in German, political thrillers in German, Harry Potter in German, local guidebooks (from 1998) in Thai and German, Buddhism in Thai, unknown books (no pictures) in Thai, and one Ancient History of the Tsetse Fly People, in English. Okay, that’s not a real book. But it could have been. And I would have read it. We kept our minds sharp.
Travel is physically taxing. Hiking eight to ten miles per day on a tropical island, in heat and humidity, constantly vigilant for danger: territorial dogs, beach crabs, falling coconuts. Coordinating walks to accommodate the best snacking locations. Swimming, kayaking, more walking. More danger: one beach had signs warning of stingrays and jellyfish. “SHUFFLE INTO WATER TO ALERT THE STINGRAYS, AVOID THE JELLYFISH.” Okaaay…
Travel is weather we aren’t used to. Hot and humid equals sweaty, tired, and lethargic. Possibly cranky. After the cold of Nepal, the heat of Thailand sucked the life right out of us. Then we discovered Bangkok’s fifty-cent iced lattes…
Travel is busy. Even when it’s not. Like waiting for buses, waiting for planes, waiting for the tide to come in (our boat transport, stranded on the mud flats). These are good times for learning to deal with tedium and stress. And the odd burst of chaos. And learning to keep my writing notebook handy. I wrote many FABULOUS blog posts in my head, then promptly forgot them. Just believe me, they were outstanding.
Travel is so many questions. Where shall we eat? What shall we eat? Is it time to eat? Is that edible? How do I eat this? Do we have any snacks? Is this eating place open? Why is no one accosting us?
Travel is stressful. Navigating scams, cultural norms, language, money. Pretty much EVERYTHING is FOREIGN. Crazy. We couldn’t get a taxi to take us to the skytrain in Bangkok in the wee hours (I could say something terribly sarcastic here, but really, we had it so easy, but come on, REALLY?). Stressful. Maybe I even got a teeny bit crabby once. Or twice.
We spent months without much news, mostly living outside, seeing spectacular sights, using our bodies to the utmost, immersing ourselves in other cultures, other people, other landscapes, other universes. We were so close to the equator in southern Thailand that even the crescent moon is crazy. Looks like a U, rather than our slouching C. And Orion was lying down. The chickens wore bedroom slippers. Okay, just feathers, but hey, foreign chickens. And foreign cats – look like ours, but do not speak English. Announcements on our Thai busses were just high pitched, chattering noise. Writing was indecipherable. We were aliens from another planet.
Travel warps time and space. This is obvious and self-explanatory. Right? I mean, right? Hello?
Travel means you are on another planet when things happen, and it takes your mind away.
So there you have it. Just another way of saying, “I’m an expert and skilled procrastinator, easily distracted. But nice. Usually.”
A few highlights from Thailand
But first, correction/addition to my last post. The banshee bugs. I said there were millions. Maybe. I didn’t count. But we did notice that whenever (what sounded like) one bug abruptly stopped making a racket, the entire jungle din went down 50 decibels. The few, the proud, the deafening. I looked them up, and according to my quick perusal they are most likely cicadas, whose calls, close up, can be up to 120 decibels. That’s like an airliner taking off. Just google “loud bugs in Thailand” and you can hear them for yourself.
Note to self: get hearing checked.
Our little Thai island was the perfect place to recuperate from Nepal. Sea level, oxygen, warmth. Pretty much everyone we met was from Germany, or some place that spoke German, and they were all chain smokers. What? We became adept at sussing out subtle air movements in order to be sitting upwind at the time of the inevitable light-up. It was ubiquitous and slightly bizarre. Happily, we were always outside. Even inside, you are outside.
And recuperate we did. Even though we complained about the heat, were bitten by big mosquitoes, and had sand in EVERYTHING. At least I didn’t open my bag after leaving the island and have a cockroach crawl out of it (happened to a fellow traveler). Poor little guy (I’m talking cockroach here), probably freaked out by the motorbike taxi ride, long-tail boat ride, tuk tuk ride, then being tossed into an unfamiliar environment away from family and friends, unable to understand what had happened.
Oh, sorry, that was us most of the time.
I do hope the little cockroach found a new and pleasant home.
To be honest, the mosquitoes only came out for about an hour each evening. And a few in the morning. And sometimes during the day. But we had a mosquito net to sleep under, and we’d leave the door and windows wide open to the tropical breezes (and sometimes cats, always geckos, and once a very large lizard).
The jungle was stunningly beautiful (if somewhat noisy at times), the ocean was WARM, the beaches mostly empty. The hornbills would visit the railings of our bungalow and also the railings of the eating area. We could never figure out what to call our guesthouse’s “restaurant.” It was set on a steep hillside, so, basically a treehouse with a few tables, and places to lounge. Made out of wood, with bamboo floor, thatched roof, lots of plants, no walls. Hornbills.
Food was pretty much Pad Thai all the way, with a few ginger, curry, and basil dishes thrown in. And in northern Thailand, lots of sticky rice, my favorite. You eat it with your fingers and dip it in a salt/sugar/chili powder mixture. Oh yeah, and green coconuts. We got into the green coconut habit in Cambodia last trip. Cheap and refreshing and so tasty. They are also called “young” coconuts, since they are mostly water (coconut water) that you drink with a straw, and a bit of coconut to scrape out (slimy goop, but good, if they are really young, harder coconut as they become more mature). We noticed that many people just drank the water and left the coconut inside (it was a bit of a chore to get it out). It was all I could do to not grab their “garbage” and finish it off.
Monk Chat
There are Buddhist temples (wats) everywhere in Thailand. Amazingly beautiful, ornate, and SPARKLY. And clean. Well cared for. We avoided the touristy ones (mostly) and found many quiet, peaceful spots in the midst of chaos. Plus clean and free toilets.
One of our favorite encounters was “Monk Chat.” Fourteen years ago we thought we were going to a lecture on Buddhism where we could lounge in the back and listen, without too much effort on our part. When we got there they whisked us to separate tables and a bunch of monks gathered round and we chatted. A little stressful for us introverts, but so worthwhile we thought we’d try it again. This time we both got to sit at the same table, and we had one monk to chat with. Whew. Less stress already.
“Our” monk was young, (he had just finished his studies at the Buddhist university connected to the wat), friendly, intelligent, and spoke good English. We chatted about many, many things: Covid-19, Buddhism, families, vegetarianism, use of technology, “a day in the life.” Their brand of Buddhism is flexible – you read the texts, try it, and if it doesn’t work for you, you let that go and try something else. They are vegetarian, but can eat whatever is gifted to them, even meat, although they cannot eat meat if it was killed for them, and they cannot ask for meat. He said a monk’s life is easy – no work, no stress, no family to take care of – “but regular people have hard life, so don’t add stress by so much rules.”
He had Covid five times. He saw his illnesses as an opportunity for growth and reflection, and used those times to practice his Buddhist mindset – being calm, meditating, connecting to his body, letting his body heal. Reflecting on the uncertainty of the future.
When he talked about “Loving Kindness” he reminded us of Daschi, back in the Himalayas, very sincere and kind, believing in the importance of love, the importance of being kind.
I was a little exhausted afterwards – you’re dealing with another culture and customs, language is sometimes confusing, you have to be “on” and focused – but we went away feeling like, wow, that was a lovely experience. It lit our way that evening when we were walking and walking. When I get cranky (huh?) I want to remember kindness.
And speaking of walking, there is some insane traffic in Chiang Mai, not at all pedestrian friendly. You know you’ve graduated to some higher plane when monks follow YOU across the road (rather than the other way around, our usual modus operandi).
Elephant Sanctuary Update
Fourteen years ago, we did a volunteer stint for two weeks at Elephant Nature Park, an elephant rescue and rehabilitation center in northern Thailand. Its goals: to improve and protect the lives of Asian elephants, while educating visitors about the plight of these creatures. They want to show that tourists will come to see elephants doing elephant things; who wouldn’t want to see elephants frolicking in the river, wrestling and playing in the mud, hanging out with their buds? Being their elephant selves?
Elephant Nature Park has been showing that you don’t need to have them paint, or play soccer, or give rides, (activities that involve much abuse of the animal, both in the training and the ongoing business), and tourists will still come. As we walked around Chiang Mai, most of the advertisements we saw for elephant encounters specified “no riding,” whereas 14 years ago that was a high priority activity. And the sanctuary has grown and is thriving. So their efforts seem to be working. I won’t go on about this, but since it is such an important idea – the fact animals deserve to be seen for who they really are, creatures with feelings and lives of their own – I wanted to bring it up, even though it didn’t work for us to go there this time. And if you are wondering what in the world you are going to do with that big windfall you got downsizing your castle and selling your Ming vases, consider donating to this amazing place. Or going there.
Their website is: elephantnaturepark.org
Return of the Jedi (oops, that title’s taken, maybe Back to the Future? Return of the Living Dead?)
We popped back into the “western” world in sort of a weird sideways slide, first into tropical rural America (Molokai, and yes, rural America it truly is), followed by a brief pause in chilly urban America (Seattle). We have just now returned to our life in boxes. We were so ready, looking forward to the “easier” life of returning, but I find myself missing all the walking, missing the simplicity (where will we sleep, what will we eat?), missing the adventure, missing even the hardships, in exchange for a clear mind and healthy being.
That’s what our brains do – they forget hard things. (Otherwise women would never go through childbirth more than once.)
My travel journal ends mid-sentence on the day we flew from Bangkok to Hawaii. I’ve started lists of what I must do, want to do, want to be. We have moved through the world in a privileged way, and we are different creatures than first set out months ago. Our hardships were not all that hard. Our stresses not all that tense. But travel changes you. It lives inside, stretching now and then to encompass and embrace you, widen your horizon, deepen your breaths. Remind you of kindness.
We are grateful to have experienced and gotten to know, even if just a little, other peoples, other landscapes, other worlds.
And as a popular musical says:
Because I knew you
