Tarzan and Jane

We'd been told by the girl at Paddy Palin in Sydney to watch the safety video carefully...



Arriving in the border town of Huay Xai, we stopped in at the office of the Gibbon Experience and handed over our 1.5 million kip.

We watched the safety video... The guides only speak Laos. OK. You are responsible for your own safety. Fine.

We read the disclaimer... Due to wet weather, you may be required to trek an extra 4-7 hours in and out of the forest. OK.

You'll need some tiger balm. OK. For the leaches. OK.



But we were very lucky with the weather, and for three days, we got to pretend to be Gibbons, swinging through the trees hundreds of metres above the jungle floor, sweeping at speed through canopy of thick bamboo, tall "banyan" trees and misty valleys swamped in vines and creepers.



The Gibbon Experioence runs treks on the edge of a nature resver in Bokeo, Northern Loas. For about 5 years they've been sending fearless Farang into the jungle to stay in treehouses bulit high in the jungle canopy. The only way to reach these tree houses is along "zip" lines - long stretches of what my childhppd recollects as "flying foxes", although the scale of these lines are very much for grown ups.



While my foolhardy decision to take Crocs along instead of buying sneakers meant that I spent a lot of the trek in sliding down muddy banks on my arse, eventually we arrived at this point: the first Zip:

Oops, out of time - stay tuned for the next installment: when we got to our tree house...

Shooting Fish in a Barrel

We came across this pond being emptied, outside of the town of Pai, near Chiang Mai. The first clue we saw was a guy riding along on his motorbike, carrying a huge, live catfish by the gills. When we arrived, it was a free-for-all, with a huge catapiller scopping more and more water out of the pond, til it was like, well, shooting fish in a barrel...

Half price fish on the menu tonight!

Monk Chat

No, I'm not about to commit mass suicide or declare my undying love to a charismatic cult leader. I'm at a meditation retreat outside of Chiang Mai. It's run as part of the "Monk Chat" program, a very clever initiative by one Phra Saneh Dhammavaro, who thought westerners should have some forum to ask all their stupid questions (why orange robes do you get to eat/drink alcohol/have sex are you bored to do think westerners are stupid etc etc). One of the questions he was often asked apparently, was "why don't you let us study meditation?" and voila, an introductory retreat for tourists was created (also thanks to a 10 million baht donation for the retreat centre itself).

So for two days, I imagined myself in blissful silence, punctuated only by meaningful discussions on the dharma, and regular insights born from my meditation practice. What I didn't count on was a college group from Nebraska, USA. These girls were in Thailand for 3 weeks, studying "y'know, like, the culture, and the religion, and like the prostitution and stuff, cause, like, that's really interesting to us..." They'd spent their time so far clubbing, shopping, getting massages and chatting up tuk-tuk drivers. Very cultural, but they were off to Koh Samui next, so at least they'd get to see some sex tourism. These girls didn't really get the polite, subtle lessons in "Thai Culture" presented, such as not touching a monk, not pointing your feet at an image of the Buddha, or keeping quiet around temples and places of meditation. But their presence through an interesting light on the whole experience, including their distain for the brand new, clean-as-a-whistle compound that was the meditation centre - possibly the cleanest accomadation I've experienced in Thailand.

The mediation itself was great, with decent periods of led sitting and walking mindfulness meditation or vipassana, where concentration of the mind on the physical or "true" present allows the practitioner to release themselves from the running commentary and jumping "monkey mind" of thought and distracted emotion. Instead, you simply focus on the rising and falling of your breathing, or the movement of each foot as you walk.

Concentrating very hard on the exact feeling of breathe entering and leaving my nostrils allowed me some success when sitting (and hearing, and thinking, and feeling pain, and getting distracted a lot), but in typical Ros fashion of making things harder for myself, I found I had to add extra steps into the "lifting-moving-placing" rhythm of the walking. Was this cheating, I asked one of the Prhas? No, was the answer, in fact the Monks used the same six step breakdown I'd constructed to keep the thoughts out of my head - they'd just assumed it would be too tricky for us Farang to grasp. Ha! I need all the help I can get crowding out the voices inside this head.

Special Massage

I saw more blind people on the street during our time in Chiang Mai then I've ever seen before. Mostly in troupes of two or three, busking for change with varying degrees of skill. I feel a little weird about giving money to people on the street, and we'd heard good things about massage by the blind. It can be a viable career for someone who' visually impaired for obvious reason, and in Thailand they are renowned for giving extra-sensitive, skillful massage - in a country where competition's pretty damn stiff in that regard. So off we went to the Chiang Mai "Massage by the Blind" Centre, hoping to inject a little tourist cash where it seemed sorely needed.

Note to Travellers: Just because the person giving you a massage is blind, doesn't mean they are, actually, trained in massage. Despite the fact that they may be in attendance at the Chiang Mai Massage By the Blind Centre. Despite the fact that they are a mature and seemingly experienced woman.

And just because the massage is done in a grotty old faux-leather armchair, with a bit of ancient, dried up Nivea cream to smooth things over, doesn't mean that the elderly lady wont fleece you out of 100 Baht. Despite the fact that she cackles and gossips in Thai throughout the experience. Despite the fact she yanks on you toes repeatedly, and with obviously glee, but no discernible therapeutic motivation.

It was a bizarre experience as it dawned on me that this was certainly not a massage, but a hilarious joke for this crazy old lady, having a lot of fun at my expense. Hope she spent the money on some new massage oil.

Bunnies

Blankey's Blog

yummy monkey juice

Cute

Our first local..

This is Nat. We met him on the boat from Ko Phi Phi to Phuket. He is one totally cool dude. When he offered to spend a bit of time with us to "make a tour" when we got to Bangkok, we had no idea what kind of day we had ahead.

We met at Chatuchuk Market Train Station (well, we did eventually: there are 2 train lines and 3 stations servicing these enormous markets... made for a fun morning of public transport joy)

We had assumed that since Chatuchuk was the meeting place, the day's activity was to be some hardcore shopping and I had a list of requests from home, which none of you will receive because we didn't go to the markets. Instead, we jumped in Nat's car and headed out of Bangkok, checked out the sites of Ayuthaya and Loburi, went to Nat's home town, met his totally gorgeous mum, had secret squirrel local Pad Thai, a delicious Vietnamese dinner, and one hell of a "tour".

Some interesting facts we discovered about Nat:

While we traipse around Asia, Nat has already clocked up the North Pole. It took us a couple of attempts to get this straight - but when we saw the framed photos and special "it's-fucking-freezing-at-the-north-pole" suit, the penny dropped.

Nat is the very handsome guy bottom right here:

http://www.yimsiam.com/club/board/topicRead.asp?wbID=pkw_board&id=006754

When Singha's not sending him to the freezing north, Nat generally passes his time at training camp - necessary when you play second base and sometimes-pitcher for Thailand's National Baseball Team.

Of course, even national level sportspeople often have to work a second job, as Nat does. He has his own TV show.

ah-huh...

It's a general sports kinda thing, and you can watch it at 12.15 every afternoon on Thai TV channel 7.

So he's leading quite an interesting life - while still being a very down-to-earth, cheerful, open, funny, typical Thai. The ancient Wats of Ayuthaya (Siamese capital for a number of centuries up until 1767), were striking in their monumental, ancient pride and and cheeky monkeys of Loburi a dose of typical Thai fun and games (where you get to giggle at other's misfortune, more than anything else...). But Nat and his mum really touched us with their easy friendship and generosity.

Thanks Nat!

Fortune telling...

Deceptively cute monkeys

Show their true colours...

The only safe way to get close to a Loburi Monkey...

Book Club

http://www.blackswangreen.co.uk/about_the_book.html

Island Hopping

From Hat Yai, we travelled to the island of Ko Lanta, then Phi-Phi and Phuket, merely for purposes of a proper compare-and-contrast to Coral Bay, or course - not for our own enjoyment...

The islands of Thailand are undeniably beautiful, but the rampent commericalism that accopanies all but the most remote (and we don't have camping/cooking gear), stopped me from really relaxing. It's not that the tuk-tuks, hair braiders, paragliders, jet-skis, and go-go bars felt like they shouldn't have been there, but more that I was missing the point. Why would I just want to lie on the beach?? Crazy talk. Got to spend some money!

Wandering down to a resort-dominated Phuket beach, lined with beach umbrellas, we assumed they existed for the comfort of guests at the resort - and so we plonked down. Materialising out of nowhere was the propritor of this gold mine business - 100 baht for an umbrella.

"Oh, sorry, we thought they were free..."

"Ha! No free! No free Thailand!"

"Ok, we'll just sit on the sand, thank you"

"Sand, that no good for you!" Was the reply.

Now, 100 baht is about $4 AUD. It's nothing and we could certainly afford it. But why not just sit on the sand?

Dinner

Riding off into the sunset (Free due to the fact I was able to actually get the pony onto the beach. I know I lok like enormous giant woman on poor little pony, but the bugger was strong!)

Empty beach on Phuket...